4 March 12011

“How to rebuke Jesus”
Mark 8:31-38
2nd Sunday in Lent series B
4 March 2012


Often, when we’re presented with a character or characters in a Scripture reading, the message … following those readings, intending to draw us in and draw out our connection, response, action … the message will take one of two approaches:
• Either, holding up a character’s actions as “this is a good example in following Jesus,” or
• Or, holding up a character’s actions and say, “behave in exactly the opposite of how this character is acting, if you want to be faithful in following Jesus.”

Today, however, let’s shake things up a little, shall we? Based on Peter’s behavior in this episode in Mark’s Gospel … let’s explore “How to rebuke Jesus.”
First, probably, we need a definition, because “rebuke” isn’t a word that is a regular part of our daily vocabulary.
The word that our Scripture translates here as “rebuke” is most often used of Jesus in Mark’s Gospel … when Jesus commands forces that challenge him … evil spirits, and the wind (while they’re in a boat on the stormy water) … those are two examples.
There’s a sense of “rebuking” which is, “exerting some power over.” Meaning that, the one doing the rebuking – by the very act of rebuking, is putting themselves in a position of power over the one receiving the rebuking.
So what other words might we use here for “rebuke,” to make this more, ah, user-friendly for us?
Here are a few:
“Tell off.” “Diss” – like dismiss, but more hip and trendy. “Scold.” “Give a good talking to.”
Get the picture?
Good.
Now, second, we need to discuss … what might inspire us to this line of thought, “How to rebuke Jesus.”
We don’t have to go very far.

[Jesus] began to teach [his disciples] that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. He said all this quite openly.
And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him.

Although we don’t have his exact words here, we can guess what Peter said to Jesus. It probably involved phrases like “What are you talking about?” and “There’s no way I’m going to let that happen,” most likely, liberally sprinkled with the salty language of his day … remember who Peter was, and what he did for a living – a fisherman, with other fishermen … have you ever watched “The Deadliest Catch?” Heard how those guys on that show talk with each other? So you get the idea. Peter, a salt of the earth, straightforward man most likely used salty, straightforward words.
But what about us?
I mean, we’re likely far more polite than Peter. We ARE Lutheran and we ARE from Seattle, after all. How might we rebuke Jesus, without using such un-polite, Seattle Lutheran language?
First, make sure that you pay no attention whatsoever to how Jesus has been or is moving in your life or in the lives of others. Ignore what he’s said and done already, to and for you, where he’s met you in your life or through the lives of others.
This point recalls last week’s message, about straight line time and round time. We heard – last week – about how, when Jesus says “the time is fulfilled” he’s talking ROUND TIME.
Round time is time which doesn’t move in a linear fashion, like “one and done,” calendar time. Calendar time is straight-line time, time which we believe we can control … while with straight line time, we note and annotate it, mark and record it, shelve it away in notebooks and check stubs and income tax returns and statistical reports … while straight line time has a beginning, a middle and an end … Jesus’ time comes and comes and comes again. Continually. Always. And always, for you.
The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent and believe in the Good News … that time keeps coming around, again and again, FOR YOU. Always time. Time for repentance. “Time for amendment of life.” Time to live and learn and grow in faith, in discipleship, in service. Time, and time, and time again.
But we’re talking rebuking Jesus here, today.
So to rebuke Jesus, we just have to stay in straight line time. Always. In All Ways. It’s All And Always About Us, Our Time is The Time, we live in it and by it and for it … so we have to control it, record it, abide by it … keep trying to “improve” in it, “more” and “better.”
Suffering … being rejected … being killed … everything Jesus describes to Peter … none of that stuff fits in straight line time, at least in the improving, increasing, more and better way straight line time requires of us. All that stuff Jesus speaks of here in TODAY’s Gospel reading, why, that equals failure, loss, emptiness … so Peter rejects it. And rebukes Jesus.
And so must you, too, if you want to rebuke Jesus.
Of course, eventually you’ll find out that straight line time really has the last laugh on you. You’ll still die from it. All your works and all your ways will be forgotten … remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return. Straight line time always has a beginning, middle, and … an end.
Nothing lasts forever in straight line time.

But maybe you’re feeling tired of hearing all this, two weeks in a row of the straight line / round time, chronological / kairos (Jesus’ time) dichotomy. Ah, but that’s out in the future. For now, I’ll do it my way. Forget this suffering stuff, Jesus. Sha-la-la-la-la-la, live for today …

No fear. I have two other ways to rebuke Jesus.
They are actually closely related; two sides of the same coin.
Believe / think / act like you’re not good enough to receive anything from Jesus.
And its flip side:
Believe / think / act like you’re too good to receive anything from Jesus.
They are two sides of the same coin, two roads reaching the same destination, because, in the end, they both lead us to turn our backs on Jesus.
“I’m not good enough to receive anything from Jesus” takes the uber-humility approach. Like our friend in Minnesota, the Lutheran pastor who we always joke that she introduces herself as “Hi, I’m Pastor X, and I’m sorry.” Yet this is also the attitude of obligatory, unimaginative religion … we might go to church every Sunday, we may have been Lutheran Christians all our lives … but we won’t tell anyone else about this; we won’t share our faith, tell others about this most important part of our lives …
… so are we ashamed of our faith? Asked, we’d say no … even though our behavior says different. What we tell ourselves is that we wouldn’t want to give anyone the impression that we think too highly of ourselves, or think ourselves better than them (although of course, we are, because we go to church and they don’t … but remember, this is the humble approach.)
And obligatory, unimaginative religion leads to “looks about right” faith. There’s a church not far from where we lived in South Dakota that Kathleen and I used to call “Looks About Right Lutheran.” Because the attitude you got from that church and it’s people was that “looks about right” was good enough.
The building was in disrepair. The cross on top of the roof had some old riveted sheet metal covering up the rotting wood. Inside, the pulpit was someone’s old empty Philco TV cabinet that had been re-used for another purpose. The pastor’s office was also the storage room, and the parking lot was full of muddy ruts so in the spring thaw you had to get pushed or pulled out of the mud.
They could have afforded better, easily. This was a congregation full of farmers and ranchers, most of them owning hundreds of thousands of dollars of farm machinery, most of them, living in very nice houses which looked much nicer than the church.
They just didn’t want anyone to think that they were thinking too highly of themselves, their church, their ministry. To them, it was better to be “the poor little church on the corner,” of which no one expected much at all, and reality fulfilled expectation.
Jesus can’t do anything for us. We can’t change. We can’t do it, we don’t have it in us, we’re not big enough or fancy enough or new enough or young enough or energetic enough or …
Well, you get the idea.
But what about the other approach? The “I’m too good to receive anything from Jesus” attitude?
This is consumer faith … ‘church shopping’ … I receive, and receive, and receive … and when I stop receiving, when my ‘felt needs’ aren’t being met anymore, then I’ll pack my bags and go somewhere else.
It’s also the “I’ll get around to having a faith life, deepen my spiritual walk with Jesus, once I get everything else accomplished … shopping, laundry, house cleaning, favorite tv show, hanging out with friends” attitude.
And it’s the place where inauthentic faith lives … you know, church congregations, faith communities, which, who say that “all are welcome” and “we encourage everyone to share their gifts” … until someone different actually shows up, or shares their gifts which are different from everyone else’s … and soon enough they find out that “welcome” is simply a word they walked across on the way in … rather than an authentic attitude shared by all.
If “looks about right” religion is the ditch of the “faithful,” then this approach, this attitude is the ditch of, if not the “faithless,” then, at least, the “faith half empty.”
Here is where the current conversation about Faith in America resides, full force.
A couple of studies, one funded by of all groups the Southern Baptists, bears this out.
The fastest growing group in this country, when it comes to matters of faith, turns out to be … the “so whats” … people like my friend. He has no interest in anything spiritual, no desire to explore this side of his life whatsoever. It’s just not part of who he is.
Almost half of those responding to these surveys spend no time seeking eternal wisdom … a fifth say “it’s useless to search for meaning” ... nearly a third have no desire for spiritual searching, deepening whatsoever.
These are not “agnostics” or “atheists,” these are “apatheists.” People who are just fine admitting that they have no spiritual curiosity whatsoever … when it comes to faith and religion, they just don’t really care.
Now, I’m not going to criticize people like this … people like my friend. I might feel bad for him, feel like he’s missing something in his life … but I congratulate him for being so authentic.
Because that’s better than a lot of “people of faith” are about their faith.
We might say “it’s all about Jesus,” but our actions belie that. Consumer attitudes toward faith, if I’m not getting filled here, getting my needs met, I’ll go elsewhere … inauthentic faith, people and communities which say one thing but live another … that simply says Jesus isn’t the most important thing. I am.
And so what happens when Jesus comes to break into our lives, to break through those walls we put up to separate, to protect ourselves from him? Because, Jesus time, round time, The Time is Fulfilled time means he will keep trying to break in, break through, get through to us? And yet … and yet … I’m not good enough for him. I’m too good for him.

[Jesus] began to teach [his disciples] that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. He said all this quite openly.
And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him.

Northern Irish philosopher / theologian Peter Rollins is one of the “new” brand of God-thinkers and God-talkers out there, holding the mirror up to people of faith and the so whats alike … an evangelical, rediscovering the ‘theology of the Cross’ of Martin Luther … as well as the path of the German 20th century theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, exploring what following Jesus in a society, in a world which in so many ways is “post-religion,” religion-less … he’s trying to flesh out that enigmatic phrase which Bonhoeffer left the world in a letter from the Nazi Tegel prison where he was being held, “religionless Christianity” … how can one be a follower of Jesus in a time, in a world, where “religion” has failed to make the world better?
Rollins writes a regular blog on the Internet. This week’s posting was related to our Gospel text for today … and was affronting enough … perhaps, it will be as affronting to you as Jesus’ words about the reality of his coming suffering and death were to Peter.
And that’s precisely the point. So I’d like to share some of it with you now.

It’s no secret that life is difficult. Yet most of us expend a great deal of time and energy attempting to avoid a direct confrontation with this reality. The problem however is that our attempt to avoid the inherent difficulties of life does not mean that we are free from suffering but rather that we are most oppressed by it.
The truth that we suffer is one that we can avoid most of the time. While it always seeps out in other ways (through frenetic activity, health problems, self-hatred, hatred of others, etc.) we can generally maintain our inner facebook profile (the idealised image we have of ourselves).
However there are times when this is difficult and we must work hard to keep the image intact, times when we go through a particularly traumatic event.
My concern is that most of the actually existing church … does not help us face up to, speak out, and work through our pain. [What much of the church provides us instead are] songs, sermons and prayers that help us avoid our suffering. These … are very appealing because of the quick fix … they offer, hence the success of such communities. However they do not help us face up to, speak out and work through our pain.
In contrast … what if the church could be a place where we found a liturgical structure that would not treat God as a product that would make us whole but as the mystery that enables us to live abundantly in the midst of life’s difficulties. A place where we are invited to confront the reality of our humanity, not so that we will despair, but so that we will be free of the despair that already lurks within us, the despair that enslaves us, the despair that we refuse to acknowledge.

Another author / theologian, the more mainstream Douglas John Hall, puts it this way:

Christ forever returns to his cross, to his grave, to hell, in order to be “with us.” He can be for us only insofar as he is with us. God is found in the despair of the cross. God is found in our many deaths, bringing possibility out of nothingness.

In the desert of life … Jesus comes … offering you the water … the bread and wine … the Word … of life.
What will be your response?
Avoidance? Rebuke?
Or reception … embracing reality … repentance … and rebirth?

[Jesus] began to teach [you] that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. He says all this quite openly.
The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent and believe in the Good News.

The time … is fulfilled …