Cultivating the Kin-Dom to Compost Empire (Mark. 6:1-16)

image © Rev. Jebasingh Samuvel

This sermon was originally preached on July 7, 2024 at Gethsemane Lutheran Church in Hopkins, MN.

The livestream of our service may be viewed here.
 
Today's scripture text is Mark 6:1-16

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Good morning, Beloved of God. As always, it is good to be together today and it’s my hope that you were able to enjoy this week’s holiday with family and friends, on the lake or at home. But I have to admit that, for me, the day was as dispiriting as it was rainy. The truth is, it’s become increasingly difficult in recent years to celebrate the 4th of July when, as James Baldwin said, “you know and I know that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too early.” To be brutally honest here -- and I mean this from the deep love and desperate hope that agitate me daily: Between climate chaos, the rising costs of living, stagnant wages, corporate greed, multiple ongoing genocides, and the impending season of political chaos that looms over everything right now here in the US, I am left with nothing but to confess I find little to celebrate. Instead, I find a deep need to gather, grieve, rage, and together in community IMAGINE SOMETHING MORE SACRED, something beautiful and liberating, that will compost this mess into life-growing gardens.  

Because -- and I will recite these words of Maya Angelou’s over and over, like a prayer and invocation, until they sink all the way into the marrow of our bones as Christ’s body in this world -- None of us are free until all of us are free. There are very few all-or-nothing truths I will plant my feet and dig my heels in on, but it is my firmest belief that all us humans, and all that lives, really, are intrinsically, inexorably, and indivisibly connected to God and each other by breath and water, and so we only get free together -- and this, we do, in the fundamentally interdependent community of the Beloved by cultivating in the here and now the upside-down Kin-dom of God that Jesus preached and the Disciples spread, and whose seeds we see planted in today’s Gospel.

Before I dive all the way in, let me commend to you this week’s Inside the Text because in it, Pastor Lydia and I took a deep-dive into this passage and teased and tweezed in conversation, which was a ton of fun and brought up so much richness it would be impossible for me to summarize right now. And secondly, let me note that Mark’s gospel is the shortest of the four, was a primary source for the two other synoptic gospels -- Matthew and Luke -- and in it he moves in action shots from Big Thing to Big Thing. 

As such, Mark is often sparse on detail which leaves wide open space for us to activate what the Black preaching tradition calls our “sanctified imagination” to carefully and creatively explore what’s not in the text based on what is. It is a kind of Midrash -- the ancient rabbinical practice of using the tools of exegesis, translation, and interpretation to “plumb the meaning of the words” and wrestle with all the possibilities bubbling between the lines, in order to ”respond to contemporary problems and craft new stories by connecting the threads of our modern realities with the unchanging biblical text.” And I would add, to connect the threads of our modern lives to those of the Great Cloud of witnesses who surround us. It is, in sum, exploring what’s explicitly in front of us in order to understand what’s all around us.

In this text, there’s a lot we aren’t told, beginning with what, exactly, Jesus was preaching. 

We know from verse 2 that whatever he was saying, according to most translations, “astounded” or “amazed” his listeners. 

The Strong’s Concordance definition of the word, though, is “To shock or strike with panic; to strike the hearer out of self-possession.” Do you hear the difference and feel the weight added when astonishment and amazement become “shocking and panic-inducing?” 

Coupled with their whispered conversations in verses 2 and 3, it is not hard for my sanctified imagination to intuit that whatever Jesus was preaching was radical, disruptive, and even dangerous. For here we see the people Jesus grew up with and who ostensibly helped raised him, Naming both Jesus’s otherly wisdom -- wisdom that Jesus, elsewhere in the gospels, like in Matthew 11, identifies as Sophia, Eternal Divine Wisdom Herself, who was with God from the beginning and with whom Jesus Is One --  and his divine power to work the miracles described in the previous chapters. And on these bases, they are scandalized, and ask each other, “who does he think he is?” 

As the episode concludes in verses 4-6, Jesus likens himself to the prophets of old whose pronouncements made them anything but welcome and wanted, and we learn that Jesus’s power is actively blocked by the community, whose collective distrust and rejection prevent him from healing all but a few people. I wonder how those few people made it? 

Now, while Matthew’s parallel telling of this episode adds little other than to modify the end, from a community who blocks Jesus’s power to Jesus choosing not to do any works of power among them, Luke’s rendering in Chapter 4 reveals much. For in his telling, this is when and where Jesus unrolls the Isaiah 61 scroll and declares himself the incarnate fulfillment of God’s promise to send an anointed Liberator upon whom the Spirit of the Lord rests “to proclaim good news to the poor, freedom for the prisoners, recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” And in Luke’s telling, the community were more than just scandalized; they were so enraged that they drove him out of the synagogue to a cliff which he barely escaped being thrown over. 

Thus we begin to see through midrash, imagination, and parallel texts, that what Jesus was preaching was radical enough to put everyone in danger and upset the power balance. Situated within the political upheaval and chaos of Jesus’s lifetime, the episode is all the more grim. 

Without getting too far into the historical weeds, let me just say this: From the time he was born in 4BCE, at the tail end of Herod the Great’s paranoid reign of mass terror and widespread surveillance; All the way through to the time of his execution in 33CE as an enemy of the state, the entire region of Judea  -- including the village of Nazareth where Mary and her family lived at the time of her pregnancy -- was so rocked by repeated uprisings and the massacres of thousands of Jewish locals who were called “terrorists” for opposing Roman rule, that, as Philip Jenkins writes, “Jerusalem in Jesus’s time was about a generation overdue for an explosion.” The meager peace established when Rome made Antipas their ruler instead of his brother, was fragile throughout his reign. That overdue explosion? It finally came during the full-scale Jewish Revolts between 66 and 70CE, and it was in the immediate wake of this “failed revolt and the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple at the hands of [Rome] that Mark tells his story.” And this is how we know that Mark’s gospel is unquestionably shaped by both the most recent violence, and unrest of the preceding 75 years. Does that sound familiar?

That is the fragile political setting in which Jesus works miracles and declares himself the Bringer of Good News and Liberation to the people of Judea. He is, to put it bluntly, an unwelcome revolutionary whose words and ways may get them all killed, and these people want no part. For good reason, they prefer the manufactured Pax Romana which comes with a modicum of “freedom” to practice their faith as long as it remains orderly and contained, to any radical or subversive liberation that may never come.  

Do you feel the chaos of this moment? The fear, uncertainty, the need to shut him up and shut him down for the sake of everyone’s safety? Fear that ultimately binds his power and keeps their friends, family members, and neighbors from being healed, freed, and made whole? Do you see how when the people of the Synagogue reject Jesus’s upside-down least-is-greatest, last-is-first Kin-dom of God, it has material consequences for the sick, injured, possessed, and oppressed who could have been healed but for their collective unbelief? 

I see it, and I get it! People, we are LIVING IT right now in so many ways. And yes, It feels safer sometimes to cling to the small freedoms we still have than to risk losing all of them by joining the revolutionary call for the composting of Empire and the birth of a Beloved Community that feels grossly unrealistic.

And yes, even moreso, for those of us still benefiting from what Empire offers -- be it the privileges of wealth, whiteness, or proximity to the Powerful -- Jesus’s proclamation of Liberation for the oppressed, occupied, poor, incarcerated, disabled, sick, and excluded, and the promise of the Year of the Lord’s favor upon them, sure can sound like reverse oppression. Like how liberation from patriarchy can sound like reverse sexism, like how affirmative action can sound like reverse racism -- none of which, by the way, are real. More liberation for “all” does not mean less liberation for us! It’s not pie!  

And that is what Jesus is doing here -- what he sends his disciples to do, what he sends US to do -- and what shocks and scandalizes his listeners: He is widening the table and throwing open the gates for any and all to belong in a Beloved Community marked by mutual love, radical inclusion, and extravagant grace, as the precise antithesis of and antidote for the individualistic and supremacist culture of Empire.

In this Kin-dom -- which becomes real real when the disciples are sent out with nothing but their shoes, tunic, and a partner, utterly dependent on the radical hospitality of strangers who deliver and whose belief and welcome make possible all manner of healings -- there is no need for anyone to starve or beg or suffer alone in a graveyard like the demoniac, because God’s abundance is so endless and irrational it lays waste to the laughable absurdity of Empire’s zero-sum equations which pit the poor against the sick against the oppressed against the outcast. For, where Beloved Community flourishes, we are enough and there always is enough, and so the power games of Empire are nothing but the dust shaken from their feet. This is the freedom I’m after!

So here we come to the end, to the sending proclamation of Jesus, his disciples, and all of us who are sent out with Good news -- which is that all should “Repent!” But friends, I want you to hear this: This is not a hellfire and brimstone condemnation of sinners, a command to “turn or burn,” but a kind and tender, if firm, invitation to reconsider what we’ve believed and been taught by Empire, to rethink what it is to be free and healed and whole, to hear and be transformed by Jesus’s revolutionary offer of liberation in community.

The truth of today’s text is this, Beloved: All that IS right now -- all the upheaval and chaos, division and discord around us, around the world, across history -- it doesn’t have to be this way. We can reject the dehumanizing work of Empire, and renounce the Imperial impulse toward the supremacy of self and primacy of in-groups which drives antagonism, competition, and the othering that inevitably leads us to violence, and choose instead The Better Way. 

It is never too late to change our minds and Trust a different Way Maker. To follow Christ whose Kin-dom is not OF this world but is being cultivated IN this world by us, right how. By how we love each other. By how we show up when it’s hard. By how we devote ourselves to Naming and Nurturing the Image of God alive in each other and every human, including and especially those we most despise. By how we use our money and our bodies and our voices and our space as individuals and as a collective to disrupt injustice and create liberation. This is the way of Beloved Community: The disruptive and rowdy and sometimes riotous but always interconnected and interdependent way of Jesus. And it is what I want for us.

That we, in this Beloved Community, will consciously and continuously follow Jesus, and so meet the madness of this moment with medicine and liberation and belonging.

Amen.