Proverbs 31:10-31
Psalm 1
James 3:13-4:3, 7-8a
Mark 9:30-37
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable to you, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer. Amen.
As many of you know, I use a set of readings every week in worship that was developed cooperatively by two groups, the Consultation on Common Texts and the International English Language Liturgical Consultation. Over nine years they collected and selected texts with two basic goals, sharing the Gospel and hearing the full range of scripture. Something else they tried to do was assemble readings without intentionally creating worship themes most of the year. Of course during the Advent, Christmas, Lent, and Easter seasons along with special holy days, the selections are more thematic.
Occasionally though, it is the responsibility of the folks who plan worship to wonder “What in heaven’s name were these folks thinking when collecting and arranging these texts?” Our gospel reading today falls into that category.
When we last left Mark’s gospel, Peter had just said Jesus is the Christ then was promptly and not so graciously reprimanded for telling Jesus how to be the Christ. Then Jesus predicted his passion and told his disciples what it takes to follow him. This is the passage where Jesus tells everyone, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me and for the gospel will save it.”
Last week I said[1] that our world is political. In the words of Reinhold Niebuhr: “Politics is the arena where conscience and control meet, where ethics and power collide, and where we must work out the tentative and uneasy compromises that make it possible for us to live together.” By “our world” I meant our whole world, church and state, sacred and secular, public and private; the whole world is political. Given that the world and the church is nothing less (but surely more) than how people work out living together on God’s good earth, we live in a political world.
I also made the point of saying that God’s politics and American politics are not the same. Among other things, American politics have become about gaining power for the sake of having power, not about improving the life of Americans. By watching television and hearing political discourse, our political process seems now to work from a place of fear of what will happen when so-and-so is elected. I believe as William Sloane Coffin once said, “While love seeks the truth, fear seeks safety.”[2]
There’s an old expression, a ship is safe while in port, but that is not where ships are meant to be. Power is supposed to be used and it is to be used to make life better. Power is to be used. If we do nothing, if we try to save our lives, we will lose them. When we are willing to die for something great we are great.
So what comes next as we enter chapter nine? What comes between this reading from last week and our reading this week? After about a week’s time there’s this little thing that happens on the side of a mountain, the Transfiguration. Peter, James, and John meet Moses, Elijah and Jesus. This was quite a moment.
Then after they came down the hill they come upon the disciples and a whole lot of people screaming and yelling. That must have been a let down. You come literally from a mountain top experience to people yelling. On second thought, Peter building those shelters sounds like the thing to do. Yes, there is miraculous healing, but it’s time for Jesus and the disciples to get out of town.
This is where we pick up with our reading. It was some time later, maybe a few days later give-or-take a day. I say this because the way scripture reads “They left that place” means more than “They left that place.” It means some time passed between the healing and where we are now. So a few days later give-or-take later they were on the back roads of Galilee . They weren’t on the main roads because Jesus didn’t want anyone to know they were on the road. Our Lord was looking for a little alone time with his disciples for a time of fellowship and discipleship.
So he taught them, he repeated his Passion prediction. “The Son of Man is going to be betrayed into the hands of men. They will kill him, and after three days he will rise.” The disciples don’t understand. We get it; then again we’ve heard this story and its outcome often. As for the disciples, well, it was all new.
I wonder if they understood the words, but couldn’t wrap their heads around the possibility that it could actually happen, and what it really means. I also wonder how many people today can’t wrap their heads around the possibility that it could actually happen, and what it really means.
This is the first story in our reading today. There is another whole story, Jesus defining leadership. Anyone who wants to be first must be the very last, and servant of all.
Then Jesus does the unthinkable, he took a little child in his arms and said to them “Anyone who welcomes a little child like this on my behalf welcomes me.” What makes this unthinkable is that children were the least in the society. Children were completely without standing or power. Jesus brings someone without standing and says those who welcome the weakest on my behalf welcome me.
I’ve noticed American politicians don’t spend too much time breaking bread with the huddled masses yearning to breathe free these days. Political dinners that run $50,000 a plate and up are closer to the norm. There is Thanksgiving of course, where politicians will serve dinner at a shelter for a while, on camera. Of course, Jesus would rather us welcome the weak, the poor, and the homeless 364 days a year and take one day off rather than the other way around. Jesus would have us do this because anyone who welcomes the weak on his behalf welcomes not only him but also the Father who sent him.
This must have convicted the disciples who had just argued with themselves who was the greatest. They were concerned with their place in this life when their master was concerned with their place in life eternal.
These two readings seem unrelated. One was on the road and the other was in a home. One was on route and the other was at destination. These types of road shows aren’t that hard to connect, but there is something more that connects them.
To truly understand what’s going on, to truly understand what Jesus is trying to say, Jesus requires time with his disciples. Jesus desires a relationship with his disciples that require nurture. In truth, it is impossible to truly be a true disciple of Christ without spending time with Jesus.
What’s even more difficult to get a hold on is that the time they spent together on this earth was not enough. One of the glories of the Last Supper is that Jesus rushes to teach his disciples as much as possible as quickly as possible. It’s like a teacher doing a review session before a big exam, and the disciples faced quite an exam.
Even more difficult is that only when they saw Jesus again, after the resurrection, did they really begin to understand what had happened. Only after the resurrection could they begin to understand what Jesus meant when he said that he would be betrayed, killed, and rise again. Only after it happened did they begin to understand what it meant.
It meant that all the power of Rome and the Temple could bring him death, but it could not keep him from defeating death. All of the power of the people, the nations, the power elite, could not keep Jesus from doing what he had come to do, pay the horrible price so that we could be in full relationship with God.
Jesus tells us that yes, we have power. We have great and terrible power, but we should seek his power. We should seek his purposes.
When looking over what I was going to say this morning, I began to wonder, “Where’s the joy?” Here’s one answer to that question: Jesus came to reconcile all of us, all of us, with what God envisioned before the beginning. By his life, he shows us how to live. By his life, death, and resurrection he shows us that we are called to live eternal life by him today, not some later time after our death in the heavenly realm. Life is more than something to be endured, it is a joy to be shared and Jesus joyfully shares his whole life with us, calling us to share his joy with all creation.
So what does this mean to us this election season? What does it mean when all of our leaders embrace $50,000 a seat fund raisers among the elite, seeking the best place at the table? What does this mean when all of our leaders embrace the powerful over the powerless? What does this mean to us when we want to live forever, not realizing that’s what’s going to kill us all? What are we to do?
First things first, we must acknowledge that if we come at the facts with our minds made up then the facts will support what we already know. I recently read of a preaching professor who wondered how a student, a young man whose faith tradition was different from her own and her seminary, she wondered how the way he analyzed scripture always led him to the place he had planned to go all along? She thought this was odd until she figured out the answer, she does the same thing. Everybody does the same thing!
It’s difficult to break the bonds of our preconceived notions so that we can learn something new, but the gospel requires us to look at things in the new light of Christ. If we don’t open ourselves to the new things Christ continues to do, we will never move beyond who we are now, and who we’ve been before.
Next we must acknowledge that the way our government works right now is flawed. Whether it’s the permanent campaign that seeks to hold power, or the slavery of a system that forces people to scratch for almost nothing just to stay alive, or whether it’s favoring moneybags who have come a long way in the economic recovery of the past five years with increasing corporate revenue and near record high stock market values without creating jobs; what we are doing is flawed.
There’s enough blame to go around, but we will never be strong as long as we worry about who’s right and who’s wrong.
Here is our shame, right now our government operates on the principles of us and them. All of us should be very afraid of them. They’re on the border, they’re hoarding, they’re working the system, they’re coming to get you and they’re coming to get your stuff. They’re coming to bomb us back to the Stone Age or they’re going to tax us back to the Stone Age.
And this is what happens when our leaders focus more on the things of the world than on the things of God.
By the way, if you’re going to ask me who “they” are, well, I won’t. For one, I don’t really think I know. There is so much information with so little analysis and so much analysis with so little information that figuring this stuff out is a full time job.
Another is pastorally; I know if I find and then share an answer then I’m going to upset someone. This way I have a better chance of upsetting everyone the same. But if what I have said makes you uncomfortable, we should remember that as many have said, “the purpose of the gospel is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable,” I’m comfortable with that.
As for the whole church and state thing, well, that’s the state’s matter and not mine. Still, Neal, Tom, and Georgia[3] would remind us all that properly maintaining our tax status is important.
There is still one more thing to be said about our leaders, about how we judge those who govern us. This again from William Sloane Coffin: “There are three kinds of patriots, two bad, one good. The bad ones are the uncritical lovers and the loveless critics. Good patriots carry on a lover's quarrel with their country, a reflection of God’s lover's quarrel with all the world.”
This brings us to our point of view; the one Jesus was sharing with his disciples all along. The disciples were in an “us and them” modus operandi. The disciples thought they and Jesus were “us” and the rest of the world was “them.” Jesus teaches that this is not so. Jesus is Jesus. He is himself. Everything else is us. Jesus came to save us all. It’s not “Us and Them,” it’s “Us and Him” and he came to join us fully human to share our life, to be in full relationship with us. Jesus calls us to join in relationship with Him. Only through relationship will our lives be what he wants and expects from his disciples.
In the end, that’s what the folks who put together the Lectionary want us to see, that Scripture is filled with God’s love played out in relationship with all creation. As Christ is with us, we are all in this together.
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