Sermon for Sunday September 30th, 2012

A couple of years ago I was standing in our driveway, conversing with someone, I can’t remember who, when a man in a suit ran up, he was out of breath and red in the face. He looked at me, I had my collar on, and he said, a little exasperated, “Are you the priest here?!” I said I was, he took a deep breath and said with some urgency, “Someone is in your garden taking your vegetables, I think he’s a homeless person, and he’s taking a whole bunch of tomatoes and other veggies.”

I smiled at the man, and said, that’s ok, that’s what the garden is there for, it serves our food shelf and anyone who is hungry. He looked even more exasperated and sighed, “OK, if that’s ok, I guess, that’s ok.” And he walked away. I know I have told you this story before, but what I haven’t told you, is that the man who was in the garden was one of our own members. A pledging, active member of Gethsemane Church.

We make great assumptions about people based on what they look like and even sometimes what we think they are doing. The disciples in today’s Gospel, who had just been told the importance of recognizing the servant leadership required in their own power, run off from that episode of humility into the next one. They go from the frying pan, into the fire. They go from conflict internally to conflict externally with people outside of their group.

Assumptions often keep us from loving one another as fully as God has called us to love one another. The importance of embracing the small, the insignificant in our culture, those who are of least importance continue to bubble up in our Gospels. It is not just those who do what we do and look like we do that we are called to serve it is those who are different from us, those who are outside our boundaries that we are called to serve.

When we engage those who are different from us, economically, politically, religiously, we not only begin to understand the power of diversity and difference our own worlds, our own minds begin to expand and understand the universality of God’s love and the broadness of God’s compassion. The other, those who are different than us are the ones that cause us to grow, to expand to see the world differently.

Jesus is forever engaging the other, Jesus is forever embracing those who were outside of the social norms where he was operating. Jesus’ work in embracing the other was about showing us how to live. And more importantly than showing us how to live, Jesus was showing us how to love.

Everywhere Jesus goes, he is encountering people who are outside the margins, people who are on the edges of society. If we want to experience our own humanity in ways that are transformative, in ways that allow us to see the world differently, than we must run to people who are outside the boundaries of our current lives. If we want to follow Jesus and be disciples, then we must look to the other, look to those who are different from us, those who are on the margins of our worlds to understand more completely how it is we live.

The author of Mark makes it very clear cut what will happen if we get in the way of those who are striving for God’s Reign on Earth. It isn’t pleasant when we get in the way of those who believe. The problem is when we start to think we know exactly what it I means to believe, what it means to know God.

When we pretend to know God, when we pretend to know what it means to believe, who is in and who is out, it is during those times that we must stop and think quickly about why it is we understand the right way to believe, the right way to live, the right way to love. Why is it that we might presume who is in and who is out?

Most of the time it is because we have entered into a place of fear, a place of anxiety. We have given up an understanding of God’s abundant presence, God’s powerful love and chosen instead to embrace our fears, our anxieties, and our limitations.

God created all of us and God created us good, as a matter of fact, we are all made good in God’s eyes. But have you ever wondered why God made us the WAY God made us? We have this little part of our brain called the reptilian brain, some call it the downstairs brain, I call it the reptilian brain. It is a part of our brain that serves one function. It tells us to stand and fight or to flee. That’s it; it is the part of our brain that cannot think it cannot function in any other way than to push us towards a battle, or cause us to run from danger.

It is this brain that lights up when we embrace fear and anxiety. It is this part of the brain that is most powerful when we are faced with things we do not know. It is this part of the brain that works to tell us this person is safe and that person is not. In many cases, this is of course, extremely helpful, but in our culture of fear, where politicians and theologians alike are preaching fear and danger, our reptilian brain gets a little more exercise than it was meant to have.

Manufactured fear can cause us to recognize not just those who are different from us as dangerous, but even those who are familiar and don’t match up to false criteria that we have created as a standard image of safety in our heads. Hence, the man who thought one of our own members was a homeless man.

What do we allow to determine how we see those who are doing God’s work in the world? What do we use to determine who is in and who is out? I would say that anytime we find ourselves trying to determine who is in and who is out, who is right and who is wrong that we stop and throw those ideas out of our head.

God’s love is not just for the 47%, or for the 53% or for the 99% or for the 1%. God’s love is for the 100%, God’s love is for everyone, and it cannot be limited in anyway, it cannot be held back or doled out in any sort of rationed way. God’s love is for everyone, and God’s love is for us to not be comfortable but rather to embrace the 100% of our world that is all around us all the time.

God’s love is transforming, God’s love is salty, and we are the main course sprinkled, no, covered in God’s love. We have so much saltiness, the only option we have is to share the love we have been given with everyone, so that we can be transformed, and expanded and made bigger by welcoming the unfamiliar into our familiar lives.