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September 26, 2006

Anne Jensen - Sept. 24, 2006

Proper 20 B Mark 9:30-37

What does it mean to welcome another in Jesus’ name?

As a campus minister with InterVarsity at Stanford, in the fall of 1997 Dan Clendenin piloted a "faculty fellowship" specifically for professors. About a dozen faculty began a breakfast meeting every Friday morning from 7–8am in the faculty club. In the next three years two more groups formed. They began with little idea whether the fellowship would work, much less flourish, but across the next six years perhaps a hundred professors, research fellows, lecturers, physicists, and visiting faculty joined the groups at one time or another.

He writes: “When we started most people did not know each other, so every Friday a different professor shared his or her Christian story. The very first Friday morning Doug disarmed everyone with a candid account of his disintegrating marriage. The following week Tony related his frustrations with raising teenagers. Another recounted his financial failures. In the succeeding months it became clear that these remarkably gifted people who had reached the pinnacle of professional success were more interested in sharing their lives rather than mere ideas. The group took on a distinctly pastoral rather than academic ethos. How do you balance personal and professional responsibilities? How do spouses negotiate dual careers with heavy demands? What advice might an older professor give to a younger scholar facing the tenure process? Does God care about my neuroscience research? I still remember the morning that Chuck spoke for many of those exceptionally gifted and gracious professors when he noted with his trademark sardonic wit that "behind every great man there often lies a trail of human wreckage."

Given a safe space that offered Christian encouragement, the Stanford professors experienced the message of Jesus that Mark articulates in his Gospel this week, namely, that the prizes of human greatness that we so honor, envy and pursue—rank, wealth, recognition, power, title, privilege, and prestige—can exact a very high personal price. Worldly greatness has a limited capacity to nourish authentic human fulfillment, it does not protect us from human vulnerabilities, and it often prevents us from experiencing God's kingdom. To make this point, by his words and actions Jesus radically reversed our normal ideas about greatness and taught that insignificant children epitomize the ethos of his kingdom.

Let’s look at today’s gospel, one which evokes a variety of emotions. Three times in Mark’s gospel Jesus foretells his death. The first time Peter tries to talk Jesus out of it, and is rebuked. Today we hear Jesus’ second telling. The heartbreaking element in this passage is that the disciples simply don't get it. "They did not understand what he was saying and were afraid to ask him." There is an acute poignancy in this passage. Jesus has been with the crowds and has responded to their great needs by offering healing and release to the tormented people who came to him. This is a crucial time for Jesus. He is telling his disciples something tragic and inevitable about himself, and they don't understand. He wants to be alone with those he has chosen, to prepare them for the sorrow and shock of his arrest and death; maybe he also longs to receive the human understanding that is so necessary to every person, the assurance that at least these, his best friends, care for what he is showing them about God's kingdom, so that they can carry on his work after his death. But they do not understand. It is easy for us post-resurrection people to scoff at them and wonder, "How could they have been so blind?"

Nevertheless they continue on. When they got to the house in Capernaum, Jesus’ headquarters for that time in his ministry, he asked them what they had been arguing about. They were silent because they were arguing about who was the greatest. No one knows for sure whether they were talking about succession planning or what would be their rank in the kingdom of God, but most likely they were silent out of embarrassment, much like children who are caught in misbehavior. He gathered them and instructed them. “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.”

Then Jesus acts out a parable. He picks up a child…a child who has no status at all. A child in that culture was like property. He picks up a child and says, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.”

To welcome a child is to extend the simplest of acts to an individual that society normally dismisses as perhaps cute but ultimately insignificant, someone who entirely lacks any accomplishments, greatness, status, or pretensions. By extension, Jesus invites us to welcome every person in the same manner, without regard for external measures of their worldly importance, status, success or failure. Don Clendenin writes, “Lately I have tried the following experiment. Whenever I am repulsed by a homeless bum who loiters near our home, or nurse a grudge against a friend who spurned me, or envy someone more successful than I am, I try to picture that person as a little baby or child. I then find it far easier to welcome or receive them only as a precious human being, rather than someone who can help or harm me, as someone I might ignore, fear or flatter.” The simple act of welcoming another person in that way, Jesus says, is to welcome him or her, and in turn to welcome God, who sent him.

Similarly, to become or imitate children, as Jesus commands in Matthew’s gospel, is to understand our own selves as children, unassuming and vulnerable, not as people whose significance rests in titles, honors, successes or failures, as if those might gain or deny us favor with God and man, but in the knowledge that we are human beings loved by God.

It is not simply the nature of the child that is important, but the acceptance of the child as a person of significance that counts with God. Servants and children were at the bottom of the social ladder. Jesus once again turns the values of the world inside out. What counts with God is not that which counts with the culture. It is this dynamic that weaves together our readings for today.

How do we take all this into our lives? To welcome the little child is to extend God’s hospitality to the insignificant and the invisible. This congregation has followed this instruction in some ways and not in others. Trinity Parish has been generous in its response to GAIA’s work in Malawi, far away in Africa, a place invisible to us except for the stories a group of people told us.

How do we welcome the people who come to our campus? Are they invisible or insignificant? Now you may think I am referring to James or some of the people who come to the clothes closet or the Sunday lunch, and I am, but I am also referring to other visitors, who look as if they might belong, but we just don’t know them. We had a number of visitors two weeks ago, among them Beth Foote’s husband and teenage children. They arrived before the service and were wandering around in the courtyard. NO ONE spoke to them, and even after the service only a few “hello-s” were exchanged. This is a family that a church would want to have. If we are going to grow, we must be more welcoming, more hospitable. What keeps us from being that kind of congregation?

I go back to the story I told at the beginning, about the Stanford faculty. They look good on the outside and yet all kinds of fears, hurts and doubts lurked within these highly successful people. The reality is that we are like those Stanford faculty, whether we are members of this congregation or just visitors. We are in need of God’s hospitality.

As a part of our year-round stewardship effort we feature a “Sower of Joy” each month. Our “Sower of Joy” this month is Edie Bridges, and among her ministries is speaking to anyone she doesn’t recognize. She says she may embarrass herself by asking “Have I met you before?”, but I doubt if anyone minds being asked. It’s a good line. Another approach if you recognize as face, but not a name, is “Hi, I’m Jane Smith, and I’m afraid I’ve forgotten your name.” Now if you wore your name tags, you could bypass that line, and go on to “Good morning, John. How’s it going?” That’s a good beginning, but only a beginning. We need to hear people’s stories, their interests, think of how to connect with them and how to help them connect to the community.

A priest friend of mine talks about three levels of conversation. The first level is “Hello, how are you?” “I’m fine, thanks. How are you?” The second level is the kinds of conversation where you share something that is important to you or concerns you. “I’m really looking forward to going to the city this afternoon. There’s an art exhibit/….play….opera I’ve really been looking forward to.” It reveals something about us; we’re sharing part of our lives. The third level is like the conversation the faculty are having at their meetings, and that’s the kind of conversation we should be able to have in Christian community, but we can’t get there until we’ve gone through steps one and two.

We’ve talked about developing the practice of spending the first five minutes of coffee hour talking to someone you don’t know. Let’s do it, and let’s begin today! Coffee hour is part of the sacrament of belonging. Don’t sneak off so that you can avoid conversation. Stay a while and build up the body of Christ that is Trinity Parish.

At the exchange of the peace I want you to look around you for someone you don’t know or know only by face. Welcome that that person. Most of us look pretty good most of the time. You don’t know all that is going on in that person’s life, but your welcoming that person in the name of Christ may make a huge difference, and at the very least, it will be a sign of God’s presence with us.

Let us close with prayer:

Almighty and everliving God, hear our prayers for this parish family. Grant us all things necessary for our common life, and bring us all to be of one heart and mind within your holy Church, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen

Reference:
Dan Clendenin, Little Children and God's Kingdom: The Holy Grail of Human Greatness