38 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.” 39 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. 40 Whoever is not against us is for us. 41 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.
Mark 9:38-50
42 “If any of you cause one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for you if a great millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea. 43 If your hand causes you to sin, 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.45 And if your foot causes you to sin, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life lame than to have two feet and to be thrown into hell. 47 And if your eye causes you to sin, have 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, 48 where their worm never dies and the fire is never quenched.
49 “For everyone will be salted with fire. 50 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.”
My sermon from the 19th Sunday after Pentecost (September 29, 2024) on Mark 9:38-50.
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So it’s the fourth week of the new NFL season and football fans all over the country are wondering: what went wrong? Teams that were supposed to be at the top of their divisions look terrible while the teams that were written off are full of new life. The headlines I read this week included words such as “awful,” “terrible,” “hopeless,” and even “I’ve never seen anything like this.” Now as a life-long Denver Bronco fan, I’m very much a “Bo-liever,” hoping this season will reverse all the heartbreak we’ve recently gone through. But being a fan isn’t easy since fandom is full of all kinds of incredible highs, sad lows, and way too many cultural expectations. Fans are, it seems, required to complain about their teams with way more passion and energy than they’re ever allowed to use when their teams win. And so-called real fans can only call themselves that when they lived through times when everything went horribly wrong. Every fandom comes with its own subculture, history, in-jokes, and memes that take way too long to learn. But once we’re in – we gain, in return, an incredible sense of connection and belonging. Fandom, though, isn’t always healthy since far too many of us let wins and losses influence how we treat one another. We let these people who we will, most likely, never meet, shape how we care in the world. Being a fan can draw us into a community that will encourage us to cry in public with either tears of joy or sadness. Yet fans can also be very particular about is allowed to be a part of the community. We, who have no personal stake in what happens on the field, will publicly debate who is, and who isn’t, allowed to wear the overpriced jersey we bought at the mall. Using our own experiences and our own ego as the decider for who is, and who isn’t, a fan has been around since sports were invented thousands of years ago. And in our reading today from the gospel according to Mark, Jesus told the disciples that when it comes to the body of Christ, we’re not the ones who get to gatekeep what God is doing in the world.
Now before we dive into what we just heard, we need to remember what happened at the start of chapter 9. This section began with Jesus’ transfiguration – when stood on a mountain top with a few of his disciples and looked exactly like the Messiah his disciples expected him to be. Then, after being lit up with all the special effects the Son of God should have, Jesus came down the mountain to heal a child possessed by some kind of evil power. To the disciples, it looked like Jesus was claiming who they imagined him to be. But he kept talking about a Cross they didn’t think could possibly come. This disconnect between what they saw and what they heard filled the disciples with all kinds of wonder and doubt. But rather than talking to Jesus about what was stirring in their hearts, they decided to argue among themselves about which one of them was the greatest. On one level, this argument was very silly since the original GOAT (greatest of all time) was literally in front of them. Yet the disconnect they felt made them question their own place within the kingdom of God. They were, by this point, already known as “the Twelve:” those who had been with Jesus since the beginning. They had seen him cast out demons, cured the sick, and fed thousands of people with a few loaves of bread. The Twelve were the ones who stayed even when Jesus’ words were hard and assumed their place among the hierarchy of Jesus’ community was relatively secure. But as the number of folks following Jesus began to grow, they were worried their status within the community might diminish. Jesus, I think, recognized the insecurity at the heart of their argument. And so, while they talked, he invited a little child to join them in the center of the room. Jesus picked the child up, held the little one in his arms, and told the disciples that His community included even little kids like these. This pronouncement caught the disciples off guard since children, in Jesus’ day, weren’t valued very much. Kids were loved by their parents and their families – but their status in the wider culture was very different. Being a child in the ancient world was hard since kids were vulnerable, needed to be taken care of, and didn’t always survive. And when archeologists survey tombstones across the Mediterranean Sea, some depict kids as young as four engaged in hard labor like mining and farming. People were often defined by their economic and social value which meant kids, except for those in the ruling elite, were treated as a kind of drain on the wider society. And it’s in this cultural context when Jesus told the disciples that the one who was vulnerable; who needed to be cared for; and who couldn’t give them anything of value – that one mattered just as much as they did. This, I think, triggered something in John, revealing his insecurity about his own place within the kingdom of God. If Jesus let those we push aside as well as random people who didn’t follow them be like Him in word and deed, then the Twelve felt as if they had no real identity within the community of God. They assumed the only way they would stay special is if they served as the gatekeepers for who was, and who wasn’t, allowed to follow them. And so Jesus, after listening and while still holding that little child, look at the disciples and, in a very firm way, simply told them: “no.”
His words, at first glance, might make us feel a bit uncomfortable since “hell” and “unquenchable fire” don’t feel very Jesusy. But the disciples were so worried about their place within the hierarchy of God, they weren’t able to see how God’s power isn’t for its own sake. Using our status, our wealth, or our perceived importance to further our own position in the world rather than to help the vulnerable and forgotten is antithetical to the kingdom of God. God’s community isn’t defined by the powerful miracles we see. Rather, God chooses to define Jesus’ family by the people who offer even strangers something as small as a cup of water. A cup of water isn’t as flashy as casting out demons or turning water into wine. Yet that small gift is also an essential gift to the one who is in need of care and love. It’s not the cup that Jesus is trying to highlight. Rather, his focus was on how we are called to learn each other’s story, history, wants, and needs. We get to see each other as God sees us and to bring relief to those we might not see in the first place. This power is something all of us, at any age, can do because we are already part of God’s holy family too. Jesus has chosen us to reflect his welcoming and hope-filled love through the lives we live. We are called to do more than create stumbling blocks for those around us. We get to listen; to heal; to care; to realize all the ways we get this Jesus thing wrong and to accept accountability when we hurt those around us. Instead of making this Jesus thing all about us, we get to embrace the opportunity God has given us to pray, sing, worship, serve, and love not only those who we are fans of but also those who God connects us to. And we do this not because we are called to be the gatekeepers of the divine but because Jesus is our gate – the one who has already opened the way to what God’s love has, can, and will do in our lives and in our world.
Amen.