Sunday, February 5, 2012

It’s Not About Me



Mark 1:29-39
February 5, 2012



It was one of those yell at the radio moments.  It was a few years ago, and I was listening to NPR – a station that should have known better, if you ask me – and they were reporting on Miley Cyrus, also known as Hannah Montana, also known as a hero of teenage girls at that time.  Of course, she was just the next in an unending stream.  The pattern is so predictable:  a child actor or singer blasts onto the scene, they seem to have it all together – they aren’t affected by all the stardom, they’re “down to earth,” and children and parents alike are so excited because here’s a wholesome figure that kids can look up to. 

And Miley fit the bill perfectly.  She was wildly popular as both an actress and singer.  And she said all the right things to the kids.  She happily proclaimed herself as a Southern Baptist Christian.  And the fantasy was that because kids were so in awe of her, what she said held sway.  And because she was one of the good ones, this would have a positive effect on the kids.  When she says she doesn’t drink, then kids might think it’s cool to not drink.  When she says she doesn’t have sex, maybe the teenage kids who idolize her won’t have sex.  And so forth.

But time and time again, these people disappoint everyone.  NPR reported that Cyrus posed for some photographs that many thought inappropriate for her age – and I suspect they were.  But here’s the piece that made me so angry: parents, TV producers, kids, and the media got mad at the fallen hero!  Cyrus should have known better, they said.  She was a role model and so she had a responsibility.  She let the public down.  She let the kids down.  People got mad at Miley Cyrus, instead of questioning the whole hero worshiping enterprise itself.  What in the world did they expect?  

We love to worship heroes.  People all over the United States will sit in front of the TV tonight rooting for their heroes.  We become so invested in them.  And of course they disappoint us.  They disappoint us.  Hero worship is not an effective strategy for building character in kids or in adults.  But, it seems to be a fairly universal, human instinct.  Hero worship was certainly alive and well in Jesus’ day – and we get a taste of it here. 

Just to set the scene for our passage:  Jesus is having an extraordinary day:  It started out in the morning with him teaching in the synagogue – wowing people with his “new authority,” as they called it.  In the middle of his teaching, he was interrupted by a very disturbed man, and Jesus stopped to cast out a legion of demons from him, and in the process not only impressed the congregation, but the demons themselves. 

He and the disciples left the synagogue and went straight to Simon and Andrew’s house where he healed Simon’s mother-in-law of a crippling fever.  By evening, people were flocking to Jesus to such a degree that the author of the gospel felt it necessary to use hyperbole:  At sundown on that busy day, the author tells us, the town brought all who were sick or possessed with demons to Jesus; every single one.  But that’s not where it ended.  Finally, before bedtime, we hear that the whole city was gathered around the door. 

The whole city!  That must have been a pretty heady moment for Jesus.  This was the most impressive church start-up ever.  It’s every pastor’s dream.  First, to have the power to really help people, and second to draw in a whole city in just one day!  No one would ever walk away from that.  But Jesus did.  He walked away – literally.

Here he was:  helping people, affecting people, drawing people in.  Surely, we tell ourselves, that’s what Jesus was about.  That’s why we think he was so special…why it is we worship and adore him.  He was the only son of God – the one capable of healing our every woe.  We need Jesus, we say all the time, to be well…to be whole…to be saved.  In fact, throughout history much of Christianity has been hoards of people metaphorically flocking to Jesus’ door because of what he could do for us. 

But in this story Jesus leaves.  Walks away…from the people, from the healing, and for a moment from the disciples.  And it was upsetting to folks.  I love verse 36.  Jesus snuck out of the house in the wee hours of the morning to go off by himself to pray.  The disciples, the text says, “hunted” for him.  This word, hunted, appears only once in our bible.  Some versions of the bible mistakenly and misleadingly translate this word as “followed”.  They say that the disciples followed Jesus – as if they were following him as disciples.  They weren’t.  There’s another greek word for “follow” – the word Jesus uses when he says, “follow me.”  There was nothing disciple-ish about this.  They were hunting him down. 

Jesus had become a local hero…almost instantly, according to the gospel of Mark.  But Jesus, it seems, was not comfortable with hero worship.  In fact, I think it frustrated him – maybe at times angered him.  Notice he didn’t just walk away from the hoards of people for a moment to collect himself and rejuvenate, and go back and continue his star-studded ministry.  Even after the disciples found him, and informed him that everyone was looking for him – hunting for him – Jesus says, “we’re outta here.”  We have other places to go, other people to see. 

The problem was, the message was getting lost, because all people focused on was the person…Jesus.  Hero worship has all sorts of problems.  In this case, seeing Jesus as the hero was allowing people to believe that he alone was capable of addressing the needs of the most vulnerable people in society.  Instead of Jesus coming to proclaim the kingdom of God at hand, they had decided he was the king of their current kingdom, and it was him alone who could make lives better.

To be clear, I don’t think that Jesus was frustrated with those who needed healing.  I really believe this.  Notice, in all the gospels including this one, Jesus did heal people when they came to him.  It’s true he left the mob scene – including many who needed healing – and he wouldn’t ever be able to cure every sick person in the known world during his lifetime, but he was time and time again moved with compassion for those who were hurting.  Instead, I think he was frustrated with the fact that there were so many who needed healing…that it was a world with so much brokenness, pain, oppression, poverty, and callousness.  And he was frustrated that the religious people, who should have known better, weren’t responding in the obvious compassionate way: reaching out to those who were hurting and doing what they could to help.  

The gospel of Mark tells us that Jesus came proclaiming that the kingdom of God was had hand and that people should repent and believe the good news.  He was pointing people to a possibility – a new reality, an alternative world where those who were hurting are met by the community with compassion and healing.  He was inviting people to turn from the old kingdom and be a part of this new one…participate in this new one.  “It’s not about me,” he said, “it’s about the realm of God in our midst.  Let’s make it happen!”

Recently a you tube video about Jesus and religion went viral.  I must have seen it posted on facebook 20 times.  It was a video of a man named Jefferson Bethke doing a rap about how Jesus is better than religion.  Now, I should begin by saying I have sympathies with this video, and it clearly spoke to many, many people. This is because there are many times the institution obscures the message of Jesus.  There are many instances when religion is a barrier to God’s work, rather than a purveyor of it.  But, when you listen to his words, he turns everything around to make Jesus the hero and religion and church the villain.

“Jesus came to abolish religion,” Bethke says.  “Religion is the infection, Jesus is the cure.”

To be fair to Bethke, when he said “religion,” he had a particular vision of what religion is – and it is the worst of what religion is.  He was criticizing religion for not being the manifestation of the Realm of God, which I think we would all agree is many times the case.  But he seems to argue that the answer is to get rid of religion and send everyone to Jesus alone.  And this is appealing to a lot of people.  This makes it about you and your personal relationship to Jesus – your salvation, your cure.  It makes Jesus a hero – and we love heroes.  

But the danger is that without religion, when Jesus alone is the point of Christianity, we might forget that we are healed for a purpose.  Like Simon’s mother-in-law, who after Jesus healed her gets up to minister to others, we are healed to continue Jesus’ ministry.  We are cured to become the church that manifests God’s realm so that others might be healed.  


It wasn’t that Jesus thought people shouldn’t be healed.  It was that he thought he shouldn’t be the only one doing it!  He was going far and wide to spread the word that the kingdom of God was at hand, and people had to decide whether to jump in and join in the ministry of God, or sit back and see what Jesus could do for them.  Jesus wasn’t a gate keeper.  You didn’t have to worship him in order to “get it.”  He wasn’t a hero – at least not in the gospel of Mark.  He was the sign post pointing the way.  

When it became too much about him; when people missed the point and worshipped him – making him special – Jesus moved on.  It’s not about me…it’s about making God’s realm real by healing the broken, extending compassion, ministering to others…in short, being the church God created us to be.  Amen.

Thursday, February 2, 2012

It Isn't Actually Possible



1 Corinthians 8:1-13; Mark 1:21-28
January 29, 2012

[note:  In part, this sermon was inspired by reading the book, "Love's Labor," by Eva Kittay]

“Pull yourself up by your bootstraps.”

“God helps those who help themselves.”

“If you give someone a fish they eat for a day, if you teach someone to fish, they eat for a lifetime.”

These sayings have all long been a part of our American lexicon.  They are based on a vision of what constitutes a good life and healthy society.  The idea is that each person is capable of living an independent, autonomous life and our society should be set up so that every person has that opportunity.  Then, each person can choose for themselves what a good, happy life looks like, as long as they don’t prevent another from being able to do the same.

On the surface, this is appealing.  Living a life where you can provide for yourself, choose to live in a way that makes you fulfilled and happy, and weather any storms that come your way must be a good thing, right?  It’s a no brainer.  And a society whose goal is to encourage people to live autonomous lives where they don’t have to be dependent on the government or charity seems logical. 

But I wonder if it is Christian.  I even wonder if it’s practical or helpful.

To begin with, this doesn’t seem to quite fit with what the bible says.  None of those three great slogans made it into our scriptures.  And today’s text is one of many examples where the bible seems to say just the opposite of these slogans.  When someone needs help, and they come to Jesus, Jesus helps.  And when you read the gospels carefully, you see that often a big part of the benefit for those who Jesus helps is that they can be a part of a community that had previously shunned them on account of their ailment. 

Community, according to torah, the prophets, Jesus, and the early Christians, is where you need to be in order to be cared for…if the communities live up to its call.  Over and over we hear the bible say to the religious communities of their day, care for the poor, the orphan, the widow, the imprisoned.  If communities do this, then the goal of helping someone is to restore them to community, not to make them autonomous.

When Jesus heals this man full of demons, instead of the goal being that the person could now live a happy life because he could take care of himself, Jesus breaks down a barrier so the man could be brought back into the community and live a happy life because he is cared for by the community.  Jesus takes away the reason the person was shunned in the first place.

It seems to me that Jesus assumed we are dependent on one another for our well being and because of that a healthy, caring community, not autonomy for everyone, should be the goal.  And that fits with my experience.  Dependency is a given in the human condition.  At various times in all of our lives we are limited and dependent on others for our basic needs.  All of us were children at one point, unable to care for ourselves, requiring the care of some adult for our survival.  And I would argue that for most, if not all, of us there are times other than our childhood when our limitations again make us dependent on others for our survival, or at least for spiritual and emotional well being.

Think about how at the other end of life, many of us will once again be dependent on others to care for us, to meet our basic needs.  Think about times in your life when you might have been laid up due to illness or trauma.  And of course, some people have permanent limitations that mean they are dependent on others their whole life.  Cognitive limitation, emotional limitations, physical limitations.

I know I’m not telling you anything you don’t know, and when folks talk about the ideal – that everyone should be given the opportunity to live an autonomous life – and when people discuss policies, all except the most delusional know there are exceptions and that we are, as human beings, responsible for those dependents…those who cannot survive without care.  But if we don’t start with dependency as the basic reality, then we don’t tend to do a good job with those exceptions.  In part this is because when something is seen as an exception to the ideal, it is inevitably devalued, denigrated, even scorned.

Think about those who are responsible for raising our children.  Everyone says children are the most important things in the world.  And no one would deny that children are completely dependent, yet as a society we do an abysmal job of supporting those who care for our children.  Last I looked, you don’t get health insurance because you are home taking care of a child…you don’t get paid.  And I’m on the board of directors at our community day care, and the people caring for our children there don’t get health insurance either, and very little pay.

We underpay social workers, CNAs, home health aides, special education teachers, and the list goes on.  When it comes to caring for the dependents in our culture, we don’t help their guardians who are responsible for them, and we don’t help those we hire to care for them when the guardians.

And the problem doesn’t stop there: Once we move beyond the obvious in terms of who is dependent – children, elderly who can no longer care for themselves, severely disabled – we don’t do a very good job at thinking about the spectrum of limitations people face.  We don’t quite know what to do with those who don’t fall at the extreme end of the spectrum.  And we don’t know what it means for those people to ever pull themselves up by their bootstraps, or learn to fish, or help themselves. 

I know deciding how to care for people in need is incredibly complex…way too complex for one sermon.  Should we try to help people move from being dependent to being able to support themselves whenever possible? – of course.  Being dependent on others can really drain your soul.  But I think we need to do a better job of thinking about the “whenever possible” of that statement.  Some of the people who land somewhere in the middle on the spectrum of limitations are expected to pull themselves up by the bootstraps because their limitations are less-than-obvious and less severe.  But, they can’t.  They’re stuck and we demand they un-stick themselves.   

In addition, I think we need to do a better job of not stigmatizing people who are dependent, thinking they are less-than because they are not capable of ever reaching the ideal picture of what it means to live a good life.  If we could do this, it would not take such a toll on someone’s soul to be dependent on others.  They would feel valued, instead of being treated like a pariah, or a drain on resources. 

You probably know this, but it isn’t actually possible to pull yourself up by your bootstraps.  Try it.  If you’re on the ground and want to get up, the bootstraps aren’t going to do the trick…there isn’t enough leverage from that position.  In fact, when this phrase originated, best folks can tell, it was meant to point out something absurd.  It’s absurd, they were saying, to leave someone in need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.  Sometimes it was used to encourage soldiers to help their comrades when they fell.  You can’t leave them there to pull themselves up by their bootstraps…that would be absurd.

Paul spent his energy writing to communities about how to care for individuals, not the other way around.  In our passage this morning, Paul is basically saying to the Jewish Christians even if you know it doesn’t matter, eat in such a way that others will not feel alienated by the community.  Care for the weak, he says.  Invite them into this community that follows Christ – a community that builds others up because of love, not “knowledge.”  Having knowledge might be akin to all those times we think we know what’s better for someone else, and try to impose that on them in order to make their lives look more like ours.  Having knowledge is the basis for the fishing metaphor, right.  We can teach them.

All of us possess knowledge, Paul says, but knowledge puffs up – makes us think we are better than someone else who might not have the same experience, resources, abilities or privileges we do.  It’s love that builds up.  The knowledge that matters, according to Paul, is the knowledge that God is love…that Jesus came to show God’s love in action.  And Jesus didn’t sit people down and try to teach them to fish.  In fact, he called all these fishermen to follow him, requiring them to be dependent on one another and strangers for their sustenance.  They chose dependency – something we would never condone.  Dependency was not a dirty word to Jesus…it was the basis for human relationships and society.  Needing things from others was not the worst thing – not being a world or community that cares for all was.

There should be no shame in being dependent on others, regardless of the reason for it.  This means when we find ourselves in need, no matter how we got there, we should not be ashamed – we should be grateful for communities that love God and love others.  And when we encounter someone in need, no matter how they got there, we should not shame them…we should help them, both by meeting any direct need they have, and by integrating them into a community that loves God and loves others.  And our decisions, policies, and values should begin with the assumption that we are all, at some point, dependent on one another. 

It isn’t actually possible to pull yourself up by your bootstraps – maybe it’s time we stopped expecting people to do the impossible.  Amen.