Knowing our place

 

Mark 10: 35-45
New Ark United Church of Christ, Newark, DE
October 17, 2021

A common and frankly overused interpretation of this passage is that Jesus is scolding James and John for seeking power and elevation, perhaps because our culture supports and overwhelmingly rewards such behavior and is typically seen as antithetical to the gospel. Yet in the early 1st century, then as now, power and elevation were how things got done in Roman society. Jesus also had had an earlier conversation with his disciples regarding the thrones they would inherit as part of God’s eternal realm. Jesus is not chastising them for being a product of their culture but rather he is pointedly asking James and John if they realize, if they understand what they are getting themselves into.



Coveting power and elevation isn’t fundamentally wrong, especially when one is disempowered and marginalized. After all, it’s one way things get done. Yet asking to be at the right and left of Jesus in glory entails a baptism in solidarity with the dispossessed and drinking from a cup Jesus prayed he could let pass him by.



In the Academy award winning film about Gandhi, there’s a scene in which a group of well-dressed and well-spoken Cambridge University students offer their help to the Mahatma, who is dressed only in a homespun loincloth and shawl. He tells them that the work of documenting the abuses of the British empire may take months. The students agree willingly. Gandhi tells them they will have to live not only like peasants but with them as well. They nod their heads soberly. He then tells them there will be risks and their nods are just that much reluctant.

Raquel Annette St. Clair, in her book Call and Consequences: A Womanist Reading of Mark, writes, “We are called to engage in life-affirming, God-glorifying, agony-eradicating ministry. We are called to partner with Jesus in service, not pain. Pain is a consequence of discipleship. It is not a lifestyle, a life sentence, or a life goal. Pain only signals the level of opposition to ministry. It is not the measure of discipleship; ministry is.”



It's the part of the gospel, the “good news”, with which we have the most difficulty. If someone strikes you, offer the other cheek. If you got two coats, give one away. Take all you have, sell it, and give it to the poor. Forgive seven times seventy. Love your enemies and pray for them. Take up your cross and follow me. Whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. Not exactly Christianity’s strongest selling points. Theologian G.K. Chesterton said that it’s not that “the Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.”

Yesterday in the Central Atlantic Conference annual meeting, delegates from New Jersey and Delaware, West Virginia and Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia discussed and voted on a resolution of the United Church of Christ witnessing a White Supremacy free zone, submitted from the Potomac Association. Those who voiced their opposition to the resolution objected not to its intent but to its provocative and what they considered to be inflammatory language. But if calling White supremacy an idol, that Whiteness itself is an idol, and that we are to tear down such idols is considered inflammatory, then our Jesus must be just as White as is most of the United Church of Christ. All lives will not matter until Black Lives Matter.



Archbishop and martyr Oscar Romero wrote, “A church that does not provoke any crisis, preach a gospel that does not unsettle, proclaim a word of God that does not get under anyone's skin or a word of God that does not touch the real sin of the society in which it is being proclaimed: what kind of gospel is that?” If the death of George Floyd and countless others before him and people of color who have been killed since that awful day have taught us anything, it is up to White people to decenter Whiteness and put an end to White supremacy.

It is within the power and elevation of White people to stop all violence against non-White people.



It is within the power and elevation of cisgender men to stop all violence against women, transgender, and gender-nonconforming people.



It is within the power and elevation of heterosexual people to stop all violence and othering of the LGBTQIA+ community.



It is within the power and elevation of the wealthy (and that includes me) to stop the violence of poverty and the violence of living on the edge of poverty.



It is within the power and elevation of Congress to ensure that every vote counts.



It is within the power and elevation of humankind to restrain its carbon footprint and safeguard a future not only for the human race but for life on this planet.



It is within the power and elevation of adults to protect children from a deadly virus.



It is within the power and elevation of any who have any kind of privilege to lift up the marginalized and criminalized; to take ourselves out of the role of main character in the story and center the ones that capitalism and empire demean and dispose of.



Christian activist and monastic Shane Claiborne wisely said, “Those who follow Jesus should attract the same people Jesus attracted and frustrate the same people Jesus frustrated.” If we’re frustrated with Jesus and his gospel, then we’re the problem.

To be slave of all and servant of all means to be master of none. To be Church means to resist our habitual identities of clan and race and culture and instead live in a covenant that transcends our differences. To be Church means to arrange our finances around those who are more vulnerable than we are. To be Church means to rebel against perfectionism, consumerism, against the forces that dehumanize and devalue, that make us slaves to empire rather than servants of love.



When we join up with Jesus, we are uniting ourselves with sex workers and thieves, drunkards and gluttons, with the disabled and neurodivergent, with queers and the poor, in a holy union that like marriage will take us through joy and sorrow, sickness and health, plenty and want, without a clue as to how it’s going to turn out. But we will learn to love well and to strive to be joyful even though we know all the facts. Amen.

A Franciscan Benediction



MAY GOD BLESS YOU with discomfort,
at easy answers, half-truths,
and superficial relationships
so that you may live
deep within your heart.

May God bless you with anger
at injustice, oppression,
and exploitation of people,
so that you may work for
justice, freedom and peace.

May God bless you with tears,
to shed for those who suffer pain,
rejection, hunger, and war,
so that you may reach out your hand
to comfort them and
to turn their pain to joy.

And may God bless you
with enough foolishness
to believe that you can
make a difference in the world,
so that you can do
what others claim cannot be done,
to bring justice and kindness
to all our children and the poor.

Amen.