Pentecost XX
SERMON
at
Christ Church, Watertown, Connecticut
Pentecost XX
October 18, 2009
by
The Rev. Stanley C. Kemmerer, AHC
Mommy, Mommy, Mommy, I want to sit up front!” “That’s not fair! I’m older.!”
“No! I should sit in front. I’m shorter! You’re taller. You can see just fine in back!”
No! Me, Mommy! You know I get car sick when I sit in the back…..”
Sound familiar? Get a group of sales executives together and listen to them compare their “numbers.” Or parents or grandparents talk about their kids and who should get the prize, the award. Soccer moms. Little League dads. See the bumper stickers, “My child is an honor student at…..” Or, in parishes across this land that have Christmas pageants, imagine being a fly on the wall as the discussion goes on about whose kid gets to be Mary and whose gets to be Joseph!
Disciples, too, hunh?
James and John, the sons of Zebedee, approached him. “Master,”
they said to him, “we want you to do us a favor….Allow us to sit
one at your right hand and the other at your left in your glory.”
So I guess we Anglicans follow in a long tradition…Even though the sees of Canterbury and York are theoretically equal in importance, dividing jurisdiction of England in half, Canterbury responsible for the south and York the north, it is the Archbishop of Canterbury who is primus inter pares (“first among equals”) as titular, or symbolic head of the communion, not the Archbishop of York. Want to know why? Because, tradition has it, when it was decided one would have primacy and the king was deciding who, the incumbent Archbishop of Canterbury lept to sit on the king’s right to claim it, edging out the Archbishop of York!
Well, the passage tells us the absolutely predictable happened with this juvenile behavior of the disciples:
When the other ten heard this they began to feel indignant with James
and John…”
Of course they did. Just as siblings do, parents do, clerics do, with this kind of behavior.
The disciples just…don’t…get…it: that the essence of discipleship is not personal glorification but servanthood. As Mark records, Jesus has tried to get it through their thick skulls:
But notice how Jesus responds to all this…(Blush) He doesn’t get frustrated, angry, and scold, as we preachers often do, and not we only---you pewsitters do your share of it too, so we’re all in this together! He doesn’t deny their request either, knee jerk fashion. He uses the occasion and its aftermath, with his infinite patience, as a teaching moment.
He challenges them, yes: “Can you drink the cup that I must drink or be baptized with the baptism with which I must be baptized?” Like, “Do you have any idea of the implications what your asking carries with it???
Like braggarts in a bar they come back with their “Of course we can!” Jesus doesn’t fire back, “I doubt it, idjits!” Instead he meets them, affirms them: The cup that I must drink you shall drink, and with the baptism with which I must be baptized you shall be baptized.
Then he makes a clear separation: but as for seats at my right hand or my left, these are not mine to grant: they belong to those to whom they have been alotted. =Dad takes care of that!
He then reiterates the very different approach following him entails: anyone who wants to be great among you must be your servant, and anyone who wants to be first among you must be slave to all.
We know. And Jesus points out: You know that among the pagans their so-called rulers lord it over them, and their great men make their authority felt. This is not to happen among you.
Then he makes clear this is not a “do as I say/not as I do” instruction. The translation we use in worship, unfortunately, leaves out a very important word which would underscore this, the Greek word kai, which means “even.” With that word, the passage would read, even the Son of Man himself did not come to be served but to serve… Him too!
As with so much scripture, this passage is not just instructive. When you think about it, it makes practical good sense. Who are the significant people who draw us to them but people like St. Francis of Assisi, Mother Theresa, Ghandi. As we prepare for All Saints Day and think of those significant to our respective faith journeys I suspect we’ll discover many are people who forsook the usual trappings of honor to serve, and “wounded healers,” those who didn’t let their downsides, their demons, get in the way of doing the positive things they could do. I often remember a statement my college chaplain used frequently, “God can use the wrath of men to praise Him!” I commend it to you.
As we think of what draws people to churches often, in those stories, a community of faith has been “there” for them at a time of crisis, or need. They encountered acceptance when they expected judgment. Perhaps for the first time in that person’s experience, the were confronted with themselves by a community’s “tough love” and shown a better way, then helped, step by step to follow it.
We are charged to “make disciples of all nations” and today provided an outline of how being a disciple attracts non-disciples to discipleship.
We’ve been considering ways to serve our community and have come up with several ideas: The Jesse Tree, in its second year, providing blessing for its pets, looking to provide hospitality, a bit of “home” to persons perhaps unable to get to their own homes for holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas, to name a few.
A good approach to conversations with prospects is to learn their yearnings, their needs and, with those where we can help, to find ways to do so. By so doing expose them to the feelings of accomplishment working side by side in such endeavors can produce, so they want to be part of the effort, alongside us.
We all want. And need. Recognition. It will come. But when it takes the form of unexpected gratitude where none was expected rather than extorted and manipulated, as James and John sought to do, it is much more satisfying. There’s much about our common life that plots us well along that positive road. We can celebrate that even as we find new ways to build on it!