October 1, 2006

By Harry T. Cook

Mark 9: 38-43, 45, 47-48

During my college years, I was a member of an organization that did not rank high on the campus social scale. We were a bunch of non-conformists – if it could be said that anyone at that little Midwestern college in the 1950s was a non-conformist. The institution being a church-related college, there were student groups for the principal denominations, the most prestigious being the Methodist Student Movement.

None of us in our crowd belonged or wanted to belong to the Methodists or any other group. We were fiercely independent and, for the time, rather irreligious. During one year an aggressive fellow by the name of Fred Pass was the president of the Methodist Student Movement and labored day and night to make it the eminent organization it became under his leadership. That group for years had made it a point to send Thanksgiving turkeys and Christmas baskets to the poor on the other side town.

We thought all that was a little too noblesse oblige, so some of our group became involved in a tutoring program with what we now call at-risk students. A couple of the guys who were handy with tools volunteered to do home repairs for the disadvantaged. When Fred Pass, he of the Methodists, got wind of our efforts, he demanded to know what we thought we were doing and why weren’t we doing it through his organization. “This is a Methodist-related college,” he said.

We wondered why it mattered as long as good work was getting done – which is the burden of today’s reading from Mark. Mark depicts one of Jesus’ close associates fretting because there were people out there doing things Jesus’ group were doing, but they were not of Jesus’ group. Mark has Jesus say, in effect, “It doesn’t matter whether they’re part of our group or not, they’re doing good work. Leave them alone.”

Actually, the charge was that these other people were casting out demons – that is, performing exorcisms – in Jesus’ name. That’s an important clue to the import of this story. The other people were not associated with Jesus and his crowd, but they were doing good works “in his name.” This is Mark telling us that the name and nature of Jesus was such good works. And it didn’t matter who did them as long as they got done, that being the point of what we call “religious commitment.”

A tremendous amount of time and energy is spent by Christian groups trumpeting their own theological orthodoxies and fealty to the Bible, and in challenging the legitimacy of others who do not agree with them. There are even critics of Crossroads/1 within our own diocese who say that the soup kitchen ought to be connected to an obligatory chapel service. In other words: no sermon, no soup.

Nobody ever died of sermon deprivation. Plenty of people have died from malnutrition and starvation. For the hungry person having no prospects for the next or subsequent meals, the salvation of his soul (whatever that term may mean) is not even on his radar screen. Thus it doesn’t matter who is driving out the demons of hunger, homelessness, ill health and social marginalization. It matters that the demons are driven out.

/1Crossroads is an Episcopal Church-related social service program in Detroit’s central city, which runs a weekly soup kitchen and provides job counseling and emergency aid to indigent persons.

© Copyright 2006, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.

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