Question Authority

Question authority.  A lot of people don’t want you to hear that, especially people in authority. Do we raise our children and grandchildren to question authority? I taught my son to question authority. And that wasn’t always easy on me. I would have been a stunning hypocrite if I hadn’t. If we expect of our children unquestioning obedience, we set them up for abuse. They must be taught to question, and their questions must be taken seriously. And no authority should be above question. Yes, I’m thinking about Larry Nassar here, and all the people who enabled him. The right to question authority makes leadership more challenging, but it makes us all a lot safer.

*****

Brea Congregational United Church of Christ

January 28, 2018

Question Authority

Mark 1:21   They went to Capernaum; and when the sabbath came, he entered the synagogue and taught.  22 They were astounded at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes.  23 Just then there was in their synagogue a man with an unclean spirit,  24 and he cried out, “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God.”  25 But Jesus rebuked him, saying, “Be silent, and come out of him!”  26 And the unclean spirit, convulsing him and crying with a loud voice, came out of him.  27 They were all amazed, and they kept on asking one another, “What is this? A new teaching—with authority! He commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him.”  28 At once his fame began to spread throughout the surrounding region of Galilee.

Almost sixty years ago, Brea Congregational Church joined the newly formed United Church of Christ. This church did not want to give up the name “Congregational,” and that is why we now have the awkwardly long name of Brea Congregational United Church of Christ.

What is so special about being Congregational?  It means the local congregation, you who are members of the church, have the authority and the responsibility for the running of the church; you do not answer to a regional authority like a bishop or a presbytery. We will see this in action today right after our worship. Members will be asked to vote for a slate of officers who do much of the work of running the church.  You also vote on a budget in June, and you occasionally vote on other weighty matters.  I believe you voted as a congregation to become “Open and Affirming,” and to approve that powerful mission statement that’s on the back of our bulletin.  Before too long you may be approving the Pastor Search Committee’s choice for your next settled minister.

I’m told congregational meetings have been pretty peaceful here.  That’s a good thing.  In a healthy Congregational church, the authority of leaders is mostly trusted, and the leaders have acted responsibly by doing the footwork before the congregational meeting to address any obvious concerns. The congregational meeting serves as a check and balance, and a chance to inform the congregation of what their leaders are doing.

At several of the churches I have served, there have been one or two people who question the leaders’ recommendations at congregational meetings, and sometimes they vote against the proposals.  I call them “the loyal opposition.”  They don’t need to control the outcome, but they do like their voices to be heard. The “loyal opposition” help remind us that it’s OK to question authority. We can respect authority, and still test it a little.  That’s the Congregational way. 

Question authority.  A lot of people don’t want you to hear that, especially people in authority. Do we raise our children and grandchildren to question authority? I taught my son to question authority. And that wasn’t always easy on me. I would have been a stunning hypocrite if I hadn’t. If we expect of our children unquestioning obedience, we set them up for abuse. They must be taught to question, and their questions must be taken seriously. And no authority should be above question. Yes, I’m thinking about Larry Nassar here, and all the people who enabled him. The right to question authority makes leadership more challenging, but it makes us all a lot safer.

Who is the ultimate authority at a Congregational church? I hope God is. No one person has a special line to sacred wisdom. Any of us has the freedom to speak to the church about how we believe God is calling our church to act.  And all of us have the responsibility to set aside our personal agendas, to think and pray and discuss how we in this church can best serve God and our neighbors. That's a lot of freedom. That's a lot of responsibility. When I get that kind of responsibility, I do my best to listen for the guidance of God before I act. I ask you to do the same.

In our reading today, everyone was surprised that Jesus taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes. That astounded them. And here we are over two thousand years later, still learning from Jesus and honoring his authority. That is pretty astounding. 

We can guess what Mark means by authority in verse 22. Jesus doesn’t pick and choose and proof-text from his community’s scriptures to justify his own teaching.  He doesn’t debate fine points of interpretation.  Jesus just comes out and says, “ I’m telling you something new.  Here’s what God gives you.  Here’s how faith works. And here’s what God asks of you.” Nobody else claimed that kind of authority.

But there’s more.  Mark reports that Jesus drove out an “unclean spirit”– and they were all amazed, and they kept on asking one another, “What is this? A new teaching—with authority! He commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him.

Let’s just set aside for a minute what we think of unclean spirits. Driving out a spirit, exorcism: how is that “a new teaching with authority?” The authority is to heal people who are possessed by unclean spirits; we would call it mental illness. But what is the teaching?

Maybe Jesus is teaching that healing is even possible, that what people have regarded as a hopeless condition is not. Maybe he is teaching that the ill person is worthy of being helped, despite this “uncleanness”– this transgression that seems to threaten their moral order.  Maybe Jesus is standing up to a force that has filled this community with fear and loathing, teaching them that they need not dread or shun people with mental illness. 

I’m not really sure what Jesus was teaching.  But I do know this.  Jesus was teaching by example.  He was not just talking about ethics or morality or healing and telling other people what to do.  He was putting the Good News of God’s love and liberation into practice. He was walking the talk.

Walking the talk… a tall order for any follower of Jesus, especially for those of us who would claim authority from God to help guide a Congregational church.  So remember what I said last week: let’s agree we can and will follow Jesus badly.  And let’s be teachable. And if you are not happy with your efforts to walk the talk of the Good News of Jesus Christ, please remember it goes two directions.  We are invited to love and to serve and celebrate.  We are are also invited to receive the love and healing and forgiveness and transforming power that God has for us, so that we can be of service to others. And if we all pitch in, we will do well enough.

But what about these unclean spirits?  Superstition from bygone days and we’re over it now? I wondered, until I read the works of Walter Wink, a biblical theologian and peace activist who opened my eyes to the language of spiritual power in the bible. And I witnessed the authority of spiritual power in action, exercised by a man named George McClain.

Rev. George McClain was for many years the director of the Methodist Federation for Social Action, a social justice group within the United Methodist church.  I met him in the early 1990’s when I too was a Methodist.  We were both working for gay rights in that church.  It is easier for us in the UCC to address gay rights than for Methodists.  The General Synod of the UCC, the national decision-making body, speaks to the churches, but not for the churches.  It cannot force local congregations to do much of anything, since we are congregational.  Over 1400 UCC churches have become Open and Affirming, but many still are not.  The United Methodist Church can force local congregations to take certain actions for or against, and those churches that don’t like how the national votes come out can threaten to leave. That’s not fun. Twenty-two years after I joined the UCC, United Methodists are still fighting over the issue of gay clergy; those clergy can still be brought to a church trial and have their credentials removed; though this doesn’t happen in California. It’s our gain; some of the UCC’s most talented clergy are refugees from the United Methodist Church.  But what a loss for the gospel: endless committee meetings, church trials for God’s sake, all that dissention instead of walking the talk.  

Anyway, Rev. George McClain taught me how to do a proper progressive Christian exorcism, and I have found that tool remarkably useful.  Here is what he did. He would go to the room where a church trial was going to being held the next day to possibly strip a person of their clergy credentials for marrying a gay couple, or loving someone of the same gender.  George would don his stole, and say his prayers, and then stride from corner to corner of the room on his long legs, proclaiming in a loud voice something like this:

            In the name of Jesus Christ, who has authority over all Powers, we declare:
Spirit of bigotry, be gone from us, from this place, and from all who will enter here.
Spirit of fear, be gone from this place.
Spirit of domination, be gone from this place.
Spirit of legalism, be gone from this place.
            and so on.  Then:

Spirit of love, fill us, fill this place, and fill all who will enter here.
Spirit of understanding, fill this place.
Spirit of reconciliation, fill this place.
Spirit of transformation, fill this place.
Spirit of Jesus Christ, we claim this place in your name.  Let your power and your love prevail here, for the sake of your Gospel and the coming of your kingdom.  And make us your servants in this work of love and justice.  Amen.

Did that ritual change the outcome of any church trials?  I don’t know.  But it changed me.  It gave me courage, and hope.  It helped me remember that narrow-minded people were not the problem. Their thinking was problem. Their thinking was riddled with these “unclean spirits” of fear, bigotry, legalism… and lacking in the spirits of love, reconciliation, and transformation. And so was was my own, much of the time. When I do not call out my own fear, it controls me. When I go through such a ritual, I remember who I am, and whose I am, and who I want to be.  My fear fades, and I am ready to face those malicious spirits, trusting that the power of God will sustain me.  

Any unclean spirits bothering you or someone you care about?  Can you think of some exorcisms you’d like to try? I am not mapping “unclean spirits” just to the unhelpful thinking of individuals. These spirits are contagious. They work so much more effectively when they can infect a whole organization or group. When one person stands up loud and proud and demeans a whole group of people, bigotry grows in other hearts; it has permission to rule with impunity.  Alternatively, when one person is filled with a spirit of courage to act for justice at great personal risk, as some Dreamers did this past Tuesday at the rally up the street, the witnesses catch that courage.  It’s contagious. That is why political activists must question authority others, and their own; must choose their methods carefully, or their spirits will be hardly distinguishable from those they struggle against.

These are some of the powers and principalities that Mark saw Jesus wrestling with. People get swept up in them; enslaved by them.  And Mark tells us that Jesus has a new teaching, with authority: authority over these powers. Interesting.

What would it mean if we took Jesus’ authority seriously in our own lives?  Mental illness is real. It has a neurological and biochemical basis.  Yet depression and anxiety are made worse by some nasty spirits that are so endemic to our culture that we give them authority without even realizing it: the spirit of materialism that equates identity with income and status, and so makes unemployment or poverty soul-crushing; the spirit of tribalism, that makes my leader right and yours wrong regardless of the facts; the spirit of individualism that tricks us into seeking freedom from the relationships and support that we need to sustain us.

Tragedies happen, but that spirit that whispers that if you were good enough, smart enough, faithful enough, hard working enough, they wouldn’t happen to you, that spirit is lying. What if we could see these lying spirits for what they were, and not be bound by them?  What if we were truly immersed in the spirit of the gospel, filled to overflowing with love and hope and courage and wisdom, no matter what the external circumstances?  That could dispel a few nasty spirits.  Jesus saves, says traditional Christianity.  What Mark wants to show us is in this passage is that Jesus saves us here and now, from suffering under the oppression of destructive spirits. His authority gives us life and hope.

Painful emotions like fear and anxiety come and go.  That’s normal. When they don’t go, they become destructive. Resentment and hatred and despair are always destructive. We all will get swept up into destructive spirits at times.  Mark is telling us that following Jesus means we can claim the authority to dispel these life-denying spirits.  We may be successful or not, but just by naming them, they lose some of their control over us. We can challenge one another to grasp the spirit and power of Jesus.  We can ask the questions that help us see destructive spirits for what they are, and we can choose the Way that leads to abundant life.

This is not an easy time to be the church, especially a church that has the inclusive message we have. We cannot get away with being a social club or a community center. And that’s OK.  We have to claim the authority to be something more: an experiment in putting Jesus’ spirit into practice in our time and place, the Way that overcomes destructive thinking and destructive ideologies, the Way that leads to life no matter what we face. We have the authority, if we choose to claim it.  What an adventure!  Amen.