From Promised Land to Compromised Land

Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

26 January 2020

Mark 5.1-20

Listen to this sermon here: https://soundcloud.com/bloomsbury-1/from-promised-land-to-compromised-land

Our journey through Mark’s gospel,

            brings us this week to the famous story of the Gadarene, or Gerasene, demoniac.

We’ll come to the man and his demons shortly,

            but it’s worth spending a bit of time first with the geography,

            not least because some of us here will be visiting this area later this year

                        on our next Bloomsbury trip to Palestine and Israel.

The reading began with Jesus and his disciples crossing the sea of Galilee,

            and going in to an area known as ‘The Decapolis’,

            which got its name from two Greek words,

                        deka, meaning ten, and polis, meaning cities.

The Decapolis was a group of ten cities

            which in the first century were on the eastern frontier of the Roman Empire.

They formed a group because of their common language, shared culture,

            geographical location, and slightly uncertain political status,

with each city functioning as an autonomous city-state dependent on Rome.

They are sometimes described as a league of cities,

            although it’s unclear whether they were ever formally organized as a political unit.

In terms of contemporary geography,

            most of the Decapolis region is now located in Jordan,

but Damascus is in Syria

            and Hippos and Scythopolis are in Israel.

At the time of Jesus, the Decapolis was a centre of Greek and Roman culture

            in a region which was otherwise populated by Jewish people.

In other words, this was ‘Gentile territory’

            that Jesus was leading his followers into,

albeit Gentile territory with strongly Jewish links.

It was the land ‘beyond’ the Jordan,

            a place where less religiously observant Jews and God-fearing Gentiles,

            could live and trade alongside people

                        of very different cultural and religious convictions to their own.

If Israel was the promised land,

            the Decapolis was the compromised land.

And Jesus taking his disciples across the sea to visit it

            was a symbolic reversal of the journey taken by the children of Israel

                        at the end of the Exodus

            when they had crossed the waters of the Jordan

                        to take possession of the promised land.

And here I want us to pause for a moment,

            and think about that word I just used… did you spot it?

The word is ‘possession’,

            and its use to indicate ownership of land

            is going to be crucial to us in our engagement

            with the story of the demon possessed man from this region.

Let me read to you from the book of Leviticus,

            which spells out some of the purity legislation

                        that the books of the law

                                    recorded as having been given by God to the Jews

                        as they took possession of the promised land:

Lev. 20.22-26 

You shall keep all my statutes and all my ordinances, and observe them, so that the land to which I bring you to settle in may not vomit you out.

 ²³ You shall not follow the practices of the nation that I am driving out before you. Because they did all these things, I abhorred them.

 ²⁴ But I have said to you: You shall inherit their land, and I will give it to you to possess, a land flowing with milk and honey. I am the LORD your God; I have separated you from the peoples.

 ²⁵ You shall therefore make a distinction between the clean animal and the unclean, and between the unclean bird and the clean; you shall not bring abomination on yourselves by animal or by bird or by anything with which the ground teems, which I have set apart for you to hold unclean.

 ²⁶ You shall be holy to me; for I the LORD am holy, and I have separated you from the other peoples to be mine.

There it is again - that slippery word ‘possession’.

And according to Leviticus, God gave the children of Abraham the promised land,

            for them to possess, for them to inhabit,

            for them to take from those who were already living there.

It’s uncomfortable at a number of levels, isn’t it?

I mean, do we really believe God works like this?

            Does God command people to displace other people

            and take possession of their land?

Some people believe this very strongly,

            and it’s the idea behind notions such as ‘The Christian Nation’,

but it also has very contemporary resonances for those today,

            who find themselves living in places that other people lay claim to.

Whether or not you agree that Israel in our time

            has the right to possess the land of Palestine,

there is no denying the strong biblical precedent,

            that passages such as this offer to such possessing forces.

One potentially helpful perspective might be

            that this passage from Leviticus, and others like it,

            rather than being a direct record of what God said to the Jews

                        as they stood on the east bank of the Jordan

                        looking across at the land flowing with milk and honey;

            is instead a later text,

                        attempting to theologically justify a historic act of violent possession,

            by claiming, post hoc, after the event, that God told them to do it.

Another, equally uncomfortable, aspect of this

            is the division that we find here between holy and unholy,

            between clean and unclean.

Do we believe that God was, at some point in history,

            only really interested in one group of people,

                        who were holy and pure and clean

                        where everyone else was unacceptable?

Certainly, the author of this part of Leviticus believed this to be the case.

We might, of course, conclude that such an isolationist perspective,

            was a betrayal rather than a fulfilment of God’s covenant with Abraham,

            that God would be his God, and his children would be God’s people,

because it denies that strand of theology within the Hebrew Bible

            which makes it very clear that the purpose of God calling one nation,

                        leading them into deeper discovery of God’s nature and purposes,

            was so that those people could then bring that blessing to others,

                        shining as a light to all the nations.

And we might conclude that when Jesus, early in his ministry,

            deliberately crossed the boundary into the Gentile territory of the Decapolis,

            to bring healing and restoration to those who lived there,

he was symbolically setting his ministry in direct opposition

            to those forces of religion in his own time

                        which were focussed on the nationalistic possession of land,

                        and on the maintenance of holiness and purity codes at all costs.

And so Jesus goes over the sea.

And here we have a slight confusion within the textual tradition,

            because it’s not quite clear which town is being talked about here.

There are two towns near each other,

            with similar sounding names.

One of them is Gerasa, and the other is Gadara,

            and depending on which ancient manuscript you’re reading,

            the exorcism either takes place

                        in the region of the Gerasenes, or the Gadarenes.

Why does this matter, you might well ask?

Well, the problem is that the better textual tradition is for Gerasa,

            which is what our pew Bibles go with.

But Gerasa, as you can see from the map, is quite some way from the sea of Galilee,

            which means that two thousand demon possessed pigs,

                        running all that way to the sea to drown themselves,

            is rather hard to visualise.

That part of the story would make much more sense at Gadara.

However, Gerasa may be the location of a notorious Jewish revolt against the Romans,

            referred to by the Jewish Historian Josephus,

in which a thousand rebels were slaughtered by the Legionaries of Rome.

Possibly what’s happened here

            is that Mark has run a couple of different stories and locations together,

giving us the confusion we’ve inherited from the maps and the manuscripts.

It doesn’t really matter, of course,

            because Mark isn’t writing history, he’s writing theology,

and the theology is clear enough wherever the story is set.

Jesus and his disciples cross the sea,

            to the region of the gentiles,

making the journey from promised land to compromised land,

            from purity to uncleanness,

from in, to out.

And what they find there is the demon possessed man,

            living amongst the tombs,

            unable to be bound,

            and self-harming in torment.

Today’s sermon isn’t a sermon about poor mental health,

            but I do just want to say at this point

that there will be those of us here this morning

            who find this story distressing,

because it records a level of self-hatred and harm

            that will resonate with our own experience.

Wherever people are victimised,

            there is the capacity for us to internalise and enact

                        the rejection we experience,

            finding ourselves compelled by forces we cannot control

                        into actions that harm us, either individually or collectively.

And whilst I do not doubt that an encounter with Jesus

            can open a path to healing and wholeness,

            for those whose souls and minds are in torment,

I firmly believe that path includes appropriate medication and talking therapy,

            supported by the prayerful love of the Christian community.

The key to understanding how Mark uses this story

            to reveal more of the person and ministry of Jesus

lies in the geography that we’ve already been paying attention to.

The man is possessed by a demonic Legion,

            which is the word for a large military unit of the Roman army,

            sometimes as many as five or six thousand men,

            but always over a thousand.

And clearly, for Mark, the man is a metaphor,

            for the Roman military possession of the land.

The land given by God to the Jews to possess,

            had been in turn possessed by the Assyrians, the Babylonians,

                        the Persians, the Greeks, and the Romans.

This is a story of possession going back centuries,

            and the demonic legions currently occupying the land

            are just the latest manifestation of a much greater and more enduring evil,

which is the cycle of oppression and domination

            where one group of humans possesses another.

We might dress it up as being about land, inheritance,

            glory, and divine right.

But ultimately this is a story about power.

Who has the power to possess another?

            Whether the ‘other’ is a man living among the tombs,

                        or the region of the Decapolis,

                                    or the nation of Israel,

            or any other people, tribe, or demographic,

                        which finds itself dominated and oppressed.

This man isn’t just a metaphor for the land of Israel,

            he’s a metaphor for all possessed peoples anywhere.

This story unmasks all such dominating powers as satanic in origin,

            and this is true whether we’re talking about one nation possessing another,

            or an ideology possessing an individual or a group of people.

From the lone suicide bomber,

            to the so-called just war,

acts of violence find their ultimate origin in evil,

            as people idolise dogma and the Legions march once again.

So, Jesus meets the man with the Legion of demons,

            and the man starts shouting at Jesus,

Mk. 5.7 

"What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God?

I adjure you by God, do not torment me."

In an earlier sermon in our series on Mark,

            I suggested that the reason Jesus kept silencing the demons who tried to name him

            was because he didn’t want to accept titles

                        that would align him with the Jewish system of purity legislation.

If part of Jesus’ strategy for bringing healing and wholeness to the land and the people,

            was the casting out of the evils of exclusion,

                        and by declaring to be clean that which was previously considered unclean,

            the demonic attempt to name Jesus as just another preacher of righteousness,

                        was always an attempt to rob him of his power,

            because it aligned him with a religious system

                        that had already demonstrated its failure

            to bring good news to those excluded, suffering, and marginalised.

So Jesus commands the demon to leave the man,

            asking him to give his name.

The demon then replies using both military and geographical language:

Mk. 5.9-10 He replied, "My name is Legion; for we are many."

And the Demon begged Jesus earnestly not to send them out of the country.

At which point Jesus cast the legion of demons

            into a conveniently legion-sized herd of pigs,

which promptly rush into the sea and drown,

            returning the demonic legion to the waters of chaos.

And those of us who have a concern for animal welfare,

            might well, at this point, be somewhat miffed with Jesus

            for solving the problem by killing two thousand pigs.

It’s not easy to explain,

            and I don’t really think from a contemporary perspective it can be justified,

but there is a possibility that it may be understood….

From a Jewish purity law perspective,

            pigs were unclean animals.

They were not to be touched, or eaten.

But of course, we’re not in a Jewish area,

            or at least, not entirely.

We’re in the compromised land, remember, not the promised land.

Here, people keep pigs,

            in quite large number it would seem.

The Jewish and Gentile population of the Decapolis

            was multi-cultural as well as multi-ethnic,

they were people who lived in the grey-area of compromise:

            ‘You like bacon? Have bacon!’

            ‘You don’t want bacon? Don’t have bacon!’

You get the idea.

            It’s not exactly modern metropolitan liberalism,

            but it’s a step in our direction.

But from a Jewish perspective,

            and of course Mark’s readership would have been predominantly Jewish,

this is the perfect end to the story:

            the unclean pigs get their comeuppance,

and there’s a not-so-subtle joke about Legionaries being pigs.

We think that insulting the police in this way is relatively modern,

            but people have been doing it for millennia.

Anyway, the man is now in his right mind,

            the possession is ended.

But the locals don’t seem very happy.

The local population now beg Jesus to leave,

            primarily because he’s just killed their pigs!

You can see their point.

            From their perspective, the compromised land is just fine,

                        and the last thing they need is some Jewish ‘purity prophet’

                        coming along with miraculous powers,

            killing their unclean herds

                        and challenging who knows what else lucrative practices!

They don’t want a radical reformation,

            they don’t want some religio-political revolution.

They just want to be left alone.

And so they plead with Jesus,

            begging him to leave their neighbourhood.

They don’t want the legions gone,

            they want Jesus gone.

They are comfortable with their compromises,

            they have learned to survive under oppression,

            and some of them are even doing very well from the resident Legions.

The reason the man had not been healed before

            was because of the dysfunctional co-dependency that had been reached,

            between his suffering and the local economy.

He had become for them their convenient scape-goat,

            the weird man in the tombs, who was both scary and useful

            they bogeyman to keep the kids in check,

                        and the person to blame when things went wrong.

But they didn’t want him gone,

            any more than they wanted the legions out of their land,

because just as they could scapegoat the man among the tombs,

            so they could blame the occupying forces

            for things that they felt were beyond their control.

There is a strange resistance to freedom,

            where those who have been oppressed for so long

            are scared when the opportunity to be and live differently presents itself.

The locals haven’t grasped that the casting out of Legion

            is good news not just for the man,

but for everyone,

            Jew and Gentile alike.

And this is at the heart of what Mark is trying to tell us

            about the nature and ministry of Jesus.

Jesus, as we are discovering, isn’t just another first-century Jewish purity-prophet,

            he hasn’t embarked on a mission to reinforce the boundary between ‘in’ and ‘out’,

            or to declare people ‘unclean’ and worthy of punishment.

Rather, he is playing a much deeper and more dangerous game,

            by challenging the very ideologies of exclusion

that create the context for people being possessed and declared unclean in the first place.

So at the end of the story Jesus doesn’t silence the man,

            rather he sends him to tell everyone about the mercy God has shown him.

This man doesn’t need to be kept quiet,

            because his testimony is to the way Jesus has healed him,

            by going beyond the boundaries of national identity and religious purity,

            and by challenging the demonic powers that dominate and possess the land.

This is a revelation of God in Jesus,

            who goes where he is not even sought,

            to bring peace to those who don’t even recognise it as a desirable objective.

And so how do we hear this story in our world?

            Where are the powers of enshrined violence to be found?

            Where are the demons that Jesus would cast out?

Let’s name a few,

            but there are many more, because their names are Legion.

Racism is a demon.

            Poverty is a demon,

Powerlessness is a demon,

            Homophobia and Transphobia are demons,

Oppression is a demon,

            Disempowerment is a demon,

Hatred is a demon,

            Self-righteousness is a demon,

War is always a demon,

            Any ideology that ends in ‘ism’ can become a demon,

Lack of hospitality is a demon,

            Denying the image of God in another is a demon.

And I could go on, and on, and on….

            but I’ll leave each of us to write our own lists.

And as we do,

            looking deep in our hearts to the darkness that lies within,

sometimes, we may discover that we do not want our demons gone,

            because we have got used to them,

            or because we have developed dysfunctional co-dependencies with them.

But the casting out of evil is always, in the end, good news,

            because how else are we to be fully human before God?

On the Relationship Between Healing and Forgiveness

Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

12 January 2020

Mark 2.1-12; 18-22

Listen to the sermon here:

https://soundcloud.com/bloomsbury-1/on-healing-and-forgiveness

I’d like to start this morning

            by setting out clearly a couple of things that I don’t believe,

            before coming on to some things that I think I do believe.

Firstly, I don’t believe that sin causes disability.

Some of you have heard me speak previously about my wonderful grandfather,

            he was a powerful influence on me when I was growing up,

                        and in many, many ways modelled the kind of human being

                        that I would aspire to be.

He was also a convinced atheist.

            The thing is, he had been brought up as a Christian Scientist.

I don’t know if you’ve come across the Christian Science movement,

            and as with many religious groups

            these days it is in something of a decline,

but you can still visit Christian Science reading rooms in many towns,

            and there’s one not far from here up at King’s Cross.

Christian Science originated in the States in the late 19^th Century,

            when Mary Baker Eddy published the book Science and Health,

in which she argued that sickness is an illusion

            that can be corrected by prayer alone.

Mary Baker Eddy described Christian Science as a return

            to what she called, ‘primitive Christianity and its lost element of healing’.

And whilst there are some superficial similarities

            with the more mainstream Pentecostal traditions

            of praying for physical healing,

there are also some significant differences.

Christian Scientists believe that reality is purely spiritual

            and that the material world is an illusion,

which means that, for them, disease and disability are mental errors

            rather than physical disorders,

and that the sick should be treated not by medicine

            but by a form of prayer that seeks to correct

            the beliefs responsible for the illusion of ill health.

Those of you who know your classical philosophy,

            or who have been watching The Good Place on Netflix,

will recognise echoes here of Platonic Dualism,

            which has dogged Christianity for the last two thousand years,

                        dividing our spiritual selves from our physical selves

                        to no-one’s real benefit.

What Christian Science boiled down to at a practical level, for my Grandfather,

            was an argument over a tooth abscess.

He was about 14, and needed to go to a dentist because of the pain he was in.

            His mother refused, and told him that he must devote himself instead

                        to prayer for forgiveness for whatever spiritual sin it was

                                    that had crept into his life,

                        and was causing the painful illusion of toothache.

            Well, he was 14, and we can all guess what thoughts had recently crept into his life

                        that he might be concerned were sinful.

Eventually, after six months of physical, sexual, and spiritual torment,

            his father relented and took him to the dentist to have the tooth removed.

Quite reasonably, I think, my grandfather rejected religion at this point;

            I would probably have done the same,

                        and I am grateful that I was brought up in a less abusive religious tradition.

So, my first point:

            I don’t believe that sin causes sickness and disability.

However, you could be forgiven (so to speak) for thinking that Jesus did,

            on the basis of our first reading this morning from Mark’s gospel.

I remember learning this story in Sunday School,

            colouring in drawings of the man being lowered down

                        by his friends through the roof of the house,

            having his sins forgiven, and then standing up,

                        taking up his mat, and walking out.

I remember learning lessons about the power of friendship,

            the importance of forgiveness,

            and how the unfortunate man could never have got to Jesus on his own.

But I don’t remember anyone ever addressing the question

            of what was going on here in terms of the link

            between forgiveness and physical healing.

Which brings me to the second thing I don’t believe:

            I don’t believe that we should set up expectations of physical healing

            for those who come to church or to Jesus.

Another story:

About a year ago, when I was on Sabbatical,

            I attended church with a friend.

It was one of those places where you sing enthusiastically for 40 minutes,

            then have a 40 minute ‘sermon’,

            and then sing again for another half an hour

                        whilst people pray for those who have come forwards for ministry.

The preacher had been speaking about healing,

            and how God wants to heal everyone of whatever is wrong with them.

The sermon then went what I can only describe as ‘slightly off-piste’

            and said that God specifically wanted to bring physical wholeness

                        to those who had had injuries and operations

                        that had left them with metal in their bodies - pins, plates, and so on –

            because these are unnatural and need removing.

The preacher claimed to have been present at a healing gathering

            where he had seen people experience

            the miraculous removal of metal from their bodies.

The prayer ministry at the end was an invitation

            for those who had such metal to come forwards and receive prayer for its removal.

At one level this is laughable nonsense,

            but we should note that this was a well-attended mainstream church,

                        with an educated and intelligent congregation,

                        some of whom went up for prayer for healing.

I’m afraid my mind started wondering what would happen

            if someone with an artificial hip or heart valve went up

            and it suddenly vanished!

Anyway, the serious point I want to make

            is that this is abusive religion, because it sets people up for failure.

If, as my grandfather discovered,

            you faithfully yearn and pray for healing that doesn’t happen,

there is a good chance that you will feel very let down

            by God and by God’s people.

So, I don’t believe that we should set up expectations of physical healing

            for those who come to church or to Jesus.

In the light of which, what are we to make of the paralysed man,

            lowered through the roof,

                        who receives forgiveness for his sins, and healing for his paralysis?

Well, the golden rule for biblical studies is always consider the context,

            and we need to remember that Jesus lived in a world

                        where people didn’t have access to a scientific understanding

                        of disease or disability.

            They didn’t understand genetics and the processes of heritability;

                        and they didn’t understand about bacterial infections, or virus transmission.

So, in one way, as twenty first century readers of this ancient story of Jesus,

            we’re at a profound advantage

            in terms of our understanding of the mechanisms of disease and disability.

However, there is an area where I think the first century Jewish worldview

            was way ahead of us.

I mentioned earlier the influence of Platonic Dualism on Christianity,

            of how it invites us to divide the physical from the spiritual,

                        to see the body as a cradle for the soul,

                        or the mind as the master over matter.

Well, here’s the thing - this dualism, this separation,

            is alien to the Hebrew mind-set.

To read Jesus as healing the man’s paralysis

            through the mechanism of forgiving his sins

is to impose a dualistic perspective

            on actions that are not dualistic, but holistic.

Jesus wasn’t enacting a kind of early Christian Science approach

            where the physical ailment was mechanistically resolved by addressing spiritual sin.

Rather, he looked at the man and saw him as a holistic being,

            mind-body-soul in unity rather than in division,

and he recognised that the man on the mat, as with all of us,

            had multi-dimensional needs.

To have simply healed his paralysis with a wave of the hand

            would have been to do only half the job;

this man needed wholeness in every area of his life,

            from the physical to the spiritual to the relational.

And in publicly forgiving him his sins,

            Jesus was acting to restore the man to right relations with society

            by healing not just his body, but his relationships.

I think there is an important key here in the words of the Lord’s prayer,

            where Jesus instructs his disciples to pray,

            ‘Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us’.

The Scribes might have accused Jesus of blasphemy

            for daring to offer forgiveness of sins,

but in their anger they missed the point of his doing so,

            which was that forgiveness that starts with God to the individual,

            finds its fulfilment in the forgiveness that restores people

                        to right relationship with each other.

This, then, is the context in which the man takes up his bed and walks;

            he has been healed holistically, rather than physically;

            it is forgiveness and restoration which creates the environment for his enabling.

In terms of what we might take from this

            for our own understanding of forgiveness, healing, and prayer,

            there are a couple of key points I’d like to draw out.

Firstly, I think that Jesus was enacting here

            something akin to what we might today call the social model of disability.

This is a way of viewing the world developed by disabled people,

            and in a nutshell says that people are disabled by barriers in society,

            not by their personal impairment or physical difference.[1]

So, for example, a person whose legs don’t work

            is disabled not by their impairment,

                        but by the physical barriers in the world

                        which prevent them from getting around.

If they have access to a wheelchair, suitable ramps, lifts, and toilets,

            they still have the impairment of non-functioning legs,

            but that impairment doesn’t disable them.

This means that the healing of the disability

            is something that is the responsibility of the community,

            rather than the individual.

It is social, not personal.

SCOPE, the disability equality charity says,

‘Barriers can be physical, like buildings not having accessible toilets.

            Or they can be caused by people's attitudes to difference,

                        like assuming disabled people can't do certain things.

The social model helps us recognise barriers that make life harder for disabled people.

            Removing these barriers creates equality and offers disabled people

            more independence, choice and control.’[2]

I’m aware that not all people who live with disability find the Social Model helpful,

            and there are other ways of framing the dialogue between society and impairment.

However, when I look at the story of Jesus encountering the paralysed man,

            it is I think very profound that Jesus doesn’t simply resolve the physical impairment,

but rather starts with a holistic approach

            which restores the man to right relationship with God and with others,

            to create the context within which his disability can be addressed.

We need to keep remembering that the world of the first-century

            was very different to ours,

            particularly on attitudes towards disability and illness.

A paralysed man would have been an outcast in his society,

            unable to work, judged as sinful by others,

            prevented from accessing the temple or the synagogues for worship,

            quite possibly ostracised from his family.

And I think there is something profound that we can learn

            from Jesus’ encounter with this man,

which addressed first his relationship to society,

            as a prerequisite to addressing his disability.

I think that if, as a church, we are to talk about healing

            in a meaningful and non-abusive way,

we have to stop fixating on the part of the story

            where the man picks up his mat and walks off.

I’m not going today to get into the big discussion about, ‘yes, but did it happen?’,

            because I don’t think that’s the point of the story.

The point, as Mark tells it very clearly, is not that Jesus can heal,

            but that Jesus can forgive sins.

This is the crucial aspect that we need to grasp here.

Jesus is bringing into being a new world,

            where the old rules of sin and suffering are torn up.

The scribes, as always in Mark’s gospel,

            are locked into their worldview of mechanistic legalism,

declaring Jesus a blasphemer

            for doing what they say only God should do,

and consequently declaring the man still unforgiven;

            while missing the point entirely that Jesus is bringing a new world order into being,

                        where forgiveness and restored relationships

                        are now available to everyone,

            inaugurating a new community based on inclusion rather than exclusion.

Last week I argued that Mark’s story of Jesus healing the man with the skin condition,

            was less about the condition itself,

                        and more about reversing the exclusion he suffered

                        at the hands of a society that declared his condition ‘unclean’.

Well, this week the story of the man let down through the roof on his mat

            is told by Mark as another example of this new world,

                        where everyone has access to the forgiveness and restoration

                        that Jesus is offering.

That which was previously unclean is declared clean,

            that which was previously unforgivable is declared forgiven.

Outsiders become insiders,

            and those who were once the guardians of the border between ‘in’ and ‘out’

            find their power to exclude torn away from them.

One of the implications of this new world

            is that it affects the way we view and understand forgiveness.

Too often churches have focussed on eliciting personal forgiveness for personal sins,

            a bit like my poor grandfather being told to seek forgiveness for being a teenager.

Dare I say that this is not what Jesus has in mind when he speaks of forgiveness?

            Or at least, it isn’t the whole story of what he offers

                        when he pronounces forgiveness.

Rather, he has in mind the creation of a new community

            of right and restored relationships,

where forgiveness is both given and received by those who are part of it,

            as the natural outworking of the forgiveness they have received from God;

and this new community is the context for holistic healing to occur.

It is through the transformation of community and relationships

            that disability is removed.

Those church traditions which have overly focussed

            on personal morality and individual salvation

            frequently miss this communal aspect.

Simply telling individuals that they must repent of their personal sins

            to be acceptable to God and God’s people

is a distortion of the forgiveness that should be shaping us together

            into communities of love, restoration, transformation and wholeness.

But still the scribes, both ancient and modern, don’t get it,

            they can’t see the benefit of this new world that Jesus is inaugurating,

                        this new ‘kingdom’ as Mark calls it,

            which is as different to the old way of doing things

                        as day is different from night.

And so they oppose it,

            challenging Jesus and those who follow after him,

            whenever we proclaim the radical, communal, universal,

                        transformative, healing power of forgiveness.

Our journey through Mark has already given us glimpses

            of the disruptive nature of who Jesus is, and what he does;

starting with his baptism in the river Jordan

            when the heavens were torn open

                        and the Spirit descended on him in the form of a dove,

            with a voice from heaven declaring him to be God’s son.

This language of the ‘ripping apart’ of the heavens

            is echoed in the two little parables

                        that we heard towards the end of our reading this morning,

            about new wine in old wineskins, and new cloth on old cloth.

‘No-one sews a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old cloak,

            otherwise the patch pulls away from it, the new from the old,

            and a worse tear is made.’

The word ‘tear’ here is the same word Mark used

            to describe the heavens being torn open at the baptism of Jesus.

And the lesson here, is the same as it was at the baptism,

            which is that Jesus is disruptive of the way things are,

                        he is doing something new which is incompatible with what was.

The world of the sceptical scribes,

            built on rules and boundaries,

            and on exclusion and power,

is coming to an end.

Similarly, says Jesus, the new wine of the kingdom of God

            will burst any old wineskin that tries to contain it, tearing it apart.

Religious systems built on definitions of who’s in, and who’s out;

            who’s clean, and who’s unclean;

            who’s forgiven, and who’s unforgiven,

are incompatible with the radical grace of the Kingdom of God

            that breaks into the world in the life and ministry of Jesus.

The scribes had lost,

            because their system of mechanistic religion

            could no longer contain God.

But the people rejoiced,

            because here was God coming to them in Jesus to offer forgiveness,

            to rebuild society, to transform relationships,

            and to bring healing and wholeness to those cast aside.

And this is the gospel that we have inherited.

Churches have a depressing tendency towards institutionalism,

            we become scribes and write things down,

                        defining God with ever more constrictive formulations,

            and the Spirit of Jesus is always working to tear that apart,

                        with acts of inclusion and mercy and grace and forgiveness.

Last year, as part of our Inclusive Church series,

            my old college friend Glen Graham preached here on disability inclusion,

and Glen, who is blind, said

            "We must include everybody, there is no opt out clause...

            because we are being shaped into the likeness of Christ's body".

We are the body of Christ, and as such we are the community of Christ,

            we are the new kingdom which he proclaimed as coming into being.

We can, and should, be the place

            where this new society takes shape,

inviting the world to participate in the gospel of Christ

            which is good news for all people.

We are those who can proclaim forgiveness to one another,

            even as we are forgiven by God and by others.

We are those who can model healing and wholeness,

            where no impairment or characteristic is exclusionary or unclean.

This is why it matters so much that we, as God’s people in this place,

            take seriously what it means to see others brought to healing and wholeness,

and it is why we continue to offer our persistent challenge

            to a world still hell-bent on scapegoating and violence.

This why it matters that we take seriously our commitment

            to making our church accessible to all.

Whether this is physical adaptation of the building,

            to the way we structure ourselves communally.

This is why it matters that we work with others from different faith traditions and none,

            to bring transformation to society

            through our involvement in London Citizens.

If we are to be the people of Christ, our mandate, our manifesto,

            is to tear, to rip, the fabric of any society or institution

            that tries to contain the and constrain the new kingdom of Christ.

And it is all because we are ourselves declared absolutely forgiven,

            we know what it is to be declared unconditionally clean,

            we know what it is to be part of a community

                        of healing, restoration, and wholeness.

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[1] https://www.scope.org.uk/about-us/social-model-of-disability/

[2] https://www.scope.org.uk/about-us/social-model-of-disability/