“What Do You Want Me to Do for You?”

Mark 10:46-52

October 28, 2018

I.

The city of Jericho is the last stop on the traditional pilgrimage path to Jerusalem.  It is east of Jerusalem, near the Jordan River.  People would overnight in Jericho and get up early in the morning to walk the last 15 or so miles, uphill — the elevation difference is 3400 feet — to the holy city.  This is what Jesus and his disciples are doing.  

Because there are so many religious pilgrims taking this path all the time, beggars would line the road, hoping to find people in a charitable frame of mind going by.  In today’s story it is also a week or so before Passover, so the road is particularly crowded.  

So with all these people making their way out of the city and up the steep road, and probably many beggars by the side calling out for alms, it is interesting that the story singles out only one.  We even know his name.  It’s Bartimaeus, or “Son of Timaeus.”  (My theory about people in the gospels who are named is that they later become figures in the earliest churches where they tell their stories and people personally remember them.)

There is a crowd of people going by.  Bartimaeus is sitting there with other beggars, his shabby cloak spread out in front of him to catch any coins people might toss his way.  And in the middle of this noisy commotion Bartimaeus hears that Jesus of Nazareth and his disciples are among them.  So he starts yelling at the top of his lungs, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!  Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!”

This is the first time in this gospel that anyone calls Jesus by this title, “Son of David.”  Son of David is a fairly loaded term.  It means Messiah.  It means king.  It means descendant of the great King David and heir to his throne.  It seems that what Bartimaeus has heard about Jesus is that he is going to be, or at least try to be, the new king.  That’s probably why people scold him to be quiet.  There are likely to be police around, and proclaiming someone to be king, especially among a crowd of people on their way to Jerusalem for Passover, the holiday celebrating the people’s liberation, is a good way to become a person of interest to them.  

Amid all the yelling, Bartimaeus is the one voice Jesus hears.  Jesus stops and instructs that people bring to him this noisy blind guy who is calling him the new king.  It could have been just to get him to be quiet about the “Son of David” stuff, which could attract unwanted attention.  But on the other hand, this is exactly the kind of person Jesus has come to serve as the king for: a blind beggar camped out on the side of the road in Jericho.

The people, who were telling Bartimaeus to pipe down, now urge him to take heart because Jesus is calling him.  He enthusiastically throws off his cloak, whatever coins he might have collected go flying, rolling, and jingling on the ground.  He jumps up and makes his way to Jesus, perhaps led by some of the other people.  And Jesus asks him, “What do you want me to do for you?”

II.

It is the exact same question that Jesus asks of the last people who approach him with the expectation that he would be king, his disciples, James and John, from last week’s reading.  It is the same question that Jesus asks of every one of us.  “What do you want me to do for you?”

For James and John it doesn’t go very well, as you may recall.  They are asking for positions of power in the new administration, which is not what Jesus is about.  But Bartimaeus replies, “My teacher, let me see again.”  He just wants his sight back.  He wants to be a normal guy.  He wants to be restored to his full humanity, with all his senses intact.

Bartimaeus shows such trust in Jesus that he abandons his only source of income, his cloak.  He may have even just thrown away all the money he had to his name.  Contrast this with the pious man earlier in the chapter who could not give up his possessions when Jesus required it of him.  Bartimaeus gives up his possessions on his own, without being asked.  He comes to Jesus blind and having made himself voluntarily penniless.

So that question, “What do you want me to do for you?”  How it gets answered is going to depend on how we come to Jesus and what we are asking for.  Is it personal glory and honor based on a misconception about Jesus’ identity and mission?  Is it all about us?

Or is it wholeness, integrity, health, and sight, based on a deeper, intuitive understanding of who Jesus is and what he can do?  Do we come burdened by our baggage: our biases, our expectations, our hopes and dreams, our egocentric personal desires, even our theology?  Or do we come having divested ourselves of our baggage, our possessions, our old life, our wealth, our only means of support?  Do we trust Jesus that much?  Just on the basis of his call, with no guarantee that we are going to receive what we ask for?

Bartimaeus doesn’t ask for anything except to be real and whole as a human being.  He abandons everything he owns because he knows that what he has is not who he is, and it is worth it to sacrifice what he has in order to just have the chance to be who he truly is.  And he knows that this Jesus is the One who is able to bring him back to himself, to restore his sight, to make him whole, to recover for him his true Self.

As he stands before Jesus then, the Lord says to him, “Go.  Your faith has made you well.  Trusting in me is to trust in who you really are; it is to trust in the true humanity I reveal and which you and I share; it is to access something already deep within you that was always there.  Your faith in me is faith in your own deepest Self.  Not your little, blind, lame egocentric self crying for handouts on the side of the road; your expansive, inclusive, eternal, heavenly Self: your Self in Me.  That is what you have discovered.”

III.

What do we want Jesus to do for us?  Buy us a Mercedes Benz, for those old enough to remember that song?

One of the ways of understanding Christianity is as a path for changing what we want so that what we want is what Jesus Christ gives us.  This is distinct from and opposed to what we are taught to want from our earliest days, which are those three things that Satan offers Jesus in the wilderness — which is, by the way, the same Judean badlands that the road from Jericho passed through.  We may reduce those to wealth, fame, and power.  Those are the things we have been taught to want for the sake of our own security and success.  Those are the things that matter to us, in our egocentric frame of reference, which is really a form of blindness that sums up the human condition that Bartimaeus represents here, the last day before Jesus gets to Jerusalem.

What we don’t want — and often don’t even know enough for it to occur to us that we should want, because we imagine that we already have it, when we don’t — is to see.  We think we see just fine, and that this existence of doing whatever gets people to throw us some money is just normal.  

Bartimaeus throws away the distracting shiny stuff that everyone says he should value when he perceives that he has a chance at receiving something real.  The fact that he sees things clearly enough at the beginning of the story to know that Jesus is the One he needs to get to shows that he really could see all along.  His body just needs to get the memo.

In teaching us what to want, Jesus teaches us what we already have and who we already are as humans fashioned in God’s Image.  The highest and best thing to want is what we are in God’s sight.  It is to be human as Jesus reveals our true humanity.  It is to be one with all things and all people.  It is to be one with God.  When we can have the insight to want that, we will receive it, along with everything else.

This week, in thinking about the throng of people on pilgrimage from Jericho to Jerusalem, I couldn’t help thinking about the caravan of refugees now walking through southern Mexico on their way to the US border.  If, in Jesus, there is no Jew or Greek, slave or free, there is also no us and them in this case.  That’s what it means to see.  Jesus doesn’t care about the lines on a map or the laws that the establishment leaders wrote into some books.  He is a refugee himself, as an infant in Egypt.  We share a common humanity in him with everyone, especially refugees who, like Bartimaeus, leave everything to be on the way to something better.

IV.

Bartimaeus immediately regains his sight and falls into the group, following Jesus “on the way.”  Mark knows that “on the way” means first that he joins the throng of people on the pilgrimage to Jerusalem.  He meets and is welcomed by the disciples who no doubt start telling him the stories of Jesus’ ministry so far, introducing him to other healed people from as far back as when they were all up in Galilee.

But there is another meaning to “on the way.”  The early church calls itself “the Way.”  All of us who are disciples of Jesus over the last 2000 years are, in a sense on the same Way.  It is the Way of the cross and the resurrection.  It is the Way of repentance in which we acquire a new mind and start living in a new manner.  It is the Way of losing what we have in order to gain everything.  It is the Way of unity with all creation, the Way of blessing, the Way of compassion and service, humility, justice, peace, and love.

+++++++

Glory.

Mark 10:35-45

October 21, 2018

I.

The Lord’s frustration with his clueless disciples deepens.  In this chapter he has already blessed little children as an example of discipleship.  He has made a point of criticizing the acquisition of wealth.  He has predicted again his own rejection, death, and resurrection.  

And yet, two of his most senior and intimate disciples, James and John, are still imagining that this movement is about gaining political power in Jerusalem.  Jesus is going to be king, and they want to have the best positions in the new government.  That’s what they think Jesus’ “glory” is going to be about.  They want to be seated at his right and left, presumably on elevated thrones, helping him with judgment and administration.  

And it’s not just James and John.  When the other disciples find out about their request, they are angry with them, but only because the Ben Zebedee brothers sought to secure places ahead of them.  It becomes clear to Jesus that in spite of everything he has been saying and doing, none of his disciples get it.  And if his disciples don’t understand, it goes without saying that the regular people in the crowd don’t.  So Jesus has to sit them down and spell out yet again the nature of ambition and leadership in this movement.

James and John were excited about Jesus’ mission; they had seen his miracles.  More importantly, they had witnessed the tremendous popular response to Jesus.  When he talks about the Kingdom of God, they were taking him literally in terms of a political movement that would place Jesus on David’s throne in Jerusalem.  They saw success as gaining power, popularity, and wealth, all measured in numbers.  

Let us not congratulate ourselves that we are any further along in our understanding than they are.  We tend still to view ambition and leadership in the same ways as the disciples.  We do not necessarily think of success, ambition, and leadership in any different terms, even in the church.  Were we asked what success looks like in the church most of us would describe a situation that involved more people, more influence, and more money.  

We define personal ambition and success according to the acquisition of the same things: greater privilege and prestige, more wealth, recognition, security, and respect.  We extend this view to nations and businesses as well.  We measure success according to what we materially gain.  The bottom line is what matters.  Success in the world is always about getting and keeping more of whatever we want.

Like us, James and John do this unconsciously.  It does not occur to them that there is any other way to measure success or to gauge ambition.  They are seeking the honor and reward of sitting on thrones to Jesus’ right and left, in his “glory,” which they understand in completely secular terms.  They imagine they are getting into the spirit of this movement, this mass, popular, peaceful, miraculous uprising that is going to install Jesus as king.

II.

Jesus first sighs that they have no idea what they are asking.  He knows that the two people on his right and left in his glory are going to be the two men nailed to crosses on either side of his.  His glory is going to be this final outpouring of love for the world Jesus exhibits in his death.  That is the “baptism,” the full immersion into human mortality, that Jesus is heading for.  That is the “cup” of suffering that he must drink.  It is not what James and John are expecting or desiring.  

So they reassuringly chirp that they are ready for what they think this “baptism” is going to be, probably some special anointing ritual in which they become royal officials.  Maybe a civil service exam, or interrogation by a select committee.  And the cup?  Probably some ceremonial male bonding thing…. 

“Yeah, well,” says Jesus, ironically, “You both will indeed be baptized with my baptism, and you will drink from the cup I must drink from.”  By that he means that both of them will die as martyrs for their faith in him.  But who gets to be on his right and left is not up to him, it’s going to be up to Pontius Pilate and his executioners.

As the other disciples get indignant and this starts to become an argument in the group, Jesus has to sit them down and tell them explicitly what’s what.  He has to lay it out again about what words like ambition, success, and leadership are going to mean in his movement.

I imagine him saying to them: “You all know how the Gentiles act.  They neither know not follow God’s Law.  They lift up rulers — kings, emperors, CEO’s, generals, judges, presidents, governors, and so forth — and those rulers lord it over everyone else.  They give them power and glory; they pay them very well; they get to live in mansions and drive expensive cars; they have servants and assistants and other employees and lackeys; they have great fame and people follow their every escapade.  They do as they please, get what they want, and have no concern for who gets in their way.  They are tyrants who kill, steal, torture, and imprison at will.”

“That’s not what this movement is about.  You, my followers, are not going to be like them in any way.  Get all that out of your heads.  You are not going to end up rich, famous, and powerful.  I am teaching and modeling a different kind of leadership, based on a different kind of success, and using a different kind of ambition.  According to the world, my way is not going to look like success at all!  On the surface, it’s going to look like the most ignominious of defeats, as I have been telling you.  I will be handed over to the authorities, and the Gentile rulers will torture and execute me; and after three days I will rise up.  That’s what we’re in for, when we get to Jerusalem.”

“Their way, their power and wealth and fame, is really a false way that terminates in death, destruction, extinction, and hell.  It is a radical separation from God that has no life, no reality, and gets swallowed up in annihilation.  Those great rulers?  They all fall.  They all die.  They all burn.

III.

“But you are not going to be like those rulers who will think no more about killing me, and you, than they care about any of their other victims.  You are not going to be mercenary power-mongering celebrities.  I am not going to be some lite or nicer version of Herod, Caesar, or Pilate!  We are not going to live in palaces and sit on thrones.  We are not going to rule by threats and force.”

“If you want to be great in my movement, you have to be a servant.  And if you want to be first, you have to be everybody’s slave.  You need to outdo yourselves and each other in losing yourselves in service to others.  And in order to do this you’re going to have to think, imagine, feel, want, and be completely different.”

“This is the kind of ministry that I myself model.  This is indeed who and what the living God is.  Our God is a God whose entire divine life is a self-emptying pouring out in absolute and endless love for all.  All of existence is itself this dynamic flow of goodness and life.  In this sense our God is an infinite cosmic Loser, always and forever giving all for all and to all.”

“Therefore, I, the Son of Man, the full revelation of both God’s life and true humanity, did not come into the world to be served and catered to like some rich Gentile despot, lounging on a golden throne paid for with the blood of the poor.  I have come to serve and welcome and include all, as you have seen in my ministry to the poor, the hungry, the sick, the marginalized, and the outcast.  I have come as well to give my life, pouring out my own blood on a Roman cross, as a ransom for everyone caught in the bondage of sin, injustice, and evil, so that all will see my death, when I give my life for the life of the world, as the Way to eternal life.”

We have to rethink our understanding of what it means to be successful as a church and as individuals and as a society.  We have to realize that there is only One Ruler, and that is God.  And that Ruler teaches us that true life is about giving; it is about participating in the flow of life, love, energy, goodness, blessing, reality, from God into the world and into all lives.  

Which means that the measure of success is: How much did I lose today?  How much was I able to contribute to the common good?  How many people did I serve today?  How much did I give of what God has given me, to make the world a better place?  How transparent did I become to the Light of God the Creator?  

How much did we as a gospel community, a church, shine God’s love into our world?  How well are we doing in learning together to get ourselves out of the way of what God is doing?  How well did we “let go and let God”?  How many lives did we touch today, with blessing and forgiveness, compassion and joy, grace and healing?  

IV.

The disciples don’t really comprehend what is going on until after Jesus returns from the dead.  Even then, the Holy Spirit has to come among them and open their hearts and minds to this amazing good news.

We are on the other side of that.  Now we have all the rites and institutions of the church as Christ’s living Body, to inspire, change, move, and inform us.  Now we are regularly fed by God’s own Body and Blood so we may more and more acquire the mind of Christ, which is the Way of self-emptying, self-giving love.  

Now that is our ambition: to lose in order to win, to give in order to receive, and to be nobody in order to be Somebody: Christ’s living Presence giving our lives as well for the life of the world.

+++++++  

 

"Then Who Can Be Saved?"

Mark 10:17-31

October 14, 2018

I.

This story of the rich man who comes to Jesus lays out most comprehensively Jesus’ attitude towards wealth and the wealthy.  Anyone hearing this, especially if they have any wealth at all, has to be at least as disturbed as the disciples who incredulously ask him, “Then who can be saved?”  If the wealthy and pious don’t make it into eternal life, who does?    

I mean, they meet a man who has scrupulously kept the letter of the Torah.  He has led what is by any measurement a good, upright, religious, maybe even humble life.  He knows enough to come to Jesus in the first place and ask about eternal life, unless he’s just fishing for complements.  He seems to perceive some emptiness in his life.  Or maybe being rich in worldly possessions isn’t good enough, he just wants eternal possessions too?

But when Jesus asks him about whether he has kept the Jewish laws, he slips one in that is not in the ten commandments.  He adds “you shall not defraud.”  He does this for a reason.  Defrauding or cheating, basically conniving to take what isn’t yours from someone else, is the whole basis of a market economy.  If you paid your workers fairly you’d only break even.  Profit is what happens when you pay them less than their work is worth.  This is how people have always become rich, by paying for resources less than they are worth, and selling them for more.  Buy low, sell high, as they say.

Jesus loves the man enough to show him the way to salvation.  Not everyone gets this chance!  Not everyone has it spelled out for them in such direct and simple terms what they need to do to have eternal life!  “Go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.”

But the man goes away grieving, for he owns a lot of stuff.  Apparently, the Lord has asked too much of him.  Jesus finally uses the grotesque image of a camel, the largest animal in that part of the world, trying to squeeze through the eye of a needle, which of course is about a millimeter wide.  He flatly concludes that rich people simply cannot enter the Kingdom of God.  Period.  End of story.

Jesus answers the disciples’ astonishment by saying, “For mortals it is impossible, but not for God; for God all things are possible.”  This does not mean that God will make exceptions for really nice rich people, so they can bypass the eye of the needle, as if the privilege they enjoyed on earth will be extended into heaven.  He means that God can change the human heart and move rich people to actually do what Jesus says the man needs to do here: give away their possessions to the poor, and follow him.  This divestment of possessions appears to be a condition of discipleship.

Jesus understands that there is nothing inherently commendable about being wealthy.  Indeed, it’s just the opposite.  People get and keep wealth mainly by exploiting other people, mainly the poor.  Like the story of Zacchaeus, the tax collector in Luke, before this man can be admitted into God’s Kingdom, he has to make restitution to those whom he has defrauded.  The command to the man to give to the poor is to make up for what he withheld from others and kept for himself. 

II.

Often in Mark’s gospel, when Jesus says something of particular importance that challenges the disciples, he takes them aside and offers a further explanation to them.  That’s what happens here after the man goes away sad and in grief.

This is where he informs them of the other side of this teaching, which is that what we lose as individuals, we gain in community.  Peter says that they, the disciples, have left everything to follow him.  Jesus replies: “Truly I tell you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields, for my sake and for the sake of the good news, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this age—houses, brothers and sisters, mothers and children, and fields, with persecutions—and in the age to come eternal life.”

Notice that the only thing on the first list of what we lose that is not on the second list of what we get back is the “father.”  Instead of fathers, the second list has “persecutions.”  

In that society, fathers were often, like the rich man, the privileged, powerful, owners, movers and shakers.  They controlled everything in their domain and were to be obeyed.  Households, like the economy, were engineered for their well-being and prosperity, and to preserve, protect, and serve their interests.  Jesus insists that there’s not going to be anybody like that in the Kingdom of God, where God is the only father, and the rest of us are all equals togeher.  

Because of that, his disciples should expect to be persecuted by those who are offended by this because they stand to lose their power, their privilege, their status, and their wealth, and that never happens very easily.

This is the point at which everyone who has been paying attention starts to get nervous and frustrated.  It sounds ridiculously demanding.  For 2000 years preachers have tried to talk their way around this passage, finding ingenious ways to water it down, qualify it, soften it, and so forth.  Usually we just shrug and place it in the category of “stuff Jesus said that I don’t get,” and move on with our lives.  At best, we consider it to be “aspirational,” a lofty goal that cannot be reached in this life, though we do our best to follow it in the meantime, however partially.

But it is highly important, even central to what Jesus is about.  If we lose this component, we lose everything.  Which is why the Lord concludes with a particularly powerful nugget of teaching: “Many who are first will be last, and the last will be first.”

III.

I have come to believe that the key to the gospels and what Jesus is talking about is found in community.  Our fear and assumption about a teaching like this is that if we just give away our possessions to the poor, we will be living with them in a cardboard box under an overpass somewhere.  That business about receiving back “houses, brothers and sisters, mothers and children, and [land],” doesn’t compute except as some vague promise of heavenly treasure, which is to say, something we get after we die.  And if the giving up Jesus is talking about remains just an individual, private act, that is probably true.  In a zero sum economy, that is true.  

But remember that when Jesus tells the man to give up his possessions, he concludes by inviting him to “come and follow me.”  In other words, join my movement; join my group of people who have given up exactly what I am asking you to give up — though perhaps not as much.  Join my little alternative economy where the rule is give what you have and receive back what you need.

That is still not attractive to someone who lives in a big house full of expensive possessions.  He is still going to have to lose, big time.  But the choice is not have everything or have nothing.  It is more like learning to have nothing yourself as an individual in competition against others, in order to have everything in community together with others.

Jesus says that we receive those “houses, brothers and sisters, mothers and children, and fields, now in this age”!  What if it is a hope, not for heaven or for the end of time, but for now?  What if “the age to come” is really at hand and within us, as Jesus says elsewhere?  What if Jesus is not condemning the rich man to simply becoming a poor beggar on the street, so much as inviting him into a new way of life in a new kind of community?  A community of generosity and sharing, mutuality and forgiveness, equality and compassion?  

What if the Lord is calling his church to be the “houses, brothers and sisters, mothers and children,” of and for each other?  What if he is calling us to live more intentionally in community?  What if he knows that we can only together handle the persecutions that will necessarily come when we live in such a counter-cultural way?

The new community that Jesus is forming will be realized in the Book of Acts, where the disciples hold all things in common and support each other.  It is a kind of radical economic equality that he is going for, and it has to include restitution like what he is telling the rich man in this story.  For it is not equality to simply forget the injustices of the past and pretend that now everyone is equal when they are not.  That would just lock in the head start some have and he handicap others have.  Jesus says that those who are first have to be last so those who are last can be first.   

It is interesting to me that Jesus does not say to the man, “Use what you have.”  He doesn’t say that he should invest or even donate his wealth to help others.  He says to give it up.  Don’t use it, lose it, he says.  That is the only way to break the inequality in power and privilege.

IV.     

What Jesus says here is challenging and even offensive.  I say that as a person who has not been very good at following this particular teaching of his.  I can invent excuses and rationalizations.  I leave myself open to the charge of hypocrisy.  I give myself unjustified credit because I compare myself to others who do worse.  I get all that.

And yet here is Jesus, loving us with the same intense love with which he loves that rich man, a love that offers an open door to eternal life for us.  Sometimes it serves only to expose our own addictions to possessions and ways of thinking and acting that oppress others and cripple ourselves.  But even that is good for us to know about ourselves.  It is a precondition to our being able to take the first step of realizing that our lives are unmanageable and we have done much harm to God’s creation and people.

At the same time we are at least here, listening to his Word and opening our hearts to his new Way.  We are at least allowing his Spirit to infuse us and change us.  We are at least becoming more self-aware, conscious of how far we have fallen into ego-centricity and violence.  And so we gather together here,  seeking to follow Jesus with all our hearts, learning how live into the world to come, God’s new heaven and new earth of justice, peace, forgiveness, equality, and joy, which emerges when we have the courage and the faith to give up all we have for the sake of those we have harmed, make ourselves last of all and servants of all, learning how true it is that “for God all things are possible.”

+++++++      

The Greatest.

Mark 9:30-36

September 23, 2018

I.

Jesus and his disciples are circling back to their home base in Capernaum.  Along the way, he again predicts his death and resurrection, but the disciples don’t get it.  And they are afraid to ask him about it, probably because they don’t want him to know how clueless they are.  They are afraid of looking stupid and spiritually inept.  They are afraid of finding out what they must suspect Jesus really means.  I mean, Peter got chewed out last week for his misunderstanding over the same issue.  So maybe they sagely nod like they know what Jesus is talking about; but behind his back they shrug, give each other quizzical looks, and continue on the way.

These fearful and uncomprehending men proceed to argue among themselves, out of Jesus’ hearing, about which of them is the greatest, and they probably don’t mean the greatest clueless coward.  It appears, of all things, like they are angling for positions in Jesus’ royal administration when he gets to Jerusalem and takes power.  Because this is all about making him king, right?

The disciples still think that leadership is about “greatness” as the world understands it.  That is, it is about one’s skills, powers, abilities, achievements, accomplishments, successes, and personal glory.  It is about the kinds of things we put on our resume when we want to impress a new employer so they will  hire us and pay us a lot of money.  It is about things the world measures, values, and rewards.

The disciples are negotiating about such things as who gets what office in the West Wing, whose is bigger, whose is closer to the Oval, who is worthy of a credenza.  Who will be the Secretary of the Treasury?… but of course that will automatically fall to Judas, duh.  John can be High Priest, Peter will head the army, James will get State… and so on.

Actually, the text just says they were arguing about who is the greatest;  it might not even have been about them.  Maybe they were discussing other kinds of greatness.  Who is the greatest pitcher in baseball… (Jacob De Grom, of course).  Who is the greatest guitar player ever, I mean after Hendrix?  The greatest movie?  The greatest runner?  The greatest physicist?  The greatest chef?  The greatest country?  The greatest President?

We all have opinions about these matters, and we use the same criteria for greatness that the disciples are using: strength, consistency, ability, power, success measured in terms of effectiveness and profitability.  I understand that there is this thing called the “7 & 2” challenge, which is to climb the 7 highest peaks and visit both poles of the planet.  Doing all that — and several people have — surely qualifies someone as the greatest… something!  It should at least get you a slot on Colbert.

II.

Who is the greatest preacher?  Who is the greatest saint?  The greatest evangelist?  The greatest theologian?  The answer would certainly be someone famous, someone influential, someone who has published a lot of books, someone popular.

These are the people we admire and emulate; they inspire us to do better ourselves.  What’s the problem with lifting up excellence?  Why not reward special achievement?  Should we not recognize people who have had such a beneficial impact on the lives of others?

Apparently not.  When Jesus asks them what they were talking about as they were walking along on the way, the disciples have enough sense to clam up and be embarrassed about it.  They are sufficiently aware to know that Jesus probably wouldn’t approve of them discussing the relative greatness of anything, let alone of them. 

Jesus knows what they were discussing.  He knows them.  He’s not an idiot.  He knows that they are burdened by the same bias and expectations about “the Messiah” as just about everyone else in their society.  He knows they have the same understanding of a “king” and what a king is supposed to do and be as everyone else.  Messiahs and kings are powerful, wealthy, famous figures.  Jesus has shown that he can heal, control the weather, and even produce bread at will.  They are surrounded by adoring mobs of supporters all the time.  The Lord understands what they are thinking.

He also understands what we are thinking.  We should not be all that condescending towards these disciples.  I assure you we interpret success in exactly the same ways.  Churches are successful and viable if they are growing, if they have lots of members, if they bring in lots of money, if they have nice, big buildings.  Many ministers see themselves as successful according to the nice office with the credenza, the staff, the budget, the size of the organ, the height of the steeple, and so forth.  We get this greatness thing, believe me!

So the Lord sits down, motions for the twelve disciples, who also sit down with him, and he says to them, “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.”  It makes no sense.  If you want to be first, you gotta be last.  If you want to win, you have to lose.  If you want to succeed, you have to fail.  If you want to live, you have to die.

And he doesn’t mean losing now to win later; he means that what we call losing is itself winning, in God’s eyes.  

III.

I imagine Jesus just looks at their blank, uncomprehending faces, men who are trying to wrap their minds around a paradoxical and nonsensical idea.  He is asking them to let go of everything they ever knew, assumed, expected, understood, and desired.  He is trying to break their minds open to a totally new and wildly, radically different way of seeing everything.  

He is looking for a way to get across to them how important it is to shift — indeed, to completely reverse — their understanding of greatness.  He wants to turn it upside down and inside out.  He wants them to think of greatness in exactly the opposite way.

So he reaches out for a little child.  Now, it is remarkable to me in the first place that when Jesus is home in his headquarters in Capernaum with his disciples, there are apparently little kids running around!  He doesn’t have to send someone out to find a child somewhere in town.  He simply reaches out for one that is already there! 

He brings this child into the center of the circle of disciples so they can see her.  Then he takes her in his arms, perhaps on his knee.  And he says, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me,” that is, God.

In other words, “If you want to be great, go work in the nursery.  Get a career in child care, if you want to be first in my Kingdom.  If you want God in your life, get a child in your life.  Then we’ll talk.  Greatness, true greatness, is found in serving and caring for the least.  Become a servant of children; that’s the way to be great in my Kingdom.”

Child-care today is one of the least remunerated, least respected professions.  Teachers of children are so chronically under-paid that they have to buy their own supplies and have second and third jobs just to survive.  I am talking about America, now.  In Jesus’ day, children were considered property with rights on the level of domestic animals, which is to say, none at all.  They were cared for by women, who were only one notch higher, if that, in the scheme of things.

So these guys who were divvying out the plum places in the new government, are basically being told that the ones in the room who are really great are the women and the girls over there doing the child-care.  That’s the preferred administration of this Messiah.

IV.

We live in a country that allows 4 in 10 children to live in poverty, where the government wants to cut children’s food stamps, that rips children from the arms of parents who come here seeking asylum, and that underwrites the bombing of children in Yemen, and the torture of children in Palestine.  And that’s just off the top of my head.

How different would the world be if we followed Jesus’ leadership teachings, and made child-care the ultimate indication of greatness?  Imagine if the government were run by mothers, grandmothers, baby-sitters, and teachers.  This is who Jesus wants to be in charge of his church; where it is actually happening more and more.  He is not concerned about the Nobel Prizes on our resume; he wants to know if we can change a diaper and comfort a crying infant.  He wants to know if we can humble ourselves and minister to basic humanity.  Because that’s what’s really important.

Can we put ourselves last?  Can we relinquish all self-important, self-righteous, self-aggrandizing notions of ourselves?  Can we stop measuring ourselves by our wealth and power?  Can we be people who find real greatness in emptying ourselves to clean up the messes of the weak, poor, vulnerable, and powerless, just as he empties himself to come down clean up our mess?

Can we make ourselves last and nobodies, and in so doing follow him, thus realizing true greatness?  Can we access our deepest creaturely humanity, and thus see emerge within us and among us the greatness and glory of God?

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Nine Miles of Bad Road.

Mark 8:27-38

September 16, 2018

I.

The Lord continues “on the way” in the far north of Galilee, in the borderlands of Gentile territory, in the towns surrounding a city named for Caesar.  By mentioning this Mark reminds us that the church will live in a conflicted and ambiguous environment, dominated by an extractive empire, where there are conflicting loyalties.  

Back in chapter 7, with the help of a persistent foreign woman, Jesus breaks with tradition, crosses a big social and religious boundary, and includes non-Jews in his mission, thus making himself even more dangerous and heretical to the establishment.  Jesus is about dissolving and ignoring boundaries, not enforcing them with draconian cruelty.

As they are walking along he asks his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?”  The disciples report the different things they have heard that people are supposing about Jesus’ identity.

Were he to ask us that question, I wonder what we would say.  What people say about Jesus in our time is complicated by 2000 years of talk about him.  Some would agree that he is a prophet, a great spiritual teacher.  Others would be wary of any talk of Jesus since so many of those claiming to follow him did, and continue to do, so much unspeakable, self-righteous damage.  Talk of Jesus can be a sure-fire conversation terminator.  Then there are those who learned what they are supposed to say in order to be theologically correct.

Peter seems to get it and makes his famous confession of faith in Jesus as “the Messiah.”  This is the first use of the word “Messiah” in Mark’s gospel.  It’s a word Jesus kind of accepts, but doesn’t want to get around about him.  He never uses it about himself.  I think that’s because it carries too much baggage and has too many associations and expectations in people’s minds. 

The question, “Who do you say that I am?” is one the church, and every disciple, has to answer, every day.  I mean, we can claim he is our “Lord and Savior”… but then do our actions and lifestyle show that to be true?  Do our lives reflect and express his life and teachings?  Or is this yet another label we choose to adopt, with no more meaning than wearing a t-shirt with a picture of Bart Simpson on it?  

Worse, do we wear his name as an expression of pride and superiority?  Are we trying to differentiate ourselves from others?  Are we touting our personal allegiance?  Peter’s confession is really an affirmation that Jesus is a winner!  And for this brilliant insight Jesus yells at him and basically calls him no less than “Satan.”

Satan is the one who tempted Jesus in the wilderness in chapter 1 and who swooped down and gobbled up the seeds landing on the road in the parable of the sower in chapter 4.  If you are hard-hearted, bone-headed, intransigent, unreceptive, and stubbornly set in your own ways, Jesus’ Word of liberation bounces off of you like an acorn hitting the sidewalk.  You are easy pickings for the Evil One.  This is what Jesus calls Peter.             

II.

Peter doesn’t understand the real meaning of the word, Messiah.  Which is why Jesus “sternly” orders his disciples “not to tell anyone about him” using this loaded term.

To clarify things, the Lord then teaches the disciples that he, referring to himself as the “Son of Man,” must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.  

Jesus is saying, in effect: “So if you’re expecting me to become King when we get to Jerusalem, don’t.  It is necessary that the Son of Man will suffer, that is, I will suffer, be rejected by the establishment, and be killed.  That’s what we’re in for here.  But what will look like loss, defeat, and annihilation from a human perspective, will actually from God’s perspective be the way of truth and wholeness.  You guys don’t get that yet.  Indeed, very few people will accept this.  But it is the only way.

“If you set your mind on human things, if you go along with conventional ways of thinking, this mission is going to look like a wall-to-wall train wreck.   As if we’re in for nine miles of bad road that leads off a cliff.  My Way appears to the world like a nihilistic suicide cult, glorifying death, hating the body, destroying families, irresponsible, atheistic, anti-social, unpatriotic, and so forth.  This is what people will say about me, and my followers.

“But if you set your mind on divine things, the things of God, if you begin to look at the world from a heavenly perspective, that is, from an all-inclusive, all-embracing, integrated, connected, wholeness point-of-view, then it will become apparent to you that my Way is the Way of healing, salvation, liberation, and peace.  

“In order have this vision you have to follow me.  Not just by changing your thinking and imagination and opinions, but by changing your actions.  This means you have first to deny yourselves.  That is, you have to let go of your small-minded, selfish, ego-centric, personality-driven way of thinking and acting.  You have to observe your desires, assumptions, motivations, reflexes, opinions, and commitments, and realize that these are all based on insufficient and faulty information.  You are swamped in ignorance.  Everything you think, do, and are is hopelessly distorted by self-interest.

“Second, you have to take up your cross.  In a world that depends on everyone slavishly following their narrow-minded self-interest, where our leaders depend on you being in competition and enmity with each other over supposedly scarce resources, you who live differently will necessarily and inevitably become pariahs, enemies of the State, heretics, and subversives.  You will be seen as dangerous because there is nothing more threatening to the status quo than people who are waking up to what is true and real.  And the penalty for such blasphemy and sedition in this empire is crucifixion.  

“So you may indeed have to take up a literal cross and get your body actually nailed to it by Roman soldiers.  More likely you will be subject to the rejection, humiliation, hatred, mocking, and legal penalties of those in power.  Taking up a cross means taking on yourself the consequences of resisting a corrupt and violent, exclusive, judgmental, and adversarial world.

III.

Jesus elaborates: “Those who want to save their life will lose it.  If you only want to try and preserve the little, limited, temporary, fragile, perishing existence you now think is your whole life, you will lose it.  Eventually, your mortal body will give out.  There will be nothing left if you identify with that ego-centric material existence.  When it dies so will you.  

“Those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.  If you relinquish that false excuse for life by learning to think and act differently, according to the broader vision I am teaching you of the Kingdom of God, if you lose your sense of separation and independence, if you embrace the compassion and justice, equality and peace which is the good news I embody, you will save, and allow to emerge, the deepest, true, good, blessed, and eternal life that God has for you.”

“You can gain the whole world!  You can be the richest person on the planet!  But that will matter not at all if, in order to get all that, you forfeited your real, eternal life.  If you gained by selfish violence, you will lose not only what you thought you had, but your real Self.  Your true life is more precious and valuable than all the money in the world because it lasts forever and connects you to everyone and to God.  

  “If someone is ashamed of me and of my words, when I hang humiliated and defeated on a Roman cross, victimized as a scapegoat by this adulterous and sinful generation, then the Son of Man will be ashamed of them.  Because they do not see the truth of what is going on there.  It is in my act of loving sacrifice, pouring out my life for the life of the world, that I reveal the true Light of God and all who share in that Light.  That, my death on the cross — not in any military victory of some self-serving, nationalistic Messianic fantasy — is the coming of the Kingdom of God, for those who are able to perceive it.  And some of you will actually see it!  You will get it!  You will understand the good news of reconciliation!  You will participate in it yourselves!  And you will be sent into the world with my message of salvation.”

IV.

The good news is that we are not who we think we are.  We are who Jesus Christ reveals we are.  And the only way from one to the other, from who we think we are to who we really are, is his Way of self-offering, self-emptying in love.  When he talks about denying our selves or taking up our crosses, it is not about hating, depriving, or hurting ourselves.  It about what is necessary for our true selves to emerge.  It is actually the highest form of self love and self-gratification!  Jesus is not calling us to lose or deny anything except what is killing, constructing, enslaving, and limiting us.  He is talking about what we have to do to save our real life!

This is what he is asking us to see by setting our minds on divine things, as opposed to the blindness and ignorance of human thinking.  Nothing less than the arrival, the emergence of the truth, the Kingdom of God, the new order of goodness, beauty, abundance, and blessing that is the truth of God’s life and creation.  It is always here and always was.  It comes to us when we let go and let God.

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