Poolesville Presbyterian Church
07.08.2012; Rev. David Williams
We have a whole bunch of trouble letting go of things. That’s a strange thing to say for a culture so obsessed with the new, but as a people, we really do struggle to let things go.
That’s a basic element of the human condition, one that has been explored and recognized by researchers who study human beings and how we live together. This next week, the results of a multi-year study by a team of UCLA research anthropologists will be published in book form. For this study, the anthropologists chose to journey to a strange and alien culture for their research: 32 native families living in the jungle wilds of dual-income, middle-class Los Angeles suburbia. They followed them for five years, observing all of their strange behavior and peculiar habits, and infrequently sampling their spit. Yes, this is what advanced degrees get you: dozens and dozens of vials of soccer mom spit.
The reason for the spit-sampling was to measure the levels of a particular stress hormone in the residents of those homes. Not one of these families were struggling financially. In fact, they were all doing well, so well that their homes were absolutely overflowing with the fruits of their labors.
This was a result of what the research team called the “hyperabundance” of suburban culture. While scarcity is typically the cause of stress in societies, what they discovered was that these aboriginal Angelenos had so much that it had started to cause an actual, physical stress response. Of the 32 families studied, for example, all had garages. But only eight out of the 32 families could actually park a car in their garage, because the overflow volume of possessions had completely filled them.
On average, there were 55 discrete objects intentionally attached to the average family refrigerator. I find this troubling, primarily because that’s waaaay less than the count I did on my own fridge. And the statistics around the number of Barbies in homes with girls are simply too disturbing to repeat. Despite feeling overwhelmed by the clutter, the researchers found that there was still this yearning to both add to it and to hold on to the countless objects that filled every last nook and cranny of their homes. Clinging to those things gave them comfort, gave them a sense that all was as it should be...while at the same time making life almost unmanageable.
We’re familiar with that clutter, I think, but we don’t realize that our human urge to cling to things extends well beyond our rec-room debris fields and deep into our own souls. It’s not just the physical objects that surround us that we grasp, but also the countless moments and encounters and memories that form our identity as human beings. We accumulate them, gather them in, and cling to them, because they form and shape our understanding of who we are. We hold on to them all, as they become the story of our lives.
But sometimes, there are things we need to release. Sometimes, there are things we need to let go.
That, at least in part, is what we are meant to take away from the story we hear this morning from Mark’s Gospel. Mark is the oldest and bluntest of the Gospels, serving up the story of Jesus and his teachings with as little muss and fuss as humanly possible. If Mark is going to serve up a detail about what Jesus taught, it isn’t going to bandy around. That detail has to have meaning. It has to have purpose.
And today, from Mark, there are details. We hear Jesus talking to his disciples about how challenging it is for someone deeply engaged with God’s presence to get that across to those who know them. But mostly, what we’re hearing is instructions to his disciples on how to get on out there in the world and teach about God’s kingdom.
What is perhaps most striking about what Jesus teaches his disciples is the relationship between their spreading the message and what they need to have to do it. Having been given authority, they are told to take...well...basically nothing. Take the clothes on your back and a walking stick, and that is all that you’ll need, says Jesus. This is a little hard for us to hear.
It’s a little hard for me to hear. Take...nothing? That’s what Jesus is suggesting. When Jesus says not even to take an extra tunic, what he’s really saying is this: you’re not going to be sleeping out on your own. You’re going to need to find a place to stay, a place that will show you hospitality.
And I think, what? How can you possibly go anywhere without an entire minivan full of stuff? I don’t know that my own family can go on any trip lasting more than 24 hours without several cubic yards of carefully packed stuff. And yet here Jesus is, suggesting that not only should disciples not pack so that we’re utterly independent, but we should go out into the world so that we have to connect. He’s forcing us to, as Blanche Dubois might have put it, depend on the kindness of strangers.
And we don’t like that. We’re Americans. We don’t want to be vulnerable. We’re fierce, we’re strong, we’re independent...and we’ve got the basement full of bulk food to prove it. But that’s not the story of ourselves that Jesus asks us to live out if we’re to declare his message. “No bread, no bag, no money in our belts.” What a peculiar demand, so very alien to our culture of materialist self-reliance.
But Jesus goes further. First, he asks that his disciples force themselves to seek out hospitality, which means not taking possessions with them so that they must find the care of others. Then, he tells them what they’re obligated to do if they encounter resistance or hostility or dismissiveness. They are to “shake off the dust on their feet” as they depart.
It’s easy for us to see this as just a way to show anger, as some impolite finger gesture directed as a final so-there towards those who haven’t received us. But that, quite frankly, is not the purpose of what Jesus is asking his disciples to do. He’s not asking them to offer up one last curse as they storm off. He’s asking them to let go, and to truly leave the inhospitable behind.
We human beings don’t do this well. We cling to slights, and we cling to offenses. We remember the times our voices were dismissed as irrelevant, or that we were mocked, or that we were made to feel unwelcome. We make those moments a part of us. We cherish them. We mount them, by the tens of dozens, on the refrigerator of our soul, so that we can see them every single time we wander through the kitchen.
If we’re trying to live our lives in alignment with the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, though, the practice “shaking the dust off your feet” is absolutely essential. Moving on from an inhospitable place is not enough, because if we carry the dust of that place with us, we’ve not gotten beyond it. It’ll carry along with us, marking our every step, reminding us of how things didn’t work, and blocking out room for an encounter with real newness and real transformation.
And if there’s no space left in our souls for that, we cannot encounter God in the way that Jesus calls us to. If there’s no room left in us, we cannot find space to rejoice in an encounter with someone new, or to have a different and healing encounter with someone who has done us harm.
So shake off that dust. Let Christ clean the clutter from the garage of your soul. Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.
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