Well, if you didn’t bring a seat belt, I do
hope you brought your cooking utensils, because there’s a lot of food imagery
going on here.
Mark’s Gospel has us walking with Jesus on the
way to Jerusalem, and Jesus is talking about discipleship. What it means to
follow Jesus and what it means to be human in the way God made us to be. Jesus
is tells us to watch where we’re going, to stop stumbling around. Jesus also says don’t be bland but be “spiced up” as
with fire and salt! “Bam!” But this isn’t a cooking show, it’s life… healed and
purified.
In an age before modern appliances and
refrigeration, everyone knew about “fire” and “spice.” In the ancient world fire
was used to purify things. Of course, it still is. We use heat to kill off
deadly bugs. And salt was used to preserve foods, to keep it from spoiling. Salt
spiced things up. And salt was used medicinally. And besides, it’s tasty!
Being a disciple of Jesus means live in the
community of Christ’s followers. So, when the apostles decided to stop the
“unofficial” followers from healing, they were forgetting that all of God’s
people together take part in Christ’s healing work.
As Christ’s own people, we are a distinctive people,
a people who live according to a different set of values than the surrounding
culture. This is what is means to be “spiced up.” God’s people, enliven and
enrich the world.
The trouble is that we can get caught up in
our specialness and end up blocking ourselves and others from doing God’s work.
In our zeal, we can trip up others—either on purpose or by accident. When Jesus
talks about “millstones” and “not letting one of these little ones fall,” he is
reminding us that we are responsible for one another. Our actions and our
choices matter. Not just within the Church but also in the places where we
live, work, learn and play.
So we need to watch for things that can get in
the way of deepening our faithfulness and the faithfulness of others. One way
think about this is pruning. We need to prune away those things that block us
from following Jesus and fulfilling our Baptismal Covenant so that we can grow
in those ways that make us become humans God made us to be.
Most of what needs to be pruned away is a
modern world that teaches that self-centeredness, inflated self-reliance, and
total, unaccountable independence is the key to the fullness of life.
Jesus calls us to be those people who dare to
say that the secret of life – and death – is giving oneself away: reaching out
to others, to the world and to God. Our culture says that we must rely on no
one but ourselves. Jesus calls us to a radical dependence on God. God has
gifted us with the Word who became flesh and dwelt among us. If we wish to
achieve fulfillment, then we, too, must give ourselves away. Moral progress
comes only as we learn to acknowledge life as a gift – we did not earn it nor achieve
it on our own – life is given to us.
To be wrapped up in ourselves, self-centered
and autonomous, says Jesus, quite simply is hell. In the Gospel, the word for
“hell” is “Gehenna” – which is a place. Not “down there but a real valley
outside Jerusalem, which to this very day is a burning, worm-infested garbage
dump. A long time ago, the Israelites turned the site once used for human
sacrifices to the god Molech into a dump. Trash, animal carcasses and junk are
dumped there and there is always a fire smoldering in this valley. Eventually, it
became a geographic metaphor for hell. It is a way of describing what happens
to when people have little regard for others, for creation, and for God.
“Gehenna”
is an image for “hell” and it tells us that hell is a product of our own
creation. Just as people go to the edge of a cliff and toss all their personal
refuse over the cliff, when we dump our personal stuff on others and on the
earth, we are creating a space that separates people from God. This dumping is
sin. Sin, says our Prayer Book, is that which corrupts and destroys the creatures
of God, including God’s creation.
So hell is not just a condition that affects
the individual; Jesus teaches us that hell human society as well—or at least an
image of it. We create an image of hell in our relentless drive toward
self-reliance, self-autonomy, of every one for themselves. The Anglican priest
and poet John Donne said it best some 360 years ago: “No man is an island
entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.”
This is why Jesus does all this talking about
hell and cutting off limbs and plucking out eyes: to impress upon us the
importance that what we do right here and now matters. That all that we do and
all that we say has eternal consequences.
We can choose to create hell, or to become
purified by fire and seasoned with the salt of Jesus.
We can squabble over who is the greatest and
who is or is not allowed to heal and cast out demons… or we can welcome
everyone who does the work of Christ who has already redeemed the whole world
on the cross.
We can be those people who hold on to all we
have, or become those people who give ourselves away. We do this not for our
sake but for the sake of the gospel, for others and the world.
I want to re-write
an old joke:
One day in heaven,
Mary, the mother of Jesus, visits Peter at the Pearly Gates. He has a hard job
and so she brings him a cup of coffee. While they are chatting, she him asks
how things are going. “Well,” says St. Peter, “I am kind of
frustrated. I’m scrupulous about my job here. I interview each soul
arriving at the Gate of Heaven, and I check to see if his or her name is
written in the Book of Life and I turn away people not worthy to enter. But you
know what? A little while later I turn around and I see those very people
wandering around on the inside! I don’t get it! What’s going on?”
“Oh. That
Jesus,” replied the Theotokos with a
knowing smile. “My son is always letting people in through the side
door.”
Sermon: https://vimeo.com/615352470
Liturgy: https://youtu.be/q-fK-dhyEXg
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