September 6, 2009
Isaiah 35: 4-10
Mark 7: 24-37
"Working with Jesus"
We tend to skip over the hard work that Jesus faced every single day. We tend to jump from miraculous birth to terrible death to glorious resurrection, taking note of some good teaching along the way. We imagine that as the Son of God, God's beloved chosen One, Jesus had it made.
But the Gospels tell a different story. Jesus labored hard at his craft. No place is this made clearer than in Mark's account. In Mark we see the very earthy, hard labor required to carry the Gospel message.
For instance, Jesus is in the land of the Gentiles, his natural enemies, when a crowd suddenly confronts him with a man who cannot hear and who can barely speak. The crowd demands that Jesus heal the man.
Jesus puts his fingers into the man's ears. Jesus spits on his finger and puts it on the man's tongue. Jesus sighs deeply as he looks up to heaven for help. After healing the man, Jesus commands the people not to tell a soul what has occurred and they absolutely ignore him. What is easy, ethereal, or serene about this miracle?
Jesus, weeps, groans and sighs. He begins his ministry squared off against Satan in the wilderness. He crashes his way through the Temple. He is rejected in his hometown where old friends mock him and send him away a failure. He confronts madmen in chains, terrifying storms in the open sea and thousands of hungry people in open fields. Jesus eats with outcasts, lepers and sinners not in palaces but in their hovels, sharing their food.
Jesus is engaged in real warfare and that is hard work. Every day he awakes to the reality of oppression, of sin, of evil and every day he goes to work fighting it as best he can with the tools God gave him to use. He fights every day, usually alone: His disciples are asleep, they are afraid, they do not understand, they argue with him, or they lag far behind Jesus arguing amongst themselves, "Who is the greatest?"
There is very little about Jesus' life that is tranquil, smooth and easy. His is not a cerebral vocation. His is not the disinterested commentator or ivory towered theologian. Jesus' life is not spent looking up into the sky with the blessed light streaming down on his serene face. Jesus' life consists principally of the daily, life and death encounter with sin. There is nothing easy about his life. There is nothing easy about living the Gospel.
On April 4, 1967, Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered a speech at the Riverside Church in New York City. He was speaking to his friends, a gathering of concerned clergy and laity against the war in Viet Nam. The setting at Riverside is magnificent, a place of great beauty, grandeur and wealth, the home of wonderful preaching and a bastion of the social and often liberal Gospel.
Rev. King should have been in his glory. He had received the Nobel Peace prize. The civil rights movement had been enormously successful, federal legislation had shattered the legal underpinnings of Jim Crow, and the "Great Society" framework, the nation's war on poverty, including Medicare, was in place. Rev. King should have been at peace and satisfied as he rose to speak to the friendly gathering.
On the dais sitting right behind Rev. King as he stood to speak and as he delivered his address condemning the War was the Rev. Dr. Avery D. Post, the fourth president of our United Church of Christ. I am fortunate enough to know Avery well, and he has told me what that moment was actually like for Rev. King.
Rev. King was deeply troubled. He did not want to speak. He had difficulty coming up out of his seat. Avery thought he remembered Rev. King groaning with effort as he stood. As King stood to condemn the war and the government that kept it going at such an enormous cost in life and riches, he was shaking. His knees and legs and hands shook through out the speech. He knew the terrible risk he was taking and he was afraid.
His voice was clear; but he was in fact terrified as he delivered his speech.
Rev. King knew that to condemn the War and the Johnson administration, to link the brutal treatment of the Vietnamese with the equally brutal treatment of citizens at home was an extremely dangerous and high-risk endeavor. To confront the evils of war and sin was physically and emotionally draining and dangerous. To label the United States as the, "greatest purveyor of violence in the world today" seemed suicidal.
Martin Luther King, Jr. dreaded what he was compelled to do by the Gospel, dreaded following what he called that day in his speech, "the vocation of agony."
The speech left Dr. King shaken, exhausted, and drained. It was a physical act of courage and faith just as much if not more than it was an intellectual and moral masterpiece.
Life Magazine, (remember it?) denounced the speech as: "a demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi." The Washington Post condescendingly wrote that the speech, "diminished (King's) usefulness to his cause, his country, and his people." A year later to the day, April 4, 1968, Rev. King was killed in Memphis trying to help striking garbage workers receive a decent wage.
The Gospel, this "vocation of agony", is not easy, it is not smooth, and it is not tranquil. It deals with the realities of life at their most basic level. It is not for the weak of heart or those who are afraid to dirty their hands with the stuff of life.
The Gospel is rich, rewarding and glorious, but it does not offer a resistance free path through life. The Gospel that promises so much, even eternal life, also demands so much, even our lives.
Where is the Gospel in Jesus' encounter with the Phoenician woman? Is it with Jesus as he refuses to help this Gentile woman who accosts the bone weary Jesus? Is it with the woman as she confronts Jesus and demands that he treat her dying child better than a dog? Is it with Jesus as he gives in, applauds the woman's clever and desperate reply, and offers healing?
Or is the Gospel to be found in the whole of this rough and tumble encounter? Can the truth be that the Gospel is being renewed and recreated in the confrontation between Jesus and the woman, between her unyielding demand to be included and Jesus' realization that she and her daughter are included? Is the Gospel being born again in new ways in this unseemly and difficult encounter between the ultimate insider and the ultimate outsider over table scraps, dogs and a sick child?
The Gospel does not come easy. It does not offer ease. It offers miracles that come out of the encounter between Christ and a person who will not let go, who will not settle for anything less than the full healing power of God Almighty. The Gospel is born again in the often difficult and messy encounter between Christ and the one who will not let go.
So grab Christ hard and never let go. It is not an easy ride, but it is worth the effort, of that there is no doubt. Grab hard onto Christ and do not let go.
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