Us and Dirt

Text: Mark 5:21-43

It turns out that if you put a metal plate in a solution of the right kind of atoms, the atoms will naturally form into chain-like molecules call lipids. The lipids like to hang around together, and when they do, they like to stand side by side, with their heads all facing up, like a picket fence. The fence-like thing is floating in water, and sometimes one end of the fence meets the other end, and when that happens, the lipids all form a ring, with their heads outside and their feet inside. These little donut rings are primitive cells. There are a lot of things they cannot do—like they cannot do almost everything. But one thing they are really good at is keeping their insides separate from their outsides. The lipid wall is a great and selective barrier to things that want to come into these proto-cells. Even at this mechanical, not-quite-life stage, barriers—and their enforcement of what is inside versus outside—are fundamental to life.

In everything from cells to societies, there are insides and outsides. And barriers from cell walls to national boundary walls. We have some general purpose names for the difference between the two. We call the inside “Us.” And we call the outside “Dirt.”

Dirt is something that is in the wrong place or the wrong time. Soil in the garden is good. Soil in your salad is dirt. Oxycontin is good in a hospital. Oxycontin on the street, not so good. Maybe you think a beer would be good; maybe after a few, though, another would be bad. Some folks in Belmont thought that Mormons were OK, as long as they weren’t in the neighborhood. Sometimes things are out of place wherever they are. Cancer is dirt.

Dirt is either polluting or corrupting. When dirt is polluting, it displaces other, more pure things. That is what cancer does. That’s why people are afraid of new immigrant groups. Or new music. When dirt is corrupting, it harms other, more pure things. Guns in the city are dirt.

Not everyone agrees about what is dirt in any given situation. Some people think guns are almost always dirt, and some think almost never. Moral arguments are almost always arguments about what is dirt and what is pure.

What you think is dirt is one sense defines who you are. Your culture, your group, your class are the people who agree with you about what is Us and what is Dirt. We call these agreements “values.” When people talk about a decline in values, they are afraid things are getting dirty. (It is telling that when people first travel from their hometowns, they often comment about how the places they visit, and sometimes the people they meet, are dirty. When they become more familiar with the place, they don’t notice the dirt anymore.)

In humans, in our cells, in our organs, in our cultures, the barriers between Us and Dirt are permeable. Partly that’s because nothing can live by itself. Cells need to bring chemicals in and send chemicals out, and so do organs and organisms, and so do cultures and nations. And partly that’s because cells and so forth are not perfect. No barrier works well all the time. Life is not composed of little perfect parts, but of miscellaneous kind-of-pretty-good parts. Dirt does get in, no matter what.

For that reason, we create rules and codes of law. Laws seem to make rational sense, and in most cases they probably do. But different cultures have different laws, and that is not because cultures that are different from Us are wrong-headed, stupid, and mean. Laws codify what is dirt and what is not. They are barriers that protect against cultural corruption or pollution. It is significant that these laws are sometimes called holiness codes. The word holy means to be separate. Holiness codes separate Us from Dirt.

The woman without a name who touches Jesus is dirty. She has violated the holiness code of her culture. Her constant bleeding makes her constantly unclean—that is, dirty. We need to think a little about how horrible this being dirty would be for her. And to do that, we need to think a little about how horrible it would be for everyone else. They would think her to be disgusting. They would be disgusted. They would find her scary, even, and want to avoid her, and not let her come near them. It was like the extreme squeamishness that we get when we think someone is really sick and we think they are really contagious. Or how we get with really crazy people. She was corrupting. If they touched her, or if she touched them, they would become dirty, too. The woman without a name would have been totally alone, isolated, dirt.

When the woman without a name touches Jesus, therefore, it is a big deal. She has made Jesus dirty by her actions. She corrupted him. It was an aggressive and desperate thing to do. It was impolite. It was crazy. It was inappropriate. To us, perhaps it sounds brave and good and, it turns out, effective. But it would definitely not have seemed that way to the crowd or even the disciples, who should have known better, but never do.

The result of being treated like dirt is shame. Sometimes it is the intended result. You ought to be ashamed, folks say, meaning you just did a dirty thing. Shame on you. Shame is the way you feel when someone makes you feel like dirt. When you have been made to feel stupid, or weak, or cowardly, or foolish, or ugly. To be ashamed is be exiled. To shame someone is to push them outside the barrier of privilege or affection. Did the woman feel ashamed as she came to Jesus?

Jesus does not shame her. Jesus does not honor the distinction between inside and outside. There is no Us for Jesus and therefore no Dirt. It is not that Jesus does not see the barriers that exist. He is not clueless. But he is heedless. Jesus acts here, as he does many times in the Gospels, as if the barriers were fiction. He walks right through them. They are erected by humans; they are not God’s. The barrier that the woman crosses so fearfully is to Jesus nothing at all.

Most of us have felt like outsiders from time to time. Most of us have felt ashamed of things we have done. Most of us have been shamed by others. And probably most of us have made others feel ashamed. It is what people do.

But it is not what God does. To be ashamed is be exiled. But to be forgiven is to be invited back in. To be restored. In his turning to the woman who touched him, Jesus shows that for God there is no wrong time and there is no wrong place. In the kingdom of God about which Jesus teaches us, in the kingdom of God for which we daily pray and work, in the kingdom of God into which we have just welcomed [baptized child], instead of exile there is invitation. Instead of shame, there is forgiveness. There is no Us. There is no Dirt.

Boat Ride

Text: Mark 4:35-41

It is easy to imagine the expressions on the faces of the disciples. A mix of accusation, incredulity, and terror.

Why did Jesus send them out in this boat if he knew that a storm was brewing? How could he sleep so soundly when the waves were swamping the boats? Maybe they were like the waves described in the psalm that were so big they ascended into the heavens and the troughs so deep that descended into the depths. The disciples, some of them, were fishers. They knew about storms and seas and danger. The knew about drownings and boats lost and people with them.

Why are you afraid? Jesus asks them. You can hear them thinking: Why are we afraid? Because this is one big storm. Why are we afraid? Because we are going to die. How about you? they might have asked Jesus, Why are you not afraid? That would have been a good question. But they asked him something else: Don’t you care, teacher, that we are perishing?

We call these people disciples. The word means student, or learner. Their relationship to Jesus is student to master, as it is with people today who study under a spiritual guide. But in the Gospel of Mark, they are boneheaded students and poor learners. They forget what Jesus says to them, and they are slow to understand who he is. We are better to call them followers, since they are at least good at that. They follow Jesus around, listening and watching. Perhaps that is enough at the moment. Now they have followed him into danger.

The disciples have just heard Jesus tell lots of stories, or parables—we heard one last week about the mustard seed—and Jesus has spoken to them about the meaning of the stories. He has explained things to the disciples. Now, after crossing the sea, Jesus will begin to cast out demons and to heal the dying. To the disciples he speaks about the kingdom of God, and to the demons he speaks as only God could. Peace, he commands the sea. Be still, he commands the water. What he really tells the water is to be quiet: the words mean “shut up,”and “shut your trap.” Creation, un-insulted, listens to him as it would listen only to its creator.

Mark reports that the disciples are surprised. Whoa, they say, who is this person that even the wind and the sea listen to him? How can they be surprised? How can they have followed Jesus all over the countryside, sitting at his feet as he talked, standing by his side as he healed people, and not have just a little hint that he was a special sort of person?

Yet in their hearts they must have known, for it is Jesus they turn to when the sea threatens them. Maybe they were astonished and annoyed that Jesus was sleeping so calmly. Maybe they, being frightened out of their wits, want Jesus to join them in their fear. But their complaint to Jesus is not that he sleeps while they panic. It is instead that he is cold hearted in the face of their panic. Do you not care that we are perishing? They think in their hearts that Jesus could stop the storm if he really cared about them. They know who Jesus is. They know before the fact that Jesus could speak as God to the storm and could save them. And they are right. He does.

Why? Why does he do that?

There were other boats on the sea, in the storm, with frightened folks aboard. Would Jesus have saved them if the disciples hadn’t pestered Jesus into action? Do the disciples, by virtue of their special relationship with Jesus, get special treatment? They certainly expect to. (And we expect them to). Is that expectation reasonable?

We, like the disciples, are followers of Jesus. We try, as they tried, to listen to Jesus. We pay attention to Jesus as they did. We try to follow the way of Jesus and we try to do what he has told us to do (more or less, just like the disciples). Can we therefore expect special treatment, too?

Jesus hears the prayers of the disciples. On their account he is willing to alter the course of history and the laws of physics. Is God the creator of the universe in any way obligated to hear our prayers and to do the same? What if in doing so someone else is harmed? Do our prayers have power, and if so, do they have more power than the prayers of others? How about more power than the prayers of our enemies?

We teach, having be taught by Jesus, that we should pray and that God will listen to us. We don’t think too much about the logistics of how God might answer our prayers without bollixing up something else on the other side of the universe. We leave that to God to figure out, who after all has a better resume for that sort of thing than we do. But on what grounds does God listen? Do we have some sort of contractual agreement with God that obligates God? Or do we pray on the strength of our relationship with God, as the disciples did, it seems, with Jesus. And if that is true, what happens when our relationship with God is not so good, at least on our side? Sometimes we are embarrassed in front of God, and sometimes angry, and sometimes disappointed. The disciples in the boat were unhappy with Jesus, and they accused him of ignoring their fears. Maybe they shamed Jesus into helping. Is that a good way to ask God for something?

We have a complicated relationship with our creator, who is small enough to care about each us (he was human sized, as Jesus, after all) and large enough to do something about it. We are often in the position of the disciples on the boat, having mixed feelings about all this. Jesus is human like us, so he should understand how frightened we are. Jesus is God, not like us, and so he should keep us safe from disaster and suffering. But Jesus does not do what we think he should. Jesus does unpredictable things, like sleeping during the storm, and then transforming the storm into dead calm.

This powerful and almost magical action frightens the disciples even more than the storm. The disciples were timid, it says in Mark about the waves, but they were terrified, it says, about Jesus’ ability and willingness to calm the waves. (Maybe it is scary to have God right in your boat. Especially if God does what you ask.)

The story of the Bible is a rich story because it is the story of humans and God trying to live with one another, but we are certainly the odd couple.

God makes the world. In creation, there is an implicit promise. That promise is to be a hospitable place for creatures. The universe is a place that nurtures us into existence. You can think of that as circular reasoning; if it didn’t we wouldn’t be here. Or you can think of that as a great gift. God has given us existence, life. And more, God has given us pleasure and beauty and hungers and the elements and danger and feelings. Everything. God’s promise to us is fulfilled in us, that we even exist. It is, all of it, a wonder. Thank you.

Today we heard from the book of Job. In the fall, we’ll have a Bible study where we read the whole book of Job. But I’m sure you know that Job was not treated all that well by God, and Job accuses God—there is a pattern here?—accuses God and demands an explanation. Today’s reading is the beginning of God’s answer. Which is: Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Is that a flippant or arrogant answer? Or is God saying: I gave you the universe. I gave you creation.

The proud waves, as it says in Job, may be bounded, but they are deadly as well to humans among them. It is only creation, it is not Eden. We come thankful for our lives and fearful of danger to them. We pray sometimes in fear. We pray in hope that we will always be safe. And sometimes the waves are calmed and the storm shuts up and things are at peace again. God is good.

But God is not a magician. Jesus is not a magician. Jesus does not promise the disciples that he can or will always save them from drowning. His gift is not freedom from the elements of the world, but freedom from the fear of the world. Jesus sleeps in the boat. The disciples panic. Jesus sleeps. He cares for them. He speaks not in criticism but in sympathy. “Why are you afraid?” He is teaching his disciples.

The Birds and the Trees

Text: Mark 4:26–34
Other texts: Ezekiel 17:22–24, 1 Samuel 16:1, 6-12

We just heard two of what are called Jesus’ agricultural parables. It turns out that Jesus wasn’t much of a farmer—he was a city boy—and some of these parables show that. For example, the mustard seed is not the smallest of all seeds, as any gardener would know. But the parables are not instructions about gardening, fortunately. They are ways to help us think about a God who might not think in exactly the same way that we do.

Parables demand interpretation. They are supposed to shake us up, and after being shaken, we are supposed to put our pieces together in a new way. So parables are not about what they seem, which means we have to think about what they are about.

A common way to interpret the parables we heard today, especially the second one about the tiny mustard seed, is to conclude that a little faith goes a long way. See, we say to our evangelistic selves, faith starts small in people but it grows and grows. Or, a small faithful church grows and grows. Or, small faithful movement. And our job, being faithful Christians, is to plant the seeds, to sow them, to scatter them, as it says. And though things look hopeless at first, much will be accomplished in the end. We are the agents, in this view, and the parable charges us to go out and do something. Because we are responsible. We are in control.

This notion, that it is up to us, places a great burden on us. It puts us right in the middle of the chain of salvation. No sower, yields no harvest. But it is attractive because we do like to think of ourselves as controlling the universe. And we try hard to do so.

But in the end, this only leads to suffering. Both in others and in ourselves, as we forcefully and sometimes forcibly manipulate events and people. We want to align things through our clever wills so that things work out the right way.

Out of this comes sorrow. For we are too puny, too ignorant, too mean, too short-sighted, and too mortal to succeed at this for long. We are not in control, and life has a sometimes harsh way of reminding us of that.

God does not think as we do. (I think.) We are made in the image of God, and we therefore share some parts of God’s nature, but who knows what those parts are? God is not totally weird to us—that’s one of the great things about God—but God is constantly reminding us in scripture (and in life) that God has different ideas than we do.

In the passage from the first book of Samuel, God’s prophet Samuel is sent to the house of a man named Jesse. Samuel’s job is to pick out the next king of Israel. “It must be this tall, strong, oldest son,” thinks Samuel. Nope, not him, says God. “Then surely it is the second son,” thinks Samuel. Wrong again, says God. This goes on through five other men, seven sons in all. None are God’s choice. In the end, young David, just a boy, is called in from his job tending the sheep. David is the one. David is chosen, and in the end he becomes Israel’s greatest king. The Lord teaches Samuel that mortals—people, you and me—see things one way, God sees something else.

In Ezekiel, what we think to be high and mighty, God brings low. The poor and despised, God raises up. What prospers, God diminishes. What is impoverished, God nourishes. The things that people do, God undoes. The things people neglect, God provides for.

It is not, I think, that God is wiser than we are, or smarter, or knows more, or is more just, though all those things are no doubt true. It is that God is freer than we are. God is less burdened by all the things that not only cloud our vision but, even when we see what must be done, make us deny what we see. We bring to every situation a lot of baggage that God is evidently free of.

The parables in Mark tell us, they say, something about what the kingdom of God is like. If that is so, then the rule of God—which is what the kingdom means; the place in which God’s rule prevails—the kingdom is a place, first, of life and growth. These are about living, growing things. And it is a place, second, of provision and plenty. Ripe wheat comes from the harvest. Great shrubs are full with large branches. And it is place, third, of utility, of usefulness. The grain is harvested for nourishment. The branches provide homes for the birds.

And finally, it is a place in which God does the work, not us.

We are the beneficiaries, not the agents. We are not responsible for the useful bounty that comes out of these gardens. It is as if, it says in Mark, as if someone were to scatter seed on the ground and then sleep and rise day and night. How that works, the scatterer does not need to know. The earth produces of itself. And then, after all this happens, that “someone” gathers all the harvest. What these parables say—and they are not alone in the Gospel—is that God provides for us, God’s creatures.

Whenever we hear or read scripture, it is good to pay attention to how we feel. To our hearts. How we feel is a good clue—a better clue than what we think—it is a good clue to what’s going on in the text. And in these parables and in the words of Ezekiel, I suspect, we do not hear yet another burden that God has put on our shoulders. Instead, we hear them with thanksgiving. They comfort us rather than frighten us. That is because the burden is taken up by God. “I, the Lord, have spoken. I will accomplish it,” it says in Ezekiel. I will undo the injustices, I will give water to those who thirst. I will provide dwelling places for my creatures. I the Lord will do these things.

God is the source of all life. We are the living. God gives us life and sustains us. We are the birds. Without the bush, we have no place to nest. We are the tree. Without water we die. God provides the bush, God provides the water. Without God, there is nothing.

The parables are not stories about our power, about how powerful we are. Our power is a joke. A myth. The cause of our sadness. They are instead stories about our dependence, about our powerlessness.

We long for freedom and peace and fulfillment in our lives. Jesus teaches us in the parables that we will not find them in our power to control the world, but in God’s power to provide for us.

Thanks be to God.

Action in Trust

Text: John 3:1-17

Let’s say you want to get to San Francisco. And let’s say you were starting here in Cambridge. Here are some ways you could do that. You could wander around aimlessly, hoping that in time you’d stumble into San Francisco. Probably not going to happen. Or better, you could realize that San Francisco is almost due west of Cambridge, and that if you had a compass you could walk in a straight line from one city to the other. Except you would have to bushwhack, ford streams, cross rugged mountains, and generally have a rough time of it. Or better yet, you could walk on a path already laid out, a path marked on a map and labeled with a sign that said “the way to San Francisco,” a road that without too much bother and in time would get you to where you hoped to go.

Life in the real world is colored with suffering. It is human to be a little lost. To be unsure of what we are doing and whether it is worthwhile. And whether it is good. Sometimes we are desperate and at wits’ end. Sometimes sad or just confused. Sometimes angry at injustices done to us, to others, to strangers. Sometimes we wonder what will happen to the world. Things are out of kilter.

We desire to be somewhere that feels like home, homey, at peace with ourselves and others. We long to be surrounded by beauty and the company of friends and the intimacy of a person to love.

How shall we get from where we are to where we want to be? We can wander around aimlessly, trying one thing or another. Or, we can sort of head in the direction we want to go, blazing our own trail. Or we can follow a way already laid down and labeled. Jesus says he is the Way. He has a big sign saying “this way to peace.” Peace of mind, peace in the world. This way to an abundant life. Those who read that big sign of Jesus, have varying responses. Some say, some of you say, “you bet, I’m already in San Francisco.” Some say “I’m on the path.” Some wonder whether there are other ways, too. And others wonder whether the journey on which Jesus leads us takes us somewhere else, not in this life at all.

This passage we just heard in John is rightly famous. And for some it is the essence of Christianity. Born again Christians (that’s from verse 3) carry signs quoting John 3:16. In this passage, Jesus first talks about a transformed life and then how to get it.

First, Jesus tells Nicodemus that he must be born from above. The word he uses for “above” also means “again.” Nicodemus is confused by the two meanings, and he and Jesus talk past each other, but no matter how you hear what Jesus says, it is clear that you cannot go on living life the way you were before. If you want to have a different kind of life, you can’t go on living the old kind of way. If you want, on a larger sense, a different kind of world, you can’t conduct business as usual.

This is not a moral or even a spiritual judgment. It is not saying you have to come to some crucial decision in your life, or to make some impassioned declaration, or anything. It is saying that if you follow Jesus you had better expect something new to happen. There will be surprises. Who knows where the wind blows? cautions Jesus. Walking the way of Jesus will change your life. That’s what we are hoping for, right? To get from where you are now to where you hope to be. Where you hope to be will, you hope, be different from where you start out. Another way to hear what Jesus say: be prepared for a change. Following Jesus will disrupt things.

Then, Jesus promises, according to the Bible verses we just heard, that whoever believes in him will have eternal life. We’ve talked a lot in the past about what John means by eternal life. To summarize: for John, eternal life is not something you have to die for. Eternal life is abundant life, starting here and now but not diminished by death. Eternal life is the San Francisco in our metaphor. What we hope for.

Lutherans make much of the difference between grace and works. Grace is God’s free gift. Works are things people tell us we must do to earn the gift. Grace: free. Works: earn. So is what Jesus says about belief a grace-statement or a works-statement? Is it something we have to do before God loves and forgives us and gives us abundant life? Whenever we have a Bible study here at Faith someone always says: but isn’t believing a work? It’s a good question.

I usually answer that it is better to translate the word Jesus uses for “belief” as “trust.” It is the same word in Greek, the language of the Gospels. And I say that God makes us an offer, which if we trust God, we accept. Sort of like someone promises to pick you up at the mall, but you don’t trust that person and you walk home anyway. The gift is offered, but you never get its value because you don’t trust the giver. Jesus says, this is the path to San Francisco, but you don’t believe him and you end up in Houston instead. Whose fault is that? If the answer is that is is your fault, then trust is a work, too. By grace you get to the destination even when you wander about aimlessly and refuse to stay on track. That’s what grace means. You get what you don’t deserve.

Part of the problem here is that the words “belief” and “trust” sound like things we can do sitting on our couches. Some little thought-thing, a minor change of mind. What does the Gospel passage mean when it says “believe in” Jesus? When we use the phrase in normal discourse it implies affectionate admiration. Something we might say to a friend. You can do it, Sally, I believe in you. Is that what Jesus means? Or, are we to believe something about Jesus (like, he is God’s son, which is an article of our creed), or are we to believe something Jesus says?

Or does Jesus expect, as I think he does, that we take him to be our leader. That we are followers of him. That the path which he lays down is the path we walk. Very rarely in the Gospels does Jesus tell us what to believe, meaning what to think. Very often he tells us what to do. Jesus has written, by his words and example, a user’s manual for, or a tour guide to, the abundant life. In it he has told us what to do if we want to get to the destination we hope for. If we trust his leadership, then we are disciples, his followers. He leads the way to abundant life. In this sense, belief is action taken in a realm of trust.

Jesus says: if you want to follow me on this path to abundant life, then you actually have to follow me. Perhaps this, too, is a work in the Lutheran sense, but if so it is a subtle one. It is like saying, if you want to go to the store, you actually have to go to the store.

The picture of the ministry of Jesus in John is a picture of change in the world and in people. It is not a picture of new doctrine. It is rarely about convictions. It is often about transformation. Water into wine. Sickness into health. Death into life. Suffering into abundance.

That is usually how it works: transformation first, conviction later. That is how it worked for Martin Luther; though he wrote pages and pages of learned opinion, it all started with a transforming experience he had. Our understanding of things—our doctrine—comes after the stories in our lives. The stories don’t illustrate the doctrine. The doctrine—such as the doctrine of the Trinity we celebrate today—is a way to make sense of the stories. What we think comes from what we do.

We seek in our search for God a way to stand in the world. For some organizing center to what interests us, how we behave toward others, who we hang with, how we deal with adversity, how grateful we are. Having Jesus in our lives gives us a chance to get from here to there. It means being able to do things, to be someone, that you could not (or would not) before. To have a new life.