Sunday, October 21, 2012

Sermon - Not So Among You


Mark 10:35-45
Not So Among You
James Sledge                                                                                       October 21, 2012

I’ve been reading a new book by MaryAnn McKibben Dana, the pastor at Idylwood Presbyterian just west of here. It’s entitled Sabbath in the Suburbs: A Family’s Experiment with Holy Time.  If you’ve ever thought about Sabbath keeping, or simply thought about how life is too busy and distracted, I highly recommend it.
MaryAnn has young children, and in the book she tells of a time she attended a parenting workshop where the leader asked them to write down their goals and dreams for their children, to say where they hoped their children would be at age twenty-one.
She writes, “It was a heartwarming experience to imagine our children on the verge of being launched, all full of glowing potential without the messy inconvenience of reality mucking up the fantasy.  My list was filled with lofty goals—that they would understand their strengths and limitations, that they would have a spirit of service toward others, and so forth.  (Later, I asked Robert what he would wish for our children—what success would look like at age twenty-one.  Without hesitation he said, ‘Their own apartment.’)”
After writing our lists, the workshop participants read them to one another and basked in the radiance of all these self-actualized Eagle Scouts and lacrosse captains, confident yet humble.  They were like young adult ghosts, beaming all around us. Then the leader said something that made them all disappear: Poof!
“ ‘This list is for you,’ she said.  ‘You want your children to have a spirit of service?  A sense of the Holy?  A curiosity and openness to the world?  Cultivate those things in yourself.  Let them see you do it.  Become the person and parent you want to be.  It’s one of the most important things you can do for your child.’ ”[1]
The book goes on to say that if we want our children to have a different sense of time than most of the world, some sense of sabbath or holy time, we will need to practice it ourselves.  And the point is easily expanded. If you want your children to have a real sense of generosity, be truly generous yourself.  If you want your children to adopt some of Jesus’ priorities over those of the world, adopt those priorities yourself.
Jesus is pretty clear that following him is about a different set of priorities.  He says that we are to love God will all our heart, mind, soul, and being, and we are to love others as ourselves.  And much of his teaching is about fleshing this out, talking about what this looks like in various settings and contexts.  I think that’s the case in today’s passage.
Although they have been with Jesus for quite a while, the disciples still seem very much caught up in the patterns of the world.  They understand that Jesus is the real deal, but they try to shoehorn that into the ways of the world.  You see that with James and John.  They act just like any career consultant will tell you to do.  “Use your connections to get ahead.”  And so when the get a moment where they have Jesus to themselves, they make a move.  “Rabbi, let us be your right and left hand men when you take over.” 

Jesus shuts them down, but the other disciples find out about their maneuvering, and they’re not happy.  Whether it’s because they think the Zebedee brothers  did something unethical or they’re just mad because they got beat to the punch, I don’t know.  But they’re upset, and they’re ready to let James and John have it.
But Jesus shuts them all down saying, “You know that in the world everyone wants to have power.  They want to be in charge so they can tell others what to do.  But it is not so among you.”  It is not so among you.  Actually it looks like it is so based on the disciples’ behavior, but Jesus insists they cannot remain this way. Greatness and importance in the new realm he brings is about being a servant, a slave.  Think about that.  A slave has to respond to others’ desires and wishes before his own.  And Jesus says that’s what it looks like to be part of the new thing he is doing, something rooted in Jesus’ own life of service and self-giving.
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As you’ve probably realized, today we are marking Children’s Sabbath, an interfaith project of the Children’s Defense Fund, created, in their own words, “to celebrate children as sacred gifts of the Divine,”  to help “houses of worship to renew and live out their moral responsibility to care, protect and advocate for all children.”  Children certainly need our help. Around the globe they face war, ethnic and religious violence, famine.  Many of us have followed the story of a young Pakistani girl shot by the Taliban for seeking an education and encouraging other girls to do the same.  In our own country, more and more children are threatened by poverty and an educational system that is failing them. And all these problems deserve our attention.
For the most part, however, these are not problems for our children.  Our children worry more about getting into the right college, making the team, and dealing with stress and hectic schedules than they do about finding shelter or enough to eat.  But that does not mean that our children don’t face their own threats to living the life God dreams for them.
The world that shapes and molds our children does not equate being a servant with getting to the top.  Rather getting to the top is about being served.  But Jesus says, “It is not so among you.”  Our culture relentlessly works to shape our children into consumers, into those who view life as one of constant acquisition to meet and serve their wants and needs.  But Jesus says, “It is not so among you.”
But it is so.  It is so for our children because it is so for us.  We may wish for them a less hectic, better balanced life. We may hope for them a gentler world, one with more room for compassion and caring, with more time for simply being rather than doing.  But we struggle to show them such a possibility because we are captive to the ways of our world, even as we hear Jesus say, “It is not so among you,” even as we often wish it were not so for us.
When we began talking about a Stewardship campaign for this year, I very much wanted it to move away from fund raising and to address this spiritual problem that afflicts us, and that we pass along to our children.  That’s how we ended up with the Grow One campaign, which asks you to look at your giving as a percentage of your income and compare that to the tithe, the idea of giving the first tenth to God.
I don’t know that there’s anything magic about ten percent, even if it’s biblical. But it’s a modest percentage, and the large gulf between the typical church giver and the tithe is a good measure of our captivity to the very non-servant ways of the world.  The figures I’ve seen put typical Protestant giving at around 2-2.5 percent, and that follows a slow but steady decline since the Great Depression.  Strange that we gave the most when we had least, and when America entered into a period of great prosperity in the mid-1950s, giving began to go down.  And as we’ve gotten wealthier and acquired more and more, our giving keeps going down. The world tightens its grip, even as Jesus continues to say, “It is not so among you.”
To Grow One, to move from giving two percent of your income to giving three, from four to five, one to two, six to seven, or simply to start pledging, is a small act of spiritual rebellion, a small step away from our and our children’s captivity to the ways of the world, a small but very real step toward new life and new freedom in Christ.
Not that the world will grant us this freedom easily. It tries to lure us back.  “You can’t live without this.  You’ll never be happy without that.  Freedom means grabbing for more, not letting go of anything. It means getting others to serve you.”
And amidst the loud clamoring of the world, Jesus speaks softly and clearly to us.  “It is not so among you.”


[1] MaryAnn McKibben Dana, Sabbath in the Suburbs: A Family’s Experiment with Holy Time (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2012) 37-38.

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