Sermon: Long Journey to Something New

Mark 9:30-37

Long Journey to Something New

James Sledge                                                                                       September 20, 2015

How many of you remember having to write essays or papers in high school or college of a certain word number? Some of you are no doubt enjoying this experience right now, and some of our younger worshipers have this to look forward to as you get a bit older. What word count would you expect for a modest, high school essay? What about a term paper for a college class? How about a Ph.D. dissertation? Anyone here who’s done one and can say? Forty or fifty thousand words sound reasonable?

I ask because I want us to think for a moment about what is required to cover a major topic in a fair amount of detail and in a good deal of depth. For example, if you were going to write something that thoroughly covered what someone would need to know to live a life of deep Christian faith and discipleship, how many words would suffice?

Of course we do have a book that Presbyterians say is the unique and authoritative witness to Jesus and for life and faith. But if anyone had ever submitted the Bible as a dissertation or as any other sort of publication, surely some academic advisor or editor would have quickly returned it saying, “Get back to me when you’ve done some serious trimming and editing.”

The Bible weighs in at somewhere near 800,000 words. By comparison, Tolstoy’s War and Peace is a bit over 500,000. If you were God and wanted to explain this faith thing to folks, don’t you think you could have come up with a nice pamphlet, or at least something you could read in a few afternoons? Why on earth have something of this magnitude, a text that gets squeezed into a single book only because of tiny print and ridiculously thin sheets of paper?

The Bible is an unbelievably complex mix of stories and myths and poems and songs and rules and advice and letters and theology and teachings. Yet we Christians often examine a few verses here or there and then attempt to distill great theological truths or axioms from them. I engage is something of this sort most Sundays when I deliver a sermon rooted in a tiny handful of the Bible’s 800,000 words, 175 words in the case of today’s gospel reading.

Without some care and restraint, there is a danger of such efforts being akin to carefully examining the earlobe of the Mona Lisa with a microscope and then proclaiming to understand the significance of the entire painting.

When you think about it, the Bible is a strange and wonderful way to make God known to us, to draw us into relationship with this God. It isn’t a bit of empirical information to be learned. Rather it is an amazing array of experiences and stories that share how God has been encountered in a variety of contexts. It is not unlike getting to know another person, and without understanding context and circumstances, without knowing to whom certain words were spoken, it is easy to misconstrue or misunderstand.

The verses we heard this morning are just one small facet of a new way of living and being that Jesus is trying to teach to his followers. If nothing else, today’s reading makes clear how difficult a time Jesus is having. This is second time Jesus has told the disciples that he will be killed. The first time Peter rebuked him. This time the disciples don’t understand, but they are afraid to ask Jesus about it..

I wonder why they’re afraid. Are they worried about saying something wrong? Or are they beginning to understand but would rather not have confirmation?

One thing is clear; they are still very much at home in an old way of living and being. They quickly move past Jesus’ upcoming death to questions of rank. Who will be the first inducted into the Disciple Hall of Fame? And this time they know full well that their conversation doesn’t fit with the new way of Jesus. They remain silent when Jesus asks them about it because they know what he thinks of their behavior.

And so Jesus speaks of servants and children. These aren’t generic teachings. They are directed at those who would follow Jesus yet still obsess about being at the front of the line, who keep comparing themselves to others in the hopes of feeling superior.

Placing a child in their midst gets understood a lot of different ways. Certainly Jesus is not speaking of the sweetness and innocence of children as that is largely a modern concept. But children were at the back of most lines in Jesus’ day.

Funny thing is that even after this teaching about a child, the disciples still try to shoo children away from Jesus just a few verses later. Who’s the greatest? Children don’t count. Jesus keeps teaching and showing the disciples a new way, but they seem hopelessly stuck in old ways. Not so different from us.

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When I was in college, I did a bit of fencing, specifically foil. That’s the one where you can only score by touching with the blade’s tip while your arm is straight with thee elbow locked. No hacking allowed.

The sport of fencing was originally developed to teach the real thing without pupils getting themselves killed, and so the rules emphasize protecting yourself. If your opponent threatens you, you must make a defensive move prior to counterattacking. Usually this involves slight movements of your arm and wrist to parry the opponent’s blade. Done well, it is beautiful and ballet like. Arms move back and forth as wrists shift the blade angle, the two foils doing a tight little dance as the fencers move back and forth. At least that’s what it looks like when it’s done well.

When you first learn to fence, a coach teaches you all these dance moves with no opponent. You learn the strange footwork that lets you move forward and back while staying in correct fighting position the entire time. You learn the different positions of arm and blade. Then you pair up with another fencer and do the dance in choreographed, slow motion. Your opponent extends his blade; you parry and go on the attack. In slow motion, it looks almost like the ballet it is meant to be.

Then comes the first time you actually fence, the real thing. No choreography. You must react to what happens in front of you, and rarely is it pretty. The first time an opponent lunges at you, foil aimed right at your heart, all those beautiful dance moves disappear. You swat at the foil like a kid sword fighting with a stick in the back yard. Even if you manage to deflect the attack, you are now so out of position that you are a sitting duck for the next lunge.

It takes a lot of practice, a lot of repetition, to maintain those delicate dance moves when the opponent attacks. But with time and effort, it starts to become more natural.  Panicked swats give way to subtle movements and tight parries, and the ballet begins to emerge.

Learning the way of Jesus is a bit like learning to fence. It is not something that comes naturally. Jesus’ way is so different. It asks us to act and react in ways that are at odds with much we have learned. We see that with the disciples in our scripture today, and in many other readings. They keep lapsing back into old ways, over and over. At times, you can see how frustrated Jesus gets with them. But he never gives up on them. He keeps teaching, keeps coaching.

Particularly in Mark’s gospel, the disciples never quite seem to get it. They keep flailing, never quite learning the discipleship ballet. Yet somehow, in the aftermath of the cross and resurrection, they carry the way of Jesus out into the world, and they found the Church.

They have now passed the job on to us, but like them, we struggle to learn the strange ways of Jesus. We lapse easily back into the ways of worrying about who’s first, striving to get our share before someone else does, loving our neighbor only when it’s easy or convenient.

But Jesus has infinite patience with us. He keeps teaching, keeps coaching, keeps encouraging us to do the practice and repetition needed to learn this new way of living that is the way of true life.

That is why we, the church, exist. We are a community called to support and encourage each other as we learn the ways of Jesus, as we practice those ways, as we work together to embody Christ for the world.

It is not easy. It feels unnatural at first. We mess up a lot, but no more than those original disciples. Who would have ever predicted or imagined that they would accomplish what they did? And with Jesus teaching us, and the Holy Spirit empowering us, there’s no telling what we might do.