Proper 5 B; June
10, 2012
1 Samuel 8:4-11, 16-20; Ps. 138
2 Corinthians 4:13-5:1; Mark 3:20-35
Simon and I are hooked on the new BBC version of Sherlock
Holmes. Sherlock still lives at 221B Baker Street, Mrs. Hudson is still his
landlady, and Dr. Watson is still his best friend – but it is 2012. Sherlock
tweets and texts, Watson is a veteran of the war in Iraq, and Mrs. Hudson is
sweet on the Pakistani grocer next door. It’s hip and fast and glitzy, but the
stories are the same, as are Sherlock’s skills at detection and his peculiar
personality – kind of hyper-active and “special needs.” But the most chilling
aspect of this “new Sherlock” – more chilling than past dramatizations, and
certainly more chilling than reading the stories, is the depiction of
Sherlock’s arch-enemy, Moriarty. He is creepy and post-modernly pathological,
with no moral code, no rationality, no pattern other than the goal of absolute
destruction. Just when you want Sherlock to solve a nice, cut-and-dry criminal
mystery like “The Red-Headed League” or “The Hound of the Baskervilles,” up
pops Moriarty, sneering and destabilizing. As Moriarity himself says, “Every
good fairy tale needs a villain.”[i]
Satan, or Beezebul, the arch-enemy of humanity, makes an
appearance in today’s Gospel – which, Moriarty’s maxim aside, does NOT have a
fairy-tale ending. Jesus has been casting out all those Satan-sent demons
inhabiting the people around him, and at the end of this passage, seems to be
casting out his family, as well.
Satan has played a time-honored role in our religious
imagination. Satan acted as an agent of God in some Hebrew texts, as in Job,
where his job was “to uncover the weaknesses”[ii]
of exemplar human beings. Satan gradually becomes less of an accomplice of God and
more of an adversary, an out-and-out tempter, especially as Persian religion
influenced Judaism, bringing in a dualistic world view, with struggles between
darkness and light, evil and goodness.
By the time Jesus meets him, during the 40 days of
temptation in the wilderness, Satan has no “good side” to his cruel suggestions
–- he is no “vision-quest” ally helping the young messiah prove himself.
Satan’s goal is to un-do God’s mission and to un-seat Jesus as the one sent by
God to bring about God’s reign. Jesus from the beginning recognized him as the
one to be cast out at every turn – and that is just what Jesus has been doing.
Those possessed by spirits so powerful they were made crazy and anti-social –
those who have been so sick that they have been cast out by their neighbors and
families – Jesus has been about the business of healing these people, restoring
them to their rightful minds, to their rightful bodies, their rightful places
in the community.
Jesus has been restoring order – and Satan has been sowing
the seeds of disorder. He has been suggesting to people that Jesus is the one
who is deranged, who is upsetting “the way things are” too much. At every turn,
Jesus has been binding this strong man, the one who gains when people are
broken and distant and incapable of living full lives. The strong man is
striking back – telling even Jesus’ family that their brother and son is the
one who needs to be bound, who needs to be the obedient child in the family
system where everyone behaves and does what they are supposed to do –- you know
that family system, the one where everyone knows things might be bad but
nothing ever changes, that family where people might be miserable but at least it
is the misery and bondage they know.
But the Gospel of Mark is no Sherlock Holmes story, and the
bible is no fairy tale. We might really want to see that Satan is God’s evil
twin, God’s dark side, that this good-evil thing is a contest between equals. But
alas, no. There are villainous things in this world, for sure. We can fall into
traps, trip headlong into ditches, end up doing all sorts of things that we
know are horrible and stupid and cruel and mean. We can fight like hell to keep
things just the way they are, even when we know that “business as usual” –
“what we are used to” – is sucking the life out of us and leading us to an
early grave.
In another version of this story, when Jesus’ family tries
to rein him in, and the people of Nazareth lead him to cliff at the edge of
town, ready to throw him off, Jesus puts up no resistance. He just walks
through the crowd and goes back to his work of healing and restoration. At the
end of his life, Mark notes, Jesus is bound, as he stands before Pontius Pilate.
Those forces of darkness seem apparently to have won. The villain has his day.
But no – just as calmly as Jesus walked through the crowds
and away from the cliff, just as evenly as Jesus dismisses the claims his
family tries to make on him, to change what he is doing and make it more “acceptable,”
Jesus rises from the dead – the stories of the resurrection, remember, tell
simple, quiet tales: Jesus sits in the garden, walks through walls, strolls
along roadsides, cooks breakfast on the beach. The good news is so good that it
just happens.
Last week was Trinity Sunday, and starting today we embark
on this long season “after Pentecost,” when we read story after story of Jesus’
work in the world – healing, teaching, feeding – no fairy tales these: just stories
that describe what the world will be like when God’s reign has begun.
[i]
Thanks to Alyce M. McKenzie for the Sherlock
inspiration: http://www.patheos.com/Progressive-Christian/Getting-on-the-Right-Side-of-God-Alyce-McKenzie-06-05-2012.html
[ii]
Ibid.
Proper 6-B; June
17, 2012
1 Samuel 15:34-16:13
Psalm 20; Mark 4:26-34
Psalm 20; Mark 4:26-34
It’s the time of year for science fairs. You’ve probably
been to one, or even entered one of your experiments in one. I remember doing
one on clouds. In one of the fairs I went to once, two of the children
experimented with plants: did a plant grow faster if one played classical
music, rock music or rap music next to it?
The children were convinced rap music did the trick. In one
boy’s experiment, one plant was kind of shrunk down compared to the others. The
other boy said that the rap music one was taller – the classical music one
looked vigorous and healthy to me – but the rap music one had broken its stem
on the way to school. But I was skeptical. Maybe I had today’s parable in mind:
we sow the seed, but it sprouts on its own – it grows tall – we know not how.
It grows to tall, ripe grain, or to become a shrub so might that the birds nest
in its branches. Even controlling for variables in a scientific experiment, it
is still God’s seed, God’s mystery, God’s power, God’s time.
That is kind of what is meant by “the kingdom of God.” That
kingdom is not necessarily a place, with border guards and boundaries, but a
sense of God’s power. God’s dominion. God rules here. God’s rules rule here.
The seeds sprout and grow into plants. The sun rises and sets. We work, we
sleep, we rise. We see God’s kingdom at work in the world around us.
Following the rules of God’s kingdom is a balancing act
between the work God calls us to do, and an utter detachment from the results
of that work. In every way, God wants us, I think, to participate in the work
of that kingdom: to plant seeds. What are the seeds God has given you in your
life? How do you think God wants you to participate in the kingdom of God?
What was God looking for when he chose David out of all the
warriors offered to him, David, the youngest, to be the one chosen and beloved
of God? What could David have possibly done to deserve such a blessing?
There are moments in our lives when we just can’t make
things fit. Try as hard as we can, something just doesn’t work. A relationship,
a task, a problem to be solved. Aren’t we just prone to worry ourselves sick?
Don’t we just want to get this right, that perfect, to please ourselves, to
please God? Is this what God would want? How do we know what is the right thing
to do? What if we just worked a little harder, fixed this thing a little
better, dug a little deeper, stayed up a little later? Wouldn’t there be more
justice in the world? Wouldn’t there be more mercy? Wouldn’t things be RIGHT?
One of my favorite summer stories is set in New York City,
in an indeterminate decade sometime in the middle of the 20th century. It’s a
story of boys playing marbles on the street, in the deepening dusk. The
narrator is Buddy, shooting marbles with his friend, Ira. Buddy’s brother,
Seymour, comes up to them.
One late afternoon, at that faintly soupy quarter of an hour
in New York when the street lights have just been turned on and the parking
lights of cars are just getting turned on - some on, some still off- I was
playing curb marbles with a boy named Ira Yankauer, on the farther side of the
side street just opposite the canvas canopy of our apartment house. I was
eight. I was using Seymour's technique, or trying to - his side flick, his way
of widely curving his marble at the other guy's - and I was losing steadily.
Steadily but painlessly. For it was the time of day when New York City boys are
much like Tiffin, Ohio, boys who hear a distant train whistle just as the last
cow is being driven into the barn. At that magic quarter hour, if you lose
marbles, you lose just marbles. Ira, too, I think, was properly time-suspended,
and if so, all he could have been winning was marbles. Out of this quietness,
and entirely in key with it, Seymour called to me. It came as a pleasant shock
that there was a third person in the universe, and to this feeling was added
the justness of its being Seymour. I turned around, totally, and I suspect Ira
must have, too. The bulby bright lights had just gone on under the canopy of
our house. Seymour was standing on the curb edge before it, facing us, balanced
on his arches, his hands in the slash pockets of his sheep-lined coat. With the
canopy lights behind him, his face was shadowed, dimmed out. He was ten. From
the way he was balanced on the curb edge, from the position of his hands, from
- well, the quantity x itself, I knew as well then as I know now that he was
immensely conscious himself of the magic hour of the day. 'Could you try not
aiming so much?' he asked me, still standing there. 'If you hit him when you
aim, it'll just be luck.' He was speaking, communicating, and yet not breaking
the spell. I then broke it. Quite deliberately. 'How can it be luck if I aim?'
I said back to him, not loud (despite the italics) but with rather more
irritation in my voice than I was actually feeling. He didn't say anything for
a moment but simply stood balanced on the curb, looking at me, I knew
imperfectly, with love. 'Because it will be,' he said. 'You'll be glad if you
hit his marble - Ira's marble - won't you? Won't you be glad? And if you're
glad when you hit somebody's marble, then you sort of secretly didn't expect
too much to do it. So there'd have to be some luck in it, there'd have to be
slightly quite a lot of accident in it.'[i]
There are no accidents in the kingdom of God. We sow the
seed, we shoot the marble, we reach out to the friend in need. The seeds
sprout, we know not how, and when we turn around, a great tree has grown up in
our midst, and the kingdom of God is here.
[i]
J.D. Salinger, from “Seymour, An Introduction” in Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters (Little, Brown 1963)
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