Well, here we are, all ready to hear what it is the preacher said. Mark has told us that this preacher taught with authority and not like other teachers the people may have heard, so we have taken our bulletins and used them to mark our place in the Prayer Book; we have settled comfortably into our pews; we are ready to hear the wisdom this Jesus had to offer.

Mark has told us that Jesus “taught as one having authority, and not as the scribes.” At first this may seem to us a bit strange; we ask, “Don’t the scribes have authority? Aren’t they the scholars of the law? Licensed by the priests in the temple to teach the people? Don’t they have authority to speak for the religious establishment? What does Mark mean by this distinction between Jesus as one with ‘authority’ and the scribes as something else?”

It helps, I think, to look briefly as the Greek word Mark uses, the word translated as “authority.” It is exousian. This is a compound word made up of the prefix ex, which means “out of” or “from”, and the word ousian which, among other things, means “being” or “substance”. This compound word (Strong’s Lexicon tells us) refers to “the ability or strength with which one is endued.” In other words, this is not delegated authority, such as the scribes possessed; Jesus’ authority comes from the core of his being – it comes from Who he is!

So Mark has us all prepared to listen: this Jesus really knows his stuff – he teaches with authority – we’d best pay attention to what he said!

And then Mark doesn’t tell us! He changes the subject and tells us about this crazy, demon-possessed interrupter.

Mark is very cagey; this author knows exactly what he is doing. He knows all too well that when a writer reports what someone else has said, the focus of the reader’s attention shifts away from the speaker to the words which were spoken. We human beings almost immediately cease to pay attention to the speaker and, instead, to try to parse out the meaning of the words spoken, to lock them down and bind them up, to cast the words (especially the words of someone like Jesus) in stone or to interpret them into a rule that we can apply for all time.

Some of you know that I’m a fan of the now-disbanded English comedy group Monty Python’s Flying Circus. They make this very point in their movie Life of Brian. For those of you who don’t know the movie, it’s the life story of another baby born in another stable laid in another manger, a baby named “Brian” who grows up sort of just a step behind Jesus. At one point in the movie, Brian is at the edge of the crowd at the Sermon on the Mount; he is so far away from Jesus that those around him can hardly hear what Jesus is saying. When Jesus says, “Blessed are the peacemakers,” someone asks what he said and a discussion ensues:

Man #1: I think it was “Blessed are the cheesemakers.”
Woman: Ahh, what’s so special about the cheesemakers?
Man #2: Well, obviously, this is not meant to be taken literally. It refers to any manufacturers of dairy products.

Mark knows that exactly this would happen if he were to report what Jesus said in the synagogue in Capernaum that long-ago sabbath. He knows that if he were to tell us whatever it was that Jesus taught to that congregation, whatever it may have been that Jesus said to the demon-possessed man or to the demon, we would tie it up in a hard-bound book and preserve it and make it last and eventually twist it around someway so that it became both more and less than what it originally was, so that it became more important than the Person who said it. But the important thing, the true thing, the Truth is not what was said but Who said it; not the message, but the Messenger; not the proposition, but the Person. Mark wants us to focus on the Word, not his words.

I pretty regularly read a blog by a Presbyterian pastor named Mark Sandlin. His blog is called The God Article. Recently he published this graphic:

Mark the evangelist doesn’t tell us what Jesus said because he knows that someone (probably a lot of us) knowing what Jesus said would claim to know “the truth”, try to force someone else to follow that “truth”, and thereby demonstrate that we really hadn’t found the Truth at all!

And that’s really what Paul is writing to the Corinthians about in today’s epistle reading. At first reading it seems to be about dietary rules. After all, Paul is answering the question, “Is it OK to eat meat which has been sacrificed to pagan gods?”

Here’s the deal … the Corinthian church was in an uproar, just going crazy because some people were doing just that. Corinth was a crossroads city, a major commercial center. People from all over the known world, people with all sorts of religions, gathered there. Some of those religions involved (as Judaism did in the Jerusalem temple) the sacrifice of animals on the altars of their idols. The clergy who conducted those sacrifices supported themselves by later selling the meat from those sacrificed animals. Some in the Corinthian church believed that the meat was “tainted” spiritually by having been so used and that eating it “tainted” the soul of the consumer; other church members thought that was nonsense – they knew better! they knew “the truth”! And they were going to act on that “truth”, on that knowledge and, in a sense, force the rest of the church to go along with them. But “knowledge puffs up,” as Paul put it so bluntly; it does not build up (love does that).

So let me ask you this … Well, first let me ask you something else?

What’s the opposite of black? (The congregation suggests “white”.) Is it? What about charcoal grey, or pearl grey, or chartreuse, or puce….? What’s the opposite of up? (The congregation suggests “down”.) Well…. what about diagonal? or sideways? or circular?

So what I was going to ask is this … What’s the opposite of truth? (Someone in the congregation suggests “lies”.) That’s what we think, isn’t it? That the opposite of truth is falsehood? But what these bits of Scripture today show us is that the opposite of truth is craziness!

While I was preparing for today I read a sermon on this gospel passage by the dean of the cathedral in Atlanta, Georgia, the Very Rev. Samuel Candler. In that sermon, Dean Candler wrote:

I have served five churches in my ordained life, and it never fails. In every place I have ever ministered, just when things are beginning to go right, the crazies show up. Just when I am having a delightful conversation, some crazy person interrupts. Just when the committee has reached a spectacular decision, the crazy one jumps up to speak. Just when it looks like the entire congregation is happy, the crazies show up angry and upset.

It’s the same way in other institutions besides churches. We ask ourselves, “How in the world did that crazy person get into this group?” We even find usually reasonable people suddenly acting crazy. It happens in our families. We ask our lover, “Where did that crazy comment come from?” (Day 1 Sermon: January 29, 2006)

Whenever the Truth begins to really hold sway, the craziness comes. That’s what happened in Corinth, all that craziness around what to eat and whether it’s OK to eat something. That’s what the lesson from Deuteronomy warns about. What God said to Moses there can be paraphrased, “I’ll be sending someone to speak truth, but in the meantime a lot of other people will show up talking crazy! They’ll claim to represent other gods, or they’ll claim to represent me but say things I couldn’t possibly have anything to do with; they’ll just be talking crazy!” And that’s what happened in the Capernaum synagogue that sabbath. Truth began to hold sway, and craziness walked in and interrupted.

We all have craziness in our lives. As Dean Candler said, it happens all the time. Some craziness is easy to identify: addiction to drugs or alcohol, medical problems, worries about money. Some isn’t so easy to peg: an over-weaning attachment to the past perhaps, or an excessive concern about the future, or an over-acquisitiveness of money and possessions. Whatever … there are all sorts of idols to which we can become attached, all sorts of craziness that can infect our lives. If Mark had told us what Jesus said to the demon-possessed man, someone might try to tell us that that is the answer to our craziness … which, of course, it wouldn’t be: it was the answer to his craziness, not to ours. But someone would try to tell us that if we just believe what Jesus taught or said that day in the synagogue ….

There was a Lutheran seminary professor named Gerhard Frost who died in 1988. Dr. Frost, in addition to being a theologian, was also a poet. I thought of his work and one poem in particular as I contemplated today’s lessons. The poem is entitled Loose-Leaf:

When your options are either
to revise your beliefs
or to reject a person,
look again.

Any formula for living
that is too cramped
for the human situation
cries for rethinking.

Hardcover catechisms
are a contradiction
to our loose-leaf lives.

(Gerhard E. Frost, Seasons of a Lifetime, p. 57, Augsburg Fortress: Minneapolis 1987)

That’s the genius of Mark, that “hardcover catechisms are a contradiction to our loose-leaf lives.” If Mark had written down what Jesus taught that congregation or what Jesus said to the demon-possessed man or to the demon, human beings would have tightly bound those words; they would have become “hardcover catechisms”. They would have become a message more important than the Messenger; the what would have overshadowed the Who; the proposition of belief would have obscured the Person before us. But as Paul wrote to the Corinthians, it is not knowledge that overcomes craziness; it is Love – Love in the Person of Jesus Christ who is the Truth. In a way never meant by those who usually say it, it’s not what you know, it’s Who you know!

We live loose-leaf lives into which craziness comes in all sorts of ways. Open the binder of your loose-leaf life and make room for Truth. We may not know what Truth spoke to the craziness in the synagogue, but we can be sure that Truth will always speak to the craziness in our lives. Open the binder of your loose-leaf life and let Truth speak to you. Amen.