Preached at Gethsemane Lutheran Austin 8/30/15; Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23
Grace, Mercy, and Peace to you from the Holy Trinity. Amen.
Thank you for welcoming me to worship with you this morning, I’m so delighted to be here with you once again, and thanks Pastor Karl for inviting me to preach…it’s exciting to be a pastor in a church that worships in the evenings, so that I can spend my Sunday mornings with great faithful people like you here, and in other Austin congregations. I bring you greetings from Table of Mercy, the new ELCA congregation I’m working on forming. We’re a group of folks who have been largely disenfranchized by the church looking for ways to reclaim our identity as Christians in the world. We meet every other Sunday evening and make dinner together and eat it during worship like the earliest Christians did and keep all our focus on social justice here in Austin and throughout the world and you’re welcome to visit us at any time!
When I was growing up, I would often times hear the line “if you were here last week you heard…” and then the preacher would refer to the gospel reading from the last week. I realize now that it was important for the sermon if it built on a theme that had been introduced the week before for everyone to be on the same page. Because often that’s the case….our readings follow one gospel per year and while each Sunday has its own integrity and ability to stand on its own theologically, sometimes its nice to take the long view of things and see how Jesus weaves the same things throughout the things he teaches, or see how he starts something in one reading and flips it on its head the next week.
But I can’t do that this week, because it is the first time we have read from the Gospel of Mark in since July 19th. We took a huge break and read from the same chapter of John for the last 5 weeks…so if you haven’t been in church since mid july, welcome back and maybe you can remember what last happened. If not, I’ll give you a little refresher…Jesus zooms around healing people and getting in boats and such and he ends up in a town where people have heard about him and touch the hem of his garment and they are healed. The religious leaders heard about this and are upset because Jesus is doing exactly everything he’s not supposed to. He’s breaking laws and as a way to trap him, the leaders known as the Pharisees, are looking for any way to get him nailed up to a cross. They catch wind of the fact that his disciples are eating without washing their hands and are appalled because they are violating the terms of the Torah, the books of the Law…which gets us to where we are today. Jesus telling three groups of people the same thing in slightly different language (the leaders, his disciples, and the crowds).
Part of the beauty of getting to preach is spending time each week locating myself in the story…and it’s something I encourage you to do when listening to it on Sunday or reading it throughout the week. By thinking about where I fit I can often times hear God’s words to me more powerfully. And since we are reading the Bible thousands of years after it was published, we have the luxury of seeing the different parts of the story and placing ourselves where we see fit.
This week, of course, it’s super tempting to see ourselves as Jesus’ renegade disciples who spend so much of their time bucking the system and the status quo and helping the orphans and widows that they don’t have time to wash their hands before they eat. It’s tempting to see ourselves as the disciples because we too are followers of Jesus, we too feed the orphans and widows not just in this city but around the world, we too try to follow the path of Christ. But this week, as I read the story, and thought about the ELCA and the world I thought that putting myself…putting ourselves….in the shoes of the disciples in this story wouldn’t be honest.
It wouldn’t be honest because, quite frankly, I think we’re more like the Pharisees than the disciples. Maybe you saw about a month ago the study that showed the ELCA was the second least diverse denomination in the United States. Surely you remember learning that the Charleston shooter was a member of an ELCA congregation. Hopefully you started listening to the voices of people of color in our church and hearing their experiences of being a Person of Color and what that means for how they interact in the world. I think the ELCA, and largely the whole church catholic tends to be on the side of the Pharisees….and I think we’re being confronted with it right now. See, the Pharisees had the privilege of hiding behind the law so that they didn’t have to interact with people they didn’t want to. The Pharisees had the luxury of not talking to people who didn’t look like them or didn’t act like them if they didn’t want to. The pharisees….are us. Now I totally understand that no one likes being called out as a racist, or that they have undeserved privileges…I don’t either…but the reality of the matter is that the ELCA and all the church have an immense amount of privilege that we’ve been hiding behind. We do amazing work around the world to alleviate hunger, we do okay work around the city to alleviate hunger. We do incredible work with disaster response and accompanying people to accomplish the goals that they set for themselves. We do things like the Youth Gathering that change the landscape of an entire city in just one week. I do not want to deny these things and the good that the church does.
But Lutherans believe we are simultaneously saints and sinners. In the midst of the good we do, we still are infected by the sin of racism, just like the Pharisees were. The issue in Jesus’ time in this story is not a story of two ethnicities, but of two different worldviews. And the Pharisees, rather than listening to the voices of those who were different than them are listening only to the narrative that gives them power and control over others. And we’ve fallen into that trap that is so alluring…the trap of power, of control…without even knowing we’ve done it. We’ve stayed a beacon of whiteness in a world that is in the middle of relearning that white identity is fragile, and is dependent on putting negative value on the color of skin that someone has if it’s not white.
And that’s really what I think Jesus is reacting to here. The isolation that happens when the Pharisees, and us, stand behind privilege and use it as an excuse (whether explicit or not) to not engage in the issues of Justice that Jesus preached about. He’s reacting to the fact that the Pharisees use their privilege to keep themselves from looking out in the world and seeing their neighbor and responding to their need.
And Jesus reaction….the reaction that says “your privilege is something you need to work with….you need to take your privilege and use it to raise up the voices of those in the minority, you need to take your privilege and work with it so that people begin to understand that black lives matter…which isn’t to say other lives don’t matter, but to recognize that for so long black lives have not mattered in this country….that reaction of Jesus is what got him killed. See, when someone tries to upset the balance of a world that thrives on the propagation of privilige, the system works its hardest to get rid of them. The system and world thought it succeeded with Jesus but that’s not the case…and it’s not the case for us either.
See, we might act a lot like the Pharisees (and that’s hard to hear)….but really, truly….we have a different story we can tell. We don’t have to hide behind these harmful and false identities of power to which we are told by the world that we need to cling to keep our identity. Because we’ve been given a different identity in baptism, a dangerous identity because it’s the identity of Christ. We are bound to him and to the way of his death in our baptism. We are bound to all those who have been rejected and killed because they have challenged the system, we become one with every single person who suffers violence because they are powerless.
And each week we gather around a table and eat and drink the body and blood of the one who was killed because he spoke out against the forces of this world that sought to keep people oppressed. He spoke out against the forces of this world that claimed that black lives don’t matter. But God, our God, cannot abide by death and takes the death of the one who was the victim of power and privilege and raised him to new life. So we, when we eat and drink the body and blood of the one who was killed by power and killed by privilege, we are bound to everyone else in the world who is killed by privilege and power, and we cannot help but see that they are part of us, and we are part of them. And we cannot help but see and experience that God raises all of us from the death we create. Because the promise of Christ is a promise that we belong to not just the death, but to the resurrection of a God that would experience all the pain in the world from humanity and still tell us that we are beloved.
When we eat and drink the body and blood of Christ we see that we are part of each other. We see the face of God in our neighbors and we can no longer live like the Pharisees, in our towers of privilege. When we consume the body of Christ and become the body of Christ amazing things happen, like the town hall meetings happening in Austin between people of color and white folk who are starting to create action plans for how to work together to dismantle racism in this city. Or a public discussion on the nature of race and policing in Austin that had to be moved to a bigger venue because so many people had RSVP’d. When we eat and drink Christ, we become one with the very people we oppress and we see that God can make something happen even in the midst of death. We come together around the name of Jesus, the one whom God raised from the dead because God refuses to let death have the final word. We come together to eat and drink and say the name of the one we crucified.
And when we say the name of Jesus we say the name of Sandra, Cynthia, Susie, Ethel, Depayne, Clementa, Tywanza, Daniel, Sharonda, Myra, and all those who have been the victims of power and privilege. And in saying their names, we speak the very name of God. We speak the name of God who shows up in the middle of suffering, who shows up in the midst of death, and brings peace, breaks down the walls that divide us, and makes us one body with new life and a new start.
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