WHAT DOES A HEALTHY CHRISTIAN COMMUNITY LOOK LIKE? [Rough Notes]

For Church Anniversary Service Mulgrave Church of Christ (Theological College Mulgrave): April 26, 2009

Text: Mark 9:38-41

Points of Contact:

1. A ‘Church Anniversary’- as with any birthday – is an occasion for celebration and review: as our ancestors used to say ‘hitherto has the Lord helped us’; it’s an opportunity to examine where we are today; and also where we’re going. (Who’s been here for the whole life of this congregation? Etc.)

2. Since 1991 we in John Mark Ministries have been preoccupied with the question ‘What does a healthy church look like?’ (On our website are articles like 100 Marks of a Healthy Church [1]; or if 100 is too many try 34 Marks of a Healthy Church [2]; maybe you want just four – see here [3]).

In our Scripture reading for today, Mark offers three or four excellent descriptions of a healthy church – ancient or modern – using intriguing sayings by Jesus which had been remembered and were obviously reiterated – and no doubt argued over! – in the churches John Mark and his friends belonged to.

[1] A HEALTHY CHURCH IS A TOLERANT CHURCH, AFFIRMING DIVERSITY (9:38-41).

Jesus’ disciple John told his friends that he’d come across someone casting out demons using Jesus’ name, so as he ‘didn’t belong to our group’ he had to be stopped.

Probably this sort of thing – casting out demons – doesn’t happen very often in your church, but it’s quite common in first generation Christian churches around the world. In traditional cultures demons are everywhere, causing sickness and disaster, and witch-doctors and other exorcists do a thriving trade keeping them in check. I have a friend from Thailand who’s studying for a PhD in an Australian university: walking through any forest she will acknowledge the presence of spirits in various trees with a courteous act of homage using an incantation and a little ritual! (Hands together and bow)…

Exorcism is a regularly-practised rite in Roman Catholic, Orthodox and many other modern churches [4]. Many of you have seen the 1970s film ‘The Exorcist’ – one of the most profitable horror movies of all time. Whatever you believe about demons, I can tell you they don’t necessarily cause epilepsy (we have a family-member who is epileptic), but I frankly have an open mind about all this. I like the attitude in William Penn’s famous quote ‘Don’t despise or oppose what you do not understand!’ In the NT there’s a similar sentiment: Jude (10) talks about ‘those who speak abusively of everything they don’t understand’.

Jesus was certainly a successful exorcist, so the ‘name of Jesus’ became hot property for the early Christians – and for others (Acts 3:6,16; 4:7,10,30; 8:9-24; James 5:14 etc.).

It’s ironic, getting back to our story, that John stopped a successful exorcist whereas just a short time before the disciples themselves had failed to drive an ‘unclean spirit’ from a young boy, and received Jesus’ sharp rebuke. (In healthy churches you won’t be jealous of other churches’ success… in our seminars I regularly hear variants of ‘That church is growing/large so they must be doing something wrong!’).

Jesus’ response to John was quite clear: Don’t stop his other guy. Be magnanimous about people who are not in your group, who are not ‘like us’. Recently on ABC Radio they had me talking about Homosexuality and the Church, and I heard myself saying ‘The real problem with many of us might not be homophobia, but heterophobia – fear of ‘the other’, people who are different. A lot of modern Islamophobia is driven by fear of a religion/culture we don’t understand.

If someone else follows Jesus differently to the way you do, celebrate that! ‘Vive la difference’, as the French say. There’s a wonderful diversity in the way different individuals and churches relate to God. In 1977 British New Testament scholar James Dunn wrote a book entitled Unity and Diversity in the New Testament where in 470 well-argued pages he concludes that there’s a marked degree of diversity within the first-century Church; there are many different expressions of the Faith within the New Testament; there was no single normative form of Christianity in the first century. Their only unifying factor, he says, was their allegiance to Jesus [5].

In a healthy church you won’t restrict truth/salvation to your own group. And you’ll have to get used to mavericks/outsiders who believe and do things differently to the way you do. The early Christians had to learn those lessons when challenged to accept foreigners like Cornelius, or persecutors like Saul of Tarsus.

Truth is bigger than our little system’s perceptions of it. Yours is one of 40,000 Christian denominations/movements in the world. It would be highly unlikely that yours has the whole truth and nothing but the truth! (Every week I remind myself of the truth that, fortunately, God is probably not a Baptist!).

[2] A HEALTHY CHURCH IS COMMITTED TO SOCIAL JUSTICE: THE STRONG HELPING THE WEAK, NOT EXPLOITING THEM (9:42).

‘If anyone causes one of these little ones to stumble, it would be better that a great millstone be hung around your neck, and you were cast into the sea’.

‘These little ones’ may either be children or new believers: whatever, they were vulnerable people who could easily be scandalized, and lose their faith. Jesus says that if you don’t look after the little people, it would be best to have a stone so large, that it needed a donkey to turn it to grind wheat into flour, and tied it around your neck and throw you into the sea. The Romans often used millstones and drowning as a means of execution: the modern mafia didn’t invent this method.

In Jean Vanier’s book of letters, recently published, this great man who pioneered ministries around the world for people with intellectual disabilities, says there are five ways of dealing with people who are vulnerable because of a disability: (1) Get rid of them (Hitler); (2)

Have a little pity for them, but confine them to large institutions, out of the way of the rest of us; (3) Get to know them and their special needs, and look after them in integrated schools; (4) Get close to them, and form authentic relationships with them, and we will be transformed; (5) See the face of God in the faces of the disabled: their presence is a sign of God who chooses the foolish to confound the strong, the proud, the so-called wise of this world.’ That has been true of our relationship with our little granddaughter, four-year old Bella, who has just been diagnosed with an Autism Spectrum Disorder/ ‘Developmental Delay’. Her face breaks into a beautiful smile every time we meet – and for us it’s the face of God: smiling more than all our four children and five other grandchildren did, put together!

In my work as a counselor, I meet people every week who say they have lost faith and hope because of the unjust/cruel actions of the powerful people in their lives. I meet people who have rejected Christianity because they were bullied by Christians. The abusers say ‘I am going to heaven and you are going to hell because my faith is ‘correct’ and yours isn’t.’ Actually in Jesus’ comments about hell – we’ll come to them in a minute – it’s the abusers – even orthodox abusers – who’ll feel the heat.

The little ones, the vulnerable ones, are all around us. (Tell briefly the stories of Melva and Jane – a parishioner, and a client, who were abused by others, but whose journey to faith became strong as they ‘faced their demons’ and became more whole). They are little children, people these days thrown out of work, around the world they are child sex-slaves, the starving, the victims of war… Dawn Rowan, persecuted by our own legal/political systems.

Over Easter recently I thought again about Caiaphas, the Jewish High Priest, who made the ultimately political comment in the debate about what to do with the prophet Jesus: ‘It is expedient – it’s in your interests – that one person die for the people, than to have the whole nation destroyed’ (John 11:50). Caiaphas was saying, in effect, ‘Pay no heed to the rights of Jesus as an individual. If you have power, use it in your own interests. And are not your interests the interests of the whole nation – peace and order in relating to the Roman occupying forces?’ How does someone get away with this sort of injustice? Simple: others keep silent. Some of them must have been disturbed, but they decided to keep out of trouble when they should have made trouble. They were religious people, but they were not religious enough to stand up for what they knew was right. Being a Christian means much more than having good standing in your church or denomination: in a crisis the most authentic Christian will be brave enough to say ‘This is wrong!’

Social Justice – the Bible is full of it – is simply the right use of power. Injustice is the abuse, misuse or non-use of power. We abuse others directly by hurting them with fists or words, or indirectly by our neglect and silence.

So a healthy church/community is passionate about inclusiveness, and about social justice, and also, thirdly, about personal holiness…

[3] MEMBERS OF A HEALTHY CHURCH ARE COMMITTED TO PERSONAL HOLINESS (9:43-50b).

These statements by Jesus about chopping off your hand or foot or gouging out your eye if they lead you into sin are very interesting – they have generally not been taken literally even by those who say they ‘obey every command in the Bible’! You don’t meet too many ‘one-eyed’ Christians – though how there are, metaphorically, is another question, as Marcus Borg notes somewhere!

Our Old Testament professor offered an example of this kind of Middle Eastern hyperbole. He was visiting an archeological ‘dig’ somewhere in Jordan, I think, and an Arab dislodged a stone which fell into a trench and hit another Arab on the head, without seriously wounding him. However the Arab down in the trench let forth several minutes of invective, which had to be translated for Dr. Thompson. His stream-of-hot-words were actually a curse, where he began with the other guy’s great grandparents, and cursed everything they owned, then his grandparents, then his parents, then – with a raised hysterical crescendo – the perpetrator himself, and so on through the children and their children and generations to come!

Those who negotiate with Middle Eastern people tell similar stories. So when we take literally a wish by the Iranians that Israel be pushed into the sea, we might ask ‘Do they mean that literally?’ Good question. However, the ancient world would have known real stories of people who chopped off bits of themselves to be more pure – like Oedipus, who gouged out his eyes so that he couldn’t look at the children he produced with his own mother; or Origen, who castrated himself on the basis of this saying of Jesus. I heard this week of an self-confessed alcoholic who chopped off a finger from his ‘drinking hand’ to remind him of the consequences of imbibing too much too often…

What Jesus is saying, of course, is that it’s worth any sacrifice to be a holy/whole person. If there’s something in your life which is weighing you down, preventing you from being whole, deal with it. And deal with it, so that it doesn’t define who you are. (In counseling I regularly hear myself say ‘Don’t let what describes you define you!’).

Now if Jesus is speaking metaphorically about cutting off/out bits of your body, does he then switch to a literal hell with fire and unending torment? The image that would have come to his hearers’ minds was the ever-burning garbage-dump in the Valley of Hinnom outside Jerusalem they called Gehenna. It had terrible associations – like the sacrifices of little children in Ahaz’ time (2 Chronicles 28:3). If one’s dead body were thrown into Gehenna, that was the ultimate degradation: separation from life, and from dignity…

Mark then quotes Jesus using two other ‘purity’ metaphors – salt and fire. They were used to purify or refine food before refrigeration was invented.

So if you want to be ‘pure’ – or ‘find real life’ or ‘enter the Kingdom of God’ – then do something about your addictions. These may not only be sexual addictions, of course (I talk to pastors and ex-pastors who are ‘addicted to encouragement’), but are anything which robs one of spiritual power and health and energy. My suggestion would be to follow what the Bible says in James (5:16) and confess your sins to someone you trust who is wise and accepting (full of ‘grace and truth’), and pray for one another, that you might become whole… (Once in Bangladesh, a Christian leader told me: ‘The Evangelicals in our country know the Bible but they don’t obey it; the Catholics here don’t know the Bible so well but they do obey it – like with this James reference to confession’).

So in a healthy church we are passionate about tolerance – accepting others even if they’re different; about social justice – the strong helping the weak; about personal holiness – dealing with whatever separates us from wholeness and from life.

Jesus’ final word (and mine this morning): ‘Be at peace with one another.’

So let us conclude this little meditation with ‘The Peace’: ‘THE PEACE OF THE LORD BE WITH YOU!’

(‘And also with you!). Amen.

[1] http://jmm.org.au/articles/8825.htm

[2] http://jmm.org.au/catalog/section/yc1.htm

Briefly: http://jmm.org.au/articles/15289.htm

[3] http://jmm.org.au/articles/4831.htm

[4] http://www.goarch.org/ourfaith/ourfaith7079

[5] http://jmm.org.au/articles/11534.htm

Rowland Croucher

April 2009