The Winning Side
Pentecost 18, Proper 21
Fr. Tim Nunez
On September 21st, 1987, President Ronald Reagan spoke to the United Nations. In an appeal to our common humanity, he said something that drew mocking humor from commentators, comedians and critics, yet all of them also had to admit that what he said was true. He said, “Perhaps we need some outside universal threat to make us recognize this common bond. I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world.”
It’s undeniably true. We can see examples in any crisis or calamity of the many ways that human beings of all backgrounds, creeds and station will rally together to help. We see it with natural disasters like hurricanes and earthquakes – or the tsunami that hit Thailand in 2004. A couple of weeks ago we remembered 9/11, and how the entire nation and much of the world came together, if briefly.
We came together in resolve not just to seek justice against those responsible but also to preserve life moving forward. We raised security standards around the world in air travel and many other areas. We all have to stand in those TSA lines and we don’t care who designed the security procedures and equipment or who trained the dogs that sniff us. We just want to know they are competent in their work and that they are on our side – the side of humanity, the side of life.
But there are two major problems with an appeal to our humanity. First, our humanity is insufficient. It is not well-defined and does not go far enough. It’s true that many, even most, people do evidence that “common good” sort of humanity as I described, but other people obviously do not. Disasters also draw looters and con artists. There are evil ideologies that do not value human life – hence 9/11 and those who cheered it. And we are all so wrought with sin that sometimes even our best efforts yield awful unintended consequences.
Our sense of humanity isn’t nearly enough. We have to move far beyond that. It’s part of the ache, the desire for pure truth and pure love. That is why we attend to and draw from the source and author of life, the source of all that is good, right and true in the universe, the God who created us and loves us. He defines our humanity.
Second, although President Reagan’s musing about an alien invasion was useful for that moment, there is no need to dream up an imagined alien threat. There is an enemy. Peter describes this enemy in his first letter, 1st Peter 5:8, “Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.”
This is the battle line between Good and Evil. They are drawn across time and across cultures, through our governments and institutions at every level and right through each human’s heart.
When Jesus’ disciples run across what they regard as an unauthorized and un-sanctioned invocation of Jesus’ name to cast out demons, they don’t like it. John, the one closest to Jesus, sees it as distracting from Jesus himself, or even competing with him. The disciples tried to stop the man. But Jesus tells them no, anyone who invokes his name in the battle is an ally that will eventually fully come around to Him.
This brings to mind Peter’s account of his encounter with Cornelius the Centurion, a Gentile who was seeking God and Peter was called to baptize, with his whole household. In describing that moment, Peter says, “…I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.” (Acts 10:34-35)
Then Jesus flips the lesson to each of them, and in turn each of us. While we are to maintain a generous heart when looking externally toward all who are working against evil and seeking God, when we look internally we are to demand the best from ourselves.
We are to be generous towards “them,” and most intently exacting toward ourselves. The language is hyperbolic; I don’t think anyone would take these instructions literally. We have to take them in context with all Jesus teaches about repentance, forgiveness and grace. But their meaning couldn’t be more serious.
Inside ourselves, anything that is working against the Kingdom of God is to be left set aside, discarded. The word that gets translated repeatedly in this passage as sin is skandalizw, or skandalizow, which is the root – I believe because of this passage – of our word scandal. It literally means to stumble.
Our hands, feet and eyes are all good and useful parts of us, but if even something very good is causing us to stumble, we are better off setting it aside. If we don’t repent, then we are stumbling toward hell. Here Jesus uses the word Gehenna. You may recall that I shared with you last summer that Gehenna was/is a deep ravine next to Jerusalem where they would throw their garbage. Garbage in their day wasn’t paper and plastic. It was the unused parts of animal carcasses and I suppose vegetables. Rather than leave it to rot, they kept it burning with a perpetual fire.
This passage also makes it most clear that while we are always concerned with our own personal growth and development in Christ, the larger purpose isn’t just to improve. It is preparation to be his witnesses and examples of his grace in our broken world. We are to be salt and light. If we are corrupted, when we fall into sin in a public way, a scandal, it discourages and distracts people from Jesus, from the Kingdom of God, which is the exact opposite of what we are supposed to be doing.
We see that happen all the time in the Church, in the scandals that erupt and in the strife that can occur when we don’t deal humbly and graciously with each other. Be salty. Don’t lose your salt. “… and be at peace with one another.”
AMEN