OCTOBER 1, 2006 PASTOR SCOTT FULLER
NU 11:4-6, 10-16, 24-29; PS 19:7-14; JA 5:13-20; MK 9:38-50
For and Against
Prepare our hearts, Lord, to receive your Word. Silence in us any voice but your own that in hearing we believe and in believing we obey your will revealed to us in Jesus Christ. Amen.
Dear friends in Christ: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
Whoever is not against us is for us! What an amazingly optimistic thing to say! I’m afraid that Jesus wouldn’t get too far as a politician in today’s climate of us versus them. His glass-is-half-full assessment of the human condition sounds…a little naïve, a little too good to be true.
Yet Carolyn and I have a friend who is a kindred spirit with Jesus’ positive attitude – has been forever. She is: good looking and smart, conscientious and compassionate, fun to be around and humble. So much so that she laughs when she describes how her head-in-the-clouds optimism was ultimately brought down to earth. It wasn’t until college, she says, when she finally realized that there were people in the world…who didn’t like her!
Until then, she had assumed that everyone was either a friend or a fan. Said one of her classmates, You know, Marcia, I like you almost as much as you like yourself! From that moment on, she had to adjust her optimism downward, to settle for something a little more realistic.
Yet, still her spirit of confidence remains strong, buoyed by and reflective of, I’m convinced, Jesus’ positive appraisal of people. His spiritually uplifting assessment, Whoever is not against us is for us, has served Marcia well on her journey in life, especially on her detours through some pretty dark valleys and places of shadows. She is no stranger to pain, physical and relational, yet still she lives in hope.
How optimistic are you? For me it all depends – on the issue, on how the Minnesota Twins or Seattle Seahawks are doing, on how many people were at worship last Sunday…actually, I’m a little less shallow than that. Periodically we pastors are asked to update our theological profile. One question had me write about my assessment of the “human condition.”
In a nutshell here’s what I said. On the one hand, I am a pessimist about the human race. Every invention to make life better is also used to make it worse. And what advance for society has not been countered by a moral failing? I don’t believe that we have the natural ability or desire to make life better for all people, to live for shalom, to usher in the Kingdom of God.
Too often we trip on our tongues, exercise our egos, fall victim to our fears, and harbor hate in our hearts. Too easily we are able to ignore problems and practices that cause pain to people across this planet. Too quickly we seek to blame someone else for our problems.
So you can see that I firmly believe what we confess every Sunday: we are by nature sinful and unclean – this is true about our worst and best moments, as individuals and as a race. Now having said that, I don’t think that we’re despicable people…far from it. Most of us, I believe, are pretty decent folk.
But, as Jesus said in Scripture, only God is good. And that is the key to the other half of my answer. For in addition to being a pessimist about humanity, I also claim to be an absolute optimist about what God can do through, with and in spite of our human failings and flaws.
From Martin Luther to Mother Theresa, history offers a few shining stars who do not claim any glory for themselves, but give it to the God who guides them. The same is true on a smaller scale for each of us. Think of all the people who have made a positive impact on your life…and of all those whom you have blessed with a kind deed, a word of encouragement, a listening ear, a ready prayer.
Surprisingly, this same theme also finds its way into our popular culture. I haven’t read many books by Stephen King. I like a lot of weird stuff, but some of his is just a little too strange for my tastes. Having said that, two of his novels have some of the best theology I have ever read anywhere.
The Stand is a story of the global struggle between good and evil, God and the Devil. I really enjoyed it. In his book The Green Mile, King describes this same conflict but in a more personal setting: death row of a prison.
John Coffey appears to be a murderer. The state has found him guilty of killing two girls and has sentenced him to die – not by a millstone around his neck and a swim in the sea, but by the electric chair. The trouble is that John didn’t do the crime, wouldn’t, in fact, hurt a mouse, none of which can be proven. And to top it all off, he also has this miraculous ability to heal, to draw out of a person the stuff that causes death and disease so that they might be filled with God’s life-giving shalom: wholeness, peace, health.
In the movie version, Tom Hanks plays a jailer who is responsible for carrying out the death-row sentences. In a beautiful plot twist, Tom’s character also becomes a believer in the good that God is doing through John Coffey, that convict sentenced to die, that healer of people’s pain.
The image that comes to mind is that of the Roman Centurion at the foot of the cross. Watching as the life flowed out of that other convict sentenced to die, that other healer of people’s pain, that executioner is moved to say, Surely this man was the Son of God.
So where does that leave us?...especially in light of Jesus’ other, more pessimistic and graphic advice about how we are to deal with our various organs when they cause us to sin? Taking a look around at our mostly intact bodies, it must mean either that we’re sinless OR we don’t believe that Jesus literally meant for us to cut off our hands, eyes and tongues as we sin.
What it says to me is that Jesus is very serious about our relationships in life: both with God and with our neighbors. The context for Jesus’ comments are how our deeds/misdeeds, actions/inaction, oughts/ought nots impact our relationship with God and how they can cause God’s “little ones” to stumble. I believe that means children, but also any people who are too weak, poor, sick or in any other way unable to care for themselves.
We know that we can’t make ourselves better by cutting off our organs that help us sin. Neither can we make life better by embracing the disciples’ desire to weed out/cut down/drive away those “bad” people who fail to follow our set of rules.
Instead, I think this text means that you and I are called by God to focus on the good and gracious work that we can do. In that way, we are then freed to assume that most of our neighbors are not our enemies, that most folks are not foes of the Gospel, that most people are probably just waiting to be welcomed with a word and action of God’s love and grace. Whoever is not against us is for us! That’s Good News. Thanks be to God. Amen.