How We Believe

Mark 9:38-50; James 5:13-20

It was hard to escape the story this week. Live coverage all day. Blanketing social media. Do you believe him? Do you believe her? Who do you believe?

The Kavanaugh hearing in Washington played out all day as a theater of belief.

How credible is she? is he? what’s the evidence?

How do we know what really happened?

That was what we were supposed to be able to find out, on Thursday; how we are supposed to know who to believe. But the commentators who narrated all that, hour by hour; the reporters who asked senators and experts those questions about credibility and evidence, were asking the wrong questions.

Because belief isn’t really about checkable facts, or about rational agreement.

And who you believe isn’t as important as how you believe.

Belief isn’t intellectual. It’s behavioral.
That’s what Jesus is talking about today. James too.

James prescribes behaviors that turn us toward God, behaviors that are belief, for many situations.

Are any among you suffering? Any among you overwhelmed with the pain of politics, perhaps? They should pray. Not just ask God for the pain to go away, but pray: commit your time and attention to offering yourself to God and listening for God. Believe by behavior.

Or if you’re feeling good? Sing, drop a beat, shout out loud, or dance your praise to God – be visible and audible with your joy.  Believe your happiness with your body. Don’t keep it in your head.

Are any among you feeling cut off from your community by illness or force of nature, by trauma, by your own errors and omissions? Reach out to those who will bring the signs of God’s love into your brokenness, and create an opportunity for you to be made whole. Behave your belief in community and call the community to behave their belief in healing.

And Jesus is teaching his disciples – again – that what you do matters more than what you think.

Teacher, John says, we saw someone casting out demons – using your name! – without signing up with us.

“Don’t get in his way!” Jesus responds.

What that person is doing will make him a believer, a disciple, a part of me, even if he never intended it.

Invoking Jesus’ name in order to help and heal affects your heart and soul – even if you only meant it ironically, or to trick someone, or to seize power for yourself.

What you do – the good you do, the name you speak with your own mouth – changes your heart, even if you don’t “believe” it does.

If you give a dollar to that person on the street because they happen to have a cross or a “God Bless You’ on their beat up cardboard sign, you’ve turned your heart toward God, even if you’re pretty sure you just got scammed.

It’s good news that our habits and small daily actions can draw us closer to God, to Jesus, even while our minds are full of doubt, or self-interest, or distraction.

Great news. But not all the news. Jesus is pretty clear that the opposite is true, too. That what we do, intentionally or in unconscious daily habit, can draw us to God, or it can be dangerous.

Whoever puts an obstacle, a trap, in the path of the least of my disciples, well, you’d be better off drowned, he says.

So if the way I live, the people I hang out with, the way I spend my money, or post on Facebook, turn someone who wasn’t already close to God away from God, better to sink under the water and stop breathing.

Even if the way I proclaim Christian teaching turns someone away from the love or transformation Jesus is calling them to – like John trying to stop that exorcist from using the name of Jesus without doing it right – better to drown.

Good intentions don’t wash out wrong actions.

Better to die than to get in someone’s way on their way to Jesus.

Better to swim with the fishes.

Jesus is using strong language on purpose here. He doesn’t want anyone to miss how serious he is about full access to him: for the little people, the marginalized, the oppressed, the unsuccessful, the losers, and the barely-believers. He wants full access, with no one and nothing standing in their way. And Jesus really does want us to take responsibility for one another’s spiritual well-being, for making sure we keep the way to Jesus wide open for everyone.

That’s going to take a lot of attention to what we’re doing, isn’t it? If we have to watch everything we do and everything we say to make sure it’s not going to get in anyone’s way on their way to Jesus? That’s going to affect how I commit my calendar, how I drive, what I say, what I buy, where I shop. It’s a big deal.

Jesus is asking a lot of us.

But Jesus isn’t just asking that of me, or of you, but of everyone we come into contact with.

Jesus doesn’t want anyone getting in your way, either.

Not even you.

If your hand gets in your way, gets between you and Jesus, cut it off. You need Jesus more than your hand. Or your foot, or your eye.

If what gets things done for you, what’s supporting you, or what keeps your attention is getting in between you and Jesus, you are better off without it, even if it’s one of the necessities of life.

If your smartphone causes you to stumble – if the email and the texts and the maps and the apps pull you away from, or substitute for, your relationship with Jesus, cut it off.
It is better for you to miss ALL the emails and be out of the loop than to go to unquenchable fire.

if your job gets between you and Jesus, quit. It is better to enter the kingdom of God poor and unemployed than to have a successful career and be cut off from God.

It sounds unreasonable, doesn’t it?

Cut off your hand?! Quit your job!?

Well, that’s exactly how unreasonable Jesus is about anything that gets in your way.

Not for Jesus’ own sake, not because God needs attention, but because we need God. Because Jesus wants to be so close to us that nothing at all can separate us. Wants us to be so secure in our deep and abiding and transformative access to God that we can never find ourselves cut off, never find ourselves alone and blocked from God’s strength, afraid and cut off from Jesus’ courage.

Jesus won’t let us let anything get in our way.

And how we believe – the daily actions and habits that remove the stumbling blocks from our own path, and from in front of others – the way we behave our faith, so that Jesus can draw our hearts closer even if our heads doubt, is more important than who we believe, this week in Washington and on our TVs, or week after week in our church and our daily lives.

Jesus is entirely serious about how much what we do matters; entirely serious about not letting us let anything get in our way as he calls our hearts and lives closer and closer and closer to him, today and always.