Hebrews 1:1 – 4, 2:5 – 12; Mark 10:2 – 16
October 4, 2009: World Communion Sunday
As I was preparing the sermon this week, I realized there was a chance that when Dennis read the passage in Mark, an elephant would walk into the sanctuary. Given this, I decided I had three choices when writing my sermon. First, I could ignore this passage from Mark – completely ignore it by not having Dennis read it at all. Every week I choose which passages we read from the lectionary, and every week I leave one or two out, for all sorts of reasons. And leaving Mark out was tempting because most of you wouldn’t know what the passage said, and so the elephant would stay safely in the zoo. But not dealing with it at all – just because it might be awkward – didn’t appeal to me because I think it’s a passage rich with meaning and possible application for us.
The second option was to preach about divorce, which would demand that I give the elephant a name: perhaps a name like, “I was divorced six years ago”. If I did this, I would prove to you that I am not avoiding a subject just because it would be uncomfortable for me. But this didn’t work either. To preach a sermon about divorce this morning would force me to find things in the text that aren’t there. Preaching about divorce just to prove I am not avoiding something seemed disingenuous.
Finally, I could preach about what I think this passage is actually about – which is not divorce – leaving the elephant present but unacknowledged. And as you have probably guessed, I chose the last option. I chose to preach on what I think it is really about. I know that leaves me open to the criticism that I’m avoiding the subject of divorce so I don’t have to talk about the elephant, but it still seemed like the best choice. You’re welcome to tell me otherwise after the sermon .
The truth is, no passage from the bible that explicitly mentions divorce has much of anything at all to say about divorce in our day and age. When Jesus talks about divorce, I am fairly confident he is not envisioning me and my ex-husband walking into the court house and filing our divorce decree. Families then share very little in common with families now. They would likely be unrecognizable to most of us. Societal expectations in the bible about marriage and kids are a far, far cry from what our society expects. And so the concept of divorce in 1st century Palestine bears little to no resemblance to our concept today.
I would be happy to have the divorce conversation or preach on it at some time in the future. This is simply not the right passage to ground that discussion. In fact, to take this passage and apply it literally to our understanding of divorce today would land us in a moralistic, judgmental place – which, interestingly, is exactly what Jesus was calling the Pharisees on.
Jesus is asked a legal question. And he deflects, “Let the law answer that question,” he says. Then Jesus goes on to talk about how we should be in relationship to each other and he chooses marriage as the example because it was where the Pharisees started. His point is that the quality of relationships cannot be measured by the law, they can only be governed by it. Relationships, all relationships, should be evaluated against the nature of God’s creation and God’s purpose for all of us.
Narrowing the application of this passage to divorce as we understand it today allows us to ignore all of the relationships we might be in that do resemble the dynamics of marriage in 1st century Palestine. In that day women and children were essentially property. The men had the money and the power, leaving women and children completely vulnerable apart from men. The power imbalance was massive and it was normal and accepted. No one stopped to ask what that power imbalance meant for women or children, or how it felt, or why it mattered.
So, what relationships in our world today do reflect the marriage dynamic in Jesus’ day? Any relationship where we treat someone as less than equal – any relationship where we have power over others and fail to recognize what the exercise of that power is doing to people. And we are all in those relationships, married, divorced or none of the above. All of us sitting here are in those relationships by just by virtue of living in a privileged country, just as all men were in imbalanced, power-driven marriages in Jesus’ day just by virtue of being men.
The global equation between the rich and the poor, the “haves” and the “have nots” is seldom questioned. It is accepted as “what is”, and those of us on the winning side of that equation rarely, if ever, stop to think about how it would feel to be born into poverty, or how it would feel to have our daily lives depend on whether the U.S. did or did not send in troops; did or did not ease sanctions; did or did not curb emissions.
In our passage, we are the ones who have the power to affect someone merely because we are born into a particular circumstance – Jesus was talking about men’s relationships to women, today it is Americans’ relationships to the rest of the world. And when we are in such a role, Jesus tells us the law isn’t going to work as the guide for how we should relate to the rest of the world. The law is full of all the same unexamined assumptions about what is “normal”. The law codifies the power imbalance.
Instead, in his answer to the Pharisees, Jesus tells them that in human relationships that seek to reflect the love of God, the powerful one should leave everything he knows and be united with the one he has power over. Become one with your wife. Become like a lowly, powerless child. When he does that, he will feel what the other feels and know what the other knows. Our contemporary word for that is “solidarity.” You leave what you know, set aside your power for a moment, and become one with someone who is “other”, whose life is so foreign to you, you can’t imagine what they might be feeling or what they know or how they do things.
Become one with your wife, Jesus says. Then you will know how your actions will affect her, you will feel it, and so you will choose rightly without needing the law to tell you what to do. And this was almost as unthinkable to men at that time as it is for us to think about leaving everything we know, giving up all of our privilege that we are born into, and becoming one with people half way around the world.
In all its convoluted language, this is what I think Hebrews is about: solidarity. Only here it is God choosing solidarity with us. The author says that first God created us, humankind, and then God’s intention was that we would live in harmony with each other and creation. But humans have never fully achieved that harmony. So God tried sending the prophets to tell us how to live and treat each other and be in relationship with each other. That didn’t work so well – so then God became human like us, and showed us how to live and treat each other and be in relationship with each other. The key to the whole thing is that God became like us. In Jesus, God felt what it was like to live in this less-than-harmonious world, to have little power, to suffer and to die. Because of this God can walk with us as we seek that harmony.
This is World Communion Sunday. Taking communion today, while thinking about people taking communion all over the world, is one kind of solidarity, even if largely symbolic. It is one way we realize that we are connected to people because they are creations of God just as we are. It is a momentary act of union. It is also an occasion to think about the harder truths we face on this World Communion Sunday.
Most of us, certainly me included, have very little understanding of the lives of most of the people with whom we share this meal today. At the same time, when we’re honest with ourselves we know that we have a great deal of power to affect their lives. Because we live in a first world country, our actions and choices often affect the lives of people in developing countries – either positively or negatively. We might not like it, but we can’t avoid it. This is where we live, and the global dynamics are what they are.
All of us need to examine our individual part in these relationships and ask ourselves how to find solidarity with the people whose lives we affect. But I thought today we might look to our church denomination as an example of being in relationships of solidarity. In other words, let’s look at how the mission program of the PCUSA addresses issues of need, power and solidarity in all the communities we serve. The good news is by and large our missionaries are people who have decided to leave everything they know, to set aside the power and privilege into which they were born, and to go to be one with people half way around the world, so that they can walk with people as together they seek the harmony God intends.
Most of us can conjure up some pretty nasty images when we hear the word mission or missionary. There have been times in our history when mission work was synonymous with going to a foreign country and converting people from their indigenous religions and cultures to “our” religion and “our” culture and “our” values. There have been people in our denomination working as missionaries whose only concern was for the spiritual state of someone’s soul without a second thought as to their material or physical needs – as if those could be separated.
But we’re a long ways from that. We have learned to see more clearly the power dynamics – we are moving from having a relationship with the world that looked like biblical marriages to relationships that look like the one Jesus envisioned where we set aside our power, leave what we know, and become one with those we seek to love and help.
At a recent gathering in Dallas, our denominational leaders constructed a document called, “An Invitation to Expanding Partnership in God’s Mission.” This paper lays out some of the new ways we understand Mission work in the Christian church. It says, “[We strive] in our mission to be aware of the context out of which we come, to respect the persons with whom we labor and to honor the context in which they live. In an era of massive global inequalities we commit ourselves to be sensitive to and address the issues of power that result from our differences. We seek to live out these mission values with humility, integrity and steadfastness.”
This shift can certainly be seen in the mission work of our own Des Moines Presbytery. Our church knows a little bit about the Presbytery’s work in El Salvador, as we have contributed to that mission many times. Our mission worker, Kathy Mahler, lives down there and knows the people as brothers and sisters. She trusts that they know best their needs; and works with them to match those needs with our resources. Our churches here partner with small communities in Berlin to work together on local projects.
This mission has been extremely successful, and I think that is due to the initial tone that was set by Bob Cook, who was our first mission worker there. He left behind everything to go live there. He loved people, learned from people, and grew daily in his understanding of the lives around him. It was from this place that he could come back to us and know what to ask for. We have church delegations go down all the time, not just to “do” things, but to be with our friends down there in solidarity. Spending a little time just seeing what their lives are like – the great stuff and the terrible stuff. It is a mission based on solidarity. We don’t impose our beliefs or worldview on them, because our beliefs and worldview are extremely limited. In order to “help”, we have to feel life from their perspective and step into their worldview, which is just as valid for them as ours is for us.
Solidarity is what God is all about. In Jesus, God chose to become us…completely, without power over us. God plunged into our lives and walked with us so we can be assured that God partners with us in working out God’s purposes here on earth. Because God became one of us, God could no more exercise power and control over us than we can over a friend we make in Berlin, El Salvador.
That is our model – God choosing to become one of us. And the next step is ours – choosing to unite with people we don’t know or understand and people we have power over and affect without even thinking twice about it. When we take this step, we will be compelled to walk with them as they work to bring God’s love to this broken world, helping out whenever we can. And this kind of solidarity – this way of being in the world – works in all directions. Power fades away and someone we think we are helping is learning about us, readying themselves to offer themselves when we need it and don’t have the resources.
We’re married to the world and we need to decide what we want that marriage to look like. When we come to this table for communion, do we come as the husband who accepts their power over their wife as a given, or as a partner? Do we come in power or in peace? Do we come as solitary individuals or in solidarity with people all over the world? Communion is what God does with us. God communes with us in Jesus. Now we are called to commune with the world. Amen.
