Saint Luke's Lutheran Church

This is the year of Mark. This is the year when most of our Gospel lessons come from the second book in the New Testament. In this Gospel of Mark, Jesus is frequently presented as one who heals. In the first five chapters alone, there are seven specific healing stories and three summary statements about how Jesus healed those who came to him. Yet, in Mark, Jesus is not primarily a healer – he is first and foremost a teacher. In our Gospel lesson for today, when Jesus looks with compassion at the crowd of people around him, the first thing he does is not to feed them or to heal them, but to teach them. Jesus understands that spiritual food is more essential than physical food and that spiritual understanding is more important than physical health. This is the reason that we invest so much time teaching here at St. Luke’s. The Jesus we meet in the Gospel of Mark would approve.

When Jesus looked at the crowd of people, he had compassion on them because they were like sheep without a shepherd. Without a shepherd, sheep are ignorant and confused – they don’t know what to do or where to go or how to care for themselves. I suspect that Jesus would say the same thing today. For all of the information that is available today, for all the education that we receive, so many people are confused about the most important things in life – about God and self and spiritual truth. So many people really do not know what to do, or where to go, or how to live their lives. These are people who do not need so much to be healed as to be taught because they are not so much sick as they are uninformed.

I am amazed at how many people today try to deal with the complexities of life with just bits and pieces of insight and wisdom that they have cobbled together from here or there. I am concerned about how many today try to live in an adult world with a faith that they learned when they were 12 or 13 and then abandoned when they were 16. I am concerned about how few people today, even in the church, know even the basic Bible stories, much less what those stories mean for their lives. I am amazed at how many people today know so little about God that they are so easily drawn in to what I call pop-theology – that shallow and misinformed theology that gains its authority from being so wide-spread or from fitting so nicely into our pre-conceived notions of what God should be like.

In his popular book, Habits of the Heart, Robert Bellah introduced us to Sheila Larson. Sheila described her faith this way: “I believe in God. I’m not a religious fanatic. I can’t remember the last time I went to church. But my faith has carried me a long way. It’s Sheilaism. Just my own little voice.”

When Habits of the Heart was published in 1985, Sheilaism came to be used to describe the real American religion of our time. In Sheilaism, there is no voice from God. In Sheilaism, everyone is his or her own authority. In Sheilaism, each individual decides for himself or herself what is good and what is right and what is true. Now, there is nothing new in Sheilaism. God dealt with the same attitude in both the Old Testament and the New Testament times. What makes Sheilaism so persistent and pervasive is that there is something very attractive about being our own authority. Most of the time we rather like being able to determine for ourselves what is good and right and true. Most of the time we rather like being able to decide for ourselves what we will do. The problem is that when everyone is his own authority there is mass confusion, and when everyone does what is right in his own eyes, there is chaos. And that’s exactly what we have. We hear about it on the daily news. We experience it in our workplaces, our market places, our neighborhoods, and yes even in our own families.

The Jesus of Mark stands as a contradiction to Sheilaism. This Jesus comes to teach. He teaches us about God and about the world and about ourselves. We are here today because we also have heard something more significant than our own little voice – something more powerful, something more authoritative, something more reliable. We have heard the voice of God.

The voice of God is not only bigger than our own little voice, but it is a voice that reveals something different from what we hear from ourselves and from others. Jesus reminds us that God’s ways are not our ways, and God’s thoughts are not our thoughts. He reminds us that we are called to value things differently than our world does and that we are called to live lives that are different from the way the world lives. Paul puts it plainly and firmly in Romans 12 when he writes, “Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect. If we really want to know and understand God, if we really want to know the truth, then we have to look beyond ourselves.

I was reminded of this several times in the past several weeks while we had our granddaughters with us. One is six years old, and the other is nine. They are really very sweet and well-behaved children. But we had not seen them for almost a year, and I had forgotten how often children of this age raise the objection: “That’s not fair!” It is raised when someone else gets a little more. It is raised when someone else gets to go first. It is raised whenever something happens that they think is not right.

While children are a little more transparent about their feelings, most adults tend to feel much the same way. We want a God is fair by our standards and criteria – in other words, a God who does what we want. We want a God who will bless us and who will punish others when they do something wrong to us. We want a God who will put us first and give us an edge over others. And when that does not happen, we say to ourselves, or even out loud, “That’s not fair.”

Last week, while we were visiting our daughter in Ohio, I overheard one of our granddaughters object, “That’s not fair.” Her aunt responded: “Fair is when everyone gets what they need, not necessarily what they want.” I thought to myself, that’s good theology – for that is exactly the way in which God deals with us.

It is not justice that we need. What we really need is mercy, and mercy is what God offers us today -- forgiveness to cover all of our sins. And this forgiveness is offered to everyone -- even those who have done the most despicable things. It is not a comfortable, affluent lifestyle that we need. What we really need is to live lives that make a difference in our world. This is what God offers us today – opportunities to serve God and to serve others in a way that will make our lives fruitful and fulfilling. It is not an easy, trouble-free life that we need. What we really need is the strength to endure whatever we face. This is what God offers us today – the strength of God’s presence and the power of God’s Spirit which enables us to face every trail or temptation.

These are some of the lessons that Jesus would teach us. These are not truths that can be learned in a single lesson. Because they are so against the grain of our world, these lessons need to be learned over and over and over again. They need to be learned until they go from our head to our heart, until they become habits of our heart and our life. So Jesus does not only teach us, but he sends us the Holy Spirit who leads us into all truth and who enables us to think the way God thinks and to live the way God calls us to live.

In just a few weeks we will be starting a new year of Christian education. I hope that all of you will be a part of our Christian education program in some way. When you do, Jesus will teach you, and the Spirit will transform you. Amen.