Mark 1:21-28
January 29, 2012
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
Two weeks ago, I attended a pastors’ retreat at San Damiano in Danville where many of you have been on past retreats. Perched on the top of a hill from downtown Danville, this adult center is for prayer and meditation. The theme was “Creating a Sabbath Lifestyle.” When pastors have a healthy lifestyle, the belief is that the congregation would also be healthy. We experienced what it means to have a Sabbath—a time to rest, a way for wholeness, and learning the rhythm and regularity of Sabbath keeping. I learned that there are four elements of Sabbath keeping: ceasing, resting, embracing, and feasting. We all agree that we liked the feasting part. In the Hebrew, the word Sabbath means to exhale. Let’s just exhale.
When we come to church on Sunday, we have endured a whole week of challenges and problems. We are tired. On Saturday night and even sometimes I check my cell phone on Sunday morning to see if there were prayer concerns that I might need to share with you at worship. By the time we come to church, we have had a friend or relative diagnosed with cancer, someone’s son has lost his job, your car broke down and who knows how much the repair bill might be, and your bills are piling up and you’re waiting for the next paycheck. You couldn’t wait for the weekend to come and come to worship where the noise of the world is left outside.
You come to church on Sunday seeking some well-needed consolation. You need an anchor in the middle of the storm. You need a quiet, reassuring place like San Damiano where they bake great chocolate chip cookies for you in the worst sort of way.
But then I stand up here behind this mighty pulpit and start preaching about how we haven’t done enough with our discipleship or how we have half-hearted commitments. You came to rest and have a quiet Sabbath but I end up shouting at you on how many ways you have come up short. Last year, I scolded you that you didn’t know your neighbors. This year, I’m reeling into you that the harvest is plentiful but you who are the workers are few.
You are sitting in your pew saying, “Why on earth did I come to church this morning? The pastor is so insensitive to what I have gone through this past week.” You want to experience what I did at my pastors’ retreat at San Damiano.
“Why did I come to church?” you say. “Why can’t the pastor just lull me to nap like he always does?” You came to church not to hear what the pastor has to say; you came to be with Jesus.
Synagogue
Coming to church is not where we come to get what we want from God even if we have had an extraordinarily bad week. Church is where God gets what God wants out of us!
In our text for this morning, our first sight of Jesus in action in Mark’s Gospel is at a Sabbath service in a synagogue in Capernaum. Jesus was a faithful Jew. The Sabbath is not only the day when Jews do not work; it is primarily the day that Jews set aside to be with God; to give themselves fully to God who has so fully given himself to them. The Sabbath is when all faithful Jews gather in the synagogue and submit to God’s word.
Well, no sooner than the Sabbath service begins than a poor, deeply disturbed man cries out. The demon that torments him begins screaming at Jesus. This unclean spirit challenges Jesus’ authority but tells the truth that Jesus is the Holy One of God.
The worshipers came to the synagogue after a long week of working, following the Mosaic laws, under the persecution of the Roman occupiers to get some comfort. But their Sabbath day in the synagogue was disrupted and disturbed. There was a raucous and everyone was startled.
Jesus commands the demon to be still. And the interrupted Sabbath service continues, but the congregation is now badly shaken.
Welcome to the church with Jesus! If something like this were to happen at our church, we would be so shaken up that the Deacons would call an emergency meeting, we might station guards at the back doors, we would be talking about this for a long time. We might be so nervous that it could happen again that we might be afraid to come to worship.
We come to church and we settle in for Sabbath, neatly seated rows of pews, every pew bolted down, a printed order of worship, just like last Sunday and the Sunday before that, everything proceeding so decently and in order.
And then, Jesus shows up. And Jesus makes a scene. We might say, “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God.” Then Jesus standing maybe right here might say, “Be silent, and come out of him!” When we want Jesus to meet us at worship, this could happen. It did happen in Capernaum.
Worship is the center of the church not only because this is where most people enter our church but also Sunday worship is where most of us find out who God in Jesus Christ is and what God is up to.
Christian worship is sometimes wild and unpredictable, not because the worship planning committee or the choir or I am trying to keep us on our toes, but because true worship is coming face to face with the living God who is Jesus. Church is where God gets what God wants out of us!
Sometimes I fear that the church is guilty of false advertising. We urge people to come to church, encouraging them on the basis of some good other than the good of simply being with God who loves and is therefore loved. Remember the old advertising slogan, “The family that prays together stays together” as if family unity is the purpose of Christian prayer. Many of our parents of young children like to come to our church because we boast that we have the best Christian education program with Day Camp and Youth Camp in the entire city advertising the point that when kids grow up at our church, they end up being good people.
When we come down to it, the purpose of coming to church is not only to receive comfort for a bad week, not only to build up healthy families, the purpose of coming to church is to be with God who seems determined to be with us, no matter what. Remember, church is where God gets what God wants out of us!
Sometimes being with God is a pleasant experience; sometimes not. But our purpose of reading the scriptures, in laying ourselves open to God in prayer, in singing the hymns, in listening to the sermons is not for our pleasure and is not for my ego needs; it’s to be with God.
Jesus’ Authority
As today’s scripture reveals, when Jesus shows up for the Sabbath, things can get surprising and sometimes disturbing and wild. Mark said that when Jesus was teaching, the people were astounded at his teaching, for he taught with authority. When the unclean spirit came out of the tormented man, the people were amazed and asked, “What is this? A new teaching—with authority!”
Living in a scientific age, we speak of the demons in the tormented man more as mental illness. In Jesus’ time, the belief was actual demons taking over a person’s body. But the reality of both understandings is the same—the unfortunate person is in bondage. He is not free and only outside intervention can set the person free.
The reason why our Sabbath can be wild and unpredictable is that Jesus Christ has the authority to set people free—to silence and cast out demons from us. While the worshipers were impressed over Jesus’ authority to teach, they were astounded by his authority over demons. Have we kept Jesus’ authority over our lives and over his church?
Martin Luther said, “When the word of God is rightly preached, demons are set loose.”
Some of you sitting here can testify that there are times when you have been here on a Sunday and your “demons” have been unleashed, that “demon” who whispers, “Wait a minute. This isn’t what I came here to hear. This is disturbing, even insulting. I’m not going to sit here and listen to this.”
Or another demon whispering in your heart saying, “What on earth does this have to do with me? How can I use any of this next week in my work?” Maybe you have a demon that tells you that everything we do in church is simply hocus pocus, silly, make-believe and fantasy but we do it anyway because it’s the expected thing to do.
Are these the demons that are working in you to resist God’s word for you today? Would you invite Jesus to have authority over your life as he has authority over this church? “A new teaching—with authority! He commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him.”
Closing the Gap
When I was a seminarian taking a course in preaching, I learned that the purpose of preaching is to take the gospel and make it relevant to the lives of the congregation. The preacher is the one who stands in the pulpit and attempts, in the sermon, to narrow the gap between you and God. Believe me, I know there have been many times that I have failed to close this gap.
But some of you can testify to the reality that even how hard and diligent I work on my sermon to make it relevant to you Sunday after Sunday, the gap between our ways and God’s way is wide indeed. God is not simply some extension of our ideas or someone who exists to fulfill our every want and need.
We come to worship on Sunday, not simply for peace, consolation, strength to go on, or any other human good. We come to worship first and foremost to be with the living God. True worship of a true and living God only begins when Jesus appears. And when he appears among us, his presence can be disruptive and surprising. When he appears among us, Jesus silences the demons. When Jesus comes to our worship, wild and life-giving miracles can happen. That’s what worshiping with Jesus is like.
This is perhaps one of the reasons why people don’t worship on Sundays—they know that to worship is to risk having your cherished prejudices, your beloved idols disrupted through meeting with the God you didn’t expect.
There’s a story of a white pastor who came to visit a Black pastor who just built a new church located in one of US’s dilapidated inner cities. The sanctuary was just dedicated and cost $2 million dollars. The Black pastor showed the white pastor the organ, the grand pulpit, the vast seating capacity. The white pastor was duly impressed.
At the end of the tour, the white pastor said, “Are you all bothered by the fact that your congregation has spent this much money, on this fine building, in the middle of the neighborhood where there is such terrible poverty?”
The Black pastor shook his head in some chagrin and some aggravation, smiling to himself at the question. “You white folk just can’t stand for people to have a good time, particularly if it’s black folk having a good time, he said. “This is more than a building. This place is a sermon. That sermon says, ‘If there’s ugliness, poverty, and despair around you, it’s not because God intended that way, Here, visibly before you, is what God intended. The world where you live is not the world as God created it to be. Come on inside here and discover what God meant for you.’ This church is free space where folk get a chance to stand up, to shout, to move. This church is a sign, a witness, an act of defiance against ugliness of the world as it is.”
When that black church comes to worship, their sanctuary space closes the gap between the world as it is and the world God intends. While our ways and God’s way is wide indeed, when the people in that black church celebrates the Sabbath, they know that when Jesus appears that’s when true worship begins.
Why do you think that we invested so much money to retrofit our church home or to clean up and spruce up our church building twice a year or to install new floor coverings on our main staircase and hallways? This little church building is the place where we have our Sabbath keeping. We want to be ready when Jesus appears among us.
Most of us think of Sunday worship as a time of quiet contemplation—a time of centering and serenity. We want to experience a Sabbath lifestyle like at San Damiano. And sometimes Sunday worship is exactly that way. But sometimes our plans for serenity are disrupted by Jesus because he is setting us free from our bondage
That day in Capernaum, the congregation experienced Sabbath with Jesus. Things quickly got out of their control. Strange, demonic forces were set loose. Jesus preached and rebuked the demons, and the congregation was astounded. Are you ready to worship God so that God can get what God wants from you?
By the grace of God, we are still astounded by Jesus’ authority.
Let us pray.
Lord Jesus, give us the grace to receive you as you are, rather than as we would demand that you would be. Come to us, Lord Jesus. Inspire us, disrupt us if that is your will, give us that which we need, rather than that which we desire. Restore to us the adventure of discipleship, the joy of service to a true and living God. Amen.