Lectionary blog for Sept. 30
Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Numbers 11:4-6, 10-16, 24-29; Psalm 19:7-14;
James 5:13-20; Mark 9:38-50
A Baptist preacher friend of mine got his first seminary degree in church music and spent at least a decade as a full-time director of music in several congregations before he went back to seminary for another degree and became a pastor. I was in the room once while he was trying to teach an old Southern gospel hymn to a group of ministers who were very well-educated musically but weren’t Southerners and weren’t familiar with the hymn. After a couple of false starts, he said to them, “Y’all are singing it exactly as it’s written. The problem is—the way it’s written isn’t always the way it’s sung. In this kind of singing, you have to allow some room for the Spirit.”
Our reading from Numbers tells the story of a time when Moses had to teach Joshua how to “allow some room for the Spirit.” In the middle of an episode of community dysfunction, the Israelites turned on their leader, Moses, who then proceeded to blame everything on God. God responded with a plan that moved the community from an authoritarian, charismatic leader model to a “spirit dispersed on the people” style of decision making. God took some of the Spirit from Moses and bestowed it upon 70 elders who had been selected by the people. Eldad and Medad were among the 70 chosen to be elders, but they did not go to the tent of meeting for the swearing in ceremony. God apparently does not care about such niceties, God put the Spirit on them anyway. Joshua got pretty upset about this and said, “‘My Lord Moses, stop them!’ 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!'” (Numbers 11:28-29)
The first part of our reading from Mark echoes the story about Eldad and Medad: “‘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’” (Mark 9:38-50). John wanted everybody singing from the same page, but Jesus reminded him, and us, “You have to allow some room for the Spirit.”
So far, so good. Up until this point, our Scripture lessons, and this homily, have covered ground most of us are comfortable with. We’re all for the removal of authoritarian power structures, taking the decision-making away from one man, Moses, and creating a more spread-out, representative, pseudo-democratic form of religious governance. And, in this ecumenical age, we applaud the way Jesus’ words appear to affirm our belief that “all truth is God’s truth,” etc. If we stopped here, we could all feel pretty good about the lesson and about ourselves.
But it doesn’t stop here. It begins to get weird and scary with talk about drowning one’s self and cutting off various body parts and tearing one’s eyes out of their sockets. While we know it’s all hyperbole, exaggeration for the sake of emphasis, designed to bring us up short and get us to pay attention to the fact that cross-bearing, following Jesus, is very serious business, that doesn’t make it any less weird or any less scary. And it does not answer the question as to what any of this has to do with the leading of the Spirit.
Jesus is reminding John and the rest of the disciples that simply having received the Spirit is not enough, we must be willing to actively remove from our lives those things that prevent the Spirit from filling and leading our lives. Anything that gets in the way of following Jesus on the way of the cross, that “causes you to stumble” (Mark 9:43, 45, 47) must be cut off, torn out, removed. We must ask ourselves—“What do we need to cut out of our lives? What are we doing that is keeping us from being the complete and whole people God made us to be and means for us to be?”
Jesus is reminding John and the rest of the disciples that simply having received the Spirit is not enough, we must be willing to actively remove from our lives those things that prevent the Spirit from filling and leading our lives.
My late mother-in-law was always on a diet. And she was always cheating on it, eating things she knew she shouldn’t. When her husband would find a wrapper from a drive-thru breakfast hidden in her purse, she would sigh and say, in her soft, sweet, eastern North Carolina accent, “Ah, ham biscuits, them’s my downfall.” When one of her grandchildren discovered an empty takeout plate from Wilber’s Barbecue under the car seat, she would say, “Ah, ribs and potato salad, them’s my downfall!” Cookie wrapper in the couch cushions? “Ah, Oreos, them’s my downfall!”
Sisters and brothers in Christ, what’s your downfall? We all have good intentions of living a life close to God. We all want to be better people than we are. We all want our churches to be communities that are full of love and compassion, capable of healing and transforming one another and the world. What’s stopping us? What is our downfall? What will it take to heal us, to make us whole, to turn us into the people God made us to be, wants us to be, calls us to be?”
The first step is allowing a little room for the Spirit, cutting out things that get in the way. The rest is trusting the Spirit to blow us where God wills.
Amen and amen.
