Sunday, August 12, 2012
You’re in a National Park in the
mountains – a day set aside to be revitalized by nature. You hike in, the trail taking you gradually
up the steep climb until you’re on the ridgeline. You tell those aching legs it’s worth it,
just a few more steps and then a couple of miles along the ridge until you get
to the clearing. Reluctantly your legs comply and after 4 hours, you’re finally
there. The view is so vast, so
breathtaking; you feel like you can see all the way to the Mississippi.
Basking in the joy of the birdsong,
the expanse of the canyon, the hum of the river hundreds of feet below down in
the valley, you feel alive. Your body
reminds you that living things eat and drink, so you tip back your canteen. It’s still ice cold, so refreshing. Then you open the pack for those delicious
and enormous sandwiches that will taste incredible after all the walking.
To your horror you see a bag of
chips, two apples, two granola bars, and no sandwiches. You look at your hiking
buddy. Didn’t you pack the sandwiches?
I was in
the garage putting ice in the cooler.
Didn’t you hear me yell in to put the sandwiches in the pack?
No. I was upstairs looking for sunscreen. … Our sandwiches! They’re on the counter.
That sort of happened to me. I was with four guys on a 5-day trip and we
wanted our camp breakfast the first morning to be extra good so we brought some
packaged ham. We knew that for most of
the week we’d be on ramen noodles. Some
nice meat would be a good beginning. The
bear that visited our food bag while we slept that night agreed. He was quiet enough not to disturb us and he
was completely uninterested in our ramen noodles. But, he opened our packaged ham and polished
it off like he done that kind of thing before.
The only thing he didn’t do was leave a “thank you” note.
In Mark 8, for a third time, the disciples are
out on the boat on the sea. In the first
instance, Jesus is asleep in the boat as a huge storm hits. Fearing for their lives, they wake him. He calms the storm and chastises them for
lack of faith. The second time, the
disciples are without Jesus and are trying to make way in a heavy wind. They are straining and making no
progress. Jesus walks on the water to
them, revealing his divine identity.
They immediately arrive at their destination, but Mark offers an
editorial note. Their hearts were
hardened. Jesus showed himself to be
God, but they couldn’t see it, not fully.
In this third instance, there are no heavy waves
to scare the pants off them and no frustrating wind to impede their
progress. The problem is not the weather
but the preparation. The disciples all
look at each other and realize that they are miles out to sea, but the sandwiches
are at home on the kitchen counter. What
do they do now? What does Jesus do?
This question comes at the end of our six-week
journey of looking for Jesus in the Gospel of Mark and in doing so, we look for
Jesus in our lives. Yes, he lived 2000
years ago, but in His Word, in His church, and in the activity of His Holy
Spirit we actively look for Him today and in looking, we expect to see Him,
hear from Him, and be led by Him that we might follow as his disciples.
But can we truly be his disciples? Not on our own ability, we can’t. Last week we heard Jesus say it is what comes
out of a person that determines whether that one is defiled or pure on the
inside. As we digested his words, we
acknowledged that all of us our sinners, so if you hang around us long enough,
you’ll hear something to show us to be defiled, not pure. But, then we looked closer and found that
Jesus surrounded himself with defiled people.
In following him, they got a bit cleaner. What came out from them changed over time
because their hearts were made new by God – God at work in them, working
through Jesus. What happened to those
first followers also happens to us. Call
it transformation of the heart that is seen in the living of our lives. Call it being made new in Christ. Call it dying to self and being born again.
However we phrase it, this newness – us becoming new creations – happens when
we actively decide to follow Jesus and he works in us. It is His work. We must be open to it and cooperative and
receptive. Saying this is not a way of
saying we achieve our salvation or our growth in holiness. Salvation and spiritual maturation are things
accomplished by God. Mark is showing
that as God worked in Christ and works through Holy Spirit to save the world,
we, the ones being saved participate by being open and receiving what God
gives.
This we requires us to let go of many of the
expectations that our culture has imprinted on us, expectations about what it
means to be successful or happy. I am
not just twisting words around here. Our
cultural world encourages us to seek our own happiness as a primary value. The Gospel says we are to rejoice in all
circumstances. Our culture values
winners. The Gospel tells us to strive
as hard as an Olympic athlete but at the same time to die to self. Our culture affirms giving to charity from
our excess, after our needs and wants have been satisfied. The Gospel calls for extravagant, sacrificial
generosity.
On the boat, a third boat trip in Mark’s gospel,
the disciples are fretting about not having any bread. Jesus seems completely uninterested in their
dilemma. “Beware of the yeast of the
Pharisees,” he tells them (8:15b).
They’ve heard so many amazing and sometimes to them incomprehensible
things from him, this seems to be another.
Another odd teaching. They
whisper & mutter, “He’s irritated that we forgot the sandwiches. We have no bread.”
Whoops!
The disciples get it wrong – AGAIN!
Jesus unleashes a torrent of questions.
Why are
you talking about having no bread?
James: “Well you said the yeast, and we …”
Do you
still not perceive or understand? Are your hearts hardened?
Peter: “No Rabbi, of course our hearts are not
…”
Do you
have eyes and fail to see? Do you have
ears and fail to hear
Andrew, elbowing Peter in the ribs: “I don’t
think we’re supposed to answer.”
Do you not
remember? When I broke the five loaves
for the 5000, how many baskets full of broken pieces did you collect?
Philip, nervously looking to the others for
helping and getting none, “um, 12.”
And the
seven loaves that fed 4000, from that, how many baskets of leftovers did you
collect?
James: “Well Lord, we all know it was seven, but
we ate all those leftovers a couple of days ago. Everybody knows John was supposed to go the
market and …”
James, zip
it. Seriously, guys, do you not yet
understand?
Jesus did not want his group worrying about
lunch. If need be, he would take care of
lunch. In this gospel, he allowed them
to pluck grain on the Sabbath, technically a Sabbath violation. He allowed them to eat without going through
the elaborate hand-washing ritual. Luke
tells us that much of the time, a group of affluent women followed making sure
the disciples never went hungry. Twice,
Jesus miraculously multiplied one person’s simple lunch and fed the population
of a small town with leftovers. Stop
fussing over lunch. Beware of the yeast
of the Pharisees.
David Garland writes that really, what Jesus
said was beware of the “leaven,” not the yeast of the “Pharisees.” Both leaven and yeast are used to make dough
rise. In Jesus’ time what was most
likely used was leaven which had dangerous potential. If the process for producing the leaven was
tainted in any way, it would spread poison through the bread.[i]
The teaching of the Pharisees was strictly on
the Law of Moses – a good thing; a great thing.
The Torah, the Law, what we read in Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and
Deuteronomy, is a gift of grace from God.
Just as leaven fills the dough so it will become life-giving
nourishment, the Law gives holiness to the community. Our highest calling from God is
holiness. But just as tainted leaven
poisons the bread, the way the Pharisees applied the law – paying attention to
their spin on it while ignoring that it is a means of drawing people to God’s
heart – leads people to death instead of life.
Legalism that neglects the heart kills the person. Jesus offered a different way, but the
disciples and the watching world and each one of us has to decide what we will
choose.
Would the disciples live under legalism and with
the expectations of God that the Pharisees had imposed? Prior to Jesus coming, their choices were the
Pharisees or the Sadducees or the armed rebellion against Rome or full
submission to Rome or retreat to the desert to live as a hermit while waiting
for the end of time. All these choices
were awful. With the arrival of Jesus,
there was another choice – the true way of God, which is a way of love,
invitation, forgiveness, inclusion, grace, and life.
As I mentioned a moment ago, in our day and
time, there are sets of values, priorities, and even thoughts about what is
real and what is true – all dictated by various voices in our surrounding
culture. Much of this in direct conflict
with what the Gospel says is real and true and important. Which will determine how we live, the world
around us or the Holy Spirit speaking through the Gospel? The challenges we face in seeing Jesus and
following Jesus are not identical to those the disciples faced, but the dynamic
is the same. Do we understand that Jesus
is God and the only for salvation is in Him?
If we do understand that, then will we trust that truth to the point
that when we have to choose between being of our culture or being of the
Kingdom of God, we will choose being of the Kingdom?
Curiously, examine again how Mark describes the
disciples in the boat. They had
forgotten to bring any bread; and they had only one loaf with them (v.14). To me it seemed that someone was supposed to
plan for the journey and forgot or left the bread on the dock. But, there’s always someone in the crowd who
is a preparer, someone who is always ready for anything, always with a granola
or a pack of crackers in the pocket.
They had forgotten to bring any
bread. But they had one loaf.
On a second look, it’s peculiar. Garland, the scholar I mentioned, proposes
that the one loaf Mark mentions is Jesus himself. He writes that when Jesus quizzes them about
the miracle feedings of thousands, they get the answers right, but they cannot
see past the numbers of those fed to understand that they have, right there in
the boat, a bread maker.
This requires imagination, but by imagination, I
don’t pretend. I don’t mean if we all
visualize bread, it will appear in our mouths and our and taste buds and
bellies will be happy. By imagination,
I mean seeing the possibilities when we realize we are walking through life
with Jesus, following Jesus, living in the power of Jesus. Will he snap his fingers and suddenly the
disciples all have the best bread they’ve ever eaten? Will the water turn to heavenly wine as they
consume it? Or, will focusing on him and
his way of submitting to God and choosing his way while rejecting the Pharisees
way – will that mental/spiritual/emotional process occupy them? They arrive at the next port with hungry
bellies but with satisfied souls.
To see Jesus in our lives demands that we have
the imagination to see the world on His terms and to live seeing his
possibilities and participating with him as He brings His possibilities to
reality.
Here’s an example from preacher/writer Frederick
Buechner:
You wake up on a winter
morning and pull up the shade, and what lay their the evening before is no
longer there – the sodden gray yard, the dog droppings, the tire tracks in the
frozen mud, the broken lawn chair you forgot to
take in last fall. All this has
disappeared overnight, and what you look out on now is not the snow of Narnia
nut the snow of home, which is no less shimmering and white as it falls. The earth is covered with it, and it is
falling still in silence so deep that you can hear its silence. It is snow to be shoveled, to make driving
even worse than usual, snow to be joked about and cursed at, but unless the
child in you is entirely dead, it is snow too, that can make the heart beat
faster when it catches you by surprise that way, before your defenses are
up. It is snow that can awaken memories
of things more wonderful than anything you ever dream.
If snow can do that in us, what can
Jesus do, if we open ourselves to Him?
If the seeking of deep reality and mind blowing wonder has not died in
us, what will Jesus do when we see Him?
See him requires imagination – not make believe; but, imagination that
dares to believe that God is real and the hungry can be fed and the world can
be redeemed and love can win because God is love and Jesus came to show us
God’s love.
It’s a choice of the Pharisees’
leaven or Jesus’ wine. It’s Martha in
the kitchen worrying about hospitality, or Mary sitting quietly at Jesus’ feet,
drinking him in. It’s fear of not enough
v. seeing hope. It’s missing out on the
big things God as we succumb to tyranny of the urgent, or living with divine
purpose every day. It accepting that
death on a cross ends the story, or daring to imagine that resurrection can
really be true.
But!
We have to make the choice to look for Him. We have to open our hearts and our minds to
see Him. From what we already know – in
the word, in the church, in the Spirit – we have to say resoundingly “No!” to
our culture when our culture defies God.
We love our world passionately and compassionately, but we say No when
our world draws away from God. And we
say Yes emphatically, by submitting ourselves to His teaching and His
love. He is the bread of life and He has
come for us. We choose not even worry
about what we are missing because He is enough.
We eat the bread we have.
AMEN
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