What's the problem?

What’s the problem? The Dover Church
October 18, 2009 – Twenty-ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Scripture: Mark 10:35-45

It is hard for folks like us with a lot of church under our belts to hear Jesus with new ears, to just let go of anything we think we might know about Jesus or being Christian and listen for something new and transformative. This morning’s lesson, for example is strange, isn’t it? I mean, what’s the problem with John and James wanting to get ahead? Everyone wants to get ahead, be rewarded for hard work and achievement, be recognized for excellence. The other disciples clearly feel the same way or they wouldn’t have gotten so angry. They act like they were beaten to the punch in asking for the raise and promotion. We recognize John and James and all the other disciples because they are us and we are them.
But Jesus? He’s kind of a pious bore, isn’t he? Here are these two enthusiastic go-getters asking to do more and what does he do? He gives them a lecture about being nice, helping out, being willing to do the unglamorous work. He gives them this baffling equation, a seeming illogical non-equation, of the first being last and the last being first. Jesus sounds a lot like Mrs. MacPherson, my nursery school teacher in 1968, who told us to play nice, be kind, wipe our chins and wash our hands. Good advice, which will take you far in life until you get into athletics, politics, business, or practically any other adult endeavor. Jesus wants us to be Wonder Bread? That’s hardly Good News.
My friends, there is something much bigger going on in this lesson. It really is earth shattering. Jesus is inviting us to a life of spiritual struggle and growth which will bring us into new and abundant life, but it sort of just goes by us. Why? I think it’s because we do not want to talk about The Problem. In churches like ours, we pride ourselves on our progressive, upbeat, positive theology. We have a generally positive self-image of ourselves as individuals and of the vast majority of humanity and we want our church to reinforce this. We go out of our way to avoid The Problem.
What problem am I talking about? Well, sin of course. Just to show you what I mean, last summer I went down to the Billy Graham School of Evangelism in Asheville, North Carolina. I was curious to see what the whole Billy Graham phenomenon was all about and maybe learn something. So there I was, feeling quite out of place among all these Southern Baptist men, when one of the leaders asked the room, “What’s the problem?” Everyone responded enthusiastically and with one voice: “SIN.” “And who are we?” “SINNERS!” “And what do we need?” “JESUS!”
Talk about being in a strange land. Up here in New England in most of the congregational churches I know, if the minister were to ask the congregation, “what’s the problem?” The enthusiastic and resounding response would be, “THE YANKEES!…Oh, he’s talking about religion…the problem, well… it’s the Southern Baptists!” “Who are we?” “Members of the Dover Church!...and Red Sox fans…because the Yankees really are a much bigger problem than the Southern Baptists.” “And what do we need?” “A good stewardship campaign and better hitting!”
You and I, we dig ourselves into a deep hole when we brush the problem under the rug. You can knock those Southern Baptists for a lot of things, but they sure are exuberantly joyful about their faith and their lives walking with Jesus. And us? Well, we’re missing out on a lot. This morning’s lesson, for example, offers us a way into completely new way of life, new and abundant life in fact. To get to it, however, we have to admit that there is a problem and that the problem is us. Ouch!
Our lesson illustrates the most pervasive and all inclusive manifestation of sin, meaning that this is something all of us can relate to. The New Testament scholar Walter Wink has really opened my eyes to a mature and life giving understanding of sin as the spiritual challenge facing all of us. Wink explains sin in terms of domination systems in which we are all entangled. He argues, and I agree, that all of us are caught up in a life of power struggles, in which we strive for domination or are rolled over. Our relationships are about control, in which we are either dominating others or being dominated. This way of life in which “power over” is the operative term, leads to death, not life. By death, I mean the end of new possibilities. Domination is not a solution to anything, because it only creates more of itself: more dominators and more victims to be dominated. It feeds itself. One act becomes a cyclical whirlwind, as dominators and dominated go away from that first interaction and do likewise, creating further cycles involving more people, and so on and so forth. And that’s why the world is the way it is right now. This is the problem and it’s at work in all of us.
“Not me,” you say? Let’s do a little spiritual work for a moment, starting right at home with our families. No offense, but most families I know are messy, with arguments, struggles for authority and influence, harbored resentments, misunderstandings, frustrations, factions, most of which has gone on for years and the beginning of which no one even remembers anymore. Think about it: Does power over work in a family? Can you dominate anyone into agreeing, getting along, understanding, letting go of old resentments? You can force you child to clean his room, but you cannot force him to love you. Which do you prefer? A clean room or love? Can you force anyone to love you, let alone sticking around and engaging when they feel that you are not interested in anything but getting your own way? Yet this is exactly how most of behave in our families and wonder why they are so dysfunctional.
On the other hand, can you love someone into agreeing, getting along, understanding, letting go of old resentments? Can you love someone into not walking out or into coming back to the table? Not always. Maybe not much at all if things have gone to far. This is hard work, giving your life for others. It feels like being crucified. And it doesn’t always work. What it does do if you dare to try and are able to stick with it, is it breaks cycles and removes at least one contributor to the system. You. Your energy is no longer feeding the system of power domination, and in so doing you create an opportunity for a new possibility.
Maybe you have a perfect family and have no experience with what I am talking about. Maybe you agree with what I am saying, but do not see any possible application for Jesus outside marriage counseling or parental training. Think again. This has earth shattering implications. Think about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan right now. They are examples of this quest for power over writ large. Terrorists attacked the United States in the hopes of breaking what they saw as our domination of them and their culture. At least that’s what they said. We were their problem and so they resorted to the power solution and attacked us. And what did they get? Freedom? Better understanding? Sympathy? Better relations?
No. We responded in kind and came down on them like a ton of bricks. In our pain, anger, and fear, we unleashed even more violence. And what have we achieved? Friendship? Better relations? Mutual understanding and cooperation? Are they even doing what we want? Behaving as we ask? Stopping all this insane violence? Have we even managed to kill all the bad guys? No. The CIA reports that our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are actually creating more terrorists, whose primary goal in life is to continue the cycle and to try to harm us.
Following Jesus, being a disciple of Christ, is a process of liberation from this bondage to power and domination. Consider your lives this week, your relationships and how you are in them. How do you nurture the domination system by your thoughts, words and deeds, either as top dog or door mat? In Christ, we are set free to be the new creation. We are liberated from bondage for our own good, but also so that we might liberate the rest of creation. It is our calling, to follow Jesus on this most difficult path. This is why there is a church: to be a community of love where we can “pour ourselves into an ambition worthy of our lives.” This is where we go to school and practice on each other. Here is where we begin to transform the cycles of domination in our world, starting in our own hearts, then reaching out to the hearts of our brothers and sisters in Christ, then to our neighbors, until our embrace reaches everyone.
So, what is the problem? Sin? And who are we? Sinners? And what do we need? Jesus. By teaching us how to live into God’s intention, we have a model to follow. A hopeless model, however, is hardly worth the effort, is it? By going to the cross, confronting overwhelming power, and into the tomb, seemingly dominated by power and being raised by the power of God on Easter, Jesus unmasked dominating power as ultimately futile in the face of life and love. Dominating power can wreak terrible havoc and destruction and cause enormous individual and communal pain to the point of death, but it is not the end. The Hitlers and Ben Ladins of the world all end up on the trash pile of history. God, who is love and life, the creator sustainer and redeemer of life, has had and will have the final word. Life and love are transformative power.
And believing that, with faith in that Good News, we are ready, each of us and all of us, ready to be the solution, ready to begin breaking the power of domination in our world, ready to start transforming all that deadly energy. How? By serving others, by giving our lives for others. This is the way. This is the truth. And this is life. This is the way out of the mess we find ourselves in. By imitating Christ, we can actually break the cycles of domination in our world. We can transform the energy for domination, in ourselves and in others, into energy for community until God’s will is done, on earth as it is in heaven. That is something worth getting excited about. But first we have to confront the problem. Amen.