A Fourth Church Sermon by Joanna M. Adams

October 19, 2003 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

When You Want It All

Joanna M. Adams
Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 104:1–9
Hebrews 5:1–10
Mark 10:35–45

“James and John, the sons of Zebedee, came forward to him and said to him, ‘Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.’
And he said to them, ‘What is it you want me to do for you?’ And they said to him, ‘Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory.’”

Mark 10:35–37 (NRSV)

Almighty God, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is commendable, let us think now upon these things [Philippians 4:8]. Grant us a lively sense of your presence, and open our minds by the power of your Holy Spirit, that we may be led in your truth, for the sake of Christ, our Lord. Amen.

The title of this morning’s sermon was turned in on Tuesday. That was the day when everyone in Chicago, with the exception of a few White Sox fans, wanted the Chicago Cubs to have it all. We believed it actually could happen. The Florida Marlins could be turned into what a member of our staff described as “frozen fish sticks.” I loved that. To some, this potential reversal of fortunes took on theological implications. Jim Wallis, a magazine editor who went to seminary in Chicago, wrote an article in which he observed that life-long Cubs fans begin to develop a deep sense of eschatology, that is, the idea that the world is about to come to an end. “Justice might not prevail in this veil of tears, but vindication for all hopeless causes will come in the end times.”(1) This October was to be the beginning of the end of history as we have known it in Chicago for the past ninety-five years. We believed with all our hearts, but it was not to be.

There are few comforting words that can be said on the Sunday after a city’s heart is broken. Platitudes don’t help. Taking the long view doesn’t help either, I don’t think. I don’t want to wait until next year.

We are discovering that time does begin to temper the bitterness of defeat. We are finding ourselves remembering a beautiful summer of baseball, and, yes, you are hearing all of this from the lips of the person who has been known to pull for the Atlanta Braves. In fact, during the division play-offs I thought John Buchanan and I were going to have to go into couples’ counseling. Once the division play-offs were settled, John and I were on the same page, pulling for our beloved Chicago team, united in our loyalties and hopes.

That is just exactly the way it was with James and John, sons of Zebedee, the day they asked Jesus if he would do for them whatever they asked him to do. They were one in their loyalties and hopes. They were all wrapped up in the one whom they had followed and come to love.

“Grant us to sit,” they asked him, “one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory.”

Some people dismiss the Zebedee brothers, seeing them in this conversation, at least, as nothing more than pushy seekers of a place at the top of the pedestal, but I think there is a lot of good going on here with these two disciples. They obviously were loaded with faith in Jesus. They believed that he was full of the power of God and that he would pull off the greatest and most surprising victory in human history. Jesus Christ would defeat the powers of sin and death and everything in all of creation that separates human creatures from their Creator. Righteousness and justice would cover the earth, and every underdog who had ever lived would finally be vindicated. They believed in him. They believed that he could do it. Their personal hopes were completely woven into his destiny.

They also loved him. Before you judge them too harshly, think of how it is with you if one whom you care about is going away. Wouldn’t you say, “Please save me a place so that we can be close to you when we get there?”

But there was a serious problem with their perspective. “You don’t know what you are asking me,” Jesus said to James and John.

Three times already he had explained to all of the disciples that while he would indeed “come into his own,” it would be necessary for him to be condemned to death and to be handed over and to be mocked, and flogged, and finally crucified (Mark 10:33–34).(2) Clearly, all of that had gone in one ear and out the other. As far as his followers were concerned, he was on the fast track to glory, and they wanted to ride the train to victory with him.

Jesus tried again to help them understand afresh the kingdom in which he reigns: “Are you able to drink the cup that I drink,” he asks, “or to be baptized with the baptism that I would be baptized with?” He is speaking here not of baptism by water, but of the death he is inevitably going to face. And the cup—the cup is full of selfless love. Can you drink it? Can you do it? Are you able to give yourselves away?

“Of course we are able,” they say, once again hearing the words but missing the meaning.

Jesus continues, “To sit at my right hand or at my left isn’t even mine to grant,” he says. If you want to be close to me, you will have to come to where I will be, and I myself have never been one to sit at the head of the table. I’ve never been ushered into the VIP section. That’s the way it is with the Gentiles. They see power as greatness and strength and lording it over others and getting to the first of the line, but things are completely reversed in my kingdom. To be great is to be a servant. I am here not to see what I can get, but to see what I can give, “to give my life as a ransom for many.” (Mark 10:33–34)

There is an extraordinary thing that I’ve discovered as I’ve studied this odd passage in Mark this week. I’d never thought of this before, but to hear Jesus tell it, he’s not even going to be sitting at the table! Where will he be in glory? He seems to indicate that he will be on the wait staff! Even in the fullness of his glory he will be asking, “Can I help you? Do you have enough to eat? Shall we put another leaf in the table to make sure that everyone can be served?”(3) Now and forever he is the one who serves.

As Barbara Brown Taylor puts it so beautifully, “Jesus simply is not in it for the reward. He is in it for the love of God who had promised his own Son nothing, except the opportunity to give himself away.” If you and I do not understand it, welcome to the club. Even the disciples could not grasp the mystery of which he spoke, but you know you have caught at least the corner of this mystery if you find yourselves living in a world that is turned upside down, if you find yourselves not asking God, “God, let me tell you what I want you to do for me,” but “Lord, tell me what I can do for you.”(4) What can I do to serve my neighbor and to live out my faith in terms of kindness, openness, empathy, and compassion?

What does it look like?

It looks like you when you tutor a child from Cabrini-Green each week. It looks like you who rise early in the morning to welcome people to this sanctuary or to sing in the choir. It looks like you who serve on committees to make sure that this place, this space is hospitable and beautiful for all who would come here.

I’ll tell you what it looked like in a family that I knew, a young couple who met volunteering to serve in the ministry of a city church. They met. They married. They had a baby boy, and then two or three years later, a daughter was born. They kept offering hospitality at the night shelter/soup kitchen that our downtown church had opened. One night a man named Randy came in. He had a bad case of pneumonia. For a month, he couldn’t get over it. Randy was everything you would think of when you think of an underdog. He was sick. He was alcohol-addicted. He was a homeless African American man in the South. Mark and Katy were worried about him. They thought he might die. They couldn’t think of what else to do except to invite him to their house to stay in their guest bedroom until he got well. He did get well—physically and spiritually. He hasn’t had a drink, Randy hasn’t, in nineteen years. Every year he comes back to celebrate Christmas and Easter with Mark and Katy—a new life made possible through Jesus Christ.

Jesus said, “I came not to see what you can do for me, but to see what I can do for you. I came to give my life, to take a risk for the sake of others.” What does this kind of thing look like in our own personal lives and in our families? I wonder if you have had an argument recently with your wife or husband or partner in which you just had to win. I wonder if there has been an occasion lately where you found yourself treating someone in a high-handed, self-righteous way. Jesus said, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. . . . Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth” (Matthew 5:3, 5).

Those who try to save their lives and be on top and win all the time, they’re the ones who are likely to lose it, and those who would give themselves away for my sake and for the sake of the gospel are the ones who will find their lives (Mark 8:35).

The theologian Søren Kierkegaard made a distinction between those who esteem Christ and those who truly want to go his way. If you esteem him, then you lift him higher and higher and hope you can grab hold to his coattails and you’ll go higher and higher, too.(5) But if you follow him, you go along with him into God’s kingdom, to the place where people who throw their weight around end up sitting at a table by the kitchen door and those who didn’t even know to call ahead for a reservation are the ones who are given the best seats in the house.

Observers of religious life in American society today are taking note of the phenomenal growth of what are called megachurches. These are nondenominational churches based on a growth pattern: the goal is growth, the methodology is entrepreneurial, and the techniques are adopted from the marketplace. One of these researchers writes, “Growth equals success, and religious growth not only equals success, but it also reveals God’s blessing on ministry.”(6) I hope that’s not the case, because it seems to me that the Christian faith, if it has been about anything for the past 2,000 years, has been about exactly the opposite. Christians have never said that bigger is better or that the church exists to grow in size and influence rather than in service.

I believe that one of the reasons that Fourth Presbyterian Church has increased in size in recent years is that people are longing to hear a different message. People are searching for an alternative to the me-first, cutthroat world in which we live. What makes Fourth Church great is not its size, its location on the Gold Coast, or its storied history. What makes a church great is its commitment to following Christ’s way in the world. One of the questions that ought to be asked here is not how big is our church, but how deep is our church’s capacity to love, to serve and to sacrifice, and to understand what it might be like to live inside someone else’s skin. We call this spiritual power. I believe that a church becomes spiritually powerful when it is more interested in empowering rather than being powerful.

I hope that Project Light will be an occasion for a burst of spiritual growth. I hope that we will be able, in a new way, to follow the way of Christ, remembering that what matters in the divine scheme of things is what we able to give and share with our neighbors and to share with the generations of Fourth Church members who will come after us. If we’re able to do that, it is because we genuinely claimed Christ’s servant power at work in us. The test is selfless love. That is Christian leadership of the highest order.

In recent weeks we’ve talked a great deal about the Chicago Avenue aspect of Project Light and whether it is a good idea to invest in this new mixed-income community that is rising up out of the old Cabrini-Green. Some have said maybe we ought to wait and see. Maybe we ought to build only on Michigan Avenue. But I think about the servant power that God has given us. Surely we ought to use that power for the sake of the 18,000 low-income people whom we know will be there. Surely we ought to sign up to be a part of the building of a new community in Chicago, so that old residents and new can weave together a new kind of community, so that the least and lost will not be forgotten.

To be a blessing in the city. Not to be a big, powerful church, but to be a blessing in the city. That is why we exist, I believe.

We were in Havana, Cuba, two Sundays ago, twenty-two of us from Fourth Church. We were the guests of First Church, Havana, a great congregation, small in size, poor by comparison with us, operating in a context of great deprivation, but powerful and strong in love. Not long ago, some young men in the neighborhood, who know nothing about the Christian church, came and asked if First Church would sponsor a baseball team they wanted to start. The pastor said yes, realizing that God’s blessing is always “located in the way of Jesus,” and that Jesus’ way is always out into the world.(7) Jesus’ way is to reach out in love to all. You might want to know what the mission statement of First Presbyterian Church, Havana, Cuba, is: “First Church, Havana: A Light in the City.”

I close by telling you about a benediction that changed my life. I was in my mid-twenties, a young, harried mother wrapped up in myself, my husband and children. As far as my own religion was concerned, I assumed that to be a Christian was to attend church and give my assent to a set of beliefs, and that was it. When worship was over, I had done what I was supposed to do. One morning the new minister at our church stood in the center of the chancel and said, “I have news for you. If you want to find Jesus Christ in the next six days, don’t look for him here, because he won’t be here. Before I have finished these words of blessing he will have left already.

“Where will you find him? You will find him wherever people work together for good, wherever voices of people long silenced are listened to with respect, wherever the lonely are welcomed, and the hungry are fed.”

I had never heard that before in my life. I wonder where else you and I would hear it today. I’m not sure we’d hear it anywhere except in church, among the community of people who want to follow the One who came, not to be served, but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many.

Go find him this week. He’s out there waiting for you.

Benediction:
As Oliver Wendell Holmes once wrote, “I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving.”

Go out in the world to move in the direction of Jesus Christ, and as you go, may his grace, God’s love, and the communion and fellowship of the Holy Spirit abide with you today and always. Amen.

Notes
1. Jim Wallis, editor, weekly email magazine of Sojourner Magazine, 9 October 2003.
2. Barbara Brown Taylor, Bread of Angels, Crowley Press, 1997, p. 43.
3. Ibid, p. 44.
4. Ibid, pp. 44–45
5. Dorothee Soelle, Theology for Sceptics, Fortress Press, 1995, p. 92
6. Luisa Kroll, “Christian Capitalism: Megachurches, Megabusinesses,” Forbes, 17 September 2003.
7. Walter Brueggeman, The Threat of Life: Sermons on Pain, Power, and Weakness. Fortress Press, 1996, p. 28