World Communion Sunday
Scripture Readings:
Hebrew Scriptures – Numbers 11: 23-291
23The LORD said to Moses, “Is the LORD’S power limited? Now you shall see whether my word will come true for you or not.”
24So Moses went out and told the people the words of the LORD; and he gathered seventy elders of the people, and placed them all around the tent. 25Then the LORD came down in the cloud and spoke to him, and took some of the spirit that was on him and put it on the seventy elders; and when the spirit rested upon them, they prophesied. But they did not do so again.
26Two men remained in the camp, one named Eldad, and the other named Medad, and the spirit rested on them; they were among those registered, but they had not gone out to the tent, and so they prophesied in the camp. 27And a young man ran and told Moses, “Eldad and Medad are prophesying in the camp.” 28And Joshua son of Nun, the assistant of Moses, one of his chosen men, said, “My lord Moses, stop them!” 29But Moses said to him, “Are you jealous for my sake? Would that all the LORD’S people were prophets, and that the LORD would put his spirit on them!”
Gospel Lesson – Mark 9: 38-502
38John 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.” 39But 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. 40Whoever is not against us is for us. 41For 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.
42“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. 43If 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. 45And 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. 47And 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, 48where their worm never dies, and the fire is never quenched.
49“For everyone will be salted with fire. 50Salt 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.”
“Whoever Is Not Against Us Is for Us."
The message of warning to us, on this day of World Communion, is about xenophobia. It’s a word that could be roughly translated as “the fear of people who are different.” The person who’s marked as different is not at all like us and therefore is an unknown, unpredictable, uncontrollable, and so even, then, a dangerous person. Being threatened by people who simply are different, and frightened by things we can’t predict or control, isn’t surprising. Today’s readings from Numbers and Mark seem to illustrate this. The need in our culture for uniformity and predictability is so strong that we’ve even come to channel the Spirit of God into paths that are acceptable to us. The Hebrews and Jesus’ disciples tried to do it. So do we.
Prejudice and superstition have always had the power to transform the natural variety of the world around us and make it frightening – even evil. But such attitudes should have no place in the church! Today’s readings ought to show us that. We should be focusing on life-giving relationships here, not on those that deal in death and destruction, hell and damnation. Any time that we lose sight of the goodness of God, whenever we forget the beauty of the world we live in, we begin to see evil in what we do not understand, and malevolence in that which is only different.
A newspaper article that appeared in The New York Times told a “traffic” story that took place in Jerusalem awhile ago, but it’s not at all like the traffic reports that we hear on our morning talk shows:
Four Israeli Egged buses were heading to the Israeli Jewish settlement of Beit-El, near the Palestinian town of Nablus – where there has been [more than] two decades of tension between Jewish settlers and Palestinians, and the boundaries are still ambiguous. The Israeli buses, which were picking up settlers to attend a protest rally…, missed the turn for Beit-El by [only] 50 meters and ended up inside the Kalandia Palestinian refugee camp. The Israeli buses were immediately pelted with stones by the Palestinian refugees, three of the buses were set on fire and the drivers fled into the fourth bus and sped away.
What’s the point? When you have a clear border between rival peoples, no wrong turn is dangerous…. When you don’t, when neither is secure in its own space, the border is everywhere and any wrong turn can cost you your life.3
Is it possible that we’ve applied the principle of “clear borders” to the different religious institutions of the world, and even now to sisters and brothers within our own church? Keep in mind: we’re not speaking of “rival peoples” anymore – two sides marked by inflicting injustices and retaliation for many, many years – but of people who claim to worship the same God.
Never mind if they’re Muslim, Jew, or Christian, people of God who publicly profess their faith while also exploiting the poor and taking advantage of the powerless, not only reveal that they know nothing of the teachings of Jesus, they also destroy the openness to that same knowledge in others – especially in those that they cause to suffer. The spiritual consequences of that kind of hypocrisy are so devastating that losing a limb or an eye, even death, would be preferable.
The good news that Jesus came to deliver, then, is that the company he keeps is far more inclusive than it first appears. People without any external qualifications, even those without explicit faith, can belong if their actions bring “good news” into the world and for others. This lesson’s bad news, though, is that those who exclude themselves by their actions or lack of love are worse off than the maimed or the dead! When Jesus says that it would be wiser to destroy a part of yourself than to lose the whole of yourself, he’s speaking from a deep awareness that it really is possible to be still walking around this earth, and yet to have lost it all – to be living so inhumanly that the very depths of your soul are infected with chaos and misery.
The well-being of every single individual in the world has to be of deep concern to us if we choose to take these words of Jesus seriously. Our lessons from the Bible today ought to remind us that our attitudes can change – given time – that tremendous patience and endurance has got to go along with us on the journey (How many years has Christianity been at this now?). Sadly, we may never eliminate violence in the world, but how do we feel toward the one who perpetrates it? A vicious terrorist – we now know – is a courageous warrior on behalf of freedom in somebody else’s eyes. In fact, scripture affirms that we’ve all been guilty of violence, we’ve all murdered, we’ve all terrorized, we’ve all been abusers and we’ve all been its victims. This is one reason why I’ve come, more and more, to believe that the current quote that I’ve got taped to my office door is not as simplistic as it sounds: “There is no way to peace. Peace is the way.”4
When the, so-called, “people of God” spend so much of their time laboring over the relative worthiness or unworthiness of others not like them, we’re missing Jesus’ point. When we see ourselves as more faithful than others, we continue to miss the point – and in a really big way! In missing it, we just may have – all over again – led somebody else into this same small, divisive view of the world. It would be better if we were to just “cut it off” – to take such a way of being and “tear it out” of our lives.
We cannot get around it: life in Christ just has to be about love, about peace with justice, not about building up walls and closing off borders between ourselves and others because they don’t live their faith the same way that we do or don’t seem to live by any religious faith at all. In much the same way, our lives as Christians have got to be about taking our own tendencies toward enmity and divisiveness seriously, and working to heal those kinds of behaviors that seem to have found a home in us.
So, how are we going to go about encouraging each other to adopt this attitude of “roominess,” this attitude of welcome that Jesus had? When will we finally challenge our own church to actually open up its doors, to become as inclusive and as gracious as Jesus was? You tell me. As a people who use the language of a family gathered at the dinner table today, we need every seat filled here, every gift offered and honored, every skill and difference put in service to the whole. Our alienated world needs the full welcome of the entire Body of Christ to his table. Our church should stand for nothing less.
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1 The Spirit of God moves in mysterious ways and the history of religions is quite literally a chronicle of human attempts to control that Spirit. Today’s readings illustrate our very human frustration in the face of the freedom and mystery of that Holy Spirit.
The characters Eldad and Medad here (names, by the way, that literally mean “God-loved” and “beloved”), if they aren’t just literary archetypes, seem to have been members of the community. But they’re not among the group of elders officially chosen to receive a share of Moses’ prophetic spirit. Like the disciples in Mark who question the work of an exorcist simply because he’s not one of them, Joshua in this account acts as spokesperson against these two who’ve dared to prophesy without holding a card in the prophet’s union. Listen carefully for Moses’ response – it’s as apropos to our own time as it was then.
2 Our gospel lesson for this morning needs some further explaining – particularly as it introduces the concept of “hell.” The Greek word, actually, is gehenna, and originally had no connection whatsoever with the concept of perdition developed later by the church. Gehenna is actually a steep ravine on the south side of Jerusalem (I actually saw it when Martha and I were there with the Pearsons some years ago.). Its name in Hebrew, ge·hinnom, or “valley of Hinnom” got its sinister reputation because in very ancient times the first-born children of the original inhabitants were burned alive there as offerings to the Canaanite god, Moloch. Centuries later the place was considered, not surprisingly, to be cursed and was turned into Jerusalem’s garbage dump. There all of the garbage – clean and unclean alike, including the corpses of animals and human beings – was tossed over the cliff into its depths. And because garbage was always burned back in those days (to keep it from becoming a source of disease), the smoke from the Hinnom Valley was a constant, stench-filled, reminder of death and destruction. At night the fires could be seen from miles away. Through the influences of the early church, you might be able to understand, now, how this valley came to be the literal symbol of a mythical place called hell.
3 Thomas L. Friedman, “Good Fences…” The New York Times, 21 July 2000.
4 A.J. Muste was one of the leading nonviolent social activists of his time. Starting as a minister in the Dutch Reformed Church, he became a socialist and labor union activist, and was one of the founders and the first director of Brookwood Labor College. In 1936, he recommitted himself to pacifism and focused his energy on war resistance, civil rights, civil liberties and disarmament. Over his life he worked with a wide array of organizations, including the Fellowship of Reconciliation, Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and War Resisters League, and served as editor of Liberation magazine. He continued his work for peace during the war in Vietnam; shortly before his death, he traveled to North Vietnam with a delegation of clergy and met with Communist leader Ho Chi Minh. A.J. Muste was widely respected and admired in the movement for social justice for his ability to relate to people of all ages and backgrounds, to listen to and reflect on all points of view, and to bridge distances among divergent political sectors. His life continues to be an inspiration to many – including my own.