New Lenses

Mark 9:30-37

September 23, 2018

I need new glasses. Well, at least new frames. These have an unsightly chip, but I reckon it’s better to have unsightly frames than, uh, unsightly lenses.

Who knows? I may need new lenses, as well. That sort of thing sneaks up on our middle-aged selves. I’ll never forget picking up a Sports Illustrated – which I read every Thursday for decades until they lost their best writers. Anyway, I picked up the magazine one Thursday early in my fifth decade of living – in other words, when I was 40 – and thought immediately, “they’ve changed the font!” Alas, ‘twas not the font that had changed.

That was my introduction to bifocals. Eventually it got to the point where I can proudly proclaim that, yes, even my lenses are progressive.

Jesus is introducing a new lens for his disciples to see the world around them, and everything remains pretty blurry for them.

They are arguing about “greatness,” and Jesus tells them they don’t know what it means. The culture around them – the Roman empire that equates the emperor with God, a deeply patriarchal religious culture with a strictly proscribed hierarchy – has taught them to equate power with the grace of God.

Jesus says, “y’all need to get a new mind for a new time. You do not understand greatness at all.”

Alas, Jesus’ disciples – then, and now – don’t get it. We choose to believe in some strange kind of chosenness: that those who wield social, political, economic power in our society do so because they have been anointed, chosen, blessed by God. They are first because God wants them to be first.

But Jesus says, if you want to see real power look to the margins, look to the least of these, look not to the first but to the last, look to children who had no status in Jesus’ culture and who have no real power in ours, either. And 2,000 years later we still struggle to understand this central claim of the gospel: that the power of God is revealed in powerlessness.

At the very least this central claim ought to inform how we treat those without power in our own systems yet clearly we do not.

For example, we see the poor and suspect there must be some defect in them that they haven’t achieved our level of economic power. This social truth holds at every economic level. No matter where we find ourselves on the income/wealth ladder we believe we got there through our own hard work, skills, and the blessings of almighty God and we look at those on the rungs beneath us with suspicion.

In the gospel reading this morning, for another example, we still don’t particularly value children, at least not if by value them one means spend social capital on them such that they might not be the most likely demographic in the country to live in poverty. Jesus honors children in a culture in which they were completely voiceless. “What happens to these ones,” Jesus says, “matters deeply to God, and it must matter to you, as well, if you are going to be one of my followers.”

Or, for a particularly timely example, we find the stories of women way more difficult to accept than those of men. I’m not going to delve into that other than to say that Jesus believed the stories of women, and when one was accused of adultery he stepped between her and the crowd that wanted to stone her to give her time and space to tell her story in safety.

We hear these stories of Jesus’ particular attention to powerless, often marginalized people and think, “well, that was Jesus; he had vision that we don’t have.”

But here’s the thing: we may not have the particular vision that Jesus had, but he left us with some powerful lenses that can correct our vision. He left us with sacramental lenses: a view of the world through which the hidden sacred can become visible.

Baptism and communion are not ancient empty rituals that we practice merely because they were handed down to us. Baptism and communion are sacramental lenses through which we are invited to see the world in a new way.

In the waters of baptism we are invited to see the unearned grace of God as available to everyone: from the powerless infant being welcomed into community to each of us as adults who stand in need of being refreshed, cleansed, and restored to community. For in these waters we die with Christ to all of those old and destructive ways of seeing the world and are raised to new life and new vision. These waters will clean your glasses, friends! They are sign and seal of the real power of God for the turning of the world.

At this table we are invited to taste the goodness of God and see the world as a single community where all are welcome to sit down at table and be richly fed. At this table we experience a foretaste of the fulfilment of God’s time and of God’s vision for all of creation: a creation restored to shalom – to peace, to healing and wholeness, to true community.

As such – as sacramental lenses – baptism and communion serve also as the ethical lenses through which followers of Jesus see the world and behave in it. Do our personal, social, economic, and political choices and decisions reflect the world God invites us to see through these sacramental lenses? If not, how shall we act differently? How shall we engage differently? How shall we see differently and thus get a new mind for our new time?

This morning, as our prayerful response, I invite you to think about how you might want to see some parts of the world differently, and, as a literally mark of this prayer, we’re invited to inscribe our prayers in a couple of ways. (Coloring and writing on cards or ribbons and then hanging the written cards and ribbons.) As you do so, I’ll ask a few more questions to guide our meditations. So let us pray with our bodies throughout this space.