Pentecost XVI, Proper 20
Proverbs 31:10-31
James 3:13-4:3, 7-8a
Mark 9:30-37
+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
A wave of satisfaction rushed through me when I closed a bank account recently. I even felt virtuous. Since the beginning of the decade, I’d done a lot of banking at one of the behemoths that greedily reaped enormous, short-term profits by irresponsibly extending credit to anyone out of diapers. It galled me that I was doing business with a bank too big to fail, a bank bailed out by the public, but still lavishly rewarding its executives – the so-called best and brightest. It took me a while, but I finally got around to acting upon principal.
As I closed the account, the bank representative was kind enough to ask me why. I mentioned my disapproval of the bank’s behavior. I didn’t have to say anything other than that. She understood. She apologized, and that struck me as rich – a teller apologizing for the avarice of the privileged big-wigs who have hardly acknowledged their betrayal of trust.
I also pointed out that their fees struck me as outrageous – $25.00 for a box of checks. She agreed and told me that I could request that they do something about that. I told her that I had tried and received no such courtesy, but instead had wasted twenty or thirty minutes trying to get a person on the phone. I shared my experience that getting anyone on the phone, getting basic service, was consistently a frustrating, aggravating chore. She told me, “You should have come in and got our branch phone number.” So it was my responsibility, and my fault, that I wasn’t getting decent service. Why would anyone want to have anything to do with such an institution?
Years ago, about the same time I was opening that bank account, I first went to a Five Guys – the hamburger joint. This was just as they were beginning their rapid expansion. While I’m waiting for my cheeseburger, I saw a sign on the wall:
You, the customer, are not dependent upon us. We are dependent upon you. You are not an outsider in our business – you are part of it. We are not doing you a favor by serving you . . . you are doing us a favor by giving us the opportunity to do so.
Five Guys should be in banking. Instead of two basis points on your CD, wouldn’t you prefer a bag of fries? I don’t know if Five Guys’ embodies their expressed appreciation of their customers, but it is an extremely attractive attitude for any public institution – including a church.
Of course, church members are not customers. We’re ministers. Jesus calls everyone of us to minister, to serve, to wait on, other people. We see ourselves as producers of ministry, not as consumers of ministry. Together we present Jesus and the gospel to the world. We also see the world beyond our doors, the people who aren’t Christians, as being part of why we’re here, that we’re dependent upon non-Christians, that they are not outsiders to what’s happening here. If we come to mass simply for ourselves, then the mass is a sham.
Worship can be a powerful encounter with God, a mountain-top experience, a type of transfiguration like what happened to Jesus. But as soon as the Transfiguration ended, Jesus went down the mountain, returning to the world to minister, to serve. The word ‘mass’ comes from the Latin ‘missio,’ meaning ‘a sending off,’ ‘a letting go.’ We come to mass where God sends us back out, strengthened to do Jesus’ work in the world. Mass is not an escape from the world, but rather empowers us to engage with the world, to serve the world more passionately, more effectively.
In today’s gospel, Jesus told the disciples that he would suffer and be killed. Naturally, the disciples didn’t want to hear this sort of talk, and they feared asking Jesus for clarification. They avoided unpleasant thoughts, and instead they began to bicker among themselves about who is the greatest, the most important, the best and the brightest. Jesus talked about giving of himself. We talk about who’s getting.
When Jesus asked the disciples what they were discussing, the disciples fell silent, embarrassed. Jesus broke the anxious moment by saying, “If anyone would be first, he must be last of all and servant of all.” Then he took a child and identified himself with that child. Jesus was not being sentimental about children and their supposed innocence. He was not telling us to be like children. Children are easily manipulated, self-centered, immature, semi-feral, simple-minded, highly dependent, submissive. Jesus doesn’t want that for us.
Rather, Jesus identified himself with having the social status of children. The ancient world held little regard or respect for children. They were at the bottom of the social structure – powerless and vulnerable. “If you want to be first, to be on top of the pile, then you have to be last, servant of all.” If we followed Jesus more closely, our world would be turned upside down. Like the disciples, those we regard as ‘great’ tend to be the powerful, the well-known, the influential, the accomplished – those in control. Jesus reverses our values: the great are not those who are served, but rather those who serve. Jesus directs us against our natural, visceral instincts and tells us to find our greatness, our worth, our value, in serving others.
In one of my favorite Bible verses, the risen Jesus has just commissioned St. Peter, telling him to feed his sheep, to provide them with spiritual sustenance, and then immediately Jesus added, “When you were a young man, you were able to fasten your own belt and set off for wherever you wished. But when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and another will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go.” (John 21:18)
For Jesus, Christian maturity is not determining where we will go; it is not accumulating power and ascending the social ranks; it is not controlling others or even our own destiny. Rather, Christian maturity includes the capacity to be taken where we don’t want to go, to deal with what we would rather avoid, to act above our instincts, to find value in service to others rather than finding value in controlling other people.
Next Friday and Saturday, the parish vestry is going away on retreat. We’ll be praying and reflecting upon our parish’s purpose, following up work the parish did together at our annual meeting, thinking about what we are doing here together, why we love this place so much, why its work is so important, what God desires of us. Later this autumn, I expect that we’ll spend more time together as a parish to share and to learn about our mission here, about what God is calling us to be and do. Through the years, we’ve done this on a regular basis, discerning and learning about God’s desire for us. It’s a constant, never-ending work.
Fr. Martin Smith, our retreat leader, has given the vestry some spiritual exercises to do in preparation. It’s probably helpful work for each of us. We will be praying and thinking about our own spiritual needs, how the parish fulfills some of these needs and frustrates others, how our life together enriches us and disappoints us. If we have the courage to be honest, we see that in every relationship there exist positive and negative elements.
Martin pointed out to us that once we become aware of our own feelings about our life together, then we are better able to empathize with the needs of others. We’re better able to imagine how other people experience life, how other people experience us and the work of Jesus here. If we can’t be introspective about our own experiences, then we can’t enter into or respect the experiences of other people. Serving others requires us to empathize with them. Can we put ourselves in another’s shoes? Can we enter another’s reality or do we force them into our own?
We can treat people like my former bank treated me – “if you want service, you’ve got to figure it out for yourself. It’s your good fortune to be banking here.” But there’s another way: the way of serving others. When we invite a friend to mass, when we talk about God with friends and acquaintances, when a visitor comes and worships with us, we can ask ourselves, “What might that person’s experience be? Is there anything I can do to express God’s love for them? Can I put them first?” That is the way of greatness.
+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
©2009 Lane John Davenport
