1 Samuel 8:4-20, 11:14-15, Psalm 138, 2 Corinthians 4:13-5:1, Mark 3:20-35
So much for Jesus and family values. His brothers and sisters will have been embarrassed, and his mother effectively dishonored. Shouldn’t he honor his mother as a categorical imperative, wouldn’t that be doing the will of God, as required by the fifth commandment?
Once again the Lord Jesus pushes so hard against established morality that he threatens to break it. What if our young confirmands today, with their mothers here to support them, decided to follow Jesus by saying, “Anyone of you here today is as much to us as our mothers are!”
Of course they won’t have to make that choice today, our confirmands. Soon enough they will be testing their family values and even threatening them. They have to, they’re teenagers, that’s their job. But today they’re doing the opposite, they are confirming something their families valued, and that is baptism. Everyone of them was baptized as a child. Everyone of them, without having been consulted by their parents, was brought to the church to be baptized in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And now everyone of them has chosen to confirm that baptism.
Our confirmation class has been meeting on Sunday afternoons since January. We used a new curriculum called Confirm, not Conform. The idea is that we all have many beliefs, quite apart from religion, and we mostly conform to the prevailing beliefs around us. As one of the confirmands put it, “Yeah, I believe most of the Park-Slope things to believe.” One of them remarked that conforming is not always bad, and often necessary. But we agreed that it is good to examine your beliefs and choose which ones to confirm, and be responsible for them.
So we reviewed the usual Park-Slope beliefs, and we reviewed the beliefs in the Apostles Creed. We learned about the Bible, and prayer, we acted out some church history on how the creeds developed, we looked at the beliefs of other religions, and then we looked at the Apostles Creed again. My goal was not church membership, but simply to have them consider Christianity well enough for them each to be able to decide whether to state in public, Yes, I am a Christian—or maybe not!
For the outcome of the class I gave them three choices: 1st, You can say thank you very much and walk away with no regrets. 2nd, You can come before the church and declare you are a Christian. 3rd, You can come before the church, declare you are a Christian, and be confirmed by the church. Four weeks ago they decided.
None chose to walk away. Two of them chose to declare that they are Christians, but reserving confirmation for later as Roman Catholics in their family heritage. One of those two could not be here today. Five chose confirmation. All seven were thoughtful about this and took it seriously, although as they gelled into a group I sometimes lost control of the class and once they had me laughing so hard we got off the rails. All seven have my esteem and admiration.
In coming years they may change their choices. That’s fine. I gave them no obligation to come to church. That doesn’t make it less real what they are doing today. We human beings are always making choices that we cannot see all the outcomes of. What I want for these young people is a first experience in a life-long task, which is to explore where in your own life you intersect with God. Where does God meet you, and how do you meet God? How do you come to terms with God, for now, at least? If you met Jesus on the road, would you want to hug him, or wrestle him? They’re close. Or maybe kill him, as the Lutheran poet Johann Heermann suggested we all have done!
Some years ago my wife Melody had a book with this title: If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him. That’s derived from a classic Zen Buddhist koan. It’s remarkable how close the Lord Jesus comes to certain forms of Buddhism. His parables can be like koans. Especially in St. Mark he speaks in riddles and puzzles and paradox. Twice he does it in our Gospel lesson today: about his mother and sisters and brothers, and about how if he’s empowered by Satan then he’s defeating Satan. Why does he speak this way? Why isn’t he more accommodating, why doesn’t he meet them half-way?
He keeps putting off balance those who judge him, whether his family or the authorities. They want order and law and clear, definable choices. They take him either as out of his mind or as defiant and needing to be stopped. He will not negotiate, not with the authorities nor his family. He keeps things in tension. He defies their judgment and his tension forces them to expose themselves and judge themselves. But his way is the way of liberation, and, if you can see it, it’s the way of grace.
These themes of grace and judgment and tension and defiance are apparent in our first reading, about the prophet Samuel. He defiantly tells the people, No, you shall not have a king! You are to be distinct among the nations, with everybody equal, no upper class, no royalty, your only king is God. And then God is in tension with his own prophet: You’re right, they’re wrong, but let them have their king. I will choose for them a king.
The people get their choice, and some kings will be good, but most of their kings were disasters and they led the nation into destruction and exile. Were they asking for it? We make our choices in the tension of the moment and we cannot see all the outcomes. In their choice the people judge themselves as rejecting God, but in the long haul God turns their rejection into grace. God defies their defiance. God gives them the House and Lineage of David, from which will come the Messiah, the savior of the world, the outcome they don’t see. In the judgment is the grace.
Your choices are rarely neat and clean. You’re usually managing one paradox or another, and you’re choosing your way through puzzles and dilemmas. You’re often choosing for one thing inside another thing, and your reasons may be complex and even contradictory. How heavy can be the consequences of a choice you lightly made. How much weight do your choices have? How much certainty can you assume, and do you not make many choices simply on faith, or hope, or love?
In the next few years these young people will be making a whole number of choices that will have enormous outcomes for the rest of their lives. They will have to make judgments, they will have to judge other people, and they will be judged themselves. Some of their choices will be in tension with the world, with those in authority and even their families. At times they may have to be defiant in their choosing. Good. That’s precisely where they might meet God again.
I am inviting you to believe that they are not cast adrift in this or on their own. The meaning of the Second Reading, the epistle, is difficult to scan, as St. Paul seems to have learned his grammar from Kierkegaard or Hegel, while his images are often word plays in disguise. The Hebrew word for “glory” derives from the word for “heavy,” so he invents the phrase, “the weight of glory.” Maybe he learned his science from Einstein. We think that something spiritual cannot be heavy because it has no mass, but for St. Paul, the glory of God has enormous gravity. And that weight of glory that God has for us gives the stability to all our flimsy choices. God’s faithfulness hidden in our freedom.
These young people are still light on their feet, they are appropriately light-hearted, and rightly they lightly made their choices to declare their faith. The heaviness is the faithfulness of God to them, more than they yet can know, the gravity is the grace of God, more than they need of now before the afflictions come and the ultimate, inescapable wasting away, the weight is the glory of God within them daily renewing their inner nature into a human nature with the capacity for the outcomes of eternity. We don’t know what that mostly means, but the witnesses of the last 2000 years invite us to believe it along with them.
Seven more witnesses. They believe, and today they speak. Just a few words, key words, “I” and “do.” I do. Words to say in public rarely because they are weighty. I do believe. I do have questions, I do reserve the right to keep looking and keep exploring, but I do believe, and so I speak. And the rest of you are witnesses of the witnesses. Love them while you can. The love of God for them is eternal. In the words of the Psalm: The Lord will make good his purpose for them, O Lord, your love endures forever, abandon not the work of your hands. Believe it, the Lord God loves them forever.
Copyright © 2018, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.
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