Salt and the Wound

Note: The following is a sermon delivered on September 29, 2024, at Holy Trinity Episcopal Church in Fayetteville, North Carolina, based on readings from Proper 21, Year B, in the Revised Common Lectionary. An audio version is found below. A video version follows the end of the written sermon.

Today’s readings call for us to examine what I’ll call our posture towards ourselves and others. By posture, I really mean our stance as we go about our lives in the world. Our military friends from up the road will use language sometimes about a “Force Posture,” which is the way armies and navies orient themselves to adversaries. We might have a defensive posture or an offensive one. A posture of peace or a posture of hostility.

In today’s Gospel, John and the Disciples have a posture. 

Just before our reading, the disciples are arguing about who among them is the greatest. In response, Jesus scoops up a child and says “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.”

For those of you playing at home, that’s four instances of the word “welcome” in a single sentence.

And here, at the start of our reading today, comes John, who says, “But but but but but.” 

It is as if he and the disciples are saying, “Okay, Jesus, we can’t figure out how to rank ourselves, but will you at least agree that we collectively are pretty great? Like, way greater than that guy over there?”

They come to Jesus with a complaint that goes something like this:

Those other people are in our territory.

They’re doing something we don’t approve of.

They’re doing it wrong.

They’re misrepresenting us.

We don’t like it.

Can you please, please go tell them to get lost, Jesus?

John and the disciples are posturing. They want to draw lines about who is in and who is out.

We know these lines ourselves. There are state lines. Borders between this place and that. There are party lines, like the ones we’re feeling now in the run up to the next Election. We disciples love our lines between right and wrong, too. Right and wrong ways to worship. Right songs to sing. Right places we sit week after week in this very worship space. Right ways to spend money. 

Wrong is whatever is on the other side of that.

Posture is how we approach the world with a kind of insistence that things be “just so.” Posturing is about how we play little control games or engage in different kinds of manipulation or coercion behind the scenes. It’s how we react to people who think differently. It is how we respond in social media comments. Posturing is maneuvering to make sure our seat at the table is secure. Posturing is the kind of preening we do when we are caught up in what other people think of us. Posturing is listening with an agenda. And all angling that comes when something doesn’t go our way.

For the disciples then and now, the posture we see so often is one of insecurity. We are so nervous that someone or something out there will threaten us. Folks just across one of those imaginary lines.

Who are those people across the line from us?

For some of us, we’re posturing about Democrats. Or Republicans. Or who gets to occupy which piece of real estate today. Or who gets to pick vegetables for us under what circumstances. Or who gets to flee what kind of violence. Or even who gets to live.

In light of Jesus' repeated call to "welcome," we Christians need to think about our posture.

What might that mean when we turn to folks who don’t believe what we believe, but who are still engaged in the work of healing and community? How might we respond to our Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist friends and their traditions that have cups of water to offer us? What might it mean to recognize that the work of Christ can happen in the healing power of an avowed atheist who is able to decouple a troubled soul from a crushing diagnosis of PTSD? What if people exactly not like us are out there saving the world?

What, then, are we posturing about?

John and the rest of the disciples have been with this Jesus guy a long time. They’re invested. And if anyone can just walk around doing what they do without that investment, I can imagine that doesn’t feel very good. Maybe even like a threat.

Jesus’s response does nothing to soothe that insecurity. Quite the opposite. He offers the disciples a way to address their concerns by addressing themselves. Let’s call it radical displacement. Provocative hospitality. The opposite of posturing. Let’s get ourselves out of our own way. If our own body is the problem, let’s, well, disable it to make room for the other. Cut off your hand. Your foot. Pluck out your eye. Ew, Jesus.

Jesus is talking about the lengths we need to go to get out of the way of God’s radical welcome. I don’t think he’s saying pluck out our eyes or amputate an offending body part. Please don’t everybody come back next week with eye patches because you looked at something you shouldn’t have. But I do think that the communities responsible for shaping Mark’s Gospel may be saying to the Body of Christ – which is to say us – that it would be worth the elective surgery to ourselves if it made room for some of those other folks. And their ways of being. And their baggage. We can’t welcome people if we just take the parts that are convenient.

This part of Mark’s Gospel takes place on the road between Jesus recognizing that he’s going to have to die and his very death. And I think the writers of Mark may be reading what they know back into today’s text in some ways. In Jesus, they see a God who willingly disables himself on their behalf. On our behalf. “By His wounds we are healed” we like to say on Sunday mornings. His body and ours – if we are indeed to be the Body of Christ today – must be willing to take on those wounds. The plucked eyeball. The pierced hand. The opened side. Life itself. Jesus is a disabled God.¹ And we are called into that diminishment.

The wounds are where the healing happens.

Today’s Body of Christ will bear different wounds than the one Christ bore. Ones that look like voting with a wince. It might look like giving up our metaphorical vocal chords entirely. It might be disabling those thumbs of ours that so readily and eagerly respond to a crazy comment on social media or a crusty text message from our boss. It might be giving up, not our right arm, but some other right we hold dear. It might be giving up our access to power. To illusions of security.

There are plenty of ways that the Body will bear the wounds, and the deep work of even the next few weeks is to wrestle with how we collectively ought to bear them.

Two words of warning: first, as we deal with each others’ wounds, we will encounter many that are invisible, of course, and that can make some of us think they don’t exist. We’d be wrong on that. Second, we have a tendency these days to confuse being wounded with being justified to do the wounding. The call to wounded life will not allow for such posturing.

I’d like to suggest a way that we consider how we might set ourselves aside for the sake of others. And that is to spend some time contemplating how other people pray for — and about — us. 

So: what do people pray about when they pray about you? I invite us to sit with that for a moment.

When I think about how other people might pray for me, I’ll admit I need to adopt a different posture. I need to soften. To go easier. To not require everything to fit my narrative. To move with less urgency. To lower my guard. To yield. To ask for forgiveness. And here’s the doozy I’ve been wrestling with recently: even though I may know some stuff about some stuff, my posture should always be one of learning instead of one that always has the answers.

As the Body of Christ, we have the ability to answer the prayers people have about us. This is a kind of hospitality, too. When we can welcome the prayers of others about our very selves – when we can really welcome those things that wound and threaten us – I suspect we’re on the road to resurrection and not merely crucifixion. But even then it will be true that the Body of Christ is, by definition, a wounded one.

Earlier this week, I drove down to South Carolina. Just across the border, not too far. I pulled off to a side road and did something I’m probably not supposed to tell you about. I took out a little shovel and scooped some dirt from the roadside and put it in a jar and I brought it back here to Fayetteville. So here it is. A bit of South Carolina has invaded North Carolina.

I have some questions for us. Is the soil still South Carolina? What if I open the jar and dump it out on the ground? What if I take this bit of South Carolina dirt outside and mix it up with some North Carolina dirt? Is it still South Carolina? If I decided to scoop up the dirt again, I might get bits of North Carolina mixed together with the other bits. What happens if I try to take all that back to South Carolina and undo what I’ve done? When does South Carolina stop being itself? When does it become North Carolina? When does it become something else altogether?

What am I loving when I love this dirt?

Our posturing would have us believe that there’s a substantive difference between the soil of Northeast South Carolina and Southeast North Carolina. Sometimes the line between such things is merely a decision. Sometimes the difference between us is what allows us to retain our flavor. Other people are our seasoning. And sometimes, the line between us and them is exactly the signal we need to show us who to welcome. Let’s get dirty.

1

Eiesland, N. L. (1994). The disabled God: Toward a Liberatory Theology of Disability.