Scripture: Mark 3:19b-35
Then he went home; and the crowd came together again, so that they could not even
eat. When his family heard it, they went out to restrain him, for people were saying, “He
has gone out of his mind.” And the scribes who came down from Jerusalem said, “He
has Beelzebul, and by the ruler of the demons he casts out demons.” And he called
them to him, and spoke to them in parables, “How can Satan cast out Satan? If a
kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. And if a house is divided
against itself, that house will not be able to stand. And if Satan has risen up against
himself and is divided, he cannot stand, but his end has come. But no one can enter a
strong man’s house and plunder his property without first tying up the strong man; then
indeed the house can be plundered.
“Truly I tell you, people will be forgiven for their sins and whatever blasphemies they
utter; but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit can never have forgiveness, but
is guilty of an eternal sin”— for they had said, “He has an unclean spirit.”
Then his mother and his brothers came; and standing outside, they sent to him and
called him. A crowd was sitting around him; and they said to him, “Your mother and your
brothers and sisters are outside, asking for you.” And he replied, “Who are my mother
and my brothers?” And looking at those who sat around him, he said, “Here are my
mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and
mother.”
_________________________________________________________________________
If you know me, then you probably know that I really like preaching. To me, preaching is an art form, an advanced branch of oratory where the delicate artistry of vocal skill intercepts with the deeply cerebral techniques of detailed research, ending in a final product that is somehow meant to inspire and educate simultaneously, despite those two disciplines often being entirely different things. And though I’ve spent my time in intellectual pursuits, been lettered and degreed like crazy, and have spent equal time pursuing artistic disciplines in art and music, none of those fields have resonated with my soul the way preaching does. Doing all of those things at once is…as beautiful as it is terrifying; as complex as it is meaningful, and I absolutely love every minute of it.
Which is why it’s been so odd lately, that I’ve had real trouble motivating myself to write and record my sermons. Every week, when the task arises I find myself dragging my feet, wanting do do anything but put fingers to keys, crack open some texts, and do that thing which, let’s remember, is generally my favorite thing to do.
What is that all about?
Well, part of it is, of course, run-of-the-mill exhaustion; between the pandemic and the stresses related to bringing up a new church with such a unique concept and design. Volunteer-church-planting isn’t for the faint of heart, after all! But, as I procrastinated in doing this weeks sermon by meditating on why I didn’t want to write this week’s sermon, I came to realize that my resistance to preaching had more to do with what was going well in our community than in what was not.
Lately, our Discord server has been starting to really rock, with our bible study thread on the book of Mark, our current events discussion thread, even our ongoing leadership team meeting all really picking up. At the same time, we’ve seen greater visibility and reach in our “Psalms from the Trails” series, and the new “Remote Pastoral Care” has been an absolute hit with folks, having been commented on and shared more than any other video our community has ever attempted.
It seems like we’ve finally started to figure out just where people are wanting to hear God’s word in their lives, finally starting to connect with just what the broader community wants and needs, and figuring out to speak into that. And as someone who is all about bringing together people into spaces of community and fellowship, this is a wonderful thing to me!
But, of course, that brings up in my heart that tiny, quiet voice; a voice that has been at the heart of several conflicts in my own life, both with others and with myself. An annoying, insistent voice that is at times almost inseparable from that pestilent groan of my own self interest. Those constant questions which balance on the knife’s edge of my heart, asking me to conceive of a “what-if” scenario that terrifies me:
“If the whole point is to uplift and satisfy the community, what is the point of a pastor?”
“Why are pastors a thing, if the community can come together on its own and do what it likes?”
“What can I offer to a community that the people of a community can’t give themselves?”
“What does God need with a starship?”
Ok…maybe not that last one, at least not all the time anyways.
But, the more I see the successes of a community coming together, the more I see laity step up and lead, the more I see people connect with the wonder and mystery of God and the oft-ignored truths of a Bible whose main theme is liberation and love, the more I begin to wonder if this is a process that really requires one person to stand up and give these annoying little lectures that no one really listens to anymore.
I mean…what’s the point of me, when everyone else is so awesome, so caring, and so dedicated to God?
And then I get a passage like the one today, something that is so dense, and touches on so many different things, that at first I don’t even know what to make of it. I mean…there’s just so much here!
We’ve got Jesus, crowds, even Jesus’ family. We’ve got actual mentions of Beelzebul, the casting out of demons, a parable, and even Jesus actually saying that there’s one sin that can’t be forgiven. And every last one of these are things I could spend an entire sermon talking about; every one touches on something important, something vital to our understandings of God and God’s relationship with us and the world.
For transparency’s sake, and for the sake of time, I just want to let you all know that I have already talked about the whole “blasphemy against the Holy Spirit” thing, as wildly confusing and misused as that particular verse is and has been. If you want to know more about that little gem, I want to invite you to check out the first two episodes of “Remote Pastoral Care” where I discussed this idea, and this passage in particular, in detail.
For now however, I want to take a broader look, less at dissecting the specific words and phrases of this verse, less at looking for specific invectives and commands, but more at looking to understand just what exactly Jesus’ role is here. How is Jesus operating in this space, and in what way is he doing what we must understand him to be doing; trying to move this community forward, somehow, in righteous and holy ways.
In the verses leading into today’s passage, Jesus has just generally been Jesus-ing around town in a very Jesus-y way, healing people and generally preaching and teaching in ways that confuse and irritate people in entrenched positions of power. And then, at the start of today’s passage, he goes home.
And honestly, the reaction he gets when he heads home is one of the most familiar, relatable moments in Jesus’ story to me. He goes home, and everyone freaks right the heck out. The crowd gathers, and everyone’s getting frisky and irritated about Jesus. It’s all “how dare you” this, and “how could you” that; tensions rising higher and higher all the while. Jesus’ family comes out, takes one look at the situation, and restrains JESUS.
In retrospect, knowing now as we do the divinity of Jesus Christ, this response is absolutely amazing to me. His family took one look at what was going on, what must have seemed like the entire town turned out in anger, and their response was to immediately try to pull back Jesus.
And while there is a part of me that, as an easily amused and fairly irreverent theologian, wants to imagine his family is freaking out and trying to restrain him lest he take a page out of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas and go full “Ark-of-the-Covenant” on everyone, the truth behind what’s happening here is quite likely far more mundane, and therefore far more realistic.
His family is just trying to save face.
They see the crowds gathered, the religious folk spouting off about Beelzebul and demon possessions and the like, and they know full well that if this is the mindset of the community with respect to Jesus, then this is not going to go well for any of them. I mean, we already know the consequences of pissing off the religious authorities in those days; it generally ended with some perpendicularly-arranged planks and a reserved spot at Golgatha. So you can imagine that his family is…worried, to say the least.
They don’t want to run the risk of upsetting the community, because upsetting the community comes with consequences. Pushing back against entrenched power structures comes with consequences.
Righteousness, it so happens, comes with consequences.
Now it would be easy for me at this point to simply let this be the point; that righteousness has its risks, but we must be bold in our assertion of the truths of Jesus Christ, rather than simply to sit back and let the worldly, sinful masses do whatever they feel they want. But whether you’re doing what we in the Unfinished Community like to do and boldly asserting Christ’s claim that all are welcome and none are condemned, or whether you’re proclaiming with equal boldness and equal wrong-ness as the megachurches do that God hates…well…whoever it is today that is irritating to your entrenched power structures, that call to bold defiance is…well, it’s too easy for us. Too simple.
It’s a call that we can feel inspired by, without having to really analyze it at all.
And it still leaves me with the same problem we started with; if the community can be bold on its own, what’s the need for a pastor?
Of course, when you think about it, there really isn’t one. When you take that call to stand boldly for what you believe is right, firm and surrounded by others who share the same conviction, all you’ve really done is built a fancy new in-group, and gleefully identified a brand-new out-group to get mad at. It’s Christian community; it’s mob mentality wearing a scriptural bag over its head.
In short, it’s possible to do the wrong thing, for the right reasons.
At the end of the story today, Jesus family is still trying to convince him to step away from the group so the situation can be calmed down a little bit. Jesus, of course, is having none of it because, as many of us here have, he has found a community of people who are equally committed to living in God’s word, and following God’s ways, and he’s hesitant to return to the judgmental ways of a family who is obsessed with how the rest of the world sees them. “Here are my mother and my brothers!” he says, “Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.”
And if the story ended here, in that moment of blunt dismissal, we could be forgiven for assuming that the lesson we were meant to take away was one calling us to bold proclamation, insisting that we abandon those who disagree with us, and take up the mantle of righteousness for ourselves and those few who join the cause alongside us.
But the story doesn’t end here.
This is not the last we see of Jesus’ family. His mother is with him right until the end, a witness to the death and resurrection of her son and our Lord. His brothers James, Joseph, Simon, and Judas (no, not that Judas) are with him until the end, and even beyond. The opening of the book of Acts sees Judas, along with his mother Mary, as part of the meeting to decide who ought to replace Judas (yes, that Judas) now that Jesus has ascended into heaven.
These are not isolated incidents, my friends.
In order to arrive at the place where Jesus’ family, his brothers and his mother, could see the truth, and be so invested in the ministry he built, Jesus first had to set a star. He had to push the community in the right direction, not by quietly and peaceably telling everyone just the good stuff, spreading the stories that they felt most uplifted by and most wanted to hear, not by avoiding the stares and glares of a concerned and questioning society, but by leaning into it.
In today’s passage Jesus is living into that prophetic office, pushing the bounds and challenging his community, his family, and all the people surrounding them, afflicting their comfort in a way that only a single individual speaking God’s word can.
At this point in the story, Jesus already had a decent sized movement. He called the disciples together two chapters ago, and had been healing and teaching at a crazy-fast pace ever since. The goal here wasn’t to build a movement, but to challenge that moment to see that God’s righteousness goes beyond the bounds of what’s comfortable, and asks us to never rest on our heels, but to keep pursuing that unreachable goal of God’s perfection.
And there will be casualties along the way; I’m sure that Jesus’ family did not take his actions today lightly but, as with all acts of righteousness, the truth becomes visible after a time. And, when all was said and done, Jesus’ family was his community of faith, but not because he had rejected his biological family in favor of that community, but because he persisted in doing righteousness so fully and completely that, in the fullness of time, they couldn’t help but come along with him.
So while this isn’t necessarily the best answer, I guess this is at least an answer for why I keep preaching, even though it seems kinda futile while so many other community-focused programs in our community are doing bigger and better work. It’s because the community as it stands, isn’t where the journey ends. We need to keep pushing forwards, challenging ourselves to do better, to be better, and to keep our eyes not on what makes our community feel most happy, fulfilled, and generally satiated, but on what keeps our community moving ever onwards towards righteousness.
We need to always be reminded that the healing and peace we find in our church community isn’t meant to be a destination; it’s necessary repair work to continue the journey. To keep us going on the path towards rebuilding ourselves, rebuilding our broader communities and, with faith and hope, eventually even rebuilding our world, in ways that reflect the righteousness, kindness, mercy and love of God.
So that’s what I think I want to leave you all with today. Not a call to go boldly, to throw aside the bounds of family and friendship in favor of telling crispy-christians and hate-filled evangelicals to go burn in that non-biblical, Greek-inspired hell they made up just to freak out people who didn’t believe; no, my call to you is to consider a larger narrative.
This week, as you go out into the world, try to consider what the longer arc of the story might look like for you, and for those with whom you constantly find yourself arguing in anger and hate. What might it look like to build a community where those who would deny your rights, and the rights of others, might one day come to be valued? What might it look like to practice a forgiveness that might one day extend to racists, bigots, misogynists, and the literal nazis that plague our social discourse today? What might it look like to rehabilitate rather than revenge, to correct rather than condemn, and to make space rather than simply reclaim it for ourselves?
What might it look like to set a star, to pick a course that we know is going to have our families irritated, that is definitely going to require some bumps and bruises, but leads eventually, through trial and pain, to a place of reconciliation, love, and peace? What might it look like for us to hold firm to our convictions that all are welcome, that all are beloved, that intolerance cannot be tolerated and that hatred has no home among us, but to hold to that in such a way that, in the fullness of time, even those who stood against us would one day stand by our side?
Honestly, I don’t know that I have an answer to that. I don’t even know that there is an answer to that which goes beyond the simple act of trying to hold that tension of being firm in your commitment to righteousness while constantly caring for everyone you encounter, and I’m not even very good at that to be honest. But I think that the secret to righteousness, that complex and meaningful righteousness which goes beyond the simple bold binaries that we love to cling to, I think that it lies in our ability to live in that tension, and to make that tension part of who we are.
Like Captain America inexplicably holding on to a helicopter, we know that what we’re doing seems utterly ridiculous, utterly impossible, and utterly doomed to end in fire, pain, and death.
But we also know that righteousness allows us no other course.
So, my friends, go out and grab hold of some helicopters this week. Try to find ways to be firm and loving at the same time. Give it everything you have and then some, and when everything explodes into burning wreckage around you, when that path leads to suffering and pain, then stand up. Dust yourself off, and keep going through.
Because on the other side of the cross is victory.
Comments