September 27, 2009
Who Is Against Us? - Mark 9:38-50
Pastor: Luke Maybry
DownloadThe FBI issued two bulletins this past Tuesday to police warning them about terrorist threats to attack stadiums, entertainment complexes, and hotels. These two bulletins followed on the heels of similar warnings about the vulnerability of mass transit systems. We only know about these most recent warnings – and the Associate Press only released them – due to the recent arrest of Najibullah Zazi, a 24 year-old Afghanistan immigrant who was a shuttle van driver at the Denver airport. Zazi, his father, and an Imam at a mosque in Queens, New York, were arrested on suspicion of masterminding a plot to use hydrogen-peroxide based explosives on our most congested mass transit systems, similar to those attacks carried out in London and Madrid in 2005 & 2004 respectively that combined to kill 243 people. The worst part of all of this, in my opinion, is that none of this is a big deal. How many of you changed your plans this weekend based off this terrorist threat? I did not go to any football games because 1, it was raining all day yesterday, 2, we had a session meeting all day yesterday, and , 3, all my teams lost anyway.
It just goes to show how complacent we have become at the constant threat against us. My teams should have been worried about their opponents on the actual field yesterday, but evidently they were not, and they all lost. I never, in my wildest dreams, thought that we would actually have to be worried about a terrorist attack in a football stadium. Whether we like it or not, there are a number of people in the world who want to kill us. There are a number of people – I’ll go ahead and say enemies – who want to do us in.
The disciples had enemies. Mark had a few enemies. Even though Mark was written well before Christians were persecuted, the larger society regarded Christians with suspicion. In fact, as threatening as modern day America has become, it pales in comparison, for example, with modern day Palestine. And even modern day Palestine pales in comparison with how Christians fared in ancient Palestine. Early Christians, including the disciples, lived under a constant external threat. Them, they were always a threat. When the disciples tell Jesus that they saw someone else doing something in Jesus’ name they raised the question about their enemies. Who are our enemies, they seem to be asking?
Jesus gives them, and us, a very interesting answer. Whoever our enemies are, they aren’t people who do things in Jesus’ Name. We all know a few Methodists and Baptists and Catholics and non-denominational types. They are not our enemies. It is a complete travesty and a scandal in the Church that in our history, they have been. But they aren’t, Jesus told his disciples. Jesus did not even seem all that concerned about the imminent persecution of Christians. In fact, Jesus didn’t even talk about the Roman soldiers who would be nailing him to a cross in just weeks to come. That would seem to me to be Jesus’ greatest worry and biggest threat.
Jesus tells us here that our greatest enemies are not external enemies at all. Al Qaida may be a threat, and we may want to be concerned about the recent saber-rattling and uranium enrichment capabilities of Iran. But the greatest threat to the church is not external at all, according to Jesus. It’s internal. The greatest threat to the church is not other people from other religions on another side of the world, but Christians. We have done much more harm to ourselves in the last 2000 years than anybody else ever thought about. In fact, in this country, the Church has never faced external persecution. If somebody wants to do us in, clearly the best way to do it is not through some external source like Al Qaida. The best way to do it is by getting us mad and jealous at one another, competing with one another, wanting to outdo the other. I went to a conference this summer in Montreat where I heard in a conversation that the Presbyterian Church in America, a more conservative branch of Presbyterians who broke away from us over the ordination of women fifty years ago, lost members last year for the first time in its short history. And in a sick way, there was a sigh of relief in the conversation, as if it’s better for the whole church to die than just this small part of it. We Christians are a jealous bunch. We do not need an external enemy to kill us. It’s not somebody else’s hands that might make a bomb that might blow us up at a football game that should concern us nearly as much as the folly of our own hands, and feet, and eyes. In fact, Jesus takes that threat so seriously that he says here that if our hands offend us, to cut them off. I hope he’s exaggerating here, though I don’t know that. My hand has offended me and others and God before, but it’s still on my arm. At the very least, Jesus takes the threat that we ourselves pose very seriously.
I have been reading a book by Michael Horton called, Christless Christianity. He writes about some other books (which you may have read and remember) that I found fascinating. “In his book, Amusing Ourselves to Death,” writes Horton, “Jewish writer Neil Postman points out the difference between two apocalyptic scenarios. George Orwell’s 1984 predicts a society ruled by ‘Big Brother’ – a totalitarian regime. Aldous Huxley has a quite different scenario in his book Brave New World. While Orwell predicts an externally imposed oppression, Huxley imagines a self-imposed captivity. ‘As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think. What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would drown in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of nothing.”
We are sinful people. We don’t like to talk about sin too much. I think to a large degree that we’re embarrassed by it. You know, we’ve got all we need within us. We can do whatever we want to do. In our culture, we are the answer to our deepest problems. Yet in our Christian faith, especially in our Reformed Presbyterian Christian faith, we are our deepest problems. We are sinful people under a sinful condition. It’s like an addiction, like something that has a hold on us and we cannot get out from under it. Scripture is clear that we are made in God’s own image, with the eyes to see the truth of God all around us, but we’re so corrupted by this condition that we cannot be who we were created to be. Our culture says that our biggest threat is external (Al Qaida, Iran, big government, republicans, democrats, immigrants) and our salvation is internal. You know, just dig down deep and look hard within. Be all you can be. Live your best life now. Just do it. It’s in you. All of those are slogans intended to sell things by appealing to what we deeply believe. Yet, from a Christian perspective, from Jesus’ perspective in this text, that’s all wrong. It’s the opposite. Our biggest threat is actually internal and our salvation is external.
Jesus is calling us in this text to take that internal threat seriously, more seriously even than we take other threats. When I was in the Army, I had the misfortune of being a bad unit. 49th Transportation Battalion was quite possibly the worst unit in the entire US Army. We had a bad and boring mission, and we consequently spent much of our time doing nothing. It was awful. Morale was terrible. Life in the 49th Transportation Battalion was a joke and everybody knew it. Every year in the summer, we would have a change of command ceremony – a dog & pony show – intended to build our morale. We would stand at attention out in the hot Texas sun for two hours just to hear some general tell us how hard-core and exemplary we all were. All we needed was to look within our army-green hearts, he would say. On the way back from one of those things riding in the back of a 5-ton pick-up, as we were ridiculing the poor general, one of my soldiers facetiously protested to all of us that, “No guys, we really are the best unit in the army.”
We do have external enemies. I do not intend to minimize the threats that they pose. But our greatest threat is internal. We are our greatest threat. We are broken and we cannot fix ourselves. We cannot, on our own power, be all we can be, or certainly be all that we were created to be. We may can unleash the beast and look hard within, but we will ultimately be disappointed by what we find there. We now know who our greatest enemies are, and it’s far worse than we ever thought.
Fortunately for us, the story does not end there. God will not leave us to our own devices. God will not let us simply kill each other off. In fact, the whole story of Scripture is that God takes the initiative to fix what we have broken. God takes the initiative to fix us. God goes to every length possible, including hanging on a cross, dumbfounded in pain, half naked, bleeding to death, at the very depths of human depravity, of the threat that we ourselves pose. God has given us that which we cannot give ourselves, and which the world cannot give us, and which the world therefore cannot take away, and which even we ourselves ultimately cannot take away. We don’t realize that fully yet and we don’t have that fully yet, but we will soon. God has given us grace. And grace, God himself, at the end of the day when the dust settles, wins. Meanwhile, we’ve got to face the threat head-on, which is not Al Qaida or something or someone else. It’s me, it’s me, it’s me, O Lord, standing in the need of prayer.
In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.
