September 28, 2006
Mending
Pentecost 17/21B Mk 9.38-50
John 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.” But 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. Whoever is not against us is for us” (Mk 9.38-40).
I suppose there’s a certain comfort in having an “exclusive,” in being the only one to know about something and to break the news and to claim the rewards. News media and especially their reporters understandably get a lot of mileage out of such exclusive stories.
Apparently, it was no different with the disciples of Jesus. They were the “in” group, the ones who’d been commissioned not just with a message, but with a unique authority to heal and even with a power greater than daemons. They were discovering grace, but embracing that novelty had a steep learning curve and was still not without a residual touch of merit — as, indeed, it is yet for us. They may well have been remembering painfully what it had cost them and what risks they’d taken and continued to take by throwing in their lot with this Jesus. So when they discovered they weren’t the only ones with this new mastery, that there were others in on the Jesus trail and who had apparently not made such sacrifices, one can understand how their noses got altogether quite out of joint.
Strangely, things are not a lot different now. We Anglican/Episcopal Christians tend to get a little smug ourselves from time to time. I’m speaking, of course, from my own bias, but not, I think, without reason. The early 20th century evangelist Billy Sunday called us the “sleeping giant of Christendom,” implying that we really didn’t know what we had in our tradition or even worse that if we did, we were not much about using it. Billy Graham once told a group of us clergy that his pattern and plan for mission was simply that defined in the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Commission on Evangelism. He also wondered out loud why we never used it ourselves.
The present discomforts in our Communion which rend our hearts as well as our fabric seem not all that dissimilar from those that provoked Jesus’s disciples. The Archbishop of Canterbury his very self has said that we are not an inclusive church. That strikes me as but another way of saying that we are an exclusive church. When I hear that suggestion, even if only implied, I hear our Lord’s response to the disciples. “Whoever is not against us is for us.” This new gospel of God’s love is about God loving and including all, not just those who follow some strict doctrinal line or who stand in what we’ve made and called in these latter years an “apostolic succession,” what the disciples could easily have meant when they said the man casting out daemons was “not following us.”
I believe that as clumsy and messy as it is, the collegial polity in the American and perhaps the Canadian church is surely a way of achieving the healing justice and love that continues to be altogether consistent with “Jesus’s name.” It is an albeit ponderous way for seeking and serving “Christ in all persons, (and) loving (our) neighbors as (ourselves)” as we have committed to do in our Baptismal Covenant.
Just so does this story of the distraught and subsequently admonished disciples reenforce the very inclusiveness of grace and justice, healing and well-being that are of the gospel’s substance and that now rise to the nub of the church’s present malaise. The disciples wanted a corner on this ministry they’d risked their lives for. Who can blame them? Many of their latter-day successors — risk or no — today seem to think they should have one, too.
Perhaps it is another story at another time, but this is also a story about witnessing. Witnessing, not simply as telling our own faith, our own stories, but witnessing as pointing to wherever we see these same gospel signs by whatever name and “performed” by whomever, commissioned and ordained or no. Jesus was quite clear about that.
The New Testament scholar and Lutheran bishop Krister Stendahl once put it like this: Wherever, whenever, however we witness the brokenness of the world being mended, there is present the Kingdom of God.