Mark 3:20-35 "Crazy Christians"

You are welcome to use parts of this sermon, but if you do, please attribute them properly!

         Jesus, son of Joseph the carpenter, has given up the family business.  Woodworking and construction was just not his thing. He has gone off on his own - leaving his parents and siblings high and dry and breaking up his family.  He has taken his small part of the world by storm.  Jesus the Rock Star:  He is a man on a mission. 

         In the whirlwind that characterizes this Gospel of Mark that we are reading, in a mere three short chapters Jesus has boomeranged from his hometown to the wilderness to Galilee to Capernaum to the sea to deserted places, to synagogues and fields of grain and back to Capernaum – and now he is home again.  But not like the Prodigal Son of which he would one day speak but rather just passing through.

         He has had all manner of peasants and lowlifes crowding about him, begging for healing, wanting for touch, hoping to hear him, demanding that his attention be paid to the demons that rocked their souls.  He has reached out to the lowest of these low, embraced all manner of disease and disability, brought a little girl back to life, and exorcised evil spirits – and now he is home again. 

        

         He has argued with the intelligentsia, put up with the naysayers, broken most of the rules, and ignored the critics constantly carping on and picking apart everything he did:  “He heals on the Sabbath.  He eats with sinners and tax collectors.  He does not fast when he should.”  And so on and so on.  And now he is home again.

         Home:  home is where the heart is.  I’ll be home for Christmas.  “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in,” as Robert Frost wrote. 

         Home:  Perhaps Jesus was hoping for some peace and time alone there.  Perhaps he was relishing the thought of a quiet and undisturbed meal.  Perhaps he was looking forward to some quality time with his family. 

         Home:  All of the above, but none of the above because such was not to be.  Home:  But the chaos continued.  The naysayers nattered.  The critics carped.  The crowds clamored, bringing their human suffering and laying it all at his feet.  And so he continued to touch – and embrace – and argue – and exorcise.  And his family looked on – horrified. 

         They were horrified because they feared the rumors that were starting already.  “That Jesus: He’s crazy.” 

         They were horrified because of the fingers that, sooner or later, would be pointing at the whole lot of them – and how embarrassing would that be?  “That Jesus:  You know, Mary’s son?  He’s bonkers, gone over the deep end.” 

         They were horrified because they were concerned for his welfare.  “That Jesus:  he’s totally gone beserk, wigged out.  He’s got a screw loose.” 

         They were horrified because they feared for his very safety,  “That Jesus:  The only reason he can drive out evil spirits must be…must be because he has one – or is one.”      

         They were horrified because, well, because maybe he really had lost his marbles.  Maybe he needed a good long rest, some quiet music, a hammer, some nails, and a couple of pieces of scrap wood to tinker with.

         And so they did what any good and loyal family would do.  They tried to sequester him away.  The disciples saw it all unfolding - his siblings pushing their way toward him.  Peter leaned over toward Jesus and, in a stage whisper, said behind his hand:  Psst!

“Your mother and brothers and sisters are outside looking for you.  They want you.”

         Well, Peter was right about that!  They did want him – most desperately.  That was why they were going to – not exactly “fetch” him – because the Greek word used is the same one that is used when the Romans come to get Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane.  It was more like they were going to seize him or grab him.  In short, Jesus’ family was attempting to stage an intervention.

         It failed, however, because when Jesus got wind of it, well, that was when he really flipped out, became unraveled, and proceeded to take on the very foundation of Jewish society, which, of course, was the family. It was the basic unit of the economy.  It was the core of conventional social and religious mores.  And Jesus shot it down when he answered:

“Who is my mother? Who are my brothers?” He looked at the people sitting around him and said, “Look! Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does what God wants is my brother, my sister, my mother.”

         Wow!  His outburst should not surprise us, however.  After all, Jesus never put much stock in the way the economy worked – the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer.  So much for his thinking that the family was the cornerstone of the economy. Nor did he ever cow tow to convention – what with his dining with tax collectors and chatting with whores.  Family values were really never a Jesus thing.  In fact, if you could call Jesus anything at all, you could easily call him a “home wrecker.” 

         As Methodist pastor, William Willamon reminds us, “In his ministry, Jesus thought nothing of destroying a family business with a terse, ‘Follow me,’ demanding that these fishermen abandon their aging father in the boat and join Jesus as he wandered about with his buddies. Jesus' invitation to hit the road broke the hearts of many first-century parents who were counting on the kids for help in their old age.

         ‘I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother,’ Jesus threatened.  ‘Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, and wife and children, and brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, can't be my disciple.’ That's a text rarely used by the church on Mother's Day.

         ‘I'll follow you,’ a man said to him, ‘only first let me go give my recently deceased father a decent burial.’ ‘Let the dead bury the dead!’ replied Jesus. ‘Follow me and let somebody else do the funeral!’’

         So much for Jesus the traditional family man!  But then, Jesus was seldom in synch with tradition anyway.  He was always redefining and reframing – and the concept of family is no exception.  Family – true family – God’s family is not determined so much by blood and kin, he seems to say, but by belief in and commitment to the role one plays in ushering in the Kingdom of God. 

         When it comes to family, he seems to say, draw the circle wide  and rid yourself of archaic structures that narrow your perspective and shut out the love of God. When it comes to family, he seems to say, align yourself with those who are passionate about God’s dream for humanity – passionate about justice and peace, passionate about service, passionate about the lowlifes in the back allies of the world.  Align yourself with those who are passionate about the Gospel – and that they may not be your kith and kin – your mother and father and brothers and sisters.          

         For us, then, when it comes to family, Jesus challenges us to join with the ones who are like him, a little bit crazy, maybe even possessed – by the Holy Spirit, that is.  Of course, we sitting here in these pews this morning hope that he had the church in mind when he spoke about true family – though, for many folks, the jury is still out on that one.  Either people remember the church of 30 years ago as boring then and irrelevant now or they associate the church with anti-intellectualism complete with a disregard of science in favor of dinosaurs in the Garden of Eden.  That is why it is so important for us here not to be fearful of letting the world know that our faith demands that we be a little bit bonkers and at times over the deep end – bonkers for justice and over the deep end for peace.

         Because, you see, Jesus set the bar pretty high for us when it comes to being crazy, being Christian crazy.  As Episcopal priest Michael Curry reflected, “…those who would follow him, those who would be his disciples, those who would live as and be the people of the Way, are called and summoned and challenged to be just as crazy as Jesus.

         I don’t want to be too quick to judge Jesus’ mother and the whole family (he goes on to say). They had good reason to be concerned. (After all, consider the gist of) what Jesus taught:….“Do not repay evil for evil or abuse for abuse; but, on the contrary, repay with a blessing” (1 Peter 3:9). That’s crazy.

         In the Gospel reading from Matthew, Jesus says, “The greatest among you will be your servant” (Matthew 23:11). That’s crazy.

         What the world calls wretched, Jesus calls blessed. Blessed are the poor and the poor in spirit. Blessed are the merciful, the compassionate. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst that God’s righteous justice might prevail. Blessed are those who work for peace. Blessed are you when you are persecuted just for trying to love and do what is good. Jesus was crazy. He said, “Love your enemies, bless those who curse you, pray for those who despitefully use you.” He was crazy. He prayed while folk were killing him, “Father, forgive them; they know not what they do.” Now, that’s crazy.

         But Jesus expects us, in our own lives and in the actions we choose to take, to be that crazy too.  It is the bottom line because crazy like Jesus is the heart of Christianity.

         When Steve Jobs, one of the founders of Apple Inc., died, an old Apple commercial went viral on YouTube. In the commercial, photographs of people who have done all manner of things to improve the world and make a difference rolled by as voice read this poem:

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels.

The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes.

The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules.

And they have no respect for the status quo.

You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them.

About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them.

Because they change things.

They push the human race forward.

While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius.

Because the people who are crazy enough

to think they can change the world,

are the ones who do.

         That is what the church is supposed to be, you know – a place for the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes, the ones who see things differently and have no respect for the status quo.  The church is supposed to be a family for crazy Christians, the gathering place for the ones bonkers enough to think they can, with God’s help, transform the world.      

         God knows we need such a family.  As Michael Curry concluded, we need “Christians crazy enough to believe that God is real and that Jesus lives. Crazy enough to follow the radical way of the gospel. Crazy enough to believe that the love of God is greater than all the powers of evil and death. Crazy enough to believe, as (Martin Luther) King often said, that though ‘the moral arc of the universe is long, … it bends toward justice.’

         We need some Christians crazy enough to believe that children don’t have to go to bed hungry; that the world doesn’t have to be the way it often seems to be; that there is a way to lay down our swords and shields, down by the riverside; that, as the slaves used to sing, ‘there’s plenty good room in my Father’s kingdom,’ because every human being has been created in the image of God, and we are all equally children of God and meant to be treated as such.”

         We need families of Christians crazy enough to believe that God’s dream for the world can be real – and it is up to us – the crazy ones - to make it so.

by Rev. Nancy Foran, Raymond Village Community Church U.C.C., Raymond, Maine

         

Acts 2:1-21 "Not Your Ordinary Sunday"

You are welcome to use parts of this sermon, but if you do, please attribute them properly!

Christianity has three major festivals each year. The first is Easter. The second, perhaps surprisingly, is not Christmas but rather Epiphany. And the third is Pentecost. On Easter, we celebrate with lilies and daffodils, more than the usual worship attendance, trumpet fanfares, and “Christ the Lord is Risen Today”. Similarly, we pull out all the stops, if not for Epiphany, then most assuredly for its first cousin, Christmas. As a truly “feel good” holiday, it is overflowing with children’s pageants, loads of proud grandparents in the pews, choir cantatas, and brightly wrapped gifts for poor people.

 However, on Pentecost, face it, not much happens. Perhaps that is because Pentecost is too close to Memorial Day, or it competes with too many graduation ceremonies, or the weather is often too darn good to be inside, even for an hour on Sunday morning. Though Pentecost may be one of the three big festivals and may be the designated birthday of the Christian Church in all its fascinating manifestations, Pentecost is often treated as little more than just an ordinary Sunday. Part of that reason, of course, is that Pentecost carries with it some pretty scary baggage for us straight-laced and tight-lipped New Englanders.

 I mean, really: Pentecost…..Pentecostal…..As one blogger wrote, “the word Pentecostal usually means that the church or preacher has the ‘Holy Spirit’ in them and they are loud and boisterous. We even imagine a tent revival and a fire and brimstone preacher just a hollering and sweating.” Add to that tales of snake handling, extensive swaying and arm waving, and that weird speaking in tongues business, and it is enough to cause any good Protestant Mainer to turn tail and run, put Pentecost forever in a box where it will never get out, and just get through it – like any ordinary Sunday.

 Oh, if folks only knew that all the word “Pentecost” meant, in its original Greek, was fifty – and nothing more - perhaps we would not hold it at arm’s length. And if folks only knew that our Pentecost has its roots in a Jewish harvest celebration that began during Passover with the first grain harvest and traditional offering of barley sheaves and ended seven weeks later with the harvesting of wheat, the last cereal crop to ripen, if folks only knew that Pentecost started out as a kind of first century version of Thanksgiving, perhaps we would embrace the day a bit more.

 You see, the original festival of Pentecost is why all those Jews, long dispersed throughout the ancient world, had come together in Jerusalem on the day that we find our little band of apostles still holed up in that upper room down a back ally of the Holy City. There they were – leaderless, probably clueless, waiting as Jesus had told them to wait, eyes cast heavenward as they mumbled something over and over about not knowing what to do next.

 Well, maybe it was because God just does not like a straight-laced, tight-lipped, locked in an upper room sort of faith. Maybe it was because God had not done anything really spectacular in a while. After all, Moses and the burning bush and that pillar of fire were well in the past. Likewise, people scarcely remembered how Elijah had out-performed the prophets of Baal with that flaming altar incident.

 At any rate, God really shook the apostles up in a most dramatic fashion. All at once, the author of Acts tell us, the whole house seemed to shake and, where a single ray of the morning sun shone across the breakfast table, it began to tremble. Then a hurricane-like wind carried by a mighty sound roared through the place. Bedding was tossed about. Dust swirled. One of Andrew’s sandals flew through the air and knocked over a pitcher of water, and its contents dripped unceremoniously onto the dirt floor. The “I haven’t had my second cup of coffee yet” apostles had all they could do to batten down the hatches, so to speak. However, all their efforts could not stop this holy hurricane, which subsided only when the flames started, those little flickering embers that settled just above the heads of the apostles.

 This was about the time they all boiled out into the street below where a large crowd was already gathered to see what the ruckus was about. Tradition has it that the apostles were about 120 strong, and they were telling their story like never before, their Gospel words and experience heard in every language possible.

 Not surprisingly though, in the midst of the din of passionate evangelizing, there was the inevitable nattering as well. Since every gathering has its naysayers and every community has those who will not condone that which they do not understand – especially if it is out of the ordinary – there were those who pronounced judgment on the whole affair, writing off the apostles’ outlandish activities with a single stroke: “These people are drunk. They are full of new wine.” Hmmm….

 Perhaps in response to the accusation but surely because he was filled with something he did not know he possessed, Peter, that illiterate fisherman/disciple, the three time denier of Jesus, the one who had bumbled his words for all the years he had traveled with the rabbi, stood up then and preached the sermon of a lifetime. “These people are not drunk,” he proclaimed. “Get real. It is only nine o’clock in the morning. We are not filled with new wine. We are the new wine.”

 And then Peter laid it all out by quoting extensively from the prophet Joel, another book in our Bible. And those open to the movement of the Spirit began to see that a new day was dawning. “‘In the last days, God says, I will pour out my Spirit on all people.
Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your young men will see visions,
 your old men will dream dreams. I will show wonders in the heavens above and signs on the earth below, blood and fire and billows of smoke. The sun will be turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the coming of the great and glorious day of the Lord."

Such a passionate sermon did Peter preach that, according to the author of this Book of Acts, the number of baptisms skyrocketed, and about 3000 people became believers over the next couple of days – every pastor’s dream. And so, once only a twinkle in God’s eye and then pregnant with possibility, the church was born. The Holy Spirit had arrived. It is Pentecost. Happy Birthday, Church! Welcome, Holy Spirit!

 However, as with any birth, all is not easy, neat, and tidy. The birth (and continual re-birth) of the church is downright messy – what with all the varied opinions on what it should be and what it should look like. And as with any birth, the birth (and continual rebirth) of the church is not painless – as we continually strive to bring forth an institution that is at once grounded firmly in the Gospel but also is relevant in our rapidly changing times and to our modern day cultural mores.

 However, also like any birth, the birth (and continual re-birth) of the church is sacred. It is God-possessed. It is imbued with the Holy Spirit. The Christian festival of Pentecost recognizes the day the Holy Spirit came to the waiting apostles, the day the church was created. It sounds so simple and a good reason to celebrate, yet we continue to hold Pentecost at arm’s length, and there is a reason for that over and above the specter of fire and brimstone preachers.

 The reason is because when we read that story in the Book of Acts, we realize that maybe we have misperceived what the Holy Spirit is all about. We think of the Holy Spirit so narrowly. Our clear bias is to render that slippery, invisible, shy third part of the Trinity as a dove, a comfort, a quiet breath – so civilized and manageable. But then comes Pentecost! This does not compute!

You see, on this day, if on no other in the church year, we are forced to reckon with the Holy Spirit as an uncontrollable wind, as flame, as challenger, as provocateur. No wonder that the Celts in Britain imagined the Holy Spirit as a wild goose – ornery, feisty, unable to be tamed, a bit dangerous, and filled with mystery. On Pentecost, God rushes into our lives and the life of the church as a howling tornado, slamming doors, catching fire. God rushes in like a wild goose, squawking and flapping. And if you have ever been pursued by a goose, you know that can be pretty scary and that is why Pentecost is such a difficult day in the life of the church, and that is why we do our best to treat it just like any ordinary Sunday.

 Tone it down a notch, put it in its self-contained little box, and get on with what we are most comfortable with when it comes to church – old styles of worship and education, tried and true projects, steer the old familiar course, don’t rock the boat, good enough is good enough. As the author of the blog, “Magdalene’s Musings” wrote, “A mighty wind blows through, and suddenly (all folks can see are) a mess of downed tree limbs and power lines. Tongues of fire alight on everyone’s heads, and sooner or later someone complains that they’ve gotten burned. You start speaking new languages, and now old friends are acting strange. They shake their heads. They say you’ve changed. We’re left feeling more like the people in the cartoon in which a voice from heaven declares, ‘I shall send down my Spirit, and it will be like a flame upon your head.’ So one person says, ‘Does this mean I can’t wear a hat?’ And another says, ‘We’d better have a fire drill.’ And another says, ‘This is a health and safety nightmare!’ And yet another says, ‘What if I set off the fire alarm?’ And, of course, someone says, ‘But my church is a non-smoking [facility]!’

 The Spirit comes. And we are not sure what on earth to do about it. We’re not even sure if we’re happy about it.” Because when the Spirit comes, so comes dislocation, so comes breaking down and breaking up, so comes – day I say it - change. Just as God did not go for that straight-laced, tight-lipped, locked in upper room sort of faith in ancient times, so God does not go for it today either. You see, the bottom line is that the Spirit does not solve problems. It creates them.

 When the Spirit comes, so comes a decision point for each one of us about what it means to be a Christian and what it means to be the church in the 21st century. The blogger goes on to say: “Are we willing to be faithful? Are we willing to be punch-drunk with love for God, so much so that people start looking at us a little funny? Are we willing to throw ourselves into new ventures on behalf of God’s hurting people, create new structures from the wreckage of the old— even if we risk failure in doing it? Are we willing to listen for the voice of God in the words of those it is all too easy to ignore or discount.. those who are too old, the ones who will prophesy, and see visions, and dream dreams? Are we willing to listen to them?” Are we willing to grab hold of the opportunity our worship grant offers us and participate fully in the blessings that it holds for us – or have we already decided to hang back and complain about the creativity and how it all seems like too much work and too much change? Are we willing to actively support not only a mission trip to Maine Seacoast Mission again this summer but also one that will take us to the Dominican Republic in 2016 – or have we already decided to insulate ourselves from the needs of “the least of these” and figure those trips are something just a few people do and are not really any of our business – except that, in a detached way, they make us feel good.

 The wind of the Spirit is trying so hard to blow through this place. And when it comes – ready or not, it will upset and complicate our lives. The flame of the Spirit wants so much to glow within these walls – but when it does, watch out because our hearts may be set on fire, and we may be remade from the inside out. That is what Pentecost is all about. It is not just an ordinary Sunday – not with the Holy Spirit swirling so frenetically - yet persistently - about. Long ago, Pentecost was the day the church was born. Today, may it be the day this church is reborn. Happy Birthday, Church! Welcome, Holy Spirit!

by Rev. Nancy Foran, Raymond Village Community Church U.C.C., Raymond, Maine