In the name of the Beloved, the Lover, and the Love Sharer, Amen. 

How do we know we are home? When we are among kin? Last week, Rev. Linda reflected on the call of Samuel, a prophet and priest, and implored us to consider how we might nurture the prophet within us and the prophets among us. I walked around with this question this week, and I realized that to nurture prophets within and among us, we must first be able to recognize when prophets are in our presence. Often, we are tempted to reject them because they call for something unfamiliar to us. How can we discern the prophet from those who mimic the prophetic only to preserve the power they know? Flawed as he is, Eli demonstrates how to yield to the prophetic and affirm the presence of the Spirit of Truth. Even when he knows assenting to God’s activity might put his position at risk, he yields to the revelation of the Spirit when God speaks to him and calls Samuel in the night. How do we take up this work of discernment of spirits when a lot is at stake? When are our very identities and structures of kin on the line? When we are discerning between an act of love and an act of madness? When someone in power claims to speak with the authority of God?

In today’s reading from the Gospel of Mark, Jesus’s identity and purpose as a prophet, priest, and Messiah is contested by the people we expect to be closest to him: his family of origin. His family is concerned he has gone mad— for how could he be in his right mind if he isn’t eating or drinking? Of course, kingdom movements cost something. When pressured for clarity about the nature of his power, rather than directly answering, he meets the questions of the religious and state authorities with parables. Of course, his dialogical method only provokes more questions. The stakes are high, things are contentious, and we are still only at the beginning of Jesus’s ministry. Jesus is already shaking things up.  

The subject of debate in this vignette is the source and shape of Jesus’s power: what kind of power is Jesus yielding to, from whom, and to what end? 

Jesus’s ministry, after all, is strange and counter-cultural. Last week, he healed a man’s withered hand in the synagogue on the Sabbath and re-situated the Sabbath as a ritual for human well-being rather than one instrument to prove one’s devotion to God. This week, when the crowd has gathered again to receive healing and express dissent, Jesus is accused of housing the demonic. “He has Beelzebub!” Said the scribes. It is interesting here that they say he has Beelzebub, not that he is Beelzebub. Beelzebub here is simply another word for Satan, which raises the question: if Jesus has Satan, how is Jesus relating to the forces of evil in his midst? 

The religious authorities are alarmed because they are not sure if this Jesus figure is binding evil or being bound by it. This is an understandable fear. The text says that his family came to “restrain him” for fear that he had gone mad. This is strong language, so we should imagine Jesus’s encounters with the demonic have been intense, even this early in his ministry. Formidable, unmistakable reckonings with evil transfigure the witnesses of these kairos, kingdom events, and Jesus is at their helm. Turning the world upside down by inverting power structures is a world-shaking practice. So, what do we make of his presence? His power? What is our part in it?

We should assume that the religious authorities, the Scribes, are responding to Jesus’s radical reconfigurations of systemic relationships and separations sincerely. Like the Pharisees, the Scribes are well-rehearsed in religious law and earnestly respond to what they perceive to be unusual behavior. Jesus is clearly in contact with evil or the demonic and is doing something with it. What exactly is at work here? Is it dangerous? Prophetic? How do we know? 

When tried by the authorities for housing satanic power, Jesus answers: “How can Satan cast out Satan? If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand. And if Satan has risen up against himself and is divided, he cannot stand, but his end has come. But no one can enter a strong man’s house and plunder his property without first tying up the strong man; then, the house can be plundered.”

What does Jesus mean by this? It could be that Jesus is saying that satan cannot dismantle satan’s house without destroying himself, and since satan does not want to destroy himself, something else is at work here. We could also read Jesus to be saying that he is occupying satan’s house not to welcome him but to bind him so that a new dwelling place and a new structure can be built–a kingdom that does not rely on satan’s architectural tactics to master, possess, and control bodies and lands. But rather, it is “a building from God, not built by human hands, that will never be destroyed,” as 2 Corinthians says.

Jesus, the prophet of prophets, is building something new. Bamboo homes are known for their resiliency, flexibility, and sustainability. They are affixed without mortar and last generations, weathering extreme storms and the turning of ages. Imagine, for a moment, that the kingdom is like a bamboo house with three essential material elements: a steal rod, joints, and the bamboo beams themselves. In this vision, Christ might be the steal rod that gives each beam its form and purpose; and the Spirit, the Advocate, might be the bundle of joints that bind and sustain the bonds between the bamboo and the steal; and we, the people of God, might be the bamboo beams who stretch to create a place of welcome that “extends to more and more people so that our thanksgiving may increase to the glory of God.”  God is building a new kind of house, and it has everything to do with what the prophetic does because the Spirit of Truth is the architect of this kingdom home. Can you tell I did some research on building with bamboo as sermon prep?

When Jesus answers the Scribes, he says we must not lose heart. We must believe that even when the kingdom appears in disturbing and dangerous ways, destabilizing power structures we want to believe will protect us, we know that God is doing something new through our bodies in these lands. God’s will is to build a new house that is not bound by property law and policing politics but is open wide to all who choose to enter and become kin— mothers, brothers, sisters, parents, children, and elders. The crowd said to Jesus, “Your mother and your brothers are outside; go to them.” The preposition outside is repeated twice, on purpose, to contrast “around,” which connotes a different spatial relationship. 

Dean of Berkeley Divinity School at Yale, the Rev. Andrew McGowan, in his meditation on this passage from the Gospel of Mark, said, “Jesus’ teaching is not about family life as we otherwise understand it, but about the fact that following him, doing the will of God, is to become a new kind of family. The significance of this for any reader is that they are offered this same relationship to Jesus, to be among those sitting around him, somehow brought into this undivided household where justice and truth are at table with him and us, and where we find that we too are “brother and sister and mother” to him”’ (Andrew McGowan. “Binding the Strong One: Proper 5, Year B; Mark 3:20-35.” June 04, 2024. https://abmcg.substack.com/p/binding-the-strong-one?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1350771&post_id=145167801&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=2u2lyz&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email). 

Jesus turns to those around him and says: “You are my kin,” not to diminish them as his family of origin, but to say to them that in the kingdom home, there is no outside and inside; there is just the place where Love is, which is home. In the kingdom, everyone who is around is recognized and beloved and is at home.

Is this kind of an undivided house possible? Can we enter into Jesus’s imagination? Yes, we must! Because the kingdom has everything to do with us. God makes God’s nature known through us, so we must keep imagining with Christ that other ways of living, working, and being together are possible even when nationalist and militaristic agendas are pressed upon us. Philosopher and activist Cornel West, whose birthday we celebrated this week, said, “To be a Christian is to live dangerously, 
honestly, freely – to step in 
the name of love as if you may land on nothing, yet to keep on stepping because the something
 that sustains you no empire can give you and no empire
 can take away.” We must keep stepping into the space around Jesus because the space around Jesus is where love is; the space around Jesus whose Spirit of Life lives in us is where we encounter the kingdom, the prophetic, in our midst. 

What does this unbound kingdom look like? Well, scripture gives us some guiding images. Remember Hannah’s song and Mary’s Magnicat? 

The kingdom is a home of God’s presence: there is no cornerstone like our God; the kingdom is a home of worship: my soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord; the kingdom is a home where needs are met: the hungry are satisfied with good things; the kingdom is a home of justice and equity where the lowly are lifted up; the kingdom is a home of rest for the weary; the kingdom is a home where wickedness is silenced, and weakness is cherished; the kingdom is home of mercy upon mercy upon mercy in every generation; is a home where another generation can be imagined; the kingdom is the home of Love incarnate that calls holy ones to participate in preserving it. 

The kingdom is a home where we recognize the presence of God, prophet, priest, and Redeemer at work within with around us. This home is a renewed Eden with the Eucharistic table at its center. This is what I hear in the signs of Hannah and Mary, the ministry of Samuel, and the words of Jesus with made family around him. The kingdom is a site of mutual recognition and nourishment where there is no fear of nakedness and no need for diving lines or defenses. Where the body is not under siege, and the lands are nurtured. 

How do we know we are home? We are home in the presence of love and those who bear love into being when we lose our courage. We are called to this kind of relationship that ever expands to embrace those around us. We recognize love through our commitments. Our commitments reflect our convictions, and our convictions determine the relationships in which we place ourselves in the house with Jesus. We know love through relationships because we are loved into being from a communal, perfect, trinitarian union of relationships. The first home of God. 

So we cry out to the Lord from our depths, with the Psalmist, and we dare to trust that God will hear our supplications and act for us and through us on behalf of Life, in accordance with Love now. That the lands will not remain ruined. That agents of death will be bound. And all will know they are beloved and at home in the dwelling place of God– Love who knows our name and is waiting for us to come in and walk with them through the rubble and make, from the remnants, a kingdom, home again. 

Amen.