A Sermon preached on June 7th, Pentecost
II, at St. Augustine’s, Wiesbaden
1 Samuel 8:4-20, 2
Corinthians 4:13-5:1, Mark 3:20-35
Today is the
second Sunday after Pentecost – we will have over 20 of such Sundays in total –
and also part of what of the Church calls “Ordinary Time,” this is ordinary in
the sense of not part of a particular season like Easter or Lent. We only have a
few major festivals to celebrate on Sundays during this time, the first
official one will be All Saints’ Day in November, though we will have our own
special festival day on July 19th for our anniversary. This means
that we will have a chance to read through some parts of the Bible more or less
consistently, consecutively and continually. As I have opted this year for the
so-called “semi-continuous track” this will also include the Old Testament
readings. So Sunday for Sunday we will be working our way through Israel’s
history in the books of Samuel and Kings, through Paul’s 2nd letter
to the Corinthians and later Ephesians, and through the Gospel according to
Mark.
What this also means
is that the OT reading is not chosen to complement the theme of the New
….. and yet strangely this week it still seems to do so. In both the story of
how Israel insisted upon getting a king to be like other nations and of how
Jesus’ family came to restrain him because of what people were saying about
Jesus I heard misplaced expectations about what is the norm or normal.
Some years ago now
there was a BBC sitcom called “Keeping up Appearances” – I apologize for the
very British cultural reference, though I believe it was also shown on PBS in
the States – and what would PBS be without English sitcoms and dramas! Anyway
the main character is a rather snobbish lady called Hyacinth Bucket, who
however insists that her last name be pronounced "Bouquet," and a lot
of the comedy comes from how her attempts to climb up the social ladder, and be
accepted by her middle to upper class neighbors, are thwarted by her own decidedly
lower-class family, whom she desperately seeks to hide.
I couldn’t help
feeling that ancient Israel’s desire to have a king over them, to be just like
their neighbors, has a lot to do with Hyacinth-like desire to be accepted as a
normal nation, which while understandable, is not what God had planned for
them. They were supposed to be exceptional, chosen by God to act as an example to
the world, not to copy the world in all its ways. That’s what’s behind all the
laws that God gave them through Moses, they are about exceptional behavior with
a focus on God and on a just and equitable treatment of others, with a
particular responsibility for the weak and the vulnerable. Instead of a
hereditary king they had been led by charismatic and divinely appointed judges,
and latterly prophets. God was supposed to be their king, not a human.
But in the end, as
we heard, God agrees to their desire to have a king to govern them – but not
without warning them of the consequences. A king, God tells them through
Samuel, will exploit you, he will amass power and wealth at your expense, you
and your sons will have to fight his battles. This is not a threat, not a
punishment by God for having rejected him. It is what was going on in all the
nations around them, all those other nations that the elders wanted to be like,
and it proves to be exactly what happens just a generation later under King
Solomon – we will hear all about it when we get to the 1st Book of
Kings.
In this morning’s
selection from Mark’s Gospel, Jesus has just come home from his mission in
Galilee. He has preached and healed and, just a few verses before today’s
passage, officially appointed the twelve to be his apostles, to be sent by him
to proclaim the message of God’s kingdom. (3:13-15) Why did he come back to
Nazareth? Perhaps he came to have a rest and to see his family. But that
doesn’t happen. People were crowding him to see if he would heal them too. And
not everyone was positive, some were claiming that he was out of his mind, that
perhaps Jesus himself, who had cast out so many demons, was in fact possessed
by them, or even worse: that he was an agent of Satan. This was not what his
family wanted to hear, this was not normal, but getting to be an embarrassment,
this was upsetting the neighbors, and so they wanted to restrain him, to remove
him from the public eye. They definitely wanted to keep up appearances!
Jesus’ reaction
sounds somewhat harsh, almost as if he is rejecting his own family: “Who are my
mother and my brothers? Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the
will of God is my brother and mother.” (3:33-35) But it’s their attitude that
he’s rejecting, not his family as such. For one thing, he cannot let them stop
him doing what he was sent to do: to preach and teach about God and God’s
kingdom, to heal people as a living sign of this kingdom and eventually – this
must have been the ultimate embarrassment – to suffer the death of a common
criminal on the cross. And so he makes clear that those who do God’s will,
those who do what God has called them to do and to be, are as much part of this
family as his blood relatives. As we know, in the end Jesus’ family got the
message – in John’s Gospel his mother is one of a small group of people who
stand at the foot of the cross and in the Acts of the Apostles James, Jesus’s
brother has become a leader of the Church – though one who still has to be
corrected by St. Paul when it comes to defining who belongs to the new family
of Christ. He had to be reminded that you did not have to be a Jew to be a
Christian, you just have to accept Christ as Lord and God, you just have to
strive to do God’s will.
And this is a lesson
we all continue to have to learn. Over the centuries Christian leaders have had
to be reminded, have had to learn again that neither class, nor skin color, nor
ethnicity, nor gender, nor sexual orientation define who is a Christian. This
inclusiveness is, thankfully, reflected in St. Augustine’s own mission
statement: “Our ministry is to all people, regardless of their cultural,
national, ethnic, or religious background, who seek fellowship in the baptism
of Jesus Christ.” That is how we have defined our norms – our normal behavior.
It was not God’s
will for ancient Israel to be like other nations. And so sometimes it will not
be God’s will for us to be and to act like everyone else and to do what
society, what the world expects. But not always - sometimes we might need to be
conservative and to defend a practice society has left behind, other times we are
called to be progressive and to be ahead of society trying to get them to
change in a direction we consider to be where God wants us to be, and
sometimes, sadly, we will even need to catch up with society. What is right can
only be decided case by case – prayerfully and as good Anglicans basing our
decision on scripture, tradition – that is the accumulated teaching of the
church, and our God-given and hopefully Spirit-guided reason in interpreting
and applying the other two.
As Christians we
need to be an embarrassment at times, we need to do the unexpected. I was
heartened by the recent decision of the Nebraskan legislature to abolish the
death penalty – against the will of the governor, and the Republican party most
of the legislators belong to, and even many, perhaps even most of the
population of that State. But I am convinced that they did God’s will. On the
other hand I regret that the Church I grew up in, the Church of England, has
still not managed to fully accept its LGBT members and does not accord them the
same rights as civil law and society now does. Finally in the area of justice,
equity, and how wealth is distributed both locally and globally, and what
responsibilities come with wealth – whether of an individual or a nation, we
still have a lot to do in our several nations to fulfill God’s will and “to pursue justice and only justice,” in
Moses’ ancient but still very valid words. (Deut. 16:20)
According to
legend a wise man was once asked to define a miracle. “Well,”
he said, “some consider it a miracle if God does someone’s will. But for me
it’s a miracle if someone does the will of God.”
So brothers and
sisters - let’s go out into the world and do some miracles!
Amen
