The One Who Has It All

Proverbs 31:10-31; Mark 9:30-37

How rare she is, this strong and capable woman, the one who has it all – and notably, does it all: runs the household from before dawn to late at night, runs her international business the same, so that nothing can harm her or her household.

Everyone respects her family and they look fabulous, too. Neither rain nor snow nor sleet nor bullies nor famine nor anything else can scare or deter he. Structural sexism can’t stand in her way. She’s buff. She takes generous care of everyone in need. She is a great boss and employer as well as outstanding wife and mother. Sheryl Sandberg has nothing on her.

And I’m exhausted just saying all that.

Only a few quirks of vocabulary prove that this portrait was drawn about twenty-five centuries ago, instead of twenty-five minutes ago. This looks so much like the idealized hyper-achiever that has a strong hold on the public imagination in our world: not just about “women who have it all”, but successful men, too. This is the image, conscious or otherwise, that ties so many of us to our cell phones and emails while we’re working and parenting or grand-parenting twenty-four seven.

This ancient poem looks a lot like the image that lives in the implied stories of today’s magazines and best selling business books and in employers’ imaginations, and that none of us are.

No matter how successful and competent you are, I promise you can’t keep up with this woman.

There’s a reason for that.

This strong woman, this woman of valor, isn’t us.

She’s God.

This woman of character, whom the Book of Proverbs tells righteous young men to seek out, is not me or you or any of the girls in their neighborhood. Lady Wisdom is the God those biblical young men – and you and I – are supposed to seek with all our hearts: to follow, commit to, to love and give ourselves to.

This ancient poem is not a job description for us, it’s a love letter from God, full of the joy and wonder and grace that God provides for those who love and commit to her.

Nowhere does it say that you or I are to imitate this valiant woman. The only instruction given to the seeker of wisdom, to the one who wants to draw close to God, is to give her a share in what she has given you, and to praise the one who does all this.

In other words, we don’t have to have it all.

God has it all for us.

And that’s what the disciples were forgetting, that day or week on the roads of Galilee, when they were talking to each other (but not to Jesus!) about which of them was the greatest.

They’d forgotten – or they’d missed it the hundred times Jesus taught it to them before – that God isn’t looking for the greatest. God doesn’t award first prize – not to anyone, ever. Jesus isn’t looking for disciples who can have it all, do it all, be it all.

Because God has it all for us.

For us.

God doesn’t hoard greatness for God’s own sake; God has all this greatness for our sake, to care for and share with and benefit us. As if we were the household – the employees and servants, the children and spouse, of that generous, competent, extraordinary, valiant woman whose praises we are invited to sing.

That’s why there can’t be a “greatest” among the disciples, can’t be a “greatest” among us, can’t be any difference in discipleship status between our gifted, inspiring, exciting Presiding Bishop preaching to the world, and a toddler whose parents never bring him to church chattering and fussing through the lovely solemn quiet or competing with the sermon.

No difference, Jesus tells his disciples, between that child and God’s own self. Because we don’t have to earn or compete toward greatness. God has all the greatness we need, and has it for us.

I hope that comes as a relief. Not just for any of us who’ve been trying to achieve greatness, or have it all. But also for any of us who’ve been trying to nudge or push or coax or force others to be greater: trying to get our kids or spouses or volunteer helpers to be more frequent church attenders, greater leaders, or higher achievers.

God has all the greatness they need; as well as all we need, and has it for us.

So we can let it go.

We not only don’t have to achieve it for ourselves, don’t have to exhaust ourselves and struggle with others in running after it all; we don’t have to hold on to it for ourselves, either. We can let it go.

That’s the other thing Jesus’ disciples mostly haven’t figured out yet – both in the story Mark is telling, and in most of our present-day lives. That’s why they’re confused when he tells them that the Son of Man is going to be turned over to the government, killed, and rise, and that whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.

They haven’t w\understood yet that the Messiah doesn’t need to avoid the humiliation of crucifixion in order to preserve God’s greatness in the world. And that we don’t need Jesus to win over the government to protect our greatness. Because it all belongs to God.

We don’t need to win first place. We don’t need to protect our position – don’t need to fear losing wealth or respect or independence or athletic achievement or academic success or number of Twitter followers. We can hold all that lightly and give it away in service to others, because it’s God’s greatness, not our own.

We don’t have to protect any of that for ourselves because God has more than enough greatness for us – each and all. Enough greatness for when we come in last, lose it all, or give up the race; especially when we send others ahead of us.

And yes, sometimes the greatness of God that’s poured out on us is pretty painful. Like crucifixion, sometimes God’s greatness is a sharing in the pain of the least-deserving, and least-respected. Sometimes God’s greatness is the grinding daily work of serving the oppressed and living as the marginalized. And God welcomes us – those first disciples, you and me – to share in that odd and excruciating greatness, because it is God’s greatness, and because in sharing that, we also find that God is pouring out generous care, love and strength and beauty and confidence, pouring out all that we can have when we have it all, on us. On all God’s household.

And all God asks from us is that we receive those gifts of greatness: all glitter the world admires and all the humble strength and service that God loves. And that we have it all and share it all, not on our own behalf, but because it is what God has given us, and praise the giver.

The Cross We Take Up

Mark 8:27-38

Why on earth would anyone want to follow Jesus?

Who would want to sign on with a leader who announces that – rather than make the change we want to see in the world, rather than liberate us from the oppressive government or systems we live under – instead, he’s going to become a victim of that oppression, suffering and dying and rising?

A leader who rejects the friend who tries to talk him out of this defeatist and depressing sounding attitude?

And who goes around publicly inviting people to get killed with him?

Who wants to sign up for that?

I don’t.

Just like Peter, I signed up to follow the Messiah who is here to heal and save: heal you, me; save the world from ourselves, and most of all defeat the evil around and oppressing us.

Two thousand years after Jesus lived and taught and died and lived again, it can be easy enough to feel comfortable with Jesus telling his disciples that he’s going to suffer and die and rise.

I hear this, and I recognize the story I know, a story we tell several times a week in the Creed and the Eucharistic prayers. I know the story, so it doesn’t shock me the way it shocked Peter and James and John and probably a couple of Marys, and the rest of the disciples, when Jesus first told them.
It doesn’t bother me, unless I remember that this means that Jesus may not be planning to overthrow the evils I’ve been expecting him to tackle and defeat in our lifetime, any more than he overthrew the Romans oppressing Israel in the first century. Or at least, not in the way I want God to do this.

And it doesn’t bother me that Jesus invites us to take up our cross (I’ve been singing happily about that for nearly forty years now), unless I really think about what it might mean to voluntarily embrace crucifixion – even if it’s only metaphorical.
I’m not especially interested in dying right now, nor in losing my self – losing the identity I’ve gotten comfortable with and becoming someone I don’t even know.  New life sounds more uncertain than attractive, from that perspective.

We’ve learned, over the centuries, how to soften the shock for ourselves, but I think Jesus still wants us to feel it. Wants us to know how radical an invitation he’s offering.

It’s not an invitation to suffering for suffering’s sake, nor because suffering or dying are holy on their own merits, but Jesus’ invitation is to suffering – or whatever work or strain or risk or loss – for the sake of something you love so very much more than yourself.
Just the same way Jesus embraced all that risk for the sake of God’s extraordinary, all-encompassing love for human beings. For us.

Jesus wants us to feel the shock, I believe, and to embrace the risk in his call to us to love as we never dreamed we could love. Wants us to understand that loving something so very much more than I love myself is, indeed, a way of dying to myself. Jesus wants us to know how much that love costs, as well as the incredible reward of abundant life that kind of love can bring.

Sometimes when you love that way you can see and feel that cross in your hands and the weight on your shoulders, as you empty your budget or your schedule or your tear ducts or even your blood into the pain of a beloved friend, a child or parent. Or when you empty your self-image, your identity, your wallet, your emotional and physical strength, into the dream of God or into the pain and need of the world: for justice, peace, good news, healing or daily bread.

Other times, when you love that powerfully, you don’t always know it consciously, or feel the weight of the cross as you take it up.

I don’t always believe, or know, that I love God’s work in the world, or God’s call that way. Often I don’t want to love Jesus quite that much – it’s overwhelming. But I can tell you that the self I used to know was never going to live in New Jersey. And here I am in the midst of life extraordinarily abundant with you.

Sometimes the cross looks like the call of Mother Teresa, Dr. King, or Oscar Romero.

Sometimes it looks like a cross-country move you hadn’t planned on, and which transforms you anyway, lost and saved all at once, by loving something or someone so very much more than yourself.

That’s the cross Jesus invites us to take up; how he invites each of us to follow him, and all of us together.

It’s an invitation we took up, consciously or not, in baptism, vowing to love and follow Jesus, and to live in imitation of him, including dying and rising.

That’s what we do in baptism, if you hadn’t noticed before. What two more of us do today, as Kathy and Reese are baptized. Through the power of the water – water we can’t breathe in, when it washes over us – we die with Jesus, and in the same water, rise to share in his resurrection: to have, in our own lives, eternal life.

A few splashes of water, in a tidy church ceremony, aren’t very dangerous. But we’ve been watching the deadly power of water all weekend long, as Florence pours through the Carolinas. We’ve been seeing all that power that can wash away who and what and where we were and leave us in a whole new landscape, a new life we aren’t even going to recognize at first.

In the promises we make in baptism, and renew any time we participate in someone else’s baptism – promises of proclaiming good news, seeking justice and peace and human dignity, loving our neighbor and seeking Christ – we commit ourselves to taking up our cross: loving God’s mission, God’s people, God’s life, in our daily actions and choices, loving more than we ever dreamed we could love.

And in taking up that cross of love, risking suffering or loss or strain or unintended transformation, we accept Jesus’ invitation to share his divine experience. Loving as God loves, infinitely more than we can ask or imagine, risking resurrection, new, unknown, abundant eternal life here and now and always.

It’s probably not what you wanted to sign up for; maybe not what you thought you signed up for when you first met Jesus, or when you were baptized. But it is what Jesus has been telling us all along. That love, cross-shaped and awkward as it may be, is already pulling us through every risk and strain and loss, to resurrection life.

Secondary

Mark 7:24-37 (James 2:1-17)

Have you ever felt that God probably wasn’t all that interested in you? Felt like God had other priorities; and whatever healing or hope or resolution you need is too much to ask?

Or have you felt confident of Jesus’ care? Sure that Jesus will always respond to your prayer, that God must and will heal or restore or resolve what you long for?

Either way, today we heard your story.

It’s not an easy story to read or hear, for many of us. It’s profoundly uncomfortable to hear Jesus call a desperate mother a dog. Jesus himself, who we would like to trust to be perfect, welcoming, universally gracious, insults this woman. Brushes her off, apparently indifferent to this mother and child and quest for healing.

It’s important that we don’t paper this over; that we hear and feel the shock of Jesus betraying our expectations of niceness; and don’t ignore our discomfort.

Because this is a story for and about those of us who aren’t at the center of the Kingdom of God.

The kingdom of God has no second class citizens, but Jesus and the prophets of ages past and present have made it clear that God does have very definite priorities. They tell us that universal healing and the gospel start with the children of Israel; that people who are poor, or oppressed, or marginalized – the people who in many cases wouldn’t feel all that comfortable at Trinity on a Sunday morning – these are the people who are God’s first priority.

It’s a priority God wants us to share – we were just reminded about that, hearing the letter of James this morning. And it’s worth noting that the many of us here who are comfortable – wealthy enough, secure enough, powerful enough to live a pretty good life – we aren’t the folks around whom the Kingdom of God and the mission of Jesus is built.

Like this Gentile woman Jesus meets today.

Now, we don’t really know anything about her except that she’s a mother, and that she’s not Jewish. She’s probably a local in the region of Roman Syria where Jesus has gone to get away for a while. She might, in fact, be one of the poor and oppressed, primary to God, “secondary” in Jesus’ mission only because she’s not of Israel.

But some scholars suggest that she represents the wealthy Gentile landlords of the area – people who tended to marginalize or oppress Jews living among them. Not necessarily by intention, but by just how their economic system works. So you could imagine her as, say, Jeff Bezos or Ivanka Trump – people who can usually command priority attention, and buy anything they want – coming to beg healing of the man who is organizing their workers to demand change.

She is, in any case, not one of God’s priorities.
And she knows it.

She starts the whole conversation from a position of vulnerability, begging at Jesus’ feet. And when he insults her, calls either her or her daughter a dog, of lesser value or priority, she doesn’t argue. She stays “under the table” at Jesus’ feet; embraces that secondary status and – with confidence and conviction – points out that there is plenty of God’s abundance to go around. The dogs eat what falls from the table without claiming a place at the table, and there’s enough. Plenty.

She’s right. Jesus affirms her words, her knowledge and proclamation of God’s abundance, of God’s grace which is more than enough for the secondary, the lower priorities, and confirms her miracle.  Her daughter is healed.

And this woman – secondary, subordinate, low-priority – is the person in this story who reveals God’s healing, abundance and grace by her confidence and trust.

It’s good news – for you and me here this morning, for the world – good news that Jesus’ priorities are different from ours.

God’s “nice”, God’s healing, God’s justice; God’s priorities are all different from ours; from yours, from mine; from the unspoken assumptions and priorities of our society (priorities here and now that definitely favor the already rich and already powerful, often at the expense of the most vulnerable).

We need God’s priorities to be different than ours, or the world can’t be transformed, saved, and made whole.

A couple days ago, I got into a conversation where we were trying to imagine a progressive utopia for a fiction writer friend. We had fun building it up – with universally accessible and excellent healthcare, a complete end to homelessness (but, you know, with freedom to live outside if you want), single page tax returns, well-funded education and parks and art and music and more…. But it was clear enough even as we built it that it couldn’t be perfect – there are conflicting and exclusive priorities even in a like-minded utopia. It couldn’t all work outside of fiction.

Not without miracles, anyway.

And the kingdom of God can’t work without God’s priorities being different than any of ours, all of ours. Different enough for true, complete, transformation ; the transformation that heals us right along with the world.

So it’s great news that God’s priorities are different from ours. Even good news that you or I or all of us might be secondary, or even last in God’s kingdom – that eternal reality where the last are first and the first are last.
Because in the kingdom of God, being secondary, being last, is a place of miraculous abundance and great joy. Where the last have the same confidence as that Syrophonecian woman proclaimed: that the least crumb of God’s grace and power is more than enough for everything we need, and seeing others be fed first is cause for hope and trust, not anxiety or fear.

The world we live in keeps pushing us to put ourselves first, to insist on our own priority, or to achieve first place.

Jesus doesn’t.

Jesus heals and loves and redeems the last just as fully as the first.

And when the world tells us that we won’t get enough if we aren’t first in line, tells us to fight to protect our status or privileges, God reminds us that there is more than enough for the very last and least. Enough, not someday in heaven, but here and now; and enough that is probably lavishly more than we would have claimed or wanted from first place.

And that lets us take joy, right now, in seeing others come first, get ahead of us. Even when everyone around us is telling us we’re losing, we know God can’t lose us.

Knowing, embracing, that we don’t need to come first in Jesus’ mission or God’s kingdom can open us up to receive and pour out and share grace and miracles in unlimited measure, confident that God cannot run out.

Because coming second – maybe even coming last – means that no matter what tries to get between us and God, no matter who or what claims to push us down the line, there is nothing, nothing, that can keep us out of God’s healing and favor and blessing.

And if that’s not good news, I don’t know what is.