The Temptation of False Gods

Lent 1b

February 18, 2018

Mark 1:9-15

If it feels like we have heard this Gospel reading before it is because we have. Three times since December 3^rd, we have heard parts of this text. But, here we are again, revisiting Jesus’ baptism, his temptation, the arrest of John and the beginning of Jesus’ formal ministry. But with the déjà vu of having heard a text repeated a few times, also comes the temptation to put details into the Temptation of Jesus that aren’t there in Mark. We get them in Matthew and Luke “If you turn these stones into bread, if you really are the son of God, throw yourself down from here, I will give all of this to you if you bow down and worship me.” These details are familiar to those who have studied the scriptures or make a habit of being in church every year on the first Sunday in Lent. However, if Mark wanted those details in there, he would have put them there. Instead, he leaves out the details of the actual temptation of Jesus, which leaves a lot of room for us to wonder just what could have happened and how Jesus responded to the temptation of the Devil. What he does note, however, is that he was driven by the Spirit into the wilderness. Not led by the Spirit, like in Matthew and Luke, but rather, he was driven – cast out. There is a notion of use of force involved. Not an invitation, a command you are expected to follow immediately, whether you are prepared or not. 

It was to the wilderness that we were driven once again on Wednesday afternoon. A wilderness of mourning, of anger, of questioning:

What happened that a 19 year old got an assault rifle into his school and killed 17 people?

What happened that this was this 18^th school shooting in 2018?

What happened that this has become almost normal in our modern history?

What happened that no one who has the power to do anything to stop this from happening again seems to be doing anything but offering up thoughts and prayers?

These are questions which have a variety of answers because we are a variety of people with a variety of opinions that aren’t always going to jive. But I know that I am not the only one who is completely done with being driven into this wilderness of domestic terrorism. I know that I am not the only one who doesn’t want to have to name the victims of such acts of terrorism that are now so common in our schools, our churches, our movie theatres, our places that are supposed to be safe but now aren’t.

When Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold walked into Columbine high school on April 20, 1999, I was 15 years old. A few weeks later, the entire student body of Grosse Pointe North High School evacuated to the football field because of a bomb threat that turned out to be fake. Even at 15, we all joked that if someone wanted to really do damage to a student body, they would call in a bomb threat, wait until everyone was locked into the football field bleachers, then open fire. Little did we know that we were entering into an age where school shootings would become the norm, where parents have spent the last 19 plus years wondering how to convince their children that they are safe in school, where communities have spent the last 19 plus years picking up the pieces of tragedies that should have never been committed – some of which could have been stopped – being retraumatized each time another individual opens fire.

The temptations that arise when act of domestic terrorism are carried out, I have observed, are to go to our corners prepared to fight.

It is about guns – one faction says

It is about mental health – says another

It was bad parenting – says yet another

But here is one thing that I hope that we can all agree on – we shouldn’t have to live like this. We shouldn’t have to live in a nation in which this cycle of violence is inevitable because we refuse to change…because we refuse to repent…because we refuse to cast off fear and, instead, run out and buy more firearms because the growing arsenal makes us feel more secure.

In my old testament classes in seminary, we learned that, in the Jewish tradition, Satan is someone whose job it was to push our short comings in our face as a means of trying to convince us to turn away to other gods. Gods that are easier to serve. Gods that don’t require sacrifice and don’t inconvenience us so that we can become better than we already are. These are gods that look and act and think like us, they even hate the same people we hate for the same reasons.

And as we sit in this wilderness, we are being tempted yet again. We are being tempted to let fear drive us, we are being tempted to fear our neighbors, tempted to fear those who look different from us, tempted to proclaim that our God has somehow allowed us to draw the boundary lines of where God can roam – turning God into a vengeful puppet master who uses the deaths of innocents to teach us a lesson.

Beloved, we have a choice – to, as a collective, be afraid, or, as a collective people, to repent. To repent of those ways in which we have looked away from Jesus and the God of Abraham and to more convenient gods – the gods of fear, the gods of wealth, the gods of personal security. These are gods that turn us in on ourselves and make us think that we are, in fact, that only gods that we need. They convince us that we are the ones in control, that drive us into isolation, that tell us that we are the ones who are right and those who disagree with us are the enemy. But we cannot afford to live in fear any longer. We cannot afford to continue to live like this. We cannot afford to let Satan continually tempt us away from our God and to gods that claim to protect us from bullets with bullets of our own. We need to ask ourselves, individually and as a nation, what is more important to us – constitutional amendments or the lives and wellbeing of our neighbors, specifically the lives and wellbeing of our children?

I don’t want to know any answers, I pose this question because I think we need to wrestle, as a collective whole, if we are truly going to be able to more forward together into a better and more peaceful and understanding future.

However, until we – as a collective- make changes to bring about a more peaceful and understanding future, I don’t think that there is anything that we can tell our children that will make them feel safer going to school. Telling them God will protect them is bad theology because that leaves us with the question of why God didn’t protect the 400 children and teachers who have been killed in school shootings since Sandy Hook? And these are not helpful questions to ask.

But what we can tell them, with certainty, is that God walks with them, from the mountains to the wilderness, from the rivers to the desert, and that God is present with them each and everyday of their lives. God was present in Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School on Wednesday, not in the shooter or the weapon used, but rather in the staff and teachers whose quick thinking and sacrifice saved lives, in the first responders who arrived on scene with great speed, God wrapped his arms around the victims and God weeps with that community, weeps with this nation. We learn from the scriptures that God never abandons us, that God goes even where we think God is not, and that no human being can put a boundary around where God can go, not even Satan can do that. What we can do is to work together to do our best to make sure that what happened at Columbine and Sandy Hook and Parkland become an anomaly at worst.

This is the essence of what John the Baptist proclaimed and what Jesus proclaimed in his ministry – repentance. It’s not just about feeling remorse when you have done something you shouldn’t. It literally means to turn around, to step away from the things that caused us to sin so that we can more faithfully walk in the footsteps of Christ. It isn’t something that happens overnight, it takes time, takes discomfort and, in some cases, it can be painful. But we have the freedom to take the bold step towards repentance because we serve a God who defeated the devil’s ability to rob eternal life from us through the death and resurrection of Christ. And so we can boldly embrace Christ’s call to repent, to allow the sinful parts of us to die so that, having repented we can look forward to a more vibrant future, believing in the good news that God is love that God will not abandon us.

Jesus' first act - According to Mark

Epiphany 4

January 28, 2018

Mark 1:21-28

The best books are the ones that let you know what they are all about right off the bat. Regardless of the genre, it is more engaging to know the premise right away, even if the details come later. This gives the reader a sense of purpose as to why they should keep reading. The writers of the gospels seek to do this as well. Each one of them begins with a premise that is intended to hook the reader in, to clue them into what they are trying to communicate about God and Jesus right off the bat. John begins by proclaiming light and abundance that come from Jesus, Matthew seeks to tie in Jesus role as it pertains to the history of Israel and Jesus’ status as a teacher, Luke goes to far as to pen his thesis in the first verses of his Gospel – with the intention that Theophilus, would come to know the person of Jesus, the one through whom God turns the world upside down. And Mark, Mark immediately shows us a Jesus that breaks down the barriers that separate us from God and us from each other – Beginning when God tears open the heavens and the holy spirit descends upon Jesus in the form of a dove at his baptism.

This morning, then, we see Jesus perform the first act of his ministry. In the synagogue. On the sabbath. As he is teaching, a man with an unclean spirit approaches, recognizing Jesus for exactly who he is, the Holy one of God, and cries out “what have you to do with us? Have you come to destroy us?”

I’m actually a bit surprised that this man was able to get into the synagogue to see Jesus. In Jesus’ time, those with unclean spirits were cast out of their communities, we see later in the gospel that they went so far as to chain a man known as the Gerasene demoniac in a graveyard because of the danger he posed to himself and to the community. So for a person with an unclean spirit to be present in the synagogue was unusual.

But Jesus, upon seeing him, rebukes the spirit and orders it to leave the man.

And the man who entered the synagogue as an unclean and outcast, has not only been rid of the spirit possessing him, he has also been restored to his family, his friends, and his community. In other words, Jesus has given him his life back. This is the first act of Jesus’ ministry – giving this man back his life – which shows us, in a very powerful and visceral way, that Jesus isn’t just interested in saving people for the next life, Jesus wants abundant life for us in the here and now and he will stand in the way of anything which seeks to rob us of that abundance.

So what does an unclean spirit look like today?

If we take a look at the scriptures, what we find is that an unclean spirit is that which stand in the way of our ability to live into the abundance of God’s love for us. This may seem like a strange venture away from the witness of our Gospel this morning. But the reality of the situation is that, in our modern and scientific times, we are faced with the temptation to want to diagnose away these unclean spirits so that we can better understand them. But if you look at the entirety of the scriptures, we find, time and time again, that unclean spirits often take the form of the temptations of this world that try to convince us that there is a better, easier way of living than following in the teaching and commands of God.

These are ways of living that cause us to see our neighbors not as God sees them, but as the world sees them. They are no longer neighbors from whom we differ and with whom we may disagree, they are enemies from whom we must be kept safe.

We saw an example of this last weekend. For those few days that the government was shutdown, it was interesting to note that politicians on both sides of the aisle spent more time laying blame on those republicans, and those democrats, than they did explaining how they were going to come together to find a solution.

From a broader perspective, we throw around words like Illegals, thugs, burnouts, moochers, dead beats, snowflakes, all the way to words that should never be uttered aloud - to describe groups of people who we don’t like or whose existence makes us uncomfortable. And when we label our neighbors as such, the participate in the act of dehumanizing one another.

And beyond the ways that we drag each other down and label one another, there are systems that are in place in this world that keep folks from being able to live in the abundance promised by God. Systems of poverty that are cyclical, unemployment, insurance systems that leave people in tremendous amounts of debt, cycles of addiction, systems that promote abuse and harassment, idolatry that looks to the gods of wealth and security rather that to the God who desires wholeness and peace for each and every person created in the image of God, which just happens to be everyone who has ever or will walk this planet.

Beloved, according to the Gospel of Mark, the work that Jesus came to do was to tear open the heavens and come down to us so that we could be freed from those things which seek to rob us of the abundant life that God wishes for us. The work that Jesus came to do was unleash the presence of God in the world so that, through Jesus, we would know that God stands against all those things which seek to rob us of our life and the abundance of it. And in our baptism, we were joined to Jesus in his death and resurrection and thus freed from the bondage of sin and death so that, in the next life we would have life abundant and eternal with him.

But that also means that we are freed in Jesus, through the waters of baptism to boldly proclaim Christ and his death and resurrection to those places where unclean spirits live. And we have been called by virtue of our baptism to first – open our eyes to see the world as God sees it, and second – to go into the places where the world has been broken by unclean spirits so that Jesus may work through us to cast those spirits out and bring an abundance of life.

We have been called to be imitators of Jesus, seeking a world in which those who have been cast out and ostracized can be welcomed back to the table, a world in which young girls can go to the doctor and know they will be safe; where women and men can go about their day with the confidence that they will not be harassed or abused; a world in which our children can go to school without the fear of gun violence. We are to seek a world in which the systems of racism, poverty, and oppression, in all its forms, are eradicated and where, instead of the doomsday clock moving closer and closer to midnight, we can actually reverse the clock and, with it, our fears of a nuclear holocaust.  

My friends, our nation is sick. Our world is a mess which has been broken by our sinful and self-serving natures. However, it is to the sick and broken places that God sent Jesus to tear open the heavens and come down in order to break down the barriers that separate us from God, those things which seek to rob us of the abundance God wishes for us, so that, in gratitude for our freedom from sin and death won for us by Jesus, we might boldly seek ways in which we and our neighbors may live free and abundant lives here and now, basking in the love of God most powerfully made known to us in the person and work of Jesus.

So, as far as books go, I think Mark is off to a compelling start. Amen.