The Rev. Mark Schultz | Festal Eucharist

Sunday, September 22, 2024 @ 11:00 am
The Eighteenth Sunday After Pentecost

The Eighteenth Sunday After Pentecost

O God, who declarest thy almighty power chiefly in showing mercy and pity: Mercifully grant unto us such a measure of thy grace, that we, running to obtain thy promises, may be made partakers of thy heavenly treasure; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen. (Proper 21)

Sunday, September 22, 2024
The Eighteenth Sunday After Pentecost

Festal Eucharist
11:00 am

Listen to the sermon

Scripture citation(s): Jeremiah 11:18-20; Psalm 54; James 3:13-4:3, 7-8a; Mark 9:30-37

✛
A Sermon by
The Rev. Mark Schultz
on
Jeremiah 11:18-20; Psalm 54; James 3:13-4:3, 7-8a; Mark 9:30-37
✛

The Center of the Circle

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In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

When I was in high school, some friends of mine and I decided that
What our school really needed
Was a secret society.
So of course we formed one. We called ourselves “The Autumn Circle”
Mostly because the majority of us were into goth music
And we thought calling ourselves
The Autumn Circle
Sounded sort of goth.
Goth for us meant loving Keats and Shelley as well as the sorts of musical groups that
Produced albums named things like
“Your Funeral, My Trial” “The Sky’s Gone Out” and “Within the Realm of a Dying Sun”
Adolescence, you may remember, is a very intense time.
So we were the Autumn Circle
We met very infrequently, officially, that is
But when we did, we would usually be planning some
Hopefully subversive art happening at the school.
Like planning our entry into the school talent show and competition.
That was the very zenith of our creative output.
We performed a skit we wrote together that was heavily influenced by Dadaist absurdism
Not because we thought we would win on the merits of Dadaist absurdism
But because we’d never seen a high school talent show that featured Dadaist absurdism. So.
The real high point of the skit featured one of our number
Standing at the edge of the stage, crying out to the audience
Over and over and over again
What are you doing here, go home!
What are you doing here, go home!
While industrial noise music played incredibly loudly over the school auditorium speakers
Oh it was glorious.
The looks of confusion on everybody’s faces
People had no idea what was going on. None.
And neither did we. Really. But.
We were the Autumn Circle:
What people did or didn’t understand had nothing to do with what we were.
They weren’t part of the Circle. They weren’t in on the joke.
What are you doing here. Go home.

Now we started the Circle, of course, really, because
We’d all found ourselves at the edges of so many other circles:
We just wanted an explicit place of belonging
And there’s nothing wrong with belonging, of course,
We need places of belonging:
Communities, friendships, relationships, families whether biological or found,
In which and through which we can share ourselves
Give ourselves to each other
So we made our own circle, dedicated to our own values, our own aesthetic sensibilities
Self-consciously having nothing whatsoever to do with any other circle
Dedicated, in fact, to the rejection of every other circle of which we were not truly a part
Literally, in the case of that talent show
Performing that rejection as a sign of our own social identity.
Of course, in many ways,
That’s precisely what made our circle exactly like every other circle:
We joined the chorus of everyone shouting at someone:
“You’re not welcome. We don’t want you. What are you doing here. Go home.”

That’s often the thing about social circles, though—in-groups:
They’re gathered around the rejection of something, usually someone who represents that something.
In his book “The Gospel and the Sacred,” theologian Robert Hamerton-Kelly
Recalls to us the prototypical human social circle when he helpfully reminds us that
“The place at the center of the circle is the place of the victim during a stoning.”
“The place at the center of the circle is the place of the victim during a stoning.”
Violence in one form or another is often found at the heart of the social
And this insidious violence by which we’re formed as social beings, political beings, economic beings,
In which we regularly and often unknowingly participate
Is, let’s name it: satanic. It is sin. And it, unfortunately, makes us who we are
Even before we know who we really are to begin with.
(There’s a startling alternative, though. We’ll get there in a minute.)
To paraphrase our epistle: we’re unable to ask for and subsequently receive
Who and what we are from someone who actually loves us
Because we’re conditioned from birth to prefer taking who we are at another’s expense.
Jesus is dealing with precisely this on our Gospel this morning.
And a little background is helpful here.

This is the second time in Mark’s Gospel
That Jesus has talked to the disciples about his death and resurrection
And it’s clear they have no idea what he’s talking about.
It’s clear, too, that they don’t even have the right conceptual framework from which to ask him about it
The last time anyone came close to asking was the first time Jesus talked about such things
When Peter told Jesus he was wrong to mention ever dying
Which prompted Jesus to call Peter Satan or Adversary for being opposed to the plan of God.
It’s likely that episode is still fresh in the apostles’ minds,
And they don’t want to repeat it:
No one wants Jesus to call them Satan.
But while they don’t want to repeat it, they didn’t really learn anything from it
Which means: they’re definitely going to repeat it.
Case in point: our reading today.
The reason why Peter was so disturbed by Jesus’ proclamation of his death
Has to do with the sort of Messiah that Peter thought Jesus was:
The warrior king who would destroy the corrupt Herods of this world,
The false client kings of the Roman Empire,
Throw off the oppressor’s yoke
Exterminate or expel all the gentiles
And reign victorious over a freed and restored nation.
Jesus’ understanding of what it means to be Messiah, though, is markedly different:
His mission is not to end violent oppression through oppressive violence
But to end the reign of sin and death that feeds oppression, that roots every Empire
And he would rather suffer violence to end it, exhausting it in the infinite depths of his love
Vanquishing it by the light of the Resurrection.
He will not reproduce or reinscribe the old patterns of violence, sin and death to which we’re victim
And then call it salvation
He will not bless those patterns, he will not sanction them, he will break them.
He will put himself at the center of the stoning circle,
Will replace every victim at the center of every social circle
With his own cross, his own thorn-crowned, pierced and nail-torn body,
He will undo death from the inside of death
And re-center every life on his own living, open and love-wounded heart,
Transforming every community into a community of welcome
So we can finally desire and receive who and what we truly are from the hands of the One
Who longs to freely give us his own divine life.

Meanwhile, expecting a worldly powerful death-dealing Messiah,
The disciples are arguing with each other about who gets to be
Prime minister or chamberlain or privy counsellor or otherwise all around great
In this shiny new worldly, powerful, death-dealing Messiah’s kingdom
That ultimately looks like every other deal-dealing kingdom in the world, except it’s theirs;
And, unsurprisingly, tempers are flaring and people aren’t talking any more, they’re bickering.

But then look what Jesus does:
Jesus turns the tables and offers a new vision of power and of community.
“He took a little child and set him in the midst of them”
In the middle.
He put a child, a little child, in the center of the group.
To us, of course, it’s precisely the sort of thing Jesus would do
We know Jesus loves the little children
We’ve sung the song probably many times throughout the course of our lives
It’s sort of a no brainer in a way
If Jesus sees a child, he’s probably gonna take them and put them in the center of things;
But imagine what the disciples are thinking.
Because in their world, in their social reality
A child is nothing.
A child has no social standing
A child has no power, no greatness
A child relies on another person who loves them for everything they need
A child can’t do anything for you
A child won’t get you the prime minister position
A child is nothing.
And here’s Jesus, after everyone’s been arguing about who’s greatest, most powerful,
Here’s Jesus putting a child in the middle of their social circle
As if it ought to be one of them
As if it could ever hope to compete with them:
How dare he.
Can you imagine the bewildered, barely veiled animosity
Radiating from the disciples who now have a discreet focus of rage
In this child at the center of their stoning circle? It’s actually an incredibly dangerous moment.

But before any of them can think or do so say anything more.
Jesus folds that child in his arms. Embraces him. Joins her in the center.
And seems to say, “Do you see what I’ve done here?
Do you see what’s become of the center of this circle?
Look how it’s now a space of welcome.
See how I welcome those who are powerless in your eyes.
See how the no-one is welcome and at home in my embrace at the center of all things.
See how I stand with, next to and in the place of
Anyone and everyone you think is nothing.
See how my love can transform the center of your lives.”
No longer “What are you doing here, go home.”
But “I’m glad I found you here, welcome home.”

It is a wondrous strange and glorious mystery of the Kingdom
That when we see Jesus, the Glorious and Sovereign Lord of the World
We’re invited to see the powerless
We’re invited to see the outcast
The unhoused, the food insecure, the refugee, the immigrant,
And in fact anyone who could be written off, ignored or rejected
We’re invited to see them all
Enthroned in the embrace of the King of Heaven who reigns from the Tree
At the place in our lives that the love of God by the sign of the cross
Has transformed into the place of welcome
Of Belovedness;
And to know that we, all of us, all people,
In our own real and innate powerlessness
In our human frailty and weakness, in our abject and naked contingency,
The enduring reality of which reveals all merely human power as empty posturing
In our inability to free ourselves from the bondage of sin
In our complete incapacity to add anything of any value to God’s own life
We, all of us, all people
Have somehow, by some inexplicable, unlooked-for grace,
Through Christ’s Incarnation, Passion, Death, Resurrection and Ascension
Through the One who became nothing for our sake because we were everything to him:
We have all been placed at the center of God’s own Love, God’s own Life
And given the opportunity to receive, through faith, our own identities as Beloved,
Belonging to God.

What would it mean to live this sort of new life of welcome?
What would it mean to become nothing to the world of death and sin and violence
So that God could be everything to us and in us?
What would it mean to discover the cross at the center of all of our social circles?
And to realize that we’re invited to call home a new sort of circle
Whose welcoming center, as the mystics say, is everywhere, and whose circumference is nowhere?
Maybe we’d find ourselves saying more often to friend and stranger alike:
I love you. I’m glad you’re here. And hey, would you look at that: we’re home.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

Sermon Audio