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?
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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).
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