Sermon for Trinity 17

Numbers 11.4-6, 10-16, 24-29 | Psalm 19.7-end | James 5.13-end | Mark 9.38-end

Sermon Preached at St Bene’t’s Church Cambridge on 26 September 2021

We live in an age of globalization, where we are increasingly connected to the rest of the world through technology and travel. It is also a time of large-scale refugee crises, with forced migration happening across multiple continents. For many of us, these things unsettle our sense of belonging, raising questions about the nature of the ties that bind us together. What is it that sustains our common life: is it heritage, values, practices, language, faith? Do we receive our shared identity from the borders that surround us, or from a common center? What makes someone an insider vs an outsider, and what purposes does that distinction serve? We find ourselves as divided as ever over our political answers to these questions, and because they are deeply human questions, we face them in other spheres as well. They have, for example, been central to questions about the church from the very beginning. Our gospel reading for today has some challenging things to say about all of this.

On the one hand, we have a principle that tends toward porous boundaries, inclusivity, and hospitality. “Whoever is not against us is for us.” Jesus tells his disciples not to stop those casting out demons in his name just because they have not joined the group of his disciples. He is commending a posture of openness, a vision of ministry that depends not on proximity to influence and formal authority, but an open invitation to participate in Jesus’ work.

But we should remember that in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus is recorded saying the less inclusive version of this same aphorism: “Whoever is not with me is against me” (Luke 11:23). The Christian vision of inclusivity is not without its limits, and in the second half of today’s passage, Jesus insists that those who cause us to stumble, who drag us into sin or untruth, should be expelled from our midst. Sounding a note of exclusivity, Jesus suggests that it is ‘better for you to enter life lame than to have two feet and to be thrown into hell.’ These are sobering words. The fifth-century preacher John Chrysostom noted that “He says this not of our limbs, but of our intimate friends, whom we look upon as our limbs because they are necessary to us; for nothing is so hurtful as mischievous society.”

Obviously, the saying, “Whoever is not against us is for us,” requires significant discernment. After all, not everyone who does something in Jesus’ name is doing the work of God—we need only think of the endless grifters who gladly twist the gospel and use it as a tool for political, social, or economic gain. In my own country earlier this year, white supremacists held crosses aloft as they stormed the nation’s capital. Today, hate groups and politicians alike brandish Bibles and use the words of Scripture as a rallying cry for violence and exploitation. They may not claim to be against us, but they are certainly not for us. [pause]

All of this is not to say that these various elements are incompatible: that a proper emphasis on boundaries, structures, and doctrine need clash with our calling to be inclusive, hospitable, and compassionate. However, I think we recognize that it’s not always easy to get the balance right. Reflecting on this passage brought to mind a story that illustrated for me the complexity of this task in practice.

A few years ago, I found myself sitting in a folding chair in the sparse living room of a small home inhabited by multiple families. Abandoned cars littered the street outside; a group of teenagers was playing basketball near a stack of old tires. The man across from me was easily three hundred pounds, with fists like the paws of a bear and long black hair in a braid down his back. He was gesturing wildly and talking about the end times and white people who think they speak for God but do not know him. I found it almost impossible to follow his train of thought, but his rising anger provoked fear in me.

I had been attending prayer meetings with a couple of my friends from grad school at a house on a first-nations reserve along the coast of the West Vancouver peninsula. Driving onto the reserve for the first time is a shock to the system. Some of the richest neighborhoods in all of North America stand within five hundred yards of this community, where poverty is on full display. I passed three Lamborghinis on the drive over and the first car I encountered on arrival was an old grey pickup resting on its roof in a shallow gulley next to the road.

It is still not entirely clear to me how we ended up with an invitation to be part of this prayer house, but I know that it took a few months before we were truly welcome there. When we started, I was largely unaware of the role the church had played in the Canadian residential school system that had decimated native families and perpetrated unspeakable abuse and violence toward first-nations children. I also did not know of the long line of Christians who had invited themselves onto this reserve in order to convert them to this or that brand of Christianity, only to abandon them when things did not go to plan, when they didn’t conform to their expectations. I didn’t know of the chilly reception they had received when they walked into the city’s churches on Sunday morning. And I didn’t know that I represented all of this when I walked in their door—that their wary expressions reflected manipulation and abuse at the hands of white Christians since decades before I was even born. As Jesus says “Salt is good; but if salt has lost its saltiness, how can you season it?”

Despite this history, a prominent family in the tribe had become Christians, and they wanted to start a ministry. They were strongly Pentecostal, and prayer meetings could go on for hours. There was chanting, singing, yelling, prophesying, casting out demons and speaking in tongues. The booming power of their voices was enough to shake the building on its foundations, and they were happy to sing the same chorus on repeat for thirty minutes straight, building toward a riotous crescendo again and again.

The prayer house wasn’t connected to any church, and none of them had training in theology or ministry. During my years with them, I was constantly troubled by their theology and practice, and I almost never agreed with what they said in their sermons and prayers. But I loved them, and I think they embodied what Christian community, forgiveness, and faith look like to a degree that I have never seen elsewhere.

Their theological beliefs were indebted to some unsavory internet personalities, and I always felt a pang of sadness that they were being misled about important, central issues of Christian faith and practice, and that a history of violence separated them from physical communion with the church. The task of reconciliation that was needed vastly exceeded my own abilities. In my time there, I was left just to know them, support them, learn from them, and give thanks for the work God was doing in their midst.

One thing this experience illustrated for me was that even if we find ourselves constrained by the mess our forebears made of history, God is not. And that if we want to see his reconciling work on dazzling display, we do well to form daring friendships with those on the margins, those who have the gall to cast out demons in Jesus’ name not because they have any credentials, but because they have found freedom in Christ.

The theologian Stanley Hauerwas once wrote that ‘to be a Christian means you can never protect yourself from the truth.’ I think this experience, and our gospel reading for today, show me also that to be a Christian means you can never protect yourself from the surprising, unsettling work that God is doing in and through people and places that we would not expect.