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There's no better way for a family to test its mettle than to take a trip together, and 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 leader. 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 try to find 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. There weren't any Holiday Inns, food and water were hard to find, and from the back seat came a persistent and annoying 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! We never wanted to come on this trip in the first place." 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, God would take some of the Spirit he had conferred upon Moses and would share it with 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 a tattletale runs to tell Moses that Eldad and Medad were prophesying as well. And this is just too much for Joshua, who liked for the people to stay in their ranks, and he complains to Moses. "Moses, my Lord, stop them. Eldad and Medad didn't go to church to get the Spirit the way they were supposed to. They slept in or something!" But Moses said, "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 his disciples are on their way to Jerusalem when they come across a young boy who is sick, possessed by demons. The disciples try to heal the boy in the name of Jesus, but they can't do it. So Jesus heals him. And shortly after this, John runs up and tattles to Jesus about something that happened while they were on the road. "Master," he said, we saw someone driving out demons in your name, and since he was not one of us we tried to stop him." And like the informer in Moses' day, John sounds as if he's looking for a pat on the back. But Jesus says, "Do not stop him, for anyone who performs a miracle in my name will not be able the next moment to speak evil of me. I wish that all the Lord's people were healers, and that the Lord would bestow his Spirit upon all of them. Whoever is not against us is on our side." "Whoever is not against us is on our side." These words of Jesus were hard for John to swallow, just as they are hard for some Christians to swallow today. But there they are, right there in the Bible. They were hard for John's friend Matthew to swallow as well, because when Matthew later includes these stories from Mark in his own Gospel, he told almost all of them, but he leaves out this story about the unknown healer, and he 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? And which Jesus is the Jesus we are to follow, the Jesus in Mark's Gospel who insists that people are with him if they're not against him, or the Jesus in Matthew's Gospel who says people are against him if they're not with him? 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 God 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 all 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 are we to do we with the story of the unknown healer in Mark's Gospel, the one who "wasn't one of us," as John said, but whom Jesus praised for his good deed and for his trust in God's Spirit, and 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. I wonder if we Christians are ready to face up to what we sometimes do to the name of Christ when we use Christ's name 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, like the unknown healer in today's Gospel, "are not one of us"? What today's stories from the Scriptures say to me is that no human being claim to own the name of God, and no human being can claim to own the name of Jesus. Or, as Dorothy Sayers puts it, "There is no power in this world or the next that can keep a soul from God if God is what [that soul] really desires." Which seems to me to be a pretty good reflection of what Jesus tells us: "Whoever gives you a cup of water because you are followers of the Messiah will certainly not go unrewarded," says Jesus. And certainly those who cast out demons in Messiah's name, those who relieve the burdens of others because of God, even if they are "not one of us," are with us, not against us. So beware of judging your neighbor, Jesus adds, a caution echoed by James in his letter. "There is only one lawgiver and judge," says James - "he who is able to save life or destroy it. So who are you to judge your neighbor?" Better to examine your own behavior, suggests Jesus, for if anyone who would cause one of these little ones who believe to fall, it would be better for him to be thrown into the sea with a millstone around his neck." Causing one who would do good in the name of God to fall from God is dangerous business, he insists. Better to tear out your eye or cut off your foot than find yourself in hell, Jesus tells his disciples. Better to examine yourselves than to judge other believers. What today's readings seem to be about is sharing "ownership." And sharing "ownership" in the faith is possible, even desirable, because no human being can claim to own the name of God, or to own the name of Jesus. Joshua and John both thought they could. Joshua was mightily annoyed when Eldad and Medad prophesied without getting God's Spirit in church the way Joshua thought it should be done, and John simply couldn't imagine sharing the healing ministry of Jesus with those who are "not one of us." But Moses told Joshua that he wished that God would give his spirit to everyone, and Jesus said that "whoever is not against us is for us." "John suffers from 'Christian' possessiveness," says Gordon McMullan, "which differs from 'secular' possessiveness only because it is exercised in the name of Christ. [In other words], whether in the Church or out of it, possessiveness is always born from a sense of inferiority.... The possessive personality wants others [to be] as unsuccessful as it is, and maybe John is uncomfortable about the [the fact] that he and his fellow disciples [had] failed earlier to exorcise the demons from the little boy. Possessive people have plans for others, and when these others don't sign on, holy terror breaks loose. The possessive person says, in essence, 'You belong to me; do as I say.'" This is how John, the son of Zebedee, feels toward this unknown healer. "The irony of all this is that such possessive persons usually end of driving away the ones they seek to control. Who likes to be a slave to anybody else? Who wants to be kept on an emotional leash? Instead of getting possessive and jealous about this guy (and running him off, no doubt), why couldn't John have treated him tolerantly, as Jesus did? Such loving acceptance could have drawn him into the fellowship of [the disciples]. After all [the unknown healer] did know the power of the name of Jesus, and he was working for others' well-being, two necessary ingredients of Christian discipleship." (in Reflections on St. Mark's Gospel) The Bible is the story of the trip we are all taking together in search of the kingdom of God, and here we are in 2006 on our own later part of the journey - Lutherans and Jews and Baptists and Muslims and Roman Catholics and, of course, the multiplying stripes of Episcopalians - all pretending, like Joshua and John, to possess God, all claiming to own the name of God or the name of Jesus, each of us claiming to be privy to just what God expects of others, each of us wanting the others to bend the knee, not to God or Jesus, but to our understanding of Jesus, because our way, we insist, is the right way. For us human beings to try to squeeze everyone into the same theological box is not only arrogant, it is also simply 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 with us. 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 own journey together in search of God's kingdom. The first is about a woman named Linda Petracelli. Although she is now a United Church of Christ minister, Petracelli 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 Roman 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 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 because I think it is uniquely, or even characteristically, reflective of Roman Catholics. I tell it because Sister Mary Roberts Cecilia's theology 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. For this reason, 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! For it reflects both the good news and the warning of Jesus in today's Gospel reading as they are captured in Dorothy Sayers' restatement of it: "There is no power in this world or the next that can keep a soul from God if God is what [that soul] really desires. But if, in seeing God, the soul rejects Him in hatred and horror, then there is nothing more that God can do for it but give it what it desires." 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, or will receive the spirit of God in the same ways. 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." I wonder, in fact, if the building of such relationships isn't the Bible's vision for the human journey. Wouldn't it be a wonderful vision for the nations of the world? Wouldn't it be a wonderful vision for Christians to share among themselves? Wouldn't it be a wonderful a wonderful vision just for the Episcopal Church and our fellow Anglicans to share among ourselves? 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." No human being can own the name of God, so maybe God is calling us who are on this journey of life together to something different. Maybe God is calling us to recognize that his vision for human beings is for all of us to explore and understand our beliefs and values in ways that build relationships among ourselves which are pleasing to him. In other words, to love each other the way we love ourselves and to do unto others the way we would want them to do unto us. 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. |