Holy Postures: Working Together
Mark 9:38-50
This month we have been looking at holy postures, at what it means to stand before the world as witnesses of Jesus Christ. Our holy postures include opening up, which makes us vulnerable to love. We are to risk all, so that we may love all as Christ has loved us. And we are to embrace low, so that we know that it is not us, but Christ through us, who does the good. Today, we will explore the holy posture of working together, which makes me think, of course, of computers.
My first computer was inspired by two engineers who got tired of working on the Atari video game “Pong.” Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak took some spare parts from an Atari gaming system, and made their first home computer. Atari couldn’t afford to start producing home computers then, so the two Steves found some venture capitalists and started Apple Computers. Their success led Atari to reconsider making home computers. The Atari computer was still, unfortunately, made with spare parts from their gaming systems.
My Atari computer had 8 kilobytes of memory – not 8 gigs, not 8 megs, but 8 kilobytes. It was hooked up to a green screen monitor, and I added a thermal paper, 9-dot, matrix printer. If you wanted to save something, it had to go on a floppy disc, because there was no hard drive. This was cutting edge back then. There is something else you need to know about this computer – it was incompatible with every other computer in the world.
There was no reason for home computers to be compatible back then. This was long before the internet, long before email, long before file sharing. A home computer was designed to play some simple games, to do some basic word processing, and to sort information stored on a digital version of an index card. Incompatible computers can’t talk to each other, and they can’t work together, so there was no point in being connected to each other.
You can’t buy an Atari computer today because when it finally decided to adopt the PC format, it was already too late. You could buy an IBM-compatible computer for much less than an Atari, and the Atari still had problems working with other computers. If there is a moral to this story, it might be this – it is hard to survive if you do not work well with others.
You might point to that little company that Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak started as the exception to the rule. But even Apple has had to learn how to work with other computers over the internet, and with email, and with file sharing.
A lot has changed since those first days of home computers. The original version of Pong took only 30 lines of computer code to run. It was two-dimensional, two colors, two paddles, and one ball bouncing back and forth. It only had to run on one system, which only had to understand one computer language. Thirty lines were enough to run the game.
Today’s software requires a few more lines of code. Most everything you see on a computer has more than two colors, more than two fonts, and more than two computer languages. The software has to work on more than two computers. And because of this, it needs more code to make the keyboard, and the monitor, and the printer, and the internet, all work together.
To give you an idea how many more lines it takes to make things work together, Facebook has about 20 million lines of computer code to work the way it does. Windows Operating Systems have about 50 million lines of computer code, and that doesn’t include any of the Microsoft Office programs. And Google, with its search engine, documents, spread sheets, Gmail, YouTube, and other apps, takes about 2 billion lines of computer code.
With that many lines of code, there are bound to be incompatibilities, making it hard for the systems to work together. For this reason, Facebook has over a thousand engineers working on the computer code every day. Microsoft has about 43 thousand engineers working on maintaining its operating systems and writing new programs. Google has 25 thousand coders working onabout 15 million lines of code every day. If there is a moral to this story, it is that it takes a lot of effort to keep everything working together.
Put these two morals together, and we get this: It is hard to survive if you do not work well with others. And even if you do work well with others, it takes a lot of work to keep it going. Those are pretty basic morals, but we tend to forget them. We tend to forget them because, as a culture, we do not value cooperation as much as we value competition.
A survey was done several years ago that asked leaders and professors what they believed to be true but which they could not yet prove to be true. The number one response surprised just about everyone involved in the survey.
More than 50% responded they believed that what separates humans from the rest of the animal world is our ability to cooperate and work together, and not our ability to compete and survive. They believed that it is not “the survival of the fittest” that makes us who we are, but the cooperation of the family and the village working together.
Of course, they could have saved themselves the time and the money if they had just talked to the church. We could have simply pointed them to the teachings of Jesus and the letters of Paul. There they would have found that the church is called the Body of Christ. There they would have found an affirmation that we are not all alike. We look different. We do different things. But it is also there that they would have found that we are all one in Christ Jesus.
As the Body of Christ, all of us have gifts to help us work together, but no one has all the gifts by themselves. We all have a part to do in the kingdom of God. None of us can do it all, and all of us need each other for the Body to live.
When we take that affirmation seriously, working together looks a lot like the United Methodist Church. And sometimes, as we can all admit, there are incompatibilities that are discovered which can make being together more difficult. One of the ways we deal with this is to work our way through the 31 thousands of lines in the Bible and the thousands of lines of the Book of Discipline. That’s why we have thousands of pastors working with thousands of congregations to try and make us work together as the Body of Christ.
This is harder to do than many people think it should be. There are those who don’t believe it is worth the effort any more to work together. There are those who claim that our understandings of scripture, vital piety, and social justice issues are incompatible, and that we cannot fix the problem. Like incompatible computers, we can’t talk to each other, and we can’t work together, so there is no point in being connected to each other.
And while the claims for not working together may be focused on particular issues, I believe that the real difficulty is that we live in an individualistic society which believes more in competition than in cooperation.
As a society, we are much more comfortable weighing competing claims as right and wrong, than we are in cooperating in discernment to find the truth that neither side has grasped fully. We are much more comfortable talking about “my faith” than we are talking about “our faith.” We are much more comfortable talking about “my church” than we are talking about “our church.” We are much more comfortable saying “my Jesus,” than we are saying “Our Lord.”
This is part of the issue in our reading for today. They think that every other rabbi, every other system for doing good, and everyone else is incompatible with what they are doing. They think there is no connection between what they are doing and what others are doing.
Another part of the issue in our reading is that the disciples think of Jesus as belonging to them, and only to them. The ownership of Jesus is why John said to Jesus, “Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we told him to stop because he does not belong to our group.”
Do you hear that? That should sound like fingernails on chalkboards in the ears of the Body of Christ! The ownership of Jesus! As if we could own Jesus, and we coulduse and do with Jesus whatever it is that pleases us. As if Jesus is not connected to God. As if God is not connected to all the other people in the world who bear God’s image. As if loving our neighbors, as Jesus taught, was incompatible with others actually loving their neighbors.
This is hardly the stuff of discipleship. This is hardly the posture of openness, vulnerability, and service to the least of these. And it certainly is not the posture of working with others.
In bringing their complaint, the disciples obviously thought they would be commended for protecting the image and brand of Jesus. But that is not how Jesus responded to their complaint. In fact, Jesus has already responded to this complaint before.
We remember when Peter complained that Jesus didn’t understand the power of his exclusive rights as the messiah. That’s when Jesus said, “Get behind me Satan! You don’t think the way God thinks. You are thinking the way people think!” Neither Peter nor the rest of the disciples had gotten the point, since they are still thinking like everyone else, and not as disciples. So Jesus tried another approach.
Jesus said to them, and to us, “Do not stop him from casting out demons. For nobody who does a Godly thing in my name will soon afterward be able to speak evil of me. He is not competing against us. He is cooperating with us. Find a way to work together.”
The gospel truth is that nobody owns the exclusive rights to Jesus and his teachings. All of us fall short of the glory of God. All of us are called to be followers. All of us are still growing in our faith. And all of us still need each other to be the Body of Christ.
That is what Jesus tells us in the next few verses. These verses are hard for us to hear because we are not familiar with the patterns and idioms of Semitic languages. We hear the harsh “drown yourself, cut it off, gouge it out” language literally, which is how it also gets interpreted in some other religions. So let me try to translate these verses into the way I think Jesus would have said it to us today.
Instead of denying life in Christ to others, it would be better to take up your cross and give up your life for them. Instead of using your hands to push people away, givethem your hand to welcome them in. Instead of tripping people up with tests of worthiness, use your feet to walk with them as you show them the way. Instead of looking for flaws and reasons to keep people out, open your eyes in faith to look for how God is already at work in others, so that the kingdom of God may come upon the earth.
This is how we, the salt of the earth, preserve the Body of Christ. This is how we learn to work well with others. This is how we find the strength to do the work that makes us one in God’s grace and love.
We are not all called to do the same thing. We are not all called to be the same thing. We are simply called to be, together, the Body of Christ. We each have our part to do, and others have their parts to do. It works together best when we each do our part.
Our next hymn is one I wrote based on one of the prayers of John Wesley. It recognizes that we all have a part to play, and that no one plays every part. In the chorus, there is a petition to “make us fit.” This intentionally has two meanings. It is a petition for God to enable us to do our part, to make us fit for service. But it also means to make us fit together in the Body of Christ. Will you stand with me, and together sing our intent as disciples to work together for the kingdom of God?
“If You Choose To Work Through Me, O Lord”