A Sermon preached on Sunday 29 September (Pentecost XIX/Harvest Festival) at St. Augustine’s, Wiesbaden
Numbers 11:4-6,10-16,24-29, Mark 9:38-50
May these spoken words be faithful to the written word and lead us to the living word, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen
I struggled today to make some form of connection between our readings and harvest festival that we also celebrate. The closest I could get is the list of foods in the Old Testament reading. “We remember the fish we used to eat in Egypt for nothing, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic.” (Numbers 11:4) But as they are the subject of a complaint to God, the Israelites were fed up with the monotonous diet of manna, that’s not really appropriate for a Festival of Thanksgiving!
To be fair, these readings were not specially selected for harvest festival, they are simply the ones appointed for this Sunday, the XIX after Pentecost. So, it’s no surprise that the passage from Mark’s Gospel does not address God’s gifts of the fruits of the earth in their season. Instead, it seems to be a collection of unrelated sayings by Jesus, and according to many commentators it is just that. Here Mark, has put together things that Jesus said at various times and in various contexts, because he did not want them to be lost, because he felt they were important and needed to be preserved for his community and for posterity. And yet, even though they were probably not said together, I think they still have a theme in common, as each highlights some aspect of what it means to be a Christian.
The first one probably comes as a bit of a surprise, we don’t have to follow Jesus to be for him? Whoever is not against us is for us, is that enough? No, it’s clearly more than that. The person the disciples want to stop is acting in and invoking Jesus’s name. This is connected to the story we heard from the Book of Numbers (11:28-29) when Joshua, the assistant of Moses, wants Moses to stop two people prophesying in the Lord’s name with the Lord’s gift of the Spirit: “But Moses said to him, ‘Are you jealous for my sake? Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets, and that the Lord would put his spirit on them!’”
We don’t stop people who are doing good, we don’t reject other people acting in God’s or in Jesus’ name. We know them, as Jesus says in Matthew’s Gospel (7:16, 18) by their fruits: “A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit.” We should not assume that we are the only ones who are right. I don’t just mean that personally, but also as a church and denomination. I think you all know that I’m very active ecumenically, working with other churches in Germany. We have a simple common framework. The 2001 Charta Oecumenica, signed by all the churches that are members of either the Conference of European Churches, or the Council of European Bishops' Conferences, describes our common task as “Listening together to God's word in Holy Scripture, challenged to confess our common faith and to act together in accordance with the perceived truth, (to) bear witness to the love and hope which are for all people.”[1]
We work together despite our different structures, vestments, music, worship and rituals, and even some of our beliefs, because we all bear and profess the name of Christ. We believe and accept that all the member churches, Catholic, Orthodox, Oriental, Pentecostal, Protestant, Free and Anglican are of God. The poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson reminds us that “God fulfils himself in many ways” and the writer Miguel de Cervantes, of Don Quixote fame, also wrote that “Many are the roads by which God carries his own to heaven.” I do not believe that Episcopalians are better Anglicans, or that Anglicans are better Christians. This is just where I feel most at home!
The second teaching block sounds very unpleasant and threatening: drowning, mutilation and unquenchable fire are not my preferred themes at a family service, and they are not to be taken literally! None of them are expected of you. The issue here is that there are things so bad that Jesus feels the need to use drastic language to warn his followers, especially those in positions of responsibility. To “put a stumbling-block before one of these little ones who believe in me,” (Mark 942) is to lead someone astray, by false teaching! One example would be to teach people to hate in Jesus’ name!
Then we have sinful desires and actions, illustrated by body parts, that come between us and God and our neighbour. It was common in the rabbinic tradition to connect particular parts of the body to sins, for example in the saying that “the eye and heart are the two brokers of sin,” probably referring here to the sin of coveting, of desiring what does not belong to us. Jesus tells us to root out and destroy anything that stands in the way of an abundant life, that would keep us from entering the kingdom of God and living by its values, that prevent us from following God’s will. The hand could stand for a hand that hits someone in anger, the foot for whatever leads us away from God, the eye for desiring something that is not good for us, some idol. We could add more, remember what James said about the tongue in his letter a couple of weeks ago!
Really the only part of this passage that we can take literally is the description of Gehenna, here translated as hell, actually the valley of Hinnom outside Jerusalem, once a place of human sacrifice and in Jesus’ day a rubbish tip or refuse heap that was covered with fires and was always smouldering. It became a symbol of hell!
Finally, we have three short sayings connected by their use of salt as an illustration. They are related to the more famous saying from Matthew’s Gospel (5:13) that we are the salt of the earth. Each of them addresses different aspects of the role we – as Christians – are supposed to play in society. Like fire we are to help purify the world, make it what it is supposed to be, the kingdom of God. Salt, used in moderation, brings out the flavour of food. We do not make the world or people good; but with the salt that is the Good News of Jesus Christ, we bring out that existing flavour, we reinforce it! But only with an unadulterated message, not one that we have redefined to our own needs. And I think that to have salt in ourselves, is simply the call to practice what we preach, one example would be at peace with one another, so that “they'll know we are Christians by our love.”
Coming back to my opening struggle to connect today’s readings with Harvest Festival! Two final thoughts:
Firstly, Harvest Festival is a celebration of variety, just look at all the different produce we have here, some in their original form, some already processed to make other foodstuffs. That could be one connection with the variety of sayings and teachings in today’s readings. Both are a varied collection of good things meant to nourish us physically or spiritually.
And secondly, all of today’s teachings are about what kind of people a church produces. What are the fruits? What is the harvest? How will we nourish a world hungry for good news?
Amen.
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