September 27 Proper 21
If you don’t read The Onion—and let me be clear. I am not recommending that anyone read The Onion. Ever—but if you don’t read The Onion, you probably missed a story last week with the headline, “Man Not Belonging to Movie’s Target Demographic Escorted From Theater by Hollywood Officials.”
It went like this:
“Hollywood officials removed David Sinclair, 24, from the AMC Esquire 7’s 9 p.m. showing of The Time Traveler’s Wife Monday for failing to meet the minimum gender, age, and socioeconomic status requirements set forth in new guidelines to ensure marketing is reflected in movie audiences. ‘Looks like this punk is a little too young and a little too male to be here,’ said Toby Emmerich, president of New Line Cinema, who spotted Sinclair trying to discretely watch the film from the back of the theater. ‘Didn’t your mother ever teach you that a romantic thriller starring Rachel McAdams and Eric Bana is for professional women aged 26 to 40 who make between $45,000 and $60,000 a year?’ Despite Sinclair’s promises that he would buy a Coke and popcorn, officials escorted the single, college-educated city-dweller out of the theater complex and issued him a $1,500 fine.”
Just to be clear, that didn’t really happen. The Onion is a satirical online newspaper that I’m hoping you do not search out, lest you think I approve of all the tasteless and offensive things they publish. But the story’s just believable enough to be amusing.
We do expect certain things from people of certain demographics. Marketers have made a profitable science out of predicting what music and food and undergarments you prefer. But marketers aren’t doing anything new. They’re just doing it better, more precisely, with greater efficiency. We know what kind of people listen to hip hop and what kind of people listen to folk. We know what kind of people drive Priuses and what kind of people drive Hummers. We know what kind of people wear Birkenstocks and what kind of people wear Jimmy Choos. (I’ve heard of Jimmy Choos because I saw The Devil Wears Prada. Although I’m pretty sure I don’t belong to that movie’s target demographic.)
We generally learn to expect certain things from certain kinds of people. And sometimes it’s a little disorienting when our expectations are wrong.
John saw something that didn’t fit his expectations for a particular group of people. “Who does this guy in Capernaum think he is,” John wonders, “casting out demons in Jesus’ name? Didn’t his mother ever teach him that exorcisms are what Jesus and his followers do? The nerve.”
John and a few others apparently tried to put a stop to the man’s work. But Jesus says, “Whoever is not against us is for us.”
One sentence from Jesus, and John’s market research disintegrates. The group of people who follow Jesus is a fairly eclectic, rag tag bunch. But at least there are only so many of them, and they are fairly easily identified. So brand control seems doable, if not easy. But Jesus suddenly expands the group of people God may be working through not just beyond his direct followers, but to everybody in the world who isn’t getting in the way.
And then he really shakes things up. He says that the people who are following him, but opposing the good work of some oblivious stranger, are the ones who should really be stopped. John needs to be stopped, because John was getting in the way of somebody else’s ministry just because that somebody else wasn’t a follower of Jesus.
Jesus’ move is so unexpected that we still miss it. People claiming to be Christians today can be heard saying, “If you’re not with us, you’re against us,” and no one thinks anything of it. But that’s what John was trying to say. “That guy isn’t with us. So he must be against us.”
“If you’re not with us, you’re against us” isn’t just un-Christian. It’s anti-Christian. It’s the very notion that set Jesus off on his little tirade in this story. He starts talking about millstones dragging people to the bottom of the sea, he mentions severed hands and feet and plucked out eyes and the unquenchable fires of Gehenna, a smoldering garbage dump south of Jerusalem.
So did you catch that? Did you notice who Jesus had in mind when he started talking like an old time hard shell revival preacher? He wasn’t talking about unbelievers or traitors or thieves or philanderers. Not predatory lenders or executives who got bailout-funded bonuses. No, when Jesus trotted out the harshest images imaginable to make his point, he was talking to his own. He was talking to the few people who had walked away from everything to follow him.
And to these closest of friends he said, “Be careful. Don’t ever get in the way of what God might be doing through somebody else. There’s no graver sin than obstructing the good work of a person just because they don’t fit our ideas about whom God ought to be using.”
It’s amazing that this Bible can still surprise us after all these centuries. But when was the last time you heard someone talking about the fires of hell as the fate of Christians who try to keep others from doing a little good just because they don’t fit our definition of good people? Just because they don’t fit our definition of Christian, even?
Now even as subversive as this passage is, it’s easy enough to direct it at other kinds of Christians. Episcopalians are quick to point to evangelical or fundamentalist folks who say we can’t be real Christians because of the things we believe or the ways we practice the Christian faith. And I think this story speaks to that issue. But Jesus wasn’t talking to John about somebody else’s problem. He was talking to him about his own blind spot.
So here’s where this story hit home for me this week. My sister in law dropped off some posters for a food drive for the Union Rescue Mission. My own theology is pretty different from the folks who run Union Rescue. The people that come to them for food and shelter may well get an old time gospel message, and they may even be told that people who don’t believe in Jesus are going to hell.
My impulse is to stop these folks. I disagree about the way they read and apply scripture. But so what? The simple provision of a cup of cold water, Jesus says, will bring a reward that can’t be taken away. And people are being housed and fed, and let’s be honest. Some people turn their lives around for the better after hearing a fire and brimstone sermon and responding at the altar call.
If I stand in the way of the ministry of the Union Rescue Mission, if I run them down or dismiss the good things they do for people, I guess I’m squarely in John’s place, and Jesus is talking directly to me. He’s saying, “Stay out of the way. Why are you throwing down stumbling blocks? Who are you to say I can’t work through someone you disagree with?”
It’s as if Jesus doesn’t need my help defending his reputation. He’s satisfied to let the truth make its way out, as he patiently says, “No one who does a deed of power in my name will be able soon afterward to speak evil of me.”
We don’t yet throw people out of movie theaters who don’t fit the target demographic. And we will always make sense of our world by using categories like old and young and urban and rural and Christian and Jewish and liberal and conservative. We’re not asked to pretend generalizations are of no use.
But Jesus says that the way we sift some ideas and people from others must never do one thing: they must never rule out the possibility that God’s goodness is coming into the world through that person who we think says the wrong things and believes the wrong things and wears the wrong things and even intends the wrong things. Jesus says that to be truly Christian is to leave our expectations open a bit, and to hold our assumptions loosely.
And he tells us that the first thing we can do for the kingdom of God is simply stay out of that strange other person’s way. Because maybe our world needs all the good deeds of power it can get. Amen.