Preaching text: Mark 4:26-34
This was a hard week for me. Coming on the cusp of last week, with the sudden and heartbreaking death of Randy Wilhide at Grace, this week continued with more pain and unpleasant experiences. On Tuesday, I discovered that the daughter-in-law of one of my fellow pastors had committed suicide. As a pastor who has done funerals for both suicides and family members (thankfully, not both at the same time), I tried to give input as best I could to help her through what she's facing in the days ahead.
On Wednesday, I got the rather abrupt and unexpected news that one of my friends had ended his multi-year relationship with his girlfriend and then decided to impulsively drop everything else in his life that mattered to him as well. If you know anything about mental or behavioral health, you know that's a big red flag, so I was scared. Thankfully, I think we're out of the woods for now, but it was a tense few days.
We keep hearing stories like this. We hear about the opioid crisis and parents overdosing with their children in the back seat of the car. We've been hearing about celebrities, people with an abundance of wealth and fame, who have been committing suicide. It feels like there's an overarching malaise in our society right now. It makes it feel like good news is really bad news and bad news is even worse. But it’s also not just what we see on TV or read on the internet. It’s in our lives. It’s in the lives of our friends and families. It’s in our own hearts and minds. I know addicts, some recovering, some not. I know people struggling with depression and suicide. It feels like it's everywhere. Something is very wrong with the world today.
Another of my colleagues and I met for lunch on Wednesday and we talked at great length about this very topic. He sees it. He sees it in his people. He feels it within himself. He asked me my thoughts and I told him much of what I’ve observed about life in these times, observations that I have often shared with you from these pulpits. I said the biggest problem in our world today is that nobody cares. Apathy has become a poison within us. We argue back and forth between “black lives matter” and “all lives matter,” when what people are really feeling is that NO LIVES MATTER.
It used to be in the business world that managers and MBAs were taught that your greatest asset was your people, your employees. Nurture, support, and cultivate them and your business has a great shot at success and profit. You still see some of this from people like Richard Branson, one of the richest CEOs in the world, when he famously said “Clients do not come first. Employees come first. Because if you take care of the employee, they’ll take care of the client.” Now, to me, that sounds like someone I’d want to work for. But that’s rare in the modern corporate world. No, today, employees are disposable assets. They’re liabilities. They’re seen as getting in the way of making more money. They don’t matter.
Our government is supposed to be “Of the people, By the people, For the people.” But when was the last time that was true? With Citizens United and unlimited spending on political campaigns, it very much feels like our leaders (from both parties) are bought and paid-for extensions of the rich and powerful. It’s not what we want. It’s what they want. And they get what they want and we don’t. We, the average voter, no longer matter.
Even here in the church, people are often viewed only by what they can give to us. As membership slumps and coffers dry up, evangelism becomes less and less about proclaiming the kingdom and more and more about bodies in pews. The charlatans in our midst do nothing to help that perception, with calls for more money to buy private jets or build stadium churches, all the while the hungry go unfed and the poor are ignored. People are just cogs in the wheel. They do not matter.
And yet we contrast all that against the teachings of Jesus. He who commanded us to love one another, to love even our enemies, to love our neighbors as ourselves. To give all that we can for the sake of others. A man who was the living incarnation of a loving God who came into this world to show us what it looks like when all lives DO MATTER.
I am increasingly convinced that this is the struggle of our time. When we stand against sexism or racism or homophobia or any other form of bigotry, what we are standing against is a world that says to people of those realities that they don’t matter. But they do. They matter to God and they should matter to us. But it’s not just the frequently disenfranchised minorities of race, gender, sexuality, and religion that feel left behind. It’s really everyone. Black, white, gay, straight, men, women, young, old. As the recent celebrity suicides imply, even the privileged among us don’t always feel that way in this reality.
But how do we fix this? It’s easy to identify the problem. Harder to solve it. In that regard, I feel that Jesus’ teaching today is very helpful. It’s really his approach to any of the great macro problems the world faces, whether it be hunger, poverty, or spreading the Kingdom as far and wide as possible.
You see, if we look at this problem via the big picture, it’s easy to become overwhelmed and discouraged. We can’t save the world. We’re just one little church in York county. But that’s not the approach Jesus is suggesting. His parables of planting seeds show us that it is the smallest of gestures that gets things going. It’s doing what we can, right now, for the neighbors right before us. The kindness we can plant in one another. The love and support we can share with each other and with those we encounter in our day to day. We can show people that they matter to us.
This is true evangelism. This is spreading the kingdom, one planted seed, one kindness, one person, at a time. This is what’s missing from our world. We have a plague of apathy where people’s lives have no meaning and they do not matter. We counter that by showing people they do matter, because they matter to God, and we show them they matter to God by showing them they matter to us. Your life matters. My life matters. The person sitting next to you, their life matters. All lives matter, black, white, immigrant, native, gay, straight, young, old, rich, poor, Christian, non-Christian, men, women. All means all.
Jesus did not come into this world to save only a part of it. John’s Gospel, really all the Gospels are very clear that he came for the whole world. God sent him to save everyone. That only becomes real when we, as the Church, make it real for people. Plant seeds. Save the world. Make people know they matter. Amen.
(Pastor's note: If you know someone struggling with addiction or suicidal thoughts, one of the greatest kindnesses you can show to them is to get them professional help. Being "nice" when someone is battling such demons is far from enough. People do matter and they matter enough that sometimes we have to make the hard choice to do more than simply saying we care, but actually doing what needs to be done to get them the help they need.)
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