Why Do You Want To Do Things Like the World? Pentecost 3-B

Rev. Dr. Rebecca L. Kiser

Why do you want to do things like the world ?

Pentecost 3B,  June 10, 2018                                       Mark 3: 20-35 & 1 Samuel 8:4-20 

After I graduated seminary, accepted my first call and was ordained, I finally got into the real pastoring, and figuring out what was authentic for me in terms of my inner calling, what was seminary-speak, and how to live in my small towns.  All of us do this, pastors or not – there’s always this inner struggle to be authentic about our growing faith and what it asks of us, while still living and working and interacting and relating.  And without people thinking we’re crazy! Samuel tried to talk the Hebrew people out of following the world in having kings instead of just letting God lead.  Jesus’ own family and religious group worried he was crazy, with the things he was doing and saying for God. The apostle Paul wrestled with this as he tried to guide the early Christians in how to both live their faith and not get thrown in jail by the Romans.  So our struggle to live our faith is not a new one.  

In the little town where my first church was, the local clergy group invited me in (which some clergywomen have not found to be the case everywhere).  There was one youngish pastor in town from a more fundamentalist church, who, when he was introduced to me, felt the need to put me in my place by saying, “Oh, I was raised Presbyterian, but I found God in college and was saved, and became Baptist.”  You know how sometimes you don’t get a good comeback line until you get home?  This time I got it right away…. I answered, “Huh – I was raised Baptist, but found God’s grace and joined the Presbyterians.”  He looked disconcerted.  Good – I meant him to be, thinking he had the right to tell me Presbyterians didn’t know God!

See, I was raised fundamentalist, and I remember the feeling that we were the only ones who got the gospel right; and that it was our Christian duty, therefore, to point out people’s mistakes.  After all, we had the highest motivation – we had to make them see they needed to repent, so they wouldn’t go to Hell.  Evil had to be confronted and confronted boldly, even if we were quaking inside.  It was for their good, so if we had to be abrupt or short with them, so be it.  If they rejected us, they were really rejecting God.  We were suffering for our faith, like the saints and martyrs. Later I realized most people just thought us arrogant and opinionated, and didn’t listen anyway. 

Although I disagree with a) our often offensive method, b) the literalism we chose to defend, and c) that we were the only ones right; I do see some strength in the fact that we sought to live following what we believed, were willing to be different, and take the consequences.  Yes, its pretty arrogant to assume we knew the only truth of God, and there’s some kind of glee in defending our belligerence & telling others that they’re wrong.  Its kind of a power trip, too.  

However, what this posture DID give me was a strong backbone, will power, or ego strength - I followed what I believed even against the popular ideas and peer pressure.  We read those verses in Scripture like, “Regard it all joy…when people revile you and persecute you in my name,” and we were proud that people said negative things about us – we were suffering for Jesus.  Its so tempting – and so justifying – to think we’re up there with the holy ones.  Instead of being jerks….

Too bad we didn’t learn better relational skills, and too bad our suffering was not for Jesus’ higher teachings. We took certain precepts and pounded them as the be all and end all of Christianity, like many of the right-wing believers are doing so visibly today.  I understand that mindset – I used to share it.  Now I see the things they’re fighting about as a mere shell of the deep teachings of Jesus; and it reduces Jesus and Christianity to a set of simple rules that don’t reflect of the depth love of Jesus, nor his criticism of a dominant culture. 

So theirs answer to the question posed by our texts today – how do we live our faith in Jesus and get along in the world at the same time– with a rigid, confrontational style.  Actually, Jesus’ style was pretty confrontational, and counter-cultural.   Jesus continually shows how he disregards the conventions of his day as unworthy of God, even against God, and promotes a view of human community that doesn’t work well with imperialism, and maybe even capitalism.  Jesus’ realm of God is radially egalitarian and welcomes all people with no distinctions; Jesus’ realm asks us to give up our own comfort and ease so others can simply live; it asks a lifestyle of community and honor of one another; and it demands that loyalty to God must supersede any other loyalty – to nation, to king, to success, to wealth, to whatever.  Jesus’ realm, in the most part, requires a 180 degree turn from the way things usually are.   That’s what “repent” means, by the way, to do a 180, turn around and head another direction.

Jill Duffy, editor of the Outlook, who you know I often quote, wrote in her comments on this passage, “Jesus is offensive. He comes to make clear that our loyalty to God trumps all other loyalties, including those we've long held sacred. Jesus is offensive. He tells the nice, respected, revered religious leaders they are not only misguided, they are instruments of evil. Jesus is offensive. He comes like a thief in the night to upend the rule of those long in power. Jesus is offensive. He gets close to crowds, calls tax collectors, touches the unclean and eats with sinners. Jesus is offensive. He speaks the truth to those in power, to us, to all. Jesus is offensive because he refuses to go along to get along, to bow down to long-accepted norms, to allow cultural or familial expectations to thwart his mission of binding up the broken hearted and liberating those long held captive.”

This is the gospel of Mark’s picture of Jesus –he is the strong man coming as a thief to take back the world for God’s realm.  He overturns the ways to thinking that have taken the whole message of liberation, justice, family, religion, civility, established order, home, church, country and economy and turned it into something tame that benefits the themselves, the elite. People hear the criticism inherent in his actions.  They are so challenged that they say he’s crazy – or worse, he’s working for the devil.  His family hears the murmurs and worries, and goes to restrain him.  And that’s why the larger population and its leaders conspire to get him killed. 

So I have to give the fundamentalists a little credit for being willing to be different, although I take issue with what they consider the important values of our faith.  Most of us would rather be kinda innocuous, not embroiled in controversy, keeping our heads down, go along to get along, be seen as nice people and not weird ones.  It can get to the point that we believers are not all that different from the main in what we value and strive for, and what we accept as, well, that’s the way it is. That’s business as usual. That’s the way things go.  I like to say, “There’s a line somewhere,” like between being seen as crazy jerks and giving away our Christian identity.  Does our following of Christ make any difference in our behavior, our values, our living?

In the letters that the apostle Paul writes to those first churches, he is thinking through how the Christian community ought to live those precepts that got Jesus killed, but in a way that won’t get us all killed.  How much can we be different in following Jesus’ teachings and how much can we still be Roman citizens? Or a typical American citizen? It’s a real struggle, it takes a real discernment before we compromise the very gospel Jesus taught.  

Someone used as a book title, How Shall We Then Live? – a good title, and one we all have to wrestle with.  We Presbyterians have certain ways we do things, but that’s organizational and mechanical.  Actually, we Presbyterians have some deep insights about the living of faith that is expected of believers.  Being Presbyterians, we’ll probably debate most ideas, but …. Its worth the effort and clarify what will identify Christians as Christians.  I’ve been wanting to do this for myself, too, so I’ll share a couple things that are forming in my thoughts and feelings. They’re not in any order yet…. Today I’ll talk about Christians knowing our sacred texts and our relationship with God in prayer.

Believers in God need to learn our sacred literature, the stories of our faith forbears.  If we learn them as kids, that’s good – we have the outlines and some details in our minds, and hopefully some good verses memorized.  BUT!!!! Our knowledge of these stories can’t stay at the 5^th grade level, which they will, if the adult believers don’t illustrate how to interpret, discern and listen to the deeper truths in them.  I say 5^th grade, because that’s when my oldest got bored with Sunday School because, as he said, “All they ever did was color pictures of animals going on the ark and everyone knows that wasn’t true anyway.”  I shared this story with a Rabbi friend, and he grinned and said, “Don’t you love it when they get to that point?”  Uh, yeah, I was kind of taken aback…but my rabbi friend is right.  See, in school my son was studying old civilizations and Greek or Roman mythology, which he knew was not literally true.  And he linked Christianity to it.  His brain was ready for a deeper level of truth, the truths of God’s preservation of a people to carry the story, the importance of the symbol of the ark throughout time, the truth that many civilizations have flood stories and there just might have been an actual big flood of some kind.  He was ready to go beyond the literal, and no one was showing him anything but rote memorization and blind acceptance.  Hmmmm…

So many adults are like a teacher I enjoyed who taught the science of the Big Bang – he was able to see the mystery and wonder of that level of science; he even was able to see the symbolic beauty and meaning in creation stories of other cultures, like some Native American stories of creation.  But when he got to Christianity’s Adam and Eve in the garden, all he could see was the literal level he’d had to memorize as a child, and now rejected as too simplistic.  Too simplistic????? Our creation stories are wonderful and deep stories of our connection to God and creation, worthy of reflection and meditation as to just what is taught about who we are and who God is, and the universe God has set us in.  But this man was stuck, and couldn’t move into an adult relationship with this story, although he could with others.  We’ve emphasized the wrong things in our faith development & kept faith at a level of either believing literally or believing nothing.

In my experience, Scripture can be read at any age and any level and still have meaning.  Scripture can be read 200 times and still reveal more truth to us – because God’s Spirit works in them and in me through those words.  I can read Scripture now in my 60s, knowing more about what life throws at us, and hear more levels than I did in my 20s – it still speaks, God still uses it to examine my heart.

Knowing the Scripture, while important, is not the whole picture, though – our faith is in God, and our own personal relationship with God needs to be cultivated in prayer and meditation, worship, community, and private time. Our parents’ deep faith needs to be wrestled with personally, and become your own deep faith.  A writer (John Westerhoff,,I believe), on faith development, said that “Faith is more caught than taught.” And he used the word “osmosis” to ponder how a person learns to practice faith through being around other people of faith, through absorbing the feeling, the culture, the practices of thought and devotion.  We can learn facts and details in our head, yet it comes to be our own practice through engagement with other believers.   Community is so important -  gathering, worshipping, praying, working. Its just as vital to just show up and be here as it is to wrestle in prayer by ourselves. 

I used to come to my prayer time trying to say things piously and hiding behind my more noble inclinations.  I was really just fooling myself, because God knew my thought and my heart desires anyway.  Its not wrong to desire a holy outlook on things – but its important to know when we don’t have it, and why.  We have views that we aspire to, that challenge us – and we also have to know where we actually are.  We don’t need to fear that God will be shocked, or that God will go away if we’re angry.  God has heard it all before, and God can stand it and stay with us.  God isn’t someone we need to fear to be honest with.   

God is concerned in every detail of our lives, too – not just holy-sounding things, but who we’re angry with, for example, or our concerns about our bodies, or what we do with our money, or how we wish we were more attractive, or how we are doing in school.  However, God isn’t a Divine vending machine, where we put in our dollar prayer and get a pony.  Prayer is simple, but not simplistic.  At this stage of my life, I go ahead and tell God what I’d like to see happen, because God knows anyway…. And sometimes I’m challenged as to whether it’s a worthy ask, and sometimes I need to  further define what I truly seek.  Then I go back in prayer later if things go a different way, and talk about how I feel about what did happen.  This is exploring WITH God.

So I’ve talked about two biggies – there’s more I want to ponder together.  I would really enjoy talking more about our practice and development of faith with you if you’re interested or intrigued, so let me know.  I think church is so much more than just budgets and policies, although we need those things to structure our being together.  Our faith in God and how we live here on earth actually the point.  AMEN.