Proper 22 (October 2-8)
Texts: Mark 10:2-16;
Heb 1-2; Gen. 2:18-24
A HEART-WARMING TEXT
I have a long history with our Gospel Lesson this morning. Friday
was the twenty-first
anniversary of my ordination. Since we use a three-year cycle of
assigned readings on Sundays,
and because three goes into twenty-one evenly, you might be able to
guess that this was the first
Gospel I had to preach on as a pastor. But it goes even further back
than that. Three years before
ordination I was just beginning my internship at Trinity in Ann
Arbor, where Pastor Lori Carey is
now pastor. And, you guessed it, this was the first Gospel on which
I was assigned to preach.
There I was, a nervous young intern, and I was called to say a
Gospel word -- including, and
perhaps especially, to all those divorced people in the congregation
-- faced with Jesus' tough
words against divorce. What does one do?
You could always ignore that first part and go directly to the
closing part of the lesson, Jesus'
wonderful blessing of the children. That can make for a
heart-warming sermon. And we do,
generally, need a heart-warming sermon.
But perhaps not in the way that you might first think, when we
picture all those adorable
children, bouncing on Jesus' knee. For I think there is a theme in
this Gospel Lesson that ties
both parts together. That theme is the hardness of our human hearts.
So we do need a heart-warming sermon, you see, but not without first
seeing the cold hardness of our hearts first, and
how it is that Jesus came to warm them. We need to see ourselves in
the Pharisees shoes as those
who love to thump the law when it is to our advantage. Jesus tells
them point blank that the
commandment permitting divorce was written for their hardness of
hearts. And when we picture
those adorable children on Jesus' knee, we first need to see
ourselves as Jesus' disciples, those
rather hard-hearted fuddy-duds who tried to keep the children away
from Jesus altogether. Jesus
was too busy and too important, they thought, for such frivolity.
The Good News in all of this, of course, is that if we can risk
seeing ourselves with the Pharisees
and the disciples and their hardness of hearts, we also can come to
see that Jesus came with the
cure for such hardness of hearts. He came to live the story from God
that can truly warm our
hearts.
How does this work? Well, as Jesus' disciples two thousand years
later, we don't have to look
back too far to see such hard-heartedness around the issue of
divorce, do we? It hasn't been all
that long ago that we in the church have been very hard on divorced
people. I would submit to
you that when we have used these words from Jesus to beat up people
going through a divorce,
we have generally suffered from the same kind of hardness of heart
that Jesus is challenging in
the Pharisees. It has been especially tragic when we've used these
words against women resorting
to a divorce from hard-hearted husbands who control them and abuse
them. To use Jesus' words
about divorce against people who find themselves in a marriage of
hard-heartedness is to commit
the same kind of hard-heartedness as the Pharisees.
And notice that Jesus' most difficult words about divorce are shared
behind closed doors to
disciples, not the Pharisees. This whole section in Mark's gospel is
about the hard-heartedness of
the disciples. Jesus has been telling them plainly about what his
Messiahship means, that he must
suffer and die before being raised on the third day. This has
consequences for being disciples of
such a Messiah, that they would being willing to bear their own
crosses. The disciples just
haven't gotten it. And, here in this story, they still don't
understand what Jesus was trying to say
to the Pharisees because their hearts were hard, too -- which they
immediately put on display
again by keeping the children away from Jesus, another
hard-heartedness which Jesus needs to
confront. The disciples themselves simply couldn't understand
because of their hardheartedness.
Hard-heartedness is what Jesus came to soften on the cross. He died
at the hands of what we
called last week our "sacrificial solution" to the problem of
violence. In order to steel ourselves
against the most unwanted violence we harden our hearts against what
we need to do to apply a
dose of sanctioned violence against the unsanctioned violence.
Think of our dilemma, for example, since 9-11 in fighting the
terrifying violence of terrorism.
We have steeled ourselves against the need to use our own dose of
violence to stop it. It takes a
certain amount of hard-heartedness, doesn't it? Despite all our best
efforts at aiming our bombs
at the places to kill terrorists, there's always going to be what we
euphemistically call "collateral
damage." And the hard heartedness comes against thinking about the
"collateral damage" in
terms of flesh and blood people like us who are somebody's mother or
child.
But this points us to that wider story of God's love in Jesus
Christ, a love which reaches out and
makes the whole world our family. Isn't that what Jesus means at the
end of today Gospel when
he says, "Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of
God as a little child will
never enter it." If we receive God's kingdom through the cross of
Jesus, we become God's
children anew such that every person in this world is a child of God
with us. Every person in this
world is a brother or sister.
In the Catholic tradition, I think this is the wisdom of calling
priests "Father." Or in the
monasteries over the ages, every other person in that monastery has
been called brother or sister.
There is a retreat center in Racine, WI, where our family has just
moved from, called the Siena
Center. It is run by a wonderful group of Catholic Sisters, who
before the Iraq War began, started
wearing badges that simply said, "I have a sister in Iraq." What
does that do to our plans for war
if we allow ourselves to think of all the innocent civilians killed
as sisters and brothers? Yet
entering the kingdom of God as a child means exactly that, I think.
We can no longer make our
hearts hard against someone who is truly a brother or sister in
Jesus Christ, the one who came
into this world as our brother in order that our hard hearts might
be warmed to love others as
God's children.
Now, what does this mean to seeing the reign of God's love in the
world? Think about how many
things are set by our birth in this world: We are born in a
geographical location that can either
accustom us to unjust privilege or lock us out of
privilege, preventing us from access to clean
water, education, the chance to live to adulthood. We are born with
a skin color that will also
condition our sense of who we are, what we deserve, whom we may love
or fear. This world is
set up in ways that try to lock us into patterns of relationship
based on our birth -- patterns that
separate us from one another and from God.
How might the world be different if those patterns were disrupted,
if you and I could be sisters
and brothers in healthy relationship? What would our relationships
look like if we shared one
birth and were raised in one loving, supportive family? What would
an economy look like that
took seriously that we live and work in a world that is our common
inheritance, and not a set of
disconnected chunks of land and resources to be conquered like a
Risk game board? What would
a world look like in which we saw every child as our own
little sister or brother -- if "family
first" included them all as our own flesh and blood?
That's Jesus' invitation to us today. Entering God's kingdom as a
little child means that Jesus
offers us freedom from relationships that ensnare us and harden our
hearts. He instead offers us
the choice to relate to one another as beloved children of one
loving God. It's a new world of
new relationships, of new and abundant life. Come now to the family
table of fellowship and
peace. Thanks be to God!
Paul J. Nuechterlein
Delivered at Prince of Peace Lutheran,
Portage, MI, October 8, 2006