John Ortberg, a Presbyterian minister and author, once said, “We’d like to be humble…but what if no one notices?”[i]
James and John were getting tired of the routine. Tired of following Jesus down dusty roads and into backwater towns where their most constant companions were the sick and the poor. Was this what they had left their fishing nets behind for? Sure, this life of humble service was what Jesus had been talking about all along, but they knew there was something more. Jesus might let the little children come to him. Jesus might talk about the difficulties the rich were going to have getting into heaven, but they knew the score. There was glory at the end of this road. There was prestige. They could handle humility for awhile but they wanted to know what the reward was.
So they came to Jesus with a request. “Teacher, we want you to grant us a request.” Everyone else was asking Jesus for something. Why shouldn’t they?
“What is it that you want?”
“We want you to let us have the best seats at the table when you get your kingdom. You know, right next to you. We’ve got dibs.”
“You’ve got dibs, huh?” Jesus asked. “You don’t have any idea what you’re asking. Can you drink the cup I’m going to drink? Can you be baptized with what I’m going to be baptized?” The cup? You know, the one that Jesus asks to be removed from him in the garden as he prays on the night before his crucifixion. The cup of suffering. The baptism? You know the baptism into death so that he can be raised to new life. That baptism.
“Oh, sure, Jesus,” the brothers say. “We’re on it. You name it we’ll do it.” They had no clue.
“Oh, you will drink the cup and you will be baptized with my baptism. But the seating arrangements in the kingdom are not mine to make. You’ll have to do it with no guarantees.”
The other disciples got wind of what was going on and they began to grumble about James and John. Just who did they think they were? Trying to claim the best seats in the house. Trying to be the favorites. Hadn’t they been just as humble? Hadn’t they been just as loyal?
“Stop it!” Jesus said. “Do you really want to be like the rest of the world? You know what you don’t like about the ways things are. In the world when people get high positions they abuse them. They take on airs and start to get condescending. They use their position to make others suffer. It’s got to be different with you. If you want to be great, you have to be a servant. If you want to be first, you have to serve others.”
Now don’t misunderstand this. Jesus wasn’t saying that they should be humble so that they could claim a reward later on. They weren’t supposed to be humble like it was some act they were supposed to do until they could finally be elevated and begin to act different. They weren’t supposed to be humble as a success strategy.
In Charles Dicken’s book David Copperfield, one of the most loathsome characters is a man who has taken this approach to life. Uriah Heep has become synonymous with a kind of fake humility that only serves in order to get ahead. Beneath the surface there is a kind of contempt for the people they serve.
At one point in the book Heep says to his young master, David Copperfield, “When I was quite a young boy…I got to know what umbleness did, and I took to it. I ate umble pie with an appetite. I stopped at the umble point of my learning, and says I, ‘Hard hard!’ When you offered to teach me Latin, I knew better. ‘People like to be above you,’ says father, ‘keep yourself down.’ I am very umble to the present moment, Master Copperfield, but I've got a little power!”[ii]
A little power. That’s what we want. A little notice. We all want to be humble…but what if no one notices?
Then again maybe we don’t want to be humble. It’s not a very American virtue, is it? It’s not how you get ahead in this world. “Nice guys and gals finish last. You’ve got to look out for Number One. Don’t give them an advantage they can use against you. If they hit you, you’ve got to hit them harder.” You see I know the lingo. I could run a political campaign. But to be a servant? Who aspires to that? What kind of leadership does that show?
Author Graham Standish says that God has an upside down vision of strength. “To be humble actually means to be strong in a wholly different and holy way,” he says. It’s there all the way through the Bible. In the Genesis stories, God chooses the younger child over the older one even though nobody in the society of the day would have handled inheritance that way. God chooses slaves in Egypt rather than their overlords. God chooses Ruth, the foreign woman, to save her destitute Israelite mother-in-law. God chooses David over all of his older brothers to be the king. God chooses Bethlehem out of all the towns and cities of the land as the birthplace of the savior. God chooses Mary, an unwed teenager, to be the mother of Jesus. Jesus chooses fishermen rather than Pharisees. Jesus chooses children over chariot drivers. Jesus chooses the widow with her two mites over the religious leaders with their showy offerings. God chose what was foolish in this world to shame the wise. God chose what was weak to shame the powerful. Given every chance to choose otherwise, God ALWAYS chooses the humble and empowers them for the work that needs doing. God’s just got a thing about that.
So when we start feeling like we don’t have enough power…when we start feeling like we’re out of the loop…when we start feeling like our social standing in school is suffering…when we start feeling like our gifts are not being appreciated in the church the way we think they ought to be appreciated…when we start wondering why no one has called to ask us over for dinner…when we start to think our opinion is not being sought the way that it ought to be…when we start to believe that maybe the rules shouldn’t have to apply to us...when we start to believe we deserve that seat by Jesus’ side at the top of the table…then God’s got news for us – we haven’t arrived yet. We haven’t yet experienced the fullness of what it means to be a servant.
This week we started a new Wonderful Wednesday class on the Reformation and I gave the class members an excerpt from Martin Luther’s treatise called The Freedom of a Christian. It was written almost 500 years ago, but it still rings clear like it was written yesterday.
In it Luther really has just two things to say. On the one hand, he says, Christians are truly free and not subject to anyone. After all, isn’t that what Jesus came to do? To set us free so that we are no longer slaves to sin and death? Didn’t he win for us salvation so that we could look to God with confidence? When we profess our belief in Christ…when we put our trust in God’s saving mercy…when we know Jesus as savior doesn’t that mean that we are free. As Luther says, “All of us who believe in Christ are priests and kings in Christ, as 1 Peter says: ‘You are a chosen race, God’s own people, a royal priesthood, a priestly kingdom, that you may declare the wonderful deeds of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.’”[iii]
Isn’t that what should be said about us? That Jesus has come and so now we can live as kings, doing as we please. God’s love is sufficient to cover a multitude of sins.
But no, that is not all that should be said, Luther says, because there is something else that needs saying. Yes, Christians are absolutely free and subject to none, but because of that they are also slaves and subject to all. We are not made free in order to then live like everyone else in the world. We’ve been there. We know that conforming our lives to the world around us is a fruitless exercise. We know how empty that life is. We know how we feel when we give ourselves over to the idols of the world. It is devastation.
In the movie Fight Club, which is a brutal depiction of the emptiness of modern life, the main character, Jack, meets a man who challenges all of his assumptions. Jack’s life is a hollow shell. His greatest joy is imagining a life surrounded by Ikea furniture, but he suffers from insomnia and goes to support groups with people with life-threatening diseases just so he can feel like he’s alive.
He meets Tyler Durden, played by Brad Pitt, on an airplane. Jack thinks he’s going to be someone he can just have a meaningless conversation with as they travel on the plane. He calls the people he meets this way “single-serving friends” because they require no lasting commitment from him. He starts chit-chatting about how single-serving friends are like plastic serving utensils – the sporks. Tyler won’t play along though. He says, “The spork. I get it. You’re very clever.”
“Thank you,” says Jack.
“How’s that working out for you?” Tyler asks. And with that simple question Jack realizes that all of his attempts to be clever and smooth and slick were really not working at all.[iv]
So when Luther says that we are free, he does not mean that we are then free to go and do whatever we want in the world. If we have really found Christ, we have really moved beyond the world. We have really moved into new territory and we are now free to follow Jesus into the strange and wonderful life he offers. And the strange and wonderful life he offers is a life of service. If we are no longer concerned for ourselves…if we are over ourselves and free of the concern for our pride and ego and all of those things that haunt us when we are unsure of ourselves…if we are Christ’s, then we can give ourselves to others. As Luther says, the rule for the life of Christians is that “we should devote all our works to the welfare of others, since each has such abundant riches in his faith that all his other works and his whole life are a surplus with which he can by voluntary benevolence serve and do good to his neighbor.”[v]
This is life, not drudgery. Once we give up concern for our own ego we are then free to learn from the wonders of all the others we will come to serve. How do we know this? Because it is the model that Jesus gives us. We don’t serve merely because Jesus commands it. We serve because Jesus did it. Because Jesus came not as a tyrant but as a servant. Because Jesus came not to be served but to serve. Because Jesus kneeled at the feet of his disciples and washed their feet. Because Jesus went to the place where the sinners and the poor and the wounded and the outcast and the sick and the dead were…he went to them to bring them back home. Because Jesus went to the cross and poured out his life as a ransom for many. Because Jesus emptied himself. And he did it because he knew that life is measured in how much we can make of ourselves but in how much we can give of ourselves to others. “If you love your life you will lose it, but if you hate your life in this world you will have it for eternal life” [John 12:25].
Julian of Norwich, a medieval mystic, once had a vision in which she saw Jesus coming to her and saying, “If I had my life to give over again, I would. Over and over until I could show you how much I love you.”
And so what shall we do except follow where Jesus leads? Yes, it’s crazy. Yes, you’ll look different. But what have you got to lose except the empty life you have been living? And what have you got to gain except everything? You’ve tried living your own life. How’s that working out for you? Come give your life to Jesus and be free. And be free to serve the world. Thanks be to God.
Mark 10:35-45
Now James and John, the sons of Zebedee, came to him saying, "Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask you."
And he said to them, "What do you want me to do for you?"
They said to him, "Grant us that we may sit, one or your right and one on your left in your glory."
But Jesus said to them, "You don't know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup which I drink or to be baptized with the baptism with which I am baptized?"
They said to him, "We are able."
So Jesus said to them, "The cup which I drink, you will drink, and you will be baptized with the baptism with which I am baptized, but to sit on my right or my left is not mine to give; rather it is for those for whom it has been prepared."
On hearing this, the other ten began to get angry with James and John. Calling them together, Jesus said to them, "You know that those who seem to rule the Gentiles lord it over them and the ones who are great among them tyrannize them. That is not so with you, but rather whoever wants to become great among you will be your servant, and whoever wants to be first will be everyone's slave; for the Son of Humanity did not come to be served but to serve and to give his life as ransom for many.”
[i] http://www.tentmaker.org/Quotes/humilityquotes1.htm
[ii] http://www.novelguide.com/davidcopperfield/toptenquotes.html
[iii] Martin Luther, “The Freedom of a Christian,” Three Treatises, [Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1970], p. 289. Referred to hereafter as Luther.
[iv] http://www.imsdb.com/scripts/Fight-Club.html
[v] Luther, pp. 302-3.
James and John were getting tired of the routine. Tired of following Jesus down dusty roads and into backwater towns where their most constant companions were the sick and the poor. Was this what they had left their fishing nets behind for? Sure, this life of humble service was what Jesus had been talking about all along, but they knew there was something more. Jesus might let the little children come to him. Jesus might talk about the difficulties the rich were going to have getting into heaven, but they knew the score. There was glory at the end of this road. There was prestige. They could handle humility for awhile but they wanted to know what the reward was.
So they came to Jesus with a request. “Teacher, we want you to grant us a request.” Everyone else was asking Jesus for something. Why shouldn’t they?
“What is it that you want?”
“We want you to let us have the best seats at the table when you get your kingdom. You know, right next to you. We’ve got dibs.”
“You’ve got dibs, huh?” Jesus asked. “You don’t have any idea what you’re asking. Can you drink the cup I’m going to drink? Can you be baptized with what I’m going to be baptized?” The cup? You know, the one that Jesus asks to be removed from him in the garden as he prays on the night before his crucifixion. The cup of suffering. The baptism? You know the baptism into death so that he can be raised to new life. That baptism.
“Oh, sure, Jesus,” the brothers say. “We’re on it. You name it we’ll do it.” They had no clue.
“Oh, you will drink the cup and you will be baptized with my baptism. But the seating arrangements in the kingdom are not mine to make. You’ll have to do it with no guarantees.”
The other disciples got wind of what was going on and they began to grumble about James and John. Just who did they think they were? Trying to claim the best seats in the house. Trying to be the favorites. Hadn’t they been just as humble? Hadn’t they been just as loyal?
“Stop it!” Jesus said. “Do you really want to be like the rest of the world? You know what you don’t like about the ways things are. In the world when people get high positions they abuse them. They take on airs and start to get condescending. They use their position to make others suffer. It’s got to be different with you. If you want to be great, you have to be a servant. If you want to be first, you have to serve others.”
Now don’t misunderstand this. Jesus wasn’t saying that they should be humble so that they could claim a reward later on. They weren’t supposed to be humble like it was some act they were supposed to do until they could finally be elevated and begin to act different. They weren’t supposed to be humble as a success strategy.
In Charles Dicken’s book David Copperfield, one of the most loathsome characters is a man who has taken this approach to life. Uriah Heep has become synonymous with a kind of fake humility that only serves in order to get ahead. Beneath the surface there is a kind of contempt for the people they serve.
At one point in the book Heep says to his young master, David Copperfield, “When I was quite a young boy…I got to know what umbleness did, and I took to it. I ate umble pie with an appetite. I stopped at the umble point of my learning, and says I, ‘Hard hard!’ When you offered to teach me Latin, I knew better. ‘People like to be above you,’ says father, ‘keep yourself down.’ I am very umble to the present moment, Master Copperfield, but I've got a little power!”[ii]
A little power. That’s what we want. A little notice. We all want to be humble…but what if no one notices?
Then again maybe we don’t want to be humble. It’s not a very American virtue, is it? It’s not how you get ahead in this world. “Nice guys and gals finish last. You’ve got to look out for Number One. Don’t give them an advantage they can use against you. If they hit you, you’ve got to hit them harder.” You see I know the lingo. I could run a political campaign. But to be a servant? Who aspires to that? What kind of leadership does that show?
Author Graham Standish says that God has an upside down vision of strength. “To be humble actually means to be strong in a wholly different and holy way,” he says. It’s there all the way through the Bible. In the Genesis stories, God chooses the younger child over the older one even though nobody in the society of the day would have handled inheritance that way. God chooses slaves in Egypt rather than their overlords. God chooses Ruth, the foreign woman, to save her destitute Israelite mother-in-law. God chooses David over all of his older brothers to be the king. God chooses Bethlehem out of all the towns and cities of the land as the birthplace of the savior. God chooses Mary, an unwed teenager, to be the mother of Jesus. Jesus chooses fishermen rather than Pharisees. Jesus chooses children over chariot drivers. Jesus chooses the widow with her two mites over the religious leaders with their showy offerings. God chose what was foolish in this world to shame the wise. God chose what was weak to shame the powerful. Given every chance to choose otherwise, God ALWAYS chooses the humble and empowers them for the work that needs doing. God’s just got a thing about that.
So when we start feeling like we don’t have enough power…when we start feeling like we’re out of the loop…when we start feeling like our social standing in school is suffering…when we start feeling like our gifts are not being appreciated in the church the way we think they ought to be appreciated…when we start wondering why no one has called to ask us over for dinner…when we start to think our opinion is not being sought the way that it ought to be…when we start to believe that maybe the rules shouldn’t have to apply to us...when we start to believe we deserve that seat by Jesus’ side at the top of the table…then God’s got news for us – we haven’t arrived yet. We haven’t yet experienced the fullness of what it means to be a servant.
This week we started a new Wonderful Wednesday class on the Reformation and I gave the class members an excerpt from Martin Luther’s treatise called The Freedom of a Christian. It was written almost 500 years ago, but it still rings clear like it was written yesterday.
In it Luther really has just two things to say. On the one hand, he says, Christians are truly free and not subject to anyone. After all, isn’t that what Jesus came to do? To set us free so that we are no longer slaves to sin and death? Didn’t he win for us salvation so that we could look to God with confidence? When we profess our belief in Christ…when we put our trust in God’s saving mercy…when we know Jesus as savior doesn’t that mean that we are free. As Luther says, “All of us who believe in Christ are priests and kings in Christ, as 1 Peter says: ‘You are a chosen race, God’s own people, a royal priesthood, a priestly kingdom, that you may declare the wonderful deeds of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.’”[iii]
Isn’t that what should be said about us? That Jesus has come and so now we can live as kings, doing as we please. God’s love is sufficient to cover a multitude of sins.
But no, that is not all that should be said, Luther says, because there is something else that needs saying. Yes, Christians are absolutely free and subject to none, but because of that they are also slaves and subject to all. We are not made free in order to then live like everyone else in the world. We’ve been there. We know that conforming our lives to the world around us is a fruitless exercise. We know how empty that life is. We know how we feel when we give ourselves over to the idols of the world. It is devastation.
In the movie Fight Club, which is a brutal depiction of the emptiness of modern life, the main character, Jack, meets a man who challenges all of his assumptions. Jack’s life is a hollow shell. His greatest joy is imagining a life surrounded by Ikea furniture, but he suffers from insomnia and goes to support groups with people with life-threatening diseases just so he can feel like he’s alive.
He meets Tyler Durden, played by Brad Pitt, on an airplane. Jack thinks he’s going to be someone he can just have a meaningless conversation with as they travel on the plane. He calls the people he meets this way “single-serving friends” because they require no lasting commitment from him. He starts chit-chatting about how single-serving friends are like plastic serving utensils – the sporks. Tyler won’t play along though. He says, “The spork. I get it. You’re very clever.”
“Thank you,” says Jack.
“How’s that working out for you?” Tyler asks. And with that simple question Jack realizes that all of his attempts to be clever and smooth and slick were really not working at all.[iv]
So when Luther says that we are free, he does not mean that we are then free to go and do whatever we want in the world. If we have really found Christ, we have really moved beyond the world. We have really moved into new territory and we are now free to follow Jesus into the strange and wonderful life he offers. And the strange and wonderful life he offers is a life of service. If we are no longer concerned for ourselves…if we are over ourselves and free of the concern for our pride and ego and all of those things that haunt us when we are unsure of ourselves…if we are Christ’s, then we can give ourselves to others. As Luther says, the rule for the life of Christians is that “we should devote all our works to the welfare of others, since each has such abundant riches in his faith that all his other works and his whole life are a surplus with which he can by voluntary benevolence serve and do good to his neighbor.”[v]
This is life, not drudgery. Once we give up concern for our own ego we are then free to learn from the wonders of all the others we will come to serve. How do we know this? Because it is the model that Jesus gives us. We don’t serve merely because Jesus commands it. We serve because Jesus did it. Because Jesus came not as a tyrant but as a servant. Because Jesus came not to be served but to serve. Because Jesus kneeled at the feet of his disciples and washed their feet. Because Jesus went to the place where the sinners and the poor and the wounded and the outcast and the sick and the dead were…he went to them to bring them back home. Because Jesus went to the cross and poured out his life as a ransom for many. Because Jesus emptied himself. And he did it because he knew that life is measured in how much we can make of ourselves but in how much we can give of ourselves to others. “If you love your life you will lose it, but if you hate your life in this world you will have it for eternal life” [John 12:25].
Julian of Norwich, a medieval mystic, once had a vision in which she saw Jesus coming to her and saying, “If I had my life to give over again, I would. Over and over until I could show you how much I love you.”
And so what shall we do except follow where Jesus leads? Yes, it’s crazy. Yes, you’ll look different. But what have you got to lose except the empty life you have been living? And what have you got to gain except everything? You’ve tried living your own life. How’s that working out for you? Come give your life to Jesus and be free. And be free to serve the world. Thanks be to God.
Mark 10:35-45
Now James and John, the sons of Zebedee, came to him saying, "Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask you."
And he said to them, "What do you want me to do for you?"
They said to him, "Grant us that we may sit, one or your right and one on your left in your glory."
But Jesus said to them, "You don't know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup which I drink or to be baptized with the baptism with which I am baptized?"
They said to him, "We are able."
So Jesus said to them, "The cup which I drink, you will drink, and you will be baptized with the baptism with which I am baptized, but to sit on my right or my left is not mine to give; rather it is for those for whom it has been prepared."
On hearing this, the other ten began to get angry with James and John. Calling them together, Jesus said to them, "You know that those who seem to rule the Gentiles lord it over them and the ones who are great among them tyrannize them. That is not so with you, but rather whoever wants to become great among you will be your servant, and whoever wants to be first will be everyone's slave; for the Son of Humanity did not come to be served but to serve and to give his life as ransom for many.”
[i] http://www.tentmaker.org/Quotes/humilityquotes1.htm
[ii] http://www.novelguide.com/davidcopperfield/toptenquotes.html
[iii] Martin Luther, “The Freedom of a Christian,” Three Treatises, [Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1970], p. 289. Referred to hereafter as Luther.
[iv] http://www.imsdb.com/scripts/Fight-Club.html
[v] Luther, pp. 302-3.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment