Today’s Sermon, using Mark 9:30-37
“Nuh-uh”.
“Yes-huh”
“You are not better than me.”
“Are too.”
“I’m Jesus’ favorite”
“No I am– Jesus doesn’t even like you. He says you smell like wet sheep.”
“Well, he says you smell like a fish.”
“So, what do you do that he might even think about calling you great? I keep all his commandments religiously.”
“Well, so do I. And I pray. A lot. So there.”
This is what we might have heard if we happened to near the disciples on this particular day, as they traveled to Capernum. No wonder they were embarrassed to tell Jesus about their discussion!
Maybe they had the feeling they weren’t understanding as fully as they might. After all, Jesus kept talking about dying– and that must mean something, but why would he say such a thing? He was just getting started! So far, he hadn’t done anything spectacular…at least not anything they expected him to do.
No riding in on a white horse. No dazzling anyone with his military proweress. No– he hadn’t done any of those things.
Jesus was great, no doubt, but when was he going to show everybody how great he was?
And since they didn’t feel comfortable talking about all that, they decided to talk about their own greatness. I mean, sure it was nice to be chosen as a disciple, but every good organization has leaders, and top dogs, and big cheeses and all that. So someone in that group had to be it. Might as well talk about it, so that at least everybody knew where they were in the group.
I guess I’d be embarrassed to let Jesus overhear a conversation like that, too. After all, Jesus has spent a lot of time upsetting social “norms”. Clearly, things that society considers great don’t do much for Jesus– he remains unimpressed.
But I wonder if we’re any better? We, as not just individuals, but as whole societies too, grab and pull and try to climb our way to the top. We strive to be great, not only in Christ’s eyes, but in each other’s eyes (which we might even deem more important that being great in Christ’s eyes.)
Society demands a lot of those it considers great: great money, great influence, great power. Unless you possess one of those things, you are pretty much just one of the crowd.
But at least we know and understand what it takes to be great in society’s eyes. The things Jesus asks of us are much, much tougher. Seriously, it might actually be easier for us to be billionaires than to get the “love your neighbor as yourself” really right really often.
We laugh at the disciples, and their pettiness. We grimace as we remember that we’re this same way.
But, as I’ve been wrestling with this text, I don’t know that either our prayer or that of the disciples is really “Lord, make me great!” What I think is at the heart of the prayers both we and the disciples have prayed is, “Lord– I don’t have to be great, but please don’t let me be least!” And if we’re really honest, perhaps what is at the heart is our desperate desire not to be invisible.
Invisibility doesn’t sound all bad. Some days, I would LOVE to be invisible. Some days, I would love to be one who just blended in– who just quietly eeked into the background. And some days, I’d love to be invisible so that I could be a fly on the wall. I’m sure there are some interesting conversations that I’d love to be able to hear!
But I wouldn’t much like it if I were invisible all the time. I’d like to be able to turn that quality on and off– and be immediately recognized and attended to once I decided I no longer wanted to be invisible.
For a long time, my mom dad and I were beginning to wonder if we actually were invisible. We would go to somewhat empty restaurants, and wait, and wait, and wait, and never so much as have our drink orders taken. We’d finally flag down a waiter, and invariably, s/he would say, “Oh, sorry. I didn’t see you there.” And my dad has actually had the experience of standing in line, being right at the counter, and having the clerk lean around him to say, “Next!”
But I’d bet most of us in this room have had the experience of feeling invisible. Probably most of us, at some point, were in a big crowd as children. Some adult “up there” maybe held our hand to make sure we didn’t get lost or carried away, but that didn’t do us much good, because all we could see were pairs of legs.
What a horrible feeling!
Can you imagine feeling like that day in and day out? I think it’d be awful!
But perhaps, there are tons of people that go through their days feeling like that. I think it’s really easy for us to see the people who are most like us– the ones who look like we do, the ones who act like we do, the ones who believe like we do, the ones whose checkbook size is similar to ours. I’ve noticed that about myself– I have 20/20 when it comes to seeing people like me, when it comes to seeing people of about my same level of “greatness”.
But it’s much harder for me to see and appreciate those who are different from me, or whom I deem less great than I am.
I guess that’s why this passage has been stepping on my toes all week long.
And not only that, but I’ve really had to wrestle with it.
Jesus’ words to me are confusing. As I began my week, I was pretty excited to hear Jesus talking about welcoming the child. I mean seriously, whenever we have a child walk through our doors, we roll out the proverbial red carpet and treat them like the royalty they are!
Clearly, Jesus wasn’t the pastor of a small church praying for children!
So what exactly is Jesus talking about, when he makes it sound like such a tough thing to welcome a child?
I had to take off my 21st century hat for this one, and dig way deep to find my Greco-Roman hat. I had to look back and remember exactly how children were regarded in those days.
The truth is– they weren’t really regarded at all. While we shower new parents with love and tell them what a blessing their baby is, this would not have been so in Jesus’ day. Children were sort of seen as non-persons, or at least not-yet persons. They weren’t useful. They didn’t help the household. They weren’t even impressive– no one that made any difference in society would’ve been impressed that a man had a new baby. And since women weren’t “going anywhere” anyway, the thing was just another mouth to feed.
Children were the lowest of the low, on the same social rung as those who served food or cleaned up pig slop. For us modern folks, it seems like Jesus makes a big jump in going from talking about being a servant of all, to welcoming a child. But in the Greek, the words for “child” and “servant” are close enough that the hearers would have made the association really quickly.
What Jesus is really talking about is welcoming the nobodies, the invisibles. Children and servants would have both been seen as weak and powerless– completely at the mercy of others.
But watch out– we love to relegate this story to the “cutesy” box which fits right there with the “Oh, isn’t that lovely” box that where we’d like to file away most scripture lessons. As is the case with most of the stories we’d place in those boxes, this is not a cutesy story about welcoming children.
Jesus is being subversive, through and through. What Jesus is doing is really upsetting the social order.
As he does in several places, Jesus reminds us that we don’t get any brownie points for rolling out the red carpet for those like us. He reminds us that real hospitality (and in this scripture) real greatness is about welcoming the nobodies.
But, I wonder, if that’s the only challenge in what Jesus offers to us today. For some, that’s challenge enough…some will go home today, and worry all week about how they are doing at showing God’s love to the invisibles.
As this passage was wrestling with me, I discovered a surprise. I’d much rather give love to someone that couldn’t earn it, than I would to allow myself to become a “nobody”.
While God’s Grace is something I preach regularly, and it’s actually at the core of my belief system, the truth of the matter is that I’d never let myself simply sit playing at Jesus feet, and believe that that’s enough.
I’ve never really considered that I was trying to “earn my way” with God, because I don’t think that the things I do will get me into heaven, but there’s a great possibility that I’ve spent my whole life trying to “earn my way” with everyone I meet. I know I’m not the only one, because that’s what human beings do. We grab, and pull, and conquer, and do, and achieve– and try to make ourselves great in each other’s eyes.
When I was a kid, every evening during the summer, all the neighborhood kids and I would meet at one child’s house. This child had a marvelous, random hill, in the middle of his yard, and our favorite game was “King of the Hill”. (Queen in my case!) The whole point was to get to the stop, and stay there using whatever you had to– even, and especially if pushing everyone else was necessary. And you know what, as much fun as it was to be at the top– it sure took a lot of hard work to stay that way.
But Christ’s invitation to us this week is to stop. Stop being a part of the “rat race”. Stop smooshing others so that we feel bigger. Stop putting pressure on yourself to be amazing.
If Christ telling us to choose servanthood feels like a burden, maybe it’s easier to see it as an invitation to the Good Life. If we’re choosing to be least, that opens up two opportunities: First, we’re able to let go of our need to be great, which takes a lot of pressure off of us. In fact, it frees us up tremendously to enjoy being in a relationship with God, without the continual striving to avoid being invisible. And Second, it provides an opportunity for someone who might otherwise remain invisible to been seen and welcomed and appreciated for a while.
Living the Good Life means letting go of the pressures society places on us–which we in turn place on each other. It means serving the one without social standing as if welcome friend, and knowing that they might never be able to pay us back. And it means sitting at Jesus’ feet playing, without the pressure to be, and do, and achieve.
Great isn’t “upward mobility”– which is a term our society uses a lot to describe those that are climbing to the top of the social ladder. Jesus says that’s backwards. The real ticket is “Downward Mobility.” It’s not about climbing to the top. It’s about sliding gracefully down to the bottom, and choosing the path of invisibility so that someone else has the chance to be seen for a while.
And here’s the funny thing– when this becomes such a habit, a way of life, when this life of choosing servant invisibility becomes so much who we are that we think we might just have actually dropped off the earth as far as anyone can tell– that’s the moment when we become most “upwardly mobile” in God’s eyes.
Christ has a pretty big soft spot for the “invisibles”, who are never invisible to him.
Amen
Copyright, 2009 Reverend Kim Justice
