Year B
 Deuteronomy 18:15-20
 Psalm 111
 1 Corinthians 8:1-13
 Mark 1:21-28

May the words of my mouth O God…  speak your truth…

Our reading from Deuteronomy this morning…  references…  refers to Deuteronomy 5:22…  and those verses after God established…  and Moses shared…  the Ten Commandments…  it describes how the unfiltered experience of God’s voice…  and the purifying heat of God’s great fire…  was too much for the people to bear…  so much so…  that they were afraid for their lives…  and they asked never to hear God’s voice again…  unless a human mouth…  spoke God’s words…  and in today’s reading…  the term prophet…  doesn’t refer to a specific prophet…  it is just God’s promise that God would provide a human voice…  when God had a message they needed to hear… and so in this very passage…  God establishes the authority of prophetic voices…  and by extension…  said that the people will have no excuse…  if they choose to go to someone like a soothsayer… ]  and God said that someone who spoke to the people in the name of other gods…  or someone who presumed to speak in God’s name words that God had not commanded them to speak…  that that those people would die…  and so we are left…  even in our time…  with the question… of whose words…  and which words…  are spoken with authority…  whose words do we take to heart…  and whose words…  do we dismiss…

Today’s reading from 1 Corinthians raises issues associated with early pagan sacrifice…  ] those who practiced these early sacrifices believed that when an animal was sacrificed to a local city-god…  then that god entered into the sacrifice… and when believers cooked and ate the meat…  they believed they were ingesting the strengths and qualities of the god they worshipped…

And in this passage…  Paul also talks about knowledge… now we may know something… we may have and have access to… HUGE amounts of information…  but information doesn’t form the human heart…  love does… and when Paul says that knowledge puffs up…  he’s talking about the kind of religious knowledge arrogantly flaunted by certain Corinthians… because many of them knew that eating meat sacrificed to idols meant nothing…  because no idol in the world really exists…  and that there is no God…  but One…  and so Paul can say…  we are no worse off if we do not eat…  and no better off if we do…

But Paul also cautions them to take care…  that the knowledge and liberty they enjoy…  doesn’t become a stumbling block to the weak…  that they don’t Lord what they have come to understand…  over them…  it reminds me of what Jesus says in Matthew 18:6…  about how if anyone puts a stumbling block in front of those little ones who believe in him…  and he must mean those who are new to the faith…  that it would be better for them to have a millstone put around their necks and be thrown into the sea… 

When I was in Junior College…  and for about six years…  I was a vegetarian…  it was around the time I learned Transcendental Meditation…  and I was motivated by a New Age…  hippie – ish…  health food kind of…  thinking…  I ate cheese and eggs…  and lots of beans and rice…  and tofu…  yes…  even tofu…  and fruits and vegetables and nuts and seeds… but no beef or pork or poultry or fish…  nothing…  they say…  that has a face…  my parents…  and some relatives in my extended family rolled their eyes… and made comments…  it took them some getting used to…  because it was though…  and all of a sudden…  I was saying…  what you’re offering me to eat is no longer acceptable…  as though I knew something they didn’t know…  as though what I thought I knew was somehow better than what they knew…  but they quickly…  and graciously…  without lording anything over me…  came to accept this change…

But what was kind of funny…  was that one of the things I ate…  was freshly ground crunchy peanut butter from the GNC store at the mall…  on rice cakes…  and after a while…  when my aunt was trying to put my uncle on a diet…  she told me that she got some of that for my uncle…  and he was surprised at how good it was…  as though anything which came from a health food store couldn’t be…  and I was surprised at his surprise…  because why couldn’t it be…  but towards the end of that six years…  and really for no reason I can articulate clearly…  I had an overwhelming and powerful craving for a cheeseburger…  and so I went out and got one…  and at each end of those six years…  I was acting on my own authority…

Fr. John Shea wrote that as we make the Gospels our own… we begin to speak about what we are experiencing… at first… our voice may stumble and sound tentative… we may worry that we don’t sound orthodox enough…  we may compare ourselves to others who seem fluent in spiritual talk about Jesus… finding our own voice doesn’t mean that we don’t learn from others… but parroting what we don’t understand will not help our faith develop either… we must trust our own path and the provisional yet real voice that is emerging…  and so we can ask about the sources of different kinds of authority… 

Conventional…  worldly authority emerges from the machinations of Empire…  things like wealth and social standing…  and the values and self-serving desires of some who occupy positions of power…  denominational authority comes from the momentum of centuries of church polity and prayer and the discernment of where the Holy Spirit is leading us…  and Holy Cross and Ascension…  have also been engaged in a similar kind of discernment…  since I was called to serve you twelve years ago…

But in today’s Gospel…  as the Word of God Incarnate…  Jesus’ authority comes not from the words of lawgivers and scribes…  not from the machinations of Empire…  and not from centuries of church polity… it comes because he is the author of his own authority…  he is the author of the words he speaks…  and of the things he does…  he speaks out of his own experience because his life is inseparable from his experience of the Father… he is his own authentic self…  it’s no wonder that the people were astounded…

And it turns out that what is inauthentic…  will always be exposed by the light of authenticity…  that’s why dysfunction eventually becomes functional…  that’s why the unclean spirit cried out…  ]  because its domain…  its power was in jeopardy…  because compared to how authentic Jesus was…  it knew itself to be in opposition to the love and reconciliation of Christ… because it thought it could own and abide in this man…  but Jesus said that not only this man…  but all of creation…  are mine…

As we conduct our Annual Meeting…  and look ahead to the future…  we may ask how we can be our more authentic individual selves…  so that our churches can be their more authentic corporate selves…  and so we can more authentically embody Jesus… and so we can speak with prophetic voices…  words that come only from the mouth of God…