Twenty-sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time, September 26, 2021 – Numbers 11:25-29; James 5:1-6; Mark 9:38-43, 45, 47-48

“Whoever is not against us is for us.” Whoever is not against us is for us. Pretty straight forward, right? This is Mark’s gospel we just read from. You find the exact same story with the exact same statement in the gospels of Matthew and Luke. What does that mean? It means that Matthew and Luke, writing about fifteen years after Mark’s gospel was written, used Mark’s gospel as their outline, then filled in other stories and other sayings of Jesus that were part of their traditions and had been handed down in their community. However, when you get to Luke’s gospel you have that quotation, and then a chapter or so later, you have this quotation, “He who is not with me is against me, and he who does not gather with me, scatters,“ the exact opposite of what Jesus said just a chapter before that in Luke’s gospel and two other gospels. So, which is it? Is it “He who is not against me is on my side” or “He who is not for me is against me?” Jesus could not have said both of those things; they’re contradictory. Or maybe, as the story got passed on by word of mouth, it changed from place to place, almost like playing telephone, and turned out exactly opposite in Luke’s private tradition as it was in Mark’s universal tradition.

I’m going to tell you a couple of stories that might help to examine this seeming contradiction. In one parish where I served, the predominant church in this little village - a village of many churches, maybe a dozen or more - was the Dutch Reformed church, now just the Reformed church. It was the money church. By that I mean there was old money in the community from before the Civil War. Just to give you an example of the kind of money I’m talking about, the Borden fortune was in this community and connected to the Reformed church. It was so important to the social life of the community, that in the early years of the twentieth century, several Catholic families abandoned the Catholic faith and joined the Dutch Reformed church so that they could succeed in business and in the society in which they lived.

Early in the twentieth century, one of the most prominent members of the Reformed church community, the town's only doctor (at that time) decided to build a little hospital. That’s what people did back then. There were two little private hospitals up in Monticello right through the early 1970s. Anyway, he decided to build a hospital. To staff his hospital, he’d invited a group of Catholic nuns to come and run the hospital - the Franciscan Sisters of the Sick Poor. Even though they had the backing of the most prominent member, or one of the most prominent members, of the Reformed church, when they would walk on the streets of this little village, people would cross the street and walk on the other side, because they hated Catholics so much.

Into this hostile environment, I came in the late 1970s as an assistant pastor. At that time the Catholics were, if not the majority religious group in the town, at least a very large minority. Yet still, we had no standing in comparison to members of the Reformed church. And an ecumenical council was just being created. My pastor had no interest, so he sent me. And we thought we would start very low-key. We had an afternoon in which the head or a representative of each of the major denominations in town gave a little talk about the main focus of their church, followed by questions. And each of us got up and gave our little thing, and then it was time for questions. The questions were going swimmingly until one person in the back of the room put up their hand and said, “Do you believe in the real presence?” Of course, I gave the church’s official position, so did the Anglican or the Episcopalian minister, who believe in the real presence just as we do. So did one of the Lutheran ministers, who belong to the branch of the Lutheran faith that celebrates Mass just like we do. The Methodist ministers just sort of waffled on the issue. And then the pastor of the Reformed church got up and said, “I want to make this perfectly clear. If ecumenism ever means that we have to believe in the real presence, count us out!” And there was embarrassed silence in the hall that kind of ended the program. Nobody could ask any questions or say anything after that.

You have to understand how the Reformed church works. The congregation of the Reformed church elects a board of directors. They’ll be like a parish council, but with more power. They get to decide not only where the money is spent and what they’ll do as a parish, but also, they get to hire and fire the pastor. And they tell him what he is to preach and how he is to preach it. So, we have to assume that he was speaking on behalf of his congregation. Let’s just call him for the sake of simplicity, the reverend V.

A couple of years go by, and the Catholic Church wants to use New York State’s new law that allows gambling for non-profit organizations to raise money. But, in order to do that, each village or town that wants to do it has to adopt the state law as their own. It takes a referendum, and the referendum has to be done twice. So we begin the process of having it put on the ballot, and there are public meetings. For the public meeting, come a whole bunch of people who are in support of this proposition - representatives of each of the five fire companies, of the scouts, of all of the people who have raised money in town - as do all of the ministers, some of whom are opposed, some are neutral, some are in favor of. So we're all at this big meeting in the high school auditorium, which holds maybe 350-400 people. Every seat is filled. The Reverend V. gets up and says, “If you let the Catholics have gambling this year, they’ll want prostitution next year.” And there’s stunned silence. I think that turned the tables. So many people were angry and upset that he had said that, that the referendum passed with flying colors. Before that, it was touch and go, whether it would work.

Flash forward a few more years, and I am in the local hospital right there in town. I’m in the hospital for ten days. During those ten days, my pastor comes to visit me about three times. The Catholic chaplain of the hospital comes to visit me about three times. The Reverend V. comes to visit me every day, comes in and asks how I’m feeling, takes my hand, and prays over me, every day.

By this time the ecumenical council is going fairly well. The ministers meet for lunch once a month, whoever can get away. We all get together for lunch one day and we start trading stories, and we find out that the same panhandler has been to every rectory in the village that same day, and, because all of us happened to be flush, he got a twenty-dollar bill from each one of us. On the other hand, there are days we would have to turn people away because we had nothing to give them. So together we came up with a plan, that one church would have a pantry, another church would have a thrift shop, another church would give out vouchers to the local stores, another church would do this, and another church would do that. We would send people from church to church, depending on what it is they needed. And it worked very well. Finally we decided that we had to have a fundraiser in order to do this because we were beginning to spend well over $10,000 a year, as a group, on this sort of thing. So, we developed a plan to have a 10K walk every spring. And the Reverend V. suggested that it should be the Catholic Church that would take care of the money raised, and distribute it, because he felt that we were the most trustworthy.

Whoever does not gather with us, scatters. Whoever is not against us, is for us. It can change from situation to situation and, in this conflicted society it’s very important to remember that.