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Don’t Let Anything Get in Your Way
A sermon by Dr. Jim
Somerville, Pastor
Richmond’s First Baptist Church
Richmond, Virginia
September 27, 2009
Mark 9:38-50
Have you ever taken a long
walk with someone? I mean a really long walk? In November of this year I’m
going backpacking with my brother-in-law Chuck and our mutual friend Joe in the
Guadalupe Mountains of West Texas. We try to take a trip like that once a year,
where we spend four or five days together on the trail just walking and talking
and marveling at the beauty of God’s creation. In that amount of time almost
any subject can come up, and often does. We hike for a while in silence and
then, while we’re catching our breath, someone will ask, “How do they
make that toothpaste with the stripes in it?” I don’t know how many days Jesus
and his disciples spent walking, or how many miles they covered, but in that
time almost any subject could have come up and in today’s Gospel reading it
does.
It begins when John comes
running up to Jesus and says, “Teacher! We saw someone casting out demons in
your name, and we tried to stop him, because he was not following us.” It’s
just one of the subjects that comes up in this morning’s reading—on this long
walk Jesus is taking with his disciples as they make their way to Jerusalem—but
it is an important one, and I’d like to pause long enough to consider it. What
Jesus tells John is that he shouldn’t have tried to stop the man, that no one
who does a deed of power in his name will be able soon afterward to speak evil
of him. And then he summarizes by saying, “Whoever is not against us is for
us.”
Somehow that word has not
gotten around to the church at large. Maybe it’s because we’ve been reading
Matthew instead of Mark. In Matthew’s Gospel Jesus says just the opposite. He
says, “Whoever is not with me is against me” (12:30), and that seems to be the
way we approach our mission. There is a kind of arrogance among Baptists that
assumes we are the only ones who know how to share the Gospel, the only ones who
know how to make disciples. If we go into an area where missionaries of other
denominations are already at work we don’t usually ask how we can cooperate with
them; we behave as if nothing had been done because, in our minds, nothing
has been done, nothing that counts anyway.
But it’s not only
Baptists.
Last Monday night I was at
Richmond Hill with a dozen other pastors, talking about how we might help Jesus
bring the Kingdom of Heaven to Richmond, Virginia. There were Baptists,
Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Pentecostals, and Disciples of Christ
all sitting at the same table. We were doing fine until one of the pastors
mentioned that her church welcomed all people as members, even gay people, and
you could almost hear the spines stiffening. A couple of the pastors felt
compelled to remind us that the Bible condemned homosexual behavior, and that
welcoming those people as members was the same thing as condoning their
lifestyle. Ben Campbell, who was hosting the discussion, said, “There it is:
the poison pill Satan throws into our midst to keep us from working together.”
But that’s when one of those same pastors said, “I disagree. I think we can
work together. I even think we can pray together. I just don’t think we will
ever agree on all matters of doctrine.”
He may be right about
that, but honestly there are some times when it doesn’t matter. When Hurricane
Fran hit the coast of North Carolina in 1996 I went to Wilmington with some of
the men in my church to see if we could help out. When we got there we found
that the North Carolina Baptist Men had been there before the storm hit, and
were busy cleaning up debris, serving hot meals, and helping those people get
back on their feet. I was impressed. When I volunteered they didn’t ask me
what I believed; they just put me to work washing dishes. And as I worked
alongside some of those other Baptists I recognized that we wouldn’t have agreed
on everything, but it didn’t matter. We were getting the job done.
That’s what Jesus seems to
be saying here, that if we have to agree on every point of doctrine the Kingdom
will never come. “Look,” he says, “the man is casting out demons. Casting out
demons is a good thing, whoever does it. Don’t get in his way!” And then he
adds, “Truly I tell you, whoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you
bear the name of Christ will by no means lose the reward.” Again I think he’s
saying that we may disagree on the finer points of doctrine, but if someone sees
what you are doing in the name of Christ and thanks you for it that person is
onto something. Like that time some of us from the church in DC went up 17th
Street picking up trash along the sidewalk. Someone saw us and asked what we
were doing. “We’re from First Baptist Church,” I said. “We’re trying to be
good neighbors in a great neighborhood.” “That’s cool,” he said. “Yeah, that’s
cool.” And then he offered to help us. Was he a Christian? Would it have
counted for anything? Well, no, not in the sense that it would save him. But
we were picking up trash because Jesus told us to love our neighbors, and he
offered to help because something about that seemed right to him. Maybe it was,
for him, a baby step on the way that leads to life.
And that’s why Jesus says
what he says next.
“If any of you put a
stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in me it would be
better for you if a great millstone were hung around your neck and you were
thrown into the sea.” The New International Version says, “If anyone causes one
of these little ones who believe in me to sin,” but the word in Greek is
scandalon, “stumbling block,” and I like that better. It paints the
picture of someone taking those first few steps on the way that leads to life
and someone else throwing a big stumbling block in front of him, deliberately
trying to trip him up. “Woe to you if you do that,” Jesus says. “It would be
better for you if a great millstone were hung around your neck and you were
thrown into the sea.” It’s what we call hyperbole, exaggeration. Jesus
is overstating his point in order to make it, but he makes it doesn’t he? Don’t
do anything that might trip up someone who is on the way that leads to life, and
that includes you, because in the very next breath Jesus says, “If your hand
becomes a scandalon, a stumbling block, cut it off; if your foot trips
you up, chop it off, if your eye causes you to sin, tear it out. These are
gruesome images but in each case Jesus exaggerates to make his point: it would
be better to go to heaven butchered and blind than to go to hell whole.
Let’s pause for a moment to catch our breath,
because we’ve been walking along with Jesus listening to whatever comes into his
mind and these last few things have been downright disturbing. The words and
images in this passage inspire the worst, rather than the best, kind of
Christianity, where people live in perpetual fear that their behavior will drag
them down to hell. I can’t believe that Jesus wants us to live in fear, so
let’s pause for a moment and see if we can figure out what he’s up to. First of
all, let’s look at that word hell. It shows up three times in this
passage. Jesus says it’s better to enter life maimed than to have two hands and
go to hell. He says it’s better to enter life crippled than to have two feet
and be thrown into hell. He says it’s better to enter the Kingdom of God with
one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into hell, where the worm never dies
and the fire never goes out.
But in each case the word he uses for hell is
the word gehenna—a contraction of the Hebrew words for the Valley of
Hinnom, where the people of Jerusalem dumped their garbage. It was just outside
the Dung Gate, which got its name for a reason. The city sloped downhill to
that part of the wall, and that was where they would open the gate and shovel
out all the garbage that had accumulated, shovel it straight into the valley of
Hinnom. They would set it on fire and try to burn it up, but because they kept
adding fresh garbage the fires kept burning. And because it was every awful,
rotting, stinking thing in the city of Jerusalem they were trying to burn up,
you can imagine that the valley of Hinnom looked and smelled…like hell. They
called it gehenna, and the disciples got the point. You wouldn’t want to
end up there, lying on top of that putrid, stinking pile of garbage “where their
worm never dies and the fire is never quenched.”
It’s a good point, and I hope we all get it.
If anything gets in the way that leads to life, if anything becomes a stumbling
block—even if it’s your own hand, foot, or eye—get rid of it, get it out of the
way. It would be better to enter life with a few missing body parts than to
wind up whole in gehenna. You could spend the rest of your Christian
life thinking about those things, about hell and the kind of sin that will send
you there, or you could spend it thinking about the way that leads to life, and
not letting anything get in your way. It’s like that verse in Hebrews that
says, “Since, then, we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us
lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with
perseverance the race that is set before us” (Heb 12:1) Let us lay aside every
weight. Let us strip off every sin. Let us remove every stumbling block. So
that we can walk in the way that leads to life without getting tripped up, so
that we can run that good race Paul talks about, and finish that course. To
follow Jesus in the way he is going means that we have to follow closely, and
keep our eyes fixed on him, and not let anything get in the way.
And so, off we go again, trying to keep up
with Jesus as he says something about everyone being salted with fire. It’s
hard to know exactly what he means (it’s often hard to know exactly what
he means). But it seems that he is still thinking about gehenna, about
that hellfire that never goes out. “Everyone will be salted with fire,” he
mumbles, and what comes to mind is the plate my mother used to set before me at
breakfast when I was a boy, with whole wheat toast on it, and bacon, and
scrambled eggs. I would butter that toast and smother it with jam, but I would
also reach for the saltshaker and shake out just a little on those eggs. Maybe
Jesus means that everyone will be salted with fire just like that, that everyone
goes through a little hell in life. Is that true? Is there anyone here who
hasn’t been through just a little hell, who hasn’t been “salted” with fire?
I didn’t think so.
“Salt is good,” Jesus says, as he goes on
down the road. I don’t know what makes him say it: maybe just the idea of being
“salted” with fire. But he’s right. Salt is good. It made those
scrambled eggs taste so much better when I was a boy. “But if salt has lost its
saltiness what good is it?” Jesus asks, and he’s right again. Unsalty salt
would leave your breakfast eggs just as bland as when they came out of the
shell. And here’s a little lesson from the one who called his disciples “the
salt of the earth”: our job, while we’re here, is not to sit around trembling
with fear that we’ll end up in hell, but to change the world on our way to
heaven. I like the way Eugene Peterson paraphrases it in his version of Matthew
5:13: Jesus says, “Let me tell you why you are here.
You're here to be salt-seasoning that brings out the God-flavors of this earth.
If you lose your saltiness, how will people taste godliness? You've lost your
usefulness and will end up in the garbage.”
Sound familiar?
One of the ways to lose our
saltiness, for sure, is to be so heavenly minded that we are no earthly good, or
to be so fearful of hell that we stand there shaking in our hiking boots,
useless to anyone. Here we are on the earth, and what are we here for? To
follow Jesus on the way that leads to life, to make sure that nothing gets in
our way as we go, to be careful not to put anything in anyone else’s way, and to
change the world for the better as we go, to “bring heaven to earth.” “Have
salt in yourselves,” Jesus says at the end of this passage, “and be at peace
with one another.” It’s good advice, isn’t it? “Don’t try to stop others from
doing good works; whoever is not against us is for us. Don’t trip up anyone on
the way that leads to life; and don’t let yourself get tripped up either. Have
salt in yourselves, disciples; and be at peace with one another.” It’s what you
might learn on a long walk with Jesus. It’s what those disciples may have
learned along the way.
I’m sure there were times when
he got out in front of them, just as he seems to get out in front of us. They
must have stood there in a clump sometimes, catching their breath and watching
him stride purposefully up the road toward Jerusalem, the place where he said he
was going to suffer and die. They must have wondered why he seemed so
determined to get there, and why he didn’t want anything to get in his way. But
then they remembered what he had said up near Caesarea Philippi, just before he
turned toward Jerusalem: that anyone who wants to save his life will lose it.
He walked like that—like someone who was determined to lose his life in order to
save it. Or maybe it was our lives he was determined to save. Maybe that’s why
he wasn’t going to let anything get in his way.
—Jim Somerville © 2009
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