By the Rev. Dr. Pamela Dolan
In talking about the Gospel, especially Mark’s Gospel, it can be easy to caricature the disciples, to mock their confusion and ignorance, and perhaps to speak about them as if they were wayward and, frankly, not very bright children.
We see, after all, how often they misunderstand Jesus and seek to dilute or even undermine his message. We see how reluctant they are to grasp the radical nature of his call on their lives. We see how Jesus himself gets frustrated and sometimes angry with these followers of his.
And, even taking into account that we have the advantage over them of 2,000 years of hindsight, we might like to think that, were we in their places, we would have been a little quicker to understand and a little keener to follow.
When I start to feel smug about all this myself, I stop and think about the big societal changes that have happened in the course of the last 50 years, roughly the period of time I have been alive on the earth. What if, 50 years ago, we as Americans or even we as Episcopalians had really listened to the voices from the margins telling us that radical change was coming, and that we needed to be prepared?
Haven’t we, collectively, all been a lot like the disciples, hearing but not always listening, let alone understanding? What if more of us had listened to those who were telling us of the dangers of climate change, of growing economic inequalities, of systemic racism and other pervasive forms of prejudice and discrimination? What if we had listened to those who were warning us that our churches were facing waves of disruption and decline that totally change the face of religious affiliation in the Western world? What might the world look like now, if we had listened sooner, and acted upon what we were hearing?
Because those voices have been speaking for decades, some for far more than 50 years. On the environmental front alone, we can point to Aldo Leopold, who introduced the idea of the “land ethic” in the 1930’s; Ansel Adams, whose vocation as an artist-activist began around the same time; Rachel Carson, who wrote Silent Spring in 1962; Wangari Maathai, who founded the Green Belt Movement in 1977; and countless others.
Those voices have been there, often starting on the margins but sometimes making their way into the mainstream, getting the media spotlight, big awards like the Nobel Prize and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and so on. Those voices have been there, and we have heard them, but how well have we heeded them? Much like the disciples, it often seems we want to take one part of the message, the more palatable part, but set aside the part that is uncomfortable to hear because it threatens to disrupt our way of life. So we embrace the beautiful pictures of Ansel Adams, the elegant prose of Rachel Carson, the stirring story of Wangari Maathai, but we protect ourselves against the alarm bells they are sounding, lest we become…well, too alarmed.
Jesus faced the same obstacles to being heard. While many people were drawn to him when he preached peace and love, when we healed the sick and helped restore broken lives to wholeness, he met resistance when they began to realize that there were consequences to the kind of love he was preaching. His disciples, those closest to him, were willing to give up so much to follow him, but even they had their limits. When he began talking about suffering and death, about taking up the Cross, that’s when things shifted. That was asking them to prepare for a level of disruption that must have felt impossible to take in.
We are in a time of disruption and decline, in our church and across our culture. As the Rev. Nurya Parish said in her sermon a few weeks ago, this is not the first time that people have faced a time of crisis and pulled through, but nevertheless this is our time of crisis, and face it we must. Maybe our first step in facing it is to seek out those voices that are hard for us to hear, those stories that have been told but haven’t been heard, at least in the church.
Many churches are, understandably, rushing to return to normal. There are good reasons for this, that have to do with our innate need for places of comfort and stability. But there are dangers in this rush to go back, too—the danger that we will refuse move forward into the new future where God is calling us, the danger that we will ignore this opportunity to become more wholly dependent on God and God’s grace, rather than our own power, resources, and influence. As it says in one of my favorite Godly Play stories, when Abraham and Sarah went where God called them, even when it was into the wilderness, they discovered that indeed, God was there, too.
For a moment, let’s consider today’s Gospel passage as a metaphor for where we are as a church in this historical moment. First, we should keep in mind that in the time of Jesus, children were not symbols of innocence or wonder but symbols of powerlessness; they had few legal protections to keep them from being abused or oppressed. Next, those bickering disciples: let’s think of them as reflections of the church in its many manifestations today. The disciples, and sometimes we churches, are jockeying for position, trying to be the best, the first, the leader, too easily forgetting that our call is to be faithful, not first.
And as a result, they, and sometimes we, are likely to create a community that does not welcome the marginalized, the dispossessed, the historically underrepresented. This is the church that needs to be cracked open, to make room for the marginalized and welcome the stranger—not because they need us, but because it is in welcoming them that we find Christ in our midst.
Sometimes I worry that talking about the need to embrace change, to be cracked open, to decenter our own privilege and power, can sound like a lecture, like criticism. I don’t mean it that way. I mean it as an invitation to new life, new vitality, new hope. Of course I also worry that it might sound like a sales pitch, like the marketing campaign for another program that is supposed to magically turn around the trajectory of decline in mainline churches. But it is not that either. Again, it is an invitation to live closer to Jesus, to get back to the center and heart of our faith.
As Stephanie Spellers so beautifully puts it, “Disruption and decline are not the end of any story with God. In our case, they may be the doorway into joining God’s community of love.”
That’s it. That’s what we all want, in this time of crisis and always. We want a doorway into joining God’s community of love. In fact, we want our church to be a doorway into joining God’s community of love. And it can be. Remember that when Jesus invites the little child into the circle of disciples, he does not leave her there in the center. He holds the child in his arms as he speaks. Jesus wants to be there, with the marginalized, so if we want to find Jesus, we should be there, too. No matter how far into the margins or the wilderness we go, if we are following God’s call on our lives, God will be there, too. Amen.
