THE WELCOMING GOD
Today’s passage from St Mark’s Gospel starts with this intriguing episode of the free-lance exorcist, the person who was “casting out demons” in Jesus’s name, but who was not part of the group of disciples who were going around with Jesus. The Twelve, the “official” disciples, do not approve of this unauthorised ministry, and they try to stop it.
But Jesus’s approach is much more open and tolerant than that of his followers. This unofficial exorcist is doing good, and moreover he is doing it in Jesus’ name. So it’s wrong to try and stop him, and Jesus sums up his attitude with this general principle:
Whoever is not against us is on our side.
Now that’s a fine saying, and I’d like us to think about it a bit further this morning. But first we do need to be aware of a very odd fact. Elsewhere in the gospels, in Matthew and Luke, we find Jesus saying the exact opposite:
Whoever is not with me is against me.
Now I suppose you have to try and explain this apparent contradiction along the lines that Jesus must have said these things in very different contexts, and indeed the second, more “restrictive” version is said with reference to future situations of conflict and persecution.
Anyway, I’m not going to try and solve that conundrum this morning – I’ll leave that to the scholars. I’m just going to reflect on the saying that Mark reports:
Whoever is not against us is on our side.
The disciples illustrate what you might call the bureaucratic approach to religion. This person is not properly authorised, he has not followed the proper procedures, he has not filled in the application form and submitted it to the authorities.
But God is not a bureaucrat. He does not restrict himself to acting through the proper channels (or what we think are the proper channels). He is free to do as he pleases. As the God of the Old Testament puts it, I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy.
God does not ask us if we have the right identity card. He does not ask us to show our security badge before letting us into the Kingdom. He gives us the benefit of the doubt.
Whereas the disciples illustrate the monopolistic approach to religion which Christian churches have so often shown. Our church is the right one, the only authentic one. If you want to be right with God, you have to come through us and jump through all the necessary hoops.
You can criticise the Church of England for all sorts of things, but at least it has the merit that it has never had this attitude that we are the only true church, the only route to salvation.
Moreover, the Church of England has never had a very clear concept of membership. It has never drawn tight boundary lines around itself, so as to define clearly who is in and who is out. I’ve heard it described as “a church with fuzzy edges”.
Quite often people from other churches in Strasbourg ask me: how many members do you have in the Anglican Chaplaincy? It sounds like a very straightforward and basic question, but I never really know how to answer. You can say that we have about 85 signed up members on the electoral roll, but there are plenty of people that that would miss out. Or you can give a rough estimate of the considerably larger number of people on our mailing list, but that would include quite a lot of people who are not really members in any active sense. Quite simply, there is no real answer to the question.
I remember once that an English woman came to see me in a great panic. She was due to marry her Finnish fiancé in a Finnish church the next week. And all of a sudden, she had learned that the Finnish church would not marry her unless she produced a certificate of membership of the Church of England. Well, of course, we have no such document. So I just had to invent one. I printed it out nicely on the chaplaincy computer and stamped it with our rubber stamp, and that satisfied the Finns.
Our church probably contains quite a lot of people who wouldn’t really qualify for membership if we had precise and objective qualifications. As I said, we have fuzzy edges. And the result of this is that you have, in any Anglican church, quite a lot of people who are pretty fuzzy about their faith, pretty fuzzy about the Bible, and maybe pretty fuzzy also about Christian moral standards.
Does this matter? Not at all, I think. As far as moral standards are concerned, we have to remember that Jesus welcomed all sorts of disreputable characters into his motley band of followers; that made him the target for a lot of criticism, and it got him a bad reputation, but he didn’t care.
Our world is full of hurt and damaged people, people who have done some pretty bad things, people who have lost their sense of self-respect and self-worth. It’s precisely these sort of people that Jesus came to invite into the Kingdom. The very people who feel that they aren’t good enough, they aren’t “worthy”.
Moreover, the society we live in is full of “seekers”, people who don’t really know where they stand on God and Jesus and the Christian faith, but who find in the life of the Church things which begin to speak to their longings, some warmth and encouragement for the soul. It is very important that the Church should welcome people who are not yet committed, and give them the freedom to continue their exploration with us.
Now in all this, I’m not saying that “anything goes” in church life, and that it doesn’t really matter how you live, or what you believe, or whether you believe anything much at all. No, the church may have fuzzy edges, and I’m very glad it does, but it needs also to have a solid centre.
That is why, even in the Church of England, which happily allows plenty of scope for freedom of thought and questioning, the clergy have to make a public declaration of faith (as you heard Christine do a few weeks ago, and you heard me do three years ago). And that is also why it’s important that our liturgy regularly includes the public recitation of the Nicene Creed, the ecumenically agreed statement of the Christian faith.
Now of course I pray that people who are at present in an exploratory stage of fairly loose association with the Christian community will in the fullness of time be led to a clearer commitment and a more definite church membership, that they will graduate from the fuzzy edges towards the solid centre.
But the important thing for all of us is to accept people as they are, to welcome them without any preconditions. Because this is what God does. God says: come as you are.
Because if we come across to people as a truly welcoming community, a place where broken and damaged people, puzzled and hurt people, feel themselves to be loved and valued just for being who they are; if our way of being together speaks to people of the welcoming God; then we create an environment in which people can start to relax, in which hearts that have gone cold can be warmed into life again, wounds can start to heal, and people can begin to blossom and flourish.
Then they may also start to “catch” the faith that makes us the sort of community we hope to be. As long as we are honest about our faith, and don’t give the intimidating impression that we have all the answers; as long as we make it clear that we are all explorers, that we all continue to have questions. Then others may feel a desire to join us in exploring more deeply into the things of God.
So this is why it is right that the church should be a real mixture of the committed, the half-committed, the explorers and the seekers. For that is the kind of church that reflects the welcoming God. That is the kind of church which says:
Whoever is not against us is on our side.
Reverend John Murray, Strasbourg Anglican Chaplaincy
27 September 2009, Year B, Proper 21
Gospel: Mark 9.38-50
