From the Pulpit:

The Rev. Margaret Waters

You’ve heard it said a lot of times, probably by a number of people in public life and privately – If you’re not with us you’re against us. We’ve all heard it said, and we’ve understood it. It is a statement that expresses conviction. The words, once spoken, draw a line in the sand and demand a clarification. Who is in and who is out. Who is friend, supporter, orthodox and who is enemy, subversive, heretic. We’ve heard the words and we’ve taken our place and found ourselves lined up and defined. And we look across the field at the opposing team and assess what it is that we are up against.  

We’ve just heard a passage of Mark’s gospel that taken on its own sounds pretty disturbing to me, so I think we need to put on our wide angle lens and place it in its context before we get all consumed with demons and hell and millstones around our necks and chopping off body parts and being cast into the fire where the worm never dies. That’s not what I want you to take home with you today, though I can’t deny that it is there in black and white.  If we back up a little bit we’ll see that Jesus and the disciples are on the road. They’ve been at Caesarea Philippi, where Peter first recognized that Jesus is the Messiah. No sooner were those words out of his mouth than Jesus clarified what it meant, not that he was going to be the royal conqueror, but rather that he would be killed by the empire, and that to be a disciple was not a free ticket to privilege but a calling to carry on his counter-cultural work with all its inherent danger. Then he took Peter, James, and John up the mountain where he was transfigured and they heard God say in no uncertain terms, This is my son, my beloved, listen to him. In case they didn’t notice, the message is getting hammered home, and as we know, they didn’t really notice, because not too much later they are all in a swivet about which one of them was going to be the greatest, and that was when Jesus swept up a little street urchin in his arms, wrapped him in a hug and told the shocked and horrified disciples, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.” It should be clear as day.

So here we are with this morning’s reading and John, in the very next sentence shows he hasn’t got it. They caught somebody casting out demons in the name of Jesus, but he’s not part of the club so they tried to stop him. Jesus hasn’t even let the urchin run back into the crowd yet if Jesus had my lack of patience he would have said to John, “What part of this do you not understand?” And then he flips that picture of who is in and who is out on its head. He doesn’t say what the word says. No, he says “Whoever is not against us is for us.”  It is not about teams after all. It is about the kingdom, and kingdom work is not about control. No, if we know one thing about kingdom work it is that if it is real, if we really let ourselves run with it, it will always be uncontrollable. What we envision and hope for will always be too small. That little child in Jesus’ arms doesn’t have a short term goal and a long term goal, no assessment of what success and failure would look like and no tools for evaluating performance. No, that child is full of curiosity and adventure, and he has scrapes on his knees from when he fell because he dared climb too high, and rips in his tunic from where he got tangled in brambles, but he’s still got that sparkle in his eyes and he’s looking for the next wonder and the next new friend. Until a minute ago he didn’t know this big burly guy whose embrace feels better than he can explain and which he feels no urgency to escape. Imagine having the arms of Jesus wrapped around you.

Steve Lopez is a journalist who writes for the L A Times. His book The Soloist was recently made into a movie which I found profoundly moving. Lopez was looking for a story with punch and thought he’d found it when he saw a homeless man playing transporting music on a violin with only two strings to a statue of Beethoven in a public park. The minute Nathaniel Ayres starts to speak in rapid fire word salad you know that he is afflicted with mental illness, but embedded in it is his claim to have gone to Julliard, the prestigious music school in New York. Here’s my story, thinks Lopez, and so he calls Julliard only to be told that no Nathaniel Ayres was a graduate. Story shot down. That is until Julliard calls back to say that Nathaniel didn’t graduate but had been one of their most promising students and they had lost track of him some years ago. The story is back on track. Human interest. The homeless cello prodigy provides focus on the plight of the 90,000 homeless people of Los Angeles. Whatever you do for the least of these, you do for me. People are captivated with Lopez’s columns to the point where a woman whose hands have become too arthritic to play her cello gives it to Lopez to give to Ayres. But it is too valuable for him to have on the street, so Lopez deals with him and convinces him that it is only safe to have that cello and his music within a facility for the homeless and mentally ill called the Lamp. Lopez becomes Ayres’ friend, but he is a friend with an agenda, a short term goal and a long term goal and it is for Ayres to be his project and his success, and of course you know it doesn’t work out. The kingdom’s work is too big for that and too messy, and so, in the end, for which you will need Kleenex, Lopez learns that he has to let go. He has to love Ayres as a gifted and beloved child of God, not as his success story. Even though I don’t think God or Jesus are even mentioned in the film, this is the kingdom at work, and even if redemption is not what we think it will be, redemption reigns. 

Who are the little ones Jesus is talking about, the ones he warns the disciples in bone-chilling terms not to put a stumbling block in their paths? Nathaniel Ayres would be a little one. The man casting out demons in Jesus’ name would be one as well as the person relieved of the demon. The person you hand a homeless kit to might be, not because he is homeless, but rather that in receiving kindness he might see the kingdom. Your dog groomer might be. Your pediatrician or lawyer or the guy who picks up your recycling. 

In a few minutes we are going to install the mentors and prayer partners for our Kids’ Hope program. I’m so excited about this. Fifteen of our members will be mentoring at risk first graders at Menchaca Elementary School. They will help them for an hour a week with school work and will play games and most importantly listen to them and demonstrate by their presence that no matter how challenging their little lives may be, there is one grown up who will be there for them even though they don’t have to be. And each mentor and child will have a parishioner praying for them. Do not ever imagine that prayer is not powerful and important. Are we out to make these children and their families Episcopalians or members of St. Alban’s? Emphatically no! Of course they are welcome. But if you know anything about public schools you know we cannot and should not go to evangelize if evangelism takes its narrow meaning, which is to add members to our team. No, as our Bishop Andy Doyle said this week in the Blandy lectures at the seminary, we are called to get down off this hill and to do the work of Christ, to be the bridge between this broken world and the kingdom and to let God take people where they are meant to be. It might be St. Alban’s, but it might not. Jesus didn’t spend one day of his life trying to get anybody to go to the Temple or to the correct synagogue. He proclaimed the good news of the kingdom and healed the pain and brokenness of the world. And he commissioned the disciples to proclaim the good news of the kingdom and to heal the pain and brokenness of the world, and my dear brothers and sisters, that is all we are called to do as well – proclaim the good news of the kingdom and heal the pain and brokenness of the world. 

Next Sunday we are going to have our Pet Blessing Extraordinaire at Menchaca Elementary School. The way it has worked out is not plan A or even plan B, but even when we don’t get our way, there is still plenty of latitude for God’s will to be done.

Actually our reluctance to let go of our agenda is exactly what tends to be a stumbling block for the little ones, the people who are going to come with trepidation, as I imagine a number of folks who dare to come to church do at first. We are not ever to stand in their way and tell them what they must believe in order to be one of us. We are to welcome them and to listen to them, to find out who they are and what they are hungry for and to affirm the gifts they bring with them.  And the fact is that each and every one of us, no matter where we are on our spiritual journey, is a little one.  We’ve probably all tripped over a stumbling block that somebody who thought they were the authority placed in our path. Somebody has tried to fit our square peg into their round hole, and it has hurt.  But that very hurt can be transformed into compassion and can empower us to let go of our agenda so that we can be servants of the kingdom, so that we can hear what Jesus says, whoever is not against us is with us, and not what the world says,  so we can embrace our membership in an inclusive family, not a combative team, so we can understand that the little ones are not only those who we perceive to have less than we do or know less than we do or are less religious than we are, but that we are all little ones hungry and hoping and believing in the kingdom and that the very best thing we will ever feel are the arms of Jesus wrapped around us in love.

Amen.

02/13/2010