Broadway Christian Church · Columbia, Missouri
Morning Worship · September 20, 2009
Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Happy are those who are not taken in by the deceptive talk of the dark-hearted
or take the path that leads into destruction,
or rub shoulders with those who scoff at the ways of God.
Happy are those who delight in the law of the Lord,
who meditate on it day and night.
They are like trees, planted by streams of water.
In all they do they prosper.
Let us pray:
Watch over our ways, O God, and guide our paths,
In our coming in and going out. Amen.
New Testament Lesson
Mark 9:38-40
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.”
Message
Anonymous.com
Tim Carson
In one of the most provoking movies of recent times, The Apostle, actor Robert Duvall plays a Pentecostal preacher from the Deep South, one who finds himself mired in all manner of intrigue in his personal life and with the law. In one playful scene, he witnesses the “blessing of the fleet” – the blessing of all the boats in the harbor – by a Catholic priest. This involves a blessing with holy water with the priest dressed in his full regalia.
The preacher looks on from a distance with wide-eyed amazement and then laughs to himself and says, “You do it your way, and I’ll do it mine… yes, you do it your way, and I’ll do it mine.”
It’s a scene that could have come right out of Mark’s story of this morning, that is, if Mark weren’t in such a hurry.
Who represents the true authority and presence of Christ in the world? Who are the true followers of Jesus? Who acts in his name? We may believe that such squabbling and division is a modern phenomenon, but not so. What we discover here is that the question as to who comprise the real insiders has been around since the earliest church, the first generation of Christians.
This story before us this morning is so important to Christians of that first generation that it is found in all three of our synoptic gospels – Matthew, Mark and Luke. That means that the issues involved in the story were live ones for Christian communities.
There were lots of different Christian movements in the first generation. The reality of the early church was not that of some homogenous, uniform organization, like a Starbucks chain that has been franchised in lots of locations, outlets that basically look the same and act the same wherever you find them. Quite to the contrary, the formation of the early Christian communities was chaotic, random and diverse. There was decentralized authority. And disparate Christian groups abounded without any kind of central connection or authority.
Do you remember when Paul wrote the Corinthian church and reprimanded them for their party spirit, their sectarian divisions? That revolved around loyalties to different spiritual teachers – Paul, Peter, Apollos and others (I Cor. 1:12-13). The situation was that there were different leaders traveling to and from very diverse Christian communities.
And so, does any of this sound familiar? It should because it is describing our present reality. As Loren Mead has reminded us, we are not living in some uniform Christendom, but rather are much, much more like those early Christians living in a very chaotic and diverse religious world (Mead, The Once and Future Church).
That puts the experience of the disciples in this story much closer to ours than it might first appear.
I was tempted to title this sermon The Other Exorcist, because that’s what happens in the story. These followers of Jesus go out commissioned to teach, heal, and cast out demons in the name of Christ. But on the way, they run into … the other exorcist. This is some stranger they have never met. He is certainly no card-carrying member of their own outreach team. And he is casting out demons in none other than the name of Jesus. They even go so far as to try to stop him.
Imagine their indignance. “Well, look who thinks he’s an exorcist… Hey! That crazed, wild-eyed, demon possessed man is mine – hands off… We’ll take it from here; your services will no longer be necessary; we’ve got it covered.”
Have you ever thought about how just naturally territorial we are? One time a group of grad assistants in a university did a study of how long it took people to give up their parking places and drive away. They found that, depending on if another person was waiting for their space, how much longer they look to leave – and it was a number of seconds. There is no reason that they cannot pull out and just leave. But they linger, just to savor a last few seconds with their little dedicated patch of earth. We get attached to turf, possessive – even with parking spots.
After we moved into our new place here in Columbia, we put up a hummingbird feeder. You know the type – a glass top with the red base. We filled it up with the red nectar, stood back and waited. Soon enough the hyper creatures began to stop by for a fill up. But the more I observed their behaviors, the more I realized how territorial these little birds are. Sometimes, after getting a long sip, the hummingbird just sits up on top, waiting. Another one comes, by and if he indicates the slightest interest in paying a visit, the dogfight is on. It usually ends with one running off the other.
I mean, there are four ports for feeding. Hypothetically, four could feed at once. How much does one of these little creatures weigh? And he can’t share a little of what would seem like a water tower of nectar to us? We’re so territorial.
We also can become religiously territorial, and I don’t mean territorial about religious sites in the Holy Land and whose land belongs to whom, though there is that, too. I mean territorial about the place and persons of our mission.
I find the response of Jesus in the story very interesting. He could have said, “Good for you! Our way or the highway!” Or he could have said, “Well, there are exorcisms and then there are exorcisms.” But no, that’s not what he said. He said, “Whoever is not against us is for us.”
That’s a new way to look at things; isn’t it? And it’s much more than looking for so-called “win-win” solutions.
In physics, if an object with mass and weight has forward momentum, there are only a few things that can slow it down. Friction can erode its speed or another object can directly collide with it, redirect its forward motion. Hypothetically, without any impediments a moving object could travel through a vacuum forever.
Jesus is saying that, in the universal scope of all time and space, unless some force is blocking our motion, impeding our mission, or changing our direction, they are for us. Don’t spend your time worrying about agents who are not blocking you – they are actually for you by the fact that they grant you freedom and don’t stand in your way.
Last Sunday, Kathy and I lifted off in our first hot air balloon ride, courtesy of the Holmes clan. We had just the finest trip across Columbia. There was another balloonist just ahead of us, and as we drifted along, I started to think about what makes balloons what they are and also the difference between their balloon and our balloon.
The essential difference between balloons, other than style and hardware, is the obvious one: The fabric, the skin. Think about it – the difference between the weight of the cold air on the outside and the hot air on the inside in tension with gravity causes the balloon to either rise or fall. The only real difference between two balloons is the membrane – the other dynamics are the same.
This parallels one of the great epiphanies of my life – that people animated by the same energy/spirit of life are fundamentally the same, separated by little more than a thin membrane. The outside of the package gives different form and shape, but what makes it all go – air, gravity, temperature, wind – are essentials shared by all.
So, whatever is not holding us down to earth is floating alongside us, heading with the wind in the same direction.
Whoever is not against us is for us.
The revolutionary power of this insight sets us free to walk through life differently. The truth of life is that whenever we arrive on the scene anywhere God has already been at work. We always enter mid-stream, mid-story, mid-process. As the Apostle Paul also said about those divisions in the early churches, “Paul planted and Apollos watered … but God gave the growth” (I Cor. 3:6). What a relief to walk through the world with a different consciousness about what God is up to.
When you enter into another person’s life, or he or she into yours, one enters a work in progress. It’s not up to us to create something out of nothing. We enter and make our contribution where and when we arrive. Pastors come to a new congregation, and they don’t create something out of nothing but rather stand on the shoulders of those who have gone before and help to write the next chapter of the biography.
This is the story of the world and God’s work through us in it – that there are multiple authors and artists at work on the masterpiece, several generations of stonemasons who work on one cathedral.
Some years ago, in one of my former congregations, a mission trip travelled to Ecuador. During that time, I was teaching lay pastors in the town of Ibarra. The particular session was focused on baptism and the Lord’s Supper. And after the session, the director of the workshop told me that two of the men would like to speak to me. We pulled up chairs and they began.
They said that they would like to know about the Santa Cena, that Holy Supper, and that they had never heard about it before. I asked them to first tell a little about their church and ministry and they did. They were the product of some mission group in Scandinavia who had brought the proclamation of the Gospel to them some years ago. But after a short time, they had to leave and never got teaching about lots of things – including the Lord’s Supper. And so, they were talking to me.
I was talking to people who already had the seeds of the Gospel planted in their hearts, who knew the broad outlines of the Christian story, but didn’t have a clue about the Jesus meal that stood at the heart of Christian worship everywhere. We not only studied where it came from and what it meant, but how to do it. They had never witnessed the breaking of the bread.
Paul planted and Apollos watered. When we climbed to the top of the mountain, we found that someone had planted their flag before we arrived, so we planted our flag alongside it. When we went out in Jesus’ name we found those who were already at work, but there was still much work to do. Those who are not against us … are drifting in the wind with us, are for us.
Benediction
And now may the grace of God known in Christ, the fellowship and communion of the Spirit, and the fellowship of all those who travel down this path bless you and guide you this coming week. Amen.
