Homily: Yr B Proper 10, June 10 2012, St. Albans
Readings: 1 Sam 8:4-20; Ps 130; 2 Cor 4.13-5.1; Mk
3:20-35
Sane
or Insane?
Not too long ago, while I
was at seminary preparing for ordination, I did an internship at the Royal
Ottawa Hospital, the psychiatric hospital we have here in town. The hospital provided an orientation session
for the new interns. And one of the
things they told us about was the Ontario Mental Health Act, and how
individuals can be apprehended and admitted involuntarily to a psychiatric
facility. One of the ways for this to
happen is for someone, perhaps a family member, to give evidence about an
individual’s behaviour and the risk it presents to a Justice of the Peace, and
then the judge fills out what’s called a Form 2. At the Royal Ottawa, the jargon for this was
that the patient had been “formed”.
Well if the Ontario Mental
Health Act had been around in Israel two thousand years ago, in today’s gospel,
Jesus would have been formed. His family
would have gone to a judge, had Jesus formed and then taken away to a
psychiatric facility. In our reading we heard
that when Jesus arrives back home, his family tries to seize him because they
think that he’s out of his mind.
Crazy. Insane. They think Jesus has lost touch with reality
and that as a result he’s become a danger to himself and to those around
him. And it wasn’t just his family that
thought so. So did the authorities, the ones who had traveled all the way from
Jerusalem to find out what was going on.
Why did they think he was
crazy? Well, it was because Jesus had
declared that the long promised arrival of God’s rule on earth was happening
now, at this very moment, in and through Jesus himself. “The time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God
is at hand” was the cry with which he launched his mission. He took upon himself the title of “Son of
Man” from the book of Daniel, the title of the one who would manifest God’s
power and win God’s victory in the cosmic battle that had been foretold. Now, these things of themselves weren’t
unimaginable to a first century Jew. The
Jewish people had been expecting a Messiah.
But Jesus didn’t behave as the Messiah was expected to behave. He sided with the enemy. He forgave sins. He violated the sabbath and dietary laws. He partied with the wrong people, tax
collectors and sinners. He provoked
conflict with those who considered themselves to be “good” Jews. And because of these things, they conspired
to destroy him.
So do you blame his family
for thinking he was insane? For thinking
that he was out of touch with reality and a danger to himself and others. If he was your son or brother, wouldn’t you
have had him committed for his own good?
Sometimes, there’s a fine
line between sanity and insanity.
Let me tell you a story.
If there had been in the 19th
century such things as iPods, MuchMusic, Grammy Awards and Super Bowl half-time
shows, you can be assured that the concert pianist Franz Liszt would have been
all over them. Long before the Beatles
and Elvis, Liszt toured all over Europe, performing to enthusiastic sold-out
crowds, causing ladies to swoon and shock their husbands by taking off their
scarves and tossing them on the stage. He
was the superstar of the Romantic piano, modernity’s first rock star.
But then something strange
happened to Franz Liszt. At the height
of his popularity, he had, well you’ll have to decide how to describe it. A psychotic breakdown. A spiritual awakening. A deep religious conversion experience. Whatever it was he began to take the
Christian faith very seriously, and began to pattern his own life after the
life of Jesus of Nazareth. As for his
vast fortune, he gave it away. He began
to give free piano lessons to the impoverished children of his town. One day when he was traveling, Liszt went
into a hotel and the hotel manager recognized him, and with a grand flourish
gave him the key to the Royal Suite, compliments of the Hotel. Liszt took the key and gave it to his valet,
and said, perhaps there’s something else for me, maybe in the servant’s
quarters.
People all over Europe
started whispering “something terrible has gone wrong with Franz Liszt”.
When he died in 1886, there
was found on his piano an unfinished composition of sacred music. And in one section of the music there was
scrawled in Liszt’s own hand, De Profundis, the title of Psalm 130 which we
read together this morning, “out of the depths I cry to thee O God, hear the
voice of my supplication, if you would mark the iniquities no one could stand,
but there is forgiveness with you.”
The section begins with
clashing chords, jarring melody and disjointed harmonies that gradually work
themselves out into a gentle melody of great beauty and serenity, almost as if Liszt
has found a way on his piano to play himself from great chaos to shalom.
Shortly before his death,
Liszt’s son-in-law heard him working on this strange composition through the
thin walls of the family residence.
Liszt’s son-in-law was Richard Wagner, himself a great composer, whose
heroic music and anti-semitic writings would later be appropriated by Nazi
Germany in the 20th century.
And when Wagner heard the jagged melodies of De Profundis, he turned to
his wife and said “Cosima, I think your father is insane.”
Sane or insane? It’s a good question. Which one is sane, Richard Wagner spewing out
anti-semitisms, or the broken down Franz Liszt giving away his money to the
poor and trying to play his way from Chaos to Shalom?
Who is sane and who is
insane?
The one thing they all
agreed on in the Gospel of Mark is that Jesus was insane.
Jesus came to establish the
kingdom of God on earth by fighting and defeating the forces and power of evil,
by opposing and overcoming all that robs humanity of the abundant life that God
intends for us.
Now before I go on, I want
to say a brief word about evil, because sometimes when we read these ancient
texts with their exorcisms and demon possessions, we start to get a bit hung up.
Evil exists. This we know. This world is not the way God intended it to
be. Much is wrong, things have departed
from God’s intentions. We call this
evil. We can identify it in the world
around us. We can see it in human
history, in the big events of wars and genocides and in individual instances of
abuse and violence. Some of us may not
like to use the word evil and we can use other words if we like, but whatever
we call it, it exists.
However the way we talk
about evil is culturally conditioned.
The worldview of Jesus time pre-supposed that there were spirits, and that
the power of evil manifested itself as the will of demons, the principle one of
which was known as satan. In our own
time, in our post-enlightenment, post-modern culture, we tend to talk about
evil in other ways. We use the insights
of psychiatry. We talk about “mob
mentality”. We talk about corruption. We talk about systemic injustice.
It doesn’t matter how we
understand evil and talk about it. But
what we have to see in order to understand the gospel of Mark is that Jesus saw
himself as the one who had to defeat evil in order that God’s kingdom might be
established and that humanity might be saved from oppression. That’s why Jesus casts out demons, and
liberates those who are oppressed.
That’s why Jesus talks about tying up the strong man and plundering his
property. These are signs of the
in-breaking of God’s kingdom.
But what happens in a world
where evil is disguised as sanity? Where it’s embedded in habits and customs and conventional
wisdom? Where hatred between ethnic groups has been
normalized and accepted as praiseworthy, as it was in Jesus world and sometimes
our own? Where the Temple system which
oppresses the poor by forcing them to pay for taxes and sacrificial animals is
thought to be the will of God? Where
purity laws which segregate and condemn people are part of the religious
infrastructure?
In a world where evil is
disguised as sanity, the one who fights evil will be called insane.
We’ve seen this throughout
history.
When Mahatma Ghandi began
his long march to the ocean to make salt, people thought he was crazy.
When Rosa Parks refused to
give up her seat on a Montgomery bus in 1955, everyone thought she was out of her mind. But in truth, she was the one who spoke
sanity to a world which had gone insane.
And that world of racial segregation started to crumble when she exposed
it for what it was.
We live in a world where far
too often, evil is disguised as sanity, and is embedded into our laws, and markets
and social systems.
We live in a world where if
we were to reduce military spending by just a few per cent a year, we would
have the resources to eliminate diseases such as malaria which claim millions
of lives annually.
We live in a world where we
have drugs that cost little to manufacture and could save millions lives, but
we can’t get them where they’re needed because that would infringe on patents.
We live in a world of credit
cards, which reward people who are wealthy with free travel, but for those who
are poor and use them out of desperation, we charge them 20% interest, money
which pays for our travel rewards.
Is that sanity or insanity?
Jesus came into this world
to announce God’s kingdom, to defeat evil, to fight against oppression, to
confront and overcome injustice and to bring peace and healing. He did it in a way that shattered
expectations, broke the rules, turned social systems upside down and revealed a
God that we had never imagined.
No wonder they thought he
was out of his mind.
Amen.
(with thanks to Dr. Thomas Long, who told us the story of Franz Liszt at Homiletics 2011 in Minneapolis)
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