Sermon for the Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost, September 20, 2009
Solemn Mass
By the Reverend Stephen Gerth
Year B: Wisdom 1:16--2:1,12-22*; Psalm 54; James 3:16--4:6; Mark 9:30-37 

Earlier this week I was at a two-day class called “Leadership in Ministry.” I’ve attended this course twice a year for a decade now – and I’m planning to continue to attend – still there’s lots to learn. Most of the people who attend the course are members of the Protestant clergy, mostly Baptists and Methodists. It turns out that one of the most attractive and gifted younger people at the conference – she’s maybe 30 – is leaving congregational work in the Baptist church.

During one of our breaks she asked me, “What is worship?” That’s the kind of simple but crucial question that I wasn’t expecting from her. She was asking it seriously. It turns out she wasn’t connecting with what was happening in worship in the church where she served on Sunday mornings or in pastoral work during the week. I bring up the conversation because when she asked the question I was already thinking about this Sunday’s gospel and what I might say.

We are at the point in Mark’s gospel, where one can begin to wonder how those who were closest to Jesus became and remained so disconnected from him. They live with him. They hear his words. They see his deeds. But the disciples and Jesus don’t connect. They are like idols. Some of you will know the passage where the psalmist condemns graven images:

They have mouths, but they cannot speak; *

eyes have they, but they cannot see;

They have ears, but they cannot hear; *

noses, but they cannot smell;

They have hands, but they cannot feel;

feet, but they cannot walk.[1]

No real communication is happening between them and Jesus. They are in some sense like a couple who have been married or partnered for years who no longer touch each other, like adult children who don’t know how to talk to their parents about anything, like parents who don’t know how to talk to their children at any age –disconnected. But, Jesus does not stop his conversation with them. He knows at some level the meaning of his life and the meaning of his relationship to his disciples lies not in the present but in the future.

Today’s gospel passage follows what has happened after Jesus, Peter, James and John have come down from the mount of transfiguration, rejoined the other disciples and healed an epileptic boy. As the passage begins, they are entering Galilee and begin to head to Judea and Jerusalem.

For the second time Jesus tells the disciples of the suffering and death that is to come to him. Mark says that when the disciples hear this, “they did not understand” and “were afraid to ask.”[2] They have ears, but they do not hear.

Mark records the disciples’ chief concern is who among them is the greatest.[3] Our passage ends with Jesus taking a child into his arms and proclaiming, “Whoever receives on such child in my name receives me.”[4] Now don’t get gushy over the idea of the child in Jesus’ arms. New Testament scholar Raymond Brown writes that the child in this context means an “insignificant person”[5] – someone who doesn’t matter is welcome to be with Jesus. And that’s all it means.

Back to connection. One of the more interesting historical questions from the Age of Discovery, the era of the Reformation, is not whether the Vikings or Columbus first made it to what we call “the New World,” but why did it take until 1488 of the Christian Era for someone from the Mediterranean world to sail down the west coast of Africa and go around the Cape of Good Hope? Late Medieval maps show that the world just stopping. More than a century later Galileo would be condemned by the Roman Church’s inquisition for asserting that the earth revolved around the sun. It is said that he invited people to look into his telescope to see for themselves and they would not.[6]

Stay with me; I’m going back to the gospel. But first, I’d like you to think about Western Europe in the Middle Ages as being stuck with a worldview that did not correspond to reality. And when human beings don’t live into the truth of reality, there are consequences, and sometimes great tragedy. Sadly, one can see the same kind of thing going on today – but that’s a sermon for another day.

I’d like to suggest that one way to understand the disciples journey with Jesus is that they lacked the spark, or imagination, to jettison a worldview that stood between them and connection with Jesus, between them and belief, between them and reality that they saw and heard the entire time they were with Jesus. For us, I think faith can be a spark, a word, if you will, that opens our lives to real joy and peace in the midst of the reality of a world that is not right and will not be right until the end of time.

Now back to the Bible. Mark and John have very different understandings of Jesus. One perspective they share that is different in emphasis from that of Matthew or Luke is how they understand the role of belief. The question of belief occupies all four evangelists, but in Mark and John it is the central concern.

The resurrection, we Christians believe, is the belief that opens the door to connection with God. It is the way we Christians philosophically, theologically, approach questions from the origin of the universe and of all life to the problem of evil. The resurrection is the event that helps us carry on in the midst of so much that we do not understand. The resurrection of Jesus is the central event of human history that changes humankind’s relationship with its God. The resurrection is what made the connection for Jesus’ disciples. What about you and me?

I grew up in a Christian household. I know as a child I felt connected to God. I remember my baptism at age 10. My life was been shaped by a biblical, Protestant formation as a Southern Baptist as much as anything else. Looking back, I would say that the key moment of faith connection for me was not baptism at age 10 or ordination at age 29, but on a day when I was 23, in graduate school in Chicago in the truly bleak midwinter, at a point in my life when I thought I mattered to anyone else in the world, that if I didn’t wake up in the morning it would not matter to anyone.

And that kind of thought, if you have any kind of obsessive compulsive disorder in you, can take you to a really dark place. When I got to that place, I believed I mattered to God. I think that’s called connection, conversion. As much as I am capable of playing philosophical or theological games with God’s reality, I never get very far because I remember that moment of connection.

Now, the disciples have not been entirely blind to what Jesus was doing. They just didn’t connect with Jesus’ reality.

It’s hard for us sometimes to see God as present and not absent in our world and in our lives. But that’s the reality the God has given us to live into; that’s the reality that the disciples lived into.

At the end of the day, Jesus doesn’t walk away from his disciples. And at the end of the day I believe God doesn’t walk away from us. He keeps working on the connection. I think it’s fair to say, that the disciples finally got it. My guess is, at a real level, you and I get it too.

+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
 

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