Right Relationship

Matthew 5:21-37 (NRSV)

"You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, 'You shall not murder'; and 'whoever murders shall be liable to judgment.' But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment; and if you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council; and if you say, 'You fool,' you will be liable to the hell of fire. So when you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift. Come to terms quickly with your accuser while you are on the way to court with him, or your accuser may hand you over to the judge, and the judge to the guard, and you will be thrown into prison. Truly I tell you, you will never get out until you have paid the last penny.

"You have heard that it was said, 'You shall not commit adultery.' But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away; it is better for you to lose one of your members than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away; it is better for you to lose one of your members than for your whole body to go into hell.

"It was also said, 'Whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce.' But I say to you that anyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of unchastity, causes her to commit adultery; and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.

"Again, you have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, 'You shall not swear falsely, but carry out the vows you have made to the Lord.' But I say to you, Do not swear at all, either by heaven, for it is the throne of God, or by the earth, for it is his footstool, or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great King. And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make one hair white or black. Let your word be 'Yes, Yes' or 'No, No'; anything more than this comes from the evil one."

Okay, now that I’m preaching every other week, you’d think the lectionary texts would align themselves so I don’t have to deal with the tough passages, wouldn’t you.  But here we are, on this 6th Sunday after Epiphany dealing with all sorts of unpleasantness in the gospel reading.

People disagreeing…divorce…murder…adultery.  You name it, it’s probably in those 16 verses that Lisa and I read to you just moments ago.  It sounds more like the headlines from the magazines at the grocery store checkout line than words from scripture.  So here I am, all ready to bring the good news and I’m stymied by the Bible of all things.  Go figure.

These verses that we heard are part of Jesus’ sermon on the mount.  We’re in the midst of a lectionary run on the sermon on the mount that begins with the beatitudes.  And here we are facing some of the most difficult of Jesus’ sayings this morning.

I’d be willing to bet that the warnings about not murdering apply to none of us in this room this morning.  But how about anger?  Or insulting someone else?  Jesus pushes the edges here and throughout the reading.  He goes to extremes and forces us to reexamine who we are and how we behave.

When you look at these verses from a distance, without starting to beat up on yourself for being less than perfect, you’ll see that they are all about relationship; right relationship.  Through these five to seven admonitions that Jesus tags onto previous laws we see him go deeper into how we are supposed to behave with each other. 

Forget about murder and adultery and divorce; remember how you’re supposed to act with each other on a day-to-day basis.  That’s the crux of living the live that Jesus calls us to.  And that’s what Jesus is doing in this sermon on the mount:  he’s calling us to live a life that follows his example.  We would call it a Christian life, though of course, Jesus would never use that terminology: the term “Christian” is still years to come when he stood up and preached his sermon.

So we struggle and wrestle with this scripture, trying to coax out the good news.  Murder, to look at the first instance Jesus uses, is serious business.  Jesus isn’t denying that at all.  But he is saying that anger is serious too.  Both murder and anger are important enough to garner God’s attention in our lives.  Murder and anger may be two sides of the same coin. 

From these pronouncements that Jesus made that day on the hilltop, we can get an idea of what might have been going on in the first-century Near East.  In that crowded, bustling area, brutally controlled by Rome and trying to keep religious laws that originated centuries earlier that were for an agrarian, nomadic people, Jesus was trying to point out that you have to go beyond the law and create law that governs how you interact with those who are right around you.

Of course, for any society to survive, there have to be rules and laws.  Laws about murder, rules about divorce, and so on.  But Jesus was saying that we have to go deeper than the humanly-created rules and laws and think about reconciliation.  Yes, that’s right, reconciliation.  Because if God is going to go to the trouble of reconciling us to God, we have to make the effort to reconcile ourselves with each other.  And that means paying attention to things like anger.

Now, in this day and age of the 21st century in North America, I’m not about to stand up here and say that anger, in and of itself, is a bad thing.  Of course, we get angry and sometimes that’s actually a good thing.  If I don’t encounter injustice and get angry, there’s something wrong.  But what we do with our anger is what’s important.  If we allow it to fester and boil over and ruin a relationship that we have with someone, that’s when we’re no longer reconciled to our brother or sister.  If anger is all we feel in our relationship with someone though, we are missing something; something important.

We’re not that different from those who were struggling to survive some 2,000 years ago you know.  Yes, Rome isn’t such a big deal anymore; it’s no longer the seat of an empire.  And we no longer follow the religious laws that regulated life for the 1st century Jew.  We are bound however by laws that go beyond what our current empire demands of us.  Yes, we pay taxes and we don’t murder but nothing out of Washington is going to tell us how to be in right relationship with each other.  It isn’t illegal to be angry or to feel lust, thank heavens.  But it’s our Christian calling that keeps us in right relationship and tells us how to deal with the anger or lust or any other number of feelings that we might be having.

Because that’s the thing.  Jesus only scratches the surface here if you think about it.  There is a passel of ways that we can damage our relationships with each other.  And if we allow such things to get in the way, we need to reread that sermon on the mount and pay special attention to the passage we heard this morning.  We, being the inventive humans that we are, have found all sorts of ways to alienate ourselves from each other.  We seem almost limitless in our abilities to cause a rift in the fabric that binds us to each other. 

So when these rifts occur, we are called to mend them as best we can.  Whatever it is that comes between us and another needs to be addressed.  Through our ministrations to our relationships we can bring about true reconciliation with each other and therefore with our God.

Jesus’ words this morning may have been hard to hear but if we look behind them we find that there is an attempt to cause right relationship.  If we are indeed to answer our call to live the Christian life, we must begin with our relationships with each other and seek true reconciliation.  For through those relationships we find the glimmer of truth that is our relationship with God.

Emmanuel

Matthew 1:18-25

Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly. But just when he had resolved to do this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, "Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins." All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet:
"Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son,
   and they shall name him Emmanuel,"
which means, "God is with us." When Joseph awoke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him; he took her as his wife, but had no marital relations with her until she had borne a son; and he named him Jesus.

I get an email five days a week from an organization called DelanceyPlace.com.  The email contains an excerpt of a nonfiction book:  some interesting nugget of information about history or business or some other aspect of life on this earth.  I’ve learned a lot, most of which, unfortunately, I’ve already forgotten.

Today’s reading from Matthew reminded me of an email I got from DelanceyPlace.com this past week excerpted from a book called Euphemania.  The excerpt was about euphemisms, those clever little phrases we all say to hide what we actually mean to say but can’t or won’t or don’t because of social strictures.  Did you ever hear the phrase “born on the wrong side of the blanket?”  Evidently, it was a euphemism popular in the late 18th century for...well, you can imagine what it was a euphemism for.  We all use euphemisms at one point or another to cover our meaning or avoid saying something directly.

Matthew’s writing this morning was heavy with euphemisms, at least part of it was.  Mary, he writes, was “found to be with child.”  In this instance we know exactly what Matthew is saying:  Mary was pregnant.  When we come to the words that Joseph planned to “dismiss her quietly” though, we’re not quite sure what Matthew meant.  Did it mean that he was going to send Mary away from her home and family to avoid the disgrace of being pregnant without being married?  Or did it mean that he would save her the horror of being stoned to death but still have her killed quietly?  We don’t know because that euphemism is lost to us now.

The words in Joseph’s dream are direct and to the point though.  They tell Joseph exactly what to do without any euphemisms or wavering in their meaning.  This clear message comes to Joseph via an angel.  Even though the angel is unnamed, I like to think it’s Gabriel again, the same angel who brought the news to Mary that she was going to bear Jesus.  That would make a nice symmetry: Gabriel, your all-purpose nativity angel.

What’s interesting about Matthew’s account of the birth narratives is that, unlike Luke’s account, this is told from Joseph’s perspective.  And this is the last we see of Joseph in the scriptures.  He disappears after this without a trace and is not mentioned again.  But Matthew, eager to settle in his Jewish readers minds that Jesus is a legitimate heir of David, gives us the genealogy from Joseph’s side and then tells the story of Jesus’ birth from Joseph’s viewpoint. 

God, through the angel, had to intervene to prevent Joseph from dismissing Mary quietly.   Without Mary, of course there would have been no birth.  But without Joseph, according to Matthew, there would have been no legitimacy to David’s throne.

Matthew is quick to quote Isaiah’s passage, the very one that we heard this morning in our Hebrew Bible reading.  In its original context, that reading was assuring a Judean king, Ahaz, that his line would continue with the birth of a son.  But Matthew uses that scripture in the context of Jesus’ birth, again adding in legitimacy to a Jewish readership that would know the original scripture well.   Matthew, from the very beginning is working to prove that Jesus is the Jewish Messiah who has come to save the world from itself.

Of course, the Jewish folks of the first century, who would be reading Matthew’s gospel and were Matthew’s intended audience, were looking for a political Messiah, who would free Israel.  But by the time Matthew wrote his gospel, there was already a split between Jews and Christian Jews, such that the Christians were no longer allowed in the synagogue.  So they were ready to accept a spiritual Messiah, one who came and conquered not Rome but death and sin.

The angel, back to our reading this morning, spoke directly to Joseph:  don’t be afraid; Mary’s baby is from the Holy Spirit; name the baby Jesus; Jesus will save the people from their sins.  That’s the summation of the angel’s message and Joseph took it to heart.  The name “Jesus” by the way is the Greek form of the Hebrew name “Joshua” which means “God saves.”  Thus the addition of the fact that Jesus will save the people from their sins in the angelic proclamation makes sense with the name, Jesus.

And that’s how we like our communications from God, isn’t it?  Direct and to the point without any room for equivocation.  Except when we’re looking for another answer than the one we got; then we want wiggle room, of course.  But when God sends an angel to deliver the message, you know that you’re going to get it direct and true.

Matthew was making a point here by focussing on Joseph.  If you think back through the Hebrew Bible, there was another famous Joseph, one who was known for his dreams, who traveled to Egypt and was known to be righteous, just as we were told Joseph is righteous.  Matthew’s Jewish readers and hearers would certainly make that connection between the more recent Joseph and his ancestor in the faith.  Again, a link to Jesus’ Jewish past is established through Joseph.

Matthew, in quoting Isaiah, gives Jesus a second name:  Emmanuel.  Emmanuel is a Hebrew name which does in fact mean “God with us.”  And that’s what the nativity stories are all about, aren’t they:  God entering into humanity as God has never done before.  God being with us in new and exciting ways. 

In fact, the whole of Matthew’s gospel is working to show that God was with us in the person of Jesus Christ.  In fact, if you jump ahead twenty-eight chapters to the closing verses of the book of Matthew, you’ll find “God with us” there again if you look closely enough.  For there at the very end of his Gospel, Matthew tells us of Jesus’ promise to be with us to the end of the age.  Emmanuel.  God with us.  Always.

This birth narrative from Matthew sets his readers and us up for the continuing story of God’s presence among us both now and for all time.  Jesus came, we are told from the very start, to save the people, not from Rome or from any other earthly power but from their own sins.  And, as we journey through Matthew this coming year, we’ll hear how God remains with us and will remain with us forever.

[Painting is The Vision of St. Joseph, by James Tissot.]

Being Shrewd

Luke 16:1-13

Then Jesus said to the disciples, "There was a rich man who had a manager, and charges were brought to him that this man was squandering his property. So he summoned him and said to him, 'What is this that I hear about you? Give me an account of your management, because you cannot be my manager any longer.' Then the manager said to himself, 'What will I do, now that my master is taking the position away from me? I am not strong enough to dig, and I am ashamed to beg. I have decided what to do so that, when I am dismissed as manager, people may welcome me into their homes.' So, summoning his master's debtors one by one, he asked the first, 'How much do you owe my master?' He answered, 'A hundred jugs of olive oil.' He said to him, 'Take your bill, sit down quickly, and make it fifty.' Then he asked another, 'And how much do you owe?' He replied, 'A hundred containers of wheat.' He said to him, 'Take your bill and make it eighty.' And his master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly; for the children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light. And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes.

"Whoever is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much; and whoever is dishonest in a very little is dishonest also in much. If then you have not been faithful with the dishonest wealth, who will entrust to you the true riches? And if you have not been faithful with what belongs to another, who will give you what is your own? No slave can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth."

What a parable we’ve just heard.  It’s one of those difficult sayings of Jesus that we end up scratching our heads over and hoping that next week’s lectionary reading is easier to understand; at least I do. But we ignore this parable at our own peril, so let’s look at it and spend some time trying to comprehend what Jesus may have been talking about.

To recap:  There’s a rich man who has a manager or steward.  The rich man discovers that the manager hasn’t been dealing with his accounts in his best interests.  The manager, upon learning that he’s been found out, hatches a plan to ensure that his good fortune continues.

He realizes that he’s too old or feeble to dig ditches and I can empathize with him there.  He’s also too proud to beg so there has to be another solution.  His solution is to create a circle of friends by reducing the debt they owe to the rich man.  Then comes the twist to the story; when the rich man learns of this plan, he commends his manager.  He doesn’t condemn him but rather calls him shrewd, as truly he is.

You’ve got to imagine that Jesus is telling this story with a glimmer in his eye.  He knows that the twists don’t make sense and that’s the joke of it all.  He’s telling this story to the man on the street; those who catch the early bus to get to grinding jobs.  This is a story for the run of the mill guy or gal who knows about rich men and how unlike they are from the rest of us.

And you have to remember that Luke, the author of our gospel, is particularly interested in proclaiming God’s preference for the poor.  Luke is concerned with what we would call economics; especially the economics of the poor versus the rich. 

So the rich man is not the hero here, well, at least not at the start.  Our protagonist is the manager, who shows how shrewd he is.  The translation we heard talks about him “squandering” his master’s riches.  In actuality, the Greek word is closer to “scattering:”  the manager was strewing about the rich man’s money. 

To where was he scattering it?  Well, very likely those hearers of the parable originally, those men and women of the street, would have assumed that it was going to the poor.  The manager was being an early Robin Hood, more or less.  Then he continues this use of his boss’ riches by shrewdly reducing the amount of what some of the rich man’s debtors owe.  And who are these debtors?  Well, once again they’re people who owe to rich people, in other words, poor people.

The manager is reducing the debts of these folks, in one case by 50%, so that they would feel an obligation to him.  Jesus is clear that the manager is doing this so he’ll be welcomed into the homes of these debtors once he’s out of a job.

Then comes the twist of the story.  The rich man learns of this turn of his affairs and commends the manager.  As Tom Boomershine, who taught me in my Digital Culture Certificate program, writes:  “This is a sign that the story is about God.  God is the one who commends a shrewd steward for acting in a way that was not in the benefit of a rich man.”  Jesus’ explanation about this is that the children of this age are shrewder than the children of light in their own generation.  That is to say, they know how to act; they know how to work the system and to have it work for them.  Children of light, Jesus is saying, are often naïve, pious, nice and don’t know how to use stuff such as money in their own interest.

Jesus knew what everyone else knew:  poor people welcome those who have treated them well into their homes.  That’s the shrewdness of this parable.  In Luke’s version of the beatitudes, the very first thing that Jesus says is that the poor shall inherit the kingdom of God; not the poor in spirit...that’s Matthew’s take on it.  And in the story about Lazarus and the rich man, it’s clear that the poor are going to be the gatekeepers for God’s realm. 

Jesus, according to Luke, is here for the poor.  And this parable only drives that point home.  We may look at it with alarm but that’s because in our materialistic culture, where money is a reward from God, the rich man is the hero.  We have to turn the tables and recognize this parable as a first century story and Jesus was telling it to the poor and those run of the mill, early bus catching guys and gals.  Jesus was, as he often does, turning things upside down; turning the story head over heels with a glint in his eye as he did it.

So where does all this leave us?  Likely none of us are in a position to scatter the riches of anyone in the upper income brackets and even if we did, we’d likely get a very different reaction when we were caught and let’s face it, we’d get caught.  Any scattering of someone else’s riches would likely land us in jail rather than commended.

And the answer to that question of where this leaves us is found in the paragraph that follows the parable, the very last line that we heard:  “You cannot serve God and wealth.”  If you’re serving wealth, you’re not going to scatter the riches around to those who need it, ignoring God’s call to serve them.  This is a parable of the end times, when things are turned as topsy turvy as the parable itself does; when God’s realm enters in fully and we don’t value people based on their bank account or garage contents.

Indeed we dismiss this parable at our own risk.  It must be viewed through the lens of God’s preference for the poor.  Only then can we begin to understand the lesson that this parable provides.

Sermon, Sunday, 15 March 2009

<--Image to the left is Christ Expelling the Moneychangers from the Temple, by Giovanni Bernardi. It is engraved rock crystal and was created c. 1540-1549. It is from the National Gallery of Art.


John 2:13-22

This passage from John is a real grabber, isn’t it? It’s a story that just jumps out at you, doesn’t it? It’s one almost anyone who’s even just glanced through the gospels remembers. It’s a real story, with excitement and passion.

Most of the stories of Jesus that we remember admittedly tend to be fairly passive. Most of the time the Jesus we encounter and remember is teaching...or discussing...or healing (which, I acknowledge, would be an important event to those healed, but you must confess there’s not a lot of pep or action in those accounts). The Jesus we remember is the cut-out, flannel board Jesus of the Sunday school rooms of decades past. We’d find that Jesus standing or sitting. Maybe even walking. But certainly never doing anything that might cause him to break a sweat.

This Jesus though...this Jesus we encounter in the Temple in Jerusalem is the action figure Jesus...in the league of G.I. Joe and any Rambo spin offs toys; not the cut-out, flat, uninspiring cut-out flannel-board Jesus. This Jesus wreaked havoc...in the Temple of all places. This Jesus--dare I say it?--got angry...teed off...hot under the collar! He was out and out indignant and infuriated and didn’t mind showing it.

I don’t know about you, but I seem to have the impression that white Protestants don’t do that. We generally don’t do the ‘A’ word. And if we do, we certainly don’t show it. We’re not supposed to, at least. It might offend someone. It might be upsetting. It might cause that other word we don’t say...conflict.

But there Jesus is...flailing about like a man gone mad with a bunch of cords he’s using as a whip, upsetting tables, causing everything to go helter-skelter, ruining a good day’s business for a bunch of people, and really frightening some livestock who were peaceably chewing their cuds just moments before.

The Gospel writer John places this account early in his record of Jesus’ life and ministry. We find it in the second half of chapter two only. John’s first chapter begins with the well-known hymn or poem which starts, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” He then introduces us to John the Baptist and gets Jesus all baptized and ready for his ministry. John ends the first chapter with Jesus calling his first disciples.

Then we find our way into chapter two. RIght off, Jesus performs his first miracle; a very public one, at a wedding feast in which he, goaded by his mother, turns water into wine. Immediately, John reminds us that Jesus is divine and can do things that mortals cannot do. After a respite with his family and disciples in Capernaum, Jesus then ventures to Jerusalem at the time of the Passover feast. And right away he rolls up his sleeves and gets to work upsetting not only tables, but local religious big-wigs too undoubtedly.

If you stop to think about John’s narration and location of this event where he placed it and know anything about Jesus’ life, something might sound just a little odd to you. There’s a good reason for that; the Synoptic Gospels, otherwise known as Matthew, Mark, & Luke, all locate Jesus in Jerusalem just one single time...the week at the end of his ministry and life when he is arrested and crucified. Those three all include this Temple clearing account but it is late in their accounts. John, however, has Jesus in Jerusalem four times throughout his gospel; three of those during the Passover festival, as today’s reading was. In our minds, being more familiar as most of us are with the synoptics‘ versions, we have Jesus wandering about the Judean countryside for a few years and finally showing up in Jerusalem in time for that final week that we know so well.

John’s gospel in all likelihood was the last of the four gospels written. It’s a latecomer to the whole story-of-Jesus’-life game. Compared to the other three, he has different emphases and reasons for putting his work together. By the time that John composed these words, the early Christian movement or community was probably very different than the others knew. There were those by this point who were claiming that Jesus was only spirit, not flesh. It was Jesus’ divinity that was important to these folks and they denied the fact that he was truly human. Among other aims, John seeks to dispel that notion.

Of course, having an anger-showing, table-heaving, whip-wielding Jesus certainly goes a long way to that end. Jesus was human, John says right off, leaving no doubts or questions. Even though John’s gospel is less gritty in some ways and is more poetic, it does not equivocate when it comes to putting forth both Jesus’ divine and human natures.

And so, here we are two thousand years or so later, facing this angry, very human Jesus and we’re not exactly sure what to do with him, are we? We can happily handle the Jesus who welcomes children, cures lepers, and even hangs out with prostitutes. That Jesus, that flat, flannel-board Jesus of Sunday schools across many miles and years is easy to take...though, you’ve got to concede, really rather bland.

If we are going to embrace Jesus; if we are really going to claim that we are a follower of the Nazarene born of Mary; if we are truly willing to confess that Jesus holds a claim on us and our lives; if we are going to do those things, then we have to accept the anger that Jesus exhibited in that Temple along with the niceties that are usually ascribed to him. If we don’t, we’re in the same camp as those early followers who wanted to mask Jesus’ humanity and make him purely spirit whom John was working hard to prove wrong.

The good news is that this human Jesus is much more interesting. This is a Jesus I can talk about with others. This is a Jesus who knows and understands my anger and my tears and my frustration with the powers I encounter in my world, in my country, in my state, in my church.

I can bring this Jesus to those who find themselves at the margins because this is a Jesus still angry that more and more people do not have access to clean drinking water. I can envision Jesus storming into denominational gatherings and demanding a place at the Table for all. Jesus, I know, would be at city halls, state capitals, and legislatures and palaces around the globe demanding that attention be paid to the least of these.

Because John took the care that he did as he composed and crafted his gospel account to place this account right at the start of Jesus’ ministry, having just established Jesus’ divine nature through the water-into-wine moment, John can carry that anger and humanity of Jesus through the rest of the teachings and sayings that he writes about. We can read the rest of John’s gospel through that lens and it leaves us a little on edge because we don’t know when and if this guy will go off again.

We who claim to be followers of Jesus cannot be reminded enough that we are Christ’s body; a living, breathing, and even sometimes angry body. Our anger is holy anger; modeled after the one who cleared the Temple because it had become something far from a place of worship. Unlike the calm, placid demeanor of those good Protestant forebears who taught us to never raise our voices, we need to claim and own our holy anger. Turn the tables in the places where you know Jesus would do the same, because you are Christ’s body.

Sermon, Sunday, 1 February 2009

Mark 1:21-28

A few years ago, Allen and I went to see a strange, fun little movie called The Queen of Outer Space which was playing at the time in San Francisco at either the Castro Theatre or the Red Vic Theater. Wherever it was that we saw it, The Queen of Outer Space’s star was none other than the glamorous and fabulous Zsa Zsa Gabor. It was released over 50 years ago now in 1958.

The film was memorable, to me at least, for how silly it was; what little plot it had was quite odd and, of course, if you’ve got Zsa Zsa Gabor as your star, as the Queen of Outer Space herself, the camp factor is bound to be high. The story, as related on the Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com) is that American astronauts are “mysteriously” drawn to the planet Venus, which is inhabited, naturally, by beautiful women and their “despotic” queen.

The scene I remember the best, and pretty much the only scene I can actually conjure up in my memory of the moive, was a shot of a spacecraft hurtling through space. Now remember, this was 1958:

• special effects master George Lucas was only 14 years old;
• the Soviet Union had sent Sputnik up only one year earlier;
• and in fact, NASA, our country’s space program, only came into being in 1958, the very same year that Zsa Zsa was alluringly ruling over all those beauties on Venus.

So the shot of the spacecraft that I’m remembering was out of the imagination of the Hollywood movie makers of what space travel might look like.

Sadly though, the reason that this scene with the spacecraft is so memorable is not because it is a forward-looking vision of things to come from the vantage point of 1958. No, it was the fact that up there on the big screen, you could see that the spacecraft hung on strings as it hurtled its way to Venus. Yes, there were strings or wires or threads or something attached to that spaceship which were very much in plain view for all of us in the audience to see. Those strings really required a lot of suspension of disbelief. One can only surmise that that 14-year-old George Lucas went to see the movie and thought to himself “I can do better than that.”

Of course, the San Francisco audience in which we sat some forty years after the film was released howled when they saw that. (Actually, we all got a pretty big kick out of most of the movie because it is so ludicrous.) In those four decades though between the original release and our viewing, we, the audience, had become more sophisticated…more discerning as viewers. I have no idea how Zsa Zsa and her fellow actors were received in 1958 because I was toddling about and not really interested in movies yet. Most of us though have grown up on the Star Wars movies and have advanced along with them and the special effects they employed. We expect our special effects today to be seamless; we don’t see the strings and can’t tell that the crowd scene is actually made up of colored q-tips. In our sophistication and discernment, we have left behind some of the innocence that the 1950s movie-going public enjoyed.

Well, if that kind of shift can happen in 40 or 50 years, a mere half century, imagine what two millennia can do. We hear stories like the one from Mark this morning and our 21st century minds immediately look for and chuckle knowingly at the strings we think we see. In the meantime though we miss some of the magic and the mystery that was a part of these narratives originally.

So today we’ve got Jesus in a synagogue in Capernaum. Now, we don’t really think much about Capernaum these days. In and of itself, it really wasn’t all that important. It sat on the Sea of Galilee and was probably established about 200 years before Jesus came along. From the gospels, we know that several of the disciples whom Jesus called were from Capernaum.

It’s the town where Jesus moved and set up his ministry from the beginning. Nazareth, where he grew up, was too small, too insignificant really for what he needed to do. He needed a more populated setting; a somewhat more urban location so that he could reach people, which was the point of him being here, after all. Sure Capernaum wasn’t Jerusalem, but it was a far cry from provincial Nazareth.

Mark is our most concise and terse gospel writer. He takes just 16 chapters to cover the same story about Jesus as the others take in 28, 24, and 21 chapters. Mark wastes little or no time in his writing and his favorite words or phrases are “immediately” or “just then” or “at once.” Mark keeps the story moving and allows us little chance to catch our breath. He has his purpose in telling this all this that he spells out right at the beginning in verse one, chapter one: “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God” and Mark is off and running.

The wheres and whens of Mark’s version of things are important. In this case, in the sparse verses preceding, Mark tells us how Jesus is baptized by John, is immediately driven into the wilderness where he is tempted and then he begins his Galilean ministry. He then calls his first disciples: those fishermen, Simon, Andrew, James, and John, who dropped everything right away in good Markan fashion to follow him. They go to Capernaum where, we heard, he went to the synagogue on the sabbath and was teaching.

Our account this morning is really two stories intertwined. We start off with is the teaching that Jesus was doing. Mark, unlike the other writers, does not actually tell us what Jesus was saying. We’re either supposed to know that already or it’s just not important to Mark. What is important in this first narrative is the effect of Jesus’ teaching on those sabbath synagogue goers: they are astounded, Mark says. Jesus teaches with authority, and, getting a jab in at the local ecclesiastical authorities, Mark lets everyone know that this teaching is not like that of the scribes.

That story, about Jesus teaching, is abruptly interrupted, just as the proceedings that day were interrupted. We hear Mark’s trademark “just then”, cluing us in to a shift in the narrative, as a man disrupts the synagogue by crying out accusations about Jesus. This man with the unclean spirit loudly questions Jesus: “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?” Notice the use of the plural there—what have you to do with us. Who is the us? The people of Capernaum? One might think that he’s referring to the unclean spirits, but Mark, just a few words before, clearly states that the man has an unclean spirit…singular; no s at the end. Who is this us?

The story continues on in the plural: “Have you come to destroy us?” is the very next thing that the man barks out. Everything and everyone in the synagogue is in an uproar at this point, without a doubt. They don’t have the luxury of reading this account and noticing little things like grammatical number usage.

And right about here is where those strings that we saw in The Queen of Outer Space come in to play: we want, in our sophisticated 21st century way, two thousand years after this narrative first made it onto paper or papyrus or however it was captured, to categorize that shrieking, pitiful man with our own contemporary label so that we can grasp onto the story better. We smile knowingly as we nod our heads, stroke our chins, and say,”oh, he must have been suffering from dementia, poor guy” or schizophrenia or any number of modern maladies. We take comfort in assigning something we can recognize onto the situation. We think we see all too well the strings that Mark uses in this story.

But I think we miss out if we do that. I believe we have to do the best we can to go back as we encounter a story like this to a time and place as different as different can be from our own and just let the story be what it is. Mark had a point to make in his rush of immediacy to get his gospel out. And that point, echoing Mark’s very first words in his gospel, comes this time from none other than the one whom we’re ready to say is mentally ill or unbalanced. After the pandemonium that occurs in the synagogue, and the man with the unclean spirit confuses everyone with his use of ‘us’, out of his mouth comes “I know who you are, the Holy One of God.”

Whoa! Right there and then, with everyone standing around with their mouths agape and ready to dial 911 on their cell phones, right at the very start of Jesus’ ministry, Mark has him proclaimed the “Holy One of God”, by someone we’re ready to discount and ignore because we think we see the strings. Mark doesn’t wait for Peter to figure it out and make some grand proclamation or for Jesus to have been around for awhile teaching, preaching, and healing and getting his credentials. No, Mark in his immediacy puts Jesus’ identity out on the table right away. Whatever strings we thought we saw in this story turn out to be merely chimera; illusions that throw us off guard and make us the unbalanced ones.

Of course, in this very public setting, in which Jesus has already impressed the locals and really didn’t need to do more, he orders the unclean spirit (back to the singular again) out of the poor guy, which happens with convulsing and yelling in a most dramatic way that would make George Lucas proud. As if the authority of Jesus’ teaching before all the commotion wasn’t enough, this little scene really gets the synagogue crowd’s attention and they can’t wait to get out of there and tell anyone who will listen what they just witnessed, incredible as it is. “There’s a new thing happening” they’re proclaiming, “wait til you hear it for yourself.”

If you encounter these marvelous, mystery-laden stories which make up our bible and spend your time looking for the strings, you’re missing out. Jesus teaches with a new authority, Mark reminds us several times in these seven short verses. It’s different from any preacher or teacher you or I have ever heard undeniably. If you see the strings, if you see the strings though, don’t worry about it. Sit back and marvel instead at the new authority that is right before you.

Artwork credit: Healing the Sick, metal relief sculpture by Ulrich Henn
St. James Cathedral, Seattle, WA 2008
Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN, https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-search.pl