There’s really only one question before us, before you: do you want to follow Jesus, as Jesus describes it, as Jesus calls you, or not? The rest is simple after that.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost, Lectionary 29 B
Text: Mark 10:[32-34] 35-45

Dear friends in Christ, grace to you, and peace in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen

Apparently the third time isn’t the charm.

The disciples hear Jesus predict his own suffering and death three times, all as he moves his ministry closer and closer to Jerusalem. Each time, the disciples miss the point.

So how many times do you need to hear it before you understand it? This whole fall we’ve heard challenging words from Jesus about what it is to follow him. We’ve heard these predictions three times ourselves. We even know the whole story, which they didn’t.

But we’re not much better at understanding, at following Jesus’ train of thought, much less Jesus’ path of life, than they seem to be. Mark today says that some of Jesus’ followers were amazed, some were afraid. That sounds about right for us.

Maybe it isn’t a problem of understanding, though.

Look at their responses. At the first prediction, Peter takes Jesus aside and says that facing suffering and death is not a good plan for a Messiah. Jesus rebukes him, and says following him will mean dying to everything, losing what you think matters, perhaps even literally dying.

The second prediction falls on silence. But after, on the road as they walked, the disciples argued about which one of them was most important. Jesus confronts them on this, and says that to be greatest is to be a servant to each other. To be the least.

With today’s third prediction, James and John are still stunningly tone-deaf. They hear Jesus speak of terrible suffering and death, and ask for the seats of honor when Jesus comes into his glory. Again, Jesus responds with talk of losing, of being least, pointing out that their society has power structures where those on top lord it over those on the bottom. Not with my followers, Jesus says. My followers who wish to be great – repeating himself from before – must be servants. But then he goes a step further. He says those who wish to be first must be slaves of all.

Maybe they understand just fine. Maybe they just don’t want this path. A path of losing, dying, willingly being a slave. This is the only question that really matters: do you even want to follow a Jesus like this?

The Church – at least in English speaking countries – is so reluctant to follow Jesus in this we’ve translated the worst of his language out.

Jesus explicitly uses the word “slave” here. It means exactly what you think it means. But this word is translated “servant” pretty much only by Bible translators. Everyone else who translates ancient Greek knows it means “slave”. Jesus knew it meant “slave”.

There are over 120 instances of the word in the New Testament. It’s a central point in the early Church’s understanding of the Christian life. But virtually every English translation translates the vast majority of those instances as “servant,” not “slave,” even though it’s perfectly clear what’s meant. Even our current NRSV, which does translate the majority as “slave,” very often renders “servant” when the reference is to how Christians might live or act.

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the first disciples weren’t the only ones who didn’t like Jesus’ plan for himself or the Church. When you can’t even translate honestly because you don’t want to hear what Jesus or the apostles are saying, that’s a pretty clear sign.

It’s a hard topic to discuss. people who look like me talking about slavery as a model for our life can be a really bad idea.

The horrible stain of racism that still exists in our society stems directly from the violent, wicked original sin of our nation, the sin of slavery. The torture, humiliation, starving, murder, oppression of millions of human beings to build our country cannot be erased from memory. These slave texts were often used by Christians in power to justify their evil.

But remember that Jesus, a brown, Palestinian man under Roman oppression in the first century, also knew slavery as a horrible, wicked reality. It was no ideal. The brutality of the slave trade in our world today, and in American history, also existed in Jesus’ day. He chose an image that his own people would shudder to hear.

But Jesus turns it upside down. He sees the Christian’s path as a chosen slavery. A willingness to put yourself at the service of everyone else. Jesus is saying, to follow me is to let yourselves be slaves to all. People who relinquish free choice to do what you want, and become obligated to serve the needs of everyone, without question. Not because you are forced. But because you choose this path.

And then Jesus reveals this astonishment: he will choose this path first.

The path to the cross, offering himself to the whole universe, his body, his blood, his pain, in order to reveal God’s love for the whole universe, this is Jesus’ willingness to be a slave, to all, for the sake of all.

Paul explicitly lays this out in his beautiful hymn in Philippians: “though Christ was in the form of God, he did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave.” (Philippians 2:6-7)

And Paul led the apostles in claiming this same status with their congregations. To his church in Corinth he wrote: “We don’t proclaim ourselves; we proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord and ourselves as your slaves for Jesus’ sake.” (2 Corinthians 4:5)

As Jesus entered into servitude for the sake of the world, now his followers choose the same path for the sake of the world.

Do you even want to follow such a Messiah? Are you willing to enter into that new reality?

We too often keep faith, and our relationship with God in Christ, fenced into its own place. Hear Jesus’ commands and teaching as options to consider. So, when he says feeding those who are hungry and clothing those who are naked is doing it to him, we agree wholeheartedly. Then we ponder when we might do that. Instead of seeing every person in need as someone we are obligated to serve.

Love your neighbor as yourself? Sure, Jesus, that’s good. Let me think about when that works for me.

We’re sitting on the edge of the pool of faith. We’ll dip our toes in if we feel a need for cooling. We’ll maybe splash around.

But Jesus says, Jump in the deep end. Let the water of my love, of the Spirit, hold you up and bring you life. But jumping in means not touching the sides or the bottom. Not being in control.

So Jesus, our relationship with God, and the walk of faith, stay at arm’s length.

We also avoid the question by distracting ourselves with the “how.”

It’s likely some of you are thinking, “tell us how we are to do this.” That’s good. There’s a lot of help. From the teachings and modeling of Jesus, to the preaching and writing of Paul through First John, the New Testament is full of wisdom, of models, of specific advice, of practical descriptions of what such a life where you are slave to all would be like.

But if you don’t want to do it, none of that matters. We’ve had the New Testament in our hands for years; this isn’t new information. But for it to help, you need to want it.

Do you remember this summer, when Jesus asked the remaining disciples if they also wanted to leave? They said, “where else can we go? You have the words of eternal life.”

That’s your dilemma. If you’ve heard God’s promise of love and forgiveness in Jesus, have found the joy and support of the community of faith Jesus established, if you’ve believed the promise of life in Christ with God after you die, if you’ve found wisdom for understanding your world, hope in Christ for a world where people live in love and peace and justice with each other, where else can you go for that?

So how many times do you need to hear Jesus before you follow?

Following is hard. Living your life as a slave to everyone else for the sake of the love of God in Jesus you know, changes everything. No options to love or not love: there’s only the command. No options to partially follow or do some of the plan: there’s only “follow me.”

But as you struggle, even as these disciples struggled, remember their experience. They ultimately followed. Many gave their lives. They embodied being a slave in love to others, because that’s what they knew in their Lord. They saw it in the suffering, the cross, the empty tomb. They saw it in their Master kneeling before them, lovingly washing their feet. They were filled by the Spirit at Pentecost who empowered their new lives of being slaves to all. Willing, choosing that life, not being forced.

You’ve known all this too, you’ve experienced the Spirit. These disciples can remind you in that knowledge and experience of the Spirit that following Jesus is, in fact, following Jesus. Following the pattern of love and service and grace that Christ has already given you and the world. Following the way that has already shown you the possibility of life. Letting God transform you into this new way.

So: what do you want to do about Jesus and his call to you?

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

 

Taking Jesus seriously here is both promise and challenging diagnosis, but ultimately reveals a path to life in this world and the promise of life in the world to come.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost, Lectionary 28 B
Texts: Mark 10:17-31; Hebrews 4:12-16

Dear friends in Christ, grace to you, and peace in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen

What do I have to do? That’s the question.

This unnamed man wants to inherit eternal life. He’s looking for a promise of life after death and thinks Jesus might have an answer.

We know Jesus sees eternal life as a both/and reality: both life after we die and life in this world. In this encounter, Jesus distinctly offers both.

Pay attention to that. It’s too easy, like this man, to focus only on one – life after death – to the exclusion of the other.

So: imagine this man is carrying luggage as he approaches Jesus.

That might make it easier to see what’s going on. He’s got the full backpack, the big roller bag with another one strapped on top, and two Samsonites he’s wrestling with. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt. He’s a good man, keeps the commandments, tries to be faithful. But he’s worried: what if I haven’t done enough to secure eternal life?

Jesus looks at him, loves him, and says, “first off, you’re going to want to drop all that stuff. It’s dragging you down. Sell it and give to those who need help.” Notice this is not conditional. Jesus doesn’t say letting go of his wealth and possessions earns him eternal life. He says, “You’re carrying too much around; let go of it, share it, and trust that you have treasures in heaven.”

But once you’ve dropped the luggage, then come follow me, Jesus says. Having let go of all that you value so much, trusting in the gift of life after death, now you’re freed to really walk alongside me. Even to the cross.

And here Jesus offers a second grace: whatever luggage our guy sets down, whatever he sells and gives to those who are poor, he will receive a hundredfold more graces in this community that’s also walking with Jesus. Countless houses where he’s welcome wherever he goes, more siblings, parents, more life than he can even imagine, Jesus says.

But the man is deeply sad. He grieves. He says, “I can’t do that.”

In this he differs from Lutherans. We say, “We don’t have to do that.”

But the end is the same: the letting go, the dropping of that which drags us down, the sharing, doesn’t happen. Our “we don’t have to do that” too often leads to not walking the path of Christ. We don’t walk away grieving, though. We’ve convinced ourselves that just believing in Jesus is the thing. Because Jesus’ death and resurrection establish the promise of life with God after death, because what we do doesn’t earn that love from God, we easily talk ourselves out of doing what Jesus says, out of following.

“The Word of God is living and active,” we heard, “sharper than any two-edged sword.

“It pierces until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart.”

Today’s Gospel is that sword Hebrews promised this morning. We try to soften this encounter with Jesus, explain it away, use God’s forgiveness and grace as an excuse to hold all our possessions and wealth and privilege.

But – and I’m as sorry to hear this as I am to say it – God’s Word cuts right through our self-justification and our desire to say we are not this man. This Gospel reading will not let us off the hook.

If this man – living under Roman oppression in a backwater part of the world in the first century – is rich, what are we? By any measure, every one of us here is in the upper percents of the one percent on this planet. Even if we led simpler lives, we’d have a lifestyle billions can’t begin to imagine. We spend so much of our lives accumulating wealth and things, protecting ourselves with locks and insurance, resisting any claim of Jesus that this is dragging us down and depriving others. We rarely think about at whose expense it was that our wealth was accumulated, whose stolen land it is that we are buying and selling, whose lives are harmed by our growing portfolios.

We rarely let Jesus’ call to “sell what you own, give the money to the poor; then come, follow me” haunt us, or bother us.

Here’s another uncomfortable truth: the early Church believed Jesus really was talking about our wealth, our possessions.

They understood Jesus saw faith as something lived concretely in the world, not just thought or believed. They embraced a shared abundant poverty that took Jesus seriously. We can easily find repeated calls for this kind of letting go of wealth and possessions throughout the entire New Testament.

And though the Church developed power and social respectability that led to centuries of theology plastering over Jesus’ words, there have been voices since those first years that kept saying, “I think Jesus meant what he said, and we need to follow him.”

The desert mothers and fathers left the cities believing they could not live faithfully in power and wealth. St. Francis of Assisi literally dropped everything to follow. Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement in the 20th century followed that call, as did Archbishop Oscar Romero in El Salvador, whom our Roman Catholic siblings will declare a saint today. There are always voices calling us to hear Jesus and take him seriously. To really follow.

We’re a lot like this unnamed man. Overall, we think we’re pretty good.

We think of sin only as bad actions we do, and forgiveness as avoiding punishment. So as long as, like him, we keep the commandments, act decently, are “good” people, we pretend we don’t have to worry about Jesus’ words. But some in the Church have heard in Jesus a different message, seeing sin more as a disease, ailing our whole body and soul. It is seen in actions, yes. But it’s a deeper problem that needs healing.

That makes sense in this case: our addiction to wealth and privilege and power is so deeply embedded, given where we were born and where we live, and our centuries of denial that we have any more than anyone else, it really is like a disease.

There are enough spare rooms and bathrooms amongst the people of Mount Olive, in all our homes, to close down the homeless encampment today, and give every one in those tents a place to stay. That you and I don’t even consider that possibility, even recoil from the idea, is a sign of how deeply the sin of wealth infects our whole being.

Now we understand the disciples’ despair: “then who can be saved?”

But hear Jesus’ answer: “For mortals it is impossible, but not for God; for God all things are possible.” As Hebrews also says today, because of Jesus entering as God into our lives and facing our suffering, our testing, our human reality, and bringing that into the life of the Triune God, we can approach God’s “throne of grace with boldness, seeking mercy, and grace to help in time of need.”

Grace to help in time of need: our disease of sinful addiction to our wealth and possessions is so deeply in our every breath, only God can do what needs to be done to end it, to change us. Give us courage to drop our luggage, face our addictions, and find the freedom to follow Jesus’ path.

Jesus offers the grace of life now and forever; let’s seek both.

To trust, because of God’s endless love, and the life won at the cross and empty tomb, that life with God after our death is our sure and certain hope. We Lutherans are right on this – there’s nothing we need do to earn that, it’s pure gift.

But to then recognize how tightly we’re holding to our luggage here, how it harms us and others, and let it go, so we are free to follow Jesus down his path. Our wealth and possessions so claim us, it’s not going to be easy even to see baby steps in dropping these bags. But we trust that for God, all things are possible, and that working in us, together as a community, God will help us simplify, let go bit by bit, share so all have what they need, and gradually find that hundredfold abundance in this communal life promised to all who follow Jesus’ path.

Jesus really is serious here. He means what he says, hopes we follow, and he also intends the grace he announces. Thanks be to God who makes possible our following, and abundant life here and in the world to come.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

 

Dependent, vulnerable, without control: this is how we find life and hope in God’s reign in this world.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost, Lectionary 27 B
Texts: Mark 10:2-16; Hebrews 1:1-4, 2:5-12

Dear friends in Christ, grace to you, and peace in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen

Children are complicated.

You long for them to learn words, then they never stop talking. You eagerly await their first steps, then they become a running blur. They’re full of love and kindness but can rapidly turn to anger and harsh words. They change quickly, outgrow clothes astonishingly fast, and can be really challenging to be around when they’re learning to exercise their own authority and voice and opinion. Children are amazing gifts and blessings. But they are complicated.

So when Jesus says to enter into God’s reign you need to become like a child, it’s perplexing. What does he mean? Innocent? Yes, children are. But they’re also capable of sinfulness and manipulation. Trusting? Yes, but no one asks “why” better than a child. Children often need hard evidence to be convinced. In fact, children are just like adults, only smaller. Similar emotions, needs, desires, opinions, arguments appear in people of all ages.

But these truths don’t apply to most adults: children are utterly dependent on others for everything, they’re exceedingly vulnerable, and they have control over almost nothing.

That’s our entry point into God’s reign, Jesus says. Not imagining some attributes of children that aren’t true, and trying to recreate them in ourselves. But instead admitting how completely dependent, vulnerable, and without control we also are in this world.

The clues are in today’s story itself.

The disciples control access to Jesus. They’re the adults, they’re in charge. For some reason, they decide these parents can’t bring their children to Jesus. (Notice that the parents also control their children. We don’t know if the children wanted to be brought to Jesus.)

Jesus is outraged (“indignant” is too light a translation). He reaches out to these children and says two critical things: first, God’s reign belongs to vulnerable ones like these. And second, if you want in, you need to be like them.

Clues also appear in the testing the Pharisees just set. They believe Jesus doesn’t honor God’s law or teach it. They make a big mistake in choosing as a test case one of the laws Jesus considers deeply unjust. Men under Jewish law at the time could basically throw their wives away in divorce for little cause, simply by issuing a certificate of divorce. Women had no such option. So Jesus answers their harshness with harshness. If you live by the law, Jesus says, be careful. You’ll get burned by the law.

Again, Jesus’ outrage is at people in strength and authority riding roughshod over those who are vulnerable, in this case vulnerable women in a patriarchal society. An outrageous reality that still exists today, as we’ve witnessed these past weeks in Washington.

That’s not the reign of God Jesus came to create.

Jesus reveals a reign of God that is only good news to those on the bottom.

God’s reign is marked by forgiveness and grace, not by rule-keeping. It’s a reign, Jesus preaches, where the least are the greatest, where everyone is willing to serve others, where life is found in letting go of domination and control.

Jesus announces good news to those who are poor and those who are oppressed, those who are downhearted and those who are sinful. Jesus goes out of his way to welcome into God’s reign people the so-called “good” people have written off.

And today Jesus takes a child into his arms to make it absolutely clear: “This is how you come to God.”

If you want to come to God and maintain control over your life, if you think that you don’t depend on anyone, not even God, if you are determined to protect yourself and your things and your opinions and your rights, you will learn it is impossible to understand or receive God’s reign.

But if you’re willing to admit you’re as vulnerable and dependent as any child, or as those women they were debating throwing away like so much trash, if you’re willing to admit you control nothing of importance in your life, that you are weak, well, Jesus says, I’ve got good news for you. I came for people just like you.

I have come that you might have life, Jesus says, but life isn’t found in control, and independence, and invincibility. When you admit your weakness, your dependence on my mercy and love, I will take you into my arms, I will always forgive you, and I will set you down again with the strength and courage to love God and love neighbor with every breath of your being.

You will know life, then, like you’ve never known it before.

That’s the true Good News of God the Son of God wants you to know.

To show you this, Hebrews says today, in Christ the Triune God became the most vulnerable and dependent of all. Christ relinquished all control and self-protection. Instead of supporting those who would crush others by their self-righteousness, Christ Jesus tasted death, Hebews says, suffered completely to become the pioneer, the guide for your healing, your saving.

Jesus also revealed that being vulnerable and dependent on God means being vulnerable and dependent on each other. While that opens you up to all sorts of pain and loss and daily death, the risen Christ has also revealed this is a path of life, even now.

When you’re willing to become one of the least, to let go of control, you find the true God has already gotten there ahead of you, and you begin to understand: God’s love can only happen where God is, and that’s always with those who are lost, those who are the least, those who are stepped upon in our midst. Those who are vulnerable and dependent, who control nothing.

Love of neighbor begins there, too, when you see everyone as a neighbor to be served, everyone as worthy of your love and care.

This is also the Good News the world has desperately needed for so long.

The healed, whole world the Triune God desires, begun by taking on our human life and continuing by making us all new, is found when we become children again, utterly dependent, utterly vulnerable, and utterly loved and graced.

The reign of God belongs to such as these, Jesus says.

And isn’t it a relief? A relief to let go of your need to prove your righteousness, to let go of your fear of failure? A relief to not have to be in charge, to find life in depending on God and your neighbor, to find healing and hope in vulnerable love and life?

You are a beloved, blessed child of God. Good news: that’s exactly what you need to be to enter into God’s reign of life and love.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen