Sermon at The Church of the Holy Apostles, New York City,
September 24, 2006, The Sixteenth Sunday of Pentecost: Year B
The Reverend Elizabeth G. Maxwell
Wisdom 1: 16, 2: 1, 6 - 22
Psalm 54
James 3: 16, 4: 6
Mark 9: 30 - 37
 

     May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be always acceptable in your sight, oh Lord our strength and our redeemer, Amen.

     Jesus was teaching his disciples, saying to them: “The Son of Man is to be betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him, and three days after being killed he will rise again.”  But they did not understand what he was saying, and were afraid to ask him.

     This passage from this morning’s Gospel is the second of three times in fairly close succession when Jesus announces his Passion.  It’s not just the brief saying that we hear this morning.  It appears to be a sustained teaching in which Jesus talks about betrayal, about his own death, about rising again.  And yet the disciples don’t get it - Jesus’ words are unfathomable to them.  We might ask, of course, whether this sequence in the gospel is simply a foil of the gospel writer’s, to try to make his theological point about the obtuseness of the disciples and about the mystery of Jesus’ destiny.

     That may be, but in any case there is something profound here in this dense text – profound for those first disciples and profound for us, contemporary disciples.  Indeed, we also are in danger of missing it because the story is so familiar.  So we might ask: What is it in this teaching that is so hard to take in?

     In the first of the Passion predictions, Peter has confessed Jesus as Messiah, and already we know that the disciples have expectations about what type of messiah that they imagine Jesus might be.  Jesus is so popular – the crowds are getting bigger and bigger; the healings are remarkable.  Surely, surely this will go from strength to strength, and end in a kind of triumphant overthrow of the Romans.  Surely the Kingdom will be established in a burst of glory.

     These are very human thoughts and hopes.  Who among us does not hope that all will go well?  And the disciples, rather like us, are wondering “What kind of job will I get when the Kingdom comes?  Will I be appreciated?  Will I be the most important?”  This very human ego – this very ordinary competitiveness- is what’s at play in the discussion they are having on the road.  We all experience it, and yet in it would seem to be the very seeds of the betrayal of what they hold dear.  Surely, they will feel that their ego is betrayed when Jesus’ destiny plays itself out, and they will betray him in their own ways.

     Another reason I expect that it’s so hard to take all this in is that they really do love Jesus.  Earlier, when there was just a chink into which Jesus’ words penetrated Peter cried “Lord, this must never happen to you!”  It’s as if they’re not able to bear the idea that they might lose him; they’re not able to bear the possibility of his real vulnerability.  In his vulnerability they see their own terrible vulnerability.  It raises questions for them about who God is and where God is, and Jesus teaches them about his suffering, his passion – really, his passion in both senses of that word.  The sense of pouring out his life unto death, and the sense of passion that is his life energy focused in compassion.  Not in suffering just for the sake of suffering, but in his decision to face his destiny, to confront the powers of the world, to take the consequences of love and integrity, to live with and die for his identification with the outcast and his commitment to serve.

     If Jesus’ words about his impending death are hard to take in, then perhaps the teaching that three days after being killed he will rise again is even more so.  Resurrection is also unfathomable.  And we see here a kind of functional atheism in the disciples, and I for one, recognize in it my own sometime functional atheism.

     This perspective, this functional atheism, is powerfully stated in the lesson that we heard from Wisdom, by which we are told that the ungodly make a covenant with death.  The writer of Wisdom has them say: “Short and sorrowful is our life, and there is no remedy when a life comes to its end.”  In other words, death is really the last word.  He goes on, “So let us enjoy the good things that exist and make use of creation to the full.  Let us take our fill.  Let us oppress the righteous poor.  Let us not spare the widow or regard the grey hairs of the aged, but let our might be our law of right.  For what is weak proves itself to be useless.”

     I don’t know about you, but for me this is a stunning picture of the way that our culture runs.  There is the nihilistic despair, the aggressive competition, the sense of scarcity and of not having enough and having to grab what you can, frantic consumption and a sense of entitlement, violence, the assumed uselessness of the weak, the amassing of enormous wealth and disdain for the poor, so little sense of common good that we all don’t even have health insurance.  Everyone is for him or herself, spending, despoiling the resources of the earth as if they belonged to us.  Out of this comes a discussion of ways to make torture of detainees legal – out of it comes a war on terror driven by fear and hubris.

     All of the scriptures, and particularly the letter of James that we also heard today, speak of the roots of fear and violence, of envy and of craving in our own souls.  I wonder if- deep in our souls-  we might find something else if we sit quietly enough.  I wonder if we might be able to take in the grace of God that points us to a different way, to a presence, to the hope of resurrection, to the open possibility that that brings us that we might live with compassion for one another – that we might in fact live for something, and out of something, larger.

     This is where Jesus goes with his disciples who are too embarrassed to tell him that they have been arguing about who is to be the greatest.  “Whoever wants to be first,” he says, “must be last of all, and servant of all.”  Their aspiration is not denied, but rather it is transformed – greatness equals service.  Service does not mean subservience or servility; Jesus is not calling the disciples to be doormats.  Rather, the service that Jesus speaks of and that he lives is availability, generosity, and profound offering of the self in a way that serves the profound good of others.

     Jesus’ service is lived out unto death.  It is choice and it is perspective.  It is seeing that devotion to the other’s good brings to each one of us an opening, an enlargement – because service is service of all.  That is to say, service of the whole and of the wholeness of all, which in the end includes even me.

     Another theme that we might pick up from this passage is that of stewardship, which is important to us at this time of year.  Stewardship is a kind of service which is participation, not owning.  It is giving our gift in a way that transforms us and others.  It is born of compassion, and it is like so much of this passage, unfathomable except in action.  The service that Jesus speaks of is the willingness to be vulnerable for the truth, in the cause of justice, by living in love.  As James says, the harvest of righteousness is sown in peace for those who make peace.

     To make his point most graphically, Jesus takes a child first into the center of the circle of the disciples and then into his arms.  We might want to linger for a moment on that image of Jesus with the child in his arms.  We’re not told anything about the child except that it’s a young one; it might be all children held in the arms of Jesus.  But this image is not sentimental, particularly not in the first century.  Rather, all the commentators say that what is emphasized here is the dependence of the child, the utter vulnerability of the child, and the total lack of status and productivity that children had in Jesus’ day.

     A child in the world of the first century is a legal nonentity, the lowest of the low.  We might, as an aside, note the continuing vulnerability of children here and around the world despite our contemporary sentimentality about them.  One in three American children are poor, the vast majority of the poor around the globe are children; they’re still an apt symbol of “the least of these.”  In any case, Jesus’ action is a scandal to the disciples.  It is the most radical welcome of the outcast, the nobody.  And Jesus says that God is here: “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me, but the one who sent me.”

     And so we are plunged into the mystery of the incarnation, of God come among us, in vulnerability, in humility, and identification with the least.  And we will not be able to fathom it, except in loving contemplation and compassionate action.

     I had a brush with the unfathomable Divine presence a couple of weeks ago.  My own personal way of observing September 11 this year was to go to an event held by September 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, those wonderful folk who have worked so hard to use their grief over the loss of their family members in the cause of peace.  They were sponsoring a panel of people from around the world whose lives have been personally touched by the loss of loved ones to violence, terror, or war, all of whom out of that experience are working for nonviolent solutions to the world’s conflicts.

     It was all very powerful, as you can imagine, but the one speaker that touched me the most was a Roman Catholic priest from Rwanda.  He was a very young man it seemed to me, and he had lost all of his family, all of his family, in the genocide in his country.  Indeed he had hidden in the bush and barely survived; it was a kind of a fluke, a kind of a grace that he was alive at all.  He told of searching refugee camps for many, many months after the killing stopped, only to realize eventually that his loved ones were all dead; all of them.  But it turns out that this man has moved from that desperate searching to beginning to minister to other refugees, to setting up structures for grieving and for hope, and now works to bring people on the different sides of the conflict together, and ministers in prisons to the very people who killed his family.

     After the panel there were questions from the audience, and literally every questioner asked the speakers “how were you able to do this?”  It was unfathomable.  And this man’s answer interested me, because although he is a priest, he did not answer in terms of theology.  He said, “I began to despair when I realized that everyone was lost, but I realized that I had some choices: I could drink, I could kill myself, I could go crazy and I was in danger of that.  I could seek revenge.  But none of those honored those who died.  None of those choices helped me become who my beloved family had raised me to be, and I realized that I was being called because of them and their love to become larger.”

     And out of that commitment, to life and to the honor of those he had lost, came this incredible commitment to service, and a sense of being upheld by his family still in a way that we might speak of as “the communion of saints.”  I was struck by his presence, by his matter-of –factness, as if he didn’t think he had done anything extraordinary, and by the remarkable sense of freedom in his words.

     Now, these stories, the Biblical story from today’s gospel and this contemporary story from Rwanda, hold up a mirror for us.  It is an extreme mirror, a mirror of extreme situations, and it challenges us who may never, God help us, undergo such extreme situations, still to find faith in action.  It invites us to a way a life that is full of freedom and full of grace in Jesus’ call to service.

     How will our choices affect the least of these, with whom God is found?  How will our choices affect the vulnerable children?  The poor in our streets?  The desperately poor around the world who have no food or water?  The detainees in prisons that have not been charged with a crime?  Those dying in Iraq or Darfur?  The voiceless species disappearing every day?  The unspeakably precious and endangered Earth?

     We will not always know the consequences of our choices, but this text, this story, calls us to pray, to be aware, to ask the question and to act as responsibly as we can.  Who will we be, upheld by the witness of the communion of saints?  What is the great service to which love calls us?

     Amen.

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