|
“Family vacation” is an oxymoron in every language. Back when Judy and
Aaron and Ethan and I would take a family trip across the country, my way was to get most of the day’s
driving done before breakfast. Their way was to stay in bed as long as possible. My way was to take care
of all needs at one service station and not to stop again until the gas gauge approached empty. Their way
was to stop at every rest stop and historical marker and every hill and mole hill on the road. When
flying, my way is to be the first in line at the airport check-in counter, and then enjoy an hour or two
with the newspaper and a cup of coffee while waiting for the plane. They prefer to have the plane wait
for them. And by the end of the trip, everyone has had a go at explaining whose way is the right
way!
There’s no better way to test how well you get along with another person than to take a trip
together.
The Bible is the story of a long family trip. In the Book of Numbers this morning we find the
people of Israel on their way from Egypt to Canaan, with Moses as their driver. And in the Gospel of Mark
the disciples are on their way to Jerusalem, with Jesus leading the way. These are two legs of the same
journey, the journey the Bible tells us about as the people of God make their way to the kingdom of
God.
On the earlier leg of the trip things are not going well. It was a long and meandering trek from
slavery in Egypt to freedom in the Promised Land. It took forty years, someone has said, because even
back then men wouldn’t stop to ask directions. There weren’t any Holiday Inns, food and water were hard
to find, and from the back seat came a frequent whine: “Moses, are we there yet? Where are you taking us
anyway, Moses? Have you brought us out into this wilderness to starve to death? Let’s go back to Egypt
where we had all the meat and onions and garlic we wanted to eat. We’re sick of this manna!”
Moses, as one person put it, stood between the whining of the people and the Lord’s anger at their
unwillingness to pay a price for freedom. And it gets so bad for Moses that he decides he has had enough
of the privilege of leadership. “This people is a burden too heavy for me,” he complains to God. “I
cannot carry it alone.”
So God tells Moses to delegate some of the responsibility. God said that if Moses would gather
seventy of Israel’s elders at the Tent of Meeting, he would take some of the Spirit he had conferred upon
Moses and would give it to the seventy, who would then share Moses’s burden of leadership. As it turned
out, however, only sixty-eight of the seventy do as they are told and go to the Tent of Meeting. There
the Lord gives each of them a portion of his Spirit, and the sixty-eight begin to prophesy.
Then Moses receives a report that Eldad and Medad had not gone to church as they were supposed to,
but that the Spirit had come to rest on them anyway and that they were somewhere back in the camp
prophesying as well. And this is just too much for Joshua, who has faithfully served with Moses since he
was a boy, and he tattles to Moses, “Moses, my Lord, stop them.” But Moses says to him, “Are you jealous
on my account, Joshua? I wish that all the Lord’s people were prophets, and that the Lord would bestow
his Spirit upon them all!”
On the later leg of the trip we find that things aren’t much different. Jesus and the disciples
are on their way to Jerusalem when they come across a young boy who is sick and possessed by demons. The
disciples try to heal the boy, but they can’t do it. So Jesus heals him. And shortly after this, John
runs up to Jesus and tattles, “Master, we saw someone driving out demons in your name, and since he was
not one of us we tried to stop him.” And Jesus reassures John, “Do not stop him,” he says, “for anyone
who performs a miracle in my name will not be able the next moment to speak evil of me. Whoever is not
against us is on our side.”
“Whoever is not against us is on our side.” This was a hard saying for John to swallow, just as
it is a hard saying for some Christians to swallow today. But there it is, right there in the Bible. It
was a hard saying for John’s friend Matthew as well, because when Matthew later told these stories Mark
tells about Jesus, he told almost all of them, but he left out this story about the unknown healer. And
later in his Gospel, Matthew takes the words of Jesus we just heard in Mark and turns them around and
upside down. Matthew’s Jesus flatly contradicts Mark’s Jesus. “Whoever is not with me is against me” --
that’s what Matthew says that Jesus says.
Matthew’s is a Gospel of sharp distinctions. He speaks a lot about the sheep and the goats, about
the saved and the damned, about insiders and outsiders. Matthew’s Jesus says, “Whoever is not with us is
against us.” But Mark’s Jesus doesn’t speak this way. Mark’s Jesus says that “whoever is not against us
is on our side.”
Well, I don’t know about you, but this leaves me with at least two questions: Why do you think
Matthew did that to this story of Jesus he found in Mark? And which Jesus is right?
This is one of those places, I think, where theology has to help us interpret the Scriptures, one
of those places where we have to begin by asking ourselves what, deep down, we know God to be like as he
has been revealed to us in Jesus, and then rely on that revealed God himself to help us come to grips with
what the Bible is saying to us.
Is God a God who boxes out all those who don’t follow the rules? Is God a God who damns those who
don’t believe the right things? If so, then what are we to do with the story of Eldad and Medad, who
didn’t follow the rules but whom God entrusted with his Spirit anyway? And what do we do with the story
of the unknown healer in Mark’s Gospel, the unknown healer who “wasn’t one of us,” as John said, but whom
Jesus praised for his good deed and power and said, “Whoever is not against us is on our side”?
This makes me think of Gandhi. Early in his life in South Africa, Gandhi was greatly attracted to
Jesus, but Gandhi did not become a Christian, because many of the Christians he saw there did not seem to
live very close to the way Jesus lived.
When the black plague broke out in the squalid Indian ghetto of Johannesburg, the sick and dying
had to be quarantined. And a heroic nurse -- whether she was a Christian or a Hindu or a Muslim or
Jewish or of no religious faith at all, I don’t know -- in any case the nurse took fearless charge of
the care of the victims of the plague.
And the nurse later tells of a night when a small figure appeared at the door. She shouted a
warning: “Get out! This is plague!” But the man quietly replied, “It’s all right. I’ve come to help
you.” The nurse realized he was a leader in the Indian community, so she let him in. At once, Gandhi
went to the sick. She watched him bend over a dying man covered with vermin. “Leave him,” she ordered.
“I’m used to it [and have already been exposed].” But Gandhi continued to attend to the man himself.
Whether the sick man was Christian or Hindu or Muslim or unbeliever, I don’t know. And neither did Gandhi
know. But Gandhi looked up at the nurse and replied, “He is my brother.” And he stayed throughout the
night until relief came.
Was Gandhi the unknown healer Jesus was talking about when he said, “Whoever is not against us is
on our side”?
“Whoever is not against us is on our side.” Sometimes I wonder what we’ve done to the name of
Christ.
Those of you who read Peanuts know that Charlie Brown has a problem with kites. Every time
Charlie Brown gets a kite in the air, it gets caught in a tree. In one strip, Charlie Brown goes out to
buy yet another new kite, but this time the owner of the kite store refuses to sell him one. Charlie
Brown is crestfallen, and when he sees Lucy outside the store, he says, “They won’t sell me a kite. They
say I’ll just get it caught in a tree. They say I’m giving kite flying a bad name.”
“That’s ridiculous!” Lucy says, outraged. “Give me your money. I’ll go buy a kite for you.”
Lucy marches into the store. “Sir,” she says, “I want to buy a red kit. What? Of course, it’s
for myself. What do you think I’m going to do, give it to my friend, Charlie Brown?” And Lucy
immediately realizes her slip, but it’s too late.
And then, back out on the sidewalk, Lucy comforts Charlie Brown. “Here, Charlie Brown, I bought
you a marble.”
Charlie Brown has to face up to what he has done to the name of kite flying. And I wonder if we
Christians are ready to face up to what we sometimes do to the name of Christ when we use it to beat up on
those who don’t play by the rules as we understand them, or when we use the name of Christ to exclude
those who don’t believe as we do, those who, as John said to Jesus, “are not one of us”?
We have some explaining to do, don’t we, when we use Christ’s name in this way, while God gives
his Spirit to Eldad and Medad, and while Jesus praises the unknown man who was “not one of us” and says
that “whoever is not against us is on our side.”
If the Bible is the story of the trip we are all taking toward the kingdom of God, it seems to me
that it is a story of a people who do not all agree, and never have all agreed, a story of a people who do
not always follow the same rules. Joshua was mightily annoyed that God would do such an outrageous thing
as give his Spirit to those who didn’t get themselves to church when they had been told to, and John
couldn’t imagine sharing the healing ministry of Jesus with those who “are not one of us.”
And here on our own later part of the journey, we know that Lutherans and Episcopalians and Jews
and Baptists and Hindus and Muslims and Roman Catholics are different, and that we don’t all believe the
same things. As we saw at our General Convention this summer, and as we will see at our diocesan
convention next weekend, not even all Episcopalians believe the same things or follow the same rules. And
how could it possibly be otherwise? It is not possible, it seems to me, for all people to believe the
same things, anymore than it is possible that everyone will want to get on the road at the same time every
morning.
I’m reminded here of the story about Bishop Fulton Sheen, who was a popular television personality
forty or fifty years ago. Bishop Sheen was invited to address a number of important persons at City Hall
in New York City one day, but on his way there he got lost. He got off the subway at the nearest stop,
but City Hall was a two or three block walk from there, and on his way he made a wrong turn and found
himself in the middle of a side street where a number of young men were playing stick ball. Bishop Sheen
asked the young men for directions to City Hall, and they gave them to him. Then, before he left, he
asked them if they would like to go with him to listen to his speech so they could learn how to get to
heaven, and one of the fellows said, “Mister, you can’t even find City Hall. How are you going to find
heaven?”
For us human beings to try to squeeze everyone into the same theological box is simply to seek the
impossible. And what today’s stories say to me is that God himself does not expect it. If today’s
stories say anything, they say that God is not fenced in by our boundaries, and that God sends his Spirit
where he wants to. These stories suggest that God’s boundaries are considerably more expansive and more
elastic than ours, that God sometimes gives his Spirit and power to those who are “not one of us” as well
as to us, and that if those who are “not one of us” are not against us, then they’re on our side.
William Willimon tells two interesting stories that reflect two different theologies, two
different views of the revealed God, and of his Church and his kingdom. They are two different theologies
that compete for our consideration as we read our Bibles and make our journey together toward God’s
kingdom.
The first is about a woman named Linda Petracelli. Although she is now a United Church of Christ
minister, she grew up going to a strict Roman Catholic school. And she recalls that one day Sister Mary
Roberts Cecilia delivered the sermon to the children in chapel. One of the things Sister Mary Roberts
Cecilia told them was that everyone who is not Catholic, everyone including, and especially, Lutherans and
Episcopalians, is going to hell.
That afternoon when Linda got home, her mother asked her the question she asked her every
afternoon. “What are you thankful for today, dear?” she wanted to know. And Linda sighed, “I’m thankful
that Sister Mary Roberts Cecilia is not God.”
I don’t tell this story, I hope you realize, because I think it is uniquely, or even
characteristically, reflective of Roman Catholics. I tell it because Sister Mary Roberts Cecilia’s is a
theology that lurks deep within us all.
The other story is about a Wednesday evening in the basement of Duke University Chapel. Willimon
says that the Duke Chapel basement has only eight rooms, but on this particular Wednesday evening all
thirteen religious groups that call the Chapel basement home were having meetings or services.
Baptists were stepping over Lutherans, the Jews were holding a heated discussion in the
Presbyterian Campus Ministry office, the Roman Catholics had borrowed the Methodists’ space for their
Eucharist, and Campus Crusade had overflowed into the Catholic Campus Ministry Center.
Willimon says that as he passed the Lutheran campus minister, who was trying to make his way to
his own group through a throng of praying charismatics, he heard him mutter, ‘Won’t we all be in for a
surprise if heaven looks like this!’”
Many of you know the Center for Christian-Jewish Dialogue, which was founded several years ago by
Rabbi Hirsch. Made up of all kinds of Jews and all kinds of Christians, the Center assumes that its
members will never agree on everything and will never believe all the same things. So it took the Center
a long time to pull together a vision statement for this group which, in principle, cannot agree on many
things. Because the members cannot agree even on something as fundamental as who Jesus is, “right belief”
cannot therefore be part of the Center’s vision or objective.
So here is the vision the Center agreed upon: “The Center for Christian-Jewish Dialogue brings
Christians and Jews together to explore and understand their beliefs and values in ways that build
relationships which are pleasing to God.”
What a splendid vision! What a splendid objective for the journey we’re all taking together!
The reality is that it is simply not possible, on this family trip of ours, for everyone to
believe the same things, anymore than it is possible that everyone will want to get on the road at the
same time each morning or will want to stop at the same places along the way.
What is possible is a mutual exploration and a mutual sharing of our beliefs and values “in ways
that build relationships which are pleasing to God.”
Wouldn’t that be a wonderful vision statement for the Church of Christ itself? And for the
Episcopal Church in particular. I wonder, in fact, if it’s not the Bible’s vision for the human journey.
Wouldn’t it be a wonderful vision statement for the nations of the world?
Perhaps that’s what God is using the Bible to do to us today in these stories about Eldad and
Medad and the unknown healer. Perhaps God is calling us to recognize that God’s boundaries are
considerably more elastic and expansive than ours. Perhaps God is calling us to recognize that God’s
boundaries can include those who “are not one of us.” Maybe God is calling us who are on this journey of
life to recognize that his vision for human beings is for all of us, regardless of agreement or
disagreement, to explore and understand our beliefs and values in ways that build relationships among
ourselves which are pleasing to him.
Is it possible that such relationships are the kingdom we’ve been searching for all these
years?
In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. |