Mark 8:34-37; James 5:13-20
Presented September 27, 2009, by J.D. Kline
The Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost
Fred Craddock, frequent preacher at the annual Festival of Homiletics, shares the childhood memory of his father taking him out to the backyard on a summer evening, inviting him to lie on the grass and look up into the sky.
“Son, how far can you think?” Fred’s dad asked.
“What?” Fred answered.
“How far can you think?” his dad questioned again.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Just think as far as you can think up toward the stars.”
Fred screwed up his imagination, and then said, “I’m thinking…I’m thinking…I’m thinking.”
Said Fred’s dad again, “Think as far as you can think.”
“I’m thinking as far as I can think.”
“Well, drive down a stake out there now. In your mind, drive down a stake. Have you driven it down? That’s how far you can think.”
“Yes, sir,” responded Fred.
“Now what’s on the other side of your stake?”
“Well, there’s more sky.”
“Move your stake.”
The two spent the evening moving Fred’s stake, again and again. “It was a crazy thing to do,” said Fred, “but I will never thank my father enough for doing it.”
Some would suggest that the power of faith is to nail down the truth, to satisfy our need for certainty, to provide an answer for every conceivable question, to stake our claim so that we know we’re in and others are out of God’s favor. But with Fred Craddock and his father, I am increasingly convinced that this matter of faith has far less to do with certainty than it does with prodding and enabling us to develop our imaginations, learning to dream new dreams and envision new visions of God’s justice and peace, God’s compassion and grace beyond measure. Faith requires that we help one another keep moving our stakes further out, further along, so that we can be in the business of thinking and envisioning far more than we ever dreamed possible.
Consider those persons who have most influenced your life, your thinking, your values—those who have functioned as mentors for you. Are they not persons who have helped you expand your vision of what it means to live creatively and faithfully in the world around you, persons who have helped you consider what it means to embrace new possibilities, new alternatives, for life?
The first step towards embracing Christ’s markedly new way of living is to envision new possibilities for healing and wholeness, new possibilities for justice and peace, new possibilities for compassionate living and self-giving servanthood. Faith and trust in the goodness of God—this is what empowers us to begin living now as if the reign of God were fully present among us; it is what opens our eyes and our hearts to a new set of values—the upside-down values of life in Christ’s kingdom, Christ’s new realm. Surely this is what the Jesuit priest John Dear has in mind when asserting in his book The Questions of Jesus:
The Gospel advocates an upside-down logic, the opposite of every worldly value. For Jesus, the goal is to gain life, to enter into the fullness of life here and now and so also to gain eternal life after our physical deaths. Contrary to the rest of us, Jesus always keeps in mind this long-haul perspective of life after death. He urges us to set our sights on God’s reign of love . . .
This morning’s Gospel lesson contains some of the most familiar, yet disturbing words of Jesus, words that demand that we set our stakes way beyond the usual, that we set our sights on the reign of God’s love. Says Jesus, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it” (Mark 8:34-35). Jesus asks nothing of his followers that he’s not willing to do himself. Only verses before today’s reading, Jesus speaks directly of the upside-down logic of his mission, telling the disciples that he is headed to Jerusalem, where he faces certain death, a death he is willing to confront head-on. In his commentary Mark for Everyone Tom Wright offers this translation: “There’s trouble in store for the son of man. The elders, the chief priests and the scribes are going to reject him. He will be killed—and after three days he’ll be raised” (8:31). It is a claim that requires upside-down thinking, an assertion demanding that the disciples set aside long-held expectations about the coming messiah as one wielding vengeance and a sword, and instead embrace the redemptive power of nonviolent and self-giving love.
The day before Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated, a reporter asked him for some personal advice. Asserted Gandhi, whose life involved a passionate embrace of nonviolence as the means for lasting change of heart and change of society, “Have nothing to do with power.” Reflecting on that admonition to the reporter, John Dear asserts, “Gandhi learned from Jesus to run in the opposite direction of the world, to renounce the world’s power, to seek powerlessness. Try not to win success, reach the top of the heap, or dominate others, Gandhi recommended. Instead, discover the fullness of life at the bottom of the heap. Protect your soul. Stand with the powerless and discover the power of powerlessness, like Jesus on the cross.”
It is an upside-down logic that Gandhi recommended, a logic deeply akin to that upon which Jesus based his life and his ministry, from beginning to end. It is a logic that flows forth from a long-haul perspective, trusting, with Jesus, that the goal of our living is to gain life—life abundant, life eternal, life everlasting. “What will it profit [us],” Jesus asks, “to gain the whole world and forfeit [our] life?” (8:36). Eugene Peterson puts it this way in The Message: What good would it to get everything you want and lose you, the real you? What could you ever trade your soul for?
This is what it means to live as God’s partners, to remind ourselves, again and again, that life’s meaning shall not be found in the grasping and the hoarding to ourselves, but in the giving and in the sharing and in the serving. In Giving, an annual journal published by the Ecumenical Stewardship Center, Geunhee Yu, Disciples of Christ pastor, reminds us that “living as a steward is not an option but an entrusted duty for all Christians.” And yet, being partners and stewards with God is not legalistic obligation. Instead, asserts Pastor Yu, “living as a steward includes a free and grateful attitude toward God’s redeeming love in Christ…. It is out of our love of God and God’s people that we freely and gratefully give.”
In her most recently released book of poems entitled Evidence, Mary Oliver includes one labeled “Halleluiah:”
Everyone should be born into this world happy
and loving everything.
But in truth it rarely works that way.
For myself, I have spent my life clamoring toward it.Halleluiah, anyway I’m not where I started.
And have you too been trudging like that, sometimes
almost forgetting how wondrous the world is
and how miraculously kind some people can be?And have you too decided that probably nothing important
is ever easy?
Not, say, for the first sixty years.Halleluiah, I’m sixty now, and even a little more,
and some days I feel I have wings.
Perhaps because I stand so near to sixty years of age, Mary Oliver’s poem caught my attention. But even more, do you hear the themes I’m trying to share this morning? The poet’s claim, I’ve spent my life clamoring toward it, toward a faith that sparks the imagination, a faith that keeps us in touch with the incredible grace and goodness of our God, a faith that invites us into partnership with God. The poet’s question, Have you too decided that probably nothing important is ever easy?: This is a question reminding us that we need to keep moving our stakes further out, further along, that faith is not something to be nailed down, but that which evokes a deep wonder and purpose in our living, that which calls us to embrace a markedly different set of values than the world around us offers, that which calls forth deep within us a vivid sense of gratitude for life, that which challenges us to live in the conviction that all that we have, all that we are, comes as gift from God. Halleluiah, anyway we’re not where we started. There is movement, there is growth, as we allow ourselves to dream new dreams, to envision new possibilities for healing and wholeness, new possibilities for justice and peace, new possibilities for compassionate living and self-giving servanthood.
This morning’s epistle lesson is the text upon which we Brethren base the anointing service. This morning, however, I invite you to think not only about the ritual, the ordinance, that is such a cherished part of our faith tradition. Even more, consider the spirit with which we approach times for anointing. The willingness to place one’s life in the hands of God, to trust that God is at work in human life, even in our times of deepest uncertainty, pain, and despair. The willingness to embrace a long-haul perspective, to affirm that we can enter into full and abundant life, here and now, while trusting that, come what may, we are forever in God’s loving hands. The willingness to take hold of Christ’s upside-down logic, to hear afresh the call to live in the compassionate spirit of Jesus. The willingness to pray with the hymn writer,
Guide this church—[guide each of us]—to true commitment, let your vision be our own;
Faith and love our earthly mission, Jesus Christ our cornerstone.
Take our lives for joyful service, ‘til our journey leads us home.
Is this not our calling, to take hold of that long-haul perspective that enables us to proclaim, Halleluiah, anyway I’m not where I started…. Some days I feel I have wings. May it be so. Amen.