Lord of the Streets
January 21, 2024
3rd after Epiphany, Year B
1 Corinthians 7:29-31
Psalm 62:6-14
Mark 1:14-20
“To Hell with this, I’m gonna live!”
One of my favorite movies is Serenity, which y’all’ve heard me talk about before. It’s a sci-fi film, many centuries in the future, with a rather sinister galactic government over all the planets and the good guys, a crew of 8 people living on a space freighter, doing various legal and not quite legal jobs. On the ship, you have the captain and others, including the ship’s mechanic, Kaylee, and the ship’s doctor, Simon. Kaylee has had a crush on Simon since they met, and it has gone unrequited for a long time.
So, at one point in the movie, the whole crew is about to be attacked by a hoard of vicious creatures, and things are not looking good for our plucky band of heroes. The captain and a couple of good fighters look like they have things pretty well handled, but everyone else, including Kaylee and Simon…they don’t really have a clue what they’re doing. Assuming they are all going to die, Simon finally professes his love for Kaylee. At that moment, she goes from terrified and fumbling with her weapon to cocking her gun and saying, “To Hell with this! I’m gonna live!”
In Paul’s letter to the church in Corinth, Paul wrote, assuming that they weren’t all about to die, but that their lives were about to be drastically changed by the second coming of Jesus. Like many in the early church, Paul seems to have believed that Jesus would be coming again within their lifetimes. So, he was telling the church to act accordingly, as though the present form of the world was passing away. Paul was obviously not entirely accurate with that belief, as we see the world is still turning as it was back in the first century.
His advice to the church, however, was still sound. Far from giving up on everything, throwing up their hands and saying, “Well, I guess nothing much matters anymore,” Paul’s message was a little bit more of Kaylee’s “To Hell with this! I’m gonna live!”
Whether Jesus’ return and the fullness of God’s kingdom comes today, or in another couple thousand years, or even further off than that, the Kingdom of God has still come near, and so we get to live. The Kingdom of God is all around us, alive and well in thousands and millions of ways, all the time, every day. God’s kingdom is alive and well even in things as simple as marriage and relationships, in joy and sorrow, in buying stuff, and in regular old dealings with the world.
Paul was writing about these things as though the world were about to end, and so he said, for those who had wives to live as though they had none. I can think that might mean, “don’t have kids” because, why would you if the world was about to end. There are all kinds of ways that if you were married, you could live as though you weren’t, some of those probably more helpful than others.
Thinking of marriage as it has been in some times and places, we can think of ancient times and of wives as not being owned by their husbands but there being a bit of a possessive aspect to that relationship. In that sense, it seems like Paul was saying, “Husbands, you can let go of your wives a little bit, rather than holding them as possessions. You can be equals as it is in God’s kingdom, equals without being given in marriage, as it is in the resurrection.”
The same seems true of the rest of Paul’s advice on how to live. Hold on lightly to possessions. They won’t go with you when this life is over, and we have to spend time in our lives working in order to get the money to buy possessions, so we’re literally spending our lives to get possessions. Paul raises a good question, then. How much of your life do you really want to give up in acquiring stuff?
Those who are mourning and rejoicing, Paul said, be as though you were not. Ok, we can’t just not be sad or not be joyful, nor would it be helpful to, but we can, again, hold on lightly to those times of mourning and rejoicing. Times of rejoicing will come to an end, and it’s ok when they do. We continue on, and there is still much beauty in life, even in times when we’re not particularly rejoicing. Times of mourning too, don’t have to last forever. We can after a time of sorrow, give that person or dream that we’ve lost over to God, and we let person go, let that dream go, let that life that we had go.
There is still plenty of life after mourning and sorrow when we are open to receiving it.
Hold on lightly. Even though The End may not come right away, it could come at any moment, and an end may also come at any moment. So, hold on lovingly but lightly. Holdin on with a tight grip is living in fear: fear of losing, anger at having lost, attacking any who seem like a threat. To that tight gripped, fearful life, Paul is teaching us to say, “To Hell with this; I’m gonna live!”
The end or an end may come at any time, so hold on lightly. By holding on lightly, we get to love people without possessing them.
By holding on lightly, we get to possess our things but with an open hand.
By holding on lightly, we get to open our hands to receive the beauty of the world and people around us.
Receiving the beauty of the world and people around us, and holding on lightly, we get to receive both joy and sorrow and not hold on to them forever, because there’s far too much living to do to be stuck fearfully clinging to people and stuff and even life itself.
There’s far too much life to live to waste time clinging to things in fear.
We’ve got a baptism today, and “To Hell with this, I’m gonna live,” is not exactly in the baptismal covenant, but it probably should be. What do we say at the beginning? I renounce Satan and all spiritual forces of wickedness that rebel against God. I renounce all evil powers of this world which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God. I renounce all sinful desires which draw me from the love of God. Then, I turn to Jesus Christ and accept him as my savior. I put my whole trust in his grace and love. I promise to follow and obey him as my Lord.
If that’s not saying, “To Hell with this, I’m gonna live,” I don’t know what is.
We’re declaring in our baptism that we’re gonna live. We’re declaring that we’re going to hold on lightly to the world around us and seek to love, rather than possess. We’re declaring that we’re going to mess up and that we’re even going to hold on to those screw ups lightly. Then, when we do mess up, we’re declaring that we’re going to ask God’s help to turn around again, to open up our hands, to let go of what we’re possessing and to receive from God the beauty of this life once again.
That’s the life of Baptism, the Way of Jesus, the life of the kingdom of God, for the kingdom of God is all around us, all the time. It may be tomorrow, or centuries, or millennia from now before Jesus comes and fully brings about God kingdom. However long or short it is, in the meantime, we get to live. However imperfectly it may be, we get to live God’s kingdom in our lives right now. Rather than wasting time clinging to fear, we get to open our hands and live.
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