Proper 5, Year B 2018

Grace Episcopal Church, Galveston
Gospel:  Mark 3:20-35
10 June 2018

Unless you had insanely overprotective parents, you probably learned early on that actions have consequences.  Some of you, like me, can recall childhood experiences when you did something that “put you in a pickle,” so to speak.  


One such memory, for me, was about this time of year when I was 10 or 11 years old.  School was just out, and I was worried about being bored.  “Back in the day,” grocery stores ubiquitously handed out a little something extra with your change at the check-out.  I’m talking about stamps, “S&H Green Stamps” at some stores and “Top Value Yellow Stamps” at others.  The grocery near our neighborhood gave out the yellow ones.  My parents had saved these stamps in a large paper grocery sack which by summer’s start was brimming full of the colorful, glue-backed tickets.  I had the idea that a good project for me would be to go about the work of pasting the stamps into the booklets provided by the grocery.  The stamps had to be moistened, one-by-one, and affixed to each page in the prescribed way.  The completed books could then be taken to a (now, here’s religious language for you) “redemption center” and exchanged for valuable prizes.  I figured that, in exchange for this constructive behavior, I should be allowed to redeem the stamps for something I wanted.  My mother jumped on the idea.  My parents both worked long hours 7 days a week at the nearby pharmacy they owned, leaving me with a lot of unsupervised time.  With this project I could be constructively occupied for a few days and be rewarded for some tedious work.  (I still remember the nasty taste of the glue.  It took me a book or 2 to realize that wetting the stamps with a damp sponge was the way to go.)  Of course, my mother was thinking that I would, in the end, exchange the stamps for something wholesomely age appropriate.  As it turned out, she was wrong about that.

Being a resourceful chap, I scored my own ride to the redemption center with my stack of stamp books. I perused the in-store catalog with wonder.  In the end what called out to me from the shelves to be released from bondage was a butane blow torch.  The torch came in a blue metal box with a latch.  I think I was attracted to the power of the idea of a tight metal flame.  Perhaps I would start by cutting a small hole in some corner of our driveway.  The unit came with instructions….but as I said at the beginning, I was 10 or 11; the way to make this thing work seemed obvious enough to me.  Anyhoo, I took the brass nozzle with knob and screwed it onto the blue butane tank.  Then I turned the knob which produced a slight hissing sound.  Conveniently a striker was included in the box, so I made it spark over the nozzle.

That’s when it all went downhill.  Instead of the tight flame in my imagination, there was a billowing flame.  It scared me so, that I dropped the torch in the grass and ran to hide behind the corner of the house.  I watched for a moment as flame billowed from the torch.  I began to wonder that, if the thing exploded, it might take out some of the house with it.  I imagined that I would be in a great deal of trouble with my parents.  In the moment that fear of my parents’ wrath outweighed fear of injury, I ran to the torch, kicked it with my foot so the knob was up and turned the thing off.  Somehow, the knob was not too hot...otherwise, the story might have had a very different ending.  I confessed to my parents that evening.  As I recall, my father started taking me with him to the drug store in the mornings.  I never saw the blowtorch again. So, learn the lesson of the blowtorch: it is possible for anyone (young or old) to suffer from the consequences of his or her own dumb decisions.

Both the story from Genesis and the story from the Gospel According to Mark are about consequences.  In Genesis, we hear how, from the beginning, human beings misused free will.  We chose to be disobedient to God’s will.  The result was alienation from God, from each other, and from self.

In Mark, we start seeing that Jesus has a difficult relationship with his own family.  They think something is wrong with him.  He’s “one taco short of a combo,” so to speak.  They seek to restrain him because he’s crazy.  As far as Mark knows, the consequence for this is that Jesus took leave of his family focussing instead on the greater family of God...a new family, now related by faith, who could be restored to wholeness and forgiven for Adam’s sin.  Thankfully, we know from tradition that Jesus’ human family members were part of the early Jesus movement too.  In John, Mary the mother of Jesus follows Jesus to the foot of the cross where Jesus places her in the care of the Beloved Disciple.  In the Acts of the Apostles, we see that James, the brother of Jesus, becomes one of the early leaders in the Church at Jerusalem.  A fruit of the Spirit is reconciliation among believers...even among those who at first thought Jesus was a “nutcase.”

We also see that Jesus’ relations were strained with religious intellectuals from Jerusalem.  The scribes thought Jesus was a liar.  Instead of manifesting the power of the God of history, he was, in their thinking, wielding the power of the Adversary of Scripture.  Jesus used a parable to show that believing he was using the power of the Adversary to defeat the Adversary was illogical.

I end this sermon with advice I was always sure to give the kiddos who took my Bible classes.  This advice is from C.S. Lewis’ book, Mere Christianity (Chapter 3).  Lewis states that, logically speaking, Jesus words and actions leave us only 3 choices that make sense regarding the truth of who Jesus is.  As someone who claimed to forgive sins, for example, Jesus was either 1) a liar (he deliberately misled others), 2) a lunatic (he might as well have announced himself to be a poached egg), or 3) the Lord of Life.  I advised my students to remember these choices, because one day (perhaps when they would be in college) someone would tempt them into bypassing these 3 choices.  The argument would be that Jesus was a good man who had great advice for living our lives but certainly not the manifestation of God.  The problem is that Jesus forgave sins...his actions and words repeatedly presented himself as God.  In all of life, including (and especially) religion, wholeness requires that we not check our brains at the door.  Logic does not allow us to pick and choose from Jesus’ words and actions to construct our own private “sanitized” Jesus with no pesky stuff that might lead to questions of his sanity or his character.  Our view of Jesus must take the “whole enchilada” if we want to maintain intellectual integrity.

There we are; the choice before us is "Lord, Liar, or Lunatic."  May our Savior mercifully guide us to choose wisely and accept the love of God into our lives anew each day!  And most importantly, may the Spirit grant us the humility to trust that our salvation is ultimately not a function of our own doing like some kind of reward for good behavior.  It is so easy to stop at the idea of behavior and consequence because life in this world teaches us that lesson.  In that scenario, we are all toast.  The Good News is God's love.  To roughly quote William Langland, as I often do, our misdeeds are to the Love of God, nothing more than a live coal thrown into the sea. Being in the family of God is pure gift...what's that word that we all know so well.....ah, God's love is simply Grace!  AMEN.