Questionable Intent
Mark 1:24-28
Good morning. I am vaguely aware that this is Super bowl Sunday J and…as an NAL (a non athletic lesbian) I am going to ignore that fact except to hope that your team wins. And now I’m moving on.
My message this morning doesn’t open with funny commercials. It opens instead with the introduction to Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone. You’ll understand why in a moment. (Cue: 30 second video)
YouTube - Twilight Zone intro.
There it is. Picture a congregation-going on a journey. We’re going beyond sight and sound. Look! There’s a signpost up ahead. We’ve entered…THE BIBLE zone. We’ve entered…MARK’s Gospel. Some days reading the bible is like the twilight zone. Between shadows and substance, mythology and history, we need the key of imagination or we can miss the rich messages that apply to us 21st century folks. Our reading today is so full of twists and turns, we need a compass. And with a compass your first question is what way am I going? And we need to remind ourselves that the people who wrote it were living in the 1st century.
So what was Mark getting at with his story of Jesus teaching in the Synagogue? What does he mean “a man with an unclean spirit?” First century science was primitive at best. Any ailment they didn’t understand was attributed to literal demons. We do not. Even after taking demons off the table, this story is peculiar, unfinished, strangely ordered. It’s a good day to ask lots of questions. All God’s Children got questions. What are we supposed to do with this story? And its only chapter one!
This Gospel is littered with unanswered questions about healing and faith. What does it mean to be "cured"? What does it mean to be "healed"? What is the role of God in either curing or healing? I suggest that before we give up and turn on the TV, maybe we live with these questions and see where they take us. Mark had something in mind. What was it?
Rev. Patrick Wilson sees it this way. “Occasionally biblical scholars have suggested that Mark is merely something of a klutz when it comes to telling a story. But perhaps he is, rather, ingeniously shrewd. Perhaps, in Marks judgment, we have too many answers already. Maybe we are missing something we have not even noticed is absent. In these opening verses Mark's method of storytelling dislocates our sense of security, dislodges our comfortable certainties, and proposes that, instead of reciting the right answers, we ask the right questions.” End quote.
Could we go out on a limb here and say that God is encouraging our curiousity? Why else would the authors be inspired to write it with so many lose and dead ends? Questions draw us along in the mystery that is God. I’ve been told that I ask a lot of questions. It can be annoying sometimes, ask my spouse.
My parents found it amusing. We loved to watch movies together and I was continuously asking questions, who is that, where’d they come from, what are they doing, what’s going to happen next? My mother would shush me and say, “Just wait, you’ll see.” Sometimes she was right and other times I was left with more questions than answers. I learned that questions almost always lead to more questions and that’s ok. After one question in particular, my father wasn’t quite sure what to do with me.
It was a Saturday afternoon (I think I was about ten years old) and we had just watched the Song of Bernadette. The Song of Bernadette is a 1943 film which tells the story of Saint Bernadette Soubirous, who reported 18 visions of the Blessed Virgin Mary near her home in Lourdes, France. The film opens with the statement, “For those of you who believe in God, no explanation is necessary. For those of you who do not, no explanation is possible.” What I was about to ask will make more sense if you know that the week before we had watched The Miracle of Fatima, another film about the appearance of the Holy Mother to three children in Fatima, Portugal. Both of these miracles had my theological motor running so I asked, “Daddy, does God only send miracles to Catholics. Are they more special than Methodists or do they need more help?” I remember my father breaking into a belly laugh then after composing himself telling me he never really thought about it like that. Thankfully he encouraged me to never stop asking questions. I’m grateful for that encouragement.
Imagine if the world had asked more questions, perhaps toxic religion and the oppressive systems they cause wouldn’t have had a snowballs chance!
Part of the problem is the church stopped asking questions, because they thought they had all the answers. God is a mystery for which we will never have all the answers. Here is a short clip from the course “Living the Questions.” (Cue video2) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZVNVwcuPm8
You and I are the product of a Christian reformation built on the questions first asked by Martin Luther. But when religion decided they had all the answers, they got stuck. And today we have two major camps, conservative Christianity that exists to convince you of the answers that haven’t much changed in two thousand years and emergent Christianity, a faith based on engaging God as continuous seekers of truth. In other words, we’re still asking questions because there are a lot of things that just don’t add up if you swallow whole the answers of the 1st century OR the 15th century.
What if we really lived into the questions of God, of the Bible, of our world? What if we said “what if” a lot more often than we do? What if we noticed that the central point of today’s scripture isn’t the answers they received but the questions they asked? Hallelujah. Even the unclean spirit was asking questions. “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us?” And after Jesus silenced the man, the people were amazed and “they kept asking one another, ‘what is this, a new teaching—with authority?’ The very next sentence “At once his fame began to spread throughout the surrounding region of Galilee” seems to tell us that the people’s amazement and their questions are what FUELED his fame.
Every parable Jesus ever taught left as many questions as it did answers. What if we let that reality cook in us? Jesus taught using questions and leaving lose ends. He expected we would ask questions in order to be drawn into the wisdom of what he was teaching.
OK so if we’re being invited to ask questions. What questions does this story invoke? Who was this man? Did the people name him as unclean, did he hate himself so much that he named himself unclean or did Jesus? We don’t know. Did Jesus rebuke him because he was unclean or because he was OUTING Jesus as the Holy One? Jesus often asked people to remain silent about his identity, why was that. You and I know that sharing the fullness of our identities is often a matter of timing. If Jesus had given out all the answers up front, the bible could have been a pamphlet. Jesus seemed to want to draw us into relationship so we could come to our own conclusions about who he is. The questions in this story have particular implications for LGBT people. We have been named unclean and we have been silenced.
Risk going deeper. If you are struggling with the shadows of shame, addiction or despair, your hurting heart may hear this man’s question with uncommon compassion, “What have you to do with us Jesus of Nazareth?”
Jesus of Nazareth has everything to do with us and us with him. So what then “came out” of this man in the story? Was it a demon or something else? All we know is that whatever plagued this man came out when he experienced the Holy One. And in that moment, his and ours, we see with new eyes and our spirits are renewed.
So what is the point of my message for you today? That’s not a question for me to answer but for you to ask. (Twilight zone music played on piano)
Amen.