Sunday, January 7, 2018 | 8:00, 9:30, and 11:00 a.m.

Holy Tearing

Shannon J. Kershner
Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 29
Mark 1:4–11

Holy One,
untamed by the names I give you,
in the silence name me,
that I may know who I am,
hear the truth you have put into me,
trust the love you have for me,
which you call me to live out.

Ted Loder, “In the Silence, Name Me”
Guerrillas of Grace: Prayers for the Battle

Have you ever asked a child where God lives? According to my mother, when I was three years old, I told her to stop hugging me so tightly because Jesus lived in my heart and I was afraid she was going to squash him. But other than that one moment as a child of professing God’s immanence, I assumed that God lived up in the sky, surrounded by clouds. Maybe you shared that same assumption.

This notion that God is above us, far away, beyond the boundary of the blue sky, is a very old idea. It is actually a reflection of the ancient Hebrew understanding of the sky. Our spiritual ancestors believed the sky was like an inverted bowl that separated the natural world from God’s heavenly domain. We get a glimpse of that picture in the poetry of the first creation story found in Genesis.

In our day, though, thanks to the gifts of quantum physics and astronomy, our understanding of the cosmos is rapidly changing. We are discovering the possibility of other dimensions of reality—dark matter out in our universe, the always shimmering truth we’ve barely scratched the surface of what else might be discovered, etc. All of this scientific exploration has dramatically changed our ancient understanding of the structure of the sky, for sure.

Yet in our spiritual core I wonder how much we still unconsciously hold on to our ancestors’ worldview. After all, that ancient sense of where God makes God’s home is actually quite useful and orderly. It keeps things nicely and neatly in their proper places. Human beings, chaos, nature, sin—all of these things live below the dome. God’s realm, God’s home, holiness and wholeness, heaven—all of that is kept nicely and neatly in its place above the dome. Both separate and apart from each other, neither impinging upon the other.

While we might complain about this distance, this boundary, from time to time, echoing Isaiah’s cry for God to tear open the heavens and come down, I suspect that most of the time, we are rather content with those boundaries being in place, nice and neat and orderly. The heavens contained up there. Our broken worldliness predictable down here. God living up there. All of us living down here. I imagine many of us still carry around that expectation that those boundaries our ancestors imagined are still firmly in place.

For example, we probably all have at least an occasional Sunday when we come into this time of worship hoping we can just enter into the heavenly realm for a bit. That hope means the last thing we want to hear about in a sermon or in a prayer is anything from the news or about our government. This is a sanctuary place where we want to escape all of that chaos, that partisan and politicized mess. This is a sanctuary time when we long to just rest and feel cared for. I hear that, and I resonate with that. As your preacher I hope that does indeed happen sometimes. I can long for that too. But I also wonder if our deeply held clear-cut boundary between heaven and earth helps to strengthen that desire and then unintentionally serves to increase our frustration when that “heavenly realm only” worship experience does not happen.

These ancient conceived boundaries between God and the world might also unconsciously reinforce the boundaries we erect between ourselves and others too. Fox and Friends watchers here. Rachel Maddow watchers there. Libertarians here. Republicans there. Rich people here. Poor people there. Earthly brokenness down here. Heavenly hope up there. All of it separated by the dome, the boundary between heaven and earth. All of us separated by our difference and our complexity. Nice, neat, contained. Everything and everyone in its place. Forget quantum physics, this is the way God wants it, designed it, right?

One word: Schizomai (Brian Blount and Gary Charles, Preaching Mark in Two Voices). Some of you might remember it since it is a word I have introduced to you before. It is a verb that is central to Mark’s telling of the gospel. Schizomai means to rip, rend, tear apart in a way that cannot be put back together again. It is violent and loud. It feels dramatic and chaotic. Schizomai. Mark 1:10 says “And as Jesus was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens schizomai—being ripped, torn apart—and God’s Spirit came down like a dove and rushed into him, possessing him, driving him, birthing him into his mission.”

It’s worth noting that before verse 10 in this first chapter of Mark’s Gospel things still seemed rather orderly and ordinary. Jesus made his way from his private life in Nazareth out to the wilderness with all the others. He left what he had probably been doing from day to day—the family trade of carpentry alongside Joseph—and had gone to see his cousin John at the riverside. After he arrived, Jesus, like everyone else, heard the invitation for baptism and responded. Mark reports it all rather nicely, neatly, orderly. But then Mark claims that God literally breaks open the scene. Schizomai. God tears through the heavenly veil, the lovely dome, the nice and neat boundary between human brokenness and heavenly wholeness, and then God’s Spirit rushes down through that opening to take full hold of Jesus, God with Us. God possesses him with God’s Spirit, and in Jesus God starts running loose in our world, daring us to keep up with the action.

According to the eyes and ears of Mark, this tearing of the heavenly veil is the central call and theme of Jesus’ entire mission and ministry. The tearing happens here in the beginning of his ministry at his baptism and then it happens again at the end with his crucifixion. As Brian Blount has preached, Mark’s overall message is this: God desires a world in which the boundaries that separate people from God and from each other—whether they be holiness and purity codes separating Jews from other Jews; or laws and traditions separating Jews from Gentiles; or cultural norms or economic class separating families from families—all of those things that keep people apart are to be schizomai. Ripped apart, torn apart, never able to be put back together again in the same way, forever different, forever open, forever torn.

Regardless of how we feel, the God we see through Mark’s eyes is clearly not content with heavenly wholeness up there and earthly brokenness down here. The God we see in Mark is clearly not satisfied with keeping all the boundaries intact, all the barriers in place, everything nice and neat and contained. The God we see in Mark is clearly not happy with the way we let our need for boundaries and order infiltrate our entire lives, separating these people from those people, separating our worship time from our mission time, separating our Sunday behavior from our weekday behavior, everything in its place, as we see fit to determine it. The God we see in Mark has watched our temptation to do all of that boundary-creating behavior and pleads with us “No more!” And Schizomai. God tears apart the boundaries between God’s home and our home and says it is all going to change.

When God tears open the heavens at Jesus’ baptism, God dramatically announces Jesus’ calling to be our God set loose in our world, tearing apart the social fabric that separates people, breaking through hardness of heart to bring forth compassion (Barbara Lundblad, www.Day1.net, 12 January 2003), shattering any rituals that have grown rigid, smashing all chains that keep folks bound, redeeming the landscape of human living, and requiring transformed lives from all of us who claim to be disciples. The tearing of the heavens at the moment of Jesus’ baptism enacts the promise that nothing will ever be the same again, for the heavens were just torn apart and God was the one doing the tearing.

Lest we think this is just a Jesus thing, this same kind of “tearing open the heavens, possession by the Holy Spirit, breaking down the barriers” activity is also present at the moment of our baptisms, as well. Regardless of when we were baptized, and though we probably did not see it, we trust that in the mystery of that sacrament the torn-apart heavens were once again announced and God’s Spirit swept into us like that dove did to Jesus, claiming us, possessing us, sealing us, and giving us our call, too. For like Jesus, through our baptism we are called to join God’s liberating actions of schizomai. Through our baptism we, too, are challenged to actively resist being content with the way things are, with everything and everyone nicely and neatly in their places, even if it is easier to live that way and some of us are tired or afraid.

As the Presbyterian Stated Clerk J. Herbert Nelson preached to around 1,000 college students a few years ago at a conference, “Young people, let’s get honest now. You cannot be content with deciding to live life solely for yourself, with determining that if life is good for you, then all must be right with the world. You cannot be content with that, because all is not right with this world, [all is not right] in this nation, [all is not right] in your community. And as baptized disciples of a living Lord, we must be about more than just that. We must be about more than just ourselves and our own comfort” (paraphrase).

That’s some schizomai preaching. And you know what? Those college students inhaled that challenge deeply into their lungs, because they already trusted this schizomai way of life is not just a Jesus thing. They trusted that their faith and their baptism were supposed to matter in their everyday lives. It is why they were at a Presbyterian conference during their winter break. They knew that God is still calling us to live out God’s schizomai to the world and that tearing apart boundaries that keep us from God and from each other, tearing apart the boundaries that keep us from being our whole beloved selves, is not just a Jesus thing. It is a disciple thing too.

So following in Reverend Nelson’s footsteps, Fourth Church, we’ve got to get honest too. We’ve got some schizomai work to do ourselves. We have got boundaries set up that keep us apart from each other or from those who might call this church home—the boundaries of skin color and economic class (not everybody feels welcome or valued); the boundaries of political parties and theological perspective (not everybody feels heard or able to speak up); the boundaries of self-protection and fear (not everybody feels safe to be themselves or to admit vulnerability). These boundaries are keeping us from being fully who we could be as a community of faith. They might even be keeping us from being as effective as we could be as a light in the city. It is hard to know. But the boundaries are there.

I see them. I hear about them. I feel them. I probably put them up too. After all, that is the way of the world, is it not? Especially in these highly polarized and divisive days. Yet that is not who we are meant to be. We are not called to be set apart from each other, everyone properly categorized. No, as a matter of fact, we have the opportunity as God’s church to be something else—to be a community of the baptized, a community of faith, that is bound and determined to live out God’s schizomai work.

Because of God’s indwelling power, we could indeed become not more reflective of the world but more reflective of God’s beloved community; not more reflective of a polarized and divisive cacophony of indifference but more reflective of the body of Christ—a body who trusts that as long as our hearts are one in Christ, our minds don’t have to be. Church might be one of the last places around that has the honest possibility to be radically different than other communities, because we trust that it is precisely the gathering up of our diversity, our messiness, our vulnerability and human complexity that best reflects God’s hope for what the world could be, will be, that best reflects God’s hope of what it looks like to live in the reign of God.

For we are a community of the baptized—those who have been claimed by the waters, given the energy of God’s Spirit, and sent out into God’s world to actively do the kind of schizomai work that Jesus did—the work of tearing apart the social fabric that separates people; the work of breaking through hardness of heart to bring forth compassion (Barbara Lundblad, www.Day1.net, 12 January 2003); the work of doing what we can for justice and wholeness and mercy for all God’s children; the work of refusing to allow ourselves to get too comfortable, too settled, too orderly, too self-centered, too staid. For while the gospel always proclaims we are welcome, the gospel rarely proclaims we are going to always be comfortable, not even in church. And this schizomai call is why Congregational Life is organizing deep listening dinners. It is why a Racial Equity Council is being formed. It is why your Session and Trustees will be practicing how to have conversations about difficult things in a way that is honest and loving.

Make no mistake about it: according to the Gospel of Mark, schizomai—tearing apart the boundaries, ripping down the barriers that keep us from knowing God, from loving each other, from being fully ourselves—that messy holy work is our baptismal call. It is what discipleship looks like. It is what we are to be about as together we try to follow our God who is on the loose and who demands we try to keep up. Holy schizomai is our baptismal way of life, a way we will learn to live together.

Amen.