“(Mark 9:38–50 NRSV)

“John said to him, “Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he was not following us.” But Jesus said, “Do not stop him; for no one who does a deed of power in my name will be able soon afterward to speak evil of me. Whoever is not against us is for us. For truly I tell you, whoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you bear the name of Christ will by no means lose the reward. “If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea. If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life maimed than to have two hands and to go to hell, to the unquenchable fire. And if your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life lame than to have two feet and to be thrown into hell. And if your eye causes you to stumble, tear it out; it is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and to be thrown into hell, where their worm never dies, and the fire is never quenched. “For everyone will be salted with fire. Salt is good; but if salt has lost its saltiness, how can you season it? Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another.”

Our gospel lesson this morning is especially important in these trying times for the Church. It’s about boundaries. It’s about setting and maintaining the boundaries that are essential for the Church to fulfill its mission within and for the world.

We Anglicans do a reasonably good job these days with the first of these boundaries, I think, so we won’t spend a lot of time on it this morning. The question arose in the early Church of how disciples are to relate to those who do the work that faithfulness demands but who aren’t in fact disciples of Jesus. Mark recalls a time when John spoke on behalf of the disciples in reporting to Jesus a problem that seemed to challenge the authority of the disciples. Someone who was not a disciple was casting out demons in the name of Jesus. This was much like the time when Joshua similarly complained to Moses that certain persons were prophesying without authorization. Jesus, like Moses, dismissed the complaint with an important teaching. “Whoever is not against us is for us.” And so, with respect to those who are not Christian but nonetheless do the work that characterizes the kingdom of God, disciples are to be open and welcoming, seeing in such work the hand of God.

So the first teaching - the one about the appropriate boundaries between the Church and the world - is fairly easy to grasp. But then we immediately encounter a very tough teaching about a different kind of boundary. Were you shocked by the harsh language? If your hand causes you to stumble, cut if off. If your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off. If your eye causes you to stumble, pluck it out. This is one of those passages that hospital chaplains are usually forbidden to preach in psychiatric wards. Tragically, some patients through the years have taken these words literally and mutilated themselves after hearing sermons on them. But if these words aren’t to be taken literally, how are we to understand them?

Before we dig into that, we need to review a little history that is essential to understanding why Mark put these sayings of Jesus together in this particular way in constructing his gospel. To get a good sense of the context in which Mark is writing, I’d like for you to think back to images you may remember of the fall of Saigon in 1975. Imagine that famous helicopter evacuation on the roof of the US embassy as North Vietnamese tanks were rolling into Saigon. American Marines and embassy personnel were frantically evacuating their loved ones and themselves, while South Vietnamese civilians were clinging to them and even to the rails of the choppers, terrified of being massacred by the North Vietnamese. If you can remember that fear of impending doom, that fear of the inevitable massacre by an approaching army, you have a good sense for what it must have been like for the early Christian Church for whom Mark wrote his gospel. Mark wrote during the time of the Jewish-Roman war of 66-70 AD, just before the Romans destroyed the Temple with fire and looted the city. The Jews revolted in 66 when Emperor Nero tried to take funds from the Temple treasury. Fighting broke out in both Judah and Galilee. The Roman governor in Syria marched on Jerusalem and occupied the northern part of it, but the Jews routed him at that point and he retreated. Rome of course responded with overwhelming force, and so in 68 Vespasian marched once again on Jerusalem and began to lay siege to it. But Emperor Nero died at that point, and Vespasian did what all good Roman generals do. He retreated and returned to Rome to declare himself Emperor. Caesar Vespasian then sent General Titus to crush the revolt. Titus arrived 18 months later and pursued a scorched earth policy - just like General Sherman did en route to Atlanta - as he made his way through Galilee en route to Jerusalem. And it’s in this period just before Titus’ arrival that Mark most likely wrote his gospel.

I share this historical note with you because I want you to have a feel for the extraordinary pressures upon the Christians in Palestine. If you remember how you felt when our own country was attacked on 9/11, you can imagine perhaps how the Christians centered in Capernaum felt during the war. This was their country, after all, and they were under attack. The rebel leaders went about the countryside recruiting Jews to join in the armed resistance using the recruiting slogan, “Take Up You Cross,” an allusion to the fact that the Roman army crucified any peasants thought to be cooperating with the rebels in Galilee as it approached. “Take Up Your Cross” was a call to arms, a call for all Jews to join in armed resistance against both the Romans and their supporters. But there were many - including the Jewish general Josephus - who eventually opposed the rebels, recognizing that the rebels could never defeat Rome; this group urged their fellow Jews to cooperate with Rome. And so, while the people of Palestine awaited almost certain destruction by the Roman Army, they killed each other in a ruthless civil war. The rebels - who were themselves split in a power struggle - routinely killed anyone who collaborated with Rome, and the Romans killed anyone who collaborated with the Jewish rebels. It was a very dangerous, terrifying time for Jewish Christians. It’s not difficult to imagine the enormous pressure on the Christians at Capernaum as those with whom they had natural sympathies demanded that they join them in meeting violence with violence. The claim of the rebels was the mantra of the world - one we hear too often in our time: “If you are not with us, you are against us. Join us or be destroyed.”

It shouldn’t be that hard for us to imagine how seductive this argument must have been given the terror of the times. It’s a particularly seductive argument when we feel great issues of social justice are at stake. It’s easy to believe that our violence is justified by the justice of our aims. Those of you who lived through the Civil Rights movement in the late 50s and 60s will know this, for who can forget the great pressure put upon African Americans by the Black Panthers, who said to those in Martin Luther King Jr’s movement, “you are either with us or against us.” Thankfully Martin Luther King knew what Mark tells us in his gospel - that how we go about our quest for justice is just as much a matter of faithfulness as the ends we seek. But we see this same seduction in much of our lives: in both the middle school lunch room and office politics when we are invited to murder the hearts of brothers and sisters in the service of various causes: “you’re either with us or you’re against us.” We practice both at home, school, and office the same politics of domination that Jesus railed against in first century Palestine.

And that leads us to the first of Mark’s use of Jesus’ sayings about salt. “For everyone will be salted with fire.” The expression, “salted with fire” comes from Leviticus and refers to the cultic practice of pouring salt on the sacrificial flame to purify it. To say that Christians must be salted with fire is to say, first, that Christians ought to expect to be tested by great trials, and, second, that Christians are to see themselves as sacrifices, in the way of the Lamb of God, as Paul says in Romans 12. We are called to be the leaven that leavens the loaf, to be a people who live in such a way that we show the world how to leave in peace with one another and with God.

And so, as his fellow Christians struggled with the question of what faithfulness demanded of them in Jewish-Roman war, Mark reminded them of teachings by Jesus that strike right at the heart of the issue. Jesus did not come merely to overturn Rome or to free the weak from domination by the elite families who ran the Temple hierarchy. He came to destroy forever the politics of domination that epitomize the human condition. Jesus called for a radical break from the old politics and invited disciples into a new politics - the politics of Jesus - a politics of non-violent resistance to all forms of violence, exploitation, and dehumanization in the world. Mere rebellion is neither sufficient nor faithful to the Way of Christ. Disciples who join the Jewish rebels in violence therefore turn from the Way of Christ. To turn to violence is to return to the ways of the world - to the politics of domination - from which Jesus called them. And once they did that, they would no longer be the salt that purifies. They would be apostate.

So a tough question inevitably arose for the Christians centered in Capernaum, just as it arises for us today: what do we as the Church do when some among us become stumbling blocks for others? To be a stumbling block in biblical language means to lead someone into apostasy - to seduce fellow Christians to return to the ways of the world. You can imagine what a tragedy that is for the Church when you recall Paul’s teaching that we are called to be one body. Indeed, Paul spoke in 1Cor 12 of how, in our diversity, some of us are called to be the feet, the eyes, and the hands of one body. What do we do when some of our body turn from the way of Christ by embracing violence - even if it is in pursuit of justice - and then seduce others to join them in their own apostasy? Here Mark reminds the Christians of Palestine of what Jesus had said about those who are stumbling blocks within the body of Christ. “If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off.” Cut if off. In other words, expel from your midst those beloved parts of your body who turn from the Way of Christ, for it is better to be maimed and still have life than to be thrown into the unquenchable fire.

There are boundaries within the body of Christ that must be maintained. As the Christians of Palestine knew well, if you mix table salt with gypsum salts from the Dead Sea, the table salt loses its saltiness. Boundaries must be maintained or salt lose its saltiness.

And that leads to the second saying about salt. If salt has lost its saltiness, how can you season it? How can you restore it so that it becomes the purifying agent it is intended to be? This was an important question for the early Church, for recall how Jewish law dealt with the apostate. Remember the stoning of Steven? The normal way of dealing with the apostate was with death. But here Mark points to a different way, once again by using a saying of Jesus. “Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another.” Salt was one of the symbols of the covenanted life to which Israel was called. To share salt with one another was like breaking bread with one another. To have salt in yourselves, then, is to practice the covenanted fellowship to which Christians are called.

And what is it that binds us together in fellowship as the body of Christ? It’s not our agreement on matters of social justice. It’s not our agreement on matters of economics or national politics. It’s not our shared sympathy for any particular cause. What binds us together is a truth that we’ve been blessed to know about God and about our relationship to God - the fact that we are sinners in the hands of a loving God. It is our knowledge of this fact - our participation in this fact alone that binds us together. When we go to the altar and confess our sins against God and our neighbor, we go not merely in the hope that God will forgive our sins, but rather in full confidence that God already has forgiven our sins. Our confession is not a fearful supplication, but a bold celebration of the truth we know about the Father, revealed in the Son. And it is that knowledge alone that makes it possible for us to be the body of Christ, to go out into the world to love and serve the Lord and each other in peace.

So how do you restore salt when it has lost its saltiness? Mark tells us that it’s only by being the salt of the earth we are called to be. By returning to the habits of the covenant life to which we are called, a common life that is to be marked by forgiveness of each other’s sins. So, yes, boundaries must indeed be maintained. Yet, because of the fact that we are called to be the salt of the earth, when we dine together there must always be an empty chair set for the apostate in the hope that they will return to the way of Christ. The chair of forgiveness is ever present within the portals of salvation.

How do you restore salt to its saltiness? By being the salt of the earth we are called to be. “Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another.”