UCC Church of Charlotte

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Words, Words, Words
Psalm 19:7-14
Mark 9:38-50

Grace and Peace to you this morning.  Grace and Peace.
   
Anyone here feel overwhelmed?  Perhaps it is easier to ask, anyone
here not feel overwhelmed?

The Gospel is really for overwhelmed people.

Jesus is surrounded by overwhelmed people.  The people of Israel are
overwhelmed.  The poor and the sick and the possessed are overwhelmed.
Even the disciples are scrambling, just trying to keep up.  Every
time they get closer, Jesus just keeps going farther on ahead.
   
John thinks he finally has a handle on this faith thing.  He checks in
with Jesus and lets him know what they have been up to:

Teacher, we saw a man casting out demons in your name,
and we forbade him, because he was not following us.
   
Jesus tells John that this can't be too bad of a thing; someone
outside of the apostles doing what Jesus wants done.  It is hard
enough to keep from getting distracted by the world, to continue to
see the Spirit at work, much less that it doesn't work only the way we
want it to.
   
Elsewhere in the Bible and in life we hear "whoever isn't for us is
against us."  That is the cry of the overwhelmed.  Here Jesus says,
"Whoever isn't against us is for us."  And he warns them not to put
stumbling blocks in front of people growing into the faith.
   
Then Jesus goes further:

If your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out.

To us, this is gross.  To them, this is gross, but it is also
religiously repugnant.  They aren't supposed to let people with
deformities into the covenant, much less the Temple.  Here Jesus is
saying if some part of their body causes them to sin, get rid of it.

I believe he is trying to shock them out of their usual way of seeing
the world.  He is saying, do not be a stumbling block to others, do
not mess up someone else's relationship with God and with their
neighbor.  Check yourself.  Deal with your own stuff first.
   
It requires a different way of seeing the world than looking through
our overwhelmed eyes, encountering it with our overwhelmed hearts.
   
In a recent article about U.S. troops training the Afghan army to talk
with civilians, they ran across a perplexing problem.  They were
trying to teach how to show non-aggression, confidence and reassurance
through body language.  The problem is that the Afghan language has no
word for "body language."  How do you describe something which we take
for granted, but for which their language has no word?  They needed a
new way of seeing things.
   
English is a scientific language.  Our language split the atom long
before Einstein did.  We can box, pigeonhole, compartmentalize,
bisect, trisect and dissect, distinguish, label, differentiate and
otherwise separate all of life into categories.
   
There are good and useful reasons for this.  I want my doctor to be
very clear what is my gall bladder and what is my spleen, what each
does, and where they are located.

We are a technological society, and our technologies require such distinctions.
   
The problem comes when we assume that the language of scripture works
the same way modern English does.

The law of the LORD is perfect, reviving the soul;
   
For many of us, we read this to say that the rules God has laid out
help us spiritually.  Not a bad translation; it isn't wrong.  But it
isn't complete.  And when we are overwhelmed, it seems even less
helpful.  We start to get all sorts of judgmental on our neighbors,
like John did.

There are three words here that it would be helpful to know some
Hebrew to understand.  The first is Torah, here translated as 'law.'
In the Jewish translation of this passage into English, it is not law,
but teaching.  Basically, Torah means any authoritative teaching or
instruction or correction, such as done by a parent, a mentor, a
teacher, or by God.
When the Old Testament scrolls were bound together into what we have
now, Torah came to mean the first five books   Genesis, Exodus,
Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy   containing the stories of
creation, the stories of the covenants, the Ten Commandments, the many
laws and statutes and interpretations by Moses.
   
So we have the idea of law, of teachings, and of the first five books
of the Bible, all in the same word.  But we are just scratching the
surface.  English often tries to have a one to one relationship
between words and ideas.  Hebrew just keeps adding layers and layers
of meaning.
   
Walter Brueggemann says it this way: at its most expansive, Torah
means the entire lore of God giving God's self to Israel, and so to
the world.  So the word here translated here as "law" really means all
of the commandments, all of the stories, all of the relationships, all
of the covenant that describes God placing God's self in relationship
to all of humanity, first to Israel, as a blessing to the world.
   
What about "perfect?"  Perfect means all sorts of things.  How was
your steak?  Perfect.  (There are all sorts of perfect for that one,
whether you like your steak barely run across the flame on both sides,
or you prefer it where you could easily sew the rest of the boot onto
it.)  Did you see that putt?  He read the green perfectly.
   
When perfect is used in the Bible, it can mean 'without blemish,' such
as the lamb sacrificed at the Temple.  But it also means pervasive,
comprehensive, enough, sufficient.  There is enough here, in the
covenant of God, to revive the soul.  God's giving of God's self is
sufficient to meet all our needs.
   
So what about "soul?"

The Hebrew word is nephesh, sometimes translated as soul, sometimes as
life.  Christianity, following Greek philosophy and western medicine,
often splits the self into a body, this physical thing with aches and
pains and illness and lusts and hungers and other problems, and a
soul, something invisible and somehow permanent, eternal, going on
after we shuffle off this mortal coil.  That is a much later idea.
The word nephesh is much older, and much more integrated.  Nephesh
means the whole self   body, mind and spirit; the physical and the
invisible parts of who we are; our social selves   who we are in
relationship to our family and friends and community.

This makes a difference for overwhelmed and troubled people.  When we
are overwhelmed, we carry our trouble in our bodies and our minds and
our connections to one another, don't we?  Our heart races, our gut
knots up, our muscles tighten, our vision narrows, our thinking locks
up, our relationships suffer.

How often do we figure out that we are overwhelmed only after some
part of our body has gone out of whack?

How often do we keep going for so long that when we finally do stop,
we just fall apart?

How often does it take someone else telling us they see a change in us
before we can admit it to ourselves?

The law of the LORD is perfect, reviving the soul

That is a good way to say it when we are praising God in
acknowledgement of the bounty of God and the goodness of God.  But
when we are overwhelmed and we need to leave Pharaoh's brickyard again
and seek God's goodness in the wilderness again, and try and find a
livable place in God's promises again, we need a better understanding.
   
The Torah of God is encompassing enough to heal and revive our Nephesh.
   
God's giving of God's self, known best to us in Jesus, is enough to
see us through our wilderness, to let our whole being live.
   
And when we are overwhelmed, let us come together and call upon God,
and remember who we are, to whom we belong, in whose image we are
made.  And let us remember that the one who created the universe, the
God who created us, has given God's self to be in relationship with
us.
   
And let us be revived.
   
Thanks be to God.
Amen.