Bizarre

Mark 9:38-50

³⁸John said to him, “Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he was not following us.” ³⁹But 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. ⁴⁰Whoever is not against us is for us. ⁴¹For truly I tell you, whoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you bear the name of Christ will by no means lose the reward.
⁴²If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea. ⁴³If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life maimed than to have two hands and to go to hell, to the unquenchable fire. ⁴⁵And if your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life lame than to have two feet and to be thrown into hell. ⁴⁷And if your eye causes you to stumble, tear it out; it is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and to be thrown into hell, ⁴⁸where their worm never dies, and the fire is never quenched.
⁴⁹For everyone will be salted with fire.
⁵⁰Salt is good; but if salt has lost its saltiness, how can you season it? Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another.”

 

Bizarre

You call us, Lord, to be

Salt

Light

All these things you show us to be

And yet we so often want the light to be our light

Not yours

We love to flavor the world to our liking

Not to yours

Help us today to remove the stumbling blocks

That keep others from you

And us

In the name of the corner stone

Jesus the Christ

Amen.

 

This week I came across a bizarre list of words from other languages and cultures that don’t appear in the English language.

 

For instance, German speakers have a wonderful word waldeinsamkiet.  It is the word that describes the feeling that you have when walking alone in the woods.

 

Or you know that feeling that you have when you first fall in love?  We in the English speaking world often use phrases like “butterflies in the stomach” or “star struck” to describe it.  But if you speak Finnish you can describe that feeling with just one word: forelsket.

 

Other fun ones?

 

The itchiness that is felt on the upper lip right before you take a sip of whisky is called sgriobn in Gaelic. If you’re a person who asks a lot of questions, you’re known as a pochemuchka in Russian.  And you know when you leave a cold glass on the table and it leaves a ring?  That has a special name in Italian: cualacino.

 

It’s bizarre to me to think that these phrases need to be encompassed in one word.  Do we really need to describe an itchy upper lip or a wet mark on a wooden table so often that we must condense it into one word?

 

Bizarre, indeed.

 

My favorite example of these bizarre words, though, is saudade.  It’s Portuguese.  It’s a word that describes that feeling that you have when you realize that something that you once had has been lost and can never be had again.

 

Saudade.

 

This bizarre word fits nicely with this bizarre reading that we have today, where Jesus talks about millstones, chopping off limbs, plucking out eyes, and salt becoming bland.

 

Afterall, if salt loses its saltiness, how can it be re-infused with that flavor?  It has a case of saudade.  It cannot get it back…

 

I meet people with saudade all the time; saudade in matters of faith.  They’ve lost the faith of their childhood and realize that they can’t go back.

 

That Sunday School faith of childhood where God watches over us and we behave, that Santa Claus-ish innocence, is often lost by the time someone with a driver’s license enters my office.

 

“Where did it go?  How could it slip through my fingers so quickly?  Where is my faith, a faith that I thought was the foundation of everything that I thought and believed in?!”

 

I can almost hear them saying, “It’s bizarre, really.  Those things I used to believe, I just can’t accept them anymore…”

 

The readjustment of faith in a person’s life can be difficult and painful.  Sometimes it feels as if a limb is chopped off or an eye plucked out, as we cut out those beliefs in our lives that no longer line up with reality.

If only they came up with a word that could encompass that process…

 

My great aunt, a lover of Jesus and staunch Southern Baptist by identity, told me one day that she believes in reincarnation.

 

My good friend in college told me one time that he thought he heard the voice of God.  Audibly.

 

I get asked all the time if I think animals go to heaven.

 

And inside of me is all of this dogma and doctrine that I have been taught since I was a child that has an opinion on all of these topics.  It’s like, I want to hold on to my right answers because I am utterly afraid of what might happen if I don’t.

 

Will it make me unchristian?   Will it make me a heretic?

 

Will it mean I might be, gasp, wrong about something?  Not everything can be permissible…

 

Will I fail to be salt for a world as God has prescribed?

 

If I start to lose faith in those things, will I lose faith in God?

 

And this, I think, is where an illustration from Rob Bell’s book Velvet Elvis, a book we’ll be exploring the next couple of weeks in the adult education forum, can help us.  In that work, Bell introduces us to two metaphors for faith: the trampoline and the brick wall.

 

In fact, he posits that most people have been introduced not to Christianity, but to “brickianity.”

 

I think he’s right.

 

Think of all of those doctrines and dogmas that you’ve been taught over the years.  All of those, “this is right and this is wrong” statements.  Imagine that they are bricks, building a wall.  Now imagine you start to take some bricks away…that they start to fall out, one by one, as what you believe and the reality around you collide together.

 

Boom. Crash. Plunk.  And soon you don’t have a wall at all.  In fact, soon you don’t have anything, because a wall with too many bricks missing can’t stand.

 

Crash.  It falls. Into a pile of bricks at the feet of someone who use to have faith, but doesn’t know what they think anymore…

 

This, I imagine, is where a lot of people are when they enter my office.  This, I know, is what happens when people experience saudade in faith matters.

 

This, I imagine, is where a lot of people are when they enter this church, too.  As a place safe for people to re-enter and re-entertain faith, we’re used to a crumbled pile of bricks in here.

 

Brickianity will always fail because it holds fast to the idea that what you believe about God sustains you.

 

And that’s just not true.  Our beliefs do not sustain us.

 

Now, the trampoline.

 

Imagine that the springs of the trampoline are those “right and wrong” statements. Not bricks now, but springs.

 

And imagine that you take some out.  And you pull it.  And you stretch it.  And you test them to see how far they go.  All the while, you’re jumping.  And a spring or two out of the trampoline will not cause you to fall.  Trust me.  As a kid I jumped on tramps until my legs ached.  And many of those tramps had a couple of springs missing.

 

But you pull it out and stretch it and you’re still able to jump.

 

Why?

 

Because it’s not the springs themselves that sustains you, but the netting underneath.  The spring just help you jump.

 

And that netting? That’s God.  The springs help to get you there.

 

That’s the God shown through Jesus.  The radical God that decides to give humanity a brain that is inquisitive and decisive, and invites that brain to consider the works of God in their lives.

 

It’s taken me a long time to cut out brickianity in my life.  And that journey, that process, led me to a place where I believed God was a bunch of nothingness.

 

And that was truly painful.  It felt as if I had chopped out my heart.

 

It’s bizarre, really, to find that that time of cutting and chopping, where I felt as if I had tied a millstone around my faith and tossed it in Lake Michigan, actually freed me to find the God beneath that pile of bricks, holding me up in a way that was more real than anything I had experienced before as I came back to faith.

 

And this doesn’t mean that everything is permissible, of course.  I wouldn’t be wearing a funny collar as a branch manager of organized religion if I thought that everything is permissible.

 

But everything can be up for question.  Everything can be up for conversation.  Everything can be up for testing, because God is found in the foundations of our being, not in the building of our thoughts.

 

We’re free to jump away.

 

And so we jump in this bizarre faith journey, stretching the springs of our experience with God, and we land back into the bizarre ways that God is revealed: in wine and bread at the table.  In water and ancient words.

 

In this bizarre community, filled with people standing in piles of old bricks, faithfully jumping in the God that loves us too much to ever let us crumble.

 

These are the foundations of God seen here.

 

People of God, it may seem bizarre, but a faith built on the trust that God supports us, no matter how we stretch or pull at this faith, is a faith that can’t lose its faithfulness.

 

To use Jesus’ bizarre metaphor, its salt that can’t lose its saltiness.

 

Because its flavor doesn’t come from our beliefs, right or wrong, but from the God shown in this bizarre rabbi known as the Christ, who takes joy in our jumping.

 

Amen.