Sermon by Pastor Mike Buttonnn

Protecting the Brand
Text: Mark 9: 38-41

^NRSMark 9

³⁸John said to him, "Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he was not following us." ³⁹ But Jesus said, "Do not stop him; for no one who does a deed of power in my name will be able soon afterward to speak evil of me. ⁴⁰Whoever is not against us is for us. ⁴¹For truly I tell you, whoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you bear the name of Christ will by no means lose the reward.

Dear Friends in Christ, may the Lord keep you and all yours in the peace that passes all understanding, for the sake of Jesus the Messiah. Amen.

Tom Waits is a famous singer-songwriter that you’ve probably never heard on the radio, and for some pretty good reasons. This is how one critic (Daniel Durcholz) described his voice: "like it was soaked in a vat of bourbon, left hanging in the smokehouse for a few months, and then taken outside and run over with a car." (You wouldn’t want him in the choir, Jeff.) On stage and in real life he typically dresses like the poor, homeless, down-and-out people he so often sings about in his songs. He describes himself as “living on the corner of bedlam and squalor,” so, no, he’s not the kind of guy you’d run up to and ask for an autograph. But in spite of, or because of, these quirks, Tom Waits, now 62, has become a kind of icon to artists ranging from Rolling Stone Keith Richard to the alternative hip hop project N.A.S.A. While his songs have been covered by artists as varied as Bruce Springsteen, the Eagles, Screaming Jay Hawkins, and the Blind Boys of Alabama, Waits adamantly, vehemently, religiously refuses to allow any of his music to be used in commercials, which in 1988 led to a legal showdown between Mr. Waits and the Frito-Lay Corporation.

Frito-Lay was then preparing a new ad campaign for their Cheetos brand that would feature an animated character known as Chester Cheetah. They wanted Chester to be a super-cool dude, so Frito-Lay approached Mr. Waits to use his song “Step Right Up,” which, ironically, satirizes the advertising industry. Of course, Mr. Waits refused unequivocally, but unwilling to take no for an answer, Frito-Lay tried an end-run. They hired a Waits soundalike to voice over Chester singing a jingle that sorta-kinda-closely resembled Mr. Waits’ original composition. Well, the guy may live on the corner of bedlam and squalor, but he knows when he’s getting ripped off. That’s how singer-songwriter, Grammy Award winner, Oscar nominee, and recent inductee into the Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame Tom Waits ended up filing a suit against the Frito-Lay Corporation for copywrite infringement. Despite appeals to the 9th Circuit Court, Waits won hands down to the hap-hap-happy tune of $2.375 million. Chester Cheetah is still around, but he doesn’t sound anything like Tom Waits.

In today’s Gospel, the disciples seem to be on the verge of filing their own kind of lawsuit. John the son of Zebedee reports to Jesus about their attempt to stop a man who was casting out demons in Jesus’ name “because he was not following us.” Certainly, the disciples had every right to conclude that this rogue exorcist was encroaching on their proper job. Obviously, this guy hadn’t gone to Jesus disciple school. He didn’t have the Jesus stamp of approval. He was not an authorized Jesus dealer. I don’t know this for a fact but I’m pretty sure that he wasn’t following the Jesus-approved liturgy for casting out demons, no way had he turned in any of the necessary Jesus paperwork, and who knows what damage he was doing to the Jesus brand. The disciples had a case; they were being infringed upon.

You probably know the feeling. We all get a little territorial at times, especially when we think that someone is horning in on our turf. Every profession draws lines over who can do what, when, where, and under what conditions. That type of boundary setting is crucial to quality control, but sometimes it’s just about control.

My first, honest-to-God, cash-on-the-barrelhead job was as a ditch-digger on a construction site at the old Kaiser Aluminum plant right here in Baton Rouge. After I paid my $200 to Local 10 of the International Laborers and Hod Carriers Union, I got a job with Watkins Brothers Construction that paid me $3.89/hour, better wages than any job I would hold for the next eight years. But before I ever picked up a shovel, I was given very explicit instructions that if I picked up the wrong shovel, started digging the wrong hole, or in any other way even microscopically infringed on another trade, I could get the whole job shut down. So, yes, we all have control issues, and not the least in the church.

Denominations are a lot like brands, and of course many of us grow up with very intense brand loyalties, either as Catholics, Lutherans, or other church affiliations. We love our brand, we cherish our brand, and sometimes we even tell our friends and neighbors about our brand. So naturally it’s not uncommon for those of us under the Lutheran brand to – how should I put this – look askance at our brand-name rivals. They may be Christian, we think to ourselves, but certainly: their theology isn’t as good as ours; their worship has to be a lot more shallow; their ministers can’t possibly be was well educated as our pastors; and those songs! No surprise, then, that when we look beyond our various Christian tribes to the world’s other religions, we find all kinds of ways to characterize their faith as substandard, defective, or just plain inferior to our own refined Christian spirituality. We stereotype, we label, we typecast other religions and their followers because we, like the disciples, want to protect our turf and like to imagine that God loves us and us alone and that only through us is God working in the world.

Looking through Scripture, you can’t but be impressed at how often Jesus celebrated the faith of outsiders. On many different occasions, Jesus goes out of his way to recognize and affirm people who didn’t belong to his race, tribe, or clan. From a few weeks back you might remember the Gospel where Jesus was just about to write off the desperate plea of a Syro-Phoenician woman, whose daughter was possessed of a demon. Remember how Jesus told her, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs,” (Mark 7:27), namely, people like her. But then she answered, “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs” (v. 28), whereupon Jesus was so totally caught off guard by this woman’s faith that he changed his mind, and told her, “For saying that, you may go – the demon has left your daughter.”

Throughout the Gospels we find many other stories where Jesus commends the belief and devotion of a Roman centurion, a Samaritan woman, a despised tax collector, and others who were considered outside God’s covenant with Israel. Jesus loved all people as God loves all people, and when Jesus saw that love at work in deeds of mercy and justice, he did not forbid them, nor did he put them down and find fault. So when the disciples protest the man exorcising demons in Jesus’ name without their explicit sanction or authority, Jesus responds, like, “What’s the problem?” Rather than draw more lines and stake out more territory, Jesus instead graciously says, “Whoever is not against is for us.”

God is at loose in the world. God will not be held captive to the concepts and categories of our making. There is no culture or corner of the universe where God is not at work, and that, of course, includes all the world’s religions. It may make us feel all warm and special to imagine that we’re the only game in God’s town, but it’s not true. God is present to and at work in the lives of Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists as much as God is present to and at work in the lives of Lutherans, Catholics, and all the other Christian brands. Does that mean that all religions are the same? No. Does this mean that it doesn’t matter what you believe as long as you’re sincere? Of course not! The Nazis were very sincere in their beliefs. Al Qaeda is, you know, a faith-based initiative of very committed believers. But as Christians, as the people to whom God has revealed his ultimate and final will for all creation, it is our responsibility to lift up and celebrate every act of healing, every work of justice, every deed of mercy as a sign pointing to that Kingdom which took flesh and lived among us in Jesus. Whether a Christian or an atheist finds the definitive cure for cancer, who cares? We will give to God the glory for using such frail, weak instruments as ourselves in making his will done on earth as it is in heaven.

The earliest Christians lived, you know, in a world saturated with other religions. There were shrines on virtually every street corner, massive temples in practically every city, and even the humblest villages received visits from traveling holy men, seers, and healers. But in meeting that world of religions, the first Christians did not launch a holy war against the pagan rites, cults, and creeds of their day. They didn’t storm the temples; they didn’t kill the priests; they didn’t mass an army to take on the emperor. They didn’t have to. What they did instead was to affirm what was good and right in the people they met and the cultures in which they moved, and in that affirmation Christ’s apostles pointed people to the God revealed in Scripture and incarnate in Jesus as the source of all good and all righteousness.

The world we inhabit is getting to be more and more like the world of those first Christians. We live, work, and go to school with people of many different faiths, religions, and philosophies. Our neighborhoods are no longer the ethnic enclaves of yesteryear where our dads all worked at the same plant, we attended the same school and worshipped at the same church. We have friends and neighbors who have only the vaguest acquaintance with Christianity, and often not a very good acquaintance, at that. Many people may have heard of Jesus Christ, but many more have not the slightest idea of what Paul called “the depth and riches” of God’s love. But that shouldn’t keep us from joining hands with them in making that God’s love incarnate. Is it our job to critique their lives, stand in judgment over them and offer them our theological verdict on their poorly shaped faith? Do we join the culture war of the religious right, hurling hellfire and brimstone on the heads of our pagan neighbors? Or do we, rather, in Paul’s words, look for “whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable” (Philippians 4:8), as the signs of God’s loving presence in their lives and in the world God so loves?

I mentioned Tom Waits at the beginning of this sermon. I have no idea what his faith commitments are. I read on Wikipedia that his mother was of Norwegian ancestry, so who knows, he might have some Lutheran in him. He once wrote a song he called “God’s Away on Business,” but don’t go looking for that one on any “Christian Contemporary” play list. There was a time, though, a couple of years back when for about a week I was in a really hard spot. I didn’t know what to do or where to turn, but I somehow found myself listening to this Tom Waits song called “Hold On,” about 350 times, all told. And somewhere around the 349th listen I could have sworn it was Jesus talking to me.

Hold on, hold on

You really got to hold on

Take my hand, I'm standing right here

and just hold on

God can use any voice, even one that sounds like it’s been run over by a car, because God turns up in people and places we would never imagine. “Whoever is not against us is for us.” Good to know.

In the Name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen