Trinity Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)
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TEXT: Mark 10:35-4
Imagine yourself in this scene:
Several months ago you started a new job
with a brand new company –
not just new to you, but really new.
The founder of the company is a dynamic person;
she draws people to her and inspires them.
It seems to be a case of
the right place at the right time;
people are flocking to hear
what your organization has to say.
And you’ve worked hard.
You’ve taken time away from your home and your family.
You’ve been on the road a lot.
You have enough frequent-flyer miles to travel
to Jupiter and back – first class!
And sometimes it’s been fun, sure,
but lots of the time it’s just down-and-dirty work.
But you’ve stuck with it;
you’ve been faithful, and you’ve been successful.
In fact, you’re clearly one of the boss’s favorites.
She often gives you special assignments
and singles you out for special attention.
So one day you make an appointment,
and go to her office to talk with her.
You remind her of everything that you’ve done:
the sacrifices you’ve made, the successes you’ve had.
And you conclude by saying that,
when the time is right,
you should be the person promoted to senior vice president
and get the beautiful office right next to hers,
with the view and everything.
Imagine how you would feel when she said this:
“I’m sorry, but you’ve got this all wrong.
You certainly have done excellent work,
and you’re a credit to this organization.
But our company policy is that the biggest promotions
go to the people who serve everyone else.
If you really aspire to be senior vice-president some day,
you need to quit what you’re doing now
and begin working in housekeeping
or in the secretarial pool.”
How bizarre those words would sound.
Working at the bottom of the corporate ladder
wasn’t what you had in mind
when you graduated with that shiny new M.B.A.!
And probably, as you leave her office,
you wonder if she isn’t just a tiny bit loony.
I can imagine that James and John, and the other ten,
must have sometimes wondered
the same thing about Jesus.
How could he say something like,
“Whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant,”
and “whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all.” ?!?
It’s not just that
servants or slaves did the menial labor,
the jobs that no one else wanted –
like washing the guests’ feet,
or cleaning out the stables –
They were also, for the most part, foreigners, captured in war,
or the children of those foreigners.
They had no legal rights,
no religious freedom, no social standing.
They were nobodies:
useful as tools, worthless as humans.
Why would Jesus tell the twelve
they should become something like that?
After all they had already done with him and for him?
It’s not what they had in mind!
It seems like,
the deeper they – and we – get into discipleship,
the stranger a proposition it becomes.
It’s all upside-down and backwards
from how we do things in what we call “normal” life.
After all, whether you’re working in a bank,
or for the school district, or in the mall, or at McDonald’s,
you don’t become the most powerful person in the company
by mopping the floors and making the coffee.
I certainly learned that the three years that I lived in Austin,
and did mostly temp work.
You don’t move up the corporate ladder
by serving other people and doing it well.
When you start at the bottom,
you stay there.
Especially if you do it well,
and everyone gets used to that level of service!
Being servant to everyone doesn’t get you very far
in the world we live in.
And yet,
Jesus’ world wasn’t all that different from ours
in this regard . . .
You need only to listen to James and John
to catch onto that pretty quickly.
They are wanting Jesus to affirm their ministry
by worldly standards:
by allowing them to sit at his right and left hand.
The place where the king’s, or emperor’s, whatever;
most trusted friends and advisers would sit.
A place of honor and status.
Notice also that by asking this question,
they show that they are trying to define Jesus
solely by the world’s standards as well.
They want to label him as a wise and benevolent king –
which he is! --
but that’s all they want him to be.
Be the king, be in charge,
hand out kingly favors,
strike down any and all who oppose him.
Jesus quickly corrects them.
Gentile rulers lord it over their people, he says.
They exercise authority over their followers.
We do it differently.
Jesus’ followers wanted him to be a leader on their terms,
on the world’s terms.
They certainly found some support in the Old Testament, their scripture,
for the notion that the Messiah
would have power in a worldly sense;
like a king, or at the very least,
like a very influential high priest.
They weren’t just making all this up
out of their own wishful thinking!
But Jesus saw himself
more in the light of other, different, portions of scripture.
Like what we read in some of the servant passages of Isaiah:
“He was oppressed and he was afflicted . . .
stricken for the transgression of my people.
They made his grave with the wicked,
although he had done no violence
and there was no deceit in his mouth.
. . . he was numbered with the transgressors;
yet he bore the sin of many,
and made intercession for the transgressors.”
That doesn’t sound much like a king, does it?
It doesn’t even sound much like a priest,
at least, in the Jewish mindset of that time.
It sounds a whole lot more like . . . a servant.
Someone who is powerless,
whether by circumstance or by choice.
He was oppressed and afflicted –
that’s what happens to slaves, not kings.
It seems that Jesus really does mean
all this business about being everyone’s servant.
If he, the son of God, is willing to do it . . .
then it’s time for us to take another look at it.
As I said earlier, slaves were, for the most part, foreigners.
They were people
who had been captured as the result of war or skirmishes –
frequently women and children,
because the men were killed in the battles –
and then were brought back to serve their conquerors.
Now most of us are not foreigners in a literal sense . . .
most of us were born in this country,
and quite a few of us, not too far from here!
We weren’t dragged away to be enslaved to someone else.
But on another level,
simply by virtue of our being Christian,
we are to some extent strangers in a strange land.
We are in the world, but not of it.
We do not and cannot share
some of the prevailing values in our society.
The followers of Jesus Christ value giving;
our society values spending and owning,
even if you have to go into debt to do so.
Christianity values honesty, truthfulness, integrity;
our culture is fascinated by clever deceptions,
and the greatest sin is not lying,
but getting caught at it.
Our faith places value in peacemaking and forgiveness;
our world values fighting and crushing your opponent
so he won’t bother you again.
We are foreigners here, to a great extent.
Our Christian faith and our culture are not one and the same;
in fact, they are often contradictory.
And, like the slaves of old,
we must struggle constantly to preserve our way –
God’s way, in this case –
in the face of overwhelming pressures
to conform to everyone else’s way.
Though it’s not quite what we had in mind,
we are like slaves in this regard.
We are foreigners in our own land.
Now there’s also another sense in which
we need to be like slaves . . .
And this is going to sound strange at first,
but stick with me!
I said earlier
that slaves were considered useful like a tool,
but worthless as human beings.
And there’s a sense in which
we need to consider ourselves worthless, too,
by human standards.
We cannot let other people define our worth,
based on what we do or do not do,
according to their standards.
Ultimately, our worth comes from God and God only,
not from humans.
Now I realize that’s easier to say than to believe, sometimes.
Human beings seem much nearer to us than God;
their voices seem to be louder, and clearer.
So it’s easy to get caught up in
what other people are saying and thinking about us,
whether it’s good or bad.
That happened to the disciples a lot,
and it happens to us.
Yet somewhere along the way,
we must come to the realization that
we have worth as children of God,
no matter what humans are saying about us.
Even if we were literally slaves,
we would be of value to God.
And so even if the world wants to write us off
as hopelessly naďve
and worthless for any practical reason . . .
God still values us and will use us
for God’s own purposes.
And that’s much more important.
Lastly, of course, we are like servants
in that we are called on to serve others,
inside our own fellowship and outside it as well.
That’s a crucial element of who we are as people of God.
And it’s one that sometimes
we don’t hear as much about as perhaps we should.
Often we Christians can get so caught up in other issues.
We’ll debate:
What exactly should we believe about
the Bible, and God, and Jesus?
What are we going to do with the church budget?
Whom should we ordain, and whom should we not?
and lots of other things, all of which may be important,
but which tend to distract us
from our servant role.
You see, we are the ones who must feed the hungry,
even if they are sometimes unwashed and ungrateful.
We are the ones who must shelter the homeless,
even if some of them are mentally ill and some are drug addicts.
We are the ones who must visit those in prison,
even if they are there for a very good reason.
We are the ones who must work for peace,
even with enemies we truly fear and hate.
In short, we are the ones who must continue to care for the world,
though we are often surrounded by people
who care only for themselves.
We are the servants of the world,
though that might not be what we had in mind
when we first decided to follow Jesus.
A story:
A very good man died and went to heaven.
St. Peter met him at the gate, hugged him,
flung the gates open wide, and welcomed him in.
It was everything he had ever imagined or heard about:
the gold and alabaster,
the milk and honey.
So for quite a while he just wandered the streets in ecstasy –
everything was so beautiful.
But soon he noticed:
he hadn’t seen anyone else there.
He walked and walked a while longer—
still, not another human (or former human) to be seen.
So he went back to the pearly gates looking for Peter.
“Are you sure this is heaven?” he asked.
Peter assured him that this was the place.
“But where is everyone?
Where are the prophets?
Where are the saints?
Where are the disciples, and Jesus himself?!”
“Oh, them,” said St. Peter.
“They’ve all gone down to hell
to minister to the damned.
Would you like to join them?
I’ll show you the way.”
A wonderful thing starts to happen:
The closer we get to Jesus Christ,
the more comfortable the servant role becomes.
It’s always going to be a struggle,
because we live in a world that defines greatness
very differently.
But there is a joy to be found in servanthood
that nothing else can match.
It’s not what we had in mind . . .
It’s better.
Thanks be to God!
Amen.