Adversarial Stories

Mark 8:31-38

February 25, 2018

“Get thee behind me, satan,” is one of my favorite lines in all of scripture. I may not preach it often, but in day-to-day living I bet I quote Jesus calling out Peter more than any other single line from the Bible.

When somebody offers me an extra piece of cake, “get thee behind me, satan.”

When somebody suggests a coffee break when I really need to be writing, “get thee behind me, satan.”

When somebody suggests going out to play a round of disc golf when I really need to finish cleaning the basement, “get thee behind me, satan.”

About 50 years ago a prominent Anglican theologian wrote a popular little book called Your God is Too Small. I think my problem may actually be that my satan is too small.

It’s perhaps helpful to be reminded that the Hebrew word ha-satan, which is the equivalent to the Greek satana which Jesus calls Peter, means simply “adversary.” It’s not a reference to some other-worldly demon or evil spirit, and it’s actually not even a name. So, really, Jesus is not so much calling Peter the devil as he is naming the temptation placed before him as a stumbling block, as averse to Jesus’ vocation, as an adversary to his movement.

What stands opposed to Jesus? Much the same temptation that Peter suggested on the mountaintop when God speaks clearly – “this is my son, the beloved, listen to him” – and Peter responds by saying, “let’s build a house and just stay here on the mountain.” What stands opposed to Jesus is the ordinary human tendency to avoid the risk of the unknown, to hold tightly to the status quo, to say “better the satan you know.”

I was working on this last Wednesday when the news filtered through social media about the death of Billy Graham. I think the good Rev. Graham had the same problem I do: his satans were too small.

Billy Graham played an out-sized role in a certain kind of American evangelicalism from the Eisenhower years through, at least, the Reagan years. I bring him up at this point and name his season in those terms because I think that, no matter what else he may have accomplished through his decades in mission, that mission was undermined by the stumbling block of power. That is to say, Mr. Graham, as he preferred to be called, allowed himself to be domesticated by those who held power – economic, political, military – and thus he became too often chaplain to the powerful rather than prophet for the nation.

He preaching shaped a generation of evangelical thought, and it paved the way for both the prosperity gospel, on the one hand, and the rise of the Religious Right, on the other. Moreover, his work on behalf of the gospel – that word of God that is supposed to be good news for the poor and powerless – was undermined by his own fawning relationship to presidents and power brokers.

It’s difficult to say, “get thee behind me satan,” when you are encouraging Richard Nixon to get tougher on Vietnam, as Mr. Graham did in the early 70s, or praising the president for his latest speech on Watergate a year or two later. At pretty much the exact same time, Mr. Graham was preaching huge revivals at which he named the demons of the age: drugs, alcohol, and sex. I promise you this; indeed, last week I listened to one of his sermons from 1971 when he preached about the devil and demons to a huge crowd in Dallas.

When Peter suggests that Jesus might not really need to go to Jerusalem, and Jesus responds, “get thee behind me, satan,” I don’t think the problem was drugs, alcohol, and sex or any possible first-century Palestinian equivalent.

Perhaps the problem is we know too many small satans and we have become so familiar with them, so comfortable with them, that we don’t even recognize the bigger ones. In contemporary American life the twin forces that stand most firmly opposed to the gospel are violence and capitalism, and we are so awash in both of them that we do not even see them as remotely demonic. Their common currency is power. They are the air we breathe.

Indeed sometimes we get so comfortable with the demonic that we come to see it as praiseworthy, and then we get a gospel of private prosperity that flies the flag and regularly calls forth God’s blessing on our troops and even on our guns.

I read a remembrance of Graham last week written by Randall Balmer, a Dartmouth professor who wrote the PBS documentary Crusade: The Life of Billy Graham. Balmer’s piece, in Religioun Dispatches, opens with this line: “Billy Graham, by any measure the most famous religious figure of the 20^th century, died today at his home in Montreat, North Carolina.”

To which I can only say, get thee behind me satan. The adversary – the satanic, if you will – is in the word choice, or, one might say simply, the devil is in the details. You see, it all depends on what you mean by “religious.”

Obviously, Billy Graham was incredibly well known. However, I think the claim that he was the “most famous religious figure” reflects something that Jesus would have called satanic and that gets to the heart of why Billy Graham’s preaching never moved me: the understanding of “religion” reflected in both the remembrance of Graham and in Graham’s life-work is simply way too narrow. If your satan is too small, your God will also be too small.

A small god is not worth following, as Abraham surely understood.

That’s why, when I read Balmer’s opening line, I thought immediately, well, get back to me on that when they make room on the Mall for a Billy Graham Memorial next to the Martin Luther King one, or even to the Gandhi statue in DuPont Circle.

For Graham, religion was confined to the narrow range of personal spiritual conviction, or, in terms he surely would have embraced, “a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.” So the stories he told in preaching always had an easy-to-spot arc: you bring your heart, broken by some personal sin, to Jesus and he fixes it. That’s not the story of Abraham, who is invited to leave everything familiar to go to an entirely new place that God will reveal along the way. It’s certainly not the story of Jesus, whose vision was always on the healing of the nations.

As Balmer put it, “The only hope for meaningful change, according to Graham, lay in the aggregate effect of individual conversions rather than in programmatic reforms.”

As a result, when Graham travelled to the seats of power it was to serve as chaplain to the powerful not to insist that the powerful use their power for the sake of justice. When Jesus set his face toward Jerusalem, he was not going there to cozy up to the powerful and offer them some spiritual succor. He was not going there to lay hands upon them and bless them. He was not going to Jerusalem to ask the chief priests and scribes to have a personal relationship with him. He was going there to confront them. He was going there to turn the tables on them because they abused the poor. He was going there to speak disruptive truth to the powerful regardless of the cost to himself.

That’s the part of authentic faithfulness that escapes most of us. We tend to count the cost before we commit to the action, and thus power remains unchecked.

Power, of course, is merely force, and has neither a positive nor negative valence in and of itself. 

As Dr. King put it, “power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.”

When power is divorced from love it stands opposed to justice and becomes satanic.

Moreover, when power is embodied in the person of a popular political leader it also becomes incredibly seductive. When such power is exercised to maintain an unjust status quo, or, worse, to maintain the positions and power of corrupt leaders, then it becomes the very adversary Jesus calls out and puts behind him.

Scripture is filled with the sad stories of court prophets – seers drawn into the orbit of kings who then turn the prophet’s words to the service of the status quo, the king’s reign. The adversary, so often in scripture, is like Peter – seduced by the idea of power and eager to hold on to it. Peter sees Jesus transfigured, witnesses the growing crowds around him, and begins to see him as the longed for messiah. It’s not hard to imagine Peter also harboring secret fantasies about some prominent role in a future “Jesus Administration.”

So when Jesus, eschewing the title of messiah in favor of the more obscure “son of man” notes that the trajectory of his vocation is toward Jerusalem and a confrontation with the powers that be Peter wants no part of that.

The call to “take up the cross” is all but impossible to embrace. Taking up the cross was a literal act of those condemned by Rome as insurgents. The condemned were compelled to carry their own cross to the place of execution. This was not a metaphor nor a spiritualized practice that escaped real-world consequences. It was certainly not about a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.

Of course, most of us will find a personal relationship with Jesus a whole lot easier to bear than the cross. The cross makes radical demands on us while a personal relationship with Jesus asks very little. A personal relationship with Jesus can happen, according to evangelical preaching, like that! That gesture was literally a trope of Billy Graham’s preaching.

That’s convenient considering that most of us find the prospect of changing our lifestyles enough to increase our charitable giving $500 a year too much cross to bear. Imagine being called to stand up for something that might cost you your job. Imagine being called to stand up for something that might cost you your life.

Most of us simply cannot even imagine it. The best of us are way more like Peter than we are like Jesus. Most of us are far more comfortable with the kind of religion that made Billy Graham famous than we are with the kind of religion that Jesus invites us into. I don’t think Billy Graham was any more satanic than Peter. I think, in fact, that they were both a whole lot like the rest of us: trying to do our best with our small gods and satans, but not really getting close enough to the heart of the gospel to have our own hearts wounded.

But if we are concerned first for the safety of our hearts we never risk them. What does it profit us to want to save them if we lose them in the process? If we set our minds on being safe, on being secure, on avoiding risks, then we will not set our faces toward Jerusalem.

But true religion is not about saving 5,000 souls in a moment of rapturous response to compelling preaching that promises glory in the life to come, it is about feeding 5,000 hungry people and compelling change to the systems that confine them to poverty in this life.

True religion is not about personal piety and pie in the sky by and by; true religion is about the long struggle to practice peace in world rent asunder by violence.

True religion is not merely welcoming Jesus into your heart, it is welcoming the poor, the outcast, the enemy to your table.

True religion is not about an individual’s relationship with Jesus, but rather a community’s relationship with justice.

I am not ashamed of Jesus and his words in this messed up generation. I want to follow him. I just need to get a whole lot better at naming the demons that get in my way. They really aren’t coffee and cake and disc golf. I need to see clearly the bigger satans in my life, for then I will be open to a bigger God. Amen.

Stories of Power

Mark 1:9-15; Genesis 9:8-17

February 18, 2018

For a long time I’ve wondered about the different ways liturgical seasons must feel in different parts of the world. The word Lent, for example, means simply lengthening, and it refers to the lengthening of the daylight during spring. But in the global south, the part of the world where the church is actually growing, the days are getting shorter just now.

It serves as a good reminder to me that our faith is not about some abstract notion of truth, but is, instead, about real life as experienced in real time in these bodies of dust. It also provides an excellent invitation to turn some of the symbols on their heads, and thus, this year, beginning last week at our Ash Wednesday service, and continuing through these 40 days, we’re not focusing so much on the coming of light, but rather on the gifts of darkness.

There is power in the darkness, and in the stories that come from dark places. We tend to place light in the center, but some of the most powerful narratives emerge from the margins, from places out of the limelight. Sometimes stories of power come from places without it.

If you have been worshipping with us for the past month, and if you are the kind of person who pays attention to such things, you will have noticed that every sermon title since late January has included the word story. It occurs to me that while we’ve talked about various kinds of stories, we haven’t really paused to talk about the idea of story itself.

So, let’s talk about stories for a couple of minutes. First off, what makes for a good story, in your experience?

* * * * * * *

The, uh, great thing about beginning a sermon with an open-ended question is that I never know where you’re going to go with it. But I guessed, with this one, that compelling narrative devices – conflict, reconciliation, and so on – and good characters would probably come up in one way or another.

On this first Sunday of Lent, the lectionary takes us to the beginning of the story of Jesus, and we immediately get conflict and characters. Jesus, John, and Satan show up and they immediately seem like interesting characters. Satan is tempting Jesus – conflict right here in chapter one, and, almost immediately, John gets arrested – lots of conflict. Isn’t that a wonderful beginning?

But, seriously, what’s going on here, and, more to the point, why should we care about it now? In other words, does this story still have any power for us? Does it matter? Does it, to riff again on Mark’s favorite word, have any immediacy?

To get at that, let’s go back just a few verses to the very beginning of Mark – chapter one, verse one, which in the most trusted manuscripts reads simply, “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ,” or, in the Greek, simply Iesou Christou, or Jesus, the Christ, Christ meaning “christened” or “anointed one” or “messiah.”

That brief journey through the Greek of the first line matters because it tells us two important things: first, from the first word, arche, the author of Mark is placing his text alongside Genesis as a story about the beginnings of salvation; second, from its very first sentence this story claims a particular kind of power for salvation, and that power is inherently and explicitly political in nature. As Ched Myers underscores, “Messiah was a political title, a symbol of popular kingship.”[1]

In the tradition of Jesus’ own community, the long-expected messiah was to throw off the yoke of the occupying oppressor, sit on the throne of King David, and restore Israel to its rightful place among the nations. That’s what the salvation story was about when the good news was first proclaimed among the poor and the marginalized of Jesus’ time.

Moreover, the word gospel – euaggelious in the Greek – would have struck Mark’s original audience as an entirely different kind of story than what we expect when we hear gospel. In our time I think most of us hear it as a genre of religious music, but even if we think first of holy scripture, we definitely hear gospel as a story of faith. It strikes us as an fundamentally religious word.

But Mark’s first readers would have heard in the word an invitation to a story of power. Euaggelious means “glad tidings,” and was typically news about battlefield victories. So from its opening words, this is a story about power not confined to the house of God. Or, perhaps more to the point, in this story about power we are invited to think much more broadly about how we understand the house of God.

It is as if Mark is proclaiming, along with the psalmist, that the earth is the Lord’s, the earth and all that is in it. God’s house is as large as the mind of God, and God’s power for salvation – healing, wholeness, communion with all of creation – extends throughout the house.

The good news that Mark begins here to proclaim reaches back to the origin stories of the people of Israel, and thus it reminds them that they are part of the covenant that God has made and renewed and is, in Jesus, renewing again: that the people belong to God and God belongs to the people – always and forever.

If we stopped the proclamation with that it would fit neatly on a Hallmark card and, like such cards, would do absolutely nothing to disturb the status quo. Which is another way of saying, it’s a nice, sweet, wholesome, thoroughly religious story – with absolutely no power.

But the story itself insists otherwise. After all, if the God of Moses did not threaten the status quo, pharaoh would not have found himself plagued by the children of Israel and their God. If the story could be simply confined to the “religious” section of the library, it would be far from the stories of world history and politics and the stuff that actually matters. But if Jesus did not threaten the status quo and the status of those who actually mattered he would not have wound up on a cross.

The book of Mark goes to great lengths to bind together those two stories in particular, and thus it’s worth noting other similarities. Both Moses and Jesus emerge to liberating leadership from unexpected places, outcasts by circumstance. Both Moses and Jesus come from the margins to the center, there to speak truth to power.

We need to be listening for truth these days with renewed urgency, for we live in a time of great deceit. Our fairly to tell the truth and attend to it has deadly consequences, mostly for those who dwell far from power.

Like most everyone this week, I have been deeply saddened and also angered by yet another school shooting. Like most everyone else, I have grown weary of our national inability to address this public health crisis that has made guns the third leading cause of death among our children. For context, young Americans are almost 50 times more likely to die from gun shots than their peers in the rest of the developed world.

The statistics go on and on and on, and they paint a tragic picture of unnecessary loss due to the pathetic inaction of people in positions of power.

Perhaps the problem is we understand power poorly. We believe that power belongs to the powerful – those in lofty positions of the government or industry.

But the stories of our faith tell us something different, and that difference, itself, has remarkable power. Jesus held no office. He had no wealth. He led no corporation. He had no tools of mass communication.

But he wielded the power of authentic good news. He preached liberation to the captives. He brought healing and wholeness to the sick and the brokenhearted. He gave new sight to the blind, and preached good news to the poor. He preached nonviolence in a violent world. He preached love to a people drowning in fear.

He brought the concerns of those on the margins directly to the center, and he spoke truth to those who held power in his society. That truth was simple: the good news is the God loves these folks you’ve neglected; God demands justice on their behalf; you need to turn from the unjust high road you’re traveling and walk the low road with humility, working in solidarity with everyone else who is struggling along.

In the current context, with the urgent concern of this week foremost in my mind, I am hearing as gospel truth the words of students, one of whom said simply, “blood is being spilled on the floors of American classrooms and that is not acceptable.” That child of God, witness to unimaginable horror in his school last week, went on to say, “by working through bipartisanship and working through our differences … we can make an actual change. And who knows? Maybe we could save some children’s lives.”

The kid who said that is basically the same age as my daughter. He goes to a school that is pretty much like Wakefield, or W & L, or Yorktown.

These kids have no power in the system – any systems, really. With respect to the decisions that have clear and dramatic effects on their lives they have no real voice. Compared to the halls of power where such decisions get made, these kids exist way out on the margins.

If there’s anything that all of scripture ought to make abundantly clear it’s this: listen to the voices from the margins, for that is where you will hear stories with the power to change the world. May it be so. Amen.

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[1] Ched Myers, Binding the Strongman, 123.