1st Sunday in Lent, February 21st,
A+D 2021
Our Redeemer and Our Savior’s Lutheran Churches
Custer and Hill City, S.D.
The Mysterious, Dreadful, and Wonderful Break Up
Mark 1:9-15, Genesis 22:1-18
Do you remember the 1960s pop hit, “Breaking
up is hard to do”? To be honest, Neil
Sedaka’s cheery song makes a mockery of breaking up. Breakups aren´t “hard to do.” They’re horrible. We hate break ups. We hate divisions, separation. We fear the intense negativity of the moment,
when two parties, maybe a husband and wife, maybe friends or business partners,
maybe two nations who had been allies, come to the point of declaring that the
unity we had is no more, that we must go our separate ways, that the fellowship
which we shared, and enjoyed, and depended upon, has ended. Words are spoken and actions taken that break
the bond, and we can’t undo them. And we
dread the aftermath, living with the brokenness.
Breakups are terrible in the Church
too. Of course, we have a special word. We don’t typically say “break-up” for a split
in the church, that would be too simple.
Rather we say “schism.” The word
itself sounds bad. There was the Great
Schism in the year 1054 between the Western Christian Church and the Eastern
Christian Church, the mutual ex-communication between Rome and
Constantinople. We Lutherans tend to use
the word “Reformation” to describe and celebrate the events of the 16th
century, put into motion by a German monk named Martin Luther. But others consider it a schism; and certainly
Luther’s efforts to reform the Roman Church led to an uncountable series of divisions in
Christendom: Lutherans, Catholics, Protestants, Baptists, Episcopalians,
Methodists, Presbyterians, Charismatics, etc..., the list goes on. Even amongst folks who call themselves
Lutherans, we have an alphabet soup of separate groups: LCMS, ELCA, WELS, ELS, NALC, AALC, LCMC, CLC,
to name a few... and that’s just in the U.S.
Once not so long ago the vast majority of the congregations that belong
to all those Lutheran church bodies I just listed enjoyed full communion
amongst themselves, fellowship of pulpit and altar. But no more.
Breaking up is terrible, especially when it means a schism in the Church
of Jesus Christ. But here we are, all of
us children of a broken church family.
All of which makes St. Mark’s choice of
verb in our Gospel today very strange.
As Jesus comes up out of the water, the heavens were opened. Matthew and Luke report the same event using
a run of the mill Greek verb for opening.
And our translation of Mark waters down his verb in “the heavens were
opened.” What St. Mark actually wrote
was that the heavens were schizo’d. You
thought you didn’t know any Greek, but you do.
You know the verb schizo, or schizomai.
The heaven’s were schizo’d, as in schism, as in schizophrenic. We all know this Greek verb from the
terrifying condition of schizophrenia, when one person’s personality is torn in
two, or three or more.
According to St. Mark, the heavens didn’t
just open at the Baptism of Jesus. They
were schizo’d, torn apart. It’s a very
strange choice of verb, because while we have established that breaking up,
separating, being torn apart, is usually a very bad thing, here the heavens are
torn apart for wonderful things, so that the Holy Spirit can descend on Jesus
like a dove and the Father can declare: "You are my beloved Son; with you I am well
pleased." Why use such a violent
verb, schizomai, to tear apart, to describe such a pleasant event, the
revelation of the Holy Trinity at the Baptism of Jesus? What is St. Mark trying to say to us?
We hate break-ups, and rightly so. But we aren’t very good at preventing them,
are we? We seek connection, partnership,
fellowship, in every aspect of our lives.
The very best part of life is our connection to others, to family,
friends, countrymen, fellow travelers.
The Covid-19 pandemic has driven this point home for literally the whole
world. It is not good for human beings
to be alone. We need connection,
community, fellowship.
And yet, again and again in the midst of
every relationship, marriages, families, friendships, business partnerships,
political and social movements, and churches, problems come up. Disagreements. Offenses.
Sins, one against the other. Once
we’ve lived long enough to suffer a few break-ups, we learn to try hard to
overcome our differences, in order to avoid breaking up. Not well of course. The way to overcome an offense, a sin,
between friends, is to deal with it head on.
As St. James said, “Confess your sins to one another, and pray
for one another, that you may be healed.” (James
5:16)
But do we confess our sins to one
another? Such honesty and vulnerability
usually frighten us as much or more than a break up, so we try other ways. We should with humility pursue honesty,
confession, repentance, apology, forgiveness and reconciliation. But when problems come up in our
relationships we are more likely to try to just ignore them, and hope they’ll
go away. Or we try to explain them away,
(she’s under a lot of stress, it’s o.k. that she’s treating me like
garbage... I know he shouts all the
time, but that´s just his way of communicating...). Sometimes we try to paper over them, stuffing
them down inside our souls and hoping they stay there.
But they don’t. With small issues, minor offenses, we may be
wise enough and strong enough to paper over them and let them go. But with real sins, serious offenses, while
we might stuff them down in our gut and move on, they won’t stay down. Real problems, serious injuries, or even a
long series of minor ones, can fester and infect our whole being, eventually
working their way back to the surface.
And the harder we try to keep them down, the more likely they are likely
to erupt in a full blown schism, a tearing apart, a nasty break up.
Which brings us back to our Gospel
reading. Jesus is starting His ministry,
His ministry of reconciliation, of healing schisms, of reuniting those broken
apart. Which perhaps is why Mark chose
such a violent verb to describe the heavens opening at our Lord’s Baptism. And then, immediately after, Jesus is driven
into the desert to be tempted by Satan.
Mark doesn’t give us much detail, but we know from Matthew and Luke that
Satan used all his trickery to try to drive a wedge between Jesus and His
Father. Satan is the arch-separator, the
schism master, tearing asunder what God had put together: mankind from God, husband from wife, brother
from brother. But Jesus easily turns
back Satan’s feeble attempts to drive a wedge between the Father and Son. Our Lord’s work of reconciliation had begun
in earnest. Jesus would go on to heal
broken bodies, and reunite families separated by demon possession and even
death. Christ Jesus, the schism healer.
All the way to the end. The Son of God did not take on human flesh to
do things halfway. From before the
foundation of the world He was committed to healing all our
divisions, all our schisms.
So committed was the Father, Son and Holy Spirit to healing the schism
that our sin created between us and Him, that God even undertook the
unthinkable.
The violent separation that the Lord
instructed Abraham to do in our Old Testament reading, the sacrifice of his
only son, his beloved child Isaac, was thankfully only a test. God never intended that Isaac should be killed
by his father. That would’ve been
horrible, and useless, a waste.
Sacrificing Isaac wouldn’t have helped anybody. In this test, Abraham demonstrated his
faithfulness, and his belief that the Lord would still fulfill His promises
about Isaac, even if he was sacrificed.
Thank God it never happened. But
it did serve as a sign, a foreshadowing, of an even more terrible, and yet
wonderful schism to come. For the
almost sacrifice of Isaac points forward to the dreadful mystery of the Gospel,
that God, in order to save sinners like me and you, took all our schisms into
Himself, in order to heal them, once for all.
The Lord would indeed provide a Lamb.
The love and unity of God, Father, Son and
Holy Spirit is eternal, it is divinely powerful. It is indestructible. And yet the Lord had mercy on us, the crown
of His good creation, now fallen into sin and guilt and division. God in His grace determined to undergo, for just
a brief and yet eternal moment, the separation of the Son from the Father and
the Spirit.
In order to free us from the offenses and
sins that separate us from each other and from God, the Father turned away from
the Son, and the Son gave up His Spirit, suffering in a single moment all the
divine punishment that our schisms and sins deserve. God the Father gave up His most precious and
beloved Son, for just a moment, in order that in Christ Jesus, we might be
returned to God.
This is why there is now no condemnation
for all those who are in Christ Jesus, that is to say, the baptized believers
who by faith are connected to the resurrected Son of God. For them, ... for us, ... for you, there is
now no condemnation, no fear of separation, no shame of schism. Because Jesus Christ, the Beloved Son of the
Father, has swallowed up all our offenses, all our sins, all our failures. The proof is in His Resurrection, His
glorious reunification with His Father and the Spirit, His great and eternal
victory, capped off with His triumphant ascension into heaven, to reign at
God´s right hand.
The wall of separation that had kept us
apart from God is now torn down. St.
Mark drives home this point when he tells us what happened at the moment that
Jesus died on the Cross: the curtain in the Temple of Jerusalem, put up by
God’s command to separate the most holy dwelling place of God from the people,
was torn apart, schizomai’d, from top to bottom. Which is just right, because in Jesus Christ
crucified, all the sin and error and malice that had separated us from God, and
from one another, is now washed away.
Unity with God is possible for us sinners, through the body and blood of
Jesus, by which we have been reconciled to God.
Christian life is still filled with threats
of break up. We have all suffered them,
and sometimes in life, as sad as it is, breaking up is unavoidable. But our status as children of God doesn’t
depend on us overcoming every possible break up. Rather, we are right with God because Jesus
has healed our break up with God. Our
failures to hold every relationship together is also forgiven by God.
We will also still struggle with break ups
in the Church. This is because, even as
holy children of God by faith in Jesus, we are still also sinners, with ears
all too ready to listen to Satan´s temptations to division. And also in the Church, sometimes it is right
to break up, to suffer schism, when a brother or sister in the Church, or
sometimes a whole sister church body, insists on maintaining a teaching that
contradicts the gracious Gospel of Jesus.
We should never do it hastily.
But there will be cases when, in faithfulness to the Word of Christ, for
the good of our brothers and sisters in the Church, and also in hopes of
turning back those in error from their mistaken path, the Church must suspend
visible fellowship for a while, in the fervent hope that this radical act will
be used by God to bring the erring back to the truth.
And this desire for reconciliation is not
just some pie in the sky hope; rather it is the plan and purpose of God for His
people, the Church. We are called to faithfully
proclaim the schism of the Cross that heals the wounds of all sinners, in order
that in the power of the Resurrection the Holy Spirit may heal and reconcile
and draw many more into His eternal congregation, where we will enjoy perfect
unity and joyful fellowship, with God and all His angels and saints, forever
and ever, Amen.
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