Norton Heights congregation 10/18/09

here's one of my more controversial sermons I preached this Fall 2009 as we at Norton Heights congregation were developing the very first Stonewall Ministry service on 11/1/09. We were experiencing some congregational disunity regarding the new ministerial and pastoral acceptance of LGBT people into the life of the congregation. This was my limited attempt to help. I am not sure it really did any good.

WE ARE ABLE
Sermon leon d berg 10/18/09 Norton Heights

Read Mark 10:32-45 NRSV (pew Bible page 36, NT)
“Please read along with me or listen reverently to the Word of God for God’s people today”
32 They were on the road, going up to Jerusalem, and Jesus was walking ahead of them; they were amazed, and those who followed were afraid. He took the twelve aside again and began to tell them what was to happen to him, 33saying, ‘See, we are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be handed over to the chief priests and the scribes, and they will condemn him to death; then they will hand him over to the Gentiles; 34they will mock him, and spit upon him, and flog him, and kill him; and after three days he will rise again.’
35 James and John, the sons of Zebedee, came forward to him and said to him, ‘Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.’ 36And he said to them, ‘What is it you want me to do for you?’ 37And they said to him, ‘Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory.’ 38But Jesus said to them, ‘You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?’ 39They replied, ‘We are able.’ Then Jesus said to them, ‘The cup that I drink you will drink; and with the baptism with which I am baptized, you will be baptized; 40but to sit at my right hand or at my left is not mine to grant, but it is for those for whom it has been prepared.’
41 When the ten heard this, they began to be angry with James and John. 42So Jesus called them and said to them, ‘You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. 43But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, 44and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. 45For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.’
Thanks be to God for the Word of God today and all God’s People said … AMEN!

I.   Let’s take a closer look at this story. This part of the life of Jesus is what I call the Pre Passion Period. Passion meaning the atonement in the Garden, the crucifixion on the Hill; and the Resurrection at the Tomb. In the Gospel’s timeline, today’s reading is only a few days from these momentous events. Jesus has spent almost three years teaching the disciples about His mission. Jesus has in fact just reminded all the disciples what will happen to him, how he will be betrayed, condemned, mocked, spit on, whipped like a criminal and killed, but then rise again. Even though he had preached and preached to them about the cost of discipleship over 3 years, they still didn’t get it.

A.   There is a wonderful button and bumper sticker that you might have seen, "Jesus loves you, but I’m his favorite." That’s what we all want—not a life of suffering and service, but to be Jesus’ favorite. That’s surely what James and John wanted, those presumptuous “sons of Thunder” as Jesus had nicknamed them. Servant ministry is not what James and John wanted, and I would venture to say, it’s not what we want, if we’re really honest with ourselves.

B.   So we see in the gospel story, James and John, who are identified as the sons of Zebedee, coming to Jesus in private with what we might call an “adolescent” request. In Matthew’s account of the story, it is not James and John themselves, but their unnamed mother, who makes the request. I would presume from this that they were very young disciples, perhaps still teenagers or young adults; being identified by their father’s name and their mother speaking for them. In Mark’s account the boys ask: "Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you." Jesus sidesteps this inappropriateness and asks what they want. They answer that they want to sit on his right and left hand when he comes to reign in glory. How presumptuous we might exclaim! The words that come to my mind are, "Just, Who do you think you are?" The words that Jesus says are almost annoyingly patient, ‘What is it you want me to do for you?" Yet Jesus engages their request respectfully, if also firmly. "You do not know," he tells them. Maybe He means, "You still do not fully realize what Christian glory means, how very different from worldly glory is the glory waiting for me."

(project “ARE YE ABLE” MIDI file from Laptop)

II. I hold here in my hand today an old Protestant “Praise” hymnal published in 1951. Among the many time-tested favorites is “Are Ye Able” written at Boston University School of Theology in 1926 by Earl Marlatt. I wish we knew it well enough to sing today. The first verse begins followed by the refrain, “’Are ye able’ said the Master, ‘to be crucified with me?’ ‘Yea,’ the sturdy dreamers answered, ‘to the death we follow thee.’ Lord, we are able. Our spirits are thine. Remold them, make us, like thee, divine. Thy guiding radiance above us shall be a beacon to God, to love, and loyalty.”

A.   Marlatt’s hymn is based in old fashioned Wesleyan theology. The English Reformer Wesley which brought us the Methodist Church held that although God’s grace saves us - we have to receive it, and in receiving it we have the responsibility for sanctification. For Wesley, salvation has to transform actual character. Marlatt sings: “Our spirits are thine. Remold them, make us, like thee, divine.” That’s a pure prayer for sacredness strengthening our faith through tough times of trouble.

B.   James and John possibly bold and cheeky boys were certainly also “sturdy dreamers.” Their request for special placement seems partly innocent based in youthful enthusiasm and naivety, but also smacks of self importance; but we read how gently Jesus responds to them, not ridiculing their dreams nor rebuking them with a lecture about servant ministry as he later did the other 10, presumably older, disciples when they angrily expressed their jealousy about James and John. Rather, Jesus gently told the two young men they did not know what they were asking. He queries whether they were able to drink the cup he would drink and be baptized with his baptism. By the “cup” he meant his destiny to be crucified; (later in the Garden of Gethsemane he prayed that this cup would pass from him, but affirmed the courage to drink it if it were his true destiny). By his baptism he meant following His Way, what would later be called the Christian Way, which was subject to much persecution.

C.   These two metaphors of the cup and the baptism are crucial to understanding the story. The cup is the blood Jesus will shed to establish the new covenant. We might remember that Jesus’ subsequent prayer in the Garden, to be spared from drinking the cup, if it is God’s will, makes the cup stand for all the suffering of the atoning passion. In Psalms [75:9], Isaiah [51:17], and in Jeremiah and Ezekiel the word cup is used metaphorically to stand for the divine wrath or punishment. The disciples are being asked if they can accept the same kind of suffering that Jesus now faces, or as the hymn says, "to be crucified with me." Baptism, used to parallel the cup, is also a symbol for suffering, because in the Psalms (42:8 and 69:3) it refers to waters overwhelming the sufferer.

D.   Mark’s gospel was written about forty years after the crucifixion in the midst of Roman persecution, and his readers would know what those expressions meant, but the boys did not have a clue. As sturdy dreamers, they answered, “We are able!” Jesus must have sighed at the innocence of these young disciples he loved.

E.   We have to remember that Mark’s original readers know that the disciples did, indeed, experience the suffering that Christ suffered. The fate of the disciples, in fact, was to drink Jesus’ cup of suffering and to be baptized into His Way that brought persecution. For example, James would be martyred in Jerusalem in the year 44 by King Herod Agrippa in a great persecution of the ancient church. However romantic and innocent their sturdy dream that they were indeed able to follow Jesus, in point of fact they were able. And through the difficult persecutions of the ancient church they, like Jesus, were made perfect through suffering, to borrow a phrase from the Letter to the Hebrews.

III. For ourselves today, the situation as described might seem to be dangerously similar. Surely Christians don’t have Romans out to persecute them these days, although Christians in many parts of the world do practice their faith in jeopardy of their lives. We have in our own Community of Christ denomination devout sisters and brothers who live in countries where their faith journey might lead to arrest and punishment. The specific danger I have in mind, however, is moral conflict that has the power to distort, pervert, and ultimately ruin Christian faith, practice and community. By “moral conflict” I mean issues on which good Christians take opposite sides, issues so strongly identified with the center of their faith, with that intense passion of loving God with all their heart, mind, soul, and strength, and their neighbors as themselves — that passion gets transferred to their moral stand regarding specific issues. Transferring infinite religious passion to morality can be somewhat dangerous to one’s own journey of faith and possibly to others, who are loved among one’s own community. This can lead to conflict, division and the destruction of religious community.

A.   One example among many such social or moral issues is the place of homosexual people in the life of the church, and the conflict over which, which has found a place in our denomination and specifically within our congregation. I speak primarily of the formation of the “Stonewall” ministry as part of the overall mission of Norton Heights congregation.

B.   Moral conflicts in religious organizations and in national politics have centered on anti-discrimination protections and legal rights of same gendered partners to marry. Several religious denominations, including our own, are in faithful conflict over a number of issues concerning the place and position of ALL people of faith regardless of “orientation”. Again, the moral conflict is a matter of balancing values that are nearly universally held. Who can be against the right of ALL people to fulfillment and happiness? Who can be against social responsibility for the moral structures of such institutions as marriage and ordination? Passions in the moral conflicts about these issues are so high that surely more than sexual ethics is involved. It seems a matter of religious identity. People even ask how you can be both Christian and Gay.

C.   Christians in good faith are divided against each other with holy passion. So, I ask, Are we able to follow the Christian Way, Christ’s Way, while we are persecuted by our own divisions on these and the many similar issues that divide Christians? Please hear me carefully, I am not defining persecution here as meaning that you or I are persecuting each other, but I am saying that each of us, whatever side of the moral issue we find ourselves, may feel persecuted for taking a passionate position.

D.   Two tempting strategies exist that I believe are inappropriate.

1.   One is to treat religion as a private matter and refuse to address public issues in church. In practice, this is what we have attempted to do in the past, for the obvious reason of maintaining harmony within the community. The ongoing life of religious communities has many more values than just the resolution of these hot-button issues, and the cost of addressing them within the community is very high. Nevertheless, religion and our faith journey are not really private after all, and when we deliberately guard ourselves against these issues about which people feel so passionately we risk making irrelevant all the real religious issues.

2.   The other tempting strategy is for the church to address issues like these without a solid theological base, as if they were merely political or moral issues. Without its theology, Christianity has nothing in particular to offer to the resolution of deep moral conflicts. Many Christians, however, get so excited about taking a “prophetic” stand on moral issues that the self-righteous fact of their convictions pretends to excuse them from justifying the convictions. Yet surely, the convictions need to be justified with careful Scriptural argument, BUT with sensitivity to the ways people with conflicting convictions weigh values, and with humility based on the plain recognition that our judgments are fallible at best. Only careful theology and insightful scriptural interpretation can adequately place the moral analysis and judgment in proper perspective.

IV. However much we would like to avoid conflict, especially over sensitive and awkward subject matter, I firmly believe the sensitive and sometimes uncomfortable moral conflicts of our time need to be brought into the church so that we can live them through together with intelligence and love. I invite you into the seemingly impossible task of sustaining our congregation in the midst of deliberately addressed conflict as we begin this journey together of creating the Norton Heights Stonewall Ministry. I sincerely believe that this church should be the one place you can come home to, possibly the only real home one may belong to, in order to address the religiously weighted conflicts of our time, not a place that suggests you can sit here escaping from real and difficult life.

A.   Certainly in our culture, Jesus words about servant-hood seem strange. Our culture is so saturated with the demand for pleasure and instant gratification that Jesus’ words about suffering often strike us as out of place and old fashioned. Jesus speaks to the reality of our world as we follow him in the Way of the Cross. Jesus would tell future Christians that they do not hide from pain and suffering, but they overcome those realities through loving service. Jesus continually told the original Twelve that the first will be last, and that the goal is not to be on top of the pile, or be Number One. But they were a hardheaded lot, and like each of us, they want to be first. As I’ve mentioned before, a cute button might reflect our sentiment, "Jesus loves you, but I’m his favorite."

B.   What I think today’s Gospel Text means for us today, is that we need to follow Jesus by following in service to others. Mark says that those who follow the suffering servant of God even Jesus would also become servants. Towards the end of the first century, Mark’s church clearly had not only embraced the cross as the definition of the messiah but also of discipleship. And so Mark says at the end of today’s Gospel, a most powerful saying for us in this time, too, "For the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many." Jesus’ entire mission was to serve. We need as well to allow others to be as Christ to us. That requires us to be vulnerable, to take risks with each other, to be honest with each other, to be like family in our community of faith. What are the ways we can be as servants to others this day, this week?

V. Now as we read from Mark, predictions of the passion have ended. Jesus has finished his instruction in discipleship. Jerusalem and Gethsemane and Golgotha are in view and we see that Jesus’ entire purpose is to serve, to die, and to set us free. How can we respond except to follow him and be his servants as well? Let me share another hymn to portray how important our role of service is as well:

(Play/Project file: “The Servant Song”)

Let us go forward holding the Christ-light for each other. Let us hold our hands out to one another and offer that sign and voice of peace that we know we want to hear. Let us stand with each other, laughing together when we can, weeping together when we must. Let us really share our joys and sorrows with our sisters and brothers in Christ. And let us reach outside these walls to hold that light for our neighbors as well, to welcome them to join us. We are all pilgrims on this journey and we are here to help each other walk the mile and bear the load. Let us be Christ’s servants for each other in the days to come, remembering that Christ has called us to follow him as fellow servants in ministry. And remembering too, that when that great day comes and we find ourselves singing around God’s throne, that we will sing such great praise to God, created from what we’ve known following Christ in service ministry and in the Way of the Cross. As Jesus said, His Way leads to crucifixion, and to many in the church these moral conflicts we are dealing with together must surely feel like that. Beyond the crucifixion, however, is the new life of resurrection, or new beginnings. Like love in a family, love in the Christian community and specifically within Norton Heights Community of Christ can bear up through the rigorous realities of conflict. Because this is Christ’s family, “resurrection-love” calls us to the joy of being real when faced with conflict, and staying in love with those with whom we struggle. A Christian community that embraces and works through conflict with sisters and brothers shines with the redeeming light of Christ, and the Holy Spirit.
Are we able to proclaim and sustain Christ’s Way when it wraps us up in the flesh and blood issues that command conflicting religious passions? I invite you to answer with me as did the young sons of thunder to Jesus: We Are Able!