Sermon for Oct. 17, 2021, Pentecost 21B
Audio is here.
Video will be available at the YouTube channel of the Central Presbyterian Church in Fort Smith, AR. after the Sunday service under the Traditional Services playlist.
Mark 10:35-45
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.”
I do not believe that any of us would be as shameless as James and John. We live in different times. In our culture, we democratize power. We do not use titles like Mister or Misses much anymore. We address our doctors by their first names. Even professors invite students to use first names.
In the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century, one of the issues was power and the abuse of power, which is why we, in the Reformed tradition do not have bishops.
But power still plays a huge role among us. Everyone has an ego, and that is where it starts. From there it grows to include the collective egos of institutions, organizations, and systems.
Power Matters to God
Power matters to God. Richard Rohr says “A [primary] idea of the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, is its very straightforward critique of misuses of power.” Specifically, power as domination.
The central narrative of the Hebrew Bible is the exodus story which begins as God hears the cries of the suffering Hebrew people. They have been bearing the weight of the empire’s pretentious ambitions, but God calls Moses to lead them to freedom.
Domination systems are antithetical to human flourishing, and therefore, contrary to God’s good will for humanity.
Power is Seductive
But that lesson is hard to learn. Power is seductive. People like being in control. Even Jesus had a frustratingly difficult time convincing his own inner circle of disciples to relinquish aspirations of power.
We will focus on the story we read from Mark 10, but we have to remember that this is the second time Jesus has tried to teach the same thing. In Mark 9, Jesus questioned the disciples about the subject of their recent argument and learned that it was about which one of them was the greatest.
That was when he asked a child to come and stand before them and said,
“Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.”
The words “servant” and “child” have a common root, so Jesus was making a play on words, which, combined with a live object lesson should have made the teaching memorable.
But it is one thing to remember a lesson and quite another to internalize it. Clearly, the disciples did not yet internalize the teaching that in the community formed around following Jesus, power was not to be used for domination.
The Shameless Request
In our text, we read that James and John come to Jesus with a request; they want to sit on Jesus’ left and right in his “glory.” They want to be in the second and third positions of power behind Jesus when his kingdom finally arrives in full.
Not only do they completely fail to grasp the nature of the kingdom of God that Jesus has been teaching, they also fail to understand the values of the kingdom. The nature of the kingdom of God is that it is not like an earthly kingdom. The kingdom of God is not hierarchical. It does not center power at the top, so that it flows downward in decreasing degrees as hierarchies do.
The values of the kingdom are different too. The kingdom of God does not center the voices of the elite, but of the marginal.
Children are the icons of the kingdom because greatness and domination are not their concerns. James and John are way off track at this point in the story.
It is remarkable that the Gospels recorded this scene. James and John have completely misconstrued Jesus’ ethical vision of a kingdom of equals in which leaders use their positions for service instead of domination.
But the early Christian communities finally got the message and considered it of such importance that this story was transmitted, even at the expense of the reputations of the community’s leaders.
It is such an embarrassing story that when Matthew re-told it, he had James and John’s mother make the request on their behalf, as if to shift responsibility away from them.
But it was not only James and John whose reputations were sullied by this story. The other disciples stumble into the same ego-pit. When they heard of James and John’s request, they became angry with them.
Why? The only reason could be that they believed James and John had jumped the gun, grasping for something they all wanted as well.
Jesus’ Responses
Jesus had two responses; first to James and John, then to the whole group. To James and John Jesus asked if they were going to be able to drink the cup he had to drink, or be baptized with his baptism.
Both cup and baptism are metaphors for suffering. The cup of suffering Jesus can see coming is so excruciating that later, in the garden, on the night of his arrest, even Jesus himself will ask God to remove it from him.
The baptism is a baptism of fire, a full submersion into agony. That is the path Jesus is facing, not the path that leads to a glorious throne of power.
Jesus’ mission included a direct confrontation with the domination system that was oppressing his people. He was on his way to Jerusalem where he was going to perform a publicly provocative action. He was going to shut down the center of power, the very location where the records of debts were stored, the temple.
In his day, many peasants, which comprised the majority of the population, were being forced off of their land and into virtual debt-slavery. The aristocratic families that controlled the high priesthood were becoming wealthier and wealthier at their expense.
Jesus, like Moses before him, was called by God to confront that domination system, even at the cost of his life.
How absurd then, for the people who were his front line staff to be quibbling about power, greatness, and thrones. And yet, at that point, they had not awakened to Jesus’ vision.
Exposing Cultural Values
Why not? They had absorbed the values of the dominant culture.
This is what humans do. We take on the attitudes, the norms, the perspectives of our culture. We do not even think to question our culture’s values.
We are blind to our cultural assumptions until someone enlightened holds up a mirror to us and we see them from another perspective.
That is what Jesus did. He held up a mirror to the disciples and said, in effect, look at yourselves; you have pagan values. You have the values of people who never heard the Genesis creation story.
They do not understand that God created everyone in God’s image so that every person has dignity and value equally. If you had internalized that story you would understand that there is no justification for domination. So he said,
“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.”
Jesus is saying, in effect, yes, that is the dominant culture; but look how that works out; you yourselves have suffered under this domination; how could you possibly want to turn around and dominate others? He said flatly,
“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.”
Then he used himself as the example to follow. Using the title for himself that literally means “The human one” he said,
“For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.”
A ransom here means the price you pay to release someone from debt slavery. Jesus was willing to put his life on the line on behalf of many, to oppose the structures of domination.
The Work Continues
That is why we who seek to follow Jesus believe it is our duty to continue his work. We know that our culture has been blind to how systems of domination have oppressed people, but now, more and more are being exposed.
We can see ourselves in the mirror when we hear the voices of those who have suffered.
We listen to women’s stories and come to understand the role that sexism and patriarchy has played in our society, from the home and family to the world of business and politics.
We listen to the voices of people of color and come to understand how racism has infected our society since the first white people arrived here four hundred years ago.
We listen to the voices of people who are in the LGBTQ+ community and we have a whole new set of reasons to have sympathetic concern, knowing that there was never a time when we cis-gendered heterosexuals ever chose to be what we are.
This is why leadership in the church only makes sense if it is servant leadership. As followers of Jesus, we demonstrate an alternative value system; the values of the kingdom of God.
Our officers take vows to “serve the people with energy, intelligence, imagination, and love.” Leadership is servant-style. It is for the flourishing of our community of faith, so that we can make a difference in the world, doing what Jesus did: exposing oppressive systems of domination which cause suffering to the people made in God’s image.
Today we will finish the process of installing officers for our church. They will repeat the same vows we ministers make. The only difference is the specific roles we play in the community.
None of us is perfect. The standards we affirm are high standards. The call to be servant-leaders is aspirational. None of us reaches them perfectly.
That is why the call to these high standards must be accompanied by disciplined spiritual practices that help us along the journey. Specifically, practices that help us with our ego issues are essential.
Meditation is a powerful spiritual technology that, over time, helps a great deal with ego. The Enneagram is also a powerful tool to help us see ourselves as we are so that we can grow towards transformation.
So, we engage these and other practices so that we can be as authentic in our quest to follow Jesus as we are able to be, as we seek to emulate the one who came, “not to be served, but to serve.”
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