Deuteronomy 18:15-20
Psalm 111
1 Corinthians 8:1-13
Mark 1:21-28
My sermon begins with a story - a story about a good, secular humanist couple who have a child. Now, this couple has decided to raise their child in good, secular humanist fashion, and so he is brought up without any church or religious instruction or formation. And this decision seems to work out well – the child is well-adjusted, ethical, and is mostly a good student. In fact, their son is doing great in school and would be on the Honor Roll if it weren’t for Math class. This good, secular humanist son of good, secular humanists parents is doing horrible in Math. The boy’s competent enough, but Math seems to frustrate him, and so he refuses to do his homework – and his grades reflect this decision.
Needless to say, the boy’s parents are not happy with his performance in Math class, and so they go about doing whatever they can to motivate him to do his work and turn his grades around. They ground their son, but this doesn’t work. They hire the best tutor in town; but this doesn’t work. They even take their son to the best behavioral psychologist around, but this doesn’t work, either. Finally, the parents contemplate doing the incomprehensible; they contemplate sending their son to the Catholic school in town. And this is what they do.
To the parents’ surprise, their son comes home from his first day at Catholic school, goes to his room to study, skips dinner, and falls asleep with his head in his books late that evening. The boy’s parents are astounded, but – they think – surely, this is a fluke and won’t happen again. And yet, the very next day, the boy comes home from school, goes to his room to study, skips dinner, and falls asleep with his head in his books. And after a few weeks of this new found work ethic, the boy and his parents begin to see the results as quizzes and tests come home with perfect grades on them. So, his parents, completely befuddled and bewildered, ask their child,
“Son, what is it about Catholic school that has motivated you to study when nothing else would?”
“Well,” the boy said sheepishly, “I knew they took Math really seriously at that school when I saw in every classroom the man nailed to a plus sign.”
Well, that’s my sermon in a nutshell. So, I could just stop there, but since I have another ten minutes or so to fill, I guess I’ll try to unpack that joke a little.
Taking as our text this morning the lesson from the Gospel according to St Mark, we hear these words: Jesus taught them as one having authority. And also, The people were amazed and kept on asking one another, “What is this? A new teaching – with authority!” And so our question this morning is what is meant by the Gospel when it speaks of this “new teaching – with authority.” And our quest this morning is to discover what is this teaching and whence the authority. But before we proceed on our quest, before we can arrive at the answer to our question, we must first clear the cobwebs of misconception. In other words, we must first be clear about what this authoritative teaching is not.
Earlier this month, on Jan 18, several websites “blacked out” their pages in protest of proposed laws being brought before Congress that day – the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act. Whatever your take on the issue, what I’d like to point out is that, although there were quite a few websites that participated in the “black out,” only one really received any media coverage – Wikipedia. This website’s popularity is undeniable – and with good reason. Wikipedia sums up and exists as a clear expression of the heart of the modernist project that is the internet. And this is no clearer than in Wikipedia’s very reason for being – the free and over-abundant distribution of information. Now, whether or not that information is accurate is another question for another time, what’s important for our purposes this morning is to recognize just how important information exchange is for our modern conceptions of knowledge and teaching.
In our time, we have really come to believe that with enough information, we can master anything, and we will – by default – be better people. When I was a kid, I used to watch the GI Joe cartoon, and at the end of every episode there would be a short moral lesson – some child would be doing something their not supposed to do, GI Joe would come onto the scene with that key piece of info that would help the child see the error of his ways, and then GI Joe would say – “Now you know, and knowing is half the battle.” All little Johnny needed to be a good guy like GI Joe was enough info. He just didn’t know enough before. And we bring this view of the transformative power of information to Church with us.
We tend to think that being a better Christian is a matter of knowing more about Christianity. If we just know what the right commentaries say about the Bible, we’ll be better Christians than those fundamentalists who don’t know enough not to take it literally. If we just know a little more info about the historical context of Jesus, or about the development of the liturgy, or about the controversy that came with the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, if we just know a little more info about Christianity, then we will surely be better Christians. Well, I don’t buy it. I don’t buy it. All of this stuff – all of this information – is certainly good to know, but I just don’t buy that it makes us better Christians. And the reason I don’t buy it is this passage from the Gospel.
You see, it all starts with Jesus taking a stroll into a synagogue, run by the local scribes – the people who were the living embodiment of Wikipedia in Jesus’ day. The scribes were the go to guys on all info pertaining to what it means to be a Jew. The Scribes knew all the right stuff. Yet Jesus comes to town and, according to Mark, the people are astounded by his teaching. Why are they astounded? Because, Mark says, Jesus taught with authority. So, what is this astoundingly authoritative teaching of Jesus? Is it the beatitudes or some other part of the Sermon on the Mount? Is it the Great Commission or his discourse on discipleship? Is it a lecture Jesus gives to the crowd or his graduate seminar for the twelve apostles? Nope. For the Gospel according to Mark, Jesus’ astoundingly authoritative teaching is not any of these exchanges of information.
Rather, Mark says that while the people were expressing their astonishment, a man possessed by an unclean spirit arrives. Despite all of their informational knowledge, apparently the scribes don’t know how to protect the people from the oppression of the demonic. And this is certainly because the demons possess even more informational knowledge than the scribes. Upon seeing Jesus, the possessed man cries out: “I know who you are, Holy One of God.” The demons even have the inside info on who Jesus really is, which is a bit of knowledge that not even the scribes are privy to. And, interestingly enough, Jesus doesn’t then engage in an exchange of information with the unclean spirit, but Jesus actually closes the information source, by rebuking the demon and saying, “Be silent! Shut up!” And then Jesus orders the unclean spirit to depart from the man – causing the first-century equivalent of a Wikipedia black-out. You see, demons have no voice of their own, they must co-opt the voice of the people they colonize. But upon Jesus’ authoritative word, the man is freed from the oppressive spirit. And then, Mark tells us, the people are amazed and say, again, “What is this? A new teaching – with authority!”
It’s not that information isn’t good. It’s not that knowledge of a lot of information is bad. It’s that information can’t overcome the unclean spirits – the powers and principalities – of this world. It’s that information won’t liberate the possessed and oppressed. It’s that knowing all of the mathematical formulas still won’t make us do our homework. We need, instead, the kind of authoritative teaching or instruction that Jesus Christ embodies to liberate us and draw us to who we are meant and made to be. We need the authoritative instruction that Christ embodies and that we commonly call love.
It’s not knowledge about the Bible that makes the Bible authoritative in our lives, rather it’s the love of the Bible – reading, marking, and inwardly digesting scripture – makes it authoritative in our lives. It’s not the knowledge of the Church’s history that makes the Church authoritative in our lives, rather it’s the love of God that the Church calls us to that makes the Church authoritative in our lives. It’s the grounding of our own story in the story of God’s love for the world as embodied in the worship and outreach of the Church that makes the Church’s liturgy and social outreach authoritative in our lives. It’s not the knowledge we can reconstruct about Jesus’ historical context, it’s the love he awakens within us, the way he pulls the compass of our souls toward God as our true north, the way his simple presence turns us around and transforms us into people who share in his love that makes Jesus Christ authoritative in our lives.
In the words of St Paul from today’s epistle lesson: Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. Anyone who claims to know something does not yet have the necessary knowledge; but anyone who loves God is known by him.
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Last Updated on Monday, 19 March 2012 12:22
