Pentecost 3B - "The Impossible Dream"

 

Saint Mark 3:20-35

Depending on your level of luck in high school either your English teacher made you read Miguel de Cervantes’ massive over thousand-page novel Don Quixote or sent you off to see the play “The Man of LaMancha.”  Since my attention span was not much longer than that of the average teenager at the time, I opted for the play. And besides, it was a musical.

Either way, the reader or the watcher, would have been introduced to the adventures of Don Quixote who obsessed “with the chivalrous ideals touted in books he has read, decides to take up his lance and sword to defend the helpless and destroy the wicked.”1 

This defending the helpless and destroying the wicked seems like, as the song goes, “an impossible dream.”  And, as far as chivalry goes, in our day, we would settle for some civility.

Never-the-less Quixote enlists the services of “a somewhat befuddled laborer named Sancho Panza, whom he has persuaded to accompany him as his faithful squire.”

At one point they come upon, in Servantes’ account, “thirty or forty windmills that rise from that plain. And no sooner did Don Quixote see them that he said to his squire, ‘Do you see over yonder, friend Sancho, thirty or forty hulking giants? I intend to do battle with them and slay them.’”2

Thus Quixote gave birth the phrase “tilting at windmills” which is defined as simply fighting imaginary enemies.

In his sermon last Sunday Dr. Scott Black Johnson, Senior Minister of the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church which is literally in the shadow of Trump Tower in New York, reminded his congregation that we can find ourselves fighting enemies, real or imagined, all the time because, as he said,  “It’s fun to call out the world’s villains. {As we say to ourselves} ‘Let me tell you about some really messed up people.’ It can feel satisfying to point out everything that is wrong {and to} criticize politicians, and criminals, and politicians who are criminals. The blame game can be the easy way out.”3

Peggy Noonan, wrote in her Wall Street Journal column: 

What I am seeing is that we don’t mind disliking each other now.  We like it. That’s the new thing, that we are enjoying the estrangement.  Nobody’s trying to win anybody over.  Some enjoy their hatred because they are by nature shallow and see the implications of nothing. Some enjoy it because they see politics as an extension of sport — booing the other team is part of the fun of being at the game. Some enjoy it because it lets them feel immersed in a warm bath of righteousness.4

 Turn against this and try to introduce a new way and people just might wonder if you might be dreaming an impossible dream.

In the book, two “of Don Quixote’s friends, the priest and the barber, come to drag him home. Believing that he is under the force of an enchantment.”

In the text from The Good Book we have before us today people were saying the same thing about Jesus, “‘He’s out of his mind,’ they said.”5

Word gets back to his family, and they show up. “His family heard the local gossip that Jesus was stark raving mad, and they came to collect him up and take him home, get him away from the public eye.”6

They are defiantly not buying into his dream.

They want to get Jesus back home safe and sound because it looks like he is going to get in a whole lot of trouble turning the world upside down and right side out.

Here’s what’s going on as the always insightful Debi Thomas sees it:

Outside the house stand the insiders — the family, the religious folk, the pious, the careful.  They think they have God pinned down.  They know what the Holy Spirit is supposed to look like, and Jesus doesn’t fit the bill. Inside the house sit the outsiders — the misfits, the rejects, the tax collectors, the prostitutes.  They’re not interested in dogma or piety; they just need love and they seem to have found it in a man who heals the sick and feeds the hungry. And in the midst of them?  Smack in the center of the sick, the insane, the deviant, the hungry, the unorthodox and the unwashed?  There sits Jesus, saying, “This. This is my family.”

Outside is in, and inside is out, and the people least likely to get it are the ones who consider themselves the most knowledgeable, the most “churchy,” and the most spiritually stable.  

Jesus divides the house, and that process hurts.  But he doesn’t divide it to make us homeless.  He divides it to rebuild it.  To make it more spacious, more welcoming, and more beautiful.7

He makes it more beautiful by expanding our definition of family and healing the hurts that may have been caused by our old ones.  As Peter Marty pointed out in a Christian Century article. “Jesus creates a new concept of family, one based not on blood but on love in action.”8  

And when our blood family, or family of origin, lets us down Jesus is giving us permission to create a new one.  It seems like an impossible dream, but it can happen.

Let me tell you a story about how I saw this work.

Back in my youth group days, a long time ago in a galaxy far far away, I had a friend who was there on Sunday nights when we got together, sang in the youth choir, and who was bright beyond measure.  So bright was he that he eventually minted a Ph. D. from the University of Iowa in Physics.

In his senior year of high school his parents got a divorce.  It was a long time in coming because, to put it mildly, his dad was a bounder, a philander, an aging Casanova who did not wear it well.  The divorce was amicable. My friend’s mom got the house while his dad moved in with his girlfriend.

Most of us were not surprised but still saddened.  Few of us knew, or even suspected the impact it had on my friend.

He went off to college and found himself joining a group of really conservative Christians.  He didn’t just become an Evangelical he became a Evangelical’s Evangelical.  He was the poster boy for Evangelicals.  Needless-to-say he stopped attending the Lutheran Church of his youth.  

Both the Pastor of his home church and I wondered what happened.  Why did this seemingly level-headed young man go so far afield?  He’d visit home, even going so far as to visit us when he came to town, but still hanging as tightly to his ways as, frankly, we were to ours.  Our visits left both the older Pastor and I, who was then a newbie to the trade wondering what happened.  And even wondering if we might have done something.

This was until his father died and, as an adult,  my friend came back to give the eulogy at his dad’s funeral and said, “I found love from my Heavenly Father that my earthly father never gave me.”

Wow! Mike drop. The other pastor and I were seated in the chancel across from each other and our eyes widened for at that moment we knew exactly what happened.  We knew what shook this man’s faith to its very core. His earthly father had failed him, maybe even betrayed him, and so he went running into the arms of his Heavenly Father.  

In our opinion there was no better place for him to be.

I think that is what Jesus was talking about when he held out the really radical notion that loyalty to anything less than the message of the Gospel was loyalty to a lesser god.

Unquestioned loyalty to a candidate or a political party is a loyalty to something less than what Jesus is offering.  Think of all those people on social media who can’t seem to find anything else going on in their lives besides what they see on CNN, MSNBC or FOX news.  As Jonah Goldberg wrote last week: “In our polarized political climate, even Republicans and Democrats talk and act like they are a special caste."9

Unquestioned loyalty to a nation can lead to Gaza or require the sacrifice of D-day.

Unquestioned loyalty to any individual – mother, father, sister, brother, pastor, is dangerous because as my pastor in Bellingham wrote in a recently published poem about his own father who fought his own demons: “Let my father be a man who loved me poorly which means he loved me.” 10

Try as hard as it might loyalty to earthly love is loyalty to something less than the love Jesus offers.

Yes, loyalty even to one's race, or creed, or gender, and yes even in this Pride Month, even one’s orientation is something less than what Jesus offers. For hidden in these other worthwhile identities is a danger that can divide.

It doesn’t have to be that way, you know, as the whole of Jesus’ life shows us.

On this day in particular Mary was there, outside, waiting, hoping, maybe even praying that her son would come home.  She wanted what any good mother would want for her son, a life of safety and security. If he came with her and his family that day he could live a good long life as a carpenter in Nazareth. It was her impossible dream because it was defiantly not what her son had in mind for his.

Jesus rejects her offer.  He has a bigger family to care for and down through the ages that family includes us, you and me.

But and this is most important, in the end, Mary never let go of Jesus and Jesus never let his mother go either.

She was there at the cross for his awful dying moments.  And from the cross, with his last breaths, he made sure she would be okay.   

Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing by her side, and said to her, “Look, there is your son!” And then he said to the disciple, “And there is your mother!” And from that time the disciple took Mary into his own home."12

Family continued.  Family was extended. Family was being redefined.

 “Anyone who does the will of God,” Jesus says, “is brother and sister and mother to me.”

Doing the will of God, even knowing the will of God may seem like an impossible dream to us, but it is Jesus' dream, and so it must be our dream too.

Don't you think?

________________

1. “Don Quixote Full Book Summary,” Sparknotes, accessed June 7, 2024, https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/donquixote/summary/.

2. “Tilting at Windmills - Meaning & Origin of the Phrase,” Phrase Finder, December 20, 2023, https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/tilting-at-windmills.html.

3. Scott Black Johnson, “The View From Here, XVII”. Sermon preached at the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York City. 2 June 2024.

4. Peggy Noonan, “We Are Starting to Enjoy Hatred,” The Wall Street Journal. wsj.com, May 30, 2024, https://www.wsj.com/articles/we-are-starting-to-enjoy-hatred-c3005b05.

5. St. Mark 3:21b. (TLB) [TLB=The Living Bible.  Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale Publishing House, 1971]]

6. St. Mark 3:21b. (TLB) [TLB=The Living Bible.  Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale Publishing House, 1971]

7. Michael Fitzpatrick, “What Cannot Be Seen,” Journey with Jesus, May 30, 2021, https://journeywithjesus.net/essays/3027-what-cannot-be-seen.

8.    Peter Marty, "Has Family Become an Idol?" The Christian Century. 1 January 2020

9. Jonah Goldberg, “The G-File.” The Dispatch. 7 June 2024. Accessed 8 June 2024

10.   Jory Mickelson, “Every Unhappy Family Manifesto Is Unhappy in Its Own Way,” Bellingham Review, June 5, 2024, https://bhreview.org/articles/every-unhappy-family-manifesto-is-unhappy-in-its-own-way

11. St. John 19:23-27. (PHILLIPS) [PHILLIPS=J. B. Phillips, The New Testament in Modern English (London, ENG: HarperCollins, 2000).

Pentecost 2B - "Good Sabbath"

 

Deuteronomy 5:12–15 and Saint Mark 2:23–3:6

"Relax. Slow down. Take it easy.”  Implored the visiting preacher from New York City, Dr. Harrison Everett Breen, in an impressive stained glass tone reserved only for preachers, to the congregants gather at the All Souls Church in the fictional town of Mayberry, North Carolina.

Even before The Reverend Dr. Breen was three paragraphs into his sermon some of the residents had taken him up on his offer.  

Gomer had fallen so sound asleep that his snoring could be heard to from the back of the church all the way to the pulpit causing Dr. Breen to pause for a moment to collect his thoughts.  

While Aunt Bea and Clara Edwards sat smiling Barney’s eyelids were also growing heavy and soon he too was beginning to doze only to be bumped awake by Sheriff Taylor.

As parishioners in the pews, you don’t usually get to see this, but clergy do, and it could have been a scene from any church anywhere, in any place in time except this one, this day, I hope.

This episode of “The Andy Griffith Show” first aired in October of 1963 and it’s funny how our problems now seemed to be our problems then as Dr. Breen pointed out:

"Consider how we live our lives today.  Everything is run, run, run. We bolt our breakfast, we scan the headlines, we race to the office, a full schedule in a split second. These are our gages of success. We drive ourselves from morn to night. We have forgotten the meaning of the word relaxation?”

“Relax. Slow down. Take it easy.” the good doctor says before he unwittingly plants a seed in their head.  

What has become of the old-fashioned ways. Who can forget at twilight the old-fashioned band concert on the village green.  The joy and Serenity of just sitting and listening.  This is lost to us and this we should strive to recapture. A simple innocent pleasure."1

The residents of Mayberry take his words to heart and decide to have a band concert that very day.

The rest of the episode is all madness as mayhem as they community begins to discover that there are innumerable obstacles to their impromptu band concerts.

Sorry, this is a little sexist, but the ladies have been dispatched to check out the band uniforms which are in a terrible state of disrepair.   They are dusty.  There is mildew.  They are rips and since the band members have grown in size but not in numbers most of the uniforms have to be let out in order to fit properly.  Soon there is a battle raging as the ladies’ frustration mounts.

Across town at the bandstand Barney and Gomer discover that it has been neglected to the point of near collapse.  There is more than days work to be done and even this will be delayed because Gomer won’t go under the bandstand because “There might be spiders under there.” he tells Barney with a wide-eyed worried look. “I hate spiders.” he tells him just incase he missed the point.

Back at the courthouse Andy is rehearsing the band.  Never very good on their best days they have fallen so far out of practice that they make Professors Harold Hill’s River City Boy’s Band sound like “The Chicago Symphony.”

It seems that nobody is relaxing, or slowing down, or taking it easy.

Now at this point, this sermon could take an unhappy turn because for many of us the idea of Sabbath is a quaint, outdated notion yet for the Children of Israel and for us it can contain an important theological truth: Even God relaxed, showed down, took it easy.

As Walter Bruggemann said of God after the work of creation was finished: “I’m not going into the office tomorrow. I’m taking the day off. I’ve put in long hours every day all week and tomorrow I’m putting my feet up and enjoying all that I’ve accomplished.”2

 That is what Sabbath is. It is taking time to enjoy all that we have accomplished.

Understand please, I am talking about you and me, what Warren Buffett called winners in “the overian lottery.”  He tells shareholders at his annual meeting in Omaha that winning or losing this lottery “would determine their place of birth, ethnicity, wealth, gender and intellectual abilities.” And he always reminds them and us that we are in the luckiest one percent of the world right now.”3

We are not scrounging for scraps or looking for a handout on the street corner.  While our lives may not be, in the words of the Tommy Bahama ad, “one long weekend” our lives, compared to most folks in the world, can be considered to be quite good, thank you very much.

And so were the lives of their disciples as they took their stroll through the grainfield and plucked some grain.  

They are not stealing grain as they journey. What concerns the Pharisees instead is the fact that they are traveling and gleaning on the sabbath. They should have stayed put and prepared their snacks on the previous day. To the Pharisees, this behavior appears to deliberately neglect the mandate to observe the Sabbath and keep it holy.4

But Jesus has a greater point to make and St. Mark helps him make it for us when he remembers “Another time Jesus went into the synagogue, and a man with a shriveled hand was there.”5

Jesus calls the unsuspecting man forward and asks the crowd.  ““What kind of action suits the Sabbath best? Doing good or doing evil? Helping people or leaving them helpless?”6

Everybody, from the learned ones to the toddlers in the crowd knew the answer: There was no violation of Sabbath laws if one’s actions met the essential needs of oneself or of others.

Just as the disciples could have packed a lunch because they were not starving this man could have come back the next day because his condition was not life threatening.  But what Jesus is asking a more fundamental question: “If you have a chance to do some good, why not do it now?”

“Sabbath ... was instituted not only to respect God but also to bring rest and wholeness to all members of the community.”7

That’s what the good people of Mayberry forgot and sometimes we forget it too because Sabbath seems like such an arcane notion.  Taking an entire day and maybe for some just an entire hour to do nothing just goes against our finally tuned Protestant work ethic but in its original form it was designed to be a time of delight.  A day to remind the Children of Israel that at one time in their history they were slaves, in bondage to taskmasters in Egypt.  Keeping a “Good Sabbath” was there to remind them every week that slaves don’t get days off.  They work when they are told to work and rest at the pleasure of their captures.  A Good Sabbath reminded them or who they were and who they are now. 

Folks that’s what we are doing right here and right now.  We are keeping Sabbath in a radical way.  We are taking time to pray, relax, and be fed by the bread of life offered as we gather around the table and remind ourselves that we have been washed clean in the waters of baptism as we all gather around the font with Zoey and her mom and dad to welcome her as she begins her adventure with Jesus.

At the conclusion of the episode of the Andy Griffith Show Dr. Breen reappears and finds the whole gang seated on Sheriff Taylor’s porch looking completely relaxed but, in fact, totally exhausted from the kind of Sabbath Day they had.  For them it was not a Good Sabbath it was a hectic Sabbath that has left them completely worn out.

The visiting preacher congratulates himself by complementing them saying, still in his stained-glass peaching voice, something like: “I see you are taking my advice, relaxing and taking it easy.”

Gomer almost spills the beans saying, “Oh no Reverend.  It’s been quite a day.” But before he launches into his litany of events that has made the day anything but restful and relaxing Andy cuts him off. 

It took them awhile just as it may take us awhile, but they got Jesus' message: The Sabbath was made for us.  It is a day in which we are to take time for each other and take time to delight in Jesus.

So, without any guilt, lets heed at least a little of Dr. Breen’s advice and for the rest of this day or at least sometime this week: “Relax. Slow down. Take it Easy.”

________________

1. “The Andy Griffth Show, episode, “The Sermon for Today” (Chicago, IL: CBS, October 21, 1963).

2. John M. Buchanan, “The Hallowing of Time.” Sermon preached at The Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago, July 9, 2000.

3.    Jeannine Mancini, “Warren Buffett Says Winning This ‘lottery’ Is Most Important Thing in Life, and You Have No Control over It - ‘I Am in the Luckiest 1% of the World Right Now,’” Yahoo! Finance, August 8, 2023, https://finance.yahoo.com/news/warren-buffett-says-winning-lottery-171412689.html.

4. Matt Skinner, “Commentary on Mark 2:23-3:6,” Working Preacher, November 11, 2020, https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-09-2/commentary-on-mark-223-28-31-6.

5. St. Mark 3:1. (NIV) [NIV=The New International Version]

6. St. Mark 3:4. (MESSAGE) [MESSAGE=Eugene H. Peterson, The Message: The Bible in Contemporary Language, with Topical Concordance (NavPress, 2005).]

7.    Renata Furst, “Mark 2:23-3:6. Commentary 1: Connecting the Reading with Scripture,” Connections. A Lectionary Commentary for Preaching and Worship, Year B, 2, no. 3 (2021): 49–51.