What Is It That You Want?

Mark 10:35-45
October 18, 2009
James and John, the sons of Zebedee, came forward to him and said to him, "Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you."
And he said to them, "What is it you want me to do for you?"
And they said to him, "Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory."
But Jesus said to them, "You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?"
They replied, "We are able." Then Jesus said to them, "The cup that I drink you will drink; and with the baptism with which I am baptized, you will be baptized; but to sit at my right hand or at my left is not mine to grant, but it is for those for whom it has been prepared."
When the ten heard this, they began to be angry with James and John. So Jesus called them and said to them, "You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many."
As we tune in to TVJesus this week the Markan chronicles continue right along. Once again, the disciples come asking Jesus a question. Last time they asked him about who was the greatest. Even though he told them then that the first would be last and so on, they press the question. Even after the rich young man has come asking after eternal life, they press the question. Even after Jesus has said, “sell what you own, give the money to the poor, come and follow me,” they press the question.
“What is it that you want?” Jesus asks.
And the disciples press the question – the wrong question.
Why? Why are they so remarkably, almost comically, insistent on the wrong questions?
Well, perhaps it is because they are so remarkably like us.
The 2,000-year staying power of the gospels rests largely on these remarkably human portraits of the disciples, and the even more remarkable portrait of the even more remarkably human Jesus.
Let’s unpack that just a bit.
There are dozens upon dozens of ancient and largely forgotten accounts of gods walking upon the earth with super-powers of healing and miracle-making and mythic victories. I’d guess that there are countless such stories completely lost to the mist of time, and we know that there are dozens of them that live on in collections of ancient myths that have long since lost their power to capture our imaginations in ways that authentically inform our lives.
But the gospel accounts live on in incredibly powerful ways because they continue to reveal authentic truths about the human condition even though the stories are bound to a culture long gone.
Crucially for our time, these stories – and particularly this series of events in the center of Mark – uncover and lay bare the human tendency to confine the divine to neat, easily understandable and controllable boxes. The disciples, just like us, create God boxes.
When Jesus asks, “what is it that you want?” the disciples answer, in effect, we want to know God on our terms. We want a God who will reinscribe the same human hierarchies and structures that we understand, and, moreover, we want a God who will place us on the top rung of those structures. We want a God who understands power just like we do, and we want a God who will give us the lion’s share of that power – “who will be first?” We want a God who understands affluence just as we do, and we want a God who will bless our affluence. We want a God who understands influence just as we do, and we want a God who will put us in positions of power – seat us at the right hand of the throne of power.
We want God to fit neatly into our own God boxes.
Almost 50 years ago, J.B. Philips, in his classic Your God is Too Small, wrote – in the style of his time – “The man who is outside all organized Christianity may have, and often does have, a certain reverence for God, and a certain genuine respect for Jesus Christ (though he has probably rarely considered Him and His claims with his adult mind). But what sticks in his throat about the Christianity of the Churches is not merely their differences in denomination, but the spirit of "churchiness" which seems to pervade them all. They seem to him to have captured and tamed and trained to their own liking Something that is really far too big ever to be forced into little man-made boxes with neat labels upon them. He may never think of putting it into words, but this is what he thinks and feels.
"If," the Churches appear to be saying to him, "you will jump through our particular hoop or sign on our particular dotted line, then we will introduce you to God. But if not, then there's no God for you."
Whether in “churchy” terms or not-so-churchy terms, we still tend to construct God boxes. Here are some of the ones lying around my house. Perhaps you have built similar ones.
I find that God boxes are a bit like Russian dolls. Inside of every God box is another, then another, then another … or, perhaps it goes in the other direction.
You get to a really small box – something that might hold a precious jewel. Surely, the love of God is precious – more precious than the finest diamond. Jesus suggested that the kingdom of God – the great economy – is like a mustard seed, so it would surely fit inside this small case.
Of course, the key to the mustard seed parable is that the seed grows into an unruly bush that, like kudzu, tends to take over everything it touches. So, clearly, the small box will not do.
This next box, which reads “Sprint” on its cover – might work. After all, it was originally used to package a cell phone – a small device used to share news broadly. On the other hand, for better and for worse, these things only work on certain networks. The boxes come with brands. If this is a God box, it might come labeled “Protestant” or “Catholic” or “Hindu” or “Muslim.” Jesus has just told his followers that anyone who is not against us if for us. I think he was telling them to beware of branding and of networks that limit who gets to call upon God. If God was to be in a cell-phone box it would have to be an open-source system. So, again, this box is too small.
This next box has a couple of items in it: a clock and a Book of Confessions.
A lot of folks imagine God as the great clock-maker, who built the mechanism of creation, wound it up and set it running, and has since, like Elvis, left the building. This is the god whom the so-called “new atheists” – the Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens of the pseudo-intellectual world – claim to have killed, once again. I’m not sure why they go to such trouble to kill a god who has been dead for centuries, and who was never the God made known in the life of Christ. For the God to whom Jesus relates so intimately as to call him “daddy, poppa, abba,” was not a clock-maker any more than any parent is a “baby maker” setting the new creation on its own at birth.
In the same way, the God of Jesus cannot be reduced – as the church has so often tried – to a set of words or propositional statements or arguments too easily dismissed by the likes of Dawkins or Hitchens. We have created creeds and confessions and used them as a fence around God to be entered only through the gates of orthodoxy guarded by a priesthood of professional clergy and theologians who know the insider language of God not because God speaks that language but because the clergy and theologians invented it.
A box of clocks and confessions is too small for God.
This next box is incredibly attractive and has much to offer. Indeed, each of our boxes has its attractive attributes – that’s why they survive so long and why each of us reinvents them in our own ways. This red one is a music box – or, more precisely, a flute case.
The church fathers understood the central role of music in human experience of the divine. That’s why they placed the psalms at the center of the canon. “When in our music God is glorified … and adoration leaves no room for pride … it is as though the whole creation cried: Alleluia!”
That is as true as any hymn can be, but, of course, not even our music is a big enough box. Look around – the windows cannot sing, but they clearly express truths about God. Beyond them, it is, sometimes, as though the whole creation sings, but not in a music that we can contain and reproduce even with the incredible musical gifts that so many faithful people have been given through the ages. Even the music box is too small for God.
See, the problem with all of our boxes is that we just don’t have good enough lids.
God gets out.
As J.B. Philips suggested a half century ago, perhaps the biggest God boxes of them all is the church itself.
How many of us – despite knowing much better intellectually – live as if God is contained in this space? We come here to get in touch with God, and thus surrender the rest of our lives to something less than God or to other false gods of the culture – those gods to whom the disciples looked in vain as they argued over who was to be the first, and who was to get the best seat, and who was to have the most power and influence.
When we confine God to this space – this beautiful, peaceful, spirit-filled space – we go out and look for the gods of power and influence and affluence out in the rest of our lives, and we forget that we are also bearers of the divine in the world. We put God in a gilded box and try to clamp down the lid.
We are like the Israelites as they were carried into exile. They believed that God was confined to the temple in Jerusalem, and they had to learn that no temple was enough to contain the God who laid the foundation of the earth, who determined its measurements, who laid its cornerstone when the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy.
The God made known in Jesus Christ will not be confined to any of the boxes we construct. That God calls us to lives of discipleship, not merely an hour of worship and reflection. That God calls us to sacramental lives, not merely a moment of bread and cup in a quiet sanctuary. That God calls us to lives of service, not merely to weekly worship services.
That God is calling. What will you say in response?
Amen.

Fields With Persecutions

October 11, 2009
Mark 10:17-31
Have you ever been in a situation where you chose not to take a risk that you knew would have improved the situation but at some cost to you – to your ego, your standing in the eyes of others, your bank account, your salvation?
Consider that question as the text this morning confronts us.
As he was setting out on a journey, a man ran up and knelt before him, and asked him, "Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?" Jesus said to him, "Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone.
You know the commandments: 'You shall not murder; You shall not commit adultery; You shall not steal; You shall not bear false witness; You shall not defraud; Honor your father and mother.'"
He said to him, "Teacher, I have kept all these since my youth."
Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said, "You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me."
When he heard this, he was shocked and went away grieving, for he had many possessions.
Then Jesus looked around and said to his disciples, "How hard it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!"
And the disciples were perplexed at these words. But Jesus said to them again, "Children, how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God! It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God."
They were greatly astounded and said to one another, "Then who can be saved?"
Jesus looked at them and said, "For mortals it is impossible, but not for God; for God all things are possible."
Peter began to say to him, "Look, we have left everything and followed you."
Jesus said, "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. But many who are first will be last, and the last will be first."
Have you ever been in a situation where you chose not to take a risk that you knew would have improved the situation but at some cost to you – to your ego, your standing in the eyes of others, your bank account, your salvation?
Consider that question.
I have shared this story before, but when I consider the question just posed it always comes back to me. It was Halloween, 1977. I was a senior in high school, 17 years old. I was iconoclastic even then, and iconoclasts are never in with the in crowd. So, when a couple of guys on the football team and three girls – the numbers seemed significant to me – when a couple of guys and three girls asked me to join them for the evening I said, “sure.”
We road around for a while. One of the guys was the son of one of Chattanooga’s largest car dealership, so nice wheels were a given. I don’t recall doing much beyond stopping at a few friends houses, and, if it was on the same night, TP-ing the snooty private girls school in the neighborhood.
But then one of the guys said, “hey, let’s go down to 9th Street and yell at the blacks”; only he did not say “blacks.” These days 9th Street is named Martin Luther King Blvd., and it was then the main street of black Chattanooga.
To my everlasting shame, I slunk down in my seat and did not say a word. To my equally great relief, we did not spot a soul on the street and headed home soon thereafter.
I knew, even scrunched down in that seat next to a girl I barely knew, that I should say something. I should say, “no.” But I was not willing to risk being thought even less cool than I was. For the sake of fleeting acceptance, I refused to speak when confronted with something manifestly wrong.
It is not necessary to drag ourselves back through the details of painful memories or share what often are deeply private stories in order for our confessions to well up in more general terms. So my confession is this: forgive me for keeping silent in the face of wrongdoing, injustice, suffering, violence.
Are there general confessions that have welled up within you as you are confronted by this text?
The good news of the gospel is that we are not loved because of what we do or fail to do; we are loved because of who we are and to whom we belong. We are the children of a loving God to whom we belong when we are seized by risky faith and when we fail to take the risks of faith.
We Proclaim the Text
Have you ever been in a situation where you chose to take – to your ego, your standing in the eyes of others, your bank account, your salvation – for the sake of what your faith called you to do?
Consider that question as the text this morning confronts us.
As he was setting out on a journey, a man ran up and knelt before him, and asked him, "Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?" Jesus said to him, "Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone.
You know the commandments: 'You shall not murder; You shall not commit adultery; You shall not steal; You shall not bear false witness; You shall not defraud; Honor your father and mother.'"
He said to him, "Teacher, I have kept all these since my youth."
Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said, "You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me."
When he heard this, he was shocked and went away grieving, for he had many possessions.
Then Jesus looked around and said to his disciples, "How hard it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!"
And the disciples were perplexed at these words. But Jesus said to them again, "Children, how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God! It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God."
They were greatly astounded and said to one another, "Then who can be saved?"
Jesus looked at them and said, "For mortals it is impossible, but not for God; for God all things are possible."
Peter began to say to him, "Look, we have left everything and followed you."
Jesus said, "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. But many who are first will be last, and the last will be first."
Have you ever been in a situation where you chose to take a risk – to your ego, your standing in the eyes of others, your bank account, your salvation – for the sake of what your faith called you to do?
Consider that question.
My father told me this story when I was a child, and I have never forgotten it. He used the tale to illustrate the New Testament passage that instructs, “no one has greater love than this; to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” It is always among the first things that comes to my mind when I read about the rich young ruler.
As a young man, my dad was a camp counselor and later a camp director for the YMCA, so he spent a lot of time with kids. Kids are risk takers by nature, and the kids who went out on a Tennessee river in aluminum canoes when thunderstorms were forecast were no different.
They set off for a camp site aiming to get there in time to make camp and cook dinner before nightfall. Another counselor was supposed to meet them at the island where they would spend the night. Summer storms in that part of the country blow up quickly in the mid-afternoon, and that’s precisely what happened.
The boys did not want to pull to the side and wait out the rain; they wanted to get to their campsite and have fun. So they pulled out the tarps under which they planned to sleep that night and created floating shelter.
It was kind of clever; and kind of stupid. They could not see a thing, so they did not notice when they drifted past the island and continued on down the river directly toward a low-head dam.
River runners have a name for low-head dams. They are known as drowning machines. The one these kids were drifting blindly toward was particularly monstrous because not only was there a standing, churning, inescapable wave just below the dam, there were large round holes along its flat top through which high water roared during storms when the river was up. The river was up.
The counselor who was to meet the group at the campsite saw the canoes with the tarps drift past the island and head for the dam so he jumped in his canoe and paddled frantically after the drifting kids yelling for them to look out. The boys in the canoe closest to him heard his cries, realized the danger and paddled across the current to the safety of the shore.
But as the counselor got closer to the second boat he realized that those kids could not hear his yells over the pounding rain or the roar of the water rushing over the dam. He also realized that he would not be able to pull the canoes out of the current that had grabbed them. So paddling in desperation he made straight for the edge of the dam, leaped from his canoe onto the flat top of the dam, ran across its slippery surface leaping over the gaping holes to grab the canoe just as it was about to be swept over the edge. Inching back to the side of the dam, he pulled the canoe by its rope to safety.
When the kids recounted this tail to my father, I’m pretty sure he told them that there was no good reason that any of them had survived. No good reason except that in a moment of decision, when the outcome was anything but certain, one young man – not wealthy but rich in courage and the conviction that the gospel of Jesus Christ called him to take risks for the sake of others – risked everything to save their lives.
Have you ever been in a situation where you chose to take a risk – to your ego, your standing in the eyes of others, your bank account, your life – for the sake of what your faith called you to do?
What values of your faith – of our common faith – compel you to take risks?
The passage from Mark suggests that leaps of faith do not come without pain.
That is an excellent reminder on the Sunday when we receive the Presbyterian Peacemaking offering. While peacemakers may be blessed and called the children of God, the work of making peace – whether in families, workplaces, communities or the wider world – brings fields with persecutions.
When I think of great makers of peace, I think of Gandhi, of King, of Mandela, and of the great risks each took to heal their wounded nations. Two were assassinated, the third spent a quarter of a century in prison.
Most of us will never be called upon to take the kinds of risks that they took, but each of us is called to risk for the sake of the gospel of love and justice. Whether it is risking our treasure or risking our time, we are invited everyday to stand for values that are often at odds with the prevailing values of the culture.
Jesus understood this when he asked the rich young man to sell everything and divest for the sake of the poor, and to follow the way of Jesus – the way of the cross. Jesus also understood just how difficult the challenge could be – and he looked at the young man not with scorn, and not with pity, but with love.
That is how God looks at us today – whether or not we are able to take the risks before us. Whether we are confessing our failures to do so, or proclaiming a gospel that calls us to risk again and again and again. God looks at us with love. It is because of that love that we know that taking the risks of faith is possible. Amen.

The Big Table

Mark 10:2-16
October 4, 2009
How many of you have experienced a divorce in your family – either parents, siblings or your own marriage?
Most of us have walked on some part of that road, and all of us know people who have.
So what do we do with this text from Mark?
But Jesus said to them, "Because of your hardness of heart Moses wrote this commandment for you. But from the beginning of creation, 'God made them male and female. For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.' So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate."
Then in the house the disciples asked him again about this matter. He said to them, "Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery."
The text seems pretty clear. The plain meaning seems obvious. Divorce, according to Mark’s Jesus, is outside of God’s plan for creation.
And yet … and yet the church has either simply ignored this passage or found creative ways around it – annulment comes to mind. “That marriage? Never happened.”
Why even focus any attention on this ancient text which obviously does not stand as prohibition or, to be honest, even as moral guidance in our time, and has not stood as such for a very long time if it ever truly did?
Well, the text itself does not much interest me beyond the reminder that love is a gift of God. I am, however, much interested in what has been done with this text and how that speaks to our time – particularly this time: the Sunday of World Communion and the day on which the local Open Doors/More Light Presbyterian chapter has its annual meeting.
This is not a lecture in hermeneutics; it is a sermon – well, in fact, it is a brief communion homily, so I am not proposing to drag us through a history of Reformed Biblical interpretation from John Calvin through Jack Rodgers. We could do that in a different setting, and it would bring us to the same point. But for the moment, let it suffice to remind ourselves that Jesus himself gives us warrant to reinterpret sacred scripture and recast it for a new time.
Reinterpretation of scripture was one of Jesus’ favorite teaching tactics. “You have heard it said … but I tell you …” and every time he used that phrase it was to take a piece of Jewish scripture and recast it for his own time.
Indeed, in the text from Mark that is provoking us this morning that is precisely what Jesus is doing. “What did Moses say?” In other words, what is the law, the holy scripture, the word of God on this? Well, you have heard it said … but I tell you … and Jesus reinscribes, rewrites and offers a teaching that was, for whatever reason, more appropriate to his time. Sometimes, as in this case, his new teaching feels more restrictive, although binding men to their promises in an age when women were utterly dependent upon their husbands was, in fact, a new understanding of justice. Other times, as with “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,” becoming “love your enemies,” the teaching clearly opens new paths to mercy and new understandings of justice.
If nothing else, Jesus is constantly teaching his followers one lesson: you have to get a new mind for a new time.
All of which leads me to ask: if the church can employ an interpretive practice that virtually ignores this text on divorce, why does it remain so hung up on a handful of other passages used to oppress gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgendered persons?
Why has the church continued to practice exclusion and oppression and participated in a culture of violence against the GLBT population? More pointedly, why does our denomination, our corner of the church, continue to deny ordination to men and women who are clearly gifted and called to offices of deacon, elder and minister of word and sacrament based solely on sexual identity? Why, in an age when divorce is nearly an epidemic, do we want to deny -- solely on the basis of sexual identity -- the right to marriage to couples who want to make covenant promises to each other? Why? Why? Why?
More to the point, how long must we continue down this dark path before light and more light break forth?
On this Sunday of World Communion we must ask these questions, and we must recommit ourselves to pressing them in the church and in the broader society. For if we, in this small congregation in our little corner of the world church do not continue to speak, our gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender sisters and brother around the world will continue to be victimized.
I did a Google search on the term “gay bashing” last week, and I limited the results to postings from the previous week. I got more than 95,000 results.
• A gay New York DJ was assaulted and called “faggot” on the streets of Manhattan last week. Two young men in London, Ontario, were beaten after being harassed about their sexual orientation last week. It was the second instance of reported gay bashing in that city during the past two weeks.
• A young man was beaten to death in a Sydney, Australia, park last week. Police suspect the murder was a hate crime directed at the man because of his sexuality.
• Petty Officer Third Class Joseph Rocha, a sailor trained to work with military dogs in the Navy's anti-terrorism, force protection, and explosive detection operations, was brutalized for more than two years at his base in Bahrain after his refusal to hire a prostitute raised suspicions that he was gay, it was reported last week.
Those are but a few instances reported from the developed world, the liberal West, during the past week or so.
Why do we keep pushing for marriage equality and for ordination within the church? Because injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere, and the inverse is also true: justice attained anywhere, even when it begins as a trickle in a small church like this one, continues to flow out until justice rolls down like a mighty water and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.
So, on this Sunday of World Communion, we break bread and share a common cup – women and men, young and old, gay and straight – committed to the ongoing work of breaking down the barriers that too often stand between us, until we come to that day when all of God’s children can gather at the big table and share in the joyous feast of the children of God.
This morning, as we gather at the table, we will be served by elders who have been ordained because they are called to this service and gifted for it. They happen, as well, to be gay – and a little more gaiety is always welcome at the joyous feast.
This morning, as we gather at the table, there’s a poster up here that represents more light shining down on the PCUSA. This evening, we’ll add this to a collection of images representing the change we are working for, specifically in the wording of our Book of Order regarding ordination. I invite you, as we continue our worship, to think about friends and loved ones who have been denied their full welcome and empowerment in the church and broader culture – whether in ordinations or marriage rights deferred or denied, or in violence suffered, or in falling victim to AIDS in an epidemic of fear and denial. As you come forward to receive the sacrament, you are invited to write the names of such friends and loved ones on this poster, for it is in the names of such people, some scared, some brave, some scarred and some silenced, that we strive for justice, and work to add another leaf to the big table. Amen.