Covenant not Competition - Sermon for Pentecost 18, 2015

Sermon:

Text: Mark 9:38-50

Grace and Peace to you from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ who makes us one.

            I was watching some football this week and was thinking about this text and noticed that while it seems very different they are actually somewhat connected. Football is a game where two teams are in direct competition with each other, there are two distinct sides striving to accomplish a goal and working to stop the other from accomplishing that goal. And here in our text we find the disciples telling Jesus what happened when they were out and about working as Jesus had sent them two by two. “Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he was not following us.” But Jesus said, “Do not stop him; for no one who does a deed of power in my name will be able soon afterward to speak evil of me. Whoever is not against us is for us.”

            Teacher, we tried to cast out demons, but couldn’t, then we saw someone else trying to and they were able to do it! Tell them to stop! This is our task, this is our goal!

            That’s pretty much what it boils down to, the disciples see someone doing what they can’t do and they want to stop that person. Jesus tells them, this isn’t a competition. In fact, if you try to stop someone like that, it would be better to have to carry a millstone around your neck.

           

            It’s really hard for us to get past the thought that it is a competition though. That ministry, church, mission, all of what Christ sends us to do, is not competition. To have something not as competition is pretty much opposite of how our culture works. Everything is a competition now days. Schools compete against other schools not only in sporting events, but enrollment, testing scores, for state money, for school district lines. Our jobs are all competition, can we out market, sell, publicize, work some other business. Can we undercut our competitor? Can I out sell my co-worker, can I outsell my own numbers from last year? What’s my personal best on that or this? Politics are all about competition, can we get more votes, poll higher than that person, can my catchphrase or one-liner be shown on more TV shows. TV itself is competition. What are the ratings on this show vs that show, how sensationalist can we make the news so that more people watch our network vs the other.

            And because of all this we feel the need to make church like this too. I admit I fall for it too. What’s our attendance vs the other church? How much do we give in mission? What’s the money like from our turkey dinner this year vs last year? How do we out do that church? How do we become the next megachurch? How do we draw all the people? How do we stop people going there and come here instead?

            And that’s when Jesus says, hey! It’s not a competition. This is not our way better than your way, or only we can do that.

            In confirmation this week we are in the midst of our Reformation unit and looked at how Martin Luther when he started out didn’t actually mean to split the church, but wanted to simply fix it from within. But like many things, it instead went sort of haywire and ended up indeed splitting the church. And then it split again and again and again, and now we have 40,000 something different church denominations across the world, some large, some very small. And if we look at church like a competition and we see all these different groups, all these different "teams", it can indeed become strenuous and we can in fact impede each other in the work of spreading the gospel. You can’t do that because we want to do that!

            We did an exercise in the confirmation class, I drew a big boxy church building on paper and then I cut it up into many different squares and had each youth color and decorate a square, then we put all the pieces back together again. You can see the picture I took up on the screen. Are all the pieces different? Yes, but they still form back into the one universal church, they all fit together into the church that Christ created. WE all fit back into the church that Christ created, because we, the people, not the building, all of us, here, there, everywhere, of every denomination, we are all the church. Not because we all have all of the right answers, but because we all have Christ. No matter what we believe on various topics, Christ must always be our center.

            Jesus closes out this passage with talk about salt. Last time we read this passage three years ago I talked about how there are many different kinds of salt, and we each are ourselves different kinds and how each kind has it’s own distinct job and purpose, and we need each of us to be salt in order for everything to function within the church, and I still hold that true.

            But, there’s a part of salt that I found out this last week. It’s salt used in a covenantal relationship. When people would travel in Jesus’ time they didn’t have hotels or inns like we think of it now, they just had people’s homes where they would stop and ask to stay the night. And the person whose house it was would announce that they are allowing them to stay by giving them a cup of water, as it says in the first part of our gospel, but they would also give them salt. Salt is not just a nice gift, it’s a need. And it’s a covenant, it's a promise. Leviticus 2:13 “Do not let the salt of the covenant be lacking in your cereal offering.” Trading salt is not just a welcoming gift, it’s a sign that you are in covenant with each other, that you make a promise to the other that they will be safe while they stay here.

            Jesus says, “Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another.”

            Make relationships with one another, trade salt with each other, pray for each other, be at peace with one another. We may be of different denominations with other people out there, but we are all still a part of the universal church that Christ founded.

            We are not in competition with each other, in fact we are just the opposite, for there is nothing to win in this competition, Christ has already scored the goal, hit the homer, hit the target, crossed the finish line, kicked the extra point, made the free throw. Christ calls us to act less like we are against each other and to spend more realizing and seeing that we are in fact still one with one another.

            To stop letting everything around us become stumbling blocks, but to instead throw those things away and to turn to salt and relationship so that together as this one church, we can serve the poor, feed the hungry, comfort the sick, and spread the good news that Christ has already died and been risen.

Amen.