In the name of God ☩ Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
“When Jesus’ family heard about what he was doing, they went out to restrain him, for people were saying, ‘He has gone out of his mind.’” Sometimes the work of the preacher is to help in translating an ancient text into modern terms. But you all have been to enough family gatherings to know exactly what is going on here. Jesus is crazy, off his rocker, not playing with a full deck of cards – or at least, that’s the accusation being made against him. Today when we call someone crazy, generally we do it as a way of invalidating whatever their action or position is. And it was no different in Jesus’ time.
We’re only in chapter three of Mark, and already people are noticing that something seems to be different about Jesus. At this point in the narrative, Jesus has been baptized and then called his disciples to follow him. He’s then done some exorcisms and healings, pronounced the forgiveness of sins and then shared a meal with sinners and tax collectors. Then, as we heard last Sunday, Jesus healed a man on the Sabbath and said “The Sabbath was made for humanity, not humanity for the Sabbath.” Now, I realize that, to us, that doesn’t seem that crazy – we’ve come to see Jesus as someone who casts out evil, heals the sick, and forgives sins. But how would we react to a man with a scraggly beard wearing a tunic standing on a street corner who claims to perform faith healings? We’d be thinking the same thing those people in Mark were.
In the Greek that Mark writes in, the word for “out of his mind” is a word that literally means “to stand outside.” And that’s actually a fairly accurate depiction of Jesus – he didn’t stay within the boundaries that people would have liked him to. To those that wanted to have a clear sense of who was in and who was out, Jesus erased the boundaries. To those who wanted to keep faith out of politics and vice versa, Jesus shattered that wall. To those who wanted Jesus to condemn those other people without turning the focus back on them, he pushed the envelope. To those who thought they understood God, Jesus revealed how little we actually understand. To those who wanted faith to be a private matter, Jesus pushed into the public sphere. To those who wanted to compartmentalize their faith, Jesus blew the doors wide open. This is the essence of Jesus’ ministry and what ultimately got him killed – he stood outside of our expectations, taught inconvenient and uncomfortable truths, and refused to “stay in his lane.” And in that sense, Jesus was very much out of his mind because he stood outside of what was accepted as normal.
There were those around Jesus who saw this different and abnormal behavior and walked away from him. They had written him off as a crazy prophet who didn’t understand the first thing about God. Or maybe they thought that Jesus had a point, but that he was too extreme. Perhaps they said “Religion is all well and good up to a point, but this guy has no sense of decency.” And what a shame on all that they missed out on by dismissing Jesus. Of course, we are those people, too.
And in no way should we condemn the people in this passage from Mark. They were good people. They were doing their best to be faithful to their faith as it had been passed onto them. They were trying to balance their commitments to their faith, to their families, and to their communities. And then this Jesus character rolls into town and is upending everything that they thought they knew about God and the world. Jesus is saying crazy things like “Blessed are the poor,” when that goes against what they were taught about how God treats the righteous. Jesus is eating with the sort of people they’ve been trained to avoid at all costs. Jesus is forgiving sins, which no human has the authority to do. He’s casting out demons, and as we heard in this passage, that makes it seems like he’s on their side if he is able to command them. Jesus does not fit into our expectations or preferences; indeed, he is abnormal. And so we dismiss him for being too extreme, too demanding, too crazy.
And we miss out on the fullness of God’s grace when we hold back from following Jesus or seeing him in others. Too often we see an example of faithfulness and generosity in someone and we say “I could never do that.” That’s not humility or self-doubt, that’s denying the power of God. We sell ourselves too short, we sell other people too short, we sell God too short because we avoid the craziness and abnormal calling of our discipleship. The result is not only do we miss out on the abundant life that God intends for us, but the witness of the Church suffers.
What kills our faith, what diminishes the vitality of our congregations, what makes people walk away from religion isn’t that atheists have come up with better arguments or that people are having their spiritual needs met in other ways. No, plain and simple, we’ve made Christianity boring. A sane and sensitized faith simply isn’t interesting. In our attempts to make Christianity easier to adopt, we’ve robbed it of its attractional power. The best tool for evangelism isn’t coercion or force, but rather fascination. And the faith that is practiced by many people just isn’t fascinating.
Both political parties in this nation claim to be holding the Christian position – one side for conserving values and norms and the other for liberally applying love and hospitality. But a Christianity that fits into the broken system of American politics is less than interesting, it’s just more of the same. How is the Christian life different from the American Dream? Too often, it’s not. Our faith isn’t about being nice, or polite, or welcoming, or generous, or even loving. You don’t need Jesus to tell you to be a nice person. A religion that is about being a good person isn’t special, it isn’t unique, and it isn’t interesting.
But Jesus, the Jesus of the New Testament – now he’s an interesting character, if we don’t try to tame him. In CS Lewis’ classic The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, one of the characters asks a question about the lion Aslan, who is a Christ-figure in the novel. She asks “Is he quite safe?” The response is “Safe? Who said anything about safe? Of course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.” Jesus is a boundary-crossing radical – but our discipleship after him is too often boring, tame, and safe.
As our Presiding Bishop, Michael Curry, has said “we need some crazy Christians.” He’s right. We need some people who know the difference that Christ makes in their lives and then are able to make a difference in this world. We need people who actually act like the least shall be the greatest, who forgive seventy times seven times, who think that it’s actually the peacemakers who are blessed, who are ready to take up their cross and follow Christ, who believe those great words from the prayer of St. Francis – “For it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.” To paraphrase a political slogan, we need to Make Christianity Interesting Again.
Right now, our 5 year old daughter, Ellie, is really interested in learning about the saints of the Church. So at bedtime each night, she wants me to tell her stories about saints. After I ran through the ones that immediately came to me, we bought her a book all about various saints. And I’ll tell you, some of these stories about saints really aren’t the best for five year olds. The saints are some crazy people – they do crazy things like loving their enemies, like serving the poor and sick, like persevering though the world around them falls apart. What makes the saints interesting is that they let the abnormal light of Christ shine through them. It’s interesting that the most rapid period of growth in the Church’s history was when persecution was rampant – it was when Christians knew the cost of discipleship and happily paid that crazy price.
Now, speaking of crazy, in just a few moments we’re going to witness two people make vows to one another in Holy Matrimony. Lee and John are going to do something that really doesn’t make much sense; after all, marriage is a bit crazy. Sure, if two people want to have joint ownership of property and want to file joint tax-returns, I get it. That’s not too crazy. But coming before God and the Church to ask for a blessing on a relationship, taking vows that bind them to each other in fidelity, faithfulness, and fortune? Now that’s interesting.
One of the great prayers from the marriage liturgy is this: “Make their life together a sign of Christ’s love to this sinful and broken world, that unity may overcome estrangement, forgiveness heal guilt, and joy conquer despair.” Now that’s a way to spice up a relationship – making it clear that this love isn’t just about the couple, but rather praying that the redeeming, restoring, and sanctifying love of God is made manifest through their relationship. And what if that’s what our witness to Christ was about – making it clear to the world that unity, forgiveness, and joy are stronger than estrangement, guilt, and despair? Well, we’d be following the crazy way of Jesus and practicing an interesting faith.
In his stirring speech called “The American Dream,” Martin Luther King notes that in psychology, we speak about children who are “maladjusted” as a way of saying that they are not adapting to society and they don’t fit in. King then says that in our society, violence, division, bigotry, hatred, poverty, and segregation have become normal. And so King says “But I say to you that there are certain things in our nation and in our world to which I am proud to be maladjusted.” Being maladjusted is actually a Christian virtue. Faith in Jesus isn’t about fitting in, it’s about being different, just as Christ is different. Being a Christian shouldn’t be bland, boring, or normal, rather Christianity makes us out of our minds. And so my prayer this day is that the Holy Spirit might make us courageous, maladjusted, and interesting. Amen.
