For Or Against

"For Or Against"

Mark 9:38-50
September 27, 2009

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 often tell you that I am surprised that I have not already preached on a particular text,
especially from the Gospels, and this week I’m going to note it again—it surprised me
that I have not already preached from this scripture, but it doesn’t really, because every
time I hear this text, I have an old memory pop up—I remember an episode of Little
House on the Prairie that I saw as a kid. Most of you, of course, know that I didn’t grow
up in an especially religious home—we weren’t church going people, but this text is one
of the few that I remember, and it’s because of how I saw it played out in that episode of
Little House. In the show, Caroline the mother, is left alone while Charles and the kids
leave for a trip—during that time Caroline receives a minor scratch on her leg that
becomes a major infection, but she is without any immediate help. Caroline turns to the
Bible for comfort, only to stumble upon this text, where it has Jesus saying that “if your
foot causes you to stumble, cut if off.” Caroline is close to death, and it almost seems
as if she is about to take the text literally, that she will cut the leg off, but thankfully, she
passes out, and then she is found by the local physician, and she becomes well again.
This episode of Little House on the Prairie is called A MATTER OF FAITH, and you can
find clips of it on youtube.com—it’s amazing what you can find on the internet, really.

Nonetheless, this is what I flash back to whenever I read this text, even after these
many years—I’ve avoided preaching on it because of the difficulty of rightfully
interpreting it, something hinted at in that episode of Little House. What is Jesus trying
to say here, in this command to cut off hands, feet, eyes? Why this command to not
cause the little ones to stumble, something fairly unusual in a culture that really didn’t
have a particularly warm and fuzzy reaction to kids, the kind that we tend to have in our
cultures—children were a burden for many, one more mouth to feed, one more set of
hands to take care of you when you got older, and perhaps half of all children didn’t
make past age 3. It’s not that ancient people didn’t love their children—of course they
did! It’s just that they didn’t put them in the center of their world, like we do in our
culture, and perhaps they couldn’t emotionally, really—if there is a 50-50 chance that
any given child is not going to make it to four, maybe some emotional distance was
something that was needed. Why does Jesus turn the table on his culture, and put the
child front and center, as both a model of discipleship, and here, as one who must be
protected, and for whom horrible punishment is accorded to those who do harm to them
and their faith? And why does Jesus protect those who cast out demons in his name,
as if his name was some sort of magic conjuring trick, like “alakazaam,” some tool to be
used by anyone who needed healing from demon possession? These folks weren’t
even his followers, people interested in being his disciples—they had just borrowed his
name, his power, maybe, and attempted to do their own good in this world.

All of these questions make the text complex, and make it a difficult one for a preacher
to tackle—and thus, because we preachers are lazier than we like to believe, a lot of us
tend to avoid this text because it’s going to require a lot of work to unpack all of this
stuff, time that most of us don’t have in the pulpit—well, not without making many of you
restless. But the other thing for me personally was how negative this text became for
me because of my early hearing of this Scripture in that Little House show—is this what
the Bible really says? Should Caroline have cut off her leg? And even if you wanted to
put it back in context, that it isn’t about a wound in a leg, but something more spiritual—
well, still, should Christians be cutting off body parts for the sake of making sure the
little ones in this congregation don’t stumble? Obviously, something else is up,
because throughout the centuries, it’s been pretty rare for Christians to do this, to take
this literally, which we obviously shouldn’t—I don’t think Jesus is being literal here, he
doesn’t want his disciples, his followers to start cutting off body parts, but there is a
tradition in the ancient world, not necessarily a Jewish or Christian tradition, that
endorsed the practice. It was called pars pro toto, and it was often used on the
fingers. “Antiquity's most celebrated hypochondriac, Aelius Aristides, was instructed in
a dream that to save his life he should "cut a piece of his body for the sake of the
whole," but that he could dedicate his finger-ring instead. Pars pro toto is also not
unknown outside the human species. Some spiders, lizards and birds have body parts
break off to distract predators while the prey finds safety.” (Homiletics Online) And, of
course, in the operating room, sometimes cutting off of a body part is what is needed to
save a human life, so its not so absurd, not so crazy, really.

But what is different here, the thing that is radical, is the idea that one would not just
sacrifice a body part for oneself, to save oneself but that one would do it for another, to
do it for the sake of another, and, in this case, in the case of our text today, for the
sake of a child, who, again, was not one of the most valued persons in the hierarchy of
important people in the ancient world. We might think it seems reasonable, to sacrifice
for our children, but it wasn’t so reasonable to the people in Jesus’ day, often for the
reasons I mentioned earlier—self survival is nothing to scoff at, to look down upon,
emotional or literal self-survival. What Jesus does here is to remind his listeners that it
matters, that the most vulnerable matter, and in the ancient world, that would be the
children all around them, the ones Jesus calls to his side, even though the disciples try
to stop them from disturbing their master.

And the interesting thing here is that he says these things in the context of these
reports that others are going around healing in his name, going around doing good by
mimicking him, copying him, doing what he does, healing others. His disciples are
disturbed that there are competitors, that the folks doing this aren’t Jesus disciples, not
like they are, and so they want Jesus to stop these copycats. And yet Jesus will have
none of that, he’s not interested in that because he knows that these copycats aren’t
the problem, they aren’t the issue, they don’t pose the most difficult problem he is going
to encounter at that moment. What Jesus is going to have to deal with, and what he
does, in fact, deal with, is the disciples’ desire to divide up the world between us, and
them, between friend and foe, between easy categories of good and evil. You are for
us or against us, the disciples think, and so they become obsessed with categorizing
the world in that way, and so if you are not part of our group, you’re not for us, and yet
Jesus will have none of that here—he pushes back against them, telling them that
whoever is not against us is for us, that one should be more generous in labeling
others, before putting them into categories.

But Jesus goes further, of course, because he then starts to talk about the little
children, and about how it would be better for a person to have a huge millstone hung
around their neck and thrown off the side of a boat than for them to cause one of these
most vulnerable ones to stumble in their faith. Now, what is the connection here,
between the disciples angst at the possibility of competing disciples, and this command
to not to cause a little one to fall, and that if a hand or foot should cause you or others
to stumble, to cut it off? I think the connection is oddly obvious, in a way, and it’s
rooted in a common mistake we make as people of Christian faith. So often we
Christians think that the struggle is out there, outside of us, in the world, with the
religious or secular competition out there, that we forget that the battle is actually within
us, within our hearts, that the battle between light and darkness is not between the
secularists and the religious people, between the atheists and the believers, but within
us, the struggle within our own hearts to be good people, good to ourselves and good
to others. If there are parts of us that cause others to stumble, we are called to cut
those parts out of us, spiritually and emotionally. Especially here, I think, Jesus is
calling us to be the kind of people that don’t make the most spiritually and emotionally
vulnerable even more cynical about religion and faith. Don’t make one of these little
ones stumble, don’t get lost in carving up the world outside of our soul into categories
of “one of us,” “not one of us,” as the disciples do in this text. The struggle is not with
“them,” but within us, the struggle to be the kind of people that actually live out our faith
authentically and without religious pretension. The disciples want the world to be easily
divided up between us and them, between Roman and Jew, between disciple and
heretic, between saved and unsaved, between insider and outsider, and yet Jesus will
have none of that, will not allow them to do what he has not done himself.

And so he points them back to the child, to this vulnerable one, and he seems to be
saying that their real work is to make sure that they do not cause these little ones to
stumble upon them, to stumble upon their hypocrisy, to the ways they want to divide up
the world, their desire to carve up the world between us and them, friend or foe, for or
against. Don’t worry about the person out there healing in my name—instead, worry
about how you are living your own life, and whether or not your life will heal or hurt,
strengthen or weakened the faith of the most vulnerable amongst us. We are own
worst enemies—not “them” out there, not the forces of secularism, or whatever—we are
the reason why our children, both literally and otherwise, stumble upon and out of the
Christian faith.

Many of you know that this year is the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth, and
it has been the source of many books and conferences celebrating the life of this
amazing man and scientist. But it is also spurred on the forces of those in our own
Christian community who want to lay all the evils of the world down at the feet of Darwin’
s theory of evolution, which they understand to be wrong, and evil and un-Christian,
despite the fact that the majority of Christians in the world accept evolution as the
means by which God creates the world. Recently, a video on YouTube has surfaced
with Kirk Cameron, the former star of Growing Pains, the sitcom from the early eighties,
and who has since become a fundamentalist, arguing that on the anniversary of Darwin’
s birth, Christians should distribute a special edition of Darwin’s Origin of the Species
with a special 50 page introduction that attempts to debunk evolutionary theory and lay
at Darwin’s feet all of the atrocities of the 20th century, plus the bonus sin of misogyny.
It is truly an absolutely ridiculous piece of propaganda, and a shameful thing to do, to
purposefully spread lies that have been thoroughly debunked over and over again.
And the irony of it is that poor Kirk and the perpetrators of this stuff seem so ignorant of
history, as if we in the Christian church don’t have so much to repent of—the Spanish
Inquisition, the condemning of Galileo, the genocide of so many Jews before the
Holocaust, so much to say we are sorry for, that even if one could make the argument
that all the evils of the twentieth century could be laid at the feet of secularism, at the
feet of those godless evolutionists, which is not likely, but even if they could make that
argument, those of us who claim the name of Christ have a lot more to account for in
the previous 19 centuries, when it comes to horrors done in the name of religion and
faith.

You see, Kirk and his kind, my brothers in Christ, they make the same mistakes the
disciples are making here—they think the problem is outside of them, they think the
problem is secularism, or atheism, or godlessness, or a culture no longer drenched in a
hollow civil religion, when the real reason why the levels of self-described agnostics and
atheists has risen in all the polls over the last couple of years, is because of people like
Kirk, people like us, people who refuse to look inward, and see that the real battle is not
between the atheists and the Christians, but between the shadow and light struggling
within their our souls, within all of our own souls. So many vulnerable ones have fallen,
not because of Charles Darwin, but because so many of our brothers and sisters have
decided not to take Jesus seriously here, to not look at how their lives are causing
those on the cusp of faith to walk away, because Christian faith seems to call for people
to turn off their brains in order to follow this Jesus of Nazareth. When some in the
church ask people to believe that women shouldn’t be leaders when it’s obvious that
they have the gifts for pastoral ministry, we lose those who think the church is forever
mired in misogyny. When some in the church tell their youth that their gay friends are
evil and wrong for loving someone of the same sex, we lose them because what we say
to them is so disconnected from what they are actually experiencing with their gay
friends. When some in the church say that to believe in Scripture is to reject
evolutionary theory, despite all the obvious evidence for it, we lose those people who
associate Christianity with those who willfully turn off their intellects in order to be
disciples of Jesus. We are losing people, not because of “them,” those on the “outside”
of the church, but because of us, we who are on the inside, we who are in the church.

So, what are we to do? Well, we look at what Christ asks us to do, which is to look
inward and not outward, when it comes to the problems in the world—how are we
contributing to what is going wrong in this world? And perhaps even more important,
we are to become salt again, we are to become spicier, if you will, to associate
Christianity not with close-mindedness, but with a wonder at what God has created and
who God has created, and to take great joy in the diversity of this world, with its many
colors, its many faiths, it many different lives, and many ways of loving. And we are to
add our own beauty to this world, our own peculiar and particular spice, something I will
be exploring in the upcoming October sermon series. I am a Christian because of what
Christ has done in my life, and I am still a Christian despite what Christians have often
done to me and those I love, and I hope that I too have not caused someone else to
stumble because I too did not have the courage to look within myself, to cut out those
parts of my soul that continue to spread out more shadow than light in the life I am
living. That is the challenge for all of us—to ask ourselves, to really ask ourselves, “if
so many find what I believe so unbelievable, so unattractive, how have I made that faith
so unbelievable, so unattractive?” That is hard question to ask, but it’s the only one
that Jesus seems to want us to ask…Amen.