Twenty-sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time, cycle B

Mark 9:38-48

I heard a story about an African American church choir director from the south who was hired by a suburban congregation in the north. One day while he was practicing with the choir he kept going over the same piece. Finally he looked at his choir and said, “You all are singing this exactly the way it’s written. But you have to leave some room for the Spirit.”

We see that sort of thing in the first reading and the first part of the gospel -- almost mirror images. Joshua is upset because Medad and Eldad (which in Hebrew mean “beloved one” and “God’s beloved”) have received the gift of the spirit, but hadn’t gone to the meeting tent like the other elders. John’s complaint is similar -- There’s a man casting out demons in your name but he’s not one of us!” Moses and Jesus have similar answers: “Would that God would put his spirit in all his people!” and “If he’s casting out demons in my name, he can’t say anything bad about me. If he’s not against us he’s on our side.” Clearly, you can’t tell the spirit what you want him to do -- Like the wind, He blows where he wills. Jesus reminds us that we have to leave room for the spirit.

Some people would interpret this as meaning, “it doesn’t matter what you believe, so long as you are nice, or doing good things.” I think instead it means that when we notice people of other faiths or denominations doing the works of God, that is a point at which to begin. We have something in common, let’s build on that, keeping in mind that our goal should be to bring the other into our camp, into our fellowship, rather than draw lines between him and me.

So far so good. But then Jesus starts to get scary. He talks about drowning, of cutting of limbs, of being cast into Gehenna. Our translation talks about sin, but a better translation is cause to stumble, trip up -- trip up the little ones. Cause me to stumble. Jesus is exaggerating, of course. But in a shocking way, he’s reminding us that to follow him means that we need to get rid of anything that causes us to stumble. If I’m wasting time on my cell phone, that’s causing me to stumble. If I spend four hours a day watching Fox news or CNN, maybe that’s causing me to stumble. If I choose to golf on Sunday morning instead of fulfilling my obligation to attend Mass, that’s causing me to stumble. What do you need to cut out of your lives? What are we doing that is keeping us from being the complete and whole people God made us to be and means for us to be? And it goes for our community, our church as well. Are we as a church of Jesus aware of barriers that keep people away? Why aren’t the members of our church coming to Mass and frequenting the sacraments? Is there something we can do about it? What is the stumbling block?

My grandfather used to smoke, and every now and then when he got to the point where he could hardly breathe, he would resolve to give up his cigarettes. And he would, for a day or so. Then what could one or two hurt? Then he would limit his smoking to when he was in his car, which made my grandmother happy. But he began spending a lot of time running errands around town so he’d be able to smoke. And when his breathing cleared up a little he’d be back to a couple of packs a day. Cigarettes were his stumbling block.

Jesus threatens his disciples with Gehenna. In that time Gehenna was not hell as we think about it today. In fact, the way we think about hell we can thank the medieval poet Dante, whose vivid description influenced all of Europe. Gehenna was the name of a dump. Where you tossed trash. It was a specific dump in Jerusalem. There were stories that long before it became where you threw your trash, it was a place where the pagan predecessors of the Jews sacrificed their children to persuade their god Moloch to grant them favors. And maybe in addition to Gehenna as a place to throw things no one wanted, it was also a cursed place, a place haunted by souls that never had a chance to become what God wanted them to be. Gehenna, I think in this context, means that those stumbling blocks can cause you to waste your life.

So today we pray that God will show us how to let the Spirit into our lives, and strengthen us so that we can follow our savior. And we pray that as we heard a couple of weeks ago, we will be able to recognize the beam in our own eye, the stumbling blocks that distract us from the way of the cross which leads to paradise.