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Millstones, Mutilation, and Fire... oh my!

9/30/2018

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HELL’S BELLS
Mark 9:38-50
Sunday, September 30, 2019
© The Rev. Dr. James Campbell
 
 
Mark 9:38-50
 
John said to him, “Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he was not following us.” But Jesus said, “Do not stop him; for no one who does a deed of power in my name will be able soon afterward to speak evil of me. Whoever is not against us is for us. For truly I tell you, whoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you bear the name of Christ will by no means lose the reward.
 
“If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea. If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life maimed than to have two hands and to go to hell, to the unquenchable fire. And if your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life lame than to have two feet and to be thrown into hell. And if your eye causes you to stumble, tear it out; it is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and to be thrown into hell, where their worm never dies, and the fire is never quenched.
 
“For everyone will be salted with fire. Salt is good; but if salt has lost its saltiness, how can you season it? Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another.”
 
 
I was raised on a steady diet of meat and potatoes; sunshine and exercise, hell fire and brimstone.  Before I ever understood anything about the boundless love of God, I knew all that I would ever need to know about the anger of God. Hell was the subject of frequent sermons and Sunday School lessons and church camps. 
 
This constant emphasis on hell was used largely to keep us all in lock step with the dictates of the church.  And the dictates of that church had to do with personal morality.  People who drank and smoked and cursed and wore revealing clothing and danced and listened to rock-n-roll were all going to hell.  And the hell they were going to was a literal lake of fire, from which there would be no escape.  And let me tell you: all that hell-talk used to scare the hell out of me!   
 
Where do those kinds of ideas come from?  They come from our holy book. They come from passages like the one we heard today, in which Jesus is purported to describe hell as a place of unquenchable fire.  
 
Well, I threw off the fearful chains of my childhood religion a long time ago now.  I came to understand that most hell-fire talk was abusive and used to manipulate and control, to divide and to conquer and to judge.  And for those reasons, for most of my career, I have steered a very wide path around the topic of hell.    
 
I’m not the only one who avoids talking about hell. I bet most of you do too.  We avoid talking about it for all kinds of reasons.  Some of us don’t believe in it, seeing it as the product of more primitive minds.  Others of us are happily agnostic about it, not knowing or caring if it’s true and sure that if it is, we’re not going there.  And still others of us find talking about it, true or not, a distraction away from the overwhelming message of the Gospel – that God’s essential essence is love.
 
And that’s true: God is love.  But part of love is justice.  We may not like to talk about hell but hell is another way to acknowledge that there is a lack of justice in this world.  Hell is about, on some level, a desire for things to be made right, for the score to be evened.  It’s much easier to dismiss the notion of hell or judgment when you are not the one who suffers at the hands of another.  Maybe we don’t talk about hell too much because our lives are not hellish.  But people who were intimately acquainted with injustice wrote the Bible.  And they longed for a God who would set the world right; a God who would judge in equity; a God who would call human cruelty and selfishness and indifference to account. The oppressed of this world still long for such a God.      
 
At the 50thanniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Elie Wiesel offered this prayer invoking the judgment of God: “Those who are here remember the nightly marches [into the gas chambers] of children, and more children, and more children. Frightened, quiet. So quiet and so beautiful. If we could see just one of them our hearts would break. But did it break the hearts of the murderers? O God, O merciful God, do not have pity on those who did not have mercy on Jewish children.”
 
When I read Wiesel’s words this week, their raw anger and sadness shocked me.  But are they really that different from the word’s of Jesus: "If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the depths of the sea.”
 
Harming little ones - how is it that our fellow humans are capable of such cruelty?  Why is it that the history is littered with folks just like us who made this earth a hell for their sisters and brothers?  How does that happen?  The answer to that question is as complicated as we are.  But much of our inhumanity to one another begins very simply.  We separate from people we do not understand or like.  And then we put them into categories.  And then we label them and judge them and finally, as a last step, we dehumanize them.  And when we do that, humans are capable of all sorts of hellish behavior – behavior that God will judge. 
 
It’s interesting to me that the separating and labeling of people is the very behavior that introduces Jesus’ talk about hell in this passage.  The disciple John was complaining that there was someone else, who was not part of the group, who was casting out demons in Jesus’ name.  This guy didn’t look like them or act like them or talk like them. He no doubt did not have his theological ducks in a row.  It is quite likely that he even misunderstood who Jesus was.  But none of that mattered.  What mattered, for Jesus, was that this man was doing good.  This “other” went about setting people free from the demons of fear and oppression.  He was helping some of the so-called “little ones.”  “Don’t stop him,” Jesus said.  “He’s on the right track because he’s doing good.” 
 
It seems to me that this unauthorized exorcist was a test for these followers of Jesus, and a very important one. It’s the same test that is put in front of us on a daily basis.  Will we believe that God works through the lives of those very different from themselves? Will we let go of control?  Will we see goodness in others?  Will we cultivate that goodness? It is so very important that we do these things because it is impossible to judge and mistreat those in whom we have seen the goodness of God. 
 
This is what the Lord Jesus modeled for us.    He was forever seeing human potential and the image of God in unlikely others. Jesus once commended a Roman soldier for his faith even though that soldier was *the* symbol of an oppressive Empire.  Jesus made a despised Samaritan the hero of one of his most memorable stories.  Jesus welcomed a marginalized tax collector and a political extremist into the apostolic band.  Jesus befriended a disreputable woman at the well.  Jesus called Saul, a persecutor of the early church, to become Saint Paul, an evangelist and missionary.  In all of these complicated and imperfect people, Jesus saw beyond the outward appearance. And whenever he went, the walls of separation came tumbling down.
 
Jesus ends this ominous and strange passage with an even stranger sentence: after saying that everyone will be salted with fire, he says: “Have salt in yourself and be at peace with one another.”  Scholars readily admit that no one really knows what this salt refers to, but the talk about peace is plain enough.  Even when Jesus spoke so openly and vividly about judgment; even when he said that those who mistreat the little ones would be better off drowned; even still, he still refused to let hell have the last word.  Even still, he spoke peace.        
 
The Nazis murdered the great German pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer.  For years he had lived the horror that was the Third Reich.  In such a situation most of us would pray that the judgment of God would have the final word.  If anybody deserved hell, surely the Nazis did.  But this great theologian, whose lifework was studying the Scriptures, wrote that while he believed that divine judgment was real - even so, he said, “judgment (is the) word before (God’s) final word.”
 
And that means that there’s hope for a sinner like James Campbell – that even when I refuse to cultivate goodness in others; even when I separate them and judge them and dismiss them; even when my actions are worthy of judgment, God does not give up on me.  God still has one more thing to say to me. And that, dear friends, most assuredly, is the good news of the Gospel: that even judgment heals us and brings us peace. It purifies us and saves us and the world for something far, far better.  
 
Thanks be to God.   Amen.   
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Jesus is the Question.

9/16/2018

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JESUS IS THE QUESTION
Mark 8:27-38
Sunday, September 16, 2018
© the Rev. Dr. James Campbell
 
Mark 8:27-38
 
Jesus went on with his disciples to the villages of Caesarea Philippi; and on the way he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” And they answered him, “John the Baptist; and others, Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets.” He asked them, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter answered him, “You are the Messiah.” And he sternly ordered them not to tell anyone about him.
 
Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”
 
He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? Indeed, what can they give in return for their life? Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.”
 
 
She looked at me with something approaching disdain: “What, exactly, is a UCC?” the skeptical, dour woman at the Garden Party asked me some years ago.  It wasn’t the first time someone had asked me that question and it won’t be the last.  Has anyone ever asked you? Have you ever seen a blank expression on someone’s face when you told them where you go to church?  Do you skip the UCC part altogether and rely on the New England standard: Congregational?  I can certainly understand why.  UCC sounds more like a community college or a medical diagnosis than a proud and historic denomination.
 
We have an identity problem in the UCC that naturally leads people to make jokes about what those letters stand for. There is the standard quip: UCC stands for “Unitarians Considering Christ.”  I’ve never liked that one very much!  But there are others.  On a website entitled “God Is Still Laughing,” I discovered these: UCC stands for “Utterly Confused Christians.”  UCC stands for “Upper Crust Congregationalists.”  UCC stands for “Uniformly Cultured Centrists” or “Underrepresented Christian Church” or my personal favorite: “Upset Christian Cynics.”  
 
Part of why people make these kinds of jokes is because they are based on the false assumption that those of us in the United Church of Christ don’t really believe in much of anything.  They mistake our emphasis on freedom of conscience for freedom from theology.  They don’t understand that how YOU follow Jesus and how I follow Jesus may look very different – but that we are all still following Jesus.  
 
This kind of religion is not an easy sale in our culture, so sure, as it is, of everything. Americans, by nature, are a confident people.  And so we tend to like confident religion.  Lots of folks are drawn to churches in which the “right” way to believe is laid out very clearly, and all one has to do is sign on the dotted line and you get to go to heaven.  
 
And I know, from experience, how comforting that can be.  I was raised with a great deal of religious certainty, and while it made me very comfortable for a while, it didn’t teach me very much about what it means to really follow Jesus into the deep and sometimes troubling questions of life.  
 
Life is so full of questions.  But surprisingly, so are the Gospels.  In Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, Jesus is reported to have asked others 307 questions.  Other people asked Jesus a total of 183 questions.  And of those 183 questions, guess how many Jesus actually answered: exactly three.  Instead of a straight answer, Jesus would often answer a question with another question. And this is completely consistent with Jesus’s Jewish faith – a faith in which the questions as avenues of faith. 
 
 
One day, Jesus and his disciples were walking around Caesarea Philippi, an unusually beautiful place that is alive with a great diversity of religious history.  Long before Jesus, it had been central in the worship of the Canaanite god Baal.  Later, in Greco-Roman times, it was said to be the birthplace of the god Pan, the flute-playing half-man/half goat.  In addition to its rich religious significance, it was a city of the Empire, a Roman outpost in the hinterland, meant to remind regular folks that Rome was always watching.  And so it was in this place, so full of the gods and of political power, that Jesus asked: “Who do people say that I am?”
 
Now there was a good deal of debate about that and so the disciples reported to Jesus what they had heard: “Well, some people think you’re John the Baptist, raised from the dead.  And others think you’re Elijah, reincarnated. And still others think you’re like a prophet of old.”  Jesus listened, and then turned the question on them: “But what about you? Who do you say that I am?’”  We don’t know how long it took for anyone to speak, but eventually Peter answered: “You are the Messiah.”  
 
Well, old Peter got that answer right! And you would think that Jesus would want Peter to spread the word.  But notice that Mark reports that Jesus sternlyordered Peter and the others not to tell a soul.  And isn’t that strange?  If it is the truth that Jesus is the long-awaited One, then why not shout if from the housetops?
 
That’s a good question.  And I think there are a couple of answers that have something profound to say about how we follow Jesus in this early part of the 21stcentury.  
 
First of all, consider this: you can search the Gospels high and low and you will never find Jesus teaching a catechism or laying out a list of rules or delineating a systematic theology. Instead, what you will find over and over again is Jesus telling stories with open-ended interpretations.  You will find Jesus touching and befriending and feeding and healing.  And you will find Jesus asking others to follow him and do what he did.  But somehow it has all gotten boiled down to believing all the right things.  Christianity has been reduced to mental assent.  And if Peter told others what the answer was – that Jesus was the Messiah – then maybe they wouldn’t discover it on their own.  And maybe they would think that thinkingthe right things was the same as doingthe right things.  
 
Second, maybe Jesus told them to keep his identity under wraps because they fundamentally misunderstood the nature of who this Messiah was. 
 
In the time of Jesus, it was commonly believed that the Messiah would be a military leader.  That’s who the people were waiting for – a Messiah who would kick the Romans to the curb and restore the glorious Kingdom of Israel. So when Peter said to Jesus: “You are the Messiah!” that’s probably exactly what he meant.  But that’s not what Jesus meant or what Jesus means.  Remember that Jesus once famously said that his kingdom is not of this world.  But those who followed him didn’t really want to hear that.  And mostly, we don’t either.  The church is still looking for power and influence and dominance.  Like the disciples, we’re not that interested in a life of sacrifice and service.  So when Jesus talked about his suffering and death, it was so offensive to the disciples that Peter pulled Jesus aside and let him have it: “Lighten up, Jesus.  You’re scaring everybody and we will never build a viable political movement that way.”  To which Jesus replied: “You devil!  Get your mind on God’s business in the world.”  
 
And then, just so that there would be no mistake about what Jesus was saying, he  turned to the crowd who had been following them that day and spilled the less-than-appetizing beans of what it means to be a Christian: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.”  To which we might say, “Lighten up, Jesus.  You’re scaring everybody.  And we will never build a stronger congregation that way.”
 
In this age of waning participation in the religious life; in this age when churches are shrinking and closing, it’s so tempting to shy away from the strange ways of Jesus. It’s a lot harder to sell a question than an answer.  It’s a lot harder to sell a lifestyle of sacrifice than an easy-to-memorize creed.  So, who wants to buy what we’re selling? 
 
Well, maybe folks who know that life is more often lived in-between; maybe folks who long for meaning more than information; maybe folks who want to be part of saving the world!  Those are the kinds of people who have always been attracted to this strange Rabbi, who questions our assumptions, and call us to find true life by giving ours away.  
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When did Jesus become Jesus?

9/9/2018

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​BE OPENED!
Mark 7:24-37
Welcome Sunday, September 9, 2018
© the Rev. Dr. James Campbell
 
 
 
Mark 7:24-37
 
From there he set out and went away to the region of Tyre. He entered a house and did not want anyone to know he was there. Yet he could not escape notice, but a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit immediately heard about him, and she came and bowed down at his feet. Now the woman was a Gentile, of Syrophoenician origin. She begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter. He said to her, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” But she answered him, “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” Then he said to her, “For saying that, you may go—the demon has left your daughter.” So she went home, found the child lying on the bed, and the demon gone.
 
Then he returned from the region of Tyre, and went by way of Sidon towards the Sea of Galilee, in the region of the Decapolis. They brought to him a deaf man who had an impediment in his speech; and they begged him to lay his hand on him. He took him aside in private, away from the crowd, and put his fingers into his ears, and he spat and touched his tongue. Then looking up to heaven, he sighed and said to him, “Ephphatha,” that is, “Be opened.” And immediately his ears were opened, his tongue was released, and he spoke plainly. Then Jesus ordered them to tell no one; but the more he ordered them, the more zealously they proclaimed it. They were astounded beyond measure, saying, “He has done everything well; he even makes the deaf to hear and the mute to speak.”
 

 +++

When exactly did you become you? Was it as soon as the sperm and egg came together?  Was it sometime during the nine long months of watery darkness?  Was it when you learned to speak and express yourself?  Or when you graduated?  Or when you had your first real crisis and survived it?  Or do you think of yourself as still becoming more fully you? 
 
And if you think of yourself as still becoming you, then when did Jesus become Jesus?  There is an often-unspoken assumption in the church that because Jesus was Jesus, he emerged from the womb fully and completely formed, sort of human but really much more divine.  And so, to even ask: “When did Jesus become Jesus” has the ring of heresy to it for some. 
 
I was raised with a thoroughly static view of Jesus. The Jesus of my childhood was the already the perfect Son of God before he was even born. We would say things like “Jesus is fully human and fully divine” but the reality was that we left no room for his humanity.  We sort of ignored the idea that Jesus was the actual son of a woman named Mary, who grew up in a working class home, and played in the streets, and no doubt argued with his siblings, and scraped his knees and had stomach aches and confounded his parents.  We so focused on his divinity that we ignored his humanity. And quite frankly, that also has the ring of heresy to it.  
 
But today’s Gospel lesson seems to show us a very clear picture of Jesus’s complicated humanity.  Jesus had traveled to the region of Tyre and Sidon, in modern day Lebanon.  This was Gentile country.  And it appears that Jesus was traveling alone this time, Mark makes no mention of any of the disciples.  And Mark says that Jesus entered a house but did not want anyone to know he was there.  So maybe he was on vacation – a very human thing to do!  
 
But try as he might to have some downtime, Jesus did not escape notice. Like a celebrity hounded by the paparazzi, word spread that the great healer and teacher from Galilee was holed up in a local house.  Suddenly, there was a pounding on the door of that house.  And when the host opened it, a Syrophoenician woman pushed her way in and immediately fell down at Jesus’s feet.  To say that she was Syrophoenician was to say that she was not one of the chosen people, that she was an outsider, that she was “other.”  And this outsider begged Jesus to cast the demon out of her daughter. 
 
Now when people came to Jesus for help, they were almost always met with compassion.  Social barriers were no barriers for Jesus.  But not this time.  This time, a tired, perhaps close-to-burned-out Savior, looks at this bold and persuasive woman, who has just poured out her heart to him and said: “Lady, let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”  At than point, most of us would have slinked away in humiliation.  But this sassy sister was undeterred and replied: “Yes sir, but even the dogs get table scraps.”
 
So, what are we to make of these strange and harsh words of Jesus?  Well, the church has been trying to answer question that for some time now, usually in an attempt to protect a static view of Jesus and his divinity. 
 
The first explanation is like this: Jesus ignored this woman and then verbally rebuffed her because he was testing her faith.  If she only could exhibit enough faith, the reasoning goes, then her little daughter would be set free.  But that kind of logic sets us humans up for some very cruel tests of faith.  It implies that when bad things happen to us, somehow it’s our fault.  If only we had more faith, then children wouldn’t die and cancer would be cured and lovers would be faithful and we would never lose our jobs.  
 
The second standard explanation is like this: when Jesus calls her a dog, he’s really calling her a puppy, sort of like a term of endearment.  The Greek word here for dog is “kunarios” which actually means little dogs or puppies. This used to be my favorite explanation until the day I realized that no one wants to be called a young female dog, if you know what I mean.  
 
And the third explanation is like this: Jesus rebuffed her because she needed to submit to Jesus.  She needed to kneel at his feet, to beg his mercy, to humble herself.  And it was this humbling that caused Jesus to grant her request.  But I was raised on a steady diet of pious humiliation and frankly it did nothing for me except to confuse me about the nature of God’s love.  
 
But there is another way to read this story.  It’s a little edgy; it might make us a bit uncomfortable.  But I find in it a huge helping of God’s amazing grace.  And it is simply this: maybe Jesus was just having a bad day.  Maybe, when those harsh words were spoken, what we see is a very human Jesus, not some immutable deity. Maybe Jesus was still in the process of change and growth; still, as one blogger has so beautifully phrased it, “on his way to becoming the Savior of the World.”  Maybe, in that exchange with an unlikely messenger, Jesus learned something transformative. And he changed.  As theologian Barbara Brown Taylor has written: In that moment of encounter with the other, “you can almost hear the huge wheel of history turning as Jesus comes to a new understanding of who he is and what he has been called to do.”[1]  And so Jesus, shaken awake by her words, is transformed and sees her not as a foreigner, not as a second-class female, not as a heretic, but as a human sister in need. And of course they only thing to do for a sister is to set her little daughter free of the evil that bound her. 
 
Immediately afterwards, Jesus is off to the Decapolis in Galilee, where the people brought him a deaf man with a speech impediment, and asked Jesus to heal him. And this is an odd story too. Jesus takes this man aside, put his fingers in his ears, and took some of his own saliva and placed it on the man’s tongue.  And then Jesus looked up into heaven, sighed, and said: “Be opened.” And the man was healed.
 
It’s easy to miss that sigh in the reading.  But that sigh seems significant to me.  Was it ironic? Did Jesus sigh with a wry smile?  When he said about the deaf man’s ears: “Be opened!” did he suddenly look up to heaven and think: “Oh.  OK Father, I get it.  Be opened. I get it.” 
 
And if it’s true that in some way our Lord Jesus Christ “got it” in a way he had not before; if it’s true that Jesus became more fully Jesus in that moment, then what does that mean for us as we encounter people who challenge our privilege and assumptions and traditions? 
 
Today we begin another year of ministry and mission in the name of this Jesus.  And so we begin, however tentatively, to draw our circle wider. And as we come face to face with those very different from ourselves, the question before us always is: Will we be content with stasis, which is really death?  Or will we be open to transformation, which is life?  First Congregational Church of Cheshire: I say, let’s imagine that God is not done with us yet; let’s imagine that there is genuine blessing in challenge and change; let’s imagine that the only kind of circle worth having is one that is always expanding, until it embraces the whole world.

Thanks be to God.  Amen.   



Thomas, Debie.  www.journeywithjesus.net, “Be Opened” accessed September 3, 2018
 
 

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"The glory of God is the human person fully alive."
Saint Irenaeus of Lyon, 2nd century