September 21, 2003
By Jack Price

Series: Life's Detours

            Jesus and his disciples were on "home turf" again, back in Galilee.  A lot had happened during their tour of the Northland around the Syrian border.  There had been incidents of healing, radically new teaching by Jesus, and the mysterious experience of Jesus' transfiguration.  Back home in Galilee, there was a sense of excitement in the band of disciples.  They must have felt their commitment to Jesus was about to pay off.  One can imagine the heady feelings of fame and success in the air.  Peter had spoken and revealed Jesus' identity as Messiah.  The Transfiguration experience had confirmed his superiority over Moses and Elijah.  And since Jesus really was the Messiah, the "Son of God," the time had come for him to take over.

            Jesus, as they walked along, voiced a realism the disciples were not ready to hear.  He talked about "betrayal and being handed over to a mob.  He mentioned violent death, and then alluded to resurrection.  This was a time of instruction for the disciples.  Jesus used the Old Testament book of Daniel (7: 9-14) to try and teach them.  This passage spoke about triumph and glory at the end of age.  This was a reference to Israel and of God's abiding presence with them even in times of exile and suffering.  The focus was on triumph, but Jesus understood its context of suffering.  He saw himself as the suffering "Son of Man".  Triumph would come only later and it would be different than the disciples expected.

            Those disciples don't understand.  They were so busy carving out their niche in Jesus' kingdom to come, so focused on the glory that would be theirs as well, that they were totally unprepared for the cross.  Their lack of understanding led to desertion and betrayal.  Jesus' death seemed for them a total failure of his mission.  Eventually they came to understand, but only after the resurrection.

            Disciples did not get it!  Jesus' careful and clear teaching was met with what must have been an awkward silence.  One might have heard, "What did he say?  Something about being betrayed, killed?  "Didn't make much sense to me."  And then, almost immediately, "So who do you think is going to get the most power?  Who does Jesus likes best?" 

            Their conversation was really inappropriate and I cannot help but think how disappointed Jesus must have been.  Maybe he was a little angry, too, because he decided to give them a "talking to".  They arrived in Capernaum, perhaps at Peter's house there.  "Sit down, guys!" Jesus said.  "We need to talk!  It's time to get your head out of the palace or wherever else it is!  Political power and victory is not what I'm about!  Time to get really 'real'!"

            Mark was writing for a post-Temple community at the time Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans, 70 in the common era.  They must have felt powerless, like failures.  They must have felt beneath contempt.  These early believers were much like those Israeli exiles in Babylon and in the Diaspora.  Mark was assuring them that they reality in which they lived was, in reality, synch with Jesus.  He taught that if you want to be first, then first you have to be last.  Do you want to be in charge?  First, be the servant.  Do you want to be important?  Be a child.  They were experiencing the political consequences of Messiah activity.  That is exactly what Jesus did and it sealed his fate.  Jesus' course would be their course because such is the fate of discipleship.

            Mark urged his people to keep the subversive messianic idea alive in daily life.  To do so, the choice of the cross must be reproduced daily in the concrete life of the messianic community.  Mark interpreted their experience encouraged them where they were.  Jesus took a child as the model of God's realm.  Children were the lowest rung on the socio-economic ladder in Jesus' culture.  In such a patriarchal culture, authority runs downward.  On that "sliding scale," children were figuratively beneath contempt.  Age and tradition were valued above all.  It was a radical status reversal.  Jesus not only noticed children.  He took them as models of a messianic kingdom, even more so than women!

            This is a message to believers and a message for believers.  Remember lesson of the child.  Be encouraged when you feel like a child, when you feel worthless.  Jesus was not saying this just to be different.  It is the truth of life.  Power, status, and wealth can be powerful resources, but they inevitably move us into their own realm.  We become dependent on them.  They become our gods and call us from discipleship to selfish service to themselves.

How can we hear Mark's message for today.  We live in a vastly different world, yet largely in the same reality.  Wayne Oates book Life's Detours guides much of the direction of this series of sermons.  He has delineated five Laws of Life's Detours.  First was the Law of Compensation.  Today, we look at the Law of Realism.  It is time to get "really real."  Denying reality is not real, yet so many of do just that.  It is said that denial is more than just a river in Egypt.  As the first stage of the grief process, denial can help cope with shock or pain at first.  Grief often begins with immense amount of shock or pain and denial of the full impact helps us survive to where we can begin the healing.  When denial becomes habitual, however, it becomes dangerous.  Healthy living requires learning to cope with straight truth.  Realism is essential to growth.  Anesthesia is essential and desirable during surgery, but eventually you have to wake up!

            Albert Einstein was arguably the greatest mathematical mind of the twentieth century, yet he was a high school dropout.  He was, in fact, kicked out for being disruptive and having bad affects on the other students.  At age sixteen, then, Einstein faced either finding a trade or moving to Switzerland to enter a Swiss Polytechnic School.  Choosing the latter, he was accepted to school because he seemed to be fairly good in math.  He barely graduated though it was generally said of him "you couldn't tell him anything."  He was very unpopular and received no placement help from his school.  He was drafted into the Swiss military, but failed the physical.  He then took a short-term substitute teacher job.  It was a confidence builder.  Eventually he got a job as a technical expert third class in the Swiss patent office.  This was a relatively minor bureaucratic post which meant Einstein could make a living and have a lot of time to read and think.

            Working in isolation from the broader scientific community allowed Einstein to give reign to his original way of thinking about mathematics.  He completed the original formulation of the Theory of Relativity in 1905 at the age of twenty-six.  In The Life of Einstein, biographer Ronald Clark of his "courage beyond the call of scientific duty, submission to the inner compulsion which was to drive him on throughout life and for which he was willing to sacrifice everything."  Oates then draws some lessons from Einstein's story.  He could have accepted the world's evaluation of him as a failure, but he didn't.  He practiced the stewardship of loneliness, not leading to depression, but to a realization of his potential.  Poet Carl Sandburg writes, "One of the big jobs a person has is to learn how to live with loneliness.  Too many persons allow loneliness to take them over.  It is necessary to have within oneself the ability to use loneliness." 

            Einstein's first spiritual discipline was his stewardship of loneliness.  He practiced the power of an inquiring mind as he learned to listen to the music of the song within himself.  His life mission became the patient and persistent search for meaning in all that exists.  Finally, he learned the gift of genuine care.  Life eventually taught him gentleness and joy.  Near the end of his life, Einstein lived in the US, in the little town of Princeton, NJ.  The story is told of "a little elementary-age schoolgirl in Princeton went home and told her mother that a happy old man had sat on a park bench beside her near the school, and they had fun working her arithmetic problems together.  Upon inquiry, the mother found that the old man was Albert Einstein."

            The call of Jesus to his disciples, of Mark to his community, and of the Spirit to us is the call to realism.  Jesus heard the text of the song playing deep within him.  The disciples did not understand.  They could not hear Jesus' song.  They could not even hear their own song because the music of a triumphant march was too loud! 

            The challenge to the community for whom Mark wrote and for our church today is to trust the reality of our inner song and follow it.  Trust that God leads us to find our song.  Trust that our song leads us to find God. 

            How will we hear this music?  We won't hear it by grasping to be first and best or most powerful.  "Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all."  "Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me."  To hear the music of God playing within us requires passionate commitment to welcome the least in others and in ourselves.  It requires us to embrace failure, those our culture calls failures, those we consider failures, and the failures in our own lives.  It requires us to love the outcast around us - in our society, in the community around this building.  It requires us to love the outcast around us - those our churches reject as unworthy.  It requires us to love the outcast within ourselves - to know that God makes us worthy.

            The call is to political and social action as a subversive messianic community, fully aware of the consequences of such action.  The call is to keep alive Jesus' example of radical status reversal and to reproduce Jesus' choice daily by our actions.  Ken Medema sounds The Call:

Can you hear it down the ages like a mighty trumpet sound,

a call to leave the night and step into the morning?
It's a call to joy and gladness in a world of war and pain,

and yet it sounds a note of danger and of warning.
It's a call to leave your treasures and your trinkets on the road,
A call to join the weeping, and to bear the sufferer's load.
It's a call to live like fools by another set of rules,

a call to take your cross in hand and follow.
It's a call to love the stranger, it's a call to live as friends,
In a world that says good fences make good neighbors;
It's a call to face the makers of destruction and of war
And to plead that we put down those guns and sabers.

It's a call to death and dying, it's a call to life and birth,
And it's a call to plant the seeds of love on barren planet Earth.

It's a call to be the lowly, and it's a call to be the least,
It's a call to join the fasting that shall lead to final feast.
I hear that music, and it's calling me,
Come and be all that you were born to be,
If anybody would come after me, take up your cross and follow!

The invitation is to follow the call of the song playing within you.  Learn to hear it.  Come to understand it.  Live to follow it.