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Strange Exchange Part 5
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
Welcome to the CommonsCast. We're glad to have you here. We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Head to commons.church for more information.
Speaker 2:Hey, everyone. Scott here. Welcome again to church today, and best wishes for a wonderful Thanksgiving weekend, whatever that looks like for you in these socially distanced times. Wherever you're joining us from, we are honored to be spending these moments together because one of the fun discoveries of moving a big portion of our community online has been the fact that we're still able to connect across distance. Where some of you here in town join us from a quiet space in your yard or your home, while some of you, having moved from Calgary, are able to journey with us in new ways, and still more of you, you're tuning in from all around the world, reminding us that there is a mystery at the heart of the church, how our gatherings have expansive time and boundaries where the divine renews and inspires us whether or not we're all able to be in the same room, and how pandemic challenges can't restrict God's goodness, which is still sensed and experienced as we meet in our far flung seats.
Speaker 2:So thank you for your investment of time and attention into this mystery that holds us. Today we're returning to our fall series entitled Strange Exchange, where we're zooming in on some moments in the scriptures, often well known to many of us, and we are looking at these questions that Jesus asked. And friends, I am loving this series because of the way that it's given me new eyes for the text, a new perspective on Jesus. How Jesus seemed to be profoundly curious about his world and the people in it. How Jesus knew when a quick answer wasn't needed but instead an invitation into further investigation.
Speaker 2:How Jesus didn't use the people around him as props for his agenda but instead asked questions. Along the way, revealing God's nature as somehow inherently generous to the unspoken queries that we carry around with us. And last week, we looked at this story where Jesus asks Peter, one of his biggest fans and fiercest followers, Why do you doubt me? And of course, the story is that Jesus had come out to meet his disciples, mysteriously and rather ghost like walking on the water. And Peter had, against better judgment, stepped out of the boat and made his way to Jesus, eventually losing his concentration or confidence or buoyancy.
Speaker 2:And Jesus has to perform a kind of lifeguard rescue. Silly Peter out beyond his depth. But I love how Bobby pushed us to consider how Jesus' question to Peter acts as an affirmation of those moments in our lives when we push out beyond our understanding and into awe. When we set out with unanswerable questions as our guides, only to find that Jesus meets us out there. Our faith redefined by our willingness to search further than save boundaries, and our faith made more sure right in the middle of our doubting, where we might find ourselves moving forward with just a little faith, but still caught fast in the hands of grace.
Speaker 2:Which brings us to our question for today. But no spoilers. We're going to get to it soon enough. First, let's quiet ourselves for a moment and pray. Join me now.
Speaker 2:Loving God, we are grateful for this chance to come together, around your story, centered around this community, which is a gift to us all. And we ask for open eyes and open ears and a soft heart with which to go forward into these texts and stories, and also with this ability to hear the question you might ask us. Give us new ways to move forward with you, we pray in the name of Christ, our hope. Amen. Alright.
Speaker 2:So today we are going to look at how Jesus speaks, the right kinds of signs, our inclinations, and the subtext. And for our story today, we're jumping into the eighth chapter of Mark's gospel where, as part of a whole set of questions, and you're going see what that means here in a little bit, Jesus famously asks, do you still not see or understand? And to set the stage for where we're going to end up, we need to talk quickly about subtext. And to understand this idea, we've got to talk about the movie Fight Club naturally. Many of you know this film, some of you might not, and if you don't, that's fine.
Speaker 2:You just need to know that this film came out in 1999 starring a young Brad Pitt and Edward Norton. And as a dark and provocative film, it is defined by end of millennium angst. It pulls no punches as it explores the world of violence and questions the role of masculinity and looks at the volatility of the unconscious mind and our fear of the future and of death, and as you might imagine, it leaves everyone feeling super hopeful. Anyway, back to subtext, which is just a device used in film and literature where there's an underlying commentary or narrative unfolding beneath the main plot. This is the story behind the story.
Speaker 2:Okay. Hopefully you get it. And here's the deal. Part of Fight Club's cult classic status formed because of one of its subtexts, where director David Fincher depicts Edward Norton's character caught in a torturously mundane, grayscale, office bound existence, considering the web of meaningless consumerism that was ensnaring late modern America. To depict this, Fincher placed a Starbucks cup, or many of them, somewhere in every scene of the film as a symbol of corporate saturation and overreach in Western culture.
Speaker 2:And let's be honest, they were all probably pumpkin spice lattes too, but stay with me. Of course, this inclusion sparked fan enthusiasm along with Tumblr accounts and YouTube videos as people discovered and went looking for the cups, each one of them representing the film's critique of North American superficiality and mindless purchasing, which was this powerful subtext under all of this film's grit and violence. Which I mention because you should watch this film if you haven't with your adult children if that wasn't a parent, but also because this idea of subtext is important to how we hear and understand the story from the gospel today. So hold on to this for a moment. Let's jump in.
Speaker 2:Mark eight where chapter starts with Jesus feeding a large crowd. The Gospels actually have two of these stories where Jesus is being followed by a bunch of people and everyone's hungry. And in both stories, Jesus takes a few scrounged morsels and finds a way to feed the multitude and still have leftovers. Now this chapter, which tells of the second crowd. Scholars note that this story takes place in a region near the Sea Of Galilee where non Jews are believed to have been the majority.
Speaker 2:Jesus is teaching and restoring non Jews there, signaling how this new movement he'd started might not be following traditional ethnic and cultural lines in its redemptive path. And this is something to note. How sometimes, naturally, in broad sections of the Gospels, The teaching of Jesus isn't found in sermons or theological discourse, but it's implied in the places that he went, in the social barriers that he stepped over, and in the faux pas that he willfully dismissed as distraction. And this has implications for what we mean when we say we follow Jesus or when we say that we are compelled by his teaching because sometimes that teaching is more about the social distance he's willing to cover to make a difference than what he says when he gets there. And it's more about compassion and justice than upstanding moral behavior.
Speaker 2:It's more concerned with social dynamics and systems than the afterlife. Which isn't to say that being moral and thinking about what's beyond our consciousness is wrong. It's just a reminder to pay attention to all the ways that Jesus speaks. Anyway, the story goes that Jesus feeds the ethnically diverse crowd and then sends them away. And he and his disciples cross back over the lake and they are promptly met by the Pharisees, the teachers of Jewish law.
Speaker 2:And the Pharisees begin to question Jesus. They're testing him and they're asking him for a sign from heaven to validate his identity and mission. And there's a couple things here that I love. First, how the text says that they asked Jesus for a sign, which we'll get to in a moment, and that Jesus sighed deeply before he responds. And no, this is not the equivalent of an eye roll emoji, easy as that is to imagine.
Speaker 2:No, The Greek verb here for what Jesus does, anastenaxo, might be better translated groaned out loud. Actually, this is a strong and exaggerated verb that can mean to groan or bewail over other sounds or voices. Which means that I imagine Jesus' groan cutting off their questions. Or, at the very least, that he wasn't able to hide or sanitize his most basic human emotional response. And I love how this allows for emotional response as a carrier of divine revelation in the text, how this helps expand my concept of who God is, and how it opens me to hear the divine guttural groan in the human reactions to injury and sorrow and loss and injustice and displacement from those around me.
Speaker 2:Now Jesus groans and then says, Why does this generation ask for a sign? Truly, I tell you, no sign will be given to it. And there's something intriguing in Jesus' answer here, because on one hand, I can't fault the Pharisees for attempting a data based analysis. It seems completely reasonable that they'd want some justification from Jesus. The obvious problem is that Jesus' critics seem to have been in the ancient equivalent of an echo chamber.
Speaker 2:Their news feeds missing some key events from the life of Jesus. Like, were they unaware of the mass feeding program that Jesus had recently coordinated? And were they never present for bodies and hearts being made new? Had they failed to notice that tax collectors were paying out instead of overcharging after having lunch with Jesus? And that social outcasts had started showing up at home?
Speaker 2:And one of the keys to understanding this ambiguity is to consider some of the religious movements of Jesus' day. How there was this latent longing for social change in Jewish culture at the time. How Roman rule and Greek culture were imposing their will on the Jewish way of life, and people were starting to clamor for things to be different. And this social anxiety sparked the emergence of all kinds of prophet and messiah types who, scholars note, frequently lured people into their followings by promising astonishing signs. The problem, well, the issue is that these signs were often pointless and self aggrandizing even, such as those who claimed that they would copy the ancient stories of Joshua or Elijah by cutting the Jordan River in half and leaving dry land in the middle, or that they were going to make Jerusalem's walls all fall down.
Speaker 2:And these kinds of miracles promised in the hopes of convincing the crowds that their cause was worth support. And unfortunately, they often sparked ill advised and violently suppressed political uprisings. And when we use this lens, all of a sudden Jesus' refusal to offer a sign doesn't sound so calloused and dismissive. He was, after all, busily walking and teaching and touching and eating as a sign of what the world might look like made new. And in this light, Jesus' refusal was a warning for Pharisees and peasants alike to avoid signs that overpromise and underdeliver.
Speaker 2:He's grown a divinely filled cry for those around him to stop seeking markers of a grandiose future instead of the humble signs of a present made right in the moment, which I think lands a little closer to home for me. In the ways that we subtly look for divine blessing in our professional advancement, trading our sanity and our peace for pay scale and recognition, or how we seek the overpromises of relationships that we know are a short term solution to our long term desire, or the ways that we trust productivity and hurry as signs of our value only to find that they don't deliver the contentment that our souls desperately long for. Jesus knew that the sign the Pharisees sought was an apparition that would, quite tragically, lead to devastation when the Romans mercilessly crushed Jerusalem in seventy CE. Just as the stories of Jesus offer us an alternative to the overpromises and the heartache that we might be susceptible to, inviting us to a kind of faith that takes each day and each breath and each humble encounter with mercy as the sign of a better way made for our flourishing. Now, after this interaction with the Pharisees, Jesus and his disciples crossed the lake again, and we read that the disciples had forgotten to bring bread, except for the one loaf that they had with them in the boat.
Speaker 2:Be careful, Jesus warned them, watch out for the east of the Pharisees and that of Herod. They discussed this with one another and said, it's because we have no bread. And aware of their discussion, Jesus asked them, why are you talking about having no bread? Do you still not see or understand? Are your hearts hardened?
Speaker 2:And there's a couple of things here as well. First, just how real world this is. Everybody leaving in a hurry and everyone's preoccupied. Everyone's fighting over who's gonna sit shotgun and someone forgets to bring the food. You had one job, Judas.
Speaker 2:But then also how Jesus doesn't seem to be bothered by this. I mean, he had addressed a bread shortage or two recently, so Jesus chooses to not berate the guilty party or throw anybody under the bus. He turns this into a teachable moment and he warns his friends, Be careful. Watch out for the yeast of the Pharisees and Herod, he says. Which might seem a little obscure, but the disciples were likely used to this by now, how Jesus would have used visual imagery in a story or conversation, paint a picture, and then just move on, coming back later to explain himself.
Speaker 2:The point is that in the Jewish imagination this reference to yeast was significant. The metaphor of yeast or leaven as it's sometimes translated turns on this capacity that yeast has, even just a little bit of it, to influence a larger substance like bread dough. And consequently, yeast was often seen in the ancient world as a metaphor for corrupting influences. Or more specifically, for how some inclinations and desires in the human heart lead us astray. And in light of the previous conversation with the Pharisees, Jesus seems to have taken this moment, the 12 of them there sharing the crumbs of this single loaf that they all have to split.
Speaker 2:Jesus chooses to make an analogy here. He says, careful, watch out for this inclination we all have. You can see it in the Pharisees, this inclination to seek signs that aren't for the best. And beware of the inclination that we all have. You can see it in Herod, the puppet king of the Romans, to search for power and significance to a fault.
Speaker 2:Which is a helpful reminder for any follower of Jesus, sitting in that boat or sitting here in the twenty first century, that the best lens for sin in our world, best way to identify the things that hold power over our lives, is to pay attention to our smallest inclinations and to stay awake to the things we desire. And where we have a tendency to look at the visible symptoms of our personal and our collective brokenness things like anger and violence, addiction, deceit and betrayal Jesus offers a gentle invitation here to pay attention to the small things at work in it all. Things like your inclination to protect yourself at others' expense, or my longing for acceptance and affirmation that goes unnoticed and untended, Our joint search for agency and power with no thought to their consequences. And in this way, Jesus nudges us toward seeing and naming and speaking to small things as the biggest step in our journey toward wholeness. Now, quite comically, the disciples hear Jesus say this bit about the yeast, and they mull it over together, and they come to the conclusion that Jesus is referring to how they forgot their lunch.
Speaker 2:Which is curious, because Jesus isn't. Clearly. Jesus is living in the world, announcing that a different kind of divine kingdom is now here and he's starting to realize just where this is going to lead him personally. And he's beginning to grapple with the cost for these young friends and followers he's gathered. And sitting there out on this boat, the water glistening as the sun comes up over it, Jesus' eyes maybe were set far off in the distance.
Speaker 2:He's thinking about this work that they're doing together. And maybe he's carrying the weight of it a little bit. And he is wrenched back into the moment by this banter in the back of the boat. Wait, what? Are you guys still talking about not bringing bread?
Speaker 2:Don't you see and understand? Are your hearts hardened? And here, Jesus appears to start quoting from the Hebrew Scriptures. Because the things that he says sound like riffs on Isaiah six and Jeremiah five and Ezekiel 12, these ancient texts where prophets had come to God's people. And in the past, they tried to call God's people back to the law.
Speaker 2:They tried to remind them of the blessing found in being just and equitable and tried to warn them of the repercussions of walking away from God's goodness. And those prophets talked about how God's people had eyes but weren't seeing clearly, and how they had ears but they weren't picking up the signals, and ultimately how God's judgment was going to fall on these faults. So Jesus seems to be pulling from these texts when he speaks to his disciples as they sit there fixated on how they'd limited the kingdom of God by forgetting to bring some food along. Do you have eyes but fail to see, Jesus said, and ears but fail to hear? And don't you remember?
Speaker 2:When I broke the five loaves for the 5,000, how many basketfuls of pieces did you pick up? 12, they replied. And when I broke the seven loaves for the 4,000, how many basketfuls of pieces did you pick up? And they answered, seven. And he said to them, do you still not understand?
Speaker 2:And to be clear, scholars do point out that misunderstanding and fallibility are hallmarks of the disciples as characters in the Gospel stories. I mean, just think of how many times they seem to be out of step with what Jesus is doing. Peter, often the gold standard for this kind of thing. And in the very fact that we take note of their fallibility, Now Jesus seems to return to the same themes over and over, reminding and rehashing. I think we have a tendency to think that the point of these stories is just that.
Speaker 2:That they didn't get the message even when it was sitting right in front of them. And when we move forward with this as our lens, it's not that far a jump to the assumption that we don't get it. Even when we've heard it before and even after trying for so long to be better, even after repeated efforts to get past the small things that we feel keep us from grace. Where if we aren't careful, we internalize the misunderstanding and the doubt and the confusion we sometimes feel with these stories to the degree that, just like the disciples, Jesus can sound like he's always scolding us. And yes, on one hand Jesus seems to be saying, Friends, don't you understand what I'm doing here?
Speaker 2:And bread keeps appearing in almost every scene like a Starbucks cup placed in every frame, and it's easy to think that the subtext of Jesus' question, do you still not see and understand, is our implied failure. Instead of placing this story in the wide arc of mercy that the scripture portrays, An arc in which Jesus isn't recycling old Hebrew prophets to shame his disciples here. No. Where these questions come not as accusation, but as gentle inquiry for our weary hearts. Are you okay?
Speaker 2:Jesus asks. Are your eyes tired and worn out from straining to perceive? Are your ears ringing with the din of the world? Is your heart hardened from all that swirls around it and from all that's happened to you? And do you find it hard to stay pliable in your search for honesty, truth, and a new way forward?
Speaker 2:See, I think that the question, do you still not see and understand? Can just as easily be heard as, do you still want to see and understand? Where the subtext of this story is not the disciple's inability to grasp what's going on. And for that matter, that the subtext of the scripture's entire scope is human error, but rather that Jesus reveals a God that always keeps on asking. And if that's true, then all of a sudden the subtext of your story isn't your failure or your struggle to believe or act the way that others say you should.
Speaker 2:If Jesus asks these kinds of questions as an invitation and not a rebuke, then maybe you can let go of the Bible as a record of God's repeated demands that you measure up and get your act together. Because friends, there is freedom in the discovery that Jesus came to reveal a God who doesn't ever try to change us by harshly saying, how many times do I have to tell you? And where the questions God asks of you are only ever offered in the hopes that you'll be honest, that you'll stop fretting over your forgotten lunches and your missed opportunities and your tendency to end up adjacent to where you could be. And that you'll start to realize that the subtext of your life is that the divine has always been there in the middle of it, showing up in every scene, always with the chance to grasp just how high, wide, deep, and perfect god's love really is. Do you still want to see and understand?
Speaker 2:I hope so. Let's pray. Loving God, present to us now in the mystery of these few short minutes, where you come to us in an ancient story and, again, you ask us a question that disarms all our defense, and it disarms all our righteous indignation, and it disarms all the ways we disqualify ourselves and others. And in the middle of all this, we turn our hearts to you. And in whatever we face in the moments to come this week, we ask that you would give us grace, grace to hear an invitation, grace to maybe put a pause on that tape of scolding we have always attributed to your voice and instead open our eyes and our ears and our heart to the goodness you bring.
Speaker 2:We're grateful for this work in us, and we hold it tenderly now even as we go. We pray in the name of Christ now. Amen.