Sermon: Like Falling in Love

 Mark 1:21-28
Like Falling in Love

James Sledge                                                                                      January 31, 2021

 There’s an old adage in the pastor business sometimes offered to a person contemplating seminary. It says, if you can do anything else, do that. I suspect the origins of the adage were about making sure a call was genuine. It should be so compelling that there’s absolutely nothing else you could do. But in our day, I’ve sometimes heard the adage offered partly as a warning about the nature of this work.

The late Lyle Schaller, author and authority on congregations who was sometimes called the dean of church consultants, once noted that in the span of a few decades, the vocation of pastor went from a high status, low stress job to a low status, high stress job. The foibles of televangelists, the loss of prestige for traditional, mainline churches, the rise of religious consumers, and more have made pastoring an interesting way to make a living.

Suffice to say that many pastors would likely find something else to do if there weren’t things about the work that they loved. For me it’s a number of things. I wouldn’t quite say I enjoy it, yet hospital visitation is very fulfilling. But the two things I love the most are teaching and preaching. I briefly thought about being a professor, but I enjoyed preaching too much.

I knew I wanted to preach while still in seminary. It’s likely why I never became an associate pastor. Preaching is still one of my favorite things, both the preparation and the actual event, but my expectations of preaching and teaching have changed over the years.

When I came out of seminary, I was steeped in a Reformed understanding of preaching which holds that when scripture is read and proclaimed (meaning preached), that by the power of the Spirit it becomes the Word of God. And so I took preaching very seriously. It seemed an awesome responsibility to proclaim God’s Word, something that could build up or tear down, could inspire a congregation to go where God called, could change lives.

I still take preaching very seriously, but I’ve learned over the years what countless other pastors have learned. It’s quite rare that preaching actually does much. People may like it or dislike it, enjoy it or be troubled by it, find it thought provoking or not, but seldom does it inspire a congregation to do something or cause someone to drastically reorder their life. Very often, preaching is simply one more voice trying to persuade, and we’re bombarded with attempts to persuade us all the time. From advertising to politics to editorials to Facebook posts, such attempts inundates our lives, and we’ve grown quite numb to them.

Neither preaching nor teaching seem to have much in the way of authority, any intrinsic power to effect change, to alter people’s lives. Perhaps they once did, but I wonder.

In today’s gospel, Jesus performs his first exorcism. Thanks largely to Hollywood, we often think of exorcisms as remarkably dramatic events where good and evil battle it out. But in the Bible, exorcisms are more like other healings. In fact, if we could go back in time and see Jesus in action, we would likely say he had cured someone of epilepsy or mental illness. 

But what I find most remarkable about the exorcism in today’s gospel is the crowd’s reaction. When those in the synagogue see Jesus cast out the unclean spirit they exclaim, “What is this? A new teaching—with authority!”

A teaching that has authority, that heals people? I’m happy if people just remember something  I said when teaching or preaching. But the people in Capernaum see Jesus heal and say, “Wow, that’s teaching! Not like any teaching we’ve ever seen.”  Not like any teaching I’ve ever seen or been a part of either.

Have you ever encountered teaching that could change you, transform you and make you into something different and new? The people in that Capernaum synagogue hadn’t. That’s why they say that Jesus’ teaching is different, not like that of the scribes. That’s not really a knock on the scribes. If Jesus showed up here today and taught and healed, people would say that his teaching had authority, not like that of pastors. Teaching and preaching from pastors, like that from scribes, is mostly information. It may claim to have authority. “Look, it’s right there in the Bible.” But that only works if the listener agrees that the Bible has authority.

But the authority in our gospel reading is different. It is self-evident. In that sense it is not unlike Jesus calling people to follow him. In the verses just prior to our reading this morning, Jesus calls Simon, Andrew, James, and John to follow him. And immediately they leave everything and go with him. People sometimes remark on the faith of these people who drop everything and go with Jesus. Sometimes they wish, “O, if only I could have faith that that.” But the story is not pointing out the amazing faith of the disciples but the call of Jesus which has the power, the authority to change those who hear it.

______________________________________________________

I may have shared with you before an experience I had as a youth advisor in my home church shortly before I went to seminary. We were on the annual ski trip, and after an evening of food and fun, we turned to the obligatory faith discussion. I don’t recall many details, but at some point I asked the youth what they would do if Jesus asked them to go to a poverty stricken, third world country to live and serve. 

Unlike how I suspect some adults would respond, all of these youth said they would not go; they would say “No.” I appreciated their honesty, but I also suspect that they’d never actually encountered the call of Jesus, never experienced his teaching that is so different from what they’d heard in church, a teaching with authority.

What if I had raised a slightly different question with that youth group? What if I’d asked, “If you fell madly in love with someone, and that person told you he or she was going to go to a poverty stricken, third world country to live and serve, would you go with them?” 

I suspect I would have gotten a fair number of yeses to that question. When you fall in love, you’ll do all sorts of crazy things. Love has an authority that can override loyalty to friends and family, carefully laid out life plans, even common sense. 

By contrast, we often view the authority of Jesus as an abstraction. It’s something we’ve heard about, but not necessarily experienced. It looks more like the teaching of the scribes. It’s from the Bible, and we often agree with it in principle. We may even think that we should follow these teachings. But when push comes to shove, other loyalties and authorities often win out. Like those youth who said “No” to a hypothetical call to a third world country, we find it easy to say “No” to calls based solely on “what the Bible says” or what the Church teaches. Unless it makes sense to us or is something we agree with, it is easy to find good reasons to say “No.”

But if you’ve ever fallen in love, you already have experience with an authority to which you cannot easily say “No.” You’ve felt what it is like to be gotten ahold of and your life turned upside down. If you’ve ever fallen madly in love, you know what it is like to act in ways that seem crazy or foolish to others, maybe even to you when you look back on it. 

When the people in the Capernaum synagogue saw Jesus teaching and healing, they witnessed an authority like that. Jesus’ words had power to change, to transform people, even to heal. It wasn’t magic, but it was very real. And those who encountered it had to respond to it. It either got ahold of them or they ran from its power lest they be caught up in it.

You can read your Bible cover to cover; you can memorize every word of Jesus recorded there, but that alone has no more authority than the teaching of the scribes. You can try very hard to be good and kind, and that would be admirable and might even make the world a better place. Yet that would not be the life changing authority of Jesus.

But when you meet Jesus; when the Holy Spirit dwells in you so that you experience the risen Christ within, that is something totally different. And you just may not be able to say “No.”