Mark 9: Forgiveness Precedes Repentance | Guest Speaker: Al Perreca

Well, welcome to Christ the Redeemer.

Uh my name is Russ Masterson.

I'm the pastor here at Redeemer.

Uh welcome.

We're glad you're here.

Whether uh it's your first time here and you're new here, uh new to this church, or maybe new to church in general, or you've been with us for uh a long time.

Uh we know it can be difficult if you are new to get connected into a church that's already going and running, and there's groups, there's different stuff, and sometimes you can get lost and figure like where's my next step.

And so we try to make that easy for you.

There's a couple things coming up that could be good just for you if you're in that situation, you're ready to take that next step.

And and the first thing is that we have a newcomer chat next week.

I'll be doing a newcomer chat in our small group room, which is at the front of the building, directly after service for about 10 to 15 minutes.

It's a very short, like, hey, here's who we are, here's how we started, here's the deal, that sort of thing.

Um, and so if you want to do that, RSVP as well.

In October, we have a growth and grace class that will meet from 9:30 to 10:15 in that first 45 minutes preceding this main service.

And so if you want to jump into that, there'll be child care, but you need the RSVP to get that arranged so you can do that.

Info's all here and the bulletin.

And then the last thing, just to kind of mark your calendar, is uh sort of a fellowship event at the Marietta High School football game.

We're going to host the kids' zone before the football game, and so that's from 5:30 to 7:30, and there's blow-up games for kids.

Um, so you can come with your kids, or if you don't have kids, you can come and just hang with us and help manage kids, would be nice.

We need a few volunteers to help do crowd control.

You can sign up in the lobby for that, and there'll be food you can buy, and we'll just be there as a church, but also with our community.

So love, love to have you uh mark that and and join us for that.

So, this is one of those handful of Sundays for me that I get to come to church, and I'm not preaching, but I get to receive.

And so I'm very excited this morning.

I'm always excited on these Sundays because I get to sit and receive rather than be worried about my sermon and my outline and is everything tied together and all of that.

And so Al Pereca's doing all that worrying this morning for us.

And uh my first ingrained memory of Al was and probably forever will be hey Russ, let me know if you need any help with the building use policy for your new church building.

All right, let's just fill you in here on something.

There's not a lot of people asking to help out with the building use policy for a new church building.

Okay?

So right away, this is the kind of thing an insurance guy asks me, hey, do you have a building use policy?

And then I start scrambling.

That's usually how this works.

And Al was ahead of the insurance guy, and so I was like, How are you even thinking about this?

Well, in a former life, he went to seminary, he was a youth pastor, he's a pastor, he helped plan a church, he helped write a building use policy, and so he helped us write ours.

And since then, he's helped us write our child protection policy.

Um, he's been on that for us.

Um, maybe more importantly than all of that is now he's he's working in the business world, but but he's a dad and he's a husband, and it's been my privilege to be with Al and walk with Al and listen to Al talk about what it means in these days for him and his family to what does it mean to walk with God and learn that God loves him even while life is not perfect and life is challenging.

Right?

I don't know if anybody resonates with Al.

I always do when he starts talking and I'm taking notes about how he's handling this.

This morning I I opened up our bulletin, which is Mark 9.

The lectionary has us going through Mark right now, and I read the passage and I was very grateful I'm not preaching it.

And I'm like, oh, that's a lot.

Wow, okay.

Some strong language.

Glad Al got this one.

And but I had a whole bunch of questions, like right away.

I was flooded with questions, like some theological questions, some Al will get to, some Al will not get to.

But a whole bunch of questions came to me personally, and for us, like, what would it mean for the hum, just like that train, like the hum of discontentment to fade, or inadequacy or guilt or shame?

And you go, well, that's not in the passage.

Well, I'm getting there.

Because at least for me, that creates a lot of unhealthy or sinful behaviors, self-saving behaviors of trying to save myself or cope or medicate.

So, what would it look like if I actually trusted in Jesus that like that he makes me whole and that his love is better than life?

I mean, Jesus' language here is quite strong.

What would it mean to be whole in Jesus in eternity, but also today, and to believe that that love is so great and better than life that I could nod along with such strong language and believe it.

So I'm gonna pray, and I'm gonna pray that that kingdom, that that kingdom of that sort of grace and love and truth would resonate in our hearts and lives, and now it would teach us a little something about it.

Let's pray together.

God, uh, we pray that you would break us open this morning.

These words are incredibly strong.

And God, they are strong because you are trying to break into our hearts, which are so callous, and love to be self-centered and self-serving, love to self-save.

We resist trust, we resist faith.

We know the hum of discontentment and inadequacy, of shame and guilt.

We act out of our sin and we act out of our shame, and yet we know your grace is more than enough for that.

We know there is a kingdom greater than this world.

And God, would you teach us this morning something of that kingdom and would our hearts be aligned with your kingdom and help us remember that Jesus is sufficient for us.

We pray for Al as he speaks, give him great comfort as he just shares with us what he has learned in the last few weeks as he studied this passage.

In Jesus' name.

Amen.

Good morning.

It has uh been quite a while since I did this, but I appreciate Russ and the elders give me this opportunity.

You know, Russ and I had been emailing back and forth uh about one Sunday, and he emailed me the date, and I said, sure, you know, that that I'll be in town.

That date looks perfectly fine.

So after I said yes, uh he then sent me the lectionary calendar, and I I read all the passages thinking one of them would certainly be better.

Uh and we ended up here in March.

So I I see now why he chose this date.

Now I don't know if that was his motivation at all.

Uh hopefully I don't offend you with this, but just so you know how my mind thinks, and I'm from the Northeast, so it it wouldn't be the first time I've offended someone in church, so so be it.

You know, every time I read this passage is terrible, but I think of the scene from Monty Python uh with the knight and the sword.

Um so my apologies.

That's that's where I won't bring that back up, but just so you know how my mind thinks, I could not get that out of my mind as I read through this passage.

I think there's a better message than that, though.

I think there is an incredible message of redemption and hope.

But I think we first need to look at the context, the broader context, look at this passage, where it sits within Mark, both within Mark 9 and also the you know the earlier chapters of Mark.

And I think we'll see a theme that underlies, that is getting that Mark is uh bringing out, getting us to this point, sort of this theme of powerlessness or helplessness, and that the juxtaposition of Jesus' power and what he brings to the kingdom.

Before we really get into that, uh you know, it was a couple of years ago.

Uh I had a trip, a work trip out to Colorado.

It was in the winter, and I loved to ski.

So, and several of my colleagues like to ski, so it it became a kind of work trip, more ski trip.

Uh so we tried to get through the meetings as quickly as possible.

And then I also invited my friend Mike, who I don't work with, but we've known each other since college.

I said, hey, you know, he loves to ski as well.

Come out, let's we'll ski together in Colorado, it'll be a great time.

So we decided he and I like adventures, oftentimes the kind of adventures where you want to check your life insurance policy before you start the adventure.

Um so we decided, you know what, before we ski, uh the afternoon that we get there, I didn't have any meetings, you know, so we fly out to Denver, let's go snowmobiling for a few hours.

So we get to Denver, you know, meet at the airport, drive a couple hours out into the Rockies, and most people would take the guided tour.

Uh we decided it'd be more fun, you know.

I mean, how could you tell how fast the snowmobiles actually go if you take the guided tour?

It'd be more fun to just take them.

So amazingly, this company rents you these snowmobiles and they just let you go out into thousands of acres of Colorado wilderness in the middle of the winter.

So we get there and we get our two-minute tutorial and a map, and they say you should follow these trails.

The map is just this black and white piece of paper, and you know, the trails, it's like, yeah, I can maybe understand those trails.

We're talking hundreds of miles of trails on an 8x11, and of course it's paper and it's snowing, so you know it's not gonna last long.

So we get out there, and it's by this time, you know, when we get started, 1.30, 2 o'clock in the afternoon, and we're out in the wilderness riding around, maybe on the trails, maybe not.

Uh, you know, while we're going, we come across this group.

So if anyone's ever been skiing, you know what a snow cat is, those big grooming machines.

So we come across a snow cat who was uh grooming some trails, like backcountry trails for snowboarders.

And he was a really interesting character, a really old beat-up grooming machine.

We didn't really think much else of it.

You know, we talked to him for a couple minutes, he had some interesting things to say, which I'll refrain from saying because that might really offend you.

Uh so we go and we get, we probably have you know 30, 45 minutes left.

Starting to snow kind of heavy, getting dark, and uh, like I said, we like adventure.

So we get to this fork, and we know for sure one way, it's about 10 miles back to the you know where we rented them.

And we thought, well, we we've not gone this other way.

I mean, we've got 45 minutes, let's try it.

So we go, and if anyone's ridden a snowmobile, you might know that when once if you get off the trail and the powder's too deep, they just sink.

And you're like 600-pound machines.

So we go, and sure enough, trail ends, and my machine gets completely stuck.

So Mike, my friend Mike, didn't realize this, and he's gone off, and I thought, well, this is a terrible situation, because there's no way I'm getting the sun stuck.

You know, and at that point I was fairly hungry, and and we've both been to the mountains plenty, but you still have to acclimate when you're at 11,000 feet, so fairly out of breath doing anything much more than sitting on the snowmobile.

So he finally realizes, oh, Al's not with me, I better go check.

So I see his headlight coming back through through the snow, and I see it stop.

Well, that's funny, why did he stop?

Yeah, he got stuck as well, because it was completely white out conditions.

So we're sitting there, and that's probably, you know, from a physical standpoint, about as as helpless of a situation as as I've ever been in, because it's like, well, it's snowing really hard.

You know, they may come rescue us, but they don't really know where we are, uh, and we can't get these unstuck.

So we spend you know a good amount of time, finally get one of them unstuck.

The other one was nothing we could do about it.

It was stuck in the snow.

So we start riding back, and sure enough, we come across this guy in the snow cat that we had saw earlier in the day, didn't really think much of.

Well, we thought a few things of that probably weren't very nice.

Uh and he said, Hey, I'll I'll come help you.

I'll come pull it out, I'll take care of you guys.

And sure enough, we were like, there's no way you're gonna be able to do that.

He comes, you know, doesn't get stuck, pulls us out, and uh we do eventually make it back to the rental place, where of course, on the way, we meet the rescue team coming to find us, because at this point it's completely dark, um, and end up having to pay a rescue fee, which we were too excited about.

But it's it's amazing how in those sorts of situations we don't like being helpless.

And there's some ways we don't even like being helped.

You know, and we were trying to tell the snow cat driver, no, no, I mean we'll figure it out.

And he's like, no, you're not gonna get that sled out.

Like, there's no way, it's it's buried in there.

I think the disciples are similar.

Um, they don't like to be in helpless situations, and they will do anything they can to sort of take the pressure off of themselves or take the focus off of themselves, much like we do the same.

And that brings us to our first point.

Jesus is for the powerless.

Jesus is for the powerless.

And throughout uh the next few minutes, I'll use powerless and helpless.

I'm kind of using those interchangeably.

I couldn't decide which one sounded better, so we'll just go with both.

So as we start this section, John says to Jesus, hey, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him because he was not following us.

The amazing thing about this passage is that just a little bit earlier in chapter 9, the disciples themselves are not able to do this very thing.

So I'm gonna read this just to help us get the context.

So uh Mark 9, starting at verse 14, you can just listen.

It says, And when they came to the disciples, they saw a great crowd around them, and scribes arguing with them.

And immediately all the crowd, when they saw him, were greatly amazed and ran up to him and greeted him.

And he asked them, Jesus asked them, What are you arguing about with them?

And someone from the crowd answered, Teacher, I brought my son to you, for he has a spirit that makes him mute.

And whenever it seizes him, it throws him down, and he foams and grinds his teeth and becomes rigid.

So I asked your disciples to cast it out, and they were not able.

So it's interesting.

The disciples being helpless, just a little bit earlier, say, hey Jesus, look, look at this guy, what he's doing here.

I mean, he's not even with us, you know?

Taking that focus off of themselves.

Before we look at Jesus' response, I do think there's a broader context in Mark.

Like I said earlier, that's bringing us to this point.

And this idea of Jesus seeking and helping those who are helpless or powerless comes up continually in Mark.

You know, Mark is by far the shortest and fastest moving of the gospels.

You know, he gets right to the point, doesn't worry about genealogies.

You know, he knew that only our seminary professors would worry about the genealogies.

So he gets right into the stories.

So if you look just very quickly, you have several stories in the first eight chapters.

So in chapter one, Jesus heals the leper.

In chapter two, he heals the paralytic, the one where his friends are lowering him down through the roof.

Chapter three, he heals the man with the withered hand.

Chapter four, he calms the storm for the disciples who are helpless against the sea.

Um, in chapter five, he heals the crazy guy.

He also heals a woman with the flow of blood, and Jairus' daughter.

He also you also have the, in chapter six, the feeding of the five thousand.

Again, another occurrence of the disciples' helplessness against the sea, the healing of the daughter of Syrophoenician woman and a deaf man in chapter seven, the feeding of the four thousand and the healing of a blind man in chapter eight, and then the healing of a boy in chapter nine.

So Mark is giving this story after story of look at this, look at the way Jesus is working in those that are completely powerless, that are coming to him completely helpless.

We also see in those passages how the disciples themselves are in a way helpless, even if they don't want to admit it.

Even at one point, Jesus asking them after he feeds the 4,000, do you not yet understand?

It's almost like, don't you see what I'm doing for all of these people the same can be for you.

So as we come back then to John's question, I think the clue is both in John's question and Jesus' answer.

You know, John says, We saw someone casting out demons in your name.

And Jesus says, do not stop him, for no one who does a mighty work in my name will soon afterward speak evil of me.

So I think you get this.

This person that's casting out the demons is just as powerless, just as helpless as any of the other people that are coming to Jesus for healing.

What he is doing is only through the power of Christ.

It is only what Jesus is allowing him to do.

And then we get into, and the passage has a lot in it, so we're not gonna, just a warning, we're not gonna touch on everything.

We don't have enough time.

Um we then get into Jesus is saying, uh, after he talks about this this person casting out demons, he says, Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him if a great millstone were hung around his neck and he were thrown into the sea.

And I'm not sure, you know, he he may still be holding, you Russ talked about the child that Jesus picked up in the earlier verses last week.

He may still be holding that child when he's saying this.

He may be referring to the guy casting out demons, he may be referring to the other people he had been helping.

But the point being, Jesus is for those who are powerless, for those who are helpless.

And while the disciples and us have a hard time learning that lesson, he still shows us patience and he shows us grace.

So, while it's a little bit disjointed, I do think it ties into this next section of the passage where Jesus talks about this unusual sort of repentance.

So our second point, you don't have enough body parts to help yourself.

Again, you don't have enough body parts to help yourself.

You probably noticed this morning in your bulletin that there's a footnote at the bottom about verses 44 and 46.

So that's what's called a textual variant.

So some translations include those verses, some do not.

Uh when translators look at the various manuscripts, uh, the Greek manuscripts, typically they will that you're gonna have some variants occasionally.

Typically they'll go, often, they'll go with the older manuscript, unless it's clearly an error like the person copying the manuscript jumped from one line to the next.

The key about textual variants is there's, if you look at all the different textual variants, and some of it's just a letter or or a word, but if you look at all the textual variants in the New Testament, there are none that impact a major doctrine.

Okay, so these are these are all things that we could argue about them all day, but you know, nothing, it doesn't impact anything major unless you think snake handling is a major doctrine.

If so, you can talk to Ross afterwards or one of the elders.

We can discuss that.

Um, on to the actual passage.

You know, I don't reading and researching this, there's some thought that there's historical context behind this.

So the book 2nd Maccabees, which is not uh we don't have in our canon, it's not scripture.

Some uh sects of Christianity may put that in their scripture, but it is a historical book, and it talks about the history of the Jewish people who lived from 180 to 161 BC.

There's actually a story in there about uh seven sons and a mother who was martyred, and it's kind of gruesome, but they had their tongues removed, their head scalped, and their hands and feet cut off.

And I, you know, did the did it did the audience have that in their mind as he's talking about that?

They probably would have been familiar with that story.

And of course, in chapter 8, Jesus talks about if anyone would come after me, let him deny himself.

Is he referencing back to that?

I don't know.

I mean, I I I struggled a lot with this passage.

I mean, certainly, you know, we don't take it literally.

I mean, I'm 40, I would have run out of body parts by now.

Uh, but even figure figurative, yeah, figuratively, uh, this is kind of a difficult passage.

I think about uh the company I work for, like many companies, we started doing a lot of uh cell.

And team development.

And we will most of the time go to an off-site location, sometimes in Atlanta, sometimes out of town, so we don't have distractions.

And you know, most of it is good stuff, and we work on different personal development items and team development items.

And one of the things we practice is issue clearing and feedback, where we basically either one-on-one or even in a group setting, go through any issues that we may have with each other or with someone's team.

And at the end of it, we say, okay, is everyone clean and clear?

Right?

As we go around, clean and clear.

And you think, boy, clean and clear, it sounds like you guys have solved workplace strife.

That must be a fantastic place to work.

But of course, the incredible thing is sometimes a month, sometimes a week, sometimes before dinner, that clean and clear is gone.

So we have not figured out a permanent solution for our inter-company relationships.

So where does that leave us with this passage?

I mean, if we can't even figure out something like that, you know, we're not gonna be able to remove ourselves from this temptation from sin, even in a figurative manner.

As I thought about it, as I read, repentance certainly matters, right?

We take time in the service to go through a time of repentance.

That should be part of our Christian life.

But I think this passage functions a lot like the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew chapter 5, specifically verse 48, where Jesus tells his listeners, be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.

Matthew 5 · chapter mention

It's a standard we cannot achieve in and of ourselves.

Just like trying to be perfect will not get us to perfection, figuratively removing our limbs will not bring us to sinlessness, will not keep us for sinning.

Instead, just like we say that we are perfect because Christ made us perfect, we only repent knowing that we are already forgiven.

Basically, Jesus is saying to them, you want to help yourselves, here you go.

This is what you have to do.

Be perfect.

Remove that.

Cut your limbs off.

We can't do that.

We can't attain that.

I was reading an article in the Mockingbird periodical, which is uh a quarterly periodical from Mockingbird Ministries, which you've probably heard several people talk about here.

It's called The Subjective Power of an Objective Gospel.

It speaks about us being saved by an objective gospel outside of ourselves.

In the paragraph I'm going to read, the author speaks about a freedom.

And this freedom is a freedom from ourselves and our own subjective inner turmoil.

The author, Jacob Smith, writes This freedom gives us permission to confront and confess our pain.

We can look our self-defeating and regressive tendencies in the eye for once.

We no longer have to pretend to be anything other than what the gospel tells us we are, hopeless sinners in need of mercy.

Honesty and repentance then go hand in hand.

Whereas a subjective gospel turns repentance into a frighteningly conditional affair, dependent on the intensity of conviction and faith, an objective gospel provides the assurance of forgiveness first, which then produces repentance, forging the pathway to the place where we find hope and redemption.

This brings us to our final point, and this will be a short one.

Jesus made the final sacrifice so we can be whole.

I'm going to read that to you briefly.

You don't have to turn to it.

And a leper came to him, imploring him and kneeling, said to him, If you will, you can make me clean.

Moved with pity, he stretched out his hand and touched him and said to him, I will be clean.

And immediately the leprosy left him, and he was made clean.

And Jesus sternly charged him and sent him away at once, and said to him, See that you say nothing to anyone, but go show yourself to the priest and offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded for a proof to them.

But he went out and began to talk freely about it, and to spread the news, so that Jesus could no longer openly enter a town, but was out in desolate places, and people were coming to him from every quarter.

What amazes me in this story, you have this leper, who possibly may have been missing some body parts, likely fingers, maybe a hand, who is not allowed to go into towns, right?

He's an outcast.

Jesus comes, makes him whole, says, don't tell anyone, because Jesus knows what would happen if he did at that point in his ministry.

But he goes and tells a bunch of people, and the roles reverse.

Right?

So this leper is accepted back into society, but Jesus can't go into towns after this without being mobbed.

I mean, he himself almost becomes or becomes that outcast, takes that reversal, takes what the leper was and becomes it himself.

I think when it becomes to repentance, it comes to this passage.

We can only repent because we have been made whole, like the leper, through the work of Jesus.

So as we close today, I know there was a lot, and there's still more we could have gone through in this passage, but I want us to recall, I want us to remember that as we approach the kingdom, we approach those who are like those who are helpless in Mark's gospel.

Knowing that our repentance repentance is only accepted by our wholeness through Christ.

May we come to the kingdom today completely helpless, knowing that it is only Jesus who can make us whole, restoring all things, even the very body and mind that cause us to sin.

Let's pray.

Jesus, we thank you for this passage.

We thank you for the power that you show through those who are helpless.

Pray that we will come to you today knowing that we are already forgiven.

In Jesus' name.

Amen.