Who, Who Are You

Sermon by Rev. Steven McClelland on Mark 9: 38 – 50.   Focus on who we say we are?  Who defines us?  Who do we call Lord by our actions and thoughts?  Check out the Lidya Diaz and the Choir after the sermon!

“Well, Who are you? Who are you? I really wanna know.” Great Who song, but its an even better question. Take a moment to ponder that question and then ask yourself how would I answer that. How do you define yourself? By what you do? By your history & heritage? Or maybe a critical life experience or by your relationships or maybe some combination of the above?

Another way to get at this question might be to ask, who gets to tell you who you are? Who has the most influence in shaping your self-image? Is it your parents, your partner or spouse, your friends and colleagues? Or perhaps it’s the world of advertising, or maybe it’s the news media.

I ask these questions because I think Mark’s passage is very much about our identity.

Though perhaps not at first glance. At first glance the passage appears to be about Jesus admonishing his disciples to lighten up, to stop worrying about others who are following him but not traveling with him. “John said to (Jesus), ‘Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in Your name, and we tried to prevent him because he was not following us.’” (Mark 9: 38 – 50)

Scholars tell us that this particular section of Mark’s Gospel reflects some of the early church conflicts between the early Christian communities. The early church argued over Jesus’ divinity, his humanity, his teachings, which gospels should be included in our Bible and why different Christian traditions such as the Roman, the Protestant and the Greek Orthodox traditions have different books in their Bibles.

What Mark was trying to do was to help his congregation answer the question of who they were and whom they belonged to. He’s asking these questions: Will they define themselves over and against other Christians or will they discover their identity by simply following in the way, the truth and the life of Jesus!

Which brings me back to the question of identity and in particular, how seductive it is to try to determine who we are by whom we are against. Note the tone and tenor in the disciples’ statement: “Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he was not following us.”

It’s not an observation. It’s a complaint. It’s an accusation. Like saying: “Who do they think they are?” The disciples want Jesus to affirm them and their authority over and against others who are seeking to follow Jesus. The disciples, in other words, have decided who they are and have defined themselves over and against these other Jesus followers.

After all they see themselves as the leaders of this new, fledgling Jesus movement. More importantly they are among Jesus’ inner circle. They should be esteemed and revered – after all they are his chosen. These others should be deferring to them. We know this because in last week’s lesson Jesus was chiding James and John for wanting to be the greatest. But it seems that all this did was to encourage the original twelve to give up vying amongst themselves so that they could vie together to be the greatest over and against everyone else.

Which is why this identity question can be really, really hard to answer. We don’t come into this world knowing who we are, where we’ve come from, or where we’re going. It reminds me of the lyrics from the Doors’ “Riders on the Storm”:

Into this house we’re born. Into this world we’re thrown. 
Like a dog without a bone. 
 An actor out on loan. 
Riders on the storm. Or in Dylan’s lyrics How does it feel? To be without a home like a complete unknown like a rolling stone. With no direction home…

In this storm of uncertainty, we are often tempted to take matters into our own hands and address the question of identity on our own. Certainly there’s plenty of encouragement from the culture to do just that. We are encouraged relentlessly to define ourselves through our fears, and who we are against. Our fears of others who look and sound different. Our fears of not having enough – enough money, friends, family, stuff. We have nothing to fear but fear itself, but we are addicted to fear!

So the moment the disciples venture down this road they’ve doomed themselves to a sense of scarcity and fear where there is never “enough” – enough honor, enough integrity, enough faith, hope or love, and each and every person around them becomes their competitor and in time their enemy. The disciples have decided to go down this road to show us how great they are. But Mark’s Gospel uses it to show us how wrong they are.

There is no scarcity of opportunity to care for others, no lack of occasions to love our neighbor not to mention our enemies. As people follow Jesus, the ones who don’t call attention to themselves, they just get it and do it. As people do this then they discover how big life can become. How grand it can be.

There is a great line that Chris Kyle’s dad in the movie American Sniper, says to his sons. There are three kinds of people in the world – sheep, wolves and sheep dogs, those of us who call ourselves Christians should be sheep dogs. It’s our job to protect the least, the lost, the most vulnerable and advocate for those who have no power.

It’s not the easiest life to live, but the good news for the disciples and for us is that we have an Advocate who has shown us the way to be, who has and continues to tell us the truth, and who promises that his way of living and loving will lead not only to an abundance of life but to eternal life. Amen