Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor
Sept. 30, 2012 Proper 21
Mark 9:41-50
41For truly I tell you, whoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you bear the name of Christ will by no means lose the reward.
42"If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea. 43If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life maimed than to have two hands and to go to hell, to the unquenchable fire. 45And if your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life lame than to have two feet and to be thrown into hell. 47And if your eye causes you to stumble, tear it out; it is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and to be thrown into hell, 48where their worm never dies, and the fire is never quenched.
49"For everyone will be salted with fire. 50Salt is good; but if salt has lost its saltiness, how can you season it? Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another."
Cursing is a peculiar art, and it is, in my opinion, a sadly failing art in our culture. Our curses are few and very crude. Four centuries ago, Shakespeare peppered his plays with almost throwaway insults that were wonderful:
"Sir, my desire is that we become much better strangers."
"I could endure anything before but a cat, and now he's a cat to me." Or, "Let's meet as little as we can."
We would not generally tell someone that they are fat but in a more subtle time, the English might say, "By truth, your girth doth make a mill stone seem a feather."
We have no more imagination than to simply say that someone is just ugly but the English might say, "Thy vile canker-blossom'd countenance curdles milk and sours beer."
I'm not encouraging you to be rude, I'm just saying that when you are rude, you could try to use a little more creative flair.
Cursing in our era tends to be one of only two things. You might hear someone telling someone to go to place of eternal torment.... Which, clearly, expresses some sincere anger.... But the other common curse wishes a sexual encounter on another person, which, as curses go, doesn't really make much sense. Our curses are either wishing someone eternal torment or brief ecstasy. Which makes no more sense than angrily saying, "I hope your daughter gets into Harvard." Or "I hope you get a substantial promotion."
That one I can't make sense out of but the former seems to come from a much deeper necessity. A necessity because the world is unfair, it is especially unfair to people who live in militarily occupied nations.... It is unfair to slaves who are bought and sold.... It is unfair to the poor who are defined by cast, class or race to be perpetually poor, generation after generation.
Something innate in our souls calls out for justice. In the most ancient strata of human religious thinking, the gods and demons meted out reward and punishment instantaneously. Earthquakes, floods, droughts and plagues were signs of god's wrath and bumper crops, healthy births and victory on the battlefield were signs of god's favor.
That system proved to be unsatisfactory. Sacrificing animals really doesn't make it rain or make crops grow. Carrying religious idols and emblems into battle will not really insure victory over bad military odds.
Our ancestors could not accept that God was either indifferent or unjust but if you just look at the events of current times or even of history, a plausible case could be made for accusing God of being indifferent, unjust or just plain old ineffective. Various religious solutions for this dilemma have been offered.... Reincarnation continues to be an inviting idea to many.... If life sucks this time around, you have an infinite number of opportunities for life to suck even more.
It was the ancient Persians who first put into words the solution that seems to have mostly stuck, at least for modern Christians, Muslims and some Jews.
Our ancestors long held fairly nebulous hopes that there was some life beyond this life. Ancient Jews had almost nothing to say about it beyond the shadowy house of Sheol, and ancient Egyptians held only to a hope that the demigod pharaohs had a future.
The Persians, as envisioned by Zoroaster, believed that everyone marched from death into eternity and there had to cross a bridge into the eternal world from which all souls come. The bridge, however, crosses over a deep pit of fire and if you have lived a good life, the bridge is wide and easy but if you have not lived well, the bridge turns and is as narrow as the blade of a knife, so that the unjust fall into the eternal flame.
Hebrew slaves were exposed to this very convenient religious belief while they were in captivity in Babylon and worked this view of eternity into their post exilic Judaism which gave birth to Christianity and Islam. I say that it is a convenient religious creation because it allows us to believe that God is just, that the world, though it looks unfair, will be ultimately set right.
On the one hand, that hope becomes a way of tolerating the gross injustices of life. But on the down side, it becomes a tool for keeping people in oppression. African slaves introduced to Christianity in North America were told that if they were obedient and worked hard, enduring their misery in this life, would have untold riches and joy in the world to come.
Even St Paul lends his voice to the conviction that this life is so temporary, compared to eternity, that we should suffer in silence, setting our hope on the unseen, unknown, unprovable world of reward for which there is not a scrap of supporting evidence.....the ultimate pig in a poke, the pie in the sky in the by and by promise for which no one can file a complaint of false advertising.
The threat of hell is then used not only to keep the poor and the enslaved in compliant service, but it is also used to keep women in abusive relationships, to tell young men and women that the urges stirring within them can not only lead to incurable diseases and unwanted pregnancy but also to eternity in a place where the flame is unceasing and the worm never dies where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth...... which never seemed to eradicate sexual conduct but it sure invested it with a lot of conflict, guilt and despair.
In very recent years, several evangelical authors have found the courage to take a look at this issue and begin to say things like, "love wins," rejecting the notion that a loving God will burn you up in eternity for doing things that a million years of evolution insists that you will do.
When I was attending the Wild Goose Festival this summer, the film "Hellbound" was being hawked by its producers and the largely evangelical preachers who spoke at that event were nearly doing cartwheels in joy as the movie traces the hell myth back to Zoroastrianism and its influences on evolving Judaism and the birth of Christianity and Islam. Something they would have known a long time ago if they had bothered to go to school..... but it only seems to infuriate them when I point that out and they generally have to fall back on one of the two insults they know, one of which makes no sense and the other had just be debunked...... it's awkward.
In this we stand at the open mouth of a dark cave with our pre-civilization ancestors. We do not know what, if anything happens when we die. We seem to have an innate hope and we have an abundance of ideas, experiences, accounts of angelic sightings, ghosts, bright lights and voices all of which add up to absolutely no proof of anything and no certain conclusions other than that we hope.
Like so many aspects of religions which begin as revolutionary movements of the poor expressing defiance against the powerful, hell is a piece of a formula in search for ultimate justice.... That there are people who are so evil, circumstances so unjust, that surely God can't let it go without some settling of accounts, some justice on the other side of what we can see and know. But then, as all surviving religions eventually become state religions, the threat of hell is used against the weak and oppressed to keep them in compliance and to control their lives.
What the emerging church must realize is that the spiritual life either has value in and of itself or it has no certain value at all.
When I was a young preacher in Louisville, KY, I taught a Wednesday evening Bible Study in the church's fellowship hall on Taylorsville Road and I had about thirty or forty people in that class. The next major road to the west was Bardstown Road where there was a very large bar that, on Wednesday nights, held a "naughty nighty competition." So I regularly thanked those in attendance at the Bible Study for choosing to read the gospels with me rather than going to the naughty nighty competition at the Toy Tiger.
But as I looked at some of the young college students in the class, I thought I could detect a certain discomfort with the choice they had made. And here is the issue, if you are in Bible study when you would rather be at the Toy Tiger because you are afraid of going to hell then, you have been tricked.
Like all of you, I have hope for life in the future and I can even add to that a bit of faith in a loving and kind God so that whatever the great unknown may be, I am willing to trust God with that.
An engaged spirituality, a religion embedded in the real world, opens its eyes to look at what is through a lens of faith. Our innate feeling that the world is unjust and that somehow the will of God still favors justice is not wrong, we just anesthetize it with talk about heaven and hell.
Your passion for justice, your desire to ameliorate suffering, to share the resources of the world with those in need..... that is holy and anything that keeps you from working to make that happen, anything that tells you to disengage and leave it in the hands of an unknown hereafter, that, I submit, is the opposite of spirituality..... in fact, when you think about it, it's really not religion, it is just old fashioned stupid.
Some people sitting at their desk watching this sermon on YouTube will protest, but Jesus warned us carefully avoid the unquenchable fire of hell, it is right there in the 9th chapter of Mark. I can tell you that the preponderance of New Testament scholars from the members of the Jesus Seminar to any Ivy League school you want to name would tell you that though the early church wrote such texts into the gospels that the historical Jesus would not have said that.
I'm here to tell you that even if he did, you need to have the courage to say that even he could be wrong about some things. Jesus was, at least in part, a product of that same culture that inherited as fact that part of their Persian history that put justice off into the afterlife. Jesus is a part of that flat earth culture that believed that it rained when God opened doors in the firmament to let the waters above fall on the earth beneath, and that the sun was literally reborn each morning as God drew it across the sky.
What we, as spiritual people in the 21st century must do is to examine the heart of the faith we have inherited, to preach good news to the poor, liberation to the captives, to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, house the homeless and to pay fair wages to laborers.
That's in the prophets, that's in the gospels, that's the preaching of the apostles and testimony of the saints.
You will not often hear me quoting that 18th century Irish American revivalist, Alexander Campbell, but he said this one thing that I love..... that if Christians will get down on the knees and pray for anything for which they will not then stand up and work for, sacrifice for, to make it happen then they are only insulting God and disappointing themselves.
We know enough about hell in the here and now without wasting time on speculation about the afterlife. Hell is when middle class legislators make it illegal for poor women to manage their own bodies when those legislators can afford to send their kids to Canada or Europe for any medical procedure they make illegal here. Hell is living in a nation with enough empty foreclosed upon houses to house every homeless person in the country but no one seems to be willing to do the math necessary to correct that absurdity.
Hell is fighting the bloodiest domestic war in history to end slavery in this nation and then blithely accepting slavery produced goods and food because they come from a nation far enough away that we don't see it. Hell is telling people that they have to get off of welfare and go to work and then we devise a transportation system where you have to buy a car, insurance, gas, pay taxes and fees to get to work.... Which is virtually impossible and at least here in Springfield, we design our bus system routes to keep the number of riders low because it costs too much to subsidize the buses.
Hell is sending the poor of this nation to kill the poor of another nation to keep the transfer of wealth into the hands of the few sailing on a sea of the blood of the unsuspecting, compliant, obedient poor. What does your religion have to say to that?
If you demand that the message of Jesus remain imprisoned in a religion that does not speak to the hell we know in favor of one that doesn't exist then, well, I have a couple of cryptic curses for you, and you can take your choice of which one you like the best, I just insist that you stay out of our way because we are going to try to change the world so that the will of God is done on earth where we can see it.
