“When his family heard it, they went out
to restrain him, for people were saying, ‘He has gone out of his mind.’” (Mark 3:21)
Some folks just act crazy at times. Back
in the early ‘70’s, my sister Maryanne was an authentic, card-carrying Jesus
Freak. You remember Jesus Freaks, right? They were a bunch of hippie-looking
kids (You remember hippies, right?) who, instead of preaching sex, drugs, and
rock ‘n’ roll, were getting high on the Gospel. They met in storefront
churches, sang folk rock praise tunes, carried their Bibles everywhere, and
went around with shockingly joyful and peaceful attitudes. They held a certain
disdain for the established church which they saw as being stuffy and
irrelevant. They were as much a part of the counter-culture as their zoned-out,
doobie-toking, war-protesting, anti-establishment contemporaries.
My sis joined their ranks to the shock and
horror of our parents. She started going to Bible studies and church services
almost nightly. She went to the breath-bereaving extremity of getting baptized
a second time—an act tantamount to sacrilege
to my Lutheran mother—and began to claim that some people at our local Lutheran
congregation might not be “saved.” When the Yom Kippur War broke out in 1973, she
listened attentively to the radio reports, believing that this might be a sign
of the End Times and the Second Coming.
Crazy? Maybe. But even Jesus was accused
of being crazy by his own family. Zeal for the things of God, for
righteousness, can look pretty weird to “normal” people who don’t experience
it. In the Gospel lesson in the Revised Common Lectionary appointed for
Pentecost 3, Year B (Mark 3:20-35), Jesus’ mom and siblings are alarmed that he’s
preaching and drawing a crowd. It just doesn’t seem right to them. The high
religious muckety-mucks even claim that he’s possessed by Beelzebul!
So how can you tell what’s “normal” and
what isn’t? When does a loving religious family of fellow believers become a
cult, or when does extreme piety turn into coo-coo for Coco Puffs?
I’m going to suggest that we look at two
factors: what are you willing to believe and how passionate are you about
believing it?
Here’s some examples: Some folks don’t
believe anything that isn’t empirically verifiable. They are, however, extremely
passionate about not believing, and
they think the rest of us should join them in their unbelief. They’re sort of
zealous evangelists for atheism. Then there are the ones who don’t believe
anything, but don’t know they don’t believe anything because they never think about anything. (We call them
teenagers.) There are also those who are all up and through supernatural
mysticism—angels, faith healing, crystals, the zodiac, UFO’s, the Rapture,
whatever you’ve got—but only when the subject comes up, or if they find
themselves in a crisis. In times of trouble they turn to anything. They try to bargain
with God. There are others who might rationally try to weigh mysticism with
skepticism, but only when they’re forced to go to church on Christmas and
Easter—or when the doctor tells them they have cancer.
For my part, I try to be in dialogue
between the mystery of God and my own common sense. But I don’t want to be too
rational about it. I love having this mental conversation, and I want to have
it all the time. I actually envy the
mystics and the ancient hermits, and all of those who could live only for
Christ. And maybe that’s crazy.
I guess it’s the people whose religious fervor
is so great that it keeps them from actually enjoying life who probably should seek professional help. In our
Gospel story Jesus does not come to imprison people, but to set them free. He’s
overpowering and tying up the “strong man”—our sense of sin and guilt, our
stubbornness, our prejudice, our desire to be in control and make ourselves
into God—so that all the things that are horded away—love, acceptance, joy—can be
liberated. He’s here to cast out the things which make us afraid and sick and
discouraged so that there’s room in our lives for the Holy Spirit.
My crazy sister didn’t stay crazy for long.
In fact, not many of the Jesus Freaks of the early ‘70’s did. Today those
storefront churches are now multi-million dollar mega churches where nobody
comes in bare feet, kids under twelve are not permitted, and worship is
conducted with slick and glitzy sound systems and video displays. My sister
traded the storefronts for fairly active participation in the Lutheran church.
In later years she joined a Baptist congregation and was active there, too. She
may have lost a bit of her counter-cultural zeal, but she never stopped being
crazy for Jesus.
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