Sermon for 17th Pentecost
The Greatest Joy in Life
By The Rev. Eric Christopher Shafer -
When I was a brand-new pastor, serving Holy Trinity Memorial Lutheran Church in Catasauqua, Pennsylvania, Phil Miller, the older pastor who served the other Lutheran church in town took me aside and said, “Eric, you will love this work. We have the privilege of getting to the second floor in people’s lives.”
At first, I did not know what he meant, but I soon found out. Getting to the second floor was literal – when I visited people who were ill and bedridden in their homes, I often had to go to the second floor in their modest homes, where their bedrooms were located.
But, “getting to the second floor” in people’s lives meant then and continues to mean much more. As a pastor, we are privileged to find out so much “second floor” information about those with whom we minister – hurts and pains and secrets and so much more. We share in the “second floor” of people’s lives, information private and public, life experiences joyful and hurtful, celebrative and sad. And it is all a real privilege for those of us who are lucky enough to wear the collar!
I go thinking about this when I real scholar David Lose’s suggestion that today’s Gospel lesson from St. Mark asks us three questions:
• What gives you the greatest joy in life?
• What creates for you the deepest sense of purpose?
• When you do you feel most alive, most true to the person you believe God created you to be?
I will return to these questions in a few moments.
Today’s Gospel lesson from St. Mark is crucial to understanding Mark’s entire Gospel and, indeed, is crucial to understanding the invitation into the kingdom of God all of Mark’s Gospel seeks to share.
Although it is the briefest of the four Gospels, Mark turns out to be a master of suspense and surprise. In this passage, a carefully developed, though largely implicit, element of suspense and tension is finally made explicit in Jesus’ questioning of his disciples.
You see, throughout Mark’s story up to this point no one is quite sure what to make of Jesus. In fact, no one even knows who he is. Except, of course, we do because we are told in the very first verse of Mark’s Gospel that Jesus is the son of God. But those in the story do not yet know this.
And so when we read Mark we feel that same sense of tension we do whenever we watch a movie and know something the main characters do not know – we want them to figure it out and worry what will happen if they do not.
And so we almost breathe a sigh of relief when Peter, in a flash of insight, is no longer content with viewing Jesus as one of the prophets old or new, but realizes that Jesus is God’s Messiah, the one chosen and anointed to deliver Israel from oppression. And we think, great, Peter has finally gotten it!
Well, Peter gets the title right, but he does not seem to understand what that title means. And so when Jesus begins to talk not about the road to glory but instead the one that leads to the cross, Peter rebukes Jesus - and then Jesus rebukes Peter right back.
And, if we are honest, Jesus’ rebuke also calls into question our own understanding of Jesus, because Peter’s definition of “messiah” is usually the one we prefer as well.
Peter, you and me, and just about everyone we will ever know, we all want a strong God, a God who heals our illnesses, provides ample prosperity, guarantees our security, urges our military and sports teams onto victory, and generally keeps us happy, healthy, and wise.
But that is not what Jesus offers.
Instead, Jesus points to a God who meets us in vulnerability, suffering, and loss. A God who meets us, that is, in those moments when we really need God, moments when all we had worked for, hoped for, and striven for fall apart and we realize that we are, quite simply, mortal, incapable of saving ourselves and desperately in need of a God who meets us where we are. Jesus’ identity proves elusive precisely because God shows up just where we least expect God to be.
Which means that we do not get the God we want, but instead the God we need.
Thus far in this text, Jesus has been talking only to his disciples. But after this encounter with Peter, Jesus calls the crowd to come closer and listen. And then he takes up the question of the Christian life, stating plain and simple that those who wish to follow him must deny themselves and take up their cross.
Jesus is stating that the “life” that has been packaged and sold to us by society is not real life and we need to die to those illusions to be born into the abundant life God wants for us.
We tend to think that life is something you go out and get, or earn, or buy, or win. But it turns out that life is like love, it cannot be won or earned or bought, only given away. And the more you give it away, the more you have. In fact – as parents know profoundly – only when you love others do you most understand what love really is.
Likewise, only when you give away your life for the sake of others do you discover it. When you help to fulfill others needs your own deepest needs are met. This is both the mystery of life and the key to the kingdom of God.
This little story stands at the very center of Mark’s story of Jesus and marks the turn from Jesus’ teaching and preaching throughout Galilee and its environs, to Jesus’ steadfast, even relentless march to the cross. In this sense, it is the pivot point of the Gospel.
At the same time, Jesus’ message was and is absolutely and totally counter-cultural simply because we live in a world of ownership and scarcity where the message seems always to be that there is never enough and the only thing you can count on are the things you own.
And Jesus challenges all of that by telling us that the only things we can hold onto are the things we give away: like love and mercy and kindness and compassion.
Jesus tells us that the only things we can really hold onto are the things we give away: love and mercy and kindness and compassion. Which is why this Gospel lesson is so important.
And here is when we turn back to those three questions for our lives:
• What gives you the greatest joy in life?
• What creates for you the deepest sense of purpose?
• And when you do you feel most alive, most true to the person you believe God created you to be?
I have been privileged to have had so many experiences that have given me great joy in my life, when I felt the deepest sense of purpose and felt most alive, most like the person I believe God wanted me to be. Some of these have been dramatic – the installation of a new bishop in Jerusalem! But, most have been much more ordinary and still wonderful – preschool children greeting me at my office window, sitting at the bedside of a sick member, celebrating all kinds of experiences in life and death. The times I have been allowed into and onto the “second floor” of people’s lives.
Your experiences may not be as dramatic, your examples of what has given you great joy, a sense of purpose, and when you have felt most alive in God, but I am guessing your answers to these questions do not involve something you bought, or even earned, but rather are rooted in relationship, in acts of service, and even in acts of what the world calls “sacrifice” when you are caring for another.
And this is what cross-bearing, taking up your cross and following Jesus, saving and losing one’s life for the sake of others, that is what this all is about in 2018. Self-denial and cross-bearing are not about being less happy, you see, they are about discovering the real and abundant life – a kind of life the culture can hardly imagine – that comes in and through sacrificial love in service to another.
Jesus tells us that the only things we can really hold onto are the things we give away: love and mercy and kindness and compassion.
So what gives you the greatest joy in life?
Amen.
(Thanks to the Rev. Dr. David Lose).
The Rev. Eric Christopher Shafer
Senior Pastor - Mt. Olive Lutheran Church
Santa Monica, California
Sunday, September 15-16, 2018
