September 23, 2012 – Mark 9:30-37
Mark 9:30-37
The Greatest
17th Sunday after Pentecost [Lectionary 25] – September 23, 2012
First Lutheran Church – Winnipeg, MB
A couple of weeks ago Jesus healed a foreign Syro-Phoenician woman way out in nowhere-ville.
And he learned something that surprised him:
He learned how vast is the scope of God’s healing concern that is pulsing through him.
Is not limited to the Jewish people but extends to all people.
That he is truly a servant of all people.
He tells the disciples this morning that he will serve all people by dying for love
Even of his enemies and forgiving them when they do it.
Typically, though, the disciples don’t get it, and they’re afraid to ask him more.
You kind of wonder what would have happened if the disciples had asked him about it.
What kind of conversation would have opened up?
What kind of new and deeper relationship with Jesus would they have had?
Maybe – as usual – these disciples are not so very different from us.
It’s hard to admit that there are some things you don’t know.
And it’s hard to ask difficult questions.
This morning – as a way of getting going – I’m going to invite you to jot down on
A piece of paper a question about faith, about God, or about the Bible that you have or
That you struggle with and that it’s hard for you to ask.
Write it down now, and then put it on the offering plate, as a way of remembering that
We not only give God our time, talents and money but also
our questions, our challenges and our doubts. (Lose)
Well: back to our sermon.
Since the disciples don’t ask Jesus a question, Jesus turns the tables on them and
Asks them a difficult question: What were you arguing about as we walked?
And it’s difficult for them because even though they know – they know! – that
Jesus has just been talking about the servant way of the cross,
They have been arguing about who is the greatest among them.
They have rejected their teacher’s posture of service.
Their wish is to become great by human standards.
But the greatest, Jesus says,
are those who put aside their greatness in order to become small for others.
See, the thing is, is that in Jesus, God lays aside divine power and glory and might
And heavenly divine life in order to be with us.
The good news this morning is that Jesus is not concerned with greatness.
The good news this morning is that Jesus lays aside the comfort and luxury of divine life
In order to come and be with us less than divine creatures.
I don’t know what all he lays aside: maybe watching the 24 hour Heaven Television Network
that shows the Heavenly Saints Football Team never losing a single game.
Maybe the Jets season tickets he has in heaven that he will actually be able to use because
There are no labour disputes in heaven because there is no money in heaven and
People just play hockey because they love it.
I don’t know, but I know for sure that he leaves behind the perfectly loving life of
The Triune God, the life in which the three persons of the Trinity exist in a
Perfectly united circle of endless giving to one another and
Endless beautiful receiving from one another.
Jesus leaves all that in order to come to us less than divine creatures . . . in order to
be with us and invite us into that life.
This costs him not only the 24 hour Heaven Television Network and the Jets season tickets.
As he says this morning, in order to serve in this way, this is going to cost him his life.
This is what love looks like.
He comes not as a great one,
but as a small one, as one who has voluntarily laid aside greatness to be with the small.
He comes as a peasant in order to love the peasant.
He comes as a poor one in order to love the poor one.
He comes as a misunderstood one in order to love the misunderstood.
He comes as an outcast in order to love the outcast.
He comes as one who suffers in order to love the suffering.
He comes to invite us all into the endless giving and endless receiving and eternal sharing of the
Triune God’s divine life.
In Christ, for our sake and for our benefit, God becomes small for us.
Such is the measure of divine love. Such is the measure of all love.
In our baptisms we receive the Spirit that was at work in Jesus,
The resurrection life that he predicts for himself this morning.
The resurrection life that is given to us doesn’t empower us for domination over others.
It empowers us to serve, to become small for others in the way that Jesus became small for us:
So that we can be in those places where they need us most.
The small can go to those places where the great cannot and would not.
In Jesus’ reckoning – in contrast to the disciples’ say of thinking –
we become great when we voluntarily choose to become small for others.
As if to answer the disciples’ question about who is the greatest,
Jesus plops the greatest one right down in their midst: a child.
The ancient world had none of the sentimentality about children that we have.
Children in the ancient world were nothing.
They had no importance in themselves.
In an honour culture, children had no honour and so had nothing to give you.
So they were beneath your notice.
For Jesus, though, they represent all the vulnerable people he loved and served in his ministry:
The hungry, the poor, the sick, the possessed, the slaves, the women, the cast out.
Who is the greatest in God’s eyes?
As the preacher Barbara Brown Taylor observes,
Jesus didn’t just tell the disciples who was the greatest, he showed them:
Twenty-six inches tall, limited vocabulary, unemployed, zero net worth, nobody. God’s agent.
In Jesus’ reckoning, Christian life is never really about us; Christian life is about the vulnerable.
Who is your neighbour? The one you can serve in their need.
Who is the greatest? The small one, the very least, the most vulnerable, whom you can embrace.
So here is my hard question for this morning: where is God when tragedy strikes?
Particularly when tragedy strikes the vulnerable who are least able to recover from it.
We certainly want to ask why God allows these kinds of things to happen.
Jesus, though, rarely gives us a direct answer to such questions.
Instead, Jesus simply embraces and serves the suffering.
And, indeed, in his life and in his suffering and crucifixion, Jesus completely
Identifies himself with the vulnerable and tragedy-struck.
He becomes the vulnerable. He becomes the tragedy struck. He becomes the suffering.
In him, God becomes the vulnerable,
God becomes the tragedy struck, God becomes the suffering.
Whoever welcomes one such of these in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me
Welcomes not me but the one who sent me, he says to the disciples this morning.
Being a disciple of Jesus means not responding to tragedy with our questions only.
Being a disciple means above all responding by serving the vulnerable and the tragedy struck.
Canadian Lutheran World Relief is an organization that is dedicated to doing this on our behalf
In Canada and throughout the world.
Since 2005 those of us who support CLWR have contributed $4.3 million – 4.3 million! – toward
emergency appeals, responding to tragedies such as the Pakistan floods,
drought in Africa, tsunamis in southeast Asia and Japan,
and earthquakes in places such as China, Iran, Chile, and Haiti.
And in one of its development programs in Africa, the vulnerable are made less vulnerable:
In Kenya, there is a girl, not much more than a child, whose days used to be consumed by
Hauling water for her family to her village from a spring 20 kilometers away.
This prevented her from going to school and ensured that
she and her family would continue to live in poverty.
Thanks to the work of CLWR, though, local wells become a reality in rural villages like this one
Throughout Africa so that this girl and countless children like her can spend their time
Not hauling water but going to school and becoming less vulnerable.
The work that CLWR does, the work of becoming small for others where we are needed,
The work of embracing and protecting the vulnerable wherever they may be found
As an expression of God’s love for all people,
The work of truly becoming the servant of all, is work that it does on behalf of all of us.
Today is a day to give thanks for that work and it is a day to pray for the furthering of that work.
It is a day for us to participate in that work by becoming less great by giving some of our
Wealth toward it.
It is a day for us to embrace, with CLWR, those who are greatest in God’s eyes.
And it is a day for us to be strengthened for our common service by the one who
Once again becomes small for us in a little bread, in a little wine,
That he may live in us less than divine creatures,
that we may become in some measure divine.
So together let us say, “Amen.”
Pastor Michael Kurtz
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