The Meaning in the End

Mark 13:1-8

            Last year in Advent, I followed my practice of the last five years of picking a theme to lace together my sermons for a whole year.  Unlike those of prior years, my sermons this year have made scant reference to the theme.   That theme has been “The Search for Meaning.”  Broad enough, wouldn’t you say?  I don’t know whether the theme or the sermons have been helpful to you, but looking at all the scriptures through this particular lens has at least been helpful to me.  I have deliberately tried to imagine myself each Sunday as a newcomer to St. Stephen’s, trying to put myself in the position of one who has not been to church much in recent years.  I have tried to look at scriptures through the eyes of one who might be vaguely searching for meaning, but more explicitly searching for identity, for a sense of place, a direction in life.  I have listened to the words of the Bible, trying to experience them against the backdrop of not of very much Christian experience, or indeed any religious experience, but of a general lack of knowledge about what any of it means or how to put any of it to practical use.  I have also kept in mind those who sit in these pews Sunday after Sunday wanting to hear something fresh, stimulating, perhaps even shocking to a point.  I have some sympathies for those who fight the yawns of boredom with what can sometimes be a religion that seems to do its best to dull meaning and to dampen imagination.  And, of course, no less important are those, young and old, who are genuinely excited by their faith and who want to dig ever more deeply to plumb it for ultimate Meaning.

            This particular hermeneutic—the search for meaning—has gotten to be quite interesting.  Hermeneutic, by the way, is what we biblical students call a principle of interpretation—what I sometimes refer to, as I just did, as a lens through which to read scripture.  It has been interesting because, as this year has unwound, I have found myself eager to engage in conversations with people—both here and elsewhere—who are in fact looking for meaning, and who are willing to talk about it.  Although I have been doing it for years, I have begun to do it with much more attention and energy than ever before.  Just two weeks ago, I was in a kitchen full of people who were chatting about what they did and did not experience in Christianity.  Some were people who had never had much if any experience of church at all.  One or two had some experience, but it was mostly negative, constricting, hyper-judgmental, and critical.  At least one was a young, enthusiastic convert to Buddhism.  The average age of the group might have been thirty, or slightly less.  I can’t quite get enough of such conversations.  All of them teach me something about what many people are actually thinking these days about their own lives and what gives them meaning—or not.

            So it is in that frame of reference that I hear this gospel message today.  It is sometimes called “The Little Apocalypse of St. Mark.”  We hear it today for a couple of reasons.  One is that we have been reading Mark all year long, with few exceptions, and we are coming to the end of it, where this passage appears.  Another is that we are two Sundays away from Advent.  Even though some of us preachers slug it out each year with Advent themes like judgment, repentance, watchful waiting, hope, justice, and the signs and wonders that point to God’s future with humanity and the planet we live on, I suspect that most of that stuff doesn’t go down very well because folks have their minds on Christmas—which is in contrast much more pleasant to think about.   Maybe there is a chance before we hit Thanksgiving and thus the grand opening of the “holiday season” to grab on to something shockingly apocalyptic.  So my jumping off point today is to ask you what on earth can be the meaning of impossibly difficult things.

            Difficult things.  That is what we face as we look towards any future that we can reasonably imagine.  If you are a recent college graduate and have landed in Washington, DC, because you have a job, you have already probably been through more job searches, more interviews, written more letters and networked more than I have in my entire life.  You know that the future, while you are excited and positive about it now, is chancy and maybe even bleak.  If you are approaching retirement, you must have some sense of foreboding as Congress plans your financial future in the process of trying to veer away from the “fiscal cliff.”  If you have made it to your seventies or eighties and you are still in good health, perhaps you have a sense of an impending ordeal, for few of us get past 85 without some serious and hard challenges.  And who among us can look at the mounting evidence of a rapidly changing climate and not worry about the future?  Forget what is causing them:  storms like Sandy and Katrina and record snowfalls and melting ice caps do not promise an easy time for planet earth and its dithering politicians. 

            Lest you think that I am totally out of line in bringing up such a string of pleasantries, allow me to point you to the gospel for today that mentions just a few of the signs of a pretty dark future.  Try earthquakes, famines, and wars.  “Aha!” someone will say.  “We must be at the end of the world now!  Look at how many of these prophecies are coming to pass!”  Well, yes.  And they came to pass last year, and ten years ago, and fifty years ago, and a century ago, and five hundred years ago, and every single day and year since Jesus said them and Mark wrote them down.  There is nothing new here, and, come to think of it, nothing all that “apocalyptic,” if by that you mean “revealing,” which is what the word actually indicates.  Wars, famines, earthquakes, and a host of other things do in fact reveal things, however.  All such things expose human weaknesses.  All of them underscore our vulnerability.  Each of them propels us into crisis.  Not one of them, nor any other such catastrophe, can be thoroughly tamed—not even war, which, while not theoretically inevitable, still proves among striving, competing, driven people a very attractive option.  Witness the reluctance on the part of many actually to bring to an end our longest war to date.  Witness even more the eagerness on the part of some to inflame war with Iran.  Witness those who this very minute rub their hands in anticipation of yet another showdown between Israel and the Palestinians.  Mark Twain somewhere called original sin “ordinary human cussedness.”  There are few signs of a human future free of ordinary human cussedness.  So put all this together and you have a recipe for ongoing apocalypse: a very difficult future.

            Now if that were the only meaning in life, I doubt that you would need to come to church to find out about it.  But the whole point of this story is that the disciples are asking Jesus questions about when his prediction of the Temple’s destruction will come to pass.  Jesus sets them straight about how when is not the issue but rather how to be disciples under tough circumstances.  Now that is something that we can get a hold on.  How can we live as people of faith, as people of hope, no matter what the future brings?  Keep in mind that there is no such thing as “the future,” only what we can imagine or predict now, in the present.  The important thing is always who we are and what we do now.   Jesus says to his disciples in this whole passage (only part of which we read today) to keep cool.  Stay centered.  Do not go with the latest fads.  Don’t follow everyone who comes along claiming to be the newest messiah or who claims the mantle of Jesus.  When you are under pressure, keep calm and carry on, never worrying about what to say or fearing what will happen to you.  In short, Jesus’ words are words not terrifying but encouraging.

            Now there’s a thought.  We have to admit that an enormous amount of religious animus is invested in scaring the hell out of people.  And that in turn is really about controlling people, usually for sinister ends and cynical purposes.  But Jesus is not into that at all, though he certainly spares the religious establishment of his day no dire warnings.  Just because you see the world falling apart does not mean that it is coming to an end, he points out.  These things are the birth pangs of a new era.  And what might that be?  It is fairly clear that Jesus viewed the Kingdom of God as the onset of a new age, possibly a thorough renovation of the world as we know it, and certainly an age where love and justice would characterize relationships.  If Jesus, like the Early Church, was indeed mistaken (I know that it may rattle some of you to think that Jesus ever made a mistake about anything, but hear me out), if Jesus was mistaken about the imminent coming of the reign of God, then is there any value at all in considering this new age being born? 

            The answer is that in fact that this “new age” is exactly what gives meaning to everything we do as Christians.  This is where we find the meaning that we have been and are and always will be searching for.  This “new age,” of which Jesus speaks, is another name for the resurrection life into which we have come through baptism.  It can also be called “heaven,” because it is life with God both now and eternally.  You may also refer to it simply as “Christian life.”  If you find the notion of being born again attractive and helpful, that certainly is a biblical metaphor to describe it, for this “new age” is exactly what Jesus had in mind (I am bold to assert so!) when he talked about becoming as children, or being begotten from above.  If you find the imagery of the cross particularly compelling, think of the new age as one in which you are taking up your cross and following him, for that is an apt description of discipleship, that state which is precisely what Jesus calls Peter, Andrew, James, John, you and me to live in and practice. 

            Time only moves forward.  Reality, therefore, is always thrusting in the direction of what is yet to happen.  There are two ways of living in time.  One is memory and the other is imagination.  Memory can be a good thing—thank God for it—but it can also be a curse.  Most of us spend 99% of our time playing out of our book of memories.  We are trying to work out the leftovers from past experiences in the present, trying to make this relationship better than the old one, measuring our current life by what is in the past.  But imagination, or inspiration I’d rather call it, is to have a vision that is not necessarily tied to the past, at least not to past behavior or past events.  And that is what Jesus’ resurrection opens for us.  That is what the new age involves.  It is a vision, in fact a whole gallery of visions, of what life can be with a few fundamental and key changes.  It is, like those many paintings of Edward Hicks, a peaceable kingdom, where lions and lambs, wolves and sheep, dwell together, a veritable paradise where Republicans and Democrats, Jews and Arabs, stop hating each other.  It is a vision of community rather than the illusion of personal self-sufficiency.  It is a vision of life based on an ethic of charity rather than a value of acquiring as much as possible.  It is a vision of a world where humans are no longer at war with nature, and God dwells in and with all people, who indeed recognize their oneness with God and each other. 

            You caught a glimpse of such a vision as you read or sang Hannah’s Song this morning [1 Samuel 2:10-10].  Not unlike Mary’s song when she was pregnant with Jesus, Hannah’s song rejoices in a life turned upside down, a radical reversal of values—the poor lifted from the dust, the rich cast down—because God makes no peace with oppression.  The way that kind of vision works is not just to give us a phrase or two to put on Christmas cards, but actually to shape the way we think and live.  Feature it as a kind of future that we literally pull into the present, as we begin seeing more and more that things which were cast down are being raised up, things that had grown old are being made new, and that all things are being brought to their perfection by him through whom all things were made, Jesus Christ.

            So were the makers of the Mayan calendar right?  Is 2012 the end of it all?  Suppose it is.  Wars, earthquakes, famines, all the rest of the misery they can film and report:  what would the meaning of it all come down to?  And what would be the point of your life in the largest context you could conceive?  If our hopes are built on anything less than the saving grace of God, author and giver of all things, then we might as well toss in the towel, because at best we have a few fleeting pleasures here and there, and nothing much will matter when there is no one left to tell the tale.  But the Christian hope sees the vision of the new age as more than a pipe dream. It is real.  It is true.  It is dependable.  Life for each of us will assuredly come to an end, but God will last beyond every dying spark.  And those whose energies, lives, hearts, souls are wrapped up in God will not have gone to waste.   Quite the opposite.  We will be like God, for we shall be living in God.  Self will cease to matter.  God will be all in all.

            And that is why the Christian life is full of little ironies, such as when we gather for each other’s funerals, affirming the meaning of life in the midst of death, saying the words of the Prayer Book, “All of us go down to the dust; yet even at the grave we make our song:  Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.”

© Frank Gasque Dunn

Ministry, Plans, and Changes of Plans

A sermon preached at St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church, Washington, DC, September 6, 2009

Mark 7:24-37

A novel I began reading this week opens with a scene of a Swiss professor walking across a bridge. He sees a rather distraught looking woman who suddenly appears to be on the verge of jumping off the bridge. He is ready to intervene when suddenly she stops, turns, and writes on his forehead a telephone number that, lacking paper, she wants to remember. She follows him to class. He only has the briefest conversation with her, but it is enough to impel him to leave his teaching post and travel halfway across Europe to Portugal, where she had come from.

I can’t tell you more because I have barely read more. But I don’t need to. It is a weird beginning, in a way. And yet it is thoroughly believable. Not because it happens every day: it does not. Yet there occurs in nearly all our lives an occasional incident whose effect on us is out of all proportion to its content or circumstances. It contains the power completely to rewrite our scripts, to alter the ways we look at the universe, or at the very least thoroughly to shake up our plans.

Such an incident forms the gospel for today. If you are tracking Jesus in Mark’s gospel, you can tell an enormous amount about the meaning of the story simply from knowing the geography of Jesus’ travels. Jesus and the disciples have crossed the Sea of Galilee a second time. They have gone to a deserted place, presumably on the eastern bank. People have followed on foot the several miles around the northern shore of the sea. It is there that he feeds them by multiplying the loaves and fish. The group comes back across the sea, and lands at Genessaret, where immediately a throng besieges him, begging for his healing power. After going around the farms and villages and cities to the north and west of the Sea of Galilee, Jesus encounters a deputation of religious leaders who upbraid him for his and his disciples’ being careless about matters of ritual purity. Then he does something that, up till now in the story, he has not tried. He heads into Gentile territory. He moves away from his native stomping ground in Galilee, and heads towards the Mediterranean coast. Mark’s readers are aware that Tyre and Sidon are largely non-Jewish centers. The notion seems to be that Jesus is on retreat. He enters a house—we don’t know whose—and he specifically does not want anyone to know that he is there.

We cannot say what Jesus’ plans really were, even in the context of Mark’s narrative. But we do know that this is not the first time in this gospel that Jesus has encountered a Gentile. The first incident happened a few chapters back on the first trip he and his disciples took across the Sea. Now that is significant in itself, because the land to the east of the Sea of Galilee was also Gentile territory. We know that it was because it was near Gerasa that Jesus encountered the demon-possessed man out of whom he drove the demons into a herd of swine. Jews don’t raise hogs; Gentiles do. The pigs promptly ran down the bank and into the sea and drowned. It is a terrifying story, and does not do much to show deep sensitivity to a Gentile farm economy, this exorcism. Nonetheless, after only this one incident, in which the demoniac is healed and ordered to stay on his side of the lake, Jesus and his disciples cross back over to Jewish territory.

So, while he is visiting in this home somewhere near the coast, comes this woman who is identified as a Syrophoenician, a Gentile. Her little daughter has an unclean spirit. The woman bows down at Jesus’ feet, a gesture of obvious humility and supplication. She begs him to cast the demon out of her daughter. Then Jesus says something that to many ears sounds utterly incomprehensible, given the usual suppositions about Jesus’ universal inclusiveness. “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” Choke! Might it not be that Jesus, good Jew that he was, actually saw the world in these terms? What we can say with some assurance is that at this point, Jesus’ ministry takes a decidedly different turn. He does not in fact, return to the familiar towns of Galilee, but instead heads through Sidon to that eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee, the Region of the Decapolis, more Gentile territory.

Assuming that Jesus was not playing games with the Syrophoenician woman (some commentators have suggested as much), she clearly had an impact on his ministry, and quite likely on his self-understanding. Certainly, her persistence that he heal her daughter caused him to change his mind and attitude towards her. And it was not just her persistence, but her willingness, as a foreigner and outsider, to state her claim on Jesus’ power and attention. Matthew tells the story a bit more elaborately. There the woman is like the importunate widow elsewhere in the gospels, clamoring for attention, bugging the disciples, annoying them beyond their patience. In that account it is clearer that the woman is outside her rights to insist on a healing when she is not even a member of the household of Israel. Mark simply says that Jesus tells her, “For saying this you may go—the demon has left your daughter.”

As the story continues, it seems clear that this encounter has changed the nature of Jesus’ mission. For when he goes to the Decapolis, the Gentiles bring one of their own, a deaf man with a speech impediment, to be healed. He does not respond by arguing that the man has no claim on healing or other blessings because he is not a Jew. No, this time Jesus has not entered Gentile territory fundamentally to get away from it all, but specifically for the purpose of ministering. Now the interesting thing about this deaf man is that he embodies exactly what Israel thought of Gentiles. One of Israel’s poets, contrasting his faith with that of the Gentiles, wrote,

Our God is in heaven; Whatever he wills to do he does. Their idols are silver and gold, The work of human hands. They have mouths, but they cannot speak; Eyes have they, but they cannot see; They have ears, but they cannot hear; Noses, but they cannot smell; They have hands, but they cannot feel; Feet, but they cannot walk; They make no sound with their throat. Those who make them are like them, And so are all who put their trust in them. [Psalm 115:3-8]

In almost no other healing account in the gospels do we get so graphic a description of Jesus’ healing as we do in this one. He takes the man privately, places his fingers in his ears, spits and touches his tongue. We have come a long way from Tyre when Gentiles were accorded the status of dogs.

There is no doubt that the most significant achievement of early Christianity is that, instead of remaining a sect within Judaism, it consciously, if at first hesitantly, embraced the Gentile mission. If we think that the Church is wrestling with explosive issues today in the realm of human sexuality, we should remember that these issues hardly compare with the gigantic breakthrough of the Early Church in smashng down the wall between Jew and Gentile. The way Mark tells the story, it is clear that Jesus himself is the origin of that movement. And how did that come to be? The key incident is that one day a Syrophoenician woman implored him to heal her little girl, resolved not to take “No” for an answer, and argued that, if she were a Gentile dog, she could still gather up the crumbs that fell from Israel’s table.

Ministry, yours as well as mine, is frequently about revising our plans and notions, even those we are completely committed to. That itself is something that a great many people have trouble seeing. Humans hold on to the past with a vengeance, whether it is a personal past or a social or religious or political past. Often the impulse to preserve what has worked well serves to protect and to extend important learnings. But all the great breakthroughs in any sphere of life are by their very nature events that blast open the confines of previously accepted wisdom. They are breakthroughs precisely because they break through barriers and ceilings and take us to new places. Yet those new places are always scary to a great many of us. We don’t know how to think or how to behave without familiar charts and conventions. Our pattern is usually to resist, and ultimately to fall back into the more familiar patterns, at least for awhile. Thus, the Early Church had its Judaizers, seeking to undo at least the thrust of the Gentile mission’s insight that the center of our freedom is in a Risen Christ and not in keeping kosher. The Reformation on both sides did not take long to devolve into a new orthodoxy, in some ways and places as rigid as the old. Vatican II, which many of us remember as shaking loose the ossified establishment of Western Christianity, both Catholic and Protestant, has been followed by decades of retrenchment.

Nor is religion the only place we see the dynamic at work. Scientists are notoriously slow to revise their mindset when an Einstein or a Heisenberg comes along with an unorthodox notion that challenges established theory. Much of what we have been seeing this summer in the way of political overreaction in the health care debate is the clash of undeniably new thinking with people’s patterned responses which they employ and defend despite all reason.

Jesus could certainly have made a case—indeed we see him making one—in Tyre which would have left the Gentile woman with a mentally ill daughter indefinitely, a case based on his own plans and the received mindset of his people. Instead he allowed himself to be changed.

Yes. Even Jesus learned what it meant to take a deep breath and look into space and say to himself, “Ephphatha! Be opened!”