Tough Answers—The Fighting Question: I Sam. 8:4-9, 19-20; Mark 3: 20-35
Years ago, while I was interning in Houston County, I observed the trial of a man who got sick of code enforcement and decided one day to shoot the code enforcement officer who was ticketing him for blighted property. The officer survived, and the shooter was charged with an assault. That man, the shooter, decided to represent himself at trial. The Assistant District Attorney prosecuting the case spent night and day preparing, considering every avenue, filing all the necessary motions. He was terrified of losing this high-profile case to a non-attorney, and he was ready for a fight. After all of this tremendous preparation and angst, the shooter stood up to question the code enforcement officer, in legal terms, to cross examine this witness. His first question was, “Were you able to recognize me when I shot you?” I leaned over to my fellow intern and said, “I don’t think that ADA needs to worry about fighting so hard.”
The lesson there is two-fold. In a post-Covid, hyper-political, news-saturated society, the world has gone nuts, and we’ve all decided that it’s our calling to fight about everything, constantly. We hear in the old hymn, “Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine, O what a foretaste of glory divine.” These days we have a foretaste of something, but it sure isn’t glory divine. Our world is antagonistic, difficult, riddled with angst, and lacking in prayer. We seem to have chosen these things over peace, hope, grace, and gentleness. We’ve sacrificed fruits of the Spirit, Spiritual gifts, and following the Prince of Peace for the latest, greatest ways of verbal combat on every social media platform available.
In a world where we claim to follow the One who willingly let himself be sacrificed on the cross for people who spat on him, we’ve instead chosen meanness over offering the other cheek. And the two questions we have to ask ourselves are: Why? And what has it gotten us? My guess is we don’t know why, and mostly it’s gotten us heartburn and high blood pressure.
But truly it wasn’t much different in Jesus’s day. We read in the Gospel lesson about the fighting Jesus endured. Tired, starving, and weary, Jesus enters a house where even then he cannot escape the crowds. As the youth would say, he’s tired and hangry. He couldn’t find a moment alone. The description provided in Mark makes it seem as if Jesus is delirious from the hunger and exhaustion. And instead of bringing him food, water, and getting him to a restful place, the teachers of religious law try to claim he’s possessed by Satan. Jesus turns this claim on its head. Satan cannot cast out Satan, and why would that ever happen? Jesus logically, not deliriously, tells them it’s proof his power is from God.
But then we get one of the problematic sayings from Jesus. They come and tell him that his mother and brothers are there and want to talk to him. Outside. Mark’s wording makes this feel like an intervention. They’ve come to whisk Jesus away from this absolute insanity. But Jesus says, “Anyone who does God’s will is my brother and sister and mother.”
The religious legal teachers came ready for a fight. They saw a vulnerable moment and wanted to come and finally trounce Jesus in a debate. They thought at this moment they could take advantage of this vulnerability, exploit Jesus’s weakness to ruin him. And still he won. Exhausted and all. The only thing Jesus wanted was for them to follow God’s will. That’s all he asked in that moment, and they couldn’t even agree on that basic idea. I remember a board meeting I attended, and I won’t say where. Two or three people were arguing strongly back and forth, getting loud, and making these heated points on the motion before the board. Finally, the chair had enough, and she banged the gavel loudly saying, “Do you all hear yourselves? You AGREE ON THE POINT! Why are you arguing!!?? What’s the matter?” One of the two in the fight said, “Oh, I’m sorry, looks like I forgot to turn my hearing aid up. I didn’t hear what they said. Never mind.”
We have too many people who want to be the teachers of religious law in our modern era. We have our hearing abilities turned down, our irritability turned up, and society is ready for a fight on literally everything. And into that churning pot of angst and anger we add the bitter herb of politics. In the Prophet Samuel’s day, there was no real king or singular leader over Israel. The prophets had listened to God and provided God’s word to the people of Israel. Essentially, God was their king. But they were tired of that… of listening to God. They wanted a king. Everyone else had a king, and now they wanted a king.
Even as Samuel spent ten verses (which were edited out of today’s reading) convincing the people how horrible a king would be, they still refused to listen and demanded a king to rule them. Listen to what God said, “’Do everything they say to you,’ the Lord replied, ‘for they are rejecting me, not you. They don’t want me to be their king any longer. Ever since I brought them from Egypt, they have continually abandoned me and followed other gods. And now they’re giving you the same treatment.’” The people wanted a political answer to a spiritual problem, and that only creates two problems.
If we want to be brothers and sisters of Jesus, then we must do God’s will and follow Jesus. That means accepting the places where Jesus taught hard lessons to people on both sides of the American political landscape. In a world where we are taught that power is the golden ticket, might makes right, vengeance is a gleeful endeavor, and we should win at all costs, we have to stop, step back, and re-read the story of a Savior. Jesus lived his life wandering around teaching about peace and love. He healed when people needed him. He forgave when eyes were opened to his grace. He spoke words of calling and comfort to those who were hurting. He told Peter, who was ready to fight, to put his sword down for those who live by the sword die by the sword.
And ultimately, he went to the cross, was sacrificed and died in agony. And though he rose again, those scars on his body remained. Jesus didn’t go to that cross because it was expected. He didn’t go because the law required. He certainly didn’t go because we had earned or been nice enough to deserve it. He went because he loved us so much that he was willing to sacrifice for that love. I can’t imagine any religious leader or Pharisee in Jesus’s day sacrificing out love for the people they served in faith. And, frankly, I can’t picture many of today’s Christians and Christian leaders doing the same either.
What the world needs today is more people who are sacrificial, gentle, loving, and silent. The world needs more people who will listen with Jesus’s ears and Jesus’s heart than with ears and tongue ready to offer a sharpened response. Every opportunity Jesus was given to throw stones at someone, who in all likelihood deserved it, he instead taught and practiced mercy and grace.
The Israelite people anointed the king they so desperately wanted. It was King Saul who went on to live out a terrible reign with a horrific ending. But we, as God’s people, have a different option. In a world filled with bitterness, fighting, angst, and downright meanness, we can choose Jesus. As Charlotte Elliot’s famous hymn says, “Just as I am, though tossed about, with many a conflict, many a doubt, fightings and fears within, without, O Lamb of God I come. I come.”
We live in a society that every single day wakes up and gets ready to fight over literally everything. And I have to ask, “Aren’t we tired of it yet?” The Jesus we follow offered grace, mercy, love, and most importantly for this sermon, peace. And if we find ourselves unwilling to live a life that is sacrificial in giving, loving everyone with open arms, forgiving, gentle, humble, peace-seeking, and ready to offer grace to every single person we encounter, just like Jesus, I have but one question. Who are we really following?
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