Boundary Disputes
Numbers 11:4-6, 10-16, 24-29; Psalm 19:7-14; James 5:13-20; Mark 9:38-50.
“If 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.”
When I worked for the government, our agency had a required annual training session on security. One particularly memorable year our trainer was a guy who I think had watched too many James Bond movies. If you’ve been around the government or the military you know the type. His basic message was: You people have no idea what security risks you are. You have no idea how many people are trying to break into your e-mail and tap your phones. You have no idea how many of the foreign embassy people you deal with are undercover intelligence agents. Then when we tell you to take the battery out of your phone before you go through airport security in a foreign country, you ignore us. Knock it off.
The next year, there had been a change of administrations and we all wondered whether we’d get another lecture at the annual briefing. Instead we were told: When you see a classified document, ask yourself, Does this really need to be classified? It was, needless to say, a radically different approach.
The thing is, both approaches are right. It is true that we were dealing with a lot of sensitive issues but our training and life experience didn’t prepare us for how aggressively people in the world of international espionage might take advantage of our inexperience in such things, so we needed to be more careful. And it is true that too much secrecy in government can undermine the accountability and transparency that are necessary in a democracy. It’s not always easy to know when we need to be more careful and controlled, and when we need to be more open.
In the ELCA, we don’t have annual security trainings, but as pastors we do have a requirement to participate in an annual training on healthy boundaries. As many of you know, I come from a tradition that has a terrible record of keeping vulnerable people, especially children, safe from abuse. So I’ve really appreciate the emphasis that the ELCA puts on making sure pastors have the tools to set appropriate limits so our congregations can be safe places – for children, of course, but really for everybody.
I’ve been through two of these ELCA boundaries trainings now, and one of the things that has surprised me is that both times there was less focus on the need for good and healthy boundaries and more focus on the problem of bad and unnecessary boundaries. Based on my experience, I was expecting a “You need to prioritize security and safety!” kind of briefing, because that’s what was really lacking before. But what we got instead was a “Don’t put boundaries on God’s grace” briefing.
Because, as our Scripture readings today make clear, God’s people are often tempted to put boundaries on God’s grace. In the Old Testament reading today, Moses can’t handle the demands that the people are putting on him in the wilderness, so God tells him to choose seventy elders who can share the role of Moses as prophet, to share the Spirit and to speak to the people on God’s behalf. But then two other people, Eldad and Medad, receive the Spirit too – and Joshua, the assistant to Moses and his eventual successor, tells Moses to make them stop. They can’t speak for God, they haven’t followed the rules.
Likewise, in the gospel reading today, the disciples see people casting out demons in the name of Jesus – people who are doing God’s work, confronting evil and bringing healing and peace in the name of Jesus, and the disciples of Jesus want those people to stop. As John, one of the leading disciples of Jesus says, they need to stop because “they aren’t following us.”
And religious leaders like Joshua and John and countless others right up until today are still very nervous when God starts doing things outside official channels. When God goes outside of the chain of command, it can be threatening to those of us who think our calling is to be part of the chain of command. Yet Jesus, like Moses before him, wants no part of putting boundaries on God’s grace. He tells John: If they’re doing God’s work, who are you to object?
But in the gospel reading, Jesus doesn’t stop there. It is as if Jesus says – The boundaries you want to draw to limit other people’s access to God, to limit what God can do in the world, these are not the boundaries you should be worried about. But there are boundaries that you should worry about.
This gets us to the harsh and difficult sayings of Jesus where he starts talking about chopping off body parts. This is, I hope, Jesus being hyperbolic – I don’t think he actually expects us to cut off our hands or gouge out our eyes. But, he says, there are some limits we’re going to have to put on ourselves – there are some things we have to give up that might feel like losing a part of our bodies – in order to avoid hell.
And there’s one thing here I’d like to point out about this before going any farther. The word being translated here as “hell” is Gehenna, which actually does not mean a place that God might send you after you die to be tortured forever as punishment for your sins. Hell in that sense is not really even a Biblical concept at all, but Gehenna definitely doesn’t mean that. Gehenna is a Hebrew word meaning the Valley of Henna – it’s the name of an actual place, just south of Jerusalem. In the time of Jesus it was the city garbage dump for Jerusalem – an ever-smoldering pile of burning trash, where the worm dies not and the fire never goes out. In earlier times, it was even worse. The prophet Jeremiah, 600 years before Jesus, talks about the Valley of Henna as the place where people who worshipped pagan gods practiced child sacrifice. And metaphorically, Gehenna is a place in this world where people do horrible things to one another. Gehenna is not a hell that God might send someone to; Gehenna is the hell that human beings make for ourselves and one another here and now.
So when Jesus says: Better to go into the Kingdom of God with one eye than to go to Gehenna with two eyes – he means, I think, if we are on the road to Gehenna and if in order to get back on the right road, to get back to the road to Jerusalem, we have to let go of something – by all means we should let go of it. Even if we’re kind of attached to it.
And I think we all know this from our own life experience. We’ve all learned habits and assumptions that helped us at one stage of our lives, but then we get to a point where if we keep clinging to them, we’ll turn our lives into Gehenna. Some of these habits and assumptions are so deeply ingrained in us that they feel like parts of our bodies – and yet sometimes we come to recognize that we have to let them go. For as long as I can remember, when I feel stressed, I eat. I’ve had a lot of stress over the years, and so here we are. For a long time it’s worked for me, it feels natural and normal to me. But as I get older I come to realize that if I don’t change this habit my health is going to suffer, I’m going to create problems for myself, and if I’m going to avoid making a Gehenna of my health I need to make changes.
But it’s not just as individuals that we need to set boundaries and limits and say no to certain things in order to live as fully healthy and joyful people. Communities need to set boundaries and limits and say no to certain things – and sometimes say no to certain people – in order to be healthy and to be open to God’s boundless and limitless grace moving in the world and in other people.
So, to take just one example, if a community wants to say – as I know here at Epiphany we do want to say – that our doors are wide open to people of every race and ethnicity and life experience, because we know everyone is a beloved child of God and shares in God’s spirit and work – well, then, to take what should be a relatively simple example, what do we do when somebody uses the N-word? Does our aversion to conflict, does our fear of not being “Christian” in our dealings with people we know and love even in our imperfections and sins – does our hesitation about setting a boundary, setting a limit that says “No, it’s not acceptable here to use language that puts down a fellow child of God” – does that mean we aren’t willing to pay a price to stand up for someone who has been mistreated and devalued? Because if we aren’t, then we aren’t really the open and welcoming community we say we want to be.
For Jesus, if we want to respect the boundless and limitless grace of God – and we should want to do this – then we also have to be willing to set boundaries and limits on ourselves. In fact, it’s precisely when we are afraid of putting boundaries and limits on ourselves – individually and as a community – that we drive other people away, because we reveal that we are not a safe place for them to truly be themselves. And that’s the road that leads to Gehenna – a hell of our own making, where we separate ourselves from the boundless and limitless grace of God.
This is a hard teaching that Jesus has for us today. A necessary one, perhaps, but a hard one. To know when to say the doors are open and the Spirit is moving wherever and however the Spirit wills, and when to say certain doors are closed and certain things have to go.
But as followers of Jesus, we know we must accept this teaching, because Jesus lived it fully himself. In his own body he absorbed the full force of every Gehenna we human beings have ever made, rather than do anything that would contribute to our stumbling towards the Gehennas we would make for ourselves. He allowed his own feet and hands butchered and his body killed, and he has shown us that it is possible to pay that price, to stare down the fires of hell and emerge from that furnace more alive than ever, knowing ourselves and everyone else to be beloved, forgiven, and invited to feast forever at the Lord’s table of unbounded love and life.1
1 – The last paragraph of the sermon is a paraphrase of the conclusion of a wonderful sermon by Nathan Nettleton on this passage, http://southyarrabaptist.church/sermons/hellfire-border-protection-and-self-mutilation/.