Based on the scripture reading for this post, Mark 5:2-13, would you have been uncomfortable in that same situation? You might be tempted to give the Jesus Juke answer, and that might be true looking back on it after some time has passed, but how would you feel in the moment?
Being uncomfortable happens, and that's not a bad thing. What it really means is that we're in a position that we don't have experience with. Sometimes the best thing we can do is leave the situation, but most often it's an opportunity for us to grow.
We don't grow where we are comfortable, but we grow in places where we're uncomfortable and being stretched. These are the times when we step out of our comfort zones and become more. We grow as a person, in experience, in our faith, as a parent, friend, or co-worker. Whatever it is, its a chance to become more completely who God made us to be.
This post is the next in a series called Our Daily Bread. It comes from the line in the Lord's Prayer where we ask God for our daily bread. What we mean by this, is sometimes, what we need just to get through the day because its been a long and hard one. Most often, though, what we mean is that we're asking God to give us what we need, not just to survive, but to thrive!
In this series, the tag line for it is to build momentum to build faith in our lives and in the lives of others. To do that, we can't be looking just to survive, but to thrive. For that we need that regular, daily bread that comes from God. To find it, we look to the examples that Jesus gives us.
We started on the post with expanding our community, to include others in it that we hadn't before. Then in the last post, I gave a homework assignment. If we are going to expand our community, then we have to go to places that we've forgotten about. Not maliciously, but that's what happens when we live someplace for a while.
When we do that, and along with the homework for this week, our goal is to make observations. Not ask the question how to fix it, but to ask how God will use us to build community in those places. And then hold on to those observations, because they will be an important part of an all church planning retreat that we'll be doing in November. They will be what helps us to live out the mission of the church in our community.
Expanding our community involves more than just going back into forgotten places. It also involves being in those uncomfortable places. Jesus, in our Gospel reading, encounters a man that it would be normal to be uncomfortable around. And it's okay to be uncomfortable around some people.
This is a guy that today we might say is "dangerous" either to others or to himself. At the very least we'd say that he is a public nuisance. So it's okay to not feel comfortable around him.
But as Mark is telling this story, there is something interesting that is going on in the sequence of events that are taking place. Jesus has met this man, with his disciples gathered there with him, and the unclean spirit, some places call it a demon, recognizes who Jesus is, but...
Jesus failed the first time he commanded the spirit to come out of the man! Now, let me put a big disclaimer on this. Could Jesus have removed the spirit on the first try? Absolutely. It wouldn't have been a challenge at all for him.
The spirit knew this, as evidenced by his reaction to Jesus, and Jesus knew this. The disciples, on the other hand, were still getting to know Jesus, and Jesus still had a lot to teach them. Primarily, Jesus wasn't going to do things the way that they were expecting. They were expecting that Jesus would remove the spirit, heal the man, and then they would all move on. That's what they knew.
But Jesus was going to make them uncomfortable, because he was doing more. After his command fails, Jesus asks for the spirit's name. The spirit talks to Jesus, and provides a solution, which Jesus takes and sends the spirit into the herd of pigs that was close by. And in the face of who Jesus was, the spirit was more than happy to leave. Then, the man was healed.
This is an intensely uncomfortable situation, for everyone except Jesus. Our response would have been like that of the disciples. We would have come in, seen what needed to be fixed, healed it, and then left to go back to where we were comfortable.
But what speaks more power? What is more important in this story? Is it that the man was healed of his possession, or was it that when the rest of the community came back they saw the man as a normal, well-adjusted, health person?
The way that Jesus handled this situation wasn't by just doing something, but the most important part of it was that he was also working on healing the broken relationship between the man and his community!
In church, we've gotten really good at acts of charity. Those are things that we do for, or sometimes to other people. That's our standard reaction, and it's not a bad one. Acts of charity are a great thing, and there are many times when they are our only response, but...
We have to do more than just acts of charity. We have to work on building relationships with others. This is what makes Jesus so important. For all that he performs miracles, and does things for other people. The greatest miracle that he was working was the way he would build relationships with so many different people, and build community in so many different places.
We recognize that we don't have Jesus' power. We aren't going to be able to perform the great miracles like he does. That's okay, because we can do the most important thing that he does. We can build relationships. Because we recognize, to the second part of the flywheel point, that we are all surrounded by demons or unclean spirits.
Most of those things won't be fixed by single acts of charity. Rather, they are fixed by the relationships that are made with other people. They could be relationships with spouses, or family or friends. They could be a relationship that we have with a doctor (or multiple doctors), or with co-workers, or advisers or coaches. It could even be with the person that smiles at you and says hi at Walmart when you are having the worst day. Sometimes, all it takes is someone acknowledging your existence. That's not much of a relationship, but its the start of one because it says either to you, or if you're giving that smile to someone else that they are a person.
There are many people that God puts in our lives to help us deal with our demons, and the most effective ones are the ones that stick around and build a relationship. They are the ones that notice we are a person. And God puts us in the lives of other people to do the exact same thing.
In expanding our community, we have to build relationships with people that we don't know. To get there we have to be uncomfortable. We have to step outside and meet and relate to other people.
The homework for this week is to go be uncomfortable for Jesus! Those aren't words that I ever thought I would type, but they work. Find a place where you can take a step out and start building a relationship with someone. You might even know where to begin. Its that person you've seen every day, but don't know their name and you keep thinking you need to stop by. It might be that place you've wanted to go volunteer at, or store to go to, or activity to take up, or something different, but you haven't don it yet. Now is the time to go do it.
It'll be uncomfortable for a while, but that's okay. And really, this is only a start. Building relationships takes time, but we can start them. Go be uncomfortable for Jesus, and most importantly go be uncomfortable in Jesus name! Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment