September 29, 2024 Sermon
Sermon title: “Is He Serious?”
Scripture: Mark 9:38-50
(Other lectionary suggestions include Esther 7:1-10 and 9:20-22, Psalm 124, and James 5:13-20.)
Mark 9:38-50
Another Exorcist
38John said to him, “Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he was not following us.” 39But Jesus said, “Do not stop him; for no one who does a deed of power in my name will be able soon afterward to speak evil of me. 40Whoever is not against us is for us. 41For truly I tell you, whoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you bear the name of Christ will by no means lose the reward.
Temptations to Sin
42“If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea. 43If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life maimed than to have two hands and to go to hell, to the unquenchable fire. 45And if your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life lame than to have two feet and to be thrown into hell. 47And if your eye causes you to stumble, tear it out; it is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and to be thrown into hell, 48where their worm never dies, and the fire is never quenched. 49"For everyone will be salted with fire. 50Salt is good; but if salt has lost its saltiness, how can you season it? Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another."
The sermon title is, “Is He Serious?”, and the answer is Yes and No. He is not REALLY serious about your cutting your eye out or crippling yourself - but he IS serious about the situation his disciples - and maybe us, too! - are facing. There is a war going on out there, and we should realize it. The war is between Good and Evil, and you and I need to do everything we can to be on the Good side. And Jesus doesn’t care who gets the credit! I love it that he says, “Whoever who is not against us is for us.” In another context, he says, “Whoever is not for us is against us,” but that’s a different context. Just between you and me, I LOVE it that the Bible says BOTH - it depends on the context! See, one size doesn’t fit all ALL the time! And I love that! Jesus lived in the world, and he realized just as you and I realize that one size doesn’t fit all ALL the time.
But as we have said before, Jesus speaks in hyperbole in order to get our attention. And you and I do that, too, in order to make a point. We might say, “I laughed so hard I thought I’d DIE.” No. You knew you weren’t going to die, but you wanted to make a point. How about this one? “I ate so much I thought I’d never eat again.” No. You knew you’d eat again, but you wanted to make a point. Jesus is doing the same thing here. He’s serious, and he wants us to listen. So, he speaks in language that is sure to get our attention.
For Jesus, it looked to him as if his listeners were beginning to take sides. For those who followed Jesus’s way, fine. But those who did not want to follow the way of peace (Jesus’s way) wanted to engage in an armed rebellion against the Romans. That was folly, thought Jesus, and even a rebelling against God. Remember that after the time of Jesus, some of the Jews of that time rebelled against Rome, and the Romans starved them out at a place called Masada. (You may have seen that story on TV many times!) In other words, history proved Jesus right: it was CRAZY to rebel militarily against the Romans.
But listen to what N. T. Wright says: “The first thing to note is that discipleship is difficult and demands sacrifices. Many today write and speak as if the only purpose in following Jesus were to find complete personal fulfillment and satisfaction, to follow a way or path of personal spirituality which will meet our felt needs. That is hardly the point. There’s a war on ((and)) God is at work in our world; so are the forces of evil, and there really is no time or space for self-indulgent spiritualities that shirk the slightest personal cost, or even resist it on the grounds that all the desires and hopes one finds within one’s heart must be God-given and so must be realized.”
Jesus is telling us to be “intentional” about our lives. Don’t just drift along with the crowd, because going down the wrong road can bring you to Gehenna, which was the area where the city of Jerusalem burned its garbage! In Jesus’s time, the place was symbolic for those who, after they died, didn’t follow God’s way. Jesus was always telling his listeners “that unless they followed his way of the kingdom, his way of peace, they, together with the nation and its capital city ((Jerusalem)), were heading for literal physical destruction, in a great cataclysm that would reduce Jerusalem to a large-scale and horrifying extension of its own smoldering ((garbage dump)).”
So don’t think you can simply drift and do what you feel like doing. “There’s a war on ((between Good and Evil)); the kingdom is breaking in; sacrifices are required; to think otherwise is to risk total ruin.”
The passage ends with something about salt and fire. “Salt purifies; so does fire.” Jesus’s followers are called to be the salt of the earth, and we can find a similar passage in Matthew. “(B)ut, as with the rest of the nation, they must beware of losing their particular flavour and so becoming worthless. If they are to be followers of the prince of peace, they must learn to live at peace within themselves.” How about us modern-day Disciples of Jesus? Is there a war going on? Is there something we ought to be doing? What do you think? Are we Americans first or followers of Jesus first? Questions?
Pastor Skip
