Quite often at our house we have to remind our
children to mind their own business.
Usually, it’s William needing the reminder. Sometimes it happens that we have to instruct
Alice on the importance of certain life skills like picking up after yourself,
not dawdling, or focusing when she’s trying to do the schoolwork she’s had to
bring home because she couldn’t finish it at school for various unknown reasons. In our calmest demeanour Dana and/or I will gently
explain to Alice the importance of getting things done so she can do the things
she likes. This is not any easy task
especially when it tends to occur ten minutes before the bus arrives and she’s
just remembering she’s got schoolwork.
In these moments of high quality family time William
will often pipe in with what he believes is helpful advice on why one should
get one’s work done, a skill which he himself has certainly mastered. This
sends Alice to the moon and into what I call Edith Bunker mode. That’s a high-pitched, shrill form of wining that
makes you flinch so hard you squeeze the blood right out of your brain. Of course, in our calmest of voices we have
to say “William, that’s not helpful.
Mind you own business.” In these
moments I just have to sing a little Hank.
In fact, just thinking about it makes me want to sing some Hank, so bear
with me while I sing some Hank.
(Please take a
little time to listen to Hank William’s Mind
Your Own Business.)
In our passage from Mark, Jesus is having a huge “mind
your own business” moment with the Twelve Disciples who are again acting like
children. If you remember last week,
they were wanting to be rock stars like Jesus and kicked off their ‘Let’s act
like children” tour by arguing about which of them was the greatest. Jesus made a teaching moment out of the
argument telling them the greatest would have to be the least of all and
servant of all. Then he nabbed a nearby
child and brought him into their midst and hugged the child and told them
basically, “if you want to know me and my God, then you need to learn how to
show hospitality and love to children.”
Today we pick up on more of that conversation and it
helps if we remember that Jesus is still holding that child while the adults
are still “acting like children”. It
seems the Twelve didn’t get what Jesus had just taught them about humility and so
they moved on from “whose the greatest” to jealousy of those outside the
clique. The Twelve had seen a man
casting out demons in Jesus’ name (which was something they had had a little
trouble doing a few days before) and they tried to stop him simply because he
was not one of them.
Jesus, still holding the child, instructs them that
anyone enabled with power to minister in his name, though not part of their
little group, is still a part of his ministry and should not be spoken against
or stopped. Likewise, there will be
those outside the fold who treat the Twelve kindly and will be blessed for
it. Cliquishness or should I say
denominationalism aside, we are all in Jesus’ Kingdom of God bearing ministry
together and should be “for” rather than “against” those outside our way of
doing the things Jesus has sent us to do.
The Twelve were being territorial, cliquish, and were
thinking that Jesus could only entrust his ministry to them because they were
the ones who were with him all the time.
They couldn’t accept that there were other cowboys in the rodeo who were
just as capable as them if not more. So Jesus,
still holding the child, more or less tells them to mind their own business in
a very stern way.
With the child in his arms Jesus tells them that if
they, the Twelve not those outsiders, if they do something that causes one of
the little ones who believe in him to walk away from him, then it would be
better for them if they had a great burden chained to them and were drowned in
the sea. Jesus’ imagery is powerful here. The guilt and shame of causing someone else
to turn away from Jesus is like having a heavy millstone chained to you while
drowning.
To keep from doing that, Jesus tells the Twelve to
mind their own business, to mind their own conduct. Our translation makes it sound like we will
go to Hell if we falter in our conduct and it causes another person weaker in
faith to stop following Jesus. But,
Jesus didn’t say Hell. Well-meaning but
unthinking translators use Hell here because that’s what’s been done since the
Middle Ages with the unfortunate result of leading us to talk about eternal
punishment Dante-style rather than actually dealing with what Jesus is saying.
The word Jesus uses is Gehenna. Gehenna was the name of the garbage dump
outside of Jerusalem that was always on fire and there was an endless supply of
maggots and other worms eating on decaying stuff. Gehenna was located just outside the city
wall on the southwest in the Valley of Hinnom which was the place where wicked
kings in ancient Judah sacrificed their own children to the Canaanite god
Molech as a means to gain absolute power.
Jesus, while still embracing that child and after
teaching his disciples that welcoming children into their lives and loving them
would teach them who God is, told the Twelve, his closest followers, that for
them to fall away from him and to fall away from him in such a way as to cause
other little ones to fall away will cause them to become a shameful waste,
waste of the sort that is thrown on the ever-burning garbage heap of the city
of Jerusalem that covers the spot where wicked kings sacrificed their children
to the false gods of evil power. Their
choice is showing humility, hospitality, and love and coming to know God’s
nature on the one hand or being prideful, jealous, and a shameful waste on the
other.
Jesus finishes by saying his followers must be like
salt. Jesus said everyone would be
salted with fire, the refining fire of staying faithful to him in the midst of
temptations and trials of persecution.
Yet, it is possible to lose the saltiness. The way to avoid that is to strive for peace
among ourselves.
Today we celebrate the Lord’s Supper. We are week early for World Communion Sunday,
but no matter. Today we gather around
the Table of our Lord confessing the sin of denominational jealousy in a global
church that is fiercely divided over many things – moral issues, traditions,
grabs at power, theological differences, etc.
A hard to accept fact for us is that our disunity, evident in our
Denominationalism, has literally caused young people to turn away from Jesus. We who judge the ways and beliefs of other
Denominations rather than seek peace and unity among ourselves must ask if the
reason the North American church is largely devoid of children is that we have
sacrificed them on the altar of false power – societal power, even political
power. Rather than actually loving young
people and trying to teach them God’s love and the actual ways of Jesus, we’ve
tried to control them and make them just like us in our hypocrisies of pride
and jealousy. Let us humbly gather to
this Table and pray for unity in the Church.
Amen.
