Epiphany 4B, 28 January 2024. The Very Rev. Pamela L. Werntz
- Deuteronomy 18:15-20. This is what you requested.
- 1 Corinthians 8:1-13. Love builds up.
- Mark 1:21-28. A new teaching – with authority!
O God of compassion, grant us the wisdom, the strength and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.
This past week an angel of the Lord sent me a book about how to live in these terrible days and, at the same time, how to live in these beautiful days. The book is by theologian Kate Bowler: Have a Beautiful Terrible Day: Daily Meditations for the Ups, Downs, & In-Betweens. She writes about living with an apocalyptic (that is, revelatory) awareness of the catastrophic — globally, nationally, communally, and personally. Many of us are living, she says, with a heightened sense of precarity, a state of dangerous uncertainty. Insisting that we can be both faithful and afraid at the same time, she maintains, “There is tremendous opportunity here, now, for us to develop language and foster community around empathy, courage, and hope in the midst of this fear of our own vulnerability.” [1] This morning we have lessons from scripture that offer timely guidance. From Deuteronomy we hear a portion of Torah teaching about maintaining the wellbeing of the community, about how to tell the difference between authentic and inauthentic prophets. It comes after this instruction:
If there is among you anyone in need within the land that you inhabit, do not be hard-hearted or tight-fisted toward your needy neighbor. You should rather open your hand…give liberally and be ungrudging when you do so…open your hand to the poor and needy neighbor in your land.
Whenever you hear Christian people blithely talking about an “Old Testament God,” it’s always worth remembering and responding that compassion is an ordering principle for Torah, and that the Holy One depicted in the first testament is the very same Holy One depicted in the second testament; and, we are the very same people, who struggle not to be hard-hearted or tight-fisted toward our needy neighbors.
Moses was giving assurance to the people that the Holy One raises up prophets for the community in every generation. Moses said, “Pay attention to them because this is what you asked for.” I love the people’s line: “If I hear the voice of the Lord my God anymore, I will die.” I don’t think we need to take that literally, any more than we should take Verse 15 literally, when it says that someone who offers prophesy in the name of other gods or says what has not been commanded will die. The truth is we’re all going to die sooner or later. What comes in the next two verses after our reading says, “You may wonder, ‘How can we recognize a word that the Lord has not spoken?’” The answer is: we can know only in hindsight; so just do the next right thing yourselves.
In his commentary on this passage, the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks explained that Biblical prophecy is not the same as prediction. Because of free will, human future cannot be reliably predicted. And furthermore, as we heard in the story of Jonah last week, it seems that sometimes God changes God’s own mind. Rabbi Sacks taught: [2]
A prophet does not foretell. He [or she] warns. A prophet does not speak to predict future catastrophe but rather to avert it….The real test of prophecy is not bad news but good. Calamity, catastrophe, disaster prove nothing…. It is only by the realization of a positive vision that prophecy is put to the test. So it was with Israel’s prophets….They warned of the dangers that lay ahead. But they were also… agents of hope…[looking] beyond the catastrophe to the consolation. That is the test of a true prophet.
Look for and listen to prophets who see beyond the catastrophe to the consolation of returning to right relationship with one another and with the Divine.
Today in our Epistle reading, Paul (a true prophet) was writing to the gathered community in Corinth to address a conflict about ethical behavior when it came to eating meat that had been sacrificed to idols. Some people in the community were using the power of their intellectual reasoning or theological knowledge to trip up people who were not as educated. Paul was cautioning them not to let their power hurt others. The Greek word here is exousia, which is also translated as authority, liberty, and strength. It is not to be used to hurt others. Compassion, not knowledge, must be the ordering principle, the ultimate authority. Individual adjustments in behavior must be made to benefit the communal body, with love, for Love.
This exousia that Paul is talking about is also at the heart of our Gospel lesson from Mark. Jesus taught with it, with a kind of vigor and freedom that was uncommon among other religious scholars, in Mark’s opinion. It’s possible to read this as descriptive and not derogatory language against the scribes; but it’s generally understood as a potshot at the religious scholars of the day. Mark had disparaging things to say about religious leaders dozens of times. His words signal an internal conflict within Judaism, which would eventually grow into violent Christian anti-Judaism. We Episcopalians are quite like the scribes. Scholarship and tradition and laws and scripture matter a great deal to us; and, we’re generally not known for teaching and preaching that are powerful enough to exorcise demons. So, it’s a good idea for us to love and follow Jesus without diminishing the work of scribes in any age.
Jesus’ first work of wonder (some would say a miracle), according to Mark, took place in Capernaum (which means Village of Compassion) on the Sabbath in a synagogue (which means gathering). Jesus was teaching when a contaminated spirit inside a guy started shouting at Jesus. The polluted spirit in the guy asked Jesus, “Have you come to destroy us?” And Jesus commanded the unclean spirit, the demon, to be silent and come out of the man. In other words, yes, if destroy means clean up; yes, Jesus had come to clean up the mess of unclean spirits. What Jesus told the unclean spirit is, “Shut up and get out of him!” Jesus did not say, “Be silent” to the demon. Jesus did not say, “Let’s talk.” Jesus said literally, “Put a muzzle on it” to the polluted spirit that was occupying or pre-occupying a man in the gathering of the community in Capernaum, the village of compassion. Jesus didn’t make the man leave; he made the unclean spirit leave. He did what he could to restore the man to community. (Who knows how long that took.)
Mark wants us to know there was something about Jesus’ teaching that was powerful, authoritative, and liberating, indeed exorcising, thrilling to some folks and disturbing to others-–healing for some and threatening or even dangerous to others. Exousia is most often associated with casting out demons in Mark’s Gospel. (The idea of demons emerged in Jewish literature of the 3rd century BCE as a way to explain the experience of evil.) [3] In Mark demons always know that Jesus is the Holy One of God; the disciples never seem to get it, but the demons always do. In fact in Mark, one real sign of the effectiveness of Jesus’ ministry is when oppressive forces start screaming bloody murder. Jesus demonstrated surprising authority (strength or license) over those oppressive forces, which backed people into narrow places, pushed them down, put the squeeze on, limited life and freedom, and alienated people from each other and from their true selves. Jesus wasn’t only proclaiming and teaching about freedom from oppression; he was enacting it, demonstrating that compassion is an ordering principle for the Torah and Gospel.
I bet many of us believe in demons when they’re defined as a spirit that alienates people from each other and from their (our) true selves. So I wonder, how do we get out of our heads, and out of our communal psyches, those things that terrify us or shame us into alienation, division, and estrangement. I don’t want to suggest that we should all become Jerks for Jesus shouting, “Shut up and get out!” I do think, however, that we tend to be under-confident, under-reverent about our own God-given authority and power to set others free and to save lives.
What if we stopped shrinking from or tolerating those unclean spirits, those oppressive forces, those demons that terrify us or shame us into alienation, division, and estrangement? What if we could see clearer that forces which diminish the integrity and dignity of human beings are decidedly unwelcome? I’m talking about forces like enmity, cruelty, jealousy, greed, disregard, domination, shame; the list goes on and on. By contrast, exousia comes from truth telling, accountability, the assertion of human integrity and dignity, giving and receiving love, even in the midst of struggle. Asserting exousia recalls the spirit back to its divine task, which is to serve the well-being of the world. I want us to continue to expand our capacity for assertive and non-violent responses to the unclean or diseased spirits that squawk in our own heads, in our homes, in our parish, on the street: wherever.
Because next Sunday Emmanuel Church will hold our annual meeting, I have been floating this past week on the annual-report contributions from all parts of our life together as a parish. There are draft copies available for you in the main lobby and on-line. I encourage you to read it. I think you’ll be as amazed and inspired as I am by the depth and reach of the ministry of this parish, which serves the needs of the wider community every day, 24-7. People seek us out to pray for help, to pray in thanks, and to pray in wonder; to listen, to speak, to sing, to play; to be quiet and to make noise (sometimes a lot of noise); to cook, to serve, to eat, to eliminate; to heal, to recharge batteries, to sleep, to wake up; to remember, to forget, to meet; to offer assistance and receive assistance; to get hands dirty, and to get bodies clean; to practice and practice and practice; to try again, to forgive; to engage, to rest from engaging; to work, to have fun; to get free and to set others free; to deliver and to be delivered; to warm up, to cool off; to create and recreate. What we all have in common, as far as I can tell, is a deep desire to be believed and to be beloved, which requires a great deal of patience and compassion from everyone involved.
Our appointed collects, hymns, and the cantata today plead for peace. I want us to be clear, however, that the peace of God doesn’t come by simply silencing loud or otherwise-disturbing voices. The peace of God comes by just distribution of resources; and the just distribution of resources comes from treating one another with kindness, with repairing and restoring community in ever widening and deepening circles. I urge you to find ways to work for peace by engaging as fully as you can in this or any other community where compassion is grown, where compassion is the ordering principle. I’ll end with this blessing from Kate Bowler. [4]
Blessed are we, the anxious
with eyes wide open to the lovely and the awful.
Blessed are we, the aware,
knowing that the only sane thing to do in such a world
is to admit the fear that sits in our peripheral vision.
Blessed are we, the hopeful,
eyes searching for the horizon,
ready to meet the next miracle, the next surprise.
Yes, blessed are we, the grateful,
awake to this beautiful, terrible day.
- Kate Bowler, Have a Beautiful Terrible Day: Daily Meditations for the Ups, Downs, & In-Betweens (New York: Convergent Books, 2024), p. xxiv.
- The late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, www.chabad.org/parshah/article_cdo/aid/2290655/jewish/Testing-Prophecy.htm
- Ronald J. Allen and Clark M. Williamson, Preaching the Gospels without Blaming the Jews (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004) p. 99.
- Kate Bowler, p. xxvii.