"Cut it off": Sermon from Jerusalem, 30 September 2018

“Cut it off”

Sermon for Sunday 30 September 2018

Lutheran Church of the Redeemer, Jerusalem

The Rev. Carrie Ballenger Smith

Mark 9:38-50

Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

“If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life maimed than to have two hands and to go to hell, to the unquenchable fire.

And if your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life lame than to have two feet and to be thrown into hell.

And if your eye causes you to stumble, tear it out; it is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and to be thrown into hell, where their worm never dies, and the fire is never quenched.”

Friends, this is not an easy passage of Scripture. In fact, it’s a bit of a nightmare for a preacher! This is not warm and fuzzy Jesus. I’d much rather preach on “let the little children come to me”, or “come to me, all who are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest” or “I will be with you always, to the end of the age.” But today, we must deal with this Jesus, the Jesus who tells hard truths about what it means to follow him.

This Jesus is trying to make a point crystal clear with the disciples: which is apparently very difficult to do! The disciples just never seem to get it. In last week’s reading from Mark chapter 9, they struggle to understand Jesus’ prediction of his death and resurrection, and then they argue amongst themselves over who is the greatest. And in today’s reading—in spite of Jesus’ careful explanation about what it means to be “great” in God’s kingdom—they proudly report that they’ve stopped someone from casting out demons in Jesus’ name, because he wasn’t part of the “Big Twelve”.

Scripture tells that what Jesus says in response is, “Whoever is not against us is for us.”

But what I imagine him saying is, “Listen, boys, it’s really not about you!”

Can you just hear his exasperated voice?

“It’s really not about you, John! It’s not about you, Mark!

My message is not about who’s the greatest, who’s the smartest, or who understands it best. It’s not about who’s part of the ‘in club’, and it’s certainly not about keeping people out of it.”

Whereas the disciples were worried about the purity of the message and of the group, and concerned about protecting the Jesus brand name and logo from unauthorized use, Jesus saw only that a suffering human had been released from the clutches of a demon. 

Jesus saw only that a beloved child of God had been healed of suffering. Thanks be to God!

And for this reason, Jesus turns the disciples’ thoughts from cutting someone out of the club, and instead turns them toward cutting off whatever is keeping them from truly following his Way of radical love and care for the Other.

This is Jesus being deadly serious—about sin, about injustice, about the harm we inflict on others, and about what a disciple should do about it.

Jesus says it is better to lose part of your body than to keep oppressing others.

It is better to lose friends than to keep silent in the face of suffering and injustice.

It is better to sacrifice things you can’t imagine doing without, so that your neighbor will know love and liberation.

Truly, discipleship is not about us! It’s about how far will we go for the sake of our neighbor. 

Jesus has already told the disciples—twice—just how far he will be going! True, they don’t yet understand the cross and the resurrection. But maybe, just maybe, Jesus thinks they will understand this, if he says it plainly:

“Whatever is keeping you from loving the world the way I love you bunch of sinners—cut it off.”

You know, I’m pretty certain that when I first read these verses (and the ones in the Gospel according to Matthew, which are similar) I thought they were all about maintaining with sexual and moral purity. Of course, I think I read them during Confirmation class, with a crowd of other teens, and most of us could only imagine sin as being about one thing. Cutting off body parts and plucking out eyes seemed an extreme way to deal with it, but then again hormones feel pretty extreme, too! I’m also certain I heard a few sermons which encouraged such an interpretation of this text.

But in fact, Jesus cannot be talking about individual sin here. If he were, there should be a lot more Christians walking around today with one hand, one foot, or one eye. Anyone who tries to tell you they are a biblical literalist had better be missing a limb. Ronald Goetz once wrote in the Christian Century, “To be sure, the hand-chopping, eye-plucking remedy for sin could never work, if for no other reason than the fact that we have more sins than we have bodily parts.” 

No, Jesus is not being literal here, but he is being serious—deadly serious—about the Christian responsibility to transform our lives and behaviors and communities so we no longer sin against our neighbor. The question is: How far will we go?

In our Tuesday morning Bible study on this Gospel text, our little group started talking about how far churches in Jerusalem are willing to go to witness against injustice. We recalled how last year, when Israel threatened to levy millions of dollars of back taxes on the churches of Jerusalem, church leaders took dramatic action. They closed the doors of the Holy Sepulcher to tourists, making the bold claim that it was the first time such a thing had happened since (maybe) the Crusades. (Not entirely sure that is true, but it made for good headlines!)

And it worked! At least for now, the churches have been saved from paying these unjust taxes. It was great to see the leaders of these different churches working together in such a way.

But. But!

Almost immediately after this crisis, we started to hear rumblings from local Christians.

Why do they not close the church doors to protest the occupation? Or to advocate for family reunification? Or to prevent escalation in Gaza?

I mean, of course we know the answer to these questions.

It doesn’t happen, because church leaders would really like to keep both their feet.

They’d like to keep their parking permits, and airport privileges, and the doors of their churches and guest houses open.

Believe it or not, priests, pastors, and patriarchs are people too! And not one of us really wants to give up the things that it easy to walk, to work, or to see.

We can’t imagine living without two hands, two feet, two eyes—and so even when we recognize the suffering of another, and even when we have said “Jesus, I want to follow you,” even then we hold on to privilege, and prejudice, and power over others, hoping we can have our cake and eat it, too. We hope we can love the neighbor and maintain our comforts, our habits, our old ways of doing and being.

Friends, I woke up Friday morning so very angry. It took me quite a few hours to figure out where the anger was coming from. It just sat in my stomach, the burning feeling like the unquenchable fire Jesus talks about, and it frankly kept me from being able to make much progress on this sermon.

Finally, I realized I was thinking about the many stories coming out of my home country, the United States, as they are trying to confirm a new Supreme Court justice. The nominee has multiple sexual assault allegations against him, and the debate over his appropriateness to sit on the highest court in the land seems to have consumed American media and Americans in general in the last days.

Of course, it makes us angry. It’s painful and disappointing when we hear people so desperate to hang on to power that they would ignore and even demean a woman who says “This man hurt me.”

And so, Americans are asking some hard questions this week: What do we need to cut off, and cut out, of our culture today, so that rape and sexual assault are no longer accepted and overlooked, and so perpetrators are no longer promoted and elected and honored?  

Today I hear Jesus being deadly serious, and saying to us all: Cut it off!

Cut off rape culture.

Cut off silence.

Cut off protecting and reassigning perpetrators—in business, in government, and in the church.

Cut off the idea that “boys will be boys.”

Cut off all our justifications, and trust that even though we can’t imagine living without some of these things that are so central to our culture, the truth is we can learn to walk and talk and live in new ways.

In Christ, there is new life for all of us—as individuals, as a society, as a church. I think of the many church members I know who have been at a point where they couldn’t imagine doing without that drink, or without that relationship, but have who come to know wholeness and healing, and have been gifted a new way of living and being.

In the same way, just as by the cross Jesus has freed the oppressed, he also frees the oppressor!

It’s not easy. Jesus says we will need to sacrifice. It may hurt. It may be inconvenient. We’ll have to learn new ways to walk and talk, new ways of seeing. We will have to confess, and we will have to cut some stuff off.

But as followers of Jesus, we are called to do exactly this, for the sake of our neighbor, for the sake of the little ones among us. We are not only sent but also empowered to remove stumbling blocks, to tear down walls, to stop nominations, and even to close church doors for the sake of the refugee, the occupied, and the survivor.

Be assured: We aren’t in this alone, for God has already shown us just how far She will go for us to be reconciled and made whole. Thanks be to God for the cross and the resurrection of Jesus, our friend and our savior, whose love for us can never be cut off. Amen.