Organizational Practice

Mark 6:30-34, 53-56
The apostles gathered around Jesus, and told him all that they had done and taught. He said to them, “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while.” For many were coming and going, and they had no leisure even to eat. And they went away in the boat to a deserted place by themselves. Now many saw them going and recognized them, and they hurried there on foot from all the towns and arrived ahead of them. As he went ashore, he saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd; and he began to teach them many things. When they had crossed over, they came to land at Gennesaret and moored the boat. When they got out of the boat, people at once recognized him, and rushed about that whole region and began to bring the sick on mats to wherever they heard he was. And wherever he went, into villages or cities or farms, they laid the sick in the marketplaces, and begged him that they might touch even the fringe of his cloak; and all who touched it were healed.

This feels like a good week to remind ourselves that Jesus is living AND the Gospels are being written/recorded in times of huge political instability. Judea is under Roman rule, and Rome is an overextended empire - “imperial overreach” is the history/poli sci term for it. Judea is geographically remote, politically unimportant, and is not getting the top brass in terms of leadership. There’s a lot of chaos at the higher levels of governance, there’s infighting and backstabbing and lines of succession that get messed up; it’s not a functional system. Violence is the control method of choice, and dissent or unrest are not treated generously (we saw this in last week's beheading of John the Baptist.)

When approach the Gospel stories, we’re working with several generations of oppressive and repressive governance, unjust taxation, poverty and inequality, etc. Folks are very generally not thriving. It’s helpful to remember that this is the context that Jesus is born into, and you can understand why people were chomping at the bit for some “Good News” - for someone to show up and make things right, to fix or deliver them from this mess. And Jesus wasn’t the only person who was believed to be the Savior! There were a lot of other Messianic figures and movements in those times; folks who came through and said, “This is bad and I have (or I am!) the solution!” Every single one of them was swiftly subdued by Rome… “subdued” being the polite history textbook word for “summarily executed”. They were beheaded, hung, and crucified. 

So how did the Jesus movement manage to not only survive, but flourish through this time - even in the absence of Jesus? It’s an complex question with many layers of answers, but today’s texts actually give us a couple of important reasons as to why we're still all here:

First: Jesus was not a personality cult leader. Yes, he was brilliant. Yes, he was charismatic and visionary, and, y’know… God made flesh in human time. But the bulk of his work on earth was focused on recruiting and equipping other people to carry out the work of making his vision a reality. Today’s Gospel reading is filled with easy to miss details that underline this point. Notice the chapter numbers: the lectionary omits a huge miracle story in the middle (the feeding of the five thousand, from 5 loaves of bread and 2 fish.) But today’s text only gives us what happens immediately before and after this event. So we’re being explicitly directed to read in the margins: it’s  Jesus checking in with his disciples and encouraging them to rest, to care for themselves and one another, in the midst of THEIR ministry in the world (not his.)

Remember that they’ve just been sent out into the communities around them to preach and to heal. Jesus gives them “authority over unclean spirits”, and Mark tells us that “they went out in pairs and proclaimed that people should change their hearts and lives. They cast out many demons, and they anointed many sick people with olive oil and healed them.” 

This is the work of discipleship! It isn’t to worship at Jesus' feet and be amazed while he does magic and fixes everything. The Jesus movement is immediately, in its earliest form, decentralized. It looks nothing like a replacement for Roman rule. There’s no hierarchy, no one taking over the throne. It’s a 100% grassroots, community-based healing movement that is focused around collective care, compassion, radical inclusivity. It’s focused on attending to the daily lived realities of human beings: providing food to the hungry, and healing to the sick. 

Yes, Jesus is the centerpiece, the cornerstone, the teacher, the Messiah - but the organizational practice is designed to be fulfilled by the disciples. By us. The mantle is taken up by us, the Children of God. We are commissioned and empowered by Christ and the Holy Spirit to carry on this work, regardless of where Jesus himself is located.

Unfortunately, it only took a couple hundred years for the movement to get subsumed into the empire, and reshaped into a top-down, state-sanctioned, state-enforced system. But that’s not where our roots are. Our roots are in the 12 disciples, going out in pairs, to change hearts and minds, to heal, and to spread love in real, tangible, embodied ways. 

Throughout our religious history, there have been a lot of calls for us to return to our roots, to go back to “the original Christianity.” Which, I will remind you, was NOT a monolith. The OG Christianity was a grassroots network, not a universally understood and practiced system. But often when “OG Christianity” is invoked, it’s a veiled power grab, an excuse to implement regressive and exclusive religious practices. We don’t know everything about the early church, but we do know that we started out as a small but diverse group of people who were trained, equipped, and sent out to be healers in a broken world. 

What has and continues to fuel and sustain us is that we are living in pursuit of a common vision. Laid out in Psalm 23, in Jeremiah, in Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. A vision where everyone’s material, emotional, and spiritual needs are met - a vision where we all have what we need to become our fullest selves, in right and loving relationship with each other and with all of creation.

There’s a reason that the scriptures hit differently when we’re going through times of chaos and conflict. They were written by and for people in exile, people living under repressive and unstable governments, sick people, lost people, people living in fear. They were written to give hope and vision, something to set our sights on and something to move towards. I think we actually understand some of our stories more fully when we find ourselves in similar contexts. And we may not find solutions or even solace, but what we will find is solidarity. We find the roadmap laid out by Jesus and the early churches: working together to create an inclusive family, to build up localized systems of care and growth, and a focus on a common vision - building the Beloved Community, a place/time/reality where we “are no longer strangers and aliens, but citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God.”

I may be wrong and I hope to be wrong, but it doesn’t seem like things at the higher levels of governance are going to get better soon. Regardless of how the next couple months play out, we need to remember that there isn’t one leader, savior, or president that will swoop in and magically make everything right. We are very much obligated to exercise the electoral power we do have in the political realm, because we can and should always be using every tool in the box to make our world more just, more equitable, more accessible, more peaceful, more caring. But let’s not lose sight of the primary tool of the Jesus movement, a movement created within and for times like these. Our most powerful tool for change and growth is our model that starts from the bottom up, a model that goes forth in pairs to change hearts and minds in our neighborhoods. A model that is decentralized, cooperative, radically inclusive, deeply loving, and ultimately focused on the vision of the Beloved Community:

-Where we are citizens with the saints and members of the household of God.
-When justice and righteousness are executed in the land.
-Where our souls are revived.
-When our common cup is running over.

Amen.