1 When our youngest child was in elementary school he would often bring a friend or two home from school for supper. We enjoyed these young people. However, I have to admit we were rather taken aback by one boy who announced with fair regularity, I m gifted, you know. With hindsight, I realize he was adapting to what was expected of him. He was internalizing that he needed to be gifted to be special. He was learning that to get anywhere in life you have to be exceptional. To be successful, people have to see you are first that you are making it. All of us have ways to assure ourselves of our place in the world. I want to be loved just like everyone else. I want to count and I don t like being afraid I don t, afraid I might not be loved. When if I m charge, I can tell myself, everything will be alright and to be in charge means I must be first. There are lots of ways I can be first. Lots of ways I can assure myself that I am really loved. I can try pleasing other people. I can try to avoid being disagreeable. I can try not to offend people. I can try to do good things, be helpful, and even go out of my way to show other people I love them - but in my darkest corners there lurks the one who needs to know I am loved in return. The person who wonders if it is possible to love the real me at all. Now I m sure you have never had this problem! You are all much too nice. If, by some remote chance, you share a small piece of that feeling you have surely learned never to admit it. Like me, you no doubt indulge in a little good willed manipulation to have things the way you want. You try to avoid those people or situations which inflict feelings of rage or cause an anger that threatens to overwhelm. We learn to avoid feelings that make us doubt
2 we are lovable at all. Perhaps you have quit entirely and decided the only way to go through this life is on your own. Perhaps you have chosen to be independent of others, and to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. The need to be first, the fear of not being loved, is the shadow in the background of this morning s reading from the gospel. Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you. This is the biblical equivalent of Santa, promise me you ll give me whatever I ask for Christmas. I knew a good therapist once who used to say that every human transaction is preceded by the unspoken phrase If you love me It had seemed an ordinary day. Jesus is leading. The disciples are following - and they don t have a clue as to what s actually going on. What s difficult is that the request is coming from two of Jesus closest disciples - James and John. These are the best he s got. And what is the best doing? - Seizing a moment when the other ten are off somewhere else to jostle for the top positions, the highest status, the big jobs, while everybody else s back is turned! Asking for the moon and the stars when they haven t even located the moon and the stars in the right heavens. I find myself wondering about Jesus at moments like this. What was he really thinking when the only people he felt he could trust start talking like this. He s on the verge of dying and all his disciples are doing is making a power grab. Hard to imagine Jesus himself felt much loved at that point. I imagine him crying out, Don t they get it yet, God?
3 But that s my picture. That says more about how I respond to confusion and misunderstanding than it does about who Jesus is. The author of the gospel gives us no clue as to Jesus inner thoughts. We are simply told Jesus asks them to come clean and really tell him what they re after. And, no doubt a little shame faced, they tell him they want to be the most important people in the world, especially to him. They want to be at home. To run with the right crowd. To know who they are and where they belong, for eternity. In other words, they want to be sure they are loved. If you love me you ll make me first. Jesus is suddenly very clear. Unlike James and John, he sees a limit to his power to have what he wants. God is in charge of outcomes, he says, not me. He tells them the truth about their lives. He can tell them that truth because he is living a human life himself. He knows what happens to human beings from personal experience. And he knows what is about to happen to him on a cross in Jerusalem in the not too distant future. He knows you can t go about this world behaving like Jesus and get away with it forever. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or be baptized with the baptism I am baptized with? he asks. Yes, they answer. But Jesus wants them to be clear about the meaning of that yes. The cup to which he refers is the pain, degradation, and death that will be required of him. In drinking that cup he will transform the cup of death into the cup of life. Likewise, baptism in Greek refers mainly to the experience of disaster, of flooding, of overwhelming, of immersion; the waters of death before they become the waters of life. Do you really know
4 what you are asking? says Jesus. Loyally and ignorantly, stumbling through the fog of their understanding, the disciples say yes. Yes to that which they don t really understand and yes to a future that is unknowable, uncertain, and painful. Jesus is telling them that his death is inevitable. His suffering is to be real and that following him - drinking the cup and sharing the baptism - will mean the same for them. Yes has a heavy price, whether they have realized it or not. It is the same for us. Christianity is not a feel good religion. Never has been, never will be, never can be. The Christian faith deals in real lives and in real deaths. It deals in the real stuff - not the fantasies we create. The Christian faith is a faith lived in the face of chaos, dissension, fear, even uncertainty about who we are and who we are supposed to be. It is a faith which struggles with being human when we would rather be divine. Take that passage from Isaiah we just read. Christians like to think it refers to Jesus. In reality, the author is clearly writing about someone who is already dead. A person, small, and unimportant, who died in shame. A person of no account, a failure, despised and rejected - a person who could so easily be you or me. Yet it is such as these, Isaiah s Suffering Servant, that the prophet tells us will be raised up in final glory. This is what Jesus is speaking about. Ordinary lives your life and my life. Lives which, God help us, will include suffering. Lives which cannot be negotiated without it. Yet it is these very same lives, lives like the life of Jesus, that we proclaim can be lifted out of the mire of our petty concerns and our pain and be transformed by the glory of God s love.
5 Isaiah, and Jesus, are pointing to the chaos and the hopelessness - to the stifling lives of prisoners, the cries of the sick, the loneliness of the homeless, the agony of disappointment in our own relationships - to whatever it is that has brought us to our knees, to whatever it is that has brought you to this place today to find meaning in the worship of God. The prophet and the Son of Man show us that through all of this, not in spite of this, but that through this God will give us satisfaction. Frankly, I would much rather stay safely in the warm dark recesses of my soul, than try to understand and submit to what this means. I can, I think, have a much safer half a life by manipulating my environment from my own little castle. I can have half a life any time I choose. I can refuse what Jesus is showing me on that cross. I can insist on being first, most important, most obeyed, and kid myself that that is what love looks like. Or I can follow Jesus. I can try to embrace the agonies of my life and those of others. I can resolve to stop being petty and scared. And if I can t stop being scared, I can at least appeal to God for help. I can ask to learn to become a more loving servant. I can live my life freely, enslaved by love. I can resolve to leave outcomes to God. I can try to give glory to God through the generosity of my life. I can claim for myself the faith of the psalmist this morning: For he (God) shall give his angels charge over you, * to keep you in all your ways. They shall bear you in their hands, * lest you dash your foot against a stone.
6 You shall tread upon the lion and the adder; * you shall trample the young lion and the serpent under your feet. And God s promise to us: Because he is bound to me in love, therefore will I deliver him; * I will protect him, because he knows my Name. He shall call upon me, and I will answer him; * I am with him in trouble; I will rescue him and bring him to honor. With long life will I satisfy him, * and show him my salvation. This kind of life, this kind of faith, will endure confusion, and yes, suffering, but it will be real. And you don t have to be gifted to get it. For the cup is not just suffering, baptism not just disaster - the cup is also joy and life. Amen.