Stephen
Baldwin
OT:
Psalm 8
NT:
Mark 10.2-16
I walked outside the choir door this
week just as the masons finished installing the columbarium. They said, “We finished your house!”
Startled, I didn’t say anything, not
knowing I if they were joking or threatening me.
So then one fellow spoke up and
said, “Nah, hopefully you won’t have to live here for a long time…but when you
do it’s a nice place!”
Facing our own mortality has a way
of putting things in perspective. And
I’m not just talking about priorities.
I’m talking about our perspective on the universe. This week NASA announced that Mars has
flowing water. They’ve also discovered dozens
of planets capable of housing life in the last year. The Kepler spacecraft that found those
planets is currently 93 million miles away from Earth. Thinking about that puts much more than your
priorities in perspective.
Like a fallen leaf dancing in the
wind on a blustery fall day, it is easy to feel small in this big world. The Psalmist in today’s reading captured that
feeling beautifully, writing: What are human beings that you are mindful of
them, mortals that you care for them?
Carl Sagan famously pointed to a picture of
the universe with a tiny little blue dot depicting Earth. He said, “Look at that dot. That's here.
That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone
you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The
aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of religions, ideologies, and economic
doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and
destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love,
every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of
morals, every corrupt politician, every 'superstar,' every 'supreme leader,'
every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of
dust suspended in a sunbeam."
With the Psalmist, we ask God: What
are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for
them?
I think sometimes we get so focused
on the little details of life that we fail to see God’s big picture. A perfect example is how we read Mark
10. We get so focused on the details of
divorce that we fail to see what the passage is really about.
Now, hear me out. Divorce is no trivial matter. It was a significant controversy in the early
church and it still is today. I know how
painful a divorce can be on families, and I also know it is sometimes the very
best thing that could happen in the long run.
So I’m not dismissing divorce as a religious issue which needs our
thought, our compassion, and our prayers.
I’m just saying that Mark 10 isn’t really about divorce. It’s about something much bigger.
Think about it. The passage begins with the Pharisees,
religious leaders of whom Jesus was regularly critical for following the law
but ignoring how it affected real people, Pharisees ask Jesus what the law says
about divorce. This was a test. Jesus knew it. He’d been through these tests before. And so they go back and forth about all the
messy details of divorce. They’re all
intently focused on those details.
Meanwhile, a bunch of kids want to
see Jesus. The disciples turn them away,
for he is busy…arguing about divorce with the Pharisees. I think sometimes we get so focused on
little, ultimately insignificant details that we fail to see God’s big
picture.
When Jesus finds out that the
disciples have kept the children away from him—children who came seeking his
acceptance, his love, and his blessing—he lets them have it. Why?
Because they couldn’t see the forest for the trees. They were all so focused on religious debates
about who God loves that they failed to love God’s children who were standing
at their feet.
Today is World Communion
Sunday. Christians of every race,
nation, and denomination will all celebrate communion across the world
today. I know how tempting it is to
focus on the little details that separate us from one another. But God’s big picture intends something
greater for us.
O God, what are human beings that you are
mindful of them, mortals that you care for them? The question itself may be the answer. We may not know why God cares so deeply for
this speck of dust suspended on a sunbeam, but why matters less than that God
does. God is mindful of each of us. The faithful church attendee who receives
communion today like every other time, the refugee family who stops at a church
along the way to receive it, the new believer who just joined the church in a
revival last week, the pastors and the officers, the musicians and the choirs,
the young and the old, the sick and the well, the literalist and the liberal,
the wise and the foolish. God is mindful
of each of us.
I can just picture the scene
depicted at the end of Mark 10, where Jesus opens his arms and gathers the
children around him in a warm and loving embrace. As you receive communion today, know that you
are being embraced by God in just the same way, just as you are. We may not understand why God is so good to
us, but we can give thanks that God is.
Amen.
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