Proper 21B: Esther 7:1-6, 9-10; 9:20-22
Psalm 124; James 5:13-20; Mark 9:38-50
The Rev'd Cameron Partridge
September 29, 2024
Good Morning, St. Aidan’s.
On a Saturday morning in April of 2013, I gathered at Church Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts with attendees of a conference organized by the Episcopal/Anglican Fellowship of Harvard Divinity School, a group I shepherded for several years in the 2010s. The conference theme that year was on the relationship of contemplation and action. We encouraged broad understanding of these terms. “Contemplation” could refer to meditative or “contemplative” prayer, as well as the life of study. Practice, in turn, could signal activism, liturgical piety, and indeed practices of prayer (as witnessed in today’s passage from the Letter of James). Practice should prompt reflection, we emphasized, and likewise contemplation should spur action, connected in an ongoing cycle. The generative energy and heart of that cycle, I argued in opening remarks, is love: love of God, love of neighbor, love of enemy. I drew on several early and medieval sources to draw this idea out. But a further, key aspect of this loving contemplative-active cycle, I argued, is our response to stumbling blocks, skandala in its Greek noun form and skandalizo in its verbal one. Painful as stumbling blocks in our lives can an often be, I wondered how such things – situations, people – might not sink us or draw us into a cycle of seeking the stumbling of others, but instead catalyze us for the cause of divine love, spurring us into spiritual growth and transformative action.
As it happened, the context for our conference was uniquely challenging. The Boston Marathon bombing had taken place earlier that week and the region had been placed on a lockdown as a search unfolded for the bombers.[1] We had planned to hold the conference at the divinity school as in previous years, but at the last minute we shifted to the church which was able to pivot more quickly when the shelter in place order was lifted. Indeed, earlier in the week we hadn’t been sure whether we should carry forward with our conference at all. We had decided in the end to move forward to open up space for reflection and community building in the wake of this tragedy, to contemplate it together as news from it continued to unfold. On that morning after the two bombing suspects had been found, as we reeled from the news, we had a chance to begin to reflect on various questions. How were we feeling in the wake of the bombings and the lockdown? How were we connected to all that was unfolding: the wounded, the responders, the brothers who had committed this terrifying crime? Where in the chaos of the week’s activity, could we discern the presence of God? How might the outpouring of divine love be drawing us to open ourselves to one another anew? How might that over which we were stumbling prompt us to stop and reflect, that we might open ourselves to the working of divine love as we responded? How might we avoid stumbling in response to this event thereby generating barriers to connection rather than the removal of such barriers?
This memory came to me as I contemplated today’s gospel reading, because of how prominently it features the role of stumbling blocks, or more specifically the practice of causing one to stumble. Our passage picks up from last week’s. Jesus is still sitting, talking to the gathered group with a child in his arms. He had just declared, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me” (Mark 9:37). As I shared last week, in Jesus’ context the child points not only to children but more broadly to those who are most vulnerable and most marginalized.[2] Such “little ones” are particularly to be welcomed, Jesus declared. Draw the circle wider, not more narrowly. Yet in the next moment one of his disciples warns him that someone had been casting out demons in his name, and that he had tried to stop this person to no avail. In response, Jesus returns to the widening of the circle: whoever is not against us is for us (Mk 9:38-40). Do not put up barriers to those who would join our efforts, even if they are not here “following us,” as the disciple had described.[3] The “we” or “us” is broader than you think. Furthermore, you yourself may be in a position of marginality, needing a cup of water to drink. Someone may offer you a cup because you “bear the name of Christ,” an action for which to be grateful indeed. As Jesus turns from this emphasis on widening the circle, pushing back against the impulse toward foreclosure, the stumbling theme comes to the fore.
Jesus utters a very strong statement about protecting those he terms “little ones who believe” (the “in me” is not in the Greek—our translation reads that as implied). Do not actively cause those who are most marginalized to stumble. Do not push them away. When you cast such a one out, it is as if you are doing that to yourself, we might read Jesus’ dramatic millstone image as saying. He then turns and invites the gathered group to look inward, to ask what causes them to stumble, what scandalizes them. The image of the body becomes a provocatively concrete way to examine this stumbling dynamic. If we bring Mark’s image into conversation with the Pauline language of the collective body, we might consider Jesus’s words as an invitation to consider what creates internal barriers to our functioning as Christ’s body in the world.[4] What keeps us from bearing forth the love of God in a world full of oppression, pain, and hatred? What provocations, what hurts, what deep offenses does the world also throw our way – including far too often in the name of a foreclosing, hateful form of Christianity – grieving us as we seek to answer with our lives the call of the One who sends us to share what our outgoing Presiding Bishop Michael Curry has emphasized as God’s way of love?[5] As just one example, I think of a horrific use in Oklahoma legislation of language from our very passage (or its Matthean parallel), initially entitled “the Millstone Act,” that seeks to prevent access to gender affirming care for any trans person under the age of twenty-six.[6] Such efforts across our country deeply offend and hurt me and my family, and I know that we are far from alone in that hurt. As I react to such examples in our world, I find myself wondering: how might we respond to such offenses in a way that refuses to cede the framing of Christian practice and theology to such efforts? How might we instead stop and seek grounding, actively pray, reflect, critically analyze, and connect among fellow Christians and across faith lines in practices not of casting out, not of counter-stumbling causation, but of resistance and transformation? Our author event with Nico Lang two weeks from today seeks in its own small way to contribute to such life affirming efforts.[7]
Jesus closes our passage with words of salt and of fire. “Everyone will be salted with fire,” he says (Mark 9:49). Salt preserves. In the right amount, salt brings out the distinctiveness of flavor. It livens the seasoning of its palette, as the phrase “salt of the earth” can suggest, illumining the hope and possibility present within that world, as the further associated phrase “light of the world” evokes (Matthew 5:13-14). Fire is cleansing.[8] It can be a sign of the stirring, transformative presence of the Holy Spirit, something we particularly celebrate here at St. Aidan’s. Thus, to be salted with fire is to be authentically and transformatively present in the world, lending our lives, our hearts, our loves to the infinitely wide, sustaining love of God. The God who, as Maximus the Confessor wrote in his letter to John the Cubicularius on Love, “made nature and wisely healed it when it was sick… through [God’s] love towards us [in Jesus Christ]… by bringing about union with God and of human beings with one another. God renewed the power of love…”[9] How might we participate in that renewed power of love? How might we bear forth such union as Maximus describes, such love in a time when so much in our world seeks to divide, to create barriers, to foster hatred? I believe our call is to recognize that which causes us to stumble. And when we see it, to name it as such, and to seek to interrupt that pattern. To pause, to reflect critically, analytically, strategically, and compassionately. To reconnect with one another and the wider “we,” redirecting the power that would divide us and instead to seek transformation, transformation that connects.
To be salted with fire is indeed to be preserved, to have flavor. But it is also to be transformed, in body as well as spirit, in action and in contemplation. And so my prayer for us today is to be grounded in the Spirit who sends us out into the world to be agents of divine peace and justice, that we might be actors who reflect, whose prayer generates our practice, and whose practice and experience causes us to reflect together. May we connect with one another and be transformed by the God who calls forth the healing of the whole creation. May we be salted with fire, people of deep, abiding peace.
[1] A summary of the attack and its aftermath can be found here: https://www.britannica.com/event/Boston-Marathon-bombing-of-2013
[2] William C. Placher, Mark: A Theological Commentary (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), 134-135.
[3] Placher, 136
[4] Paul’s language of the collective body of Christ can be found in a number of places, including 1 Corinthians 12:27 and Romans 12:4-5. Ephesians 4:1-16 is another example.
[5] Michael Curry, Love is the Way: Holding on to Hope in Troubling Times (Avery, 2020). This vision as made programmatically available to the wider Episcopal Church can be found here: https://www.episcopalchurch.org/way-of-love/
[6] Colby Gordon references this egregious example in Glorious Bodies: Trans Theology and Renaissance Literature (University of Chicago Press, 2024), 169. The Oklahoma “Millstone Act” was SB 129. A description quoting its author can be found here: https://oksenate.gov/press-releases/bullard-files-bill-prohibiting-genital-mutilation-youth-under-26#:~:text=OKLAHOMA%20CITY%20%2D%20Sen.,under%20the%20age%20of%2026.
[7] Nico Lang is the author of American Teenager: How Trans Youth Are Surviving Hate and Finding Joy in a Turbulent Era (Abrams Press, 2024)
[8] Adela Yarbro Collins, Mark: A Commentary (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007), 454-455.
[9] Maximus the Confessor, “Letter 2: On Love” trans. by Andrew Louth, Maximus the Confessor (New York: Routledge, 1996), 87-88.
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