Scripture: Mark 9:38-50
The scripture reading for this morning follows on the heels of the one from last week, and the sermon this morning in a way is a continuation of last week’s sermon as well. I’m struggling with the scripture reading this morning. Actually, that’s not quite right. I’m struggling with myself over an issue the scripture has presented me with.
The story for this morning is that Jesus and his followers are traveling around the Galilean countryside, and one of the disciples, John, happens to tell Jesus about an incident where someone was casting out demons—healing people—in Jesus’ name and the disciples tried to stop him because he was not one of Jesus’ followers, not one of “us”. I had not realized this before but John, in his previous life before becoming a disciple must have been not only a fisherman but also a copyright attorney. Maybe he just fished on weekends, because he seems quite seriously concerned about the unauthorized used of Jesus’ name. Jesus…isn’t. He tells the disciples, in my paraphrase of what he says, not to worry about it, that whoever engages in healing, or even offers another human being a cup of water, shares in the spirit of what they are doing.
The questions that are raised for me in this brief conversation have to do with this matter of who is with us and who is against us, who is one of us and who is not one of us, in other words who is us and who is “them”. This is a concern that in the last 3½ years I think has come up in my preaching more than once. I also think though that what I am going to say today is probably quite a bit different from what I have said on other occasions.
What I said on other occasions was likely along the lines of the idea that we ought to be working to get rid of that distinction between them and us, that it’s a false distinction, an unwise and unhealthy idea to divide the world into camps, the good guys and the bad guys, that it’s not a good idea to make other people “other” to us, that labeling people as “them” seldom does good and often does harm, that our task should be to get past the them and us mentality and work hard at getting to the point where we are all we.
My memory is not too clear on when I might have said such things, but I’m pretty sure I said things like that because that’s what I believe. And I’m not going to take it back this morning. Wind me up and I could wax eloquent, or at least wax somewhat lengthily, along those lines. Those are all o.k. things to say. They’re the right and proper things to say. Especially if we’re going to talk about building a culture of peace and non-violence in a violent world, a thought that I said I intended to hold in my spirit as we go forward this fall. Especially with that thought in mind, it would certainly be proper to take the position that we need far fewer us’s and thems everywhere in our lives. So I’m not going to take any of that back. But I am going to say this morning that I guess my life is not very proper and not nearly so clear-cut as all that. I know that for me there are thems and there are us’s, and I’m struggling with that, but I’m also not just assuming that if I were a really good person there would be no thems, just us, just one big happy human family.
Let me be personal about this for a moment. I have felt like an outsider all my life, for as long as I can remember anyway. You wouldn’t know it from the outside. My image of myself is that I have given every appearance over the years of being a pretty conventional sort of person. I have done acceptable things all my life. I have made choices from an approved list of possibilities. I went to school, and went to school, and went to some more school, and eventually found a respectable job, was employed more or less continuously in the same line of work for 35 years, a line of work that many would consider solid and upstanding and very mainstream—people who don’t know too many ministers might think of it that way anyway. I have not in any way lived a counter-cultural life. And as a straight white male, I have not had outsider status forced on me.
But on the inside I have always been an outsider. I have always felt, pretty much no matter where I was or what I was doing, I have always felt like I didn’t quite belong. Sometimes—for brief moments here and there, and occasionally for longer periods of time—I have felt that maybe God made a mistake, plopped me down on the wrong planet where I was doomed to feel out of place no matter what. And so on this matter of “us and them”, it is not the case that I want to or somehow naturally tend to look on other people as “them”; it is that I look on myself as a “them”. It’s not that I want to treat other people as outsiders; it’s that I feel like an outsider myself. I feel not like I’m on the inside looking out, but on the outside looking in.
Now I know that you could say this is all just playing with words, that it all amounts to the same thing. If we see the world in terms of thems and us’s, it doesn’t really matter who is the us and who is the them. It doesn’t really matter whether you’re a Hatfield or a McCoy, whatever your group is is “us” and the other group is “them”. I don’t know if you’re following me here, but it doesn’t matter if you’re not, because I think it does matter whether one feels oneself to be an insider or an outsider. I am pretty sure there are other people in this room, lots of other people in this room, who, like me, and for much better reason than me, or at least for more specific reasons than me, have felt like an outsider, like a person who is somehow out of place, or who doesn’t belong. When that is the case, it’s hard not to have a feeling of “them” and “us”, and it may be wrong to claim in a sweet sort of way that there should be no such thing.
I also realize that this condition I have tried to describe of feeling odd, or out of place, or of not belonging maybe can be treated with pills , or disposed of in some way. But then can and should are two different things. It is also possible that not belonging is how we are supposed to feel and outside is where we are meant to be.
I have gradually come to the conclusion over the years that if there is something inside me, as I have already said that there is, something inside me that makes me feel not quite at home anywhere, that is not in general a disease I need to be cured of but a dis-ease for which I should be thankful. I do feel these days, to pick up on what I was saying last week, like an outsider to the society I am a part of and that I owe so much to. I feel like someone trying to sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land. And that is not something we need to get over. It is a place we need, I need, to embrace, to learn from, a place that may not be comfortable but that is healthy and is where I am supposed to be.
I have this attitude in part because I am a Christian, and to be a Christian in our society, anywhere in our world for that matter, had better mean to be outside the mainstream. But I am also an outsider to Christianity, a person who not only feels alienated, or maybe a better word is differentiated, in some pretty basic and important ways from my society but who also feels differentiated from the very faith that leads me to feel separate from the society. A double outsider. Marie Baker gave me a book to read recently by an award-winning novelist named Reynolds Price, who is unabashedly, even evangelically, Christian, but for various reasons he calls himself an outlaw Christian, and for various somewhat different reasons that is a term that I feel like fits me pretty well too.
Reynolds Price doesn’t go to church, hasn’t gone in years except for baptisms,weddings, and funerals of friends. For various reasons, some of which I don’t know and others that I won’t go into, he has decided that he needs to hide out in caves, as it were, rather than go into town to go to church. Obviously that is not my story. I have spent lots of years living inside the church, having very little life outside the church, being an official representative of the church. I have not done that comfortably. As many of you know, I did not have an easy time seeing my way into Christianity, and truth to tell, I never quite made it. I have always felt myself to be more than a bit of a heretic—and grateful to the UCC for having a place for heretics.
I have in addition felt myself alien to the kind of Christianity that claims or implies that one has to be a Christian in order to be saved, or that a little more subtly thinks that you can find God a little bit in any religion but that you can find God fully only in Christ, or that there is probably some good in all religions but more good in Christianity. I find my spirit alien to the kind of Christianity that has an air of polite condescension where you feel sorry for people who are not Christian because they are not blessed like we Christians are. I find myself alien to a church that uses the language of love speaks of everyone being a child of god but that has sometimes been blatantly bigoted and has almost always been less than committed to the struggle for racial justice. I find myself alien in a Christian environment that has sometimes excluded women, has often condemned lesbian and gay people, and has denied the full participation, and indeed the full humanity of both women and sexual minorities in order to keep peace in the church.
And let me be clear here. I don’t just feel alien from people who are in some far distant part of the Christian spectrum theologically or socially, people who are sometimes referred to as the Christian right. I also often feel alien in the context of mainline and mainstream Christianity, alien even in the context of the United Church of Christ. I often feel more of an “us-ness” with people who are not Christian than I do with other Christians.
But the answer is not to stop trying to be Christian. I hope for Sojourners to be not only engaged in an effort to build a culture that is an alternative to the culture of violence in which we live, but also to be engaged in an effort to build a culture that is alternative to much of what Christianity has been and remains. I hope to be part of a Christian community, and I don’t mean just Sojourners but part of a much larger Christian community that is trying to live without its exclusive claims to truth or salvation, without any spiritual strutting, without wearing any Christian badges of honor, without haloes, without the assumption that Christianity confers on us or anyone some special status.
We are involved, I hope we are here at Sojourners, in trying to do something different, not just in relation to the general culture we live in but in relation to the church. We are not, of course, doing this by ourselves. The “us” in this case is not just us but people in all sorts of places doing all sorts of things that are aimed at creating the same kinds of alternatives we are aiming at. But I am also clear that anytime you see yourself as involved in creating some kind of alternative, there is an us and them mentality built in. The us is whoever we are trying to build the alternative. The them is whoever you’re alternative to.
And there are problems with that too, because there is always the danger of self-righteousness, and because those “others”, the “thems” in our lives are part of our family. Sometimes the “thems” are literally part of our family, our biological family, people related to us by blood and love. Sometimes they are people whose kindnesses to us we could not have done without. Sometimes those “thems” are part of our denominational church family. Always the thems in our lives are part of our human family. And so the thems in our lives, whoever they are, are in some ways them, but in other very important ways not “them” at all. And so I continue to struggle with the issue.
And I was struggling with the issue when I realized that the second portion of today’s scripture actually had something to say to me. I typically dismiss this paragraph when I come across it because I know Jesus couldn’t have meant it literally, but I don’t like the way he put it, and I’m not sure what he was getting at. “If your hand offends you, cut it off. It’s better to go through life with one hand than to rot in hell with two.” Same for your foot or your eye. If it causes you to stumble, cut it off, pluck it out. I frankly had planned to ignore this part. You know, non-violence and all that.
Then I had a thought about what Jesus might have been getting at, Just might be getting at. I don’t know for sure of course. But the thought I had was that he might be pointing out to us, to use the language I am using this morning, that sometimes the thems in our lives are in fact us, I mean me, or at least parts of me. There are parts of me that are alien to me. I am not all one thing within myself. There are parts of myself I need to be alternative to. I’m always going to have issues with how I see myself in relation to other people, how I can relate to others as both a them and a we at the same time. But the passage reminds me that I have issues to deal with that are just mine, not the thems out there but the thems in here, the parts of myself I may have trouble seeing, trouble admitting, trouble confronting, and trouble making into a part of an alternative, more Christian, more human me. That too is a struggle I need to be involved in, maybe the one I need to be involved in most of all. Amen.
Jim Bundy
September 28. 2003