Advent Lutheran Church

"A Life-Giving Collision"

             Grace and peace to you from God the Creator and the Lord Jesus.  Amen.

            Over the years we have performed quite a lot of weddings here at Advent.  One of the elements of our premarital work, a process that we use with each engaged couple, is a relationship inventory.  This is a nonjudgmental instrument that measures the degree to which a couple agrees on a variety of topics; financial planning, attitudes about children and parenting, communication, and so on.

            Predictably, there are a number of couples who score very high in couple agreement in most areas.  That’s a good sign.  There are also couples who show a stunning lack of agreement in many areas.  OK, so there’s work to do.  But there is one section of the inventory which everyone – all couples, regardless of their score in the rest of the inventory – absolutely bombs. 

It’s called Marriage Expectations.  Sprinkled throughout the inventory are a number of questions that are designed to show how realistic a couple is when it comes to the nature and demands of marriage, of creating a life with just one other person.  It’s not surprising that premarital couples don’t do well here, of course; you don’t know what you don’t know, and the only way to really understand marriage is from the inside of one.  But I’m never brutally frank with couples when it comes to debriefing their results in this category.  I never say, “You know, along with the romance and the euphoria and the goosebumps, you’re going to experience more frustration, heartache and exasperation than you ever thought possible.  Now, let’s plan a nice wedding.”  I just don’t do that.  (Although, if you’re a couple planning to be married at Advent and you’re here this morning, I guess I just did.)

I know that sometime during the first years of marriage, every couple will encounter a collision; a collision between their expectations of marriage and the reality of marriage.  It’s a collision that certainly isn’t restricted to marriage, of course; we encounter it in most areas of life as we grow and mature. 

How do you handle that collision, when what you thought would happen and what actually takes place are two very different things?  It’s a good question to talk over at brunch after church.  It’s always a good question for Christian believers of every age and generation.  It certainly occupied those original disciples, as we see them in our Gospel lesson.

As the writer of Mark’s Gospel unfolds the story, Jesus and his followers are making their way to Jerusalem.  And as they journey Jesus tells them for the second time what fate awaits him there.  “The Son of Man is to be betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him, and three days after being killed, he will rise again.”  The first time he told them – that was last week’s Gospel reading – Peter pulled Jesus aside to set him straight.  “Look, this business about suffering and death – this was not what we signed on for, not for you, not for us.”  And that’s when Jesus set Peter straight.  “Peter, you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.  You’re stuck in your human frame of reference, not even trying to see things clearly, with my perception.”

Now, when he tells for the second time, there is silence.  No one says anything.  Scripture says that “they did not understand what he was saying.”  But then comes this: “they were afraid to ask him.”  They were afraid.  What were they afraid of?

Mark Twain once said, “It ain’t the parts of the Bible I don’t understand that bother me.  It’s the parts of the Bible I do understand.”  I suspect that they were afraid because they were beginning to realize that Jesus’ agenda was very different from their own.  They were beginning to enter that collision between their expectations and Jesus’ reality.

Peter wanted a God who embodied massive, overwhelming power.  Like many people in his day, he was expecting a descendant of the mighty King David, someone who would rise up from among the people, gather together a great army, drive out the Roman occupying forces and restore Israel to a position of prominence among the nations of the world.  Jesus certainly seemed to be the one to make it happen.  The disciples had been with him, had seen for themselves as Jesus had not only comforted the down-trodden, but had healed people simply with a touch, and had even restore life to someone who had died.  Clearly, there was divine, irresistible power at work in this man.  So all this talk about suffering and death simply did not fit Peter’s picture of strength.

Peter wanted a strong God.  Can we blame him?  Are we any different, really?  When hardships mount up to overwhelm us like a relentless storm, when the voices of discouragement and despair drown out the voices of confidence and hope, when life seems to be just one disappointment after another – don’t we also want a strong God to swoop down and make things right, put us back on top of our game?

And yet, it is precisely at those times, when we are laid out flat on our back, our own resources exhausted, the voices of discouragement the loudest in our heads, when we feel much closer to defeat than to victory – it’s at those times when we’re most able to connect not with a God of winners, but with the real God, the God of the Bible, the God, Scripture tells us, “whose power is made perfect in weakness.”

That’s what Jesus was getting at when he told Peter he was setting his mind not on divine things but on human things; he was setting up that collision between Peter’s expectation and Jesus’ reality.  By our calculation, strength is everything.  “Might makes right,” “He who dies with the most toys wins,” we’ve all seen the bumper stickers.  But what the story of Jesus tells us is that God operates with a very different economy.  God measures strength not in terms of power but in terms of love; not victory but vulnerability; not acquiring but sacrifice; not glory but the cross.  What a contrast.

Jesus continues illustrating that contrast with his teaching about greatness.  “Do you want to be first in my book?” he asks them.  “Watch this.”  He takes a child, gathers it up in his arms, and teaches his followers.

In the ancient world, children were regarded very differently than they are today.  Then, they were not objects of attention, or even passing interest; they were really little more than pieces of property, under the control of the male head of the household.  They gained in value and stature only as they gained in size and ability and were able to contribute to the material well-being of the household.  But as little children, they were literally “worth less.”

And Jesus takes a worthless one into his arms and says, “If you want to have fellowship with me in this world, then don’t focus on your own importance.  Instead, find a way to open our arms to and serve the most vulnerable among you and around you; because that’s where you will find me.”

Bennett Sims is an Episcopal priest who has written a terrific little book titled Servanthood.  In it he says this: “The paradox of greatness is true not because Jesus said it, but Jesus said it because it is true.”  Jesus teaches real truth, or, as our Second Lesson from James puts it, “wisdom from above.”  There’s wisdom from above and wisdom from below.  Wisdom from below is wisdom that comes from us humans, truth as we have decided to define it.  “Wisdom from above” is God’s own wisdom, divine truth that is embedded in the very fabric of the created order; it never changes and isn’t impacted one bit by how we might feel about it.  It simply is eternally true.  So when Jesus redefines greatness in terms of servanthood he is speaking a truth that is valid for all times and places and people and contexts.  It is God’s path to greatness for your marriage or partnership, for government, for business.  Jesus reveals not a way of being religious; Jesus reveals a way of being alive.

I think of a man I met a week and a half ago, a man named Raphael.  I was in the Dominican Republic with a small group from Advent, preparing for a Service Ministry project that we’ll hear about next month.  Raphael is the director of the Santo Domingo office of an organization called Children International, where for $22 a month you can be a lifeline, literally a lifesaver, to a child born into extreme poverty.

As we walked along the streets of Santo Domingo, Raphael told me a bit about his own story.  He had had a successful career in the private sector, and had been a consultant for the United Nations.  Then he had joined Children International.  “When I see the change that takes place in the life of a child because of what we do and what I’m a part of, when I see a child begin to raise her sights and imagine a future that’s brighter than the circumstances into which she’s born, I’d never go back to what I was doing before.  Sure, the hours here are long and the pay isn’t that great, but man, this is the best.”

I think of people I know in this congregation, people who have retired after many years in their careers.  And only now do they begin to experience the deep-down satisfaction and sense of fulfillment that comes from serving others.  They’ve managed to put aside their own agendas and put themselves out there as servants in a variety of capacities.

God’s version of greatness and strength.  What might it mean for our country?  America continues to be the most powerful, most affluent nation in the history of the planet.  It’s as important now as it has ever been to recognize that the use of military power simply for the sake of power is not what a moral and ethical people would want.  Greatness is, rather, commitment to the principles that made this country: liberty, justice for all, pursuit of the common good, not just for us but for all people.

What might God’s version of greatness and strength mean for our church?  You really don’t have to go on a mission trip to Mexico or Texas or New Orleans to find and serve the most vulnerable and needy.  There are people in our own congregation who would count themselves among the least-regarded, least-desirable; when in fact they are the beloved of God.  Embracing those in pain, showing mercy, speaking the truth in love, ignoring status – these are marks of a great church, because they are marks of Jesus himself.

The disciples experience a collision between their expectation and Jesus’ reality.  But it’s a life-giving collision, because instead of getting the God they want, they get the God they need, a God who uses the apparent failure of the cross to bring life to the world, to you and to me.

God still uses that cross to give his servants strength to feed the hungry, heal the sick, bind up the broken.  Yes, God comes to give life to his servant.  Let that servant be you.

Amen.