Sermon for September 24, 2006

Chris Morck 

Last week we heard what is commonly referred to as the first passion prediction.  Today we hear the second.  Through these two Gospel readings we see that Jesus is not giving the disciples much to hang on to, much to encourage them to stay on.  He is being blunt and really quite harsh.  At least for me it is hard to feel the severity of what Jesus says here.  I think the passages have been domesticated, and it is hard to hear Jesus as his disciples might have heard him.  Jesus strikes a severe blow to the disciples’ ideas about who he was and what following him would mean.  

In the reading last week the disciples tell Jesus they think he is the Messiah, the Anointed One.  It seems that the expectation was for a triumphal judge, warrior, and king using political and military power to achieve certain ends.  Yet Jesus says that he will suffer and be killed.  

Today we hear Jesus tell them again that he will be killed.  This time the disciples were too afraid to respond.  Along the way, though, they are arguing about status.  It seems that their views have not changed about who Jesus is, how this whole thing is working out, and what they are going to get out of it.  In response, Jesus says that those who welcome a little child welcome him.  Jesus expects this of his followers.  

Hearing this now might not have quite the same effect on us as it had on the disciples.  We read this now often linking Jesus’ talk about a child to a child’s innocence, trust, or humility.  But it doesn’t seem that Jesus’ hearers would so readily connect these ideas to childhood.  During Jesus’ time, just as it still is true in many parts of the world, childhood was incredibly precarious, with high infant and child mortality rates.  Children were the weakest, the least powerful, living in constant uncertainty and insecurity.  Children were the most vulnerable members of society.  And, they were probably not even thought of as members of the society.  I read that they were most probably thought of as little more than property.  They had no status.  

So, like what we read from last week, this week Jesus again unnerves the disciples.  What Jesus says must have been a terrible shock.  They are arguing about status, and Jesus says to them – “I have no status.  Welcoming a child is like welcoming me, yet you are thinking about how great you are.  And, do you know what it means to follow me?  To follow me, to welcome me, is to welcome those who have no status in the world’s eyes.  It is to welcome those who are most vulnerable, those who are most marginalized.”

Later, in Mark 10, Jesus tells the disciples that the kingdom of God belongs specifically to the little children.  And, one must be like a little child to enter the kingdom at all.  Jesus tells them that those who partake in the kingdom of God are those who are least in the eyes of the world.  

What Jesus says to his disciples here is not new.  It intimately connects to what we know of God through the Exodus, the Law, and the prophets.  From the very beginning of the Scriptures God’s relationship with humankind is shown to be one of defense of the weak, the powerless, the afflicted and the oppressed, of loving care for the poor, the widow, the orphan and the alien.  God, whose love is universal, is not neutral in the midst of inequality and suffering.  As Jesus preached it and as we read in James, God is on the side of those who are excluded.   

Jesus embodies this God.  Jesus embodies the hope of those deprived of hope.  Jesus represents our yearning for justice.  Jesus is the savior who defends the weak and ushers in peace and reconciliation.  

To me, what Jesus says to the disciples also comes from an understanding of the way that the systems of the world work, and the cost of succeeding through these.  Jesus recognizes the true cost of affluence, power, and privilege, how they are often obtained and maintained, and how this is directly opposed to the way and reign of God.  

What we read in James also recognizes that the prosperity and the privilege of the few is often built on the backs of the impoverished and exploited.  And, James also talks about status.  He talks about the partiality, envy, ambition, and greed that are used to attain it.  He says that this is at the root of our violence.  

James contrasts the dominant realities of violence to the way of God characterized by peace and mercy.  We hear that this peace must be made.  James says that peace is not the mere absence of violence.  Peace must be sown, it must be cultivated.

What does this talk about peace mean for us when so much of our own society is built upon violence?  When the name of Jesus is even used to justify this violence?  And not just outright war, although that is true enough.  Look also at how so much of our economy depends upon violence in our dumping, mining, drilling, slashing, dredging, burning.  

Depending on where and who we are in society, we can be largely shielded from these realities.  The dominant groups in society, of which I am a part, are the last to have to see this violence.  Those of us who have affluence, power, and privilege often have the largest stake in creating the violence, yet are the last to be overtly affected by it.  This violence might be more difficult to obscure if I were in a southern Black community where we all dump our waste or a rural White community where we dump our corporate toxins.  

The violence is also hidden from me because I am immersed in this context, in this life.  In a sense, my way of life is partly sustained by violence.  It is something which I have been nurtured within and which I economically and existentially depend upon on a daily basis.  This violence might be more difficult to hide if I were in an indigenous community in Ecuador that has been recently reorganized and whose land is being stripped and polluted for our minerals and our petroleum.  

And often the violence that is not directly hidden is concealed.  Its nature and meaning is distorted and obscured.  Ecological degradation is named “progress.”  Contamination becomes an “externality.”  In war as in the economy we see this – it is not torture, it is “interrogation,” it is “protecting the innocent.”   Overt aggression becomes “peace-keeping” or “defense.”  It is not murder; it is “collateral damage.”   

This is not useless meandering or browbeating I am doing here.  The readings for today deal directly with violence and peace and the nature of the reign of God in the world.  What does peace mean in our context?  How do we pursue it?  And I am not talking about “over there somewhere,” but right here, in our own communities.  The pursuit of peace is a defining point for those who follow Jesus.  This peace is an active, intentional, and often difficult journey.

For us to call Jesus the Christ is to make the commitment to align ourselves with him and his way at the expense of any idol or god, be it even security in our own standard of living and way of life.  Jesus lived out the reality of the reign of God in the midst of the world as it is, and he calls his followers to the same.

Looking at all of this, I see that I am not well-equipped to pursue the reign of God, to actively pursue God’s peace and reject my own and the world’s violence.  I feel completely inadequate.   I feel overwhelmed by the violence within myself just as I feel it in the world around me.  I lack imagination of what could be, of alternatives.  Maybe you, too, feel this.  

And so, you probably already see that we need others in order to live out the good news, to participate in the reign of God in the world.  We need relationship to help us in our pursuit of peace.  We need others to help us see outside of our violence, to help change and grow our ways of thinking and being.  All of us here can probably think of ways in which we have been changed, ways in which we have come to know ourselves and the world more clearly through relationship.  

We need others to help us see the ways within us that lead us both to and away from God.  We need others to build hope where we feel despair.  We need others to help our despair be a call to repentance and action instead of leading to shame.  And, others need us.  We need each other to help create something new, to live out the gospel.  This is mission.

Mission needs and creates radical new relationships and communities between all peoples and groups.  Through it we create, with God’s help, new ways of being. We partner with others in life-giving ways.  Through these new relationships we are all changed and avenues are opened up through which we can know ourselves and our God more fully.  As we allow ourselves to be changed, relationships of companionship and partnership can be created and bear fruit, giving birth to something new, something bearing hope for all of us.  

These relationships are icons of the reign of God, visibly showing the world who God is.  Through the lives of people and communities pursuing these relationships, we preach the good news.  We show the world who God is as Jesus did.  We call the world to repentance as Jesus did.  We heal the world as Jesus did.  God does these things through us as we pursue peace and reject violence.  As we do this in community.  

Obviously then, mission is not somewhere “over there.”  It can be, of course.  For example, part of this is my family and I living in Ecuador to partner with the Diocese of Central Ecuador and the Latin American Council of Churches.  This is a part of the big picture, but in some ways maybe an easier part.  Just by going “over there” we can deceive ourselves into thinking that this is it.  

Mission is here.  Pursuing and embodying communities of peace, of reconciliation, of knowing others and being known.  This is what I have learned from St. James’s.  For me, St. James’s has been an icon of the reign of God.  I have seen God’s reign through the community itself, in its worship, its prayer and its action.  I have seen it as St. James’s strives to be a place that holds us all, a place where we can all come to partake in the oftentimes messy stuff of relationship through worship and dialogue, change and growth.  And I have seen God’s reign through relationships I have here.  It is in part because of what I have seen here, what Trish and I have experienced here, that we can take this step out to Ecuador.  We can pursue these missional relationships because we have experienced them ourselves.

Let us all then, with God’s help, continue to follow after the Anointed One’s call to mission, being partners with God in God’s reign in our communities and in the world.