revdougnz

Pentecost 23B, 2018
Mark 10: 46-52

Possible In The New…

Ian Cairns’ writes: “Mark [the storyteller] also wishes to stress that faith, rightly understood, is not dependence-inducing, but rather is eliciting of a sturdy independence.  Faith is choosing to trust that life’s kindliness does not support us, however circumstances seem to contradict this…”.

The Jesus of the Marcan story we just read, saw and heard Bartimaeus and did something about it. He offered some simple words and ordinary caring. Jack Spong says that “In Jesus we have met a presence of God… come among us offering life, love, and being to this world” (J S Spong. 2003).

The question we have now is; is this what blind Bartimaeus saw in Jesus? Did he see a God presence offering life, love and being? Tom Boomershine, an Australian storyteller when working with this story, says: “Jesus response is a word of affirmation and encouragement in which he gives permission for Bartimaeus to act on the power implicit in his own faith” (Boomershine 1988:128).

If we put this scene into our context today we might get a bit confused given that our environment seems to be caught up in the loss of absolute truth and the power of perception and the importance of rhetoric. The wild debates around what is and is not PC or politically correct and just scuttlebutt. Where is common sense in all this, in fact what is common sense anymore. Our human systems of order seem to be in some chaotic meltdown process and it is hard to discern where to from here. In the context of our story, who is the nobody in the world’s eyes? It might be the gullible, or the naïve or even the sensible.

On the perhaps more positive side of this picture is the concern for education, and the concern for mental health. Sir Ken Robinson says that “Given the challenges we face, education doesn’t need to be reformed — it needs to be transformed. The key to this transformation is not to standardize education, but to personalize it, to build achievement on discovering the individual talents of each child, to put students in an environment where they want to learn and where they can naturally discover their true passions.” This needs good teachers and good teachers are teachers for whom teaching is a vocation not a job, it is not an exchange of offering for reward, it is a valuing of a gift, a making an authentic place for an offering of love for humanity. Pay is part of it but only when it is alongside a true valuing of the person.

Here we have a nobody in the world’s eyes, a sidelined person, a blind beggar sitting in the dust. And then, suddenly, and to the surprise of all, he becomes the hero of the story. When he raised his voice, when he spoke out, when he challenged the culturally expected people were quick to remind him he was a nobody. Hey! Shut up! Be quiet! No-one wants to listen to you! Get back in the closet! But then with the persistence which can characterize the desperate, the deviant, the different he doesn’t shy away from being a nuisance… I am not odd, I am not stupid, I am not a case to be handled, I am not a need to be met. I’m a person, not a discounted person or a person to be discounted. Mark’s Jesus responds, hears his request, and, we are told, makes him whole.

William Loader, the Australian biblical scholar, suggests this is storyteller Mark at his subversive best. “Mark can do this because he knew such stories.  Jesus did not sideline people. Jesus responded to what were seen as the ‘hopeless cases’ of his day” (William Loader/Web site-2003). This is a central theme to the ministry of Jesus and here again “Whether at the symbolic level or at a literal level, the story illustrates an approach to people which is central to Jesus’ teaching” (WLoader/Web site-2003).

About now you might be saying yes; we recognize this theme. It’s a familiar one in almost all of Marks stories We hear this ‘inclusive’ theme in Mark as we hear of children, legalism, Toll collectors, Lepers, Purity Rules and women. “The invisible domain of God is populated with the poor, the destitute, with women and unwanted children, with lepers, and toll collectors, all considered under some circumstances to be the dregs of society.  They are outsiders and outcasts.  They are exiles from their native social, political, economic and religious traditions.

One of the reasons perhaps as to why we hear these themes often is that they are humanity’s most likely areas of neglect. We remember also that much of Jesus’ energy in controversy is with his fellow Jews. He spent lots of his energy trying to show that scripture needed to be interpreted in a way which sees its priority as concern for human well-being.

In responding as he did to Bartimaeus as he did Jesus is giving him permission to express and act on the power implicit in their own faith or religious journey, especially when others want to say to them: shut up! His action is an affirmation of courage and faith and encouragement which allow that faith or religious journey to be fully lived out… offering life, love and being. The challenge is also to see the shut up, get back in your closet response is born in the fear of change, the fear of having to integrate a huge change of world view. That’s the clear defining characteristic of a life lived out of fear. It sees the loss of fear as a life of chaos, of frightening openness. A life of so much choice it is akin to madness. It is threatened by the possible in the new.

Another dimension to this dilemma is what might be termed neo-liberalism or trickle-down theory. Leave it to the free market to provide. This seems to have ignored the fact that human resources are like natural resources; they’re often buried deep. One has to go looking for them, they’re not just lying around on the surface waiting to be turned into money. One has to create the circumstances where they show themselves.” One has to listen and I mean really listen to Bartimaeus. No good just paying lip-service. Co-creators must participate, take responsibility for one’s role, act in God’s image if you like.

I want to interject a note on systemic, archetypal and mythical suggestion here in that I think we are at a point in time where we need to listen to Bartimaeus again. Not to argue for the replacement of neo-liberalism by state control or some sort of socialist expression but rather to suggest that most of us who hold power in the world in all areas of human endeavour are facing obsolescence on a big scale if we don’t listen hard enough. Get beyond our partisan positions and listen to the big picture that underlies the voice of our Bartimaeus. Our particular world in our particular part of history was created in the interests and images of industrialism. In many ways, we reflect the culture our world was designed to support. Our systems are based on the principles of the assembly line and the efficient division of labour and our economies are exchange based. We do this in exchange for that, we provide this in exchange for that. Our knowledge is a commodity to be valued monetarily and we divide it up into specialist segments in order to impose a value on it.: We arrange our days in standard units of time, marked out by the clocking on and off, or the amount of product we produce. Students are educated in batches, according to age, as if the most important thing they have in common is their date of manufacture. Our super schemes are related to age in the workforce, thus the debate about superannuation being paid for by one’s tax contribution. What I think the voice of Bartimaeus is saying here is “Hey, I am here, its my worth you are talking about, am I of any value?” ‘Just because I can’t see do this mean that I am of no value?” Just because I can’t till fields, make mats, herd sheep, build houses, doesn’t mean I can’t sing songs, tell stories, teach and participate in human flourishing. What if the world was based on the assumption that what I as one of billions of persons bring to the world is of value? What if what I did was of value not for what it gets in return but just for what I give?

Given our current worldwide disillusionment with politics, international relationships, economic uncertainty and chaotic diplomacy Mark’s story about a bloke called Bartimaeus is an important story. Especially in our religious tradition, at this time as we need to listen to all the Bartimaeus’. Jesus had to hear him and enable him to transform his place in the society. Human flourishing is not a mechanical process; it’s an organic process. And we cannot predict the outcome of human development. What we are called to do is to create the conditions under which the oppressed may begin to flourish.” We need to listen to all the voices that speak up against injustice, apathy, ignorance and assumption. For when we do listen, we know they affirm the journey we are all on. We invite them into the sacred conversation and enable their voice to share in the journey of transformation. And in that journeying which we might call life or living we and others are blessed. Amen.

Notes:
Bausch, W. A World of Stories for Preachers and Teachers. Mystic. Twenty-Third Publications, 1998.
Boomershine, T. E. Story Journey. An Invitation to the Gospel as Storytelling. Nashville. Abingdon Press, 1988.
Cairns, I. J. Mark of a Non-realist. A Contemporary Reading of the Second Gospel. Masterton. Fraser Books., 2004
Funk, R. W. A Credible Jesus. Fragments of a Vision. Santa Rosa. Polebridge Press, 2002.

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Pentecost 22B, 2018
Mark 10:35-45

Pretending to be asleep?

I want to begin today with a paraphrase of our text from Mark. James and John, the sons of Zebedee, came forward to him and said to him, “Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.” In other words we are worried and maybe even a bit afraid so how about you help? And he said to them, “What is it you want me to do for you?” And they said to him, “Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory.” In other words we want the assurance you have. We want to know that we will be ok in the future so can you keep us close to you in this realm of God you talk about. But Jesus said to them, “You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?” In other words, do you really know what you are asking? Have you thought this through as my life is at risk because I have taken on the world that we know and live in. By joining me in my baptism there is only one way this will end. Baptism is a whole of life journey. They replied, “We are able.” Then Jesus said to them, “The cup that I drink you will drink; and with the baptism with which I am baptized, you will be baptized; In other words ok you will come with me. but to sit at my right hand or at my left is not mine to grant, but it is for those for whom it has been prepared.” In other words ‘coming with me on this journey is a commitment to leave everything worthwhile behind and risk your very existence. You will only know you have arrived when you get there. When the ten heard this, they began to be angry with James and John. Now look what you have done, you have made it impossible for all of us. You have caused the setting of entry standards beyond our reach. So Jesus called them and said to them, “You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.” See its not about getting on the coattails of God, hedging one’s bets on the journey being comfortable. It’s about participating as a servant of good, in fact its about service itself, serving as an orientation for living, a doing for others, not as an unthinking obedient slave but as a collective corporate existence.

We have just finished our General Assembly in Christchurch and we await the uplifting, confident encouragement that our church is in mission. It is no longer consumed by debates and rulemaking about who’s in or out, who’s eligible to be a leader in our church or who’s not. It is no longer consumed with its decline in income and what to do with its growing value in assets. Its no longer hell bent on telling the world how to think and how to behave as if the world will listen. Our hope is that it has in traditional fashion, listened to its people explaining where the world is at and what the world is saying and it has with the help of all those present found how to encourage, resource and facilitate, mission initiatives among the people of the world. Surely the business of the church is about enabling mission as opposed to more efficiently managing the decline. As was said to me the other day about the current plan for strategic management of the church’s property portfolio, it is good for the institution, it will focus on the efficiency of the management but it will have little to offer mission. Having your seat on the left or right of Jesus is not the issue. It is about risking the alternative, about the leap of faith, about the stepping out beyond the frontier, it is about God’s mission which you know exists but have little idea of how to secure your seat. It’s in the risk of Baptism and not the security of appointment to power. It’s about moving with God’s Spirit, and that is best understood when wrestling with it and engaged in that wrestling together. It is not about finding out how to avoid it.

There’s a prayer by a J Wood that could be helpful at this point. The prayer seems to give insight into what a Session, Presbytery and General Assembly might do at its meetings, consider as motivation for its gathering and remember when it is caught up in seeking to claim its place alongside Jesus. It goes like this….

Galilean Jesus,
on hills and near beaches you called people
around you for reflection, explanation and resolution.

So now we reflect together, knowing that
we will hear wise words if only we listen intently.

We each bring some knowledge and some understanding
and we bring our faith,
incomplete,
sometimes uncertain, but willing.

Help us to complete our task together
and to be resolute in gospel action.
Amen. J Wood

The challenge in that prayer is that the only role General Assemblies, Presbyteries and Sessions have is not to meet, as if that is a committee’s or council’s reason for existence is to manage, but rather, “to be resolute in gospel action”. The challenge in business language might be to not expect to sell your ice blocks to eskimos but rather to feed the hungry. The question we ask today is how did our General Assembly go? There seems to have been a lot of words said and discussion had and there may have been some resolution passing. But was there any theology debated? Was there any social justice action planned? Was there any theological exploration into why fewer people call themselves religious let alone Christian? Was there any theological and sociological discussion about why fewer people see the worth of a faith journey? And I don’t mean wallowing in the church’s decline and finding reasons that justify our reasons for doing nothing, that is just the church looking at itself through its own lens and it is a good way of avoiding the real questions. If you and I believe so strongly that the Jesus Way is a convincing call to live our lives in that manner why is it that others do not? Why are people not flocking to call themselves followers of Jesus? Its more than ‘they just haven’t heard that truth’, and its more than’ we haven’t told them our story yet’. The story is already out there and they seem to be rejecting it. I wonder why?

I often think that this dilemma is the one that lies at the heart of St David’s frustration about an educational project as our mission. Show us how it will provide a congregation. Show us how it will add success to the institution; show us how it will not have a detrimental effect on other church schools. All these seem to be focused on the survival of the institution as opposed to the gospel in action. Maybe they think we don’t know what the gospel is, or maybe its because there is some confusion around what it is so let’s not do anything. Or maybe its because St David’s are thinking too far out of the institutional theological boundaries. I might agree with this last critique but I rather think its because no theology is being done because it might rock the institutional boat.

On the Presbyterian Website it says that there are thirteen schools with associations to the Presbyterian Church of Aotearoa New Zealand. It also says that each school has its own story, valued traditions and current flavour but they all share the special character of a Christian ethos within the Presbyterian/Reformed tradition. My question is a mission question and it is; what is the special character of a Christian ethos within the Presbyterian, Reformed tradition? What does it mean and what is it about St David’s proposal that is outside that reformed tradition?

I want to now switch tack a bit and explore some reasons for what I think is our dilemma as a church. In the mid-1980s Archbishop Desmond Tutu said “It’s very difficult to wake up someone who is pretending to be asleep.” And I think this might be a charitable reason to consider.

Our church has been virtually paralysed by more than 30 years of debate and dispute
over human sexuality and falling attendance numbers. Led by the fundamentalists, ultraconservatives, and many liberals our Church has shown itself to be too anxious about these issues to risk perceived additional losses at the hands of, what might be termed, theological reform. Even the liberals were limited in their concern for deconstruction and universality and afraid to embrace constructive theological reform. Today at least among thinking people the message is clear. What is perhaps a ‘progressive’ Christian grassroots movement is loud and clear: that theological and liturgical reform is the much -needed root of ‘gospel action’ today. As we at St David’s have explored this desired reform should include as Hal Taussig said in 2006:

1. a spiritual vitality and expressiveness,
2. an insistence on Christianity with intellectual integrity,
3. a transgression of traditional gender boundaries,
4. the belief that Christianity can be vital without claiming to be the best or the only true religion, and
5. (v) strong ecological and social justice commitment.

Like others I want to suggest that today’s gospel story from the storyteller we call Mark, touches on this matter of ‘gospel action’ or ‘mission’. It does this in that it seeks to empower its listeners. It appears Jesus was experienced as powerful, but in an empowering way. His life did not require him to seek power for his own sake, but to own the power he had in compassion and in self-giving. His call was to model a new kind of being in the world. Not to be served but to serve. Not to be about maintenance, or in-reach, but to be at mission, at outreach, at risk taking stuff, or as suggested, at ‘gospel action’. The challenge to us is to stop pretending to be asleep and get on with God’s Mission. Amen.

Mark 10: 2-16

It Was A Test

I don’t think the reading this morning has anything to do with Divorce. Not only because the text actually relates to marriage but also because I don’t think the text is addressed to individuals. It is in my view more likely to be a descriptive of and a helpmate to community. I am here suggesting that we approach this text in a different way to the traditional literalist way and a way different from an intensely personal way. This will not be all that easy because most of us will have had some contact with divorce, be it personal experience of family experience or someone close to you. What such an experience does is influence us to hear this passage as addressed to particular individuals and feeling ashamed or angry or hurt or embarrassed, and that’s totally understandable. Especially if Jesus imagined these words being addressed to individuals.

But here’s the thing: I don’t think he did. I don’t think this text is anything to do with the personal but rather is about the communal. We note, for instance, how Mark sets up this scene: “Some Pharisees came and to test him, said ‘Is it lawful…. Here we have the suggestion that this isn’t a casual – or even intense, conversation about love, marriage, and divorce. It’s a test. And not even a test about divorce, but rather about the law. We remember here that there were, in that time, several competing schools of thought about the legality of divorce. Not so much about whether divorce was legal – everyone agreed upon that – but rather under what circumstances. And with this question of test, the Pharisees are trying to pin Jesus down, trying to label him, trying to draw him out and perhaps entrap him so that they know better how to deal with him. I felt a little like Jesus might have felt at a recent Auckland Council hearing where the issue was about Church verses buildings and the Council was trying to test my understanding of heritage in a lawful sense.

But Jesus was having none of this. He deflects their question away from matters of the law and turns it instead to relationship and, in particular, to God’s hope that our relationships are more than legal matters but instead help us to have and share more abundant life. Hence the turn to Genesis: questions of marriage and divorce, he argues, aren’t simply a matter of legal niceties, but rather are about the Creator’s intention that we be in relationships of mutual dependence and health.

In fact, Jesus goes one step further and takes what had turned into a legal convenience – typically for the man who sought a divorce – and pushes his interlocutors to see that this law – indeed, all law – was and is intended to protect the vulnerable. When a woman was divorced she lost pretty much everything – status, reputation, economic security, everything – so how can they treat this as a convenience, Jesus asks, let alone a debating topic. The law is meant to protect the vulnerable and hurting and every time we use it for another purpose we are twisting it from the Creator’s plan and, indeed, violating it in spirit if not in letter. One could also say that when we literalize this text, when we see it as about the legalities of marriage and divorce we are placing the law before the people as opposed to the people before the law.

The thing to see here is that Jesus isn’t speaking to individuals, he’s instead making a statement about the kind of community we will be. In fact, he’s inviting us to imagine communities centered in and on real relationships; relationships, that are founded on love and mutual dependence, fostered by respect and dignity, and pursued for the sake of the health of the community and the protection of the vulnerable. Marriage and divorce in his time was a time when women were chattels, vehicles for the man’s child. Procreation was the primary purpose for women’s existence. There are several brief articles from the Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible about this text.  First, the article on divorce (IDB, I, 859) reveals that “something objectionable” (NRSV) in Deut. 24:1 was very loosely defined.  Indeed there were two schools of thought as to what this meant:  “The Hillel school viewed this as a general term, and the Shammai school took it to mean adultery only.”  A woman’s inability to bear children was a common reason for divorce.  The article on marriage is also instructive (IDB, III, 278f).  We note the following:  “The husband has the power over his wife…She has rights and freedoms only within the context of this authority…  The husband may even revoke a vow that his wife made to God, if he sees fit. (Num 30:10-13)…” Finally, the article on woman is also revealing:  “The father received a bride price for his daughter and thus engaged in a contract with the prospective husband to make her sexuality available to him.  This transaction, however, was not a transfer of chattel property.  Rather it was the surrender of authority over a woman by one man to another.” (IDB, IV, 864f) All of this reveals why Jesus viewed wives as “the little ones” (in other words; vulnerable ones needing protection).  In his critique of law, Jesus was championing the cause of women who would be living in abject poverty, without support, if dismissed by their powerful husbands.

The background to this world was a past where female children were exterminated at birth, and despite the fact that we now think that women played a significant and founding role in the Jesus movement, in fact may have been instrumental in the survival of the movement, Jesus here was challenging all the historical cultural assumptions by challenging the use of marriage and divorce as a tool for the law when trying to protect their world view.

The interesting part about this is that even though the discussion has been about divorce, I don’t think that’s really the heart of what’s going on here. We can be grateful the lectionary includes the next verses describing the reaction of Jesus’ disciples to those bringing children to Jesus to bless and, more importantly, Jesus’ reaction to the same.

We go back to the context and remember that Jesus has announced his intention to go to Jerusalem to probably or maybe die and, in response, his disciples argue about who is the greatest. Jesus in turn tells them that to be great is to serve, and that the very heart of the kingdom he proclaims is about welcoming the vulnerable. In fact, he says that whenever you welcome and honour a child – one who had the least status and power in the ancient world – you were actually welcoming and honouring Jesus. Now, on the heels of this conversation about the purpose of the law, some folks bring their children to be blessed and the disciples try to keep them away. And Jesus intervenes, forcefully, saying that welcoming the kingdom pretty much means welcoming children, that is, the vulnerable, those at risk, and those in need.

This suggests that this whole passage, is about community. But it’s not the kind of community we’ve been trained to seek. It’s not, that is, a community of the strong, or the wealthy, or the powerful, or the independent. Rather, this is a community of the broken, of the vulnerable, of those at risk. It’s a community, in other words, of those who know their need and seek to be in relationship with each other because they have learned that by being in honest and open relationship with each other they are in relationship with God, the very one who created them for each other in the first place.

Here we have the seeds of what a church might be about – in traditional language, a place for all those who have been broken by life or rejected by the powerful and who come to experience God through the crucified Jesus as the One who met them precisely in their vulnerability, not to make them impervious to harm but rather open to the brokenness and need of those around them. And let’s be very honest here. This is not easy to remember! The Church is not for us who have made it. Even Paul speaking into the movement before it became known as Church had to remind the Corinthians of this.

When we consider our own call to walk the Jesus Way, in hindsight we could say that not many of us were wise by human standards, not many of us considered ourselves powerful, not many of us were of noble birth. There is a sense that we were foolish and weak and were chosen to shame the wise; chosen as weak in a world to shame the strong. Perhaps we were not chosen as low and despised in the world but chosen because we are vulnerable in the face of something like the law. Not in the sense of woe is me, not as a need to reduce to nothing things that are real, but rather as one who is vulnerable to the systems and intentions of a world that can alienate, isolate and destroy the very fabric of life.

We are reminded that part of being human is to be insecure, to be aware of our need and, in light of the cultural preference for strength, power, and independence, to maybe even be embarrassed by our need. For this reason, Paul, following Jesus, reminds us that to be broken isn’t something to be ashamed of. Rather, to be foolish, unfinished, incomplete and broken is, in fact, to be human. And to be human is to be loved by God and drawn together into relationship with all the others that God loves. Which means that our gatherings on Sundays are local gatherings of the broken and loved, of those who are hurting but also healing, of those who are lost but have also been found, of those that know their need and seek not simply to have those needs met but have realized that in helping meet the needs of others their own are met in turn.

The challenge today is to look at our text, not so much as instructions about divorce but instead as an invitation to see our communities as those places where God’s work to heal and restore the whole creation is ongoing, not by taking away all our problems but surrounding us with people who understand, and care, and help us to discover together our potential to reach out to others in love and compassion? We can tell people that we are communities of the broken, but we are those broken whom God loves and is healing and, indeed, using to make all things new?

We are then, in short, communities of the broken and blessed. And let’s be honest here, that can be a hard message to hear because it runs contrary to conventional wisdom about strength and security. To be strong is to be blessed. To be in control is to be blessed whereas we are seen in today’s environment as people in therapy, in need of religion to get through life. Dependent on an old story. We are seen as foolish, but we know it can also be life-giving, not only to those who know themselves to be broken and wonder if this is a place to them, but also to those in denial, seeking relentlessly to make it on their own, even if it kills them. Our text rather than being about those who have failed in marriage or whose ideals are foolish and unattainable, is rather about how one might discover God’s life-giving grace, love, and mercy. Amen.