Threats from the Inside

Sermon for Sunday, September 27
Scripture: Mark 9:38-50

I remember one day in high school, when my friend Dan and I were driving out to the golf course. We were almost there when we came up behind a big truck, a pretty nice looking truck, driving slowly and kinda swerving a little. Now, it’s 11:00 am, a little too early in the day for this to be a drunk driver. But something had to be up. As we looked more closely, the driver was flailing around as he tried to drive. Something was obviously aggravating him. Finally, the truck stopped in the middle of the road, the door flung open, and the driver jumped out and flailed around some more. And what do you know? This is Matt Bianco, owner of the Bianco Baseball School. He was Dan’s private hitting instructor. So we got out and asked him what was going on. As it turned out, Matt had a bee flying around inside his shirt. So here was a man, driving a truck with airbags and other safety features, a vehicle big enough to protect him no matter what happened out there on the road, and he was driving on a windy road that people often took too fast. But the biggest threat to Matt’s safety turned out to be inside his shirt.

The story we find in the book of Esther is about perceived threats to the Persian Empire and its king, Ahasuerus, also known as Xerxes. Haman, the king’s highest official, persuades Ahasuerus that the Jews living outside the king’s walls pose a serious threat to the kingdom’s purity and integrity. So the king agrees to let Haman enact genocide against the Jews.

But as it turns out, the king’s newly chosen queen, Esther, is a Jew – although no one knows it. When Esther discovers that Haman has planned to wipe out the Jews, she brings Haman and the king together and persuades the king that Haman is a greater threat to the kingdom than the Jews that he wishes to eliminate from the empire. So Esther saves the day, as the king eliminates the threat of Haman within his walls rather than concerning himself with the threats outside his walls. Here is a man, sitting on a throne, being told by his top advisor of the need for ethnic cleansing to eliminate the dangers “out there,” and as it turns out, the biggest danger comes from the innermost circle of the king’s court.

The disciples of Jesus noticed someone outside of the established community of believers casting out demons in the name of Jesus. They were worried this unknown follower of Jesus would compromise the integrity of they the established followers of Jesus. How do we know this guy is really a follower? What will happen if we let just anyone do things “in the name of the Lord”? Isn’t it dangerous to have no control over who is and who isn’t considered part of Jesus’ community?

Jesus reminds the disciples that they themselves may pose a threat to the integrity of the community. It’s possible that even those within the established community of believers may be doing more to tear down the kingdom than those outside. After all, the outsider they tried to stop was able to cast out demons, which is something this inner circle of Jesus’ disciples weren’t even able to do. Here are disciples representing the established community of believers, fretting about the dangers outside the established boundaries. But as it turns out, the biggest threat to the kingdom of God lies within that already established community of believers.

“If any of YOU put a stumbling block before one of those little ones who believe in me,” Jesus says, “it would be better for you if a great millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea.” In other words, it’s possible for established members of the community to get in the way of those who seek God, and it might be best for the community if those stumbling blocks were chucked into the sea. We do ourselves no favors by ignoring the reality that there are threats to the kingdom of God within this body of Christ we call Church. Jesus continues:

If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life maimed than to have two hands and to go to hell, to the unquenchable fire. And if your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life lame than to have two feet and to be thrown into hell. And if your eye causes you to stumble, tear it out; it is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and to be thrown into hell.

In other words, the path to God’s kingdom must be cleared of stumbling blocks, and the established community of believers has stumbling blocks living within its own boundaries. Some are hands, some feet, some eyes. And these stumbling blocks, these things doing more harm than good in the body of Christ we call Church, must be cut out.

Fred Craddock tells a story of his first pastoral appointment, in a town near Oak Ridge, Tennessee. When Oak Ridge began to boom with all the atomic energy research, that church’s little town became a booming city overnight. Every inch of open space in that area was filled with people who came from everywhere, pitching tents, setting up trailer parks, full of hard hat wearing folks from everywhere. The church wasn’t far away. It was a beautiful little white church, with a gorgeous chimney, hand-built pews, and ornate decorations on the walls. One Sunday, Craddock asked the leaders of the church to hang around after worship. He told them, “Now we need to launch a calling campaign and an invitational campaign in all these trailer parks to invite these people to church.”

“Oh, I don’t know. I don’t think they’d fit in here,” one of them said. “They’re just here temporarily, just construction people. They’ll be leaving pretty soon.”

“Well, we ought to invite them, make them feel at home,” Craddock said. They argued about it, time ran out, and they decided they’d have a vote the following Sunday. The next week, they sat down after the service, and one person said, “I move that in order to be a member of this church, you must own property in the county.” They got a second. It passed. Craddock voted against it, but was quickly reminded he was just the preacher and he didn’t have a vote anyway.

Years later, Craddock took his wife back to see the little church. It was different. The parking lot of the church was full, and there was a big sign out front: “Barbecue: All You Can Eat.” The church had become a restaurant. Craddock went inside. The pews were pushed to the side, the organ was pushed in the corner, and there were all kinds of people – families, truckers, bikers, all different kinds of people – sitting around eating barbecue. Craddock turned to his wife and said, “Good thing this is not still a church, otherwise these people couldn’t be in here.” A small congregation tucked away in East Tennessee, worried about all those outside people ruining their church, and as it turned out, the most dangerous people were the ones who ruined the church from the inside.

Sometimes, we spend so much time worrying about outside threats that we fail to see the threats from within. We worry about “those people out there” so much that we fail to see the ways we destroy the kingdom of God from “in here.” We guard ourselves against the evils “out there”: music that isn’t “Christian”, books that aren’t wholesome, movies and TV shows that possibly make our children think differently. We protect ourselves against temptations of gambling, drinking, or hanging out with the “wrong” people – those temptations that exist outside our approved, established community. Some of those “dangers” out there are real, and we do well to be cautious about them. But I fear we often make too big a deal about those dangers outside, as if these are completely to blame for what’s ruining the church.

Too many of us want to blame all the shortcomings of God’s kingdom on the evils of society. It’s the loose morals out there that are ruining the church. It’s the people out there that don’t come to church that are to blame for the church’s declining numbers. It’s the New Age-y books out there that are hurting the church. If it wasn’t for that noisy, immoral rock and roll music out there, God’s kingdom would be thriving. If we didn’t have casinos and bars out there, the church would be perfect. If those people out there let us keep the Ten Commandments outside the courthouses, and those school administrators out there had kept prayer and Creationism in schools, then there’d be no problems in the community of believers.

Surely, these things don’t help the cause of the kingdom. You can say some of them may even be real dangers from outside the boundaries of our community, dangers that do that threaten the kingdom of God. But why is it always everyone else’s fault that the church is struggling? Why is it always society’s fault if our children stumble and fall? Why is anything that hurts the kingdom of God always the fault of those people and those things “out there”?

Jesus is teaching us that if there are threats outside the established community, you can bet there are even more dangerous threats inside the established community. Perhaps we’re to blame for loose morals. Maybe some (or all) of us within the church are to blame for declining numbers – maybe we’re not being hospitable, and we’re not inviting our neighbors. Maybe in throwing out the negative aspects of popular culture, we refuse to see the good in it. Perhaps our kids’ music may make us want to scream, but it may lead them into deeper spirituality. Maybe it’s a good thing that schools won’t lead children in prayer or won’t teach them the stories of Creation, because that was never their job anyway. That’s our job.

What if we’re the ones who are the most dangerous? What if we are the biggest threat to the kingdom of God? Jesus calls us to consider placing some of the blame on ourselves rather than pointing the finger only at “those things” outside our walls. He’s calling the disciples – and us – to really evaluate whether we’re doing things “in his name” or whether we’re just stumbling blocks that would be better off drowning in the ocean. It’s a challenging question that Jesus asks us this morning, and I pray that we might have the courage to find the answer. Are the biggest threats to the kingdom of God coming from outside, or are they coming from within? In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.