Remembering the Past...
        Planning the Future

    Park Christian Church
                                                                    (Disciples of Christ)

September 27, 2009

Scripture:         Mark 9:38-50

Sermon:           “Limping Towards Heaven”

            Let’s turn our attention now to the word of the Lord.  Our scripture lesson comes from Mark’s gospel.  There in chapter 9 we will read together verses 38 through 50.  You can find that easily on page 62 of the New Testament in the pew Bible.

            These are, really, two separate stories.  But, I believe that they are connected by a common theme.  The first story concerns the activity of some unnamed outsider who healing folks of their demons by using the name of Jesus.  He’s not a disciple.  We don’t know anything about him.  Maybe he was a part of a crowd at one of Jesus’ healings and took it on himself to do more of the same.  We don’t know.  But, the disciples didn’t like it one bit.  And they told him to stop.

            And then Jesus begins to warn the disciples in some very harsh terms about the ways in which they live their lives.  He talks about cutting off your hand or your foot, gouging out your eye.  And all of this seems to be prescribed as a way to avoid the fiery punishment of hell.  Man, those are tough words.

            Just how are these two things all connected?

            It seems to me that all of what Jesus is saying and dealing with in his disciples has to do with the ways in which they push people away from the good news.  Listen now for the word of the Lord.  See if that occurs to you as well.

            John said to him, “Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he was not following us.”  But Jesus said, “Do not stop him; for no one who does a deed of power in my name will be able soon afterward to speak evil of me.  Whoever is not against us is for us.  For truly I tell you, whoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you bear the name of Christ will by no means lose the reward.

            “If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea.  If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life maimed than to have two hands and to go to hell, to the unquenchable fire.  And if your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life lame than to have two feet and to be thrown into hell.  And if your eye causes you to stumble, tear it out; it is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and to be thrown into hell, where their worm never dies, and the fire is never quenched.

            “For everyone will be salted with fire.  Salt is good; but if salt has lost its saltiness, how can you season it?  Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another.”

            Wow.  That’s a lot of talk about punishment and torment and judgment, isn’t it?  Better to enter into life limping around with one hand and blinded in one eye, Jesus said.  Better to wound yourself than end up you know where.

            We Disciples, you know, we don’t really like to talk about such things.  Hellfire and brimstone is what it sounds like.  And we don’t much like to discuss that.  But, Jesus wasn’t so afraid of it.  It’d be better if you gouged out one of your eyes than wind up there.  You know the fire in that place is unquenchable.  The worms?  They never die.  That’s what Jesus said.

            No, we don’t care for it very much.  Let’s be honest.

            Makes you wonder what prompted such talk in the first place.

            Now the story goes that John came running up to Jesus quite proud of himself.  There was a man out there somewhere who had been doing ministry in Jesus’ name.  Went to another church or something.  He wasn’t following them.  And John told this guy to stop.

            That’s what prompted Jesus to warn his own followers about being thrown into the eternal fire.  They’d gone and pretty much scared this fellow away.  Stopped the man’s faith right in its tracks.  That’s what Jesus saw.  You’ve got a man that obviously believes in Jesus, enough to minister to others using Jesus’ name.  And when the folks who followed Jesus everywhere he went got wind of it, they didn’t like it very much.

            Now, how do you think this guy reacted?  The one who had been doing ministry for Jesus, how do you think he reacted?

            There’s a woman that goes to church every Sunday.  Faithful as she can be.  She’s raised her family in the church.  Her son teaches at a seminary near here, which is how I know this story.  She’s there in the pew every time the doors open.  She prays when the service turns to prayer.  She takes the bread and the cup whenever it is offered.  She listens to the sermons.  She read the Bible.  But, do you know what happens whenever the organ begins to play and everyone in the sanctuary opens their hymnals to offer songs of praise to God?  She just stands there empty handed.  Not a word comes out of her mouth.

            It used to be that she tried to sing in the choir when she was younger.  But, she didn’t sing too well.  Music was a foreign thing to her.  And the choir director tried to coach her.  He tried to explain how it worked.  But, she was what you might call tone deaf.  And the choir director, he gave up.  And he said, “Why don’t you just try mouthing the words when the rest of us sing?”

            She doesn’t sing anymore.  Ever.

            So, how do you think this guy that John confronted reacted?  Have you ever been discouraged?  Are you getting the picture?

            I was having some car trouble a few years ago.  And I don’t really know beans about cars.  All I knew was that my car kept sputtering and stalling for no apparent reason.  So, I took it to the only garage in the small town where we lived.  And I said, “Can you give this thing a look?”

            A few hours later the mechanic called me to deliver the bad news.  It’s kind of like waiting on test results from the doctor, I think.  What is it?  Cancer of the carburetor?  Has my car contracted some sort of fuel virus?  He said, “Well, we’re going to have to replace the intake manifold and the fuel pump is about to give out.  I’m going to have to order the parts.  So, it’ll take a little while.  You’re looking at close to a thousand dollars here.”

            A thousand dollars?  I didn’t have that kind of money.  So, I told him that I’d take my car back and return after saving up for a while.

            As luck would have it, though, a friend of mine in the congregation got up under the hood and had a look for himself.  He said, “No way this should be a thousand dollars, preacher.”  And he tinkered around for a bit.  Then he emerged from the hood of the car holding a handful of sparkplug wires.  You see, if those wires get dirty, or if they start wearing out, your car will run like it’s skipping a beat.  And that’s kind of what my car was doing.

            He drove over to the next town, bought some new sparkplug wires for fifty bucks, and then put them in my car.  We cranked it up.  And it ran like new.

            I can tell you this.  I never, ever went back to that garage in town.  No way was I going to get stung like that, again.

            Have you ever learned from hard experience that you’d be better off just avoiding a certain place or certain people?  I ask that because it’s the same thing with church.  I once heard words just like that from somebody who’d been beat up pretty bad by the church.  “No way I’m going back to one of those places again.”

            What John, the disciple, had done to this one man was push him out.  And if you notice what happened next, Jesus was not at all happy about it.  Was he?

            “Don’t stop this man!  If he’s experiencing the power of my name right now he’s likely going to grow in his faith.  You’ve just gone and nipped it all right in the bud.”

            It was the occasion which prompted Jesus to start talking about such things as amputating parts of your body and winding up in the hellish torment of fire and worms.  Words, I think we should notice, that were directed not towards the outside, unbelieving world.  They were words directed towards those who are following Jesus already!

            You, church, are capable of pushing people out, you know.  You can nip the faith of folks right in the bud if you’re not careful.  And if we take Jesus seriously here, which apparently he would like us to, that’s not what he’s got in mind.

            It seems to me that Jesus wants to catch our attention.  He’s not talking about hell in order to scare anyone into having faith.  I have an uncle that likes to say that his faith is like a “Get Out of Hell Free Card.”  You remember the “Get Out of Jail Free Card” in Monopoly.  He’s equated faith with some sort of magical formula to avoid eternal punishment.  You get one of those in your wallet and you’re set.  But, that’s not what Jesus is saying.

            I want to make sure that we all understand that.  Jesus is using some very harsh language so that we will understand he is serious about getting in the way of folks as they discover the beauty of faith.

            If you’re getting in the way of somebody’s faith, take a good, long look at yourself.  And figure out how to stop it.  There’s too much at stake.

            I want to talk about something that’s very important to me here this morning.  It has to do with the way that we fundamentally see ourselves and one another.  And it concerns me because I see the church time and time again pushing folks out because of this fundamental starting point for our faith.  It goes something like this…

            All human beings are just totally depraved, sinful, and hopeless.  Have you ever heard that?  The total depravity of man, as folks like John Calvin and even St. Augustine would say.  The premise is that we have inherited this sinful nature all the way back from Adam and Eve so that we are totally depraved, incapable of righteousness or beauty.

            Now, don’t get me wrong.  We are some sinful folks, you and I.  No way around that.  We are.

            But, if our starting point for how we understand ourselves is this dark and hopeless place, what we end up doing is focusing on all the things that are wrong with us and wrong with others.  We get fascinated with sin.  Fascinated with it.  And we spend a great deal of time and energy pointing it out to others just how utterly rotten and hopeless they are so that they’ll be moved to faith in a Savior.

            Here’s one way this plays out, which scares me.  My sister called me one day, alarmed out of her wits.  My niece, who was all of six years old at the time, brought home a craft from vacation bible school.  Six years old and she was holding this black, construction paper heart with a white cross drawn on it.  She said it was a reminder that Jesus came to save us from our black, sinful hearts.

            If that is our starting point for understanding ourselves and others, we will push far more people away than inviting them in to discover what is good and holy about themselves in the first place.

            I mean, don’t we realize that the Bible itself begins with this incredible message of how God created us all in God’s image?  And what did God say when finally taking a break to look around at it all.  Genesis 1 tells us that “he looked around and saw that it was very good.”

            The Bible does not begin by telling us how utterly depraved we are.  Why do we do that?  And what does it do to how we see one another if we begin with total depravity?  What if we started with the radical notion that God created us in a very holy image, and that it is very good?

            Many centuries ago some religious pilgrims stopped by the monastery on the coast of Gaza.  They went to find a man named Dorotheos.  And they asked him to tell them how to get closer to God.  He told them to stand around the walls of the room and imagine that God was in the center.  “Now, come and get closer to God.”

            You see, they started running into each other, bumping shoulders and touching one another.  They couldn’t do it without getting closer to other people.  Not pushing them away.  They had to get closer to each other in order to get closer to God.

            I think Jesus wants us to see that.  And in order to get closer to one another, we’ve got to begin with seeing just what it is within them that is worth getting closer to.

Rev. David James Brown

Park Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)