Mark 9:30-37

Pentecost +17 - Year B

Mark 9:30-37

And again we find ourselves in a normal state of affairs - going on from “there”. It is helpful to leave “there” for leaving “here” is always difficult. Our attachements here grow quickly and deep.

Even further, we find that we are not only leaving “there” but doing so on the sly.

Jesus needn’t have worried about being quite up-front about his view of the disaster headed his way - death and destruction which will turn from conflict to celebration. This is never something folks take to easily. Denial runs strong in our DNA - Don’t kNow Anything.

Not only is this such a foreign approach, to head directly for the crux of the matter, where the most heat is, it is beyond foreign — invisible and unable to be asked about.

Instead of wrestling with this meta-view, folks distracted themselves the way we often do, conversing about power, drawing straws for a favored position. Americans do the same every two, four, or six years with the distraction of voting rather than looking at what is coming down the pike. We may have missed the violence at the beginning of an Industrial Age, but we seem to be moving toward it at a rapid pace, here at the end of the Age. The environment has been raped and the poor also. Children have not been been welcomed to their future, only to a past empty of all but financial profit. The gulf between G*D and Mammon has grown exponentially.

May this time of transition be a “there” soon left as we decide to not argue among ourselves, but rise, throw off chains of death and enslavement and move forward to occupy community resources for the larger community.