“Standards”

Tellico Village Community Church

July 22, 2001

Stephen Nash

“Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he was not one of us.” --Mark 9:38

In the next several weeks, throngs of this year’s high school graduates will be leaving home for the first time and heading off to college. An exciting time. I have a friend from high school and college whose daughter is going to Stanford this year. I understand from him that there are going to be about 1600 freshmen students at Stanford. Almost 16,000 applied to go to school there. Very good and prestigious school. One out of every ten applicants actually will enroll.

What that obviously means is, you don’t just walk up to the front door of Stanford University on the first day of classes and say, “I would like to go to school here. I would like to enroll.” No. You have to apply. Then the school will carefully check your grades, your SAT scores, your class rank, look at your essay and your recommendations. They don’t take everyone who applies, because the school has standards. Standards.

I have decided that I would like to become a member of the American Bar Association. Now, it is not that I want to be an attorney, but I have noticed that lawyers have their meetings in places like Honolulu, and San Francisco. Churches have their conventions in places like Tulsa and Des Moines, or Albuquerque the last week of July! I would like to be a member of the American Bar Association, but they will not let me in. I know they won’t. I have never been to law school. I have never read a law book. The closest I have ever gotten to a law book is a John Grisham novel. I have never passed the Bar Exam. I have never taken the Bar Exam. They will not let me. They have standards.

The church has standards too. We do not let just anyone preach or teach. That may come as a surprise to you, given your current staff. But it is true. The church has standards. In another congregation where I was serving as pastor in the Chicago area, I became aware that a young woman in the church, one of our junior high youth sponsors, was involved with a married man, also a member of the congregation. I went to her and said, “Jill, you know that as both a pastor and as a friend, I will listen to you with compassion and understanding and be here for you any way that I can be. But at the end of the day, if you ask me my counsel, I’m going to tell you that I hope you end this relationship. It is causing a lot of pain to a lot of people. But end it or not, you are no longer one of our junior high sponsors.” She was surprised to learn that the church has standards.

I’m glad that the part of the Christian family from which I came, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) has raised the bar for those who seek to become a minister of the gospel. The standards of that denomination are higher these days than they used to be. There was a time when a congregation, acting on it’s own, could ordain anyone who came to that congregation and said, “I have been called to be a preacher.” There was no universally observed criteria, no policy. No one else had to approve this ordination. All you had to do was say, “I have been called to preach.” They would say, “Praise the Lord! Let us lay hands on this boy.” And back then it usually was just a boy.

Anybody could become a preacher. It did not matter if you understood scripture responsibly. It did not matter if you did not care about people. Nobody asked questions about a person’s mental health or gifts for leadership or theological understanding. Just—“I want to preach.”

I’m glad to say that the denomination doesn’t do that anymore. We learned the hard way that the church cannot afford to let just anyone call him or herself “preacher” who wants to. Now the seminaries have an active role in determining a person’s fitness and gifts for ministry. There are several “Readiness for Ministry” assessments toward the end of the seminary experience. Regional commissions on the ministry meet with candidates in a lengthy process. There are numerous interviews to evaluate each candidate carefully and determine whether or not this person should be a minister of the church—based upon spiritual, emotional, intellectual, social, and ethical standards. Not everyone who shows up with a Bible and a sermon outline gets to be a minister of the Christian Church. There are standards.

And John said to Jesus, “Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him because he was not following us.” It was a matter of standards.

I want you to know that I am sympathetic with John. I get nervous around self-appointed preachers and teachers and faith healers and church leaders. We cannot let everyone run around using the name of Jesus. We have got to have some standards. Who authorized this person’s ministry? What are his credentials? Has he followed Jesus? Does he know the books of the Bible? Can she recite the Beatitudes? The Lord’s Prayer? We must be careful. We must be cautious. After all, this person might do something that would embarrass us.

For John it was a matter of standards. His standard was clear and simple. “He is not one of us.” Not one of the twelve. Not one of those called out by name, by Jesus, to be a member of his inner circle. He hasn’t traveled with us. Hasn’t studied with us. He is not a member of the Pension Fund. Her name is not in the denominational yearbook. Who is this person?

That kind of protest makes sense to the church. Jesus gathered around himself a community of people, a group of followers, and tried to teach them enough about who he was and his understanding of what God was doing in the world, so that once he was gone they could carry on his mission and his ministry. That is the church. That is us.

And once Jesus was gone, the church felt that it had to decide who belonged and who did not. Who was a legitimate leader and who was not. Who should exercise the gifts of ministry. Who should teach the faith to new Christians. Who should speak for the church. Who would be allowed to use the name of Jesus. All decisions the church felt like it had to make, in its earliest years.

The first generation of Christians had to make those kinds of painful, difficult decisions about standards. “Should we let the Gentiles in—people who are not Jews, people who have not been circumcised, people who do not know the law of Moses, people who do not know the story of the faith of Israel—should we let them in? They are not, after all, one of us. How should we deal with those whose faith waivers in the face of persecution? If they aren’t willing to die for the faith, are they true believers, do they really belong? Are they one of us?”

Even Saint Paul, who wrote more documents of the New Testament than any other single author, the greatest missionary, the great theologian of the first century, had to defend himself against those who said, “He should not be allowed to preach. He should not be allowed to teach. He did not know Jesus. He was not called by Jesus during Jesus’ lifetime to this ministry. He is not one of us.” Even Paul had to say, “The Lord appeared to me. The Lord came to me. I saw the Risen Christ and was called to this Ministry by Jesus Christ, so I meet the standard.”

“Teacher, we saw someone driving out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him because he was not following us.”

It is a question of standards. And the underlying question, of course, is—what should the standard be, and who should determine it, and how should it be applied?

Jesus said to John about this man who was casting out demons in his name, “Do not stop him. He who is not against us is on our side.” Not against us! What kind of standard is that?! Is that all we have to say? “Just do not oppose us. Just do not be against us.” Is that enough? Does that mean that we are suppose to tolerate the indifferent and praise the half-hearted? You can be a Christian, you can even be a preacher, just as long as you do not oppose Jesus and those who seek to follow him. Is that a sufficient guideline for determining who should be in the community or lead the community? Should that be the standard by which we judge whose ministry is legitimate and whose is not? “Do not stop him, because if he is not against us, then he is on our side.”

Jesus’ response to John must mean, at the very least, two things. First of all, it must mean that whatever the standard for deciding who is a disciple and who is not, whatever the standard is, we are not it. We are not the standard by which other people’s faith is judged.

“We tried to stop him because he was not one of us.” One of us . . . Have you ever heard the church draw that boundary line around itself? One of us. “What is he doing here? He is not one of us.” Well, what does that mean? “He does not look like us. He does not dress like us. He does not think like us. He does not believe like us. He does not behave like us. He does not worship like us.” What does it mean? The temptation is to say, “We are the standard.” But Jesus says no. “Do not stop him.”

Being one of us, whatever that means, can never be the standard by which someone is excluded from the fellowship of the church, from the waters of baptism, from the table of the Lord, even from ministries that reveal the reign of God to the world. There is a standard, but it is not –“Are you one of us?”

The second thing that Jesus’ reply must mean is this. When he says, “If someone is not against us, he is on our side,” I have to wonder who is it that is against us? Who is it that opposes us? Do you know someone, let me ask, who actively opposes Jesus? Do you know someone who teaches and preaches that Jesus of Nazareth was wrong? That the reign of God is not coming? That the universe does not bend slowly toward justice? That you should not love God or love your neighbor? That that is not the way you should live? Do you know someone who works, diligently, to suppress the memory of Jesus? Anyone who torments people who seek to follow him?

I am sure there are people who do just that. In his own lifetime, Jesus encountered that kind of opposition from religious leaders. And in the first century of its life, the Christian Church had members who experienced several periods of persecution because they held to the faith. Christians throughout the ages have been tormented and persecuted by totalitarian regimes. And maybe it is true, that even in our own time, even in our community, here in the heart of America, there may be militant opposition to the Christian faith. But I will tell you, I’ve never encountered it. Unlike some, I do not consider the fact that schools cannot mandate involuntary prayer a form of persecution of or discrimination against Christians. Failure of the state to give an advantage to the Christian faith in the free market of religion and ideas hardly qualifies as persecution or opposition, crusading voices notwithstanding. I certainly have never been persecuted for my faith.

Does that mean that no one is against us? Does that mean that someone has to actively oppose Jesus and the church in order to qualify as “being against us?” Does someone have to speak against Christ and persecute Christians—be against the Christian movement in that sense—or is there another way?

I want to suggest, that in our time and in our place, the greatest opposition to Jesus and to those who follow him, to the dream of God—a vision of a great commonwealth of justice and compassion and peace on earth—the greatest challenge, comes from those who do not care. I have always liked the Malcomb Muggeridge quote that Marty shared last week, and it bears restating: “It is not that Christianity has been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and never tried.” It is not hostility that threatens us, that stands over against us and denies the truth of what we say and the value of what we do. It is not hostility. It is indifference. Indifference. The notion that what we say and do here just really does not matter.

There are many ways to be against Christ. Some are, simply, more obvious than others. Remember, if you will, the man who sparked this controversy to begin with. We do not know his name. I wish we did. We do not know his name, we do not know where he came from. We do not know his history. We do not know what happened to him after this encounter.

All we know is that he was living out the gospel, for the gospel is not primarily about beliefs or being a part of a certain group and not another group. It is about an intimate relationship with the divine that results in an ethic and action based upon the dream of God. All he was doing was liberating people from unholy powers that would control them and enslave them and dominate them and destroy them. All we know is that this man was not an indifferent bystander to the pain of the world around him. He wasn’t teaching some wild-eyed theories about the apocalypse. He wasn’t debating with someone the fine points of Christology or the trinity or some other theological abstractions. All we know is that this man was not indifferent to the pain of the world around him. All we know is that he had taken upon himself the mission and ministry of Jesus Christ. That he was actively engaged in doing things that demonstrated to the world that the reign of God was at hand. He was doing these things not simply because he was a kind, good person, some kind of benevolent humanitarian. He was doing them in the name of Jesus because he must have believed that in this person, Jesus of Nazareth, the dream and power and presence of God had come close to us. It was about this person, who was doing what the church would be called to do, about this person that Jesus says, “If he is not against us, he is for us.”

And so the final reminder is that it is not our responsibility to make decisions and judgments about other people’s faith and discipleship and ministry. There are ways to follow Jesus that are beyond the range of our experience and our comfort. Our responsibility is not to test others. Our responsibility is to examine ourselves, and to ask ourselves in what we say and what we do – are we for Christ? Do our words and our work bear witness to the reign of God? Do our words and our work open others to the love of God?

There is a standard. It is not being “one of us.” The standard is: in our speaking and in our living, do we embody the compassion of Christ?

“Master, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him because he was not one of us.” But Jesus said, “Do not stop him; for whoever is not against us is for us.”