SUNDAY SERMON

A Sermon by Rev. Dr. Jack E. Skiles

January 29, 2012

Trustworthy Authority

1 Corinthians 8:1-13; Mark 1:21-28

The older I get the more stuff there is to ponder. One maxim I have enjoyed more fully of late is the one that says, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” Common agreement tells us that it is a French statement from the late 1890's. It next appeared in print in George Bernard Shaw 's Revolutionist's Handbook in 1903. The French know a great deal about living through one revolution after another, always, it seems, ending up with the same problems. It is not easy to significantly alter base dilemmas of the human condition.

Back a hundred thousand years ago when I was first starting doing youth ministry we could ask the question, “Where were you when President Kennedy was shot?” and everyone would be able to answer. Many of our youth group kids today were born during the waning years of the Clinton Administration and only really remember George W. Bush as President. Surely this one of the main reasons we teach history, because what a narrow historical perspective we have in our growing up years, through no fault of our own.

All of this is passing through this preacher's brain because of an article I read this week in the New York Times regarding who voted for Mitt Romney and who voted for Newt Gingrich in South Carolina. Romney got only 10% of the evangelical vote and Newt got 46% of those who said that religion meant a great deal for whom they voted.

I was in first grade when the staunchly Roman Catholic John F. Kennedy ran against Richard Nixon, a Quaker. It might well be argued that neither represented their faith well. But, I remember the agonizing conversations of religious bigotry as Kennedy was elected our first Roman Catholic president and the talk about his being the anti-Christ was loud and resounding in Protestant circles.

The voices were nearly as loud then as they have been these last three years proclaiming that Obama is the anti-Christ in the eyes of many white Americans. It is a sad, unchanging reality of our human condition that we seem to fear leadership from what were once minority positions in our culture. Mitt Romney is getting much of the same treatment, and if he wins the Republican nomination we will have two potential anti-Christ figures running against each other.

To the Jews of the 1 st century of the Common Era, Jesus was not the Messiah; if anything, because of his attacks on common security by threatening the Romans and those who supported the Romans, as well as his disregard of the Temple in Jerusalem, he was regarded as the anti-Messiah. Jesus was about faith development in changing times in a changing and charged religious political environment and no matter that his message resonated with the masses, a price was going to be extracted for his boldly luring our world forward religiously and politically.

In this morning's Gospel lesson from Mark's first chapter, we have Jesus showing up for the synagogue service and teaching. There was a time in the service ritual for conversation around the morning's lectionary readings. It was probably not so dissimilar to our Sunday School format. It could be that the time was a combination of deathly boring mixed with some excitement, depending on the topic and the available teachers.

A couple of things are noteworthy: Jesus fit into the existing schedule of Jewish faith activities very normally. It could be well argued that it was his pattern because he was a faithful 1 st -century Jewish male and a respected teacher, also referred to as Rabbi. People wonder about what Jesus did between puberty and his public ministry and the answer is probably intensely boring and plain. He was probably working to support himself and learning/practicing to be a teacher/rabbi.

It was probably not a new pattern for him to walk into the synagogue in Capernum and join the gathered group for discussion. What we know from the preceding stories is that Jesus felt his time had come. It was time, the fullness of God was in him, around him and through him. What we know is that Mark's Gospel said he spoke with an unaccustomed authority. Jesus spoke and people listened. Jesus taught and people learned. He was moving his crowd to action. What happens next in the text is a stumbling block to most of us 21 st -Century seekers and believers. We struggle to know what to do with the man who, the text says, is possessed with an evil spirit that challenges Jesus.

What most of us do is we read straight by the story and say to ourselves, “Well, we don't really believe in demon possession and in supernatural stuff, so we will just overlook this problem.” Through the years of my daughter's growing up I have joked in sermons that if you don't believe in demon possession you need to spend a week in our house at one of my daughter's worst moments. Kali has said back many times, if you want to believe in demon possession you should see my dad when he's mad. Fair's fair. But, this is not really what we are talking about in this story and it deserves better interpretation than merely overlooking it, and others like it, and making jokes about how the devil made me do it.

Many, perhaps even most 1 st -century people most probably did believe in evil spirits that came along and possessed a person. They would even believe that a foreign army would be under the influence of the evil one, Satan or the devil. But just because they believed something and even wrote about it in our Bibles does not make it true.

I believe in evil. Evil stuff happens. People do evil things. Groups of people can even undertake a persona of evil and actually seem to act outside their parameters of normal behavior. There is group think, group action that can take on not only good overtones, but also very evil ones. But the evil, the wrongness remains rooted in individuals and we are responsible for evil that we do or allow to be perpetuated in our name in society or around the globe.

People bought and sold slaves in our country. Folks who were otherwise experienced as good-as-gold people bought and sold human beings. Slavery was allowed to grow and take on a cultural normalcy in some areas. It is a great example of how individuals doing evil grew into a national epidemic of evil. Slavery didn't require some supernatural motivator. It only took a few people willing to cross the lines of disregard for the sanctity of human life and slavery was off and running because other nearly-good-as-gold people let it progress into the full ugliness that it became. And, we might well argue and note that it is continuing to this day.

Blacks did not become full citizens in this country until 47 years ago when the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1964 and it then took a huge civil rights action to bring our country around to recognizing the ongoing evils of racism alive in our country. Even today, as citizens we incarcerate more blacks in our prison system than were held in slavery at its peak, and there is no similar scale of justice in the same laws when applied against white skin and black skin. I suspect that if we dared ask the black men in prison if slavery were over in this country we would be standing in front of some very despairing and angry people who are held in prison by the system that we uphold with our voting, our tax money, our lack of due diligence to monitor systems that we don't see operating because we are so busy in our lives. The system perpetuates an evil that we allow.

I've told a couple of you my story of running into a young man from Vietnam on my recent sabbatical. We boarded a bus in Salisbury, England for an eight- or nine-mile trip out to Stonehenge. He was a young extroverted college student at Portsmouth College, one of those people that make introverts like me just say, “oh, please sit somewhere else.” He was going to talk to me from beginning to end of our close encounter on this tour bus.

So we talked and he wanted to know whether he could visit the Anglican Salisbury Cathedral, since he was not a Christian. I assured him that he could and that he should allow himself to see that beautiful structure. And then he asked me if I had ever visited Vietnam. I smiled and told him that he probably could not understand that I had spent many years when I was his age avoiding going to Vietnam.

He looked at me with this puzzled smile and said, “Oh, you mean the wartime?” I said, “Yes. My country did horrible things in Vietnam and I am still embarrassed by the evil we did in your country.” He reached over and took my arm and said, “You need to get over it.” He said, “Come now and visit Vietnam—we are a beautiful country.”

I have lived and worked for a lifetime against war. I have nothing but respect for soldiers who do their job. I have a horrible disrespect for a huge spirit of evil that is perpetuated in our country that war is an acceptable alternative to the very hard work of working out our differences without sacrificing our young men and women on the battlefields.

After Hurricane Hugo devastated large parts of the southeast back in the eighties, I led a group down to South Carolina to work, mainly in areas populated by blacks that had yet to receive disaster relief. I can scarcely tell you how crazy-making it was to live and work in the midst of such horrid, active racism alongside some of the most lovingly thankful people I have ever encountered.

We stayed in a white church in sleeping bags. Our stay was arranged through a secular organization. The white church folks came and warned us that we should not go over to the other side of town. They remained coldly distant to us for our entire visit. Black churches on the other side of town arranged evening banquets for us, hugged us and left us overwhelmed with affection and thanks for our work.

The reason I'm telling you this story is that I was given a graveyard to clean up that was filled with thirty downed trees. I'm out there chainsawing and stacking wood and recognize very early on that this is a relatively new cemetery. I started reading the stones and I still cry when I ponder what I saw. It was a cemetery full of young black men who died fighting in the Vietnam War, just from that small area of South Carolina.

My tears cannot erase the reality that I avoided going to Vietnam while my country overloaded the front lines with mainly African American men. Even had I gone to Vietnam, my chances of dying there compared to any black man that was sent there were staggeringly stacked against black Americans. There was and there still is a huge evil spirit in our land.

That is what Jesus encountered in his synagogue in our story. It was not some supernatural demon-filled man. It was a man or a group that gave voice to the individual and systemic evils that ruled in Jesus' world. This voice that was so evil supported the status quo and did not want Jesus challenging the familiar discomforts of the status quo. “Well, Jesus, at least we have a place, at least some of us are successful and making it. Yes, some are still suffering but most of us are at least comfortable, we know what to expect and the Romans and the way they rule us isn't that bad.” And Jesus stood face to face, toe to toe with this voice and said, “Silence. Be quiet!”

We are not told much more except that, by the time Jesus was done teaching and loving this man, he was shaking and changed. And the Scriptures say that folks were so amazed with what Jesus was able to do with this voice that for their whole lives had spit out the most horrible and vile pronouncements of evil and going-along-to-get-along and encouraging people to be quiet in the face of greed, avarice and brutality while the Romans and their lackeys subdued the general population. Jesus said, the time is now, it is ripe with expectation that all this evil can change. The time is now, the reign of God is coming, it is here calling us to be more than we've ever even dreamed of being.

Mark's Gospel says that those who were present said, “What is this? A new teaching and with authority!”

It is so much easier to write this morning's story off as a supernatural 1 st -century demon possession than it is to recognize that it was a call then and is a call this morning for God's peoplee to stand in the face of the ugly and demonic voices of our day and demand their silence: Racism is as powerfully alive now as it was when Dr. King was marching in Selma and dying in Memphis; Homophobia kills Matthew Shepards every day in our land and around the world gays are treated horribly; Women remain second-class citizens in a majority of work environments and homes in our country; Poverty of the masses in the United States and around the globe is escalating in the face of economic down turns, overpopulation, and global warming disasters; and the Good News of Jesus tells us to pick up and speak up for those who need our voices, our charity, our thoughtfulness and the essence of who we are.

If seems overwhelming, it is not. It takes one step at a time in the direction that we have placed in front of us. Read the Good News that Jesus proclaims, we are today's heralds “To tell the Good News to the poor, to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight to the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.”

Live the Good News. Be the Good News. It is our calling and the world is ready for what we have to share.

This gets so serious doesn't it? Remember with me that we don't have to do it all, just our part. And whenever Jesus could, he had a party. Whenever even one person found their way to understanding the depth of God's mercy, the joy of knowing that they were acceptable to God, Jesus' crowd popped the cork, it seems, on a lot of wine bottles and celebrated their successes.

Stand tall, speak clearly, be the truth and then have a party and know that God is fully celebrating with us.

Amen.