MARK 1:14-20
BY TOREY LIGHTCAP
ST. BARNABAS EPISCOPAL CHURCH
JANUARY 25, 2008
“WHY BE CHURCH?”
As we just heard in the reading from Mark,
True faith promises us nothing in the way of superficial ease.
It will not grant us material prosperity;
It will not give us the happy, shiny family we’ve always dreamed of.
True faith doesn’t guarantee much,
Except, as we’ve heard this morning in the song we just sang,
“Strife closed in the sod.”
So why come?
Why stoop and prostrate ourselves before this altar?
Why sacrifice at all?
Why fight the tide? Why buck the trend?
If it costs us so much, Why be church?
Why?
When the slopes and grocery stores are full on Sundays,
And we run from pillar to post with equal haste,
And the concept of Sabbath is all but gone,
Why add just one more thing?
Why? When Sunday-morning’s religious TV and radio programs
Are brimming with either angry shouters
Or bland promises of general goodness bye-and-bye …
We have to ask ourselves,
Why join those ranks?
Really; “Why?”
When Christ and all he represents
Are grotesquely ground down and boiled up and reduced,
So that Jesus equates with Nice, or Rich, or Healthy …
Why participate in that?
If we had the luxury of complete honesty ……. We might choose not to participate.
Because there’s at least a small part of us that looks at the church universal today
And wonders, really wonders, why Simon and Andrew and James and John
Were so anxious to throw down their nets and split up their families
And endanger their fishing businesses –
Businesses that scholars tell us were pretty lucrative.
There’s certainly a nice, quiet sort of piety sewn into this scene,
That these men would stand up and follow a complete stranger
Into the pages of history.
That they would learn from him
And then watch him die and be raised,
And later would counsel together,
And, not too longer after that, be martyred.
It is, as I say, a nice piety, and comfortably removed from us.
But when we put ourselves in their shoes,
On that beach,
And knowing what we know now …
Would we really run as hard after Jesus as they did?
This is a heavy question –
A heavy question, over which we must grieve …
Truly, grieve.
If we are honest, then we can only look, at first, with despairing eyes.
We can only survey this situation
And see at it as did the author of the 80th psalm, when he wrote
That God had fed the people with “the bread of tears,” with “bowls of tears to drink.”
We can only feel as did the author of the 102nd psalm, who sadly intoned
That his “days were passing like smoke,”
That his “heart was stricken and withered like grass,”
That he was “too wasted” even “to eat [his] bread.”
A heavy question.
I have run to this text and back this week many a time,
And have been confronted by it:
By the anxiousness, by the readiness of these men,
To flick away their businesses and families
And to help shape something
That in time would become the thing it is today.
My own weary 21st-century cynicism makes me look at these men
With cold calculation
And, in my own catty way, call them naïve.
It is a sad conceit on my part,
And a tough thing to confess.
Most of the world, my brothers and sisters, has already gone down this road.
Most have decided that the principles of Christ are worth saving from history,
But that enthusiasm for Jesus himself is for the past.
As though the two might be separable.
They read of the eagerness, the willingness, the devotion of these saints;
And it just doesn’t make sense.
They wonder, as we sometimes do:
Can’t we just keep on tending these nets?
Why all this straining forward?
I read these words in Mark myself,
And I recall how, in 1st Kings, the prophet Elijah passes by young Elisha
And throws his mantle on him, the symbol of divine adoption;
How Elisha says he’ll follow Elijah anywhere,
But to wait just a moment so he can say goodbye to his parents;
And how Elijah dismisses the boy for his one instant of hesitation,
Before Elisha irrevocably turns and slaughters his oxen, gives out the meat,
And then runs after Elijah, to learn the Way of God.
I see Elisha – his expectation full, his eyes clear –
As he struggles to catch his breath, sprinting after Elijah to make up the ground –
I see him, and I am cut to the bone with guilt.
When did I stop running? I wonder …
When did the church?
Where did unbridled enthusiasm become lukewarm institutionalism?
Where, exactly, did our passion for God’s reign and for God’s justice
Succumb to something else?
And I grieve.
I grieve because it’s the last and only thing to do.
Grief is our final refuge.
We grieve with our hands open –
The universal gesture of helplessness.
We grieve because we cannot see past our own tiredness, our collective weariness,
Our dread over what is to come.
To us,
To stand over the slowly expanding grave of the church,
This just feels like pain and doubt …
But to the Holy One,
It is, finally, an Opening – not in the ground, but in us.
When we eat the bread of tears today,
We confess that we do not understand where the disciples’ enthusiasm came from
And that we can’t bear to look at where it’s gone.
And if – I say, IF – we make that confession, God finally has room to move
And to revive us – If we are willing to be revived.
If we are not willing, If we do not confess
Then church is nothing more than a funeral for church –
Words on a page, old hymns, ritualistic movements,
Where everything is a memory, and nothing is felt or meant from here forward.
I’ve searched myself beyond the funeral –
I KNOW there’s life –
I’m not here to bury the corpse of this church, and neither are you.
I will not just lay my hope down today;
I will lay my Net down.
For I have grieved over my 21st-century irony;
I have drunk bowls of tears over the deep sarcasm that beats in the chest of my generation;
I have confessed it in my heart before the One who made me,
And am confessing it to you now publicly,
So that with clean and open hands I can stand before you
And offer myself as a presider in a liturgy of Life and Meaning and Purpose,
(If not for ever, then for the little time we still have together):
I offer myself as A Presider in a liturgy
Where enthusiasm is not for the naïve, … but for those who know –
Who’ve been to the edge of the grave, and who know –
Who’ve confessed their weariness and their skepticism –
Who’ve dropped their nets, and are now running after Jesus.
It’s the only kind of church I can be.
For the old Episcopalians in the room, Please note:
I offer myself as A Presider, not as The Celebrant.
There is something old and clubby and irritating about that term,
Because it takes the celebrating away from you.
It is for you, to the great glory of God,
To celebrate, to exult, to brim.
Believe these words, for they are more than words.
The same nerve, the same love, the same energy and zeal of the disciples …
If it were only for them, then church would rightly be some bizarre artifact of history .
But those things were not just for them – They are for you.
It is for you to come together that this sanctuary was hewn;
For you, that this altar is spread;
For you, that songs are prepared to sing;
For you, that the Word is cracked open and put back together;
For you, that confession is made accessible in its hour of greatest need;
For you, that grief and moving beyond grief are possible.
All this …
For you, and to the glory of God.
All for you; all ready for you.
All awaiting your choice,
And I’ve already told you mine.
I choose Jesus Christ.
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