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Bishop Kee Sloan, former Bishop of Alabama and the bishop who ordained me, has always been known as a great storyteller. When I was in seminary, he began a book series telling the story of Buddy, a fictionalized version of Bishop Sloan. Many of the events Buddy goes through are the same stories I heard Bishop Sloan tell about himself, particularly in his sermons. Others veer wildly with an expert author’s eye for dramatic and adventurous flair.
In the second book in the series, Beulah, Buddy is serving at a church in rural Mississippi. While he is there, he befriends Jojo, a young man who started out helping with yard work at the church. One day, Buddy ends up taking Jojo out for lunch. Now Jojo is black and Buddy is white, and while this is past the time of segregation, not everyone is happy about who The Rev. Buddy is associating with. Soon after Chuck, one of the church leaders, confronts Buddy about this. Buddy’s comment, of course, is that it’s his money, he can do what he wants with it. Chuck responds by saying it’s “Money we pay you.” This conversation is understandably hard on Buddy, but he doesn’t let it keep him from serving God and doing what he knows in his heart is right.
Paul in 2 Corinthians tells us “We do not proclaim ourselves; we proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord and ourselves as slaves for Jesus’ sake.” Whether we serve in the pulpit or the pews, we need to keep these words in mind. We should ask ourselves, who are we listening to? Are we listening to the views inside ourselves, or are we listening to what God has to say to us?
Like Buddy, Jesus goes head-to-head with the religious leaders of His day, though not over race. Instead the issue pertains to the Sabbath, part of the original Ten Commandments in the Law.
Now the Sabbath, as laid out in Deuteronomy, is about giving everyone a rest. This is true for everyone, even immigrants to the land, livestock, and also slaves. There was one day you couldn’t use or exploit someone. There was one day that, no matter who you were, you got a break. That was the Sabbath day. It’s worth it for us today to think about what that idea of rest, for ourselves and for everyone actually really means.
The Sabbath is about giving people a break. It’s about providing rest. It’s about helping people when we stop and think about it.
Now in Jesus’ day, as is the case still, there were many debates about what constituted work. These debates became unhelpful. Jesus’ Disciples are hungry, so they pluck some of the grain nearby, something they were allowed to do. The issue is the day they do it, and the religious leaders are very unhappy about this.
Yet Jesus points out what is really going on here. The Sabbath wasn’t about creating an arbitrary rule. It was about helping people.
Jesus makes that all the more obvious by healing a man on the Sabbath, in the synagogue no less. He asks, can you do good or harm on the Sabbath? Yet He gets no reply, much to his anger and grief. Jesus shows that in listening to God, you go to the Spirit behind the Word. You help people. Like Buddy, Jesus does so, even though it leads to His demise as set forth by the religious leaders of His day.
Samuel and Eli have a similar situation, though with a very different result. Samuel was the great prophet who anointed the first kings of Israel: Saul and David after him. Before that though, he was a prayed-for baby. His mother Hannah wanted him so much that she prayed to the Lord that she would give him over to God’s service, if only the Lord would grant her a child. God did, and so Hannah gave Samuel over to the priest Eli to be raised by him in God’s House.
Here we see Samuel, a young child, already being called by God to serve as a prophet. Yet the message Samuel is called to give is a hard one. Eli, who was also a judge, the rulers of Israel at the time, wasn’t the best of fathers. His children, those born to him before he began to raise Samuel, were causing trouble, so much so that God can stand no more of it. Eli, God says, will fall from his station. Samuel, meanwhile, will grow to be a great servant of God, and “none of his words [would] fall to the ground.”
Eli presses Samuel to learn what God has to say, so Samuel tells him. Yet unlike the religious rulers in Jesus’ day, Eli doesn’t get mad. He accepts God’s word. In doing so, he accepts Samuel’s role as God’s messenger as well.
Who are we proclaiming? Like Paul says to the Corinthians, are we proclaiming Christ Jesus or are we proclaiming ourselves? Are we following rules because God wants us to or because we think they are our rules and that they need to be followed?
Walking the path of Jesus isn’t always easy. His own road led to the Cross, and we see some of it being laid out in Mark today. Yet following God is the only way we can hope to make it through. Following God is the only way to make weakness into strength, as we see in Paul’s mighty treasure laid in weak clay jars in 2 Corinthians, or even in the fact that God came down to this world and became a mortal human baby in the form of our Lord Jesus. Following Christ can lead to being afflicted, perplexed, persecuted, and struck down, though if we continue to listen and be in God’s presence, it will not lead us to be crushed, driven to despair, forsaken, or destroyed, all as Paul in his own words reminds us.
Being a prophet and spreading the Good News can be hard. Yet in the end, no matter where it leads, we have the righteousness of God on our side. We have Goodness and Truth. That’s all there really is. That’s all we really need.