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February 26, 2012

The Righteous for the Unrighteous

By The Rev. Dr. Baron Mullis

Morningside Presbyterian Church, Atlanta

The Righteous for the Unrighteous
Mark 1:9-15; Genesis 9:8-17
Morningside Presbyterian Church

Rev. Dr. Baron Mullis
February 26, 2012


The Righteous for the Unrighteous
Mark 1:9-15; Genesis 9:8-17
Morningside Presbyterian Church

Rev. Dr. Baron Mullis
February 26, 2012

I’m not much of a sailor myself, but my brother is. And so I have
subsequently through the years been dragged on many sailing trips. A few
years ago, I found myself on a rather long one. As I said, I had sailed many
times before, but usually it was more of the sunfish variety. And this time it
was a large catamaran on the open ocean. It was an illuminating experience
to say the least, in addition to being a wonderful vacation. There is
something about being twenty miles out to sea in a smallish boat that makes
the old Mariners’ Prayer make a great deal more sense. It’s a whole other
world, and one would expect that different laws might apply. It’s wonderful;
it’s beautiful, but it’s also extremely exposed. It’s raw and immediate.
There’s a reason the old mariners pray, “Be good to me Lord, for your sea is
so wide and my boat is so small.” You could need others at any minute.

So you can imagine my surprise, when shortly after I returned, I was in a
meeting, and our devotion consisted of a portion of a sermon speaking about
maritime law. The woman who was offering the devotion quoted a minister
named Eileen Lindner. Dr. Lindner was at the Jiffy Lube waiting for her car
to be serviced. After a somewhat humorous pontification about the quality of
literature available at the Jiffy Lube, she moved around to what she in fact to
what she was actually reading. It was a chapter on maritime code. She read:
“There are two kinds of craft. One of them has access to great power. It can
accelerate and push its way through the strongest of waves. It can change
direction on command. It can even stop on demand. It has great power of its
own. The other class of craft is dependent on the forces of nature: wind, tide,
and human effort in paddling, or rowing, or maintenance of the sails. And
these two classes of craft are known as privileged and burdened.”

But get this now -- the powerful boats, are they considered privileged or
burdened? They, my friends, are the burdened vessels. The powerful boats
that can make their way forward no matter what, under their own power, are
the burdened vessels, burdened with responsibility to give way to the boats
that are without power. And the powerless vessels, the ones dependent on
tide and wind and weather, they are classified as privileged vessels. To them
is accorded the right-of-way -- for if the powered vessels do not turn aside,
the un-powered vessels may not make safe harbor.” Dr. Lindner continues,
“Imagine that: the powerful boats are burdened, and the powerless boats are
privileged. And when these two kinds of craft meet each other on the open
water, the powerful are burdened and must give way if the powerless are to
make safe harbor. I thought to myself, who wrote this thing, Billy Graham?
Mother Theresa?” She said, “I turned to the front and it said ‘New Jersey
Department of Transportation.’” You know what a notable, theological
institution the New Jersey Department of Transportation is!

Friends, what’s going on? What’s going on in our land when the
Department of Transportation gets it that the powerful are considered
burdened, and the powerless are considered privileged – yet the government
of the United States and the Church of Jesus Christ are having trouble with
this concept? 1

Now, that’s her sermon; those are her politics, and I don’t try to bring my
personal politics into the pulpit. And I don’t know whether the government
of the United States knows this or not. But I do know that the church of
Jesus Christ must absolutely understand this. We must understand that in the
kingdom, in the kingdom, the rules are different. In the kingdom, we will
live in God’s way. We will operate by Christ’s rules.

A number of years ago, I was in a discussion group with Doug Oldenburg,
where we were talking about economic justice. There are few people who
can talk about economic justice quite like Doug. During those discussions,
he would generally manage to raise questions - pressing questions, needling
questions - that would get at the people in the seminar. What I noticed, as we
began to talk about economic justice, the stakes suddenly started rising.
Emotions rose. I realized -- it’s tough, because when we think about the
kingdom of God and justice and what it looks like, none of us want to think
of ourselves as unjust. None of us wants to think of ourselves as outside the
way of the kingdom of God.

So what does it mean to live in God’s way? It means to realize that the
powerful are burdened, and the powerless are privileged, or at least they are
in God’s order and the New Jersey Department of Transportation.

You see, the Bible offers us an ongoing view of what it means to live in
God’s way, and I will readily grant that it can be difficult at times to discern
what that is. But if we diligently study the Bible, there are recurring themes
all the way throughout that make God’s wishes and will for us known. And
they are very clear. But just because they are clear does not mean that they
are without controversy.

One of the most controversial is the idea that God exercises a preferential
option for the poor. Now this doesn’t mean that God loves the poor more
than the rich. God loves all of humanity. God made us, after all. Rich people
can suffer and need every bit as much as poor people. I don’t use people as
sermon illustrations without their willingness, but I will tell you that I have
known some very wealthy people, who have led very sad lives – and through
no fault of their own. They were every bit as much in need of God’s care,
every bit as much in need of God’s grace. God does not despise the rich to
the benefit of the poor. But God does expect that we will be cognizant of the
poor in our midst and their need. God knows who needs the most, and God
cares who needs the most. That’s what is meant by this.

God cares about us, whatever our life’s circumstance. I do sometimes think
that gets lost, that God cares. Not just about the corporate “us” -- of
Morningside Church, or the Presbyterian Church, or even the church
universal, but also the specific “us”, the individual “you”. God cares about
you and you particularly. That is the Gospel, and it has always been the
Gospel.

It’s been the Gospel since God set that rainbow in the sky. I happen to think
we treat the story of Noah and his ark very charitably. It’s a terrifying story
if we consider it with fresh eyes. God determines that creation is so flawed,
so run amok that the only way to salvage it is to wipe the slate clean and
start over again. Only the waters of the flood can restore righteousness. And
so God acts.

God acts and we have the story of Noah’s ark. Now, Noah’s ark is portrayed
on murals throughout the world in children’s Sunday school wings, for their
faith development, because the animals coming in two by two appears to be
cute. And I will say it is cute! But I do have some questions about it. How
did the termites survive the woodpeckers? Given the opportunity to eradicate
the mosquito, why didn’t God act in due course? But those questions gloss
over the basic terror of the story. Despite the cuteness of the giraffes and
elephants and koala bears of our murals, it is a terrifying story. God had to
establish holiness. God had to cleanse. It is terrifying…if you are a sinner.
But then God makes a decision. God decides to be for humanity. And in that
decision, the powerful became burdened.

When God makes a decision, it is not made lightly. God makes a covenant
with Noah. And it’s not just a covenant with Noah; it’s a covenant with us,
with all of us. God promises that God is going to be for humanity. The
Noahic covenant never gets mentioned again in all of the Bible, but it is
foundational for everything that follows it because it tells us something of
who God is. It tells us that the God we worship is the God who bears the
burdens.

Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann spanned centuries of theology
this way: “In this post-flood decree of creation, the sanctity of human life is
established against every ideology and every force which would cheapen or
diminish life. ‘God deems himself violated in the violation of these persons.’
(Calvin) In this decree is ground for Karl Barth’s thesis of the Humanity of
God. God unqualifiedly aligns himself with every human person as of
ultimate value to him.” The ultimate value of every person is echoed in the
statement of Jesus, ‘Even the hairs of your head are numbered. Fear not; are
you of more value than many sparrows?’”2

God chooses to be for us and promises that it will always be so. That’s a
powerful decision. God didn’t have to make it; God chose to.
And that is the Gospel - that God chooses to be for us. And because of this,
Jesus doesn’t act like a king or a politician. He doesn’t stay in a royal palace;
he doesn’t wear soft robes. Jesus goes out into the wilderness for us. Jesus
carries our burdens.

Through the years, I have realized that any preacher worth his or her salt
should be mightily aware of the capacity for preaching to sound like a series
of platitudes - I get this! We could make it sound platitudinous to say God
carries our burdens. Jesus loves me; this I know for the Bible tells me so.
God counts the hairs of my head. We could take these amazing promises and
make them sound like platitudes. But they aren’t. These aren’t platitudes
unless treated cheaply and without care. Understood rightly, this is the heart
of the Gospel - that God cares for each of us.

God chooses to be burdened for the powerless. This is the source of Isaiah’s
unbelievable assurance that ‘when through the deep waters, I call thee to go,
the rivers of sorrow shall not overflow, for I will be with thee, thy troubles to
bless, and to sanctify to thee thy deepest distress.’ To redeem our distress -
that’s the only way I can make sense of Jesus going out into the wilderness.
You go out into the wilderness because someone needs to be saved.

I understand that some people go out into the wilderness for fun. And when I
say that, I get it -- the word wilderness should have air quotes around it, and
by wilderness we mean as long as we have our North Face coats and subzero
Marmot sleeping bags and bear repellent. We turn it into our living
rooms writ large without TVs. That is not what the Bible means by “the
wilderness.”

When Jesus went out into the wilderness it was not a camping trip. It was the
unknown, the unclean, the terrifying. When Jesus goes out into the
wilderness, it is the righteous venturing out on behalf of the unrighteous to
face temptation, and to return our troubles to bless.

That is the powerful being burdened, so that the powerless may be
privileged.

We encounter two caricatures of Jesus in modern culture, to my mind: gentle
Jesus, meek and mild, and Rambo Jesus, psychotic temple cleanser. I’m
speaking tongue in cheek of course, but I suspect there’s some truth to that. I
suspect we are domesticating the grace of God by tying Jesus up in verbiage,
so that he looks just like our prevailing ideology and the Gospel gets lost in
the process.

The truth is that Jesus went out into the wilderness for us. He didn’t have to.
He chose to. Jesus went into the wilderness for us and it is the living out of
the Noahic covenant: God is for us. God has declared himself to be
burdened, in order that we may be privileged. And we can dance around the
reality of this all day if we want to, but what it means is that God loves us,
and we’re stuck with that. And it means there’s something we ought to do
about it.

There’s something so wonderful about that Noahic covenant, and the wonder
is that is so closely tied to the creation narratives. Even before we get to
Father Abraham and all the wonderful stories of the Old Testament, we
know something about who God is. We know that God’s righteousness is
torn on the one hand between his love affair with the creation he made and
loved so deeply, and his holiness, his righteousness. And yet, right there in
the mess of creation, as it got worse, and worse and worse, and each did
what they thought was right in their own mind – that’s what leads up to
Noah. God declares there isn’t going to be any casuistry of theology that
saves us from this awful conundrum: God made it to be good, and it’s gone
terribly off the rails. It’s become flawed; it’s become tragically flawed, and
it must be fixed. And in a moment of terrible righteousness God fixes it, and
declares instantly that it can never be thus again. The righteous takes on the
burden of unrighteousness - of sin - so that the unrighteous may be
privileged to be in communion. God decides it has to be different.

When Jesus goes out into the wilderness to be tempted, that is God choosing
to be for us. The powerful are burdened, and the powerless are privileged.
There’s something off kilter about that! When you think about the way the
world works, there’s something off kilter about the powerful being
burdened.

And yet, the truth is there has been something off kilter about it from the
start. God’s way is different. God’s way is holy. And yet, God’s holiness,
God’s declaration that God’s way is different - God won’t leave the
unrighteous behind. God’s concern for the unrighteous is positively
scandalous!

But the danger we run when we declare that the Gospel is scandalous is that
we’ll declare it’s scandalous so often, that it won’t really be scandalous
anymore. “The Gospel’s scandalous. The Gospel’s scandalous.” We sound
like Chicken Little when we say it. We sound like Chicken Little if we say it
so often that it’s meaningless because we haven’t done anything about it.

Then it becomes meaningless.

But if Jesus will go out into the wilderness for us, if Jesus will walk the
lonesome valley to Jerusalem for us through this season of Lent, then it is
not meaningless. It is decidedly different. It is the living out of God’s
declaration to Noah, to always be for us, despite the fact that we’re
unrighteous. That is different!

And thank God that is different; otherwise, we couldn’t come here. It would
be too terrifying.

But we can come. We can come because we are guests invited. God has
called us to this place.

When we come together in this sanctuary, we’re declaring that we’re part of
something different. Jesus calls all who are weary and carrying heavy
burdens to come and have rest. That’s right; the burdened can lay down their
burdens. In the church, it’s not so much that the burdened and the privileged
have the reversal of roles; we do come, after all, as ourselves. It’s that when
we come to the church, the declaration that we are making is that we are all
burdened, and we are all privileged.

We’re all burdened. We’re carrying a load of grace that must be given away.
And we’re all privileged, because God decided to make it that way.
Jesus didn’t just go out into the wilderness for a good time. He went
because the rainbow still means something: that God is still for us – for
absolutely all of us. God set the bow in the sky to remind us of the covenant
that the righteous will always stand for the unrighteous. God set the table to
remind us that the powerful took on the burdens so that the powerless can be
privileged.

That’s kind of tough to acknowledge -- it is for me at least -- because it
won’t let us rest lightly in our own goodness. Let me ask you, do you really
want to rely on your own goodness to save you? I’m more comforted by the
idea that the powerful took on the burden of my sin. I don’t know about you.
The whole thing’s off kilter because it’s God’s way and God’s world and
God’s church. So to all of you who are carrying heavy burdens, remember,
the righteous one is waiting to welcome us all and give us rest. The powerful
became burdened so that the powerless could make safe harbor.
In the name of the Father and of the Son and the Holy Ghost. Amen.


1 Lindner, Elileen W. Thus Far on the Way: Towards a Theology of Child Advocacy. Louisville: Witherspoon Press, 2006, p22-25

2 Brueggemann, Walter. Genesis in Interpretation. Atlanta, John Knox Press, 1982. P82 



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