A Persistent Unclean Spirit

 Mark 1:21-28

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The synagogue in Capernaum, I was there years ago in my seminary days during a study tour of the Bible Lands.  We visited the ruins of the ancient town of Capernaum and I stood in the ruins of the synagogue there.  It wasn’t the same synagogue Jesus taught in.  That one was probably 10-15-20 ft below where I stood.  The synagogue ruins that stand there today were built a few hundred years later and likely on top of the one that Jesus taught in.  

Those ruins are special to me.  It was there that I had an epiphany, a flash of insight about the historical realness of Jesus.  If you go to Jerusalem, everything is so crowded and touristy and religious to the point of being superstition – pray here where Jesus did this, light a candle, leave a donation and receive a blessing.  But Capernaum is different.  It’s very rural.  It lacks the crowds.  I could stop and breathe and take it all in and not worry about getting pickpocketed.  

Capernaum was where Jesus began his ministry.  It was his home base.  There’s indication in Mark that Jesus may even have had a house there.  He gave the Sermon on the Mount just a little way down the shoreline of the Sea of Galilee.  The place where he fed the 5,000 (actually more than 15,000 considering women and children), it was not far from there.  Most of his ministry happened in and around Capernaum.  

As I stood there in the ruins of that synagogue at the heart of Jesus’s ministry, it suddenly began to sink in that Jesus really lived.  The stories of him that we have in the Gospels are memories of things that really happened.  It’s kind of like going back to your home town and to the house you grew up in after years of being away, back to where you began and realizing “my memories really happened.  I am real.”  If that makes any sort of sense.  The stories in the Bible really happened and I was where they happened.  This faith we share has real historical roots.  It’s not just a bunch of beliefs.  

Thinking about that synagogue itself and what it would have been like back in Jesus’s day, it would have been more than what a church is for us; you know, the place we go to usually only on Sunday morning to worship and socialize.  Outside of the home, the synagogue and the market place were the two most important places in any Jewish town.  Similar to us, they did their weekly.  They went to synagogue Friday evening at the beginning of the Sabbath for worship, but it was also a bustling place every day of the week.  It was a social hub like what a coffee shop would be today or, forgive me, Facebook.  You had the enclosed place for Sabbath worship, but there was also a huge courtyard with a covered porch going all the way around it.  People gathered there.  In one of the four corners there would have been a special stone slab for a rabbi or elder or scribe to sit and teach so that here was teaching going on all the time.  There were people debating matters of faith.  People debating politics.  People talking about life and business.  This space, this synagogue courtyard (where I was standing) was the place to be when you didn’t have anywhere else you had to be.  It was the social hub, the newspaper, the place of shade to sit, the sacred place, all rolled into one.

Well, to take a moment to think about who Jesus was to the people in Capernaum.  Prior to his first visit to that synagogue there would have likely been some buzz about Jesus going around.  Though his Baptism by John the Baptist had happened a few months prior several days walk from there down in the Jordan Wilderness near Jericho, word-of-mouth news would have travelled up to Capernaum about what happened when Jesus was baptised there among all those people flocking out to John the Baptist.  The people of Capernaum would have heard about how a voice came from the heavens saying about Jesus, “This is my beloved Son; with him, I am well-pleased,” and how the Spirit of God like a dove came down upon him.  But then he suddenly and rather hurriedly ran off into the barren wilderness with nothing but the clothes on his back only to show up forty days later just after John the Baptist was arrested, wandering around, heralding the message, “The appointed time is now.  The reign of God is upon us.  Repent and believe the Gospel.”  Then, as he got closer to Capernaum, he started to invite some local men to come and be his disciples, his students.  When can assume with high probability that by the time he got to the synagogue that Sabbath the people of Capernaum were curious to hear him.

Another thing to consider, if you’ve been paying attention the last couple of weeks of my sermons, you will remember that I have been highlighting there’s Jewish Messianic and Roman Imperial innuendo going on in the way Mark introduces Jesus as Son of God.  That was one of Caesar’s titles.  And, what God said at Jesus’s baptism is pretty much what was said when the Roman Emperor adopted a son to be his successor.  And, remember that the Romans are in the land as an occupying force.  All this talk going about Jesus, that he is/might be the One, the Messiah, the Anointed King appointed by God to establish his reign on earth was verging towards treason.  The synagogue would have been where people would have been talking about all this.    

So, here we are, Jesus came to Capernaum where a couple of his disciples lived, Peter and Andrew, and when the Sabbath rolled around, they went to the synagogue and the leaders allowed him to speak.  The people were astounded because Jesus taught as one who had the authority to interpret the Scriptures unlike the scribes.  The scribes were the experts, but all they ever did was say that the great Rabbi so-and-so said this and the great Rabbi so-and-so said that.  But Jesus, for some reason, he could say, “But, I say this.”  He had authority to speak for God.

While he was teaching, a man with an unclean spirit came into the synagogue and began to make a scene.  I imagine him to be one of those loud-talking-bully types.  He shouted: “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth (there was some stigma associated with Nazareth back then)?  Have you come to destroy us?  I know who you are: The Holy One of God.”   This is where things get weird, so allow me to take a moment and talk about what an unclean spirit is.

Mark, Matthew, and Luke use the term “unclean spirit” pretty much interchangeably with the term “evil spirit” something we would call a demon today and it does refer to being possessed by a spirit.  A spirit is a personal force from another realm that can exert influence on a person.  For it to be “unclean” meant that it wasn’t serving God according to the good ordering of this world that God created and called good and so it was not welcome in God’s presence.  Like the Serpent in the Garden of Eden story, this unclean spirit was a muck disturber from another realm who twists the truth or outright lies to get people to work against God and we can add, in self-destructive ways.  

In our “scientific”, “psychologized” culture today we don’t give much credence to the existence of these sorts of spirit-things.  Mention the word demon and immediately people will either start thinking Linda Blair in The Exorcist levitating, spinning her head, screaming obscenities, barfing green pea soup, and snapping the necks of very ill-prepared Roman Catholic priests.  People think that or conjure up some other medieval beast with horns out of Dante’s Inferno.  Or, they go to the other extreme and do what typically gets done in the world of biblical studies: explain these things away by literally “demonizing” mental illness and epilepsy.  

There’s little to no way to address this topic these days without going to either of those extremes.  But I’m going to try it.  So, let’s try to see this man with the unclean spirit and what he does from two perspectives.  First, let’s look at him from the perspective that we don’t know he is possessed.  Let’s imagine what this man’s behaviour would appear to us to be apart from the “unclean spirit” stuff.  I think it would look familiar.  I think he would appear to your typical bully.  Imagine, a man from the community walked into the synagogue and started rudely and loudly shouting at Jesus, “What have you to do with us Jesus of Nazareth?”  We would right off the bat take him as being anger-issued, loud, and bully-ish.  

This first question is straight out of the book of bully tactics.  He is highlighting that Jesus isn’t from there and really had no business in Capernaum.  Jesus was not “one of us”.  The us here would not be referring to some sort of cohort of demons possessing this man, but rather to us, the people of Capernaum. Moreover, the man is pointing out that Jesus was one of them Nazareth-people.  Back then, Nazareth was stigmatized for some reason.  We don’t know what, but there was a phrase floating around back then that went, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”  So, If we didn’t know this man had an unclean spirit possessing him, he would appear to be a loud bully trying to turn the synagogue crowd against Jesus by means of prejudice -  “He’s not one of us.  He’s one of them.”  This verbal bullying by means of awakening prejudice makes this spirit unclean.    

Next, the man moves on to another bully tactic - fear mongering.  He shouts, “Have you come here to destroy us?”  Here the loud bully, knowing that the talk about Jesus is that he might be the Messiah and knowing that Jesus had been preaching Kingdom of God stuff that could and would upset the Romans, is more or less saying “Why have you come to our town with your left-leaning Kingdom of God politics.  Are you trying to get us on the radar of the Romans who will send in their army and destroy our village and our livelihoods?”  We see this today – conservatives scaring people by using the word socialism and liberals scaring people by using the word fascism.  This attempt at fear mongering makes this spirit unclean.

Next, the man uses a third bully tactic of mocking Jesus.  Tack a little “Yeah, right” into the tone of voice when he says, “I know who you are: The Holy One of God”.  Mocking Jesus like this would only serve to destroy the people’s hope in God by making it appear impossible that Jesus of “Nazareth” could in any way be God’s anointed and that God might be finally acting to remove them from oppression.  This bullying by means of mocking and belittling makes this spirit unclean.

Well, looking at this man not knowing that he has an unclean spirit living in him lead us to consider him to be like one of those loud church bullies who rants on at church meetings loudly and angrily knowing that people won’t stand up to him. He or she always get their way because they mock and belittle others, and make people lose hope and be afraid of what the future might bring.  They conjure up our latent prejudices to keep us from loving our neighbour in more than just saccharin words.  We’ve all encountered people like that, and in church of all places.

Now let’s look at this man from a second perspective - Jesus’s perspective.  Jesus knows he has an unclean spirit in him.  The man, whether willingly or not, had given free rent in the safe haven of his mind to an unclean spirit who twisted the truth to his own ends so that the truth became a lie.  It was true that Jesus was/is the Holy One of God who has come from “not from around here” to save us from all things that make us afraid and lose hope in God and what God is up in the world and to heal his creation that has fallen victim to sin, death, and evil.  Indeed, if “us” refers to this unclean spirit and his cohorts, Jesus had indeed come to destroy them.

Jesus, saw the unclean spirit resident in the man and told him, “Shut up!  Get out of him.”  Jesus did not try to reason with it.  He took its voice away and commanded it gone.  We need to know that when people bully others using prejudice, fear, and mockery to preserve themselves and to stand in the way of compassionate progress, we are dealing with unclean spirits.  We can’t reason with them for they thoroughly believe the lies to be the truth.  We can only expose the lies.  If that doesn’t work, we take away their voice.  If that doesn’t work, we send them away. 

This past Wednesday was International Holocaust Remembrance Day.  A friend of mine posted a meme to Facebook that read and I don’t know who originally said it so I can’t properly give credit: “Remember, it didn’t start with gas chambers.  It started with politicians dividing the people with ‘us vs. them.’  It started with intolerance and hate speech and when people stopped caring, became desensitized and turned a blind eye.” That was certainly true of Nazi Germany.  The meme was also directed at the political situation in the U.S. these last five years.  But, you know, this same sort of unclean spirit thing persists even up here in “O Canada”.  Anytime topics like Indigenous Rights, Refugee resettlement, or Immigration come up, the “unclean spirits” rush to the floor attacking person and awakening prejudice and fear.  It is so sad that this unclean spirit still rears its head even in churches today and instead of shutting it up, we the followers of Jesus, give ear to it and quite often we put them in the pulpit and stand amazed at their teachings.  Seriously, too often it is the case that the minister who says things like welcome the refugee or understand the homosexual gets fired, when the one who spouts fear and prejudice in the name of God gets a raise. 

I don’t know anything about exorcism. I can only pray, “May we who follow Jesus be able to discern that unclean spirit and its lies when it comes into our midst, for it inevitably will, and may we strive to not let it get hold in our congregations, and may we rather overcome evil with the radical love that the Church is supposed to be known for.  Amen.

 

 

A Time For Decisive Faithfulness

 Mark 1:14-20; 1 Corinthians 7:29-31

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I started this sermon on Wednesday morning January 20, 2021 sitting in front of the television awaiting the swearing in of President Joseph R. Biden and Vice-President Kamala D. Harris.  I could not help but feel a sense of “the time is fulfilled, complete, come to an end; something new is upon us.”  And, “the appointed time has grown short”.  There’s another way of translating that.  It would go, “The appointed time has been wrapped up like a corpse.”  (Both these time references are from our readings, in case you didn’t read them.)  I reflected on how for the last four years I have been giving the now former President of the United States free rent to occupy space in my mind.  I couldn’t help it.  Open my computer, look at the news, and there he was.  Go out and meet people, it didn’t take long for him to become the topic of conversation.  There was just no escaping him. I think the reason he, the real estate mogul, ran for President was that he might have free rent to occupy space in our minds.  The space he got from me was not a good space for me.  As an American living abroad I daily felt shame, anger, disbelief, and disgust at the former President’s behaviour, his decisions, his lying.  I feel like I’ve been bullied.  I have that sense of traumatization that bullies leave us with that will take a while to get over.  Unfortunately, due to the following he has amassed he will continue to appear in our lives like the flashbacks of traumatic events that plague those who suffer Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.  But he’s gone now.  He’s not our neighbour anymore.  His time is over.  It’s time to heal.

I wonder what tomorrow and the next day, week, month, year will be like in a world with a United States once again behaving like an adult, like a responsible world citizen.  I’m cautious.  Being an adult myself, I know we don’t always make good decisions and it sadly becomes our children who suffer for it.  Just ask Greta Thunberg.  She’ll tell it like it is.  But at least I feel as if Uncle Joe and Sister Kamala are competent and listening.  It is now time for some very prudent and decisive action bent towards compassion and empathy.  This world, not just the U.S., needs a time of healing, a moment dedicated to healing, a moment that will shape the course of history.  

I apologize for jumping right into a Greek lesson, but the word for time that popped up in our Scripture readings is an interesting one.  Jesus says, “The time is fulfilled; the Reigning of God is at hand”.  Paul writes, “The appointed time has grown short.”  That word for “time” there in Greek is kairos.  It has different meaning than another word in Greek for time which sounds familiar to us, which is chronos.  We get our word chronology from that one.  Chronos is the tick-tock of time; the putting of things into chronological order kind of time.  Kairos is different.  It means a decisive moment in time.  It’s a time for something specific to happen; a time in which events have obviously come together in such a way that people need to rise to the occasion and do the right thing because the impact of the decisions made at this time will profoundly shape history. 

As an example, marriages can have kairos times, difficult times or good times, where spouses can say that the way we handle this moment, these weeks, these months, even years will make or break us.  We will either come out with a stronger relationship, a deeper friendship, or we’ll just set up boundaries we know not to cross.  That’s kairos – a period of time in which important decisions need to be made and proactive actions taken.

 With respect to God.  Kairos is a decisive period of time when people of faith need to get off their laurels and be faithful.  A period of time to stand up and be counted.  In First Corinthians Paul was expecting the imminent return of Jesus to establish the Reign of God which would put an end to the world as we do it.  So, he advises the Corinthians to put their allegiance to Jesus first, even before their marriage.  Quit grieving, Quit rejoicing.  Quit acting like possessions make any difference.  Quit being so damned political for the way this world works will soon not be the way this world works anymore.  

Kairos time is a period of time for people of faith to stand up and be faithful because faithful action during this time will affect the faith of others for generations.  I’m reminded of an old Jewish scribe named Eleazer who lived about 160 years before Jesus.  At that time, Israel was occupied by the Greeks.  The head Greek in the area was Antiochus IV Epiphanes or Antiochus IV the Enlightenment (or Enlightened or Enlightener.  His ego was beyond exaggerated).  Antiochus wanted the people that he conquered and ruled to become Greek in culture and faith.  Well. the Jews regarded Greek culture as being a bit randy and had their own God, thank you, and so they did not do well with Antiochus IV Epiphanes.  The Jews’ refusal to worship any other God but their own eventually came to a head when Antiochus IV Epiphanes put a statue of Zeus in the Temple where the Ark of the Covenant stood and sacrificed a pig to it and demanded the Jews worship it.  A revolt ensued, the Maccabean Revolt.  Hanukkah originated from that revolt.  As far as what became of Antiochus IV Epiphanes, he died a painful, disgusting, and humiliating death; some would say the God of the Jews smote him. 

One year during the Festival of Dionysius, the most randy of the Greek festivals, Antiochus started forcing Jews to eat pork at the threat of flogging or worse.  He had an old scribe Eleazer who was 90 years old brought before him and told him to eat the pork.  Eleazer refused.  His soldiers shoved it in Eleazer’s mouth and he spit it out.  Antiochus then had the 90-year-old Eleazer flogged and brought back before him and privately offered Eleazer the option to eat some other form of meat and pretend it to be pork.  This would at least allow Antiochus to appear to have broken the old man’s faith.  Again, Eleazer refused and so Antiochus had him flogged to death – a 90-year-old man. 

Eleazer didn’t stand silent through it all.  His speech to Antiochus was a remarkable statement of “kairos” faith.  After Antiochus made him the offer to eat some other kind of meat, Eleazer said: “Such pretense is not worthy of our time of life, for many of the young might suppose that Eleazer in his ninetieth year had gone over to an alien religion, and through my pretense, for the sake of living a brief moment longer, they would be led astray because of me, while I defile and disgrace my old age.  Even if for the present I would avoid the punishment of mortals, yet whether I live or die I will not escape the hands of the Almighty.  Therefore, by bravely giving up my life now, I will show myself worthy of my old age and leave to the young a noble example of how to die a good death willingly and nobly for the revered and holy laws” (2 Mac. 6:24-28).

There is something to be said for those people who are in their elder years and continue to stand faithful, who continue to be involved in a congregation and who share their faith with the younger generation even though it seems like a royal waste of time.  In this day and age when “the truth” is such a disputed matter, the wisdom encapsulated by the continued faith and faithfulness of the elder generation is a clear indicator of what Truth really is.  When a 78-year-old Joe Biden (and I realize 78 is the new 58) takes the Oath of Office and says “and so help me God” and says it knowing what it is to have had God’s help in his darkest moments, in his kairos times, and actually want God’s help; that speaks volumes to a nation whose younger generations do not know what it is to bow their heads in prayer to a God who actually cares or sing “Amazing Grace” from the heart but have rather devoted their lives as per the example they’ve been shown to the idols of Wealth, Consumerism, Celebrity, Amusement, Politicians, Power, Sex, Technology…all those Greek gods that still persist yet with another name…and of course the unholy trinity of “me, myself, and I”.  There can be no Truth found when God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are not sought.

We are at a kairos time, a moment that calls for drastic action.  As Paul wrote: “The kairos – the appointed moment to act decisively – is growing short.”  We are about to wrap the shroud around it and bury it.  The time is right now for us the people of planet Earth, particularly those who are in power to make the decisions and enact the legislation that will protect the climate, end racism, end sexism, end nationalism, end poverty, end corruption in governments and court systems and do it in the midst of a pandemic that demands immediate action or people will needlessly suffer and die.  We are at a kairos time that is coming to an end and if the appropriate decisions are not made and the appropriate actions not taken the consequence will be grave. 

What role do we people of faith have in this kairos time?  Well, Jesus came in the midst of a kairos time bringing with him a kairos time.  The office of Roman Emperor was just over 20 years old when Jesus was born.  The known world was beginning to figure out what it was to bend the knee to one man and call him Lord and Saviour and Son of God.  The Roman Emperors promised peace and prosperity all the while enforcing their whims with the most powerful military the world had ever known.  The world we know would not be the world we know apart from the decisions made by these few powerful men and those surrounding them even though they lived 2,000 years ago.  Imperial Rome is still with us.  We might call it Democracy and have figured out how to limit the powers of want-to-be Emperors, but Western Culture is still Roman Culture.  Like the movie Groundhog Day, we are stuck reliving Rome.

Jesus came into that kairos time bringing with him a moment of decision for each person to make.  He was a Jew, one of those pesky people who wouldn’t bow the knee to any other god than their own God, the one true God.  As truly being the Son of God, Jesus stood in opposition to everything the Roman Emperor stood for.  The Spirit of God rested upon Jesus and empowered him.  Everywhere Jesus went he proclaimed good news to the poor.  He healed people.  He cast out demons.  He raised the dead.  He called people to love God and neighbour.  He called people to forgive each other.  He called people to act peaceably.  He called people to share their stuff.  Invited the rich to give to the poor.  He allowed himself to be “bothered” by children.  He regarded women as equal to men.  He listened.  He cared.  He prayed.  He knew the Scriptures and taught them.  He confronted religious hypocrisy.  He fed over 15,000 people with five loaves of bread and two fish.  He calmed a storm.  He walked on water.  He was crucified for treason, but God the Father in the power of the Holy Spirit raised him from the dead in vindication starting a New Creation that will come to its fullness when this time is fulfilled and Jesus returns.

Jesus came proclaiming the Gospel.  Let me break it down for you, “The kairos is fulfilled.”  Humanity’s ability to rule itself and solve its problems will never become anything more than a repeat of Imperial Rome.  If you want to know everything Man can be when Man sings “I did it my way”, Imperial Rome and its pathologies is as good as it gets.  The Kairos of Man is fulfilled.  Come to its end.  If humanity wants to move forward, then we truly have to take Jesus seriously.

“The Kingdom of God is at hand.”  This makes more sense if we say the reigning or ruling of God is upon us.  Everywhere Jesus went through everything he said and did, the ruling of God manifested.  It continues today through those who follow him and are indwelt by the Holy Spirit and love God and love neighbour. 

“Repent and believe the Gospel.”  The Greek word for repent literally means “Be with-minded.”  Be with-minded with God.  Think on the things of God not the things of Man.  Want the things of God rather than indulge the compulsions of Man.  Man has lived according to the lie that God is Almighty Power.  Jesus, rather, has showed us the love of God, the true power of God, when he died on the cross and was raised.  He did not inflict his power upon anyone in any kind of way that was not healing or freeing or empowering.  God’s power is sacrificial, unconditional love that respects persons and heals them.  It is not this survival of the fittest leading to domination by the fittest thing.  The Greek word for believe does not mean “I think these ideas to be true.”  It also goes beyond a simple matter of trusting God.  It is loyalty that arises from love; loyalty which we demonstrate  by faithfulness.  To repent and believe the Gospel that the kairos is fulfilled and the Reign of God is at hand is to become a loyal disciple of Jesus.  It is to gather together with a group of friends to prayerfully hash out the question, “Who are you, Lord Jesus?”  He will show up where people gather in his Name in the fullness of the love of God in the power of the Holy Spirit to heal us and make new us.  

If humanity wants to be anything more than what it was under Imperial Rome, we each need to take Jesus seriously.  This kairos time that we are in is the same kairos time that humanity has been in.  You, the elder church stand as a testimony to the faithfulness of God, of God’s love for you as God has proven himself faithful to you time after time after time after time after time throughout the many years of your lives.  This is Truth.  This God who has been true to you is pouring his reign in love upon the world through Jesus by the power and presence of the Holy Spirit.  Have the courage to share this truth with your children and grandchildren pointing to Jesus as the Way forward.  Teach not preach Jesus and his ways.  Be disciples who disciple.  In this kairos time, Jesus must become our primary loyalty, our primary devotion for he is the way forward for this world stuck in Rome.  Amen.

 

 

Keeping the Lamp Lit

1 Samuel 3:1-10

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Back in the mid-90’s during my last two years of seminary some upperclassmen friends of mine passed to me the distinct privilege of conducting the Sunday evening chapel service at the Masonic Home of Virginia. It didn’t take long for it to become more than just a preaching gig.  As the community did not have a chaplain, I soon found myself de facto in that role, but not so much to the entire home but to those who attended the chapel service.  They had found a sucker in me in that I was willing to come over and visit and what not.

 The organist/choir director and my contact there was Frances Pugh, and Frances wasn’t just an organist and choir director.  She was a church planter if I’ve ever seen one.  She was always inviting people to come to the chapel service.  She visited and prayed with people, and would send me to those who needed to see a minister due to something really major happening.  Frances realized that most of the folks weren’t able to attend a church on Sunday morning because distance from their home communities, transportation problems, and health issues kept them from being.  So, she set about trying to get residents to consider this chapel service and the folks in it as their church.  She wanted to plant a church there (though she wouldn’t have said it like that.) and have it not just be a part of adjunct activities.

Well, something clicked during my two years there.  Attendance at the chapel service went from being in the upper 20’s into the 70’s.  There were even people coming who hadn’t really wanted anything to do with “church” before, but suddenly they did.  The little choir of six or seven members became a big choir pushing 20 members.  The Administration noticed and decided to do some accessibility renovating to the chapel to make more room for wheelchairs and finally installed a decent sound system.  God was moving.  Frances’ vision was taking hold.  

For me, that was my first experience of having to preach every week in the same place.  I was at a bit of a loss as to what to say week after week after week.  I stuck to the lectionary much as I do today.  Oddly, I found that the Holy Spirit had impressed upon me essentially four “words”, four messages, that no matter what the Bible passage was the sermon wound up being one of those “words”.  They were resurrection, have hope, love one another, and keep praying.  The people were hearing God speak to them and so they came back.

So, there I was having my first taste of ministry in the midst of the elder church at the Masonic Home under the tutelage of Frances Pugh.  I was learning from them to listen for the voice of the LORD and speak it. Surprisingly, in this community of people who had lived too long (and if you’ve lived too long you know what I mean), who were losing sight and hearing and had myriads of other health challenges, who had left their homes and lost independence, lost dignity, who hardly had energy to get dressed everyday but still did, whose hearts were broken in grief; there, among them, God was still present and speaking and renewing and giving strength.  A church, a part of the body of Christ, a community of faith was alive and vibrant in that retirement home…and growing.  I got a real sense of how the elder church can teach the younger church to listen to God and to minister.  They just welcomed this young guy into their midst and listened to the words the LORD had given me for them.  I was 50 years younger than the average age of the people who attended there and I felt it was relevant to me because I knew God was working through me for them.

Anyway, that brings us to Eli and Samuel.  Eli was the high priest back in the day.  He was quite old.  Traditional protocol had it that he would pass his priestly ministry off to his sons.  He had trained them for it, but they were corrupted by the power of the position and used it to their own advantage.  Eli knew what they were doing and it seems that for reasons of familial loyalty and fear of public disgrace, he did nothing to rein them in.  Instead, he focused on Samuel.  Samuel had been entrusted to Eli’s care and tutelage by his mother Hannah out of gratitude to God for giving her a child.  She had been childless and was mocked for it by other women in her community and so she made a bargain with God that if he gave her a child, she would dedicate the child to his service.  God gave her a child.  They named him, Samuel in Hebrew means, “God has heard” and she kept her word. And so, we have Eli a very old priest teaching a young boy Samuel how to minister before the LORD in the Tabernacle.  

Well, Eli and Samuel didn’t have the same experience that Frances and I had.  The historian who wrote this book tells us, “The word of the LORD was rare in those days; visions were not widespread.”  Something was up, God just was not speaking to his people.  Moreover, the historian says Eli’s vision was fading from what seems to be cataracts, but it would not be a stretch to say that the historian was really implying that Eli was going spiritually blind and we can add spiritually deaf to the list as well for as long as it took Eli to clue in that the LORD was speaking to Samuel.  

This was not a time of spiritual vitality in the life of ancient Israel.  Everybody appeared to be a bit spiritually lazy.  Eli was lying down in his room.  Samuel was also lying down, apparently in the Holy of Holies where the Ark of the Covenant was, resting.  They are doing little more than tending to the ritual of it all.  They weren’t up and about speaking vibrantly, proclaiming and teaching the word of the Lord. Actually, the one’s who were up and about looking dynamic were Eli’s corrupted sons who were abusing the ministry and the people and getting wealthy.  For some reason, God wasn’t speaking the Word and so Eli and Samuel were just tending to temple rituals.

  Yet, there’s a glimmer of hope here in our story.  The historian says that the Lamp of God had not yet gone out.  There was a candelabra in the Holy of Holies and it symbolized both the Light of the Presence of the LORD by which we perceive God’s presence and understand his ways and also the prayers of the people. The Lamp was to stay lit at all times and so it seems Samuel was there just making sure it didn’t go out.  

It happened one night that Eli was lying down in his room adjacent to the Temple and the boy Samuel was lying on the floor in the Holy of Holies making sure the Lamp didn’t go out.  Suddenly, the LORD called to Samuel, called him by name, “Samuel! Samuel!”  Well, the historian says that Samuel did not yet know the LORD and the word of the LORD had not yet been revealed to him.  We might say he hadn’t yet had his Pentecost, his brush with the Holy Spirit, an encounter with the Living Presence of the Living God (you know, what the Lamp he was tending was supposed to be all about.)  He did not yet know the LORD so as to know his voice.  So, Samuel jumped up and went to Eli thinking Eli had called him.  “Here I am, for you called me.”  Eli, and I can imagine him being a bit annoyed for having his sleep disturbed, says, “I didn’t call you.  Go back and lie down.”

It’s interesting how Samuel mistakes the call of the LORD as being Eli, the old priest, wanting him to come and do something.  I think that’s an endemic problem for young people getting involved in the life of the church.  The LORD calls them to come and follow and serve and they think it’s to come and assume the “church” duties that the elder church can’t do anymore.  Unfortunately, that can too often be what the elder church expects the younger church to do.  You know, Eli had Samuel watch the Lamp because he was, in fact, too blind to see it should the flame die out.  That is a very powerful image.  

Putting it contemporaneously, Eli’s is too old to do “church” the way he’s always done “church” so he gets a young person to do “church” for him so that “church” can go on doing the same things it always has.  The end result is that the young don’t come to know the LORD, to recognize his voice, and understand his call to them.  They’re just feeling the elder generation’s obligation to carry on the duties involved in doing church the way the elder church assumes it has always been done.  The next thing you know ritual replaces vital, living faith and ministry, and as Eli and Samuel both demonstrate, church becomes a good place to come and sleep.  Sorry, I started to preach there.

Three times the Lord called Samuel and Samuel mistook it for Eli calling him.  It’s a good thing God’s not a “three times and you’re out” kind of God.  God stays persistent with us.  Finally, after the third time, Eli clued in that Samuel just might be hearing the voice of the LORD and so he gave young Samuel a little “spiritual direction” on how to listen for the voice of the LORD.  “Go.  Lie down; and if it happens again (and that’s a very pregnant if.  Eli is hoping Samuel hasn’t missed his chance); if it happens again, say ‘Speak LORD; for your servant is listening.” 

There’s a significant change in wording there.  This time Eli doesn’t say “Go back and lie down.”  He says, “Go.  Lie down.”  This time it wasn’t “go back” to the routine of your temple duties.  It’s “Go,” like God told Abraham to “Go”.  This time going to lie down would be the means for Samuel to go forward into God’s calling.  (I bet you never thought a good nap in church could be so life changing.)  And so it happened.  The LORD called Samuel to be the first of the “king-maker/breaker” prophets.  It was time for a monarchy in ancient Israel.  Samuel would be the first prophet to be God’s voice to establish the kings of Ancient Israel and keep them in line.  He will his start as young boy delivering the word of God against Eli’s sons, definitely not an easy task.

So, what’s this got to do with us today.  Well, for me my experience at the Masonic home under the tutelage of Frances Pugh was a good 25 years ago.  I took seriously the lessons I learned there of listening for the word of the LORD and proclaiming it everywhere I’ve ministered.  The vibrant ministry that happened at the Masonic Home also happened at my first church.  You folks can say the same about the ministry of these four churches in the Coop.  Back in the ‘90’s things were still fairly vibrant.  But since, and I can speak for most Presbyterian Church in Canada ministers and congregations, it just seems like we are just struggling to keep the Lamp of God lit in our communities.  Vibrant churches with a vision are not widespread and you have to be a little suspicious of those that are.  It’s easier to create a cult of personality fed on populist drivel, nostalgia, judgementalism, and spiritual pablum than it is to foster committed disciples of Jesus Christ.  

I still preach the words of resurrection, hope, love of neighbour, and prayer and I’ve added the call to be disciples of Jesus.  Is it that like Eli went blind, I’ve gone spiritually deaf and I just don’t hear the “Word” of the Lord?  Is it that we the faithful remnants of the North American Mainline Church just aren’t hearing what the LORD is saying and we’re holding back the younger church in our midst or just plain running them off by tying them down to doing church the way we’ve always done it?  

I don’t know.  But this I will say, notice that both Eli and Samuel were lying down, resting amidst carrying out that one task of making sure the Lamp of God stays lit and that’s when the LORD called Samuel.  I think we are in a day when the “word” of the LORD is rare.  God has been holding his tongue.  He will speak again.  In the mean time we have to keep coming back and keeping the lamp lit.  In AA at every meeting they give the encouragement “Keep coming back” for they know that participation in that unconditionally loving, non-judgemental community is the path to sobriety for an alcoholic.  So it is with us, the church.  The community of faith is the pathway to the New Life in Christ.  Christian fellowship is where the Presence of God is, where the Lamp of God burns.  Be assured; there is a sense of “Go” here to what we’re doing, to our just lying around making sure the Light doesn’t go out.  God will start to speak again.  So, let’s just lie here and wait and when we hear the voice we know to say, “Here we are LORD. Speak, for your servants are listening.”  Amen.

 

 

 

Religion and Politics

 Mark 1:1-15

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We have all received and given the advice that when you go to a social gathering there are two topics you just don’t get into: religion and politics.  These are topics people tend to feel passionately about and the last thing you want to do is start an argument with somebody you hardly know at a social gathering.  After all, religion and politics are what people go to war over…or so they say.  Personally, I don’t think religion and politics have been the cause of war.  I think it’s that there are people in this world who lust for power and wealth and they know how to effectively use religion and politics as a means to motivate people to their own ends.  

And that brings us to another side of this Rubik’s Cube.  We have heard it said and said it ourselves, “Don’t mix religion and politics”.  Most Modern Democracies have as one of their founding principles the separation of Church and State.  This is because the institution of the Church in Western Christianity has a long and terrible history of mingling with empires and nations to the result that Christians frequently went to war not only against Pagans and then against Muslims but with each other and believing it to be what God wanted us to do in God’s name.  But again, religion and politics were not the problem.  A careful read of history shows it was people who lusted for power and wealth using religion and politics as a means to motivate people to their own ends.

Religion and politics are ideological powder kegs or maybe I should say idiotological powder kegs to try to add a little brevity to the topic.  We know that mixing politics and religion or even just talking about them is as foolish as getting involved in a land war in Asia or going in against a Sicilian when death is on the line (A quote from the movie The Princess Bride which probably most of you didn’t get.)  We know to just stay away from the topics of religion and politics, but we don’t.  So, guess what? I’m going to have to talk about religion and politics today.  And I will say that this is the sermon I would have preached today regardless of what happened in Washington, D.C. this week.  

It is Baptism of the Lord Sunday.  The lectionary passage for today comes from Mark’s Gospel and, guess what Mark has done right here at the very beginning of his account of the life and ministry of this Jew from Nazareth named Jesus.  He has mixed religion and politics about as thoroughly as you possibly can and the implications were and are huge. 

Starting right here with verse 1 Mark writes: “The beginning of the gospel about Jesus the Messiah (Christ), Son of God.”  To our ears today we hear that verse with strictly theological or religious ears.  We assume it to say that Jesus is divine, God the Son, and in calling him Christ we think that simply means he died for our sins and that’s what the Gospel is all about.  But, if we try to hear this verse with the ears of somebody who lived in the Roman Empire back in the first century and was probably a member of a small group of Jesus disciples of Jewish descent who were trying to make sense out of why they were being persecuted, well, it sounds quite political.  The terminology that Mark uses to refer to Jesus is all political terminology used in reference to Caesar.  

In fact, I would step out on a limb and say that verse 1 of Mark’s Gospel was one of the most treasonous sentences written in the first century.  Mark is blatantly proclaiming that Jesus, the crucified and risen, Messiah/King of the Jews is the true Emperor, not only of Roman Empire, but of the entire world.  This sentence would get anyone in possession of a copy of Mark’s Gospel in deep trouble with both the Jewish authorities and the Romans because Mark is saying that Jesus is the true God-anointed King of the Jews and more powerful than Caesar.  That’s mixing religion and politics.

So Randy, explain yourself.  Make your case.  Ok, first we’ll look at this title Son of God.  The idea that Jesus is God the Son, the second person of the Trinity, developed a couple of centuries later.  So, hold off on that.  In ancient Israel it was not uncommon for them to refer to their king as the son of God, especially if he was a good one like King David.  But, this didn’t mean that they thought of the king as being divine.  It just meant that God favoured the king and he was an agent acting on behalf of God.  In the Roman Empire “Son of God” was a title given to the Emperor.  Many emperors minted coins with their image on it that also had the inscription “Son of God”.  But to the Romans, it did mean that they believed that the Emperor was in some way a god.  To the Romans, divinity wasn’t some idea of metaphysical, ethereal mumbo-jumbo.  Divinity had to do with power.  The Roman Emperor was the most powerful person on earth and was therefore considered to be a god.  He was also believed to be the son of the Roman chief god, Jupiter, or Zeus in Greek mythology.  So, Mark’s assigning to Jesus the title of Son of God was in the least saying Caesar now has a rival and it’s the Messiah of those rebellious and cantankerous Jews.

The second title Mark uses here is Messiah in Hebrew or Christ in Greek.  You’ll see either of the titles used depending on your English translation.  The title Messiah or Christ means anointed king, the king that God has chosen and empowered to reign.  In Jesus’s day the Messiah was the title they used to refer to a particular king that God was going to send at the end of the age anointed with his own Spirit to deliver his people from all their oppressors and to establish God’s kingdom here on earth.  Mark here calling Jesus the Messiah or the Christ means that Jesus is this particular Holy Spirit anointed, end of the age king that God had sent to deliver his people from Roman oppression and establish the Kingdom of God.  So, you can see here that there is a blatant hint of insurrection here by the followers of Jesus proclaiming Jesus to be the Jewish Messiah destined to overthrow Caesar.

And there’s more.  This word Gospel that Mark uses.  We euphemize this term today by translating it as “Good News”.  Though that is literally what the word means in Greek, but in the first century Roman world it did not mean just some good news.  Nor was what we have wrongfully come to call “The Gospel”; what you need to believe to be saved and go to Heaven when you die.  The word Gospel was reserved for a proclamation of something good or blessed that had happened to the Roman Emperor.  A Gospel was a message that imperial heralds proclaimed throughout the Roman Empire such as “Caesar has conquered Gaul” or “A son has been born to Caesar”.  And since it had to do with Caesar, Son of God, there was a sense of divine blessing behind it as well.  Good news about Caesar meant the gods had blessed the entire empire.  For Mark to call this collection of stories that he had put together about Jesus a gospel was to set up Jesus with status equal to or surpassing Caesar and saying that the God of Israel is blessing the world through this Jesus…and let’s tag onto that…that it also means the downfall of Caesar and his kingdom.  You see, Jesus came proclaiming the Gospel that the Kingdom of God was at hand and people should fall in line with him.  This is some treasonous, political stuff.  It’s not just religion.

One more thing, Jesus’s Baptism.  We could say that Jesus’s Baptism is strictly a matter of religion and focus on its theological meaning.  But doing that comes at the expense of realizing and understanding the real-life political movement at the root of what was going on with John the Baptist.  The crowds of people, huge crowds of people, were coming to John out in the Jordan River wilderness to the area where the ancient Israelites first entered the Promised Land in order to be baptized in the Jordan as the means of repenting for their sins and the sins of their nation.  In a sense they were a let’s get back to our faith roots and start over movement.  

These people recognized John as God’s prophet, someone God had sent to his people to speak for him, to give them hope.  These people had lost all hope in the effectiveness of their political and religious leaders to do anything to make their lives better under Roman oppression.  The Jewish monarchy were immoral, self-serving parasites who often verged into the world of paranoid psychosis killing anyone whom the perceived to be a threat to their place, even siblings.  They did nothing more than get wealthier on carrying out the wishes of the Romans who were occupying and oppressing the Jewish people with the most powerful military in the world all the while calling it Pax Romana, the Peace of Rome.  The religious leaders had turned Temple worship in Jerusalem into a big business and personal devotion to God into a very irrelevant legalism.  

This very large movement of religiously and politically disillusioned everyday people with real everyday needs for peace, justice, and food on the table could have very easily been incited to go storm the palaces and the Temple.  But that was not what John the Baptist was about.  He dressed and acted like the great prophet Elijah of old.  He was constantly confronting those political and religious charlatans for their immorality and abuse of power and wealth and calling everybody to return to God.  He proclaimed that God was soon to send the Messiah who would liberate everybody and establish God’s Kingdom on earth and pour his own Spirit upon everybody to make them righteous…so be ready, get ready.  He preached a real hope.  He proclaimed the reality of Israel’s God being present, listening, and acting.  Their God had not forgotten them.  Another Exodus like in the days of Moses was about to begin.

Then came Jesus to be baptized.  He steps into the water.   John pours water over him.  Boom.  The heavens are torn open meaning if you had the right angle you could see up into the realm where God was.  The Holy Spirit like a dove descended to rest upon him.  Then God spoke.  “This is my son, the Beloved. I am well pleased with him.”  The promised one whom God had chosen to deliver his people had arrived.

Now let me tell you something you probably never heard before.  What God the Father said about Jesus is almost verbatim what a Roman Emperor said when he declared the person who would succeed him.  Back in the first century there were two ways a new Emperor came to power: insurrection or succession.  It was usually insurrection but when succession was the route, we would expect that the emperor would pass the torch to his eldest son.  But, if memory serves, no emperor passed the torch to an eldest son.  He usually passed it to someone whom he considered capable and so he had adopted to be his own son.  Take Julius Caesar and his nephew Octavian who became Caesar Augustus as the example. 

When an Emperor adopted someone as his son to be his successor he would gather together a great crowd and publicly declare something to the effect of “This is my son, whom I love.  I am well pleased to choose him to inherit all that is mine.”  Then a gospel would go throughout the Empire announcing that the Emperor had adopted a son to be his successor.

If we lived in the Roman Empire during the First Century and heard the first chapter of the Gospel of Mark we would know precisely that Mark is proclaiming that Jesus, the Messiah of the Jews, is God’s loved and chosen one to reign over all the world with the implication that Caesar must kneel before him.  We would then be challenged to listen further to the rest of the Gospel to hear what kind of ruler Jesus will be when he returns.  He will heal the sick.  Cast out demons.  Raise the dead.  Establish a fair justice system and an equitable economic system.  He will hold corrupt rulers and religious authorities accountable for their self-serving abuse of the people they were to shepherd.  His death on the cross for the sins of humanity exemplifies the nature of the love by which he reigns in power.  His resurrection from the grave shows that nothing, not even death, is able to stop what God is doing through him.  He has died for the world and will bring with him when he comes the New Age where Evil, Sin, and Death are no more. 

Back to religion and politics.  We are remiss to believe or try to think that the two can or should not have anything to do with one another.  Frankly, if people of faith did not get politically involved there would likely be no such thing as hospitals, public education, civil rights, the abolition of slavery, and so on.  But, there does need to be some boundaries set.  Religious authority should never be used to undergird political authority.  Political authority should never put itself in the place of religion.  Religion should not become politics nor politics become a religion.  When the two get confused and politics uses religion for its own ends or religion uses politics for its own ends, evil is the result.  

I am a disciple of Jesus Christ, Son of God.  I am also a Christian minister and an American citizen living abroad.  We have all watched something really disturbing unfold in the United States this week as Trump supporters egged on by the President and members of Congress stormed the Capital Building and interrupted the work of Congress in an attempt to stop the Electoral College votes from being counted under the false assumption that this would somehow keep Donald Trump in power.  Left out of the equation is the role that religious leaders have played in egging on this very deluded movement which history will call Trumpism.  In the U.S. there has always been this very troubling confusion and mixture of religion and politics.  There are religious leaders in the U.S. who have been holding up President Trump as the Messiah who is going to save America and Trump has quite successfully used them in his personal pursuit of power and wealth.  As I just said, whenever religion uses politics for its own ends and politics uses religion for its own end, evil is the result.  They need to be held accountable too.

The only person in whom religion and politics can healthfully, constructively, and peacefully come together is Jesus Christ, Son of God.  Come and follow him.  Pursue him and his Kingdom.  Learn his way of self-sacrificing, unconditional love.  Be filled with the Holy Spirit and know yourself to be a dearly and personally loved child of the God who made everything and who has an abundance of enough to give to everybody.  Learn the power in prayer.  It’s time we all come to the Jordan in repentance and make a new attempt at devoting ourselves to the things of God rather than things of Man.  Let us leave or idols of Consumerism, Materialism, Celebrity-ism, Racism, Nationalism, and all those other ism’s down and pick up the cross of Christ and find Life in him.  Amen.