"True Greatness", (Mark 9:30-37)

A Sermon Preached By

Rev. Dr. Peter W. Shidemantle

  Sunday, September 21, 2003, 25^th Sunday in Ordinary Time

PEBBLE HILL PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH

5299 Jamesville Rd., Dewitt, NY  13214

 Phone:  315-446-0960        FAX:  446-0672          phillchu@twcny.rr.com

These things are so unlikely as to be comical, but there is a kind of inverted logic to them that points to a reality which, if we dwell on it too much, can start to make us a little nervous. And so it is a reality that is easy to ignore most of the time because it is so unlikely and so unrealistic - unless and until you meet somebody like Jesus. These are the kinds of things, the kind of reality, that he is always talking about and always demonstrating as we see him in the New Testament gospels. You might say it is his "stock and trade." He talks about and demonstrates a reality that is so very different from how this world normally operates. It is God’s reality. And as much as we find it appealing and are drawn toward it - things like the measure of true greatness coming by way of servanthood and not domination, and the first being last and the last being first - when, like his earliest disciples, we find he is not making a joke, not using hyperbole to make a point, that he is serious about God’s order of things, then perhaps we can see why his disciples grew strangely silent toward him, and argue and compete among themselves.

This is now the second time in Mark’s gospel that Jesus has said to his disciples that he would suffer and be killed and on the third day be risen. They said nothing to him, according to Mark, because "they didn’t understand and were afraid to ask him." And then, as they were on their way to Capernaum and they were arguing among themselves about who was the "greatest," when he asked them what they were discussing, they were silent. There were two kinds of silence toward him; one that will not give voice to their fears (just don’t say anything and maybe it will go away), the other the kind of silence that will not speak about or admit to their wrong-headed notions about what it means to be his disciple, how to live it out.

In the next chapter Peter will speak for all the disciples when he says, "Lord, we have left everything and followed you." And indeed they had; for nine chapters they’ve been following him - but especially as Mark tells it, all the while they’ve been evading him. They want to be with him, to be near him - and who wouldn’t? - but they don’t want to be taught by him, and they don’t want him listening in on their conversations.

Census reports generally suggest that church membership is roughly twice what denominations report. Apparently, a lot more people think they belong to a church than actually do. They don’t actually engage in the dialogue of faith, with God and other people, which is how the process of discipleship occurs. Maybe the disciples were silent because they didn’t think they could really live in the way that Jesus taught and they didn’t say anything because they didn’t want him to think ill of them. Don’t you think Jesus would have known that, that they had their own fears and doubts and feelings of inadequacy? Jesus did, himself! But they didn’t say anything. Maybe we don’t say anything because we’re afraid we aren’t strong enough, don’t have enough faith - because we struggle with certain doctrines or beliefs - because we don’t know or don’t have the answers ourselves, or we’re not feeling very good about ourselves. What better way is there to engage in the process of discipleship, engage in the dialogue of faith, than to bring our doubts and questions, to reveal what confounds us? This is not easy stuff, which is why Jesus seeks to engage them, "What were you talking about...?" He had just laid another bombshell on them. He had to know they weren’t talking about the weather! But they had to offer it, to open up to him.

Suffering, humiliation, death - these don’t usually rate high on our scale of conversation topics either. After all, we live in the "real" world, don’t we, where greatness is measured in dollars and celebrity and influence - not in anonymous sacrifice and servanthood. It’s one thing to rub up against God’s reality. It’s quite another to actually enter it and participate in it on God’s terms.

Of course, Christians are still arguing among themselves about who is the "greatest" - the most correct in their theology, the most faithful in their biblical interpretation, who loves Jesus more. When clergy gather the talk often goes to how many members you have, how big your church’s budget is, whose outreach or mission is the most impressive. It’s all part of the same evasion, isn’t it? Jesus saw what the disciples were doing, and so he sat them down and gave them a leadership seminar right then and there: "Whoever wants to be first among you must be last of all and servant of all," he told them. Then he showed them what he meant by taking a little child in his arms. They wanted to know who was the greatest, so he showed them.

Borrowing from an African proverb, "It takes a village to raise a child," The Rev. Agnes Norfleet tells about once preaching a sermon entitled, "It takes a church to raise a child." But after studying this scripture again the next time it came around in the lectionary cycle, she came to wonder if she didn’t have it backwards, that what Jesus really seems to be saying here is that it takes a child to raise a church!

We often speak about what our children and grandchildren "need" by way of guidance, moral instruction, awareness of and exposure to the stories and the music of our biblical and faith traditions. We think of them largely as these kind of empty receptacles that are going to be filled with something, and we only have so long to get "our" stuff in there. And in many ways it is true that children are most open and receptive early on to being marked and formed - for good and for ill. But we also know the power that children have to mark and form adults, how when they come into a house they cause us to completely re-arrange our priorities and often cause us to behave very strangely. Children are a tremendous responsibility, but they also have a way of focusing life on the most basic things. They can make us deliriously happy, and they can try the most patient soul.

I’d suggest that it is in this second way, how children mark and form the rest of us, rather than how the rest of us mark and form them, that Jesus was talking about when he brought a child to the middle, saying that it is in the act of welcoming the child that we welcome Jesus and the one who sent Jesus. The disciples in this scene are more dependent on the child for understanding than the other way around.

In Charles Dickens’ "A Christmas Carol," the "Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come" leads the miserly Scrooge to the home of his poor clerk Bob Cratchit, where one of the Cratchit children is reading aloud the words, "And He took a child and set him in the midst of them." Soon we realize that the Cratchit household is mourning the death of Tiny Tim, and he becomes an example for them all. Bob Cratchit tells the family, "I know my dears, that when we recollect how patient and mild he was; although he was a little, little child; we shall not quarrel easily among ourselves..."

As in our story in Mark’s gospel, a child, Tiny Tim, makes it clear to would-be disciples that there is no room for quarreling in the fellowship. In an earlier scene, returning from church in the arms of his father, Tiny Tim, even in his suffering, asked God’s blessing on everyone. As Scrooge watches this scene from the perspective of the future, the foreboding of the death of fragile Tiny Tim - should no help arrive to heal him - is a key to the conversion of Scrooge from an insensitive miser to a childlike and compassionate servant of those in need. He awakens from his dream to admit that he has actually become like a baby. He announces, "I don’t know what day of the month it is! I don’t know anything. I’m quite a baby. Never mind. I don’t care. I’d rather be a baby." It is then that a "re-born" Scrooge brings gifts to the Cratchits, sees to the care of Tiny Tim, and becomes a benevolent servant to those in need.

We know where true life is - and maybe our resistance to it lies less in our own feelings of inadequacy or guilt or lack of knowledge than it does in our refusal to let our dreams shape us and form us. We live in a complex world, and there are so many pressures and influences that bear down on us and our children - it sometimes seems that the church and its message of love and servanthood has so little chance of getting through and taking hold. We often see ourselves in competition with everything else, and on the "greatness" scale we can hardly match up. But when we get caught up in that we’ve forgotten what is there in the middle - receiving one such child in his name. When we do that, we receive Christ, and in Christ we receive God. It’s all about what’s in the middle. It’s all about receiving the little ones, the lost ones, the forgotten ones, the easily ignored ones, the unimportant ones. It’s about letting Christ set the priorities in the house, so we should not quarrel easily - but should understand true greatness, and aspire to a life of servanthood.

Amen.

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