“Pardon the Interruption”

Mark 1:21-28

January 29, 2006

St. Paul United Methodist Church

Rev. John A. Fleming

Most of the time, us United Methodist preachers aren’t too good at disruptions in the worship service. Our brothers and sisters in other denominations seem to handle these things a little better than we do and seem to be a little more comfortable with the spontaneous. Us? Well, we like the order of worship. If the Holy Spirit wants to be a part of our worship, that is no problem, but we would like to know about it ahead of time so that we can set apart some time for it in the order of worship. We are Method-ists, after all.

I do not think that it was the first sermon that I preached, but I can remember being the guest preacher at the First United Methodist Church in Decaturville, Tennessee. At the time I was working on the summer staff at Lakeshore, the conference camp for the Memphis Annual Conference. The Decaturville Church had a Lakeshore staff appreciation worship service one Sunday every summer and invited us over for it and for the meal afterwards. We mostly went for the meal! Because I had just finished my first year of seminary and was planning on being a preacher when I grew up, their pastor asked if I would deliver the sermon. I should have said no, but I said yes. I don’t know what I was thinking. There was no time to work on a sermon while working at the camp. Somehow I was able to get some words together.

So there we were in Decaturville on a Sunday morning. The pastor introduced me. I read the morning’s scripture. I was a line or two into the sermon when I saw this boy who could not have been more than three or four, who starting at the back of the church, did somersaults all the way down the middle aisle. His doing this didn’t seem to surprise the church. I got the idea that he had done it before. As it turns out, he was the preacher’s son! I have warned Annie Grace not to do that here during a worship service.

The Harmony Grove Church was my first church. You have heard me speak of it. The church is a beautiful white framed building that you might see on the front of a postcard. In the spring of the year, there is a real problem with wasps! Most of the church has siding around it which stops the wasps from swarming. But in the open space of the bell tower, the wasps find their way into the sanctuary. Through the tower, past the bell, down through a hole that houses the rope to bring the bell to life. We tried to anticipate the wasps. We tried to bomb them in the spring. We tried to anticipate their arrival. Still we often dodged them during worship services. I was told that one of the former pastors of that church was trying to make a point. She gently pointed her finger toward the congregation and when she did a wasp landed on it. She tried to gently wave it off, but it did not budge. By that time, everyone was watching and it looked as if she were conducting the choir by the way that she was waving her finger around. The wasp didn’t sting her, but it did sting the worship service. After that she didn’t have any luck getting back on track.

Then there was my first Sunday to preach at First United Methodist Church here in Little Rock. I had been on duty a month when my Sunday to preach came around. That Sunday, one of our members, a retired preacher, was sitting in his usual place. He had a heart condition for which he took nitroglycerin tablets. That morning, for some reason, he took two of them instead of the recommended one. You may know what effect doing such a thing has. I stood up to read the scripture lesson. When I did, this man fell out. He passed out. He slumped over in his pew. Luckily there was a doctor or two in that congregation. They tended to him. The head usher called for help and an ambulance with siren blaring as loud as it could pulled up in front of the church. He passed out. Then, with all that commotion, in walked our bishop of the time, Rev. Janice Riggle Huie. I was preaching for the first time in front of my new church, a big congregation. A man had just passed out. I had never preached in front of a bishop before. I nearly passed out. Somehow I kept my composure, read the scripture and preached the sermon.

These are the things that we laugh about later, after they are over. At the time they are not so funny. But sometimes a disturbance in the church is a good thing and an opportunity for the church to see a little bit of God.

Our scripture lesson for this morning tells of an interruption in a worship service. Our lesson, taken from the first chapter of Mark’s story of Jesus, is the setting. In the lesson, we find Jesus creating quite a stir at the synagogue and then dealing with a disturbance in the congregation.

The occasion, as you heard, was the Sabbath day and location was the synagogue in Capernaum. Folks from that congregation came to the worship service like they always did. Standing up front in the place of their usual rabbi was a guest teacher. No one knew this Jesus. Now Mark doesn’t give us his sermon notes. Mark doesn’t tell us if Jesus used the words of Isaiah or one of the other prophets. We have no idea what he said. But there was something either in the way that he said it or in the words themselves that was so different and so extraordinary that Mark says that the people were astounded. There are synonyms for the word astounded. Some of my favorite are flabbergasted, dumbfounded, thunderstruck and stupefied. All those words mean that whatever Jesus said or how he said it was powerful and different. That, in and of itself, in a church of all places, is enough to cause a disturbance. I mean, after all, do you expect such things in worship services?

So there was a disruption, but it wasn’t the only one that morning in the synagogue. There was another one just waiting to happen. It came in the form of a man who Mark describes as one who had an unclean spirit. You will need to know this, unclean spirit, evil spirit, and demons, these words are used interchangeably by Mark.

The last time I preached this passage was three years ago. Three years ago I focused on that unclean spirit, that demon. Together we thought about the demons in our lives. I know that all of you remember that great sermon, right? Well, today I do not want us to think about the demons. There are demons out there, of course. We battle demons and evil is real. I know that. The unclean spirit inside the man represented all of the other ones. These demons somehow had the inside track on recognizing the Messiah. They knew who He was and what He had come to do. It took the better part of three years for the disciples to begin to understand who Jesus was and what He had come to do. At the end of those years, the disciples still did not understand.

What I want us to do today is to thank that unclean spirit, because he asked a question that has every thing to do with all of us. Here it is. What authority does Jesus’ teaching have on our life? Or, as the unclean spirit puts it, “What have you to do with us Jesus of Nazareth?

The folks in the synagogue were amazed and astounded that Sabbath morning because Jesus spoke with authority. Somehow the spirit inside the man was affected by that authority. Somehow he knew that this Jesus was no meek and mild Messiah and that he was about to disturb the whole world. Somehow he knew, somehow he sensed that Jesus’ authority was about to turn the old ways, the old values, the old systems, the old way of life completely around, maybe even upside down!

What have you to do with us, Jesus? Isn’t that the most important question for us these days? Don’t we really want to know where Jesus’ authority touches our lives? How do we experience it? Does it really matter to us? Let me ask you, can you think of a time where there has been a greater need for Jesus to have something to do with us?

Adam Hamilton is the senior pastor of The Church of the Resurrection in Leawood, Kansas, just outside of Kansas City. He planted the church he now pastors. It started in a funeral home, thus it’s name. He started with four members (himself, his wife, and his two daughters). Now the church is one of the largest in our denomination. Adam has a heart for the unchurched and the nominally churched. That is his emphasis. My brother recently gave me one of Adam’s books Leading Beyond the Walls. In that book, Adam says that the first question every church should be able to answer is not, “How can we get new members?” Instead, the first question that the church should ask is, “Why do people need Christ?” We need to know what this Jesus has to do with us, the claims that he makes on our lives, and the authority that he demands of us all. We need to know, says Adam Hamilton, that most of the problems we face are spiritual problems.

You see, what Jesus has to do with us must not be limited to the hours that we spend here at the church, on Sunday mornings, or even to the time that we spend reading our Bibles and praying. We have to take Jesus to other places. We must let him barge into the boardroom. We must let Him into our homes. But most importantly, we must let this Jesus take over our hearts.

I tell you all of this, this morning, because my experience is that when I give Jesus free reign and authority in my life, which by the way isn’t very often because I don’t like this kind of thing, he takes it and disrupts my life and challenges me and makes me struggle with important issues.

What do you have to do with us Jesus of Nazareth? The answer, of course, is everything. This is a time, I think like never before when we need to talk about what Jesus has to do with us, what he has to do with our church, what he has to do with our world. It is a time to talk about it around the Sunday School circle of chairs. It is time to talk about it around the Sunday lunch table. It is time to talk about it with that friend, the one that you trust, when you have lunch together. As one preacher put it, we need to ask Jesus to come and be a guest teacher for all of us.

This Jesus has not come to destroy us as he did the demons. He is the Holy One of God and He can bring meaning to our lives. Let us pray.