STILL CALLED TO SUFFER, DARN IT!
A sermon Rev. Dr. Jack E. Skiles

September 27, 2009

James 3:13-4:3, 7-8; Mark 9:30-37

I have some personal habits that are very, how shall I say this, that are very disturbing to me. Now, don't get excited here thinking that I am going to do any great confession about my personal habits in such a way that will make any of you feel better about yours. The habits of mine that are on my mind this morning are my television watching behaviors.

I used to watch a lot of Barney. Even after my daughter escaped that period of her life, I could still be found watching it on occasion just to see how things were going. My wife has had a lifetime crush of Mr. Rogers and his neighborhood.

Today my television habits revolve around watching the news, America's Got Talent and American Idol. How absolutely horrifying that I subject myself to the news twice a day with the same regularity that I take my vitamins. As a child and as a teen I loved horror movies. Today, I just watch the daily doses of horror that we call news.

So last Wednesday evening, I watched with many of you the finale of America's Got Talent, the take off of England's show of the same name. I am wonderfully moved to tears watching Susan Boyle rise up out of her years of struggle and poverty, having devoted her life to caring for her parents, finally finding a venue for that voice of hers.

She sang Wednesday night in her American debut and then came the announcement that this year's American winner was Kentucky country boy, Kevin Skinner, whose last job before unemployment was that of a chicken catcher. He said it was not unusual for him to snag some 8,000 caged chickens in a day's work. Both Boyle and Skinner capture the essence of our American Dream scenario of rising from near obscurity to become the stars that we really all are in our hearts and souls.

I want you to know that I am suppressing my desire to tell you about caged chickens and their deplorable conditions. I have been a chicken catcher and I can tell you that this young man was not a chicken farmer, he was a hired hand doing a nasty and dirty job so that some conglomerate could have little chicken pieces filled with antibiotics put into cans of chicken soup and marketed to us as a loving food that our mothers in another generation would have made for us. Sadly for us as a people the deplorable conditions of this most significant food source of eggs and chickens will not be enhanced by Mr. Skinner having won a million dollar prize and becoming a country western star.

I celebrate that Mr. Skinner and Ms Boyle have made it big and that we are part of a societal system of government and economics that allows people to be successful beyond very humble and poverty stricken situations. What these two television shows do is throw out a fishing line to hundreds of thousands of people and they pull out one, two people and make them stars and make millions off those others who are mere players in a game that profits the already wealthy. Celebrity judges get paid million dollar packages to find the one or two fishes in the sea that will be invited to become stars. I enjoy the shows and I cringe that I participate in the process at all.

What would Jesus say about our quest to be standouts in our field, twinkling bright stars in the mass darkness of our Universe? The short answer is the easy the one. God surely celebrates with all of us who are over achievers and we who desire excellence with all the many gifts that we possess. But, let's allow ourselves once again to immerse ourselves in the Scripture stories that remind us not only the attitude we are to assume, but also the ultimate aim of our lives.

The disciples are in a most interesting scenario in this morning's glimpse into their life with Jesus. The disciples, men and women, we must assume. Though the women are not mentioned, we must always remind ourselves that the women are present and have more often than not been written out of the stories.

But, all of them have stars in their eyes. They get caught talking about who is going to be greatest when Jesus pulls them all together in God's throne room. They have glimpsed that Jesus is the long awaited Messiah and they are the ones who are with him. There are books deals to be signed. There are star studded dinners of lamb and the best wine as Jesus brings God's glory back to Israel and they are the close inner circle. Think of the advertising possibilities and promotional possibilities that will be ours being so closely aligned to the Messiah! They are saying to each other, “And those folks thought we were stupid to leave what jobs we had as chicken catchers to follow this guy, won't they be envious! Hollywood, Jerusalem, Rome here we come!

I'm not too harsh on those early disciples in my reflections on them. They were the first generation of folks to learn from our shared Master Teacher that what God most desires is not what the world teaches us that fame and success and the good life is all about. Jesus came teaching a very alternative view of what it means to be a woman or a man who has found salvation in God.

In last weeks reading the teaching on discipleship laid down this broad principle of losing one's life to find it. In this week's reading it becomes clearer what Jesus meant by that scary call to lose our lives in order to gain life. Jesus is calling us all to a servanthood salvation as an alternative to the quest for status and worldly power. And it is a reversal both of normal human expectations and of typical social systems. The earlier call to lose one's life in order to find it is now fleshed out not in terms of actual martyrdom but in terms of one's social conduct, you know how we act and what we seek with all our hearts and souls. To follow Jesus and find salvation is to adopt an alternative, decidedly counter cultural, style of life.

And then Jesus uses an object lesson to tell us what servant lives would look like. He takes a child and bounces the child on his knee, probably even hugs it and says when you welcome and embrace a child you are welcoming and embracing me. Now, what you don't get to see at that moment are the disciples taking two steps back and uttering under their breath, “Well, maybe this is not what I want to do after all.

We love children. We dote on them, give them special attention, watch over their every move, spend ourselves broke sending them to college and they are our number one priority. Not in Jesus' day.

John Pilch sheds helpful light on the customs and culture reflected in Jesus' action and words. Children in Jesus' day were lowest on the priority list. In our culture and common sense we can't even understand how pathetically children were understood. Next to zero value. You did not hear in Jesus' day, "Save the women and children first!"  Even more recently in medieval times, Pilch writes, "Mediterranean cultures put a low value on children: Thomas Aquinas taught that in a raging fire a husband was obligated to save his father first, then his mother, next his wife, and last of all his young children."

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Our contemporary culture would reverse that order, so it's easy for us to sentimentalize the action of Jesus in picking up a small child and exhorting his followers to give children's sermons. And, indeed in our minds when we read this scripture it is a sweet scene that it conjures up and we see pictures of Jesus in Sunday school class rooms tenderly cuddling white blue eyed children. It is indeed a sweet scene that we imagine, but that's not what is going on here. Jesus is once again saying something perplexing, even disconcerting and certainly provocative.

He tells us that if we want to gain true life, we should lose it. Now when we want to claim greatness, claim to have the best faith in the world, a spirituality that others envy and a for sure seat in heaven, preferably very close to the head table, Jesus tells us to desire not the best seat, but the lowest and last seat, even in this life. And then he reaches out for the human being lowest on the scale of power, the one least able to do anything for us in return and says, "Folks, when you bring this person into wholeness, into your life and not only welcome them, but embrace them, then, that is when you are welcoming me and God into your lives."

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It is so disconcerting for disciples then and today. I say that and perhaps it is just me. Jesus is asking me to invest the best in folks who can't pay me back today and who may not be able to ever. Jesus is reaching out to homeless alcoholics who stink and chicken catchers who can't carry a tune. Jesus is reaching out to convicts in jail and too...well, you fill in the blanks. We are a high functioning collegiate community where we reach out with eagerness to the best and the brightest and we are not being asked to stop doing that, but we are being asked to remember that we are not excused from reaching out to the least likely to ever attend our school and who will never do research and who mostly like will be a research statistic of ours and we are being told by Jesus to mostly value those who are not statically significant.

It is interesting to note that in our culture, most of us live and work in structures with a diagram that charts where the power to control lies. Jesus, Marty says, “presents the disciples with a new flowchart for organizing the kingdom of God.” And at the top of the chart are all those folks, those cultures, those groups, those other faiths that are the most challenging to deal with, the least fun to work with, at most risk of falling through cracks in society and that we would prefer just to pay others to deal with for us...and Jesus is saying, “No!” Our faith success depends on our pulling them to us and embracing them. Is it any wonder that folks walk away from such a faith or construct faith responses that have no demand of faithful service, but only liturgical feel good statements and for sure seat in heaven?

This passage in Mark's Gospel this morning is both short and powerful. Jesus' teaching is clear, and when he "breaks the silence and initiates instruction on this truth," Marty says, "he repackages the language of desire into the vocabulary of requirements. It all points to the creation of a new community with altered priorities. This new community would be one where the least of humankind count. And the least would not only count, they would be embraced." Actually, they wouldn't just be embraced; they would be served. Or, as Taylor puts it, "they wanted to know who was greatest, so he showed them: twenty-six inches tall, limited vocabulary, unemployed, zero net worth, nobody. God's agent. The last, the least of all."  if we want to welcome God into our lives then there in so one whom we may safely ignore.  No one whom we may safely ignore!

We might not consciously think about aspiring to greatness, let alone claim it openly among our friends and colleagues, but many of us long to see ourselves as faithful and righteous in the eyes of God. Dianne Bergant thinks most people, however, are "more concerned with success, beauty, strength, confidence and fame and those who enjoy them.  We extol those who have made a name for themselves, those who entertain us. We encourage people to be ambitious, to think of themselves first. Seldom is one's popularity based on righteousness." And yet, righteousness "is one of the pillars upon which the reign of God is established. Those who enter that reign must be gentle and merciful, faithful and sincere. They must be lovers of peace. The righteous must be willing to take the last place, to be the servant of all."  The righteous then, will be first in caring. That is the kind of Messiah we are choosing to emulate with our lives. Can you see why he was such a disappointment to so many and so challenging to us today and so rarely followed except in occasional personal piety?

The road to being a successful follower of Jesus is a hard one. It really is. Though repeatedly in the Gospel of Mark the disciples are called upon to be servant suffers, like Jesus; they are never credited in the Gospel with being successful. For us, too, the way of discipleship is long and much is expected of us, and we are asked to offer our lives, our priorities, or gifts, our talents, our very selves, and the honor, the power and place and prestige that we long for. The repetition throughout Mark's Gospel of where all of this is leading, the suffering and death of Jesus – reflects the deep human resistance to the transformation to which we are called, the gift of radical transformation of our lives that is offered to us.

Please we ask, let us contemplate honor, not the cross. And yet, how else can we every experience our resurrection and new life that is promised. How else can be experience true joy?

We are still called to be suffering servants in the way of Jesus, darn it. America's got talent, but it is not going from chicken catcher to a Hollywood Star. Our talent is reaching out to the poor, the tired, and the huddled masses that yearn to be free. Henry Ward Beecher said, “Greatness lies, not in being strong, but in the right using of strength. Helen Keller said, “I long to accomplish a great and noble task, but it is my chief duty to accomplish humble tasks as thought they were great and noble.

Jesus calls us and says, "Take up your cross, carry it and follow me." While it seems too hard, nothing is impossible with the God who will give us the strength to be true servants of God's most persuasive love.

Amen.