September 20, 2009
Making Connections - Mark 9:30-37
Pastor: Luke Maybry
DownloadBud Shaney, Vernon Knox, and I went to a Presbytery meeting this past Tuesday in Harrisburg. I have been attending Presbytery meetings now for five years, and I have decided that, by far, the most important thing that happens in a Presbytery meeting is the connections that we make there. In fact, and I don’t mean this to be negative, those connections may be the only thing important happening in Presbytery meetings. Presbytery meetings are the only way for me to specifically meet other Presbyterians. Professionally speaking, that’s a big deal. Connections are a big deal. When I was seeking a call a few years ago, the most important thing in that entire process was finding some sort of connection. If I knew somebody who knew somebody who knew somebody at a certain congregation, then I had an advantage. (Incidentally, I ended up at Central Steele Creek, which was the only place without any connection at all.) Nevertheless, connections are important, especially in the fine State of South Carolina. I have gotten out of more than one speeding ticket in the Palmetto State because I knew somebody who knew somebody who knew somebody who knew a judge. Connections are important for success. It’s not so much what we know as much as it is who we know.
The disciples in this passage wanted success. I know that because I know me, and I know you, and we all want to succeed in some form or fashion. Yet, none of the disciples knew success. All of the disciples came from the wrong side of the tracks. Matthew was the only one who had money, and he got all his money from ripping people off. The rest of the disciples were poor, and uneducated, and socially unimportant. But now that they were following Jesus, even though he himself was poor, and uneducated, and socially unimportant, he and vicariously they were starting to get some clout. In fact, it looked very much like they had the potential to get some real clout. For the first time ever, people were starting to pay attention to them. Even the religious leaders, even the doctors and lawyers and politicians were starting to give them the time of day.
There were only two problems. First, Jesus kept saying this non-sense about suffering and being rejected. That looked unlikely at best, especially if, as Peter said earlier, Jesus was THE ONE. How could THE ONE, the long awaited Messiah who came to save Israel from hundreds of years of oppression, end up being rejected? Yet Mark 9 was the second time that Jesus had said this. Mark says that they were too afraid to even ask what that meant. Maybe Jesus was exaggerating. You know, it’s lonely at the top. Or, as the old song says, “It’s hard to be humble when you’re perfect in every way.” Jesus was The One, you see. The disciples had no idea about the cross.
And even if they did, they had another problem, and that is that there were twelve of them. And of the twelve, there had to be some kind of order. There always has to be a pecking order, you know. I may not always be at the very top of that pecking order, but I’m not at the very bottom of it, either, and I need some quantifiable way of knowing that. Jesus is THE ONE, so they needed a connection to him. They needed to distinguish themselves to be uniquely close to Jesus. That’s all they talked about the whole way to Capernaum. Who was the greatest? Who was closest to Jesus? Who “deserved” to be the closest, and so on.
“What were ya’ll arguing about?” Jesus asked them. They were too afraid to answer, but Jesus told them that if they really want to be connected, here’s how. “If anyone wants to be first, he shall be last of all and servant of all.” Jesus had said that before. Now, though, for the first time ever, Jesus told them specifically what that meant. Jesus picked up a child, and said “whoever receives a child like this one in my name, receives me, and whoever receives me receives the One who sent me.”
So that’s it. It sounds easy. We aren’t real sure about the cross and suffering, but we all want to be close to Jesus. So, here’s how. It’s almost natural for us. We love our children. We sacrifice everything for our children. We save for their education, we plan our lives around them. Even our legal system values children more than the rest of us, and I would argue that it should. That was not true in 1st Century Palestine. Children in Jesus’ day were essentially property. In fact, the Greek word for child, paidon, is the same word for slave. Children were a means to an end. The New Revised Version says that Jesus “took a little child and put it among them, and took it in his arms.” That’s not a mistake. For Jesus to be teaching, which is something that only adult men could do, and to pick up a lowly child, a lowly “it” as Scripture says, and tell his disciples to be like and receive one of these, was a radical concept in that day. If you want to receive me, Jesus told his disciples and is telling us, then you have to receive this child. You have to receive this, for lack of better term, nobody. In Matthew’s version of this story, Jesus says that you become like a child. Mark says that you have to actually receive the child. You have to receive the forgotten ones, the nobodies among us. From a Christian standpoint, rubbing elbows with the higher-ups isn’t that big of a deal. But how we receive the nobodies in our day is a huge deal. In fact, in Mark’s Gospel, it is specifically how we connect to Jesus.
Of all places, the Church ought to be a place where all people are welcomed. One of the things that I think this church does very well is Room in the Inn. Room in the Inn is a program where we, along with Pleasant Hill, McClintock, & Mt. Olive Presbyterian Churches house 14 homeless men every Monday night from December through March. The program requires that we provide three meals, and a place to stay. We could do like I do at home, and that’s open a can, poor it in a bowl, nuke it for 30 seconds, and call that a supper. But we refuse to do that. We throw out the red carpet and cook a meal that would make anybody proud. We even do their laundry. I am proud of that program here. In fact, we even signed up for a whole week last winter when it got so cold. And, we also have signed up for a week next month to house homeless women. And, there is even another program that houses a homeless family for one week every quarter. Because it’s a week and because it’s just one family, it allows the a congregation and that family to build a relationship, which often times leads to a lasting relationship, which almost always gets that family off the street. It’s an incredible ministry, and we may want to give it a shot. I think we’ve seen just how valuable those programs are. If nothing else, at least from Mark’s perspective, they give us valuable connections.
The measure of Christian discipleship is not about how high we get. It’s not about friends in high places. If anything, according to Jesus anyway, the measure of Christian discipleship is our friends in low, forgotten, miserable places. You cannot read any of the Gospels and escape that. God cares very deeply about all of us, everyone of us, even those whom we love to avoid, even those who don’t love us back, even those who haven’t earned our love or respect and don’t really care about getting it. Our faith in Jesus Christ leads us directly to those people, whom we would love to forget, and whom we have forgotten. I know that idea turns success on its head. The Apostle Paul even said that it sounds like foolishness, and I guess in many ways it is foolishness. Yet THE ONE, the Savior of this broken world, the very God we worship became one of those forgotten ones, one of the nobodies on our behalf, and in doing so, “chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise, what is weak in the world to shame the strong, what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are.” Now that’s the Good News. That’s the Gospel. So let’s go out there and make some connections.
In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.
