The Truth We Possess

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

09.26.2015; Rev. Dr. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Mark 9:38-50, Numbers 11:24-29

What does it mean to own an idea?  What does it mean, to say that a concept is your property.

It’s a central part of how we run things, about how our world operates, an endless thicket of trademarks and copyrights, as we stake out ideas and declare them to be ours in perpetuity, or for at least as long as we can manage to extend our ownership.

Here, in this era when information moves with wild abandon, when sharing a story or a song or video of a puppy is almost as easy as breathing, there’s a fierce desire to defend the rights of a creator to their creation.

I feel this, as a writer wrestling with the wild world of publishing.  Having someone wander off with your story idea and pass it off as their own would be wildly frustrating.  

But as a pastor, I have trouble processing that.  A few years back, there was a pastor of a big church in DC who got busted for plagiarizing other people’s sermons, something that I can’t imagine someone ever doing with my preaching.  Sermons are creatures of a moment and a place, spoken into a particular now and a particular context.  They’re personal, imbued with voice and relationship.  

Honestly, anyone is welcome to them, although eventually your church will start wondering why you keep dropping references to Poolesville, Maryland, your Jewish children and rambling on about motorcycles.

But in other ways, our culture teaches that we can own things, own them utterly and completely.

LIke this last week, when a copyright case was settled in favor of DC comics against a small business that made custom cars, and by custom cars, I mean Batmobiles.  The company, called Gotham Garage, would build you a perfect replica of an Adam West era Batmobile, so that you could if you so chose drive around and pretend to be Batman.

But the Batmobile, in any of its iterations, is owned by DC Comics.  You may not build one, or sell one, without them getting their cut.  The idea of Batman is owned, lock, stock, and bat-barrel.  I understand their legal counsel is also moving against anyone who might try to build Wonder Woman’s invisible jet, although that’s posing some technical difficulties.

If anyone sings our songs, we should get a cut, like Warner Music was every time Happy Birthday was sung over the last thirty years.  Fifty million dollars worth of payments, wrung out of every musician who sang that song in public.  Last week, in a rare press against that great tide of ownership culture, a judge finally struck that down.  Why, well, it’s Happy Birthday.  No-one should be able to own Happy Birthday.

And for the disciples, following along after Jesus, that was an issue they encountered as they travelled through Judah spreading the message.

As we heard last week, they’d been having trouble figuring out how to follow Jesus without getting into power struggles or worrying about pecking orders.  That concern about who had more authority or more responsibility was redoubled when they encountered someone doing Jesus work without being a part of the certified circle of licensed Disciples.

It is John who tells Jesus that they’ve run across this guy infringing on their copyright, flagrantly using the name of Jesus without permission.  That’s threatening to them, in the same way the spread of the Holy Spirit in the camp was threatening to those who followed Moses.  If anyone can do this, then where does that leave us?  We need to control it!  

“We tried to stop him,” John said, most likely expecting some positive response from Jesus.  We protected the brand!  We defended your intellectual property from copyright infringement!

“Don’t do that,” is the reply John gets, after which Jesus says, as plainly as he can, that there’s no reason to resist people who aren’t actively opposing you.  He’s not willing to be possessive about the Gospel message, or about the claim that a person is following him.

And he goes further, much further.

He reminds them of what matters to him, and of who matters to him.  What matters are those whose lives are beginning to be transformed by the radical love ethic he taught.  The “little ones,” or “micron”, don’t refer to children.  The term is used throughout the Gospels to refer to those in whom the seed of Christ’s potential has just been planted.

By challenging someone who was working in his name, John has not only not managed to undercut the individual busy about doing the work of Jesus.  He has potentially sabotaged the entire point and purpose of the Gospel, which is the spreading of the gracious news of the Kingdom.

Jesus responds to this in ways that aren’t exactly all sweetness and light.  They are the farthest thing from it.  His language gets positively medieval, all filled with drownings and chopping offs and poking outs, language that is far more aggressive and violent than we’d normally associate with Jesus, more scary-ISIS-Jesus than the Prince of Peace.

“If you stumble chop it off, else in faith you’ll have gone soft.  If you don’t you’ll burn in hell, where charbroiled you’s the only smell.”

Jesus, of course, was a storyteller-teacher, and if ever there was a passage that reminded us that significant portions of the Bible were never meant to be taken literally, this is it.  In context, it’s a challenge to his disciples to step away from the yearning for control that lies at the heart of all human conflict.

That dynamic, Jesus seems to be saying, is what destroys the faith we’re trying to share.  If we think the hierarchies and and dynamics of property and territory apply to the Gospel, we are no more Christians than salt can be salt if it no longer tastes or behaves like salt.

“Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another,” Jesus concludes, and in that, reminds his disciples that their entire identity is wrapped up in being willing to let go of the grasping, power-focused, selfish hunger that drives human beings to deny the God-given graces they encounter in others.

In our culture, which values the control that comes with ownership over almost all else, this yearning to own and to have ownership stands in fundamental opposition to the spread of the Way.

I encountered a reminder of that reality in a book I read recently, Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Living With A Wild God.”  It’s a spiritual autobiography of sorts, but with an interesting twist.  Ehrenreich is a third generation atheist.  Her mother and father were fierce, dogmatic atheists, as were her grandparents, passing their disdain for belief from generation to generation.  But Ehrenreich was also an accidental mystic, someone who in her adolescence suddenly began having powerful experiences of something she could only understand as the presence of God, experiences that shook both her sense of self and her own sanity.  It’s a fascinating, thoughtful, human book, filled with struggle and ambiguity.

One detail that struck me, and struck me hard, was the story of how atheism entered her Irish Catholic family.  The family story was of a grandmother, lying dying on her deathbed, and the call going out to the priest to come and be with the poor and struggling family in those last moments before she passed on.

The word came back to the family that sure the priest would come, but they needed to pay a required fee first.  The grandmother, in a final fit of good Celtic fury, hurled her bible across the room, renouncing the faith forever before she died.

That story, colored and flavored as all Irish family stories are, was enough to carry through the generations of a family, a stumbling block before the potential faith of those still unborn.

It’s still hard for us to shake, even if we know the impact it can have on others.  We get territorial.  We want to claim things as ours, and through our power over them to control them.  We get possessive, and in our possessiveness try to prove that others are wrong, or that others are unworthy.

And in doing so, we sabotage and undercut the very ethic that we’re claiming to live by.

This truth, the truth that matters, cannot be owned or possessed.  

As we move in the world, as we live and act, we need to listen carefully to that warning.

Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.