Desperate<title> <link rel="STYLESHEET" type="text/css" href="../../sermon.css"> <style fprolloverstyle>A:hover {color: #FF0000} </style> <style type="text/css"> p { font-family: sans-serif; font-size: small; text-align: justify; } </style> <link rel="STYLESHEET" type="text/css" href="../2002/sermon.css"> </head> <body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" vlink="#0000FF"> <table BORDER=0 CELLSPACING=0 CELLPADDING=4 > <tr VALIGN=BASELINE BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF"> <td COLSPAN="2" BGCOLOR="#000080"> <b> <font color="#FFFFFF"> <span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: Times New Roman; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA">  Desperate </span> </font> </b> <font color="#FFFFFF"><br>A Sermon based on </font> <a target="_blank" href="http://bible.gospelcom.net/cgi-bin/bible?language=english&version=NIV&passage=Mark+9:30-37"><font color="#FFFFFF"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: Times New Roman; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA">Mark 9:30-37</span></font></a> </td> </tr> <tr> <td COLSPAN="2" width="640">  <p><strong>"On the way, they had argued with one another who was the greatest."</strong> Wouldn't you love to have heard that argument? I wonder what that sounded like.</p> <p>I think I got a clue at my ten-year high school reunion, because that argument goes on, kind of silently behind the scenes. You remember your ten-year reunion? That's the year it's important to drive up in the right car and have the right job, to be able to prove to all the classmates who thought you were a nerd that you had been at least a successful nerd.</p> <p>By your thirty-fourth class reunion, things have changed quite a bit. We don't normally have thirty-four year class reunions. But, a few weeks ago several of us who still like each other got together. You saw them here at church that morning. Scott spoke to us for a moment and gave us the Episcopalian greeting that several of you have commented on so positively.</p> <p>That was a different kind of reunion that day. By your thirty-fourth high school reunion, everyone has been pretty much pureed in the life blender by then. Humbled up good! So, you tell stories about things that you would just as soon have forgotten. The stories that remind you how cool you really weren't in high school. The story they enjoyed telling on me this year when we gathered again, the one that seems to recur every time we get together, is about the time I fell from the stands the high school football stadium.</p> <p>Our coach had decided that day that we needed a training exercise that involved climbing down a rope that was tied from the top of the stands down to a fence about thirty feet below. What this had to do with physical training related to football I still don't know. For some reason, our coach thought it did. The climb involved getting into a rather awkward position between the railings, grabbing hold of the rope with one hand, then the other and then leaping. I put one hand on the rope, leaped, and then reached with the other hand. But, I missed with the second hand, my weight loosed was too great for one hand on the rope which then slipped loose. I fell about thirty feet onto a concrete sidewalk. The entire football team was standing there watching. They had a great time laughing at my misfortune. Both physically and in many other ways, it really, really hurt.</p> <p>It seems that I've spent my whole life trying to traverse the distance between where I am and where others think I should be, or where I think others think I should be. Can you relate to that at all? How much of your life have you spent trying to prove to yourself and others how competent and capable and witty and creative and powerful you are?</p> <p>The problem with that traversing act is that we keep running into this troublesome thing called life. We also keep running into this thing called the gospel, the story about Jesus, God in the flesh, traversing this human experience with us for a few years. On the way one day, he heard his disciples arguing about who was the greatest. When they wouldn't answer his question about the argument, he sat down, called them over and said, "Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all." Then he took a little child and demonstrated accordingly.</p> <p>Some years ago, my late mentor in the faith, Glen Edwards, helped me keep my faith and stay in the ministry with one little sentence. Simple words that I think about virtually every day. He said, "Sometimes, the greatest challenge of our Christian faith and of our calling is learning to navigate the distance between the biblical ideal for the church and its institutional reality." What a distance to be traversed! What happens when we can't do that?</p> <p>Church aside, what happens when the distance between what we wish our lives were and the reality of our lives is just too great? Well, we fake it, of course. Right? We learn words that feign competence to others. We learn behaviors that keep people at a safe distance. We seek responsibilities that will prove we can handle more than our share of the load. Sadly, for those of us "raised" in the church, we learn all of these faking-it-while-we-traverse skills at church.</p> <p>The ideal is that we would always be strong and capable and competent and always have the right words in every situation for everyone no matter what. The last thing we should ever do, especially at church, is admit how incompetent we truly are. So, to pass the time and deflect the truth, we tend to get into arguments instead, about who's the greatest.</p> <p>People are largely afraid to let the church know how much they are really hurting. Church is not, by and large, the place where most people feel free to admit they don't have everything together. Sadly, for far too many, the church has become just one more social venue in which they feel that they're expected to prove their competence.</p> <p>About twenty years ago, when I was a youth minister, I was called late one evening to the home of a couple of young people who were in my youth group. The call came from their father. He had always seemed a little at a distance, on the fringe, of what most people thought of as "normal" social behavior. He had called me to his home that night, he said, because his son had beat up his younger daughter and run away. The dad sounded panicky on the phone.</p> <p>When I walked into their home his daughter was sitting across the room from the sofa where the dad invited me to take a seat. She was wearing very obvious physical signs of having taken a severe beating. The son was gone, nowhere to be found. As the father began to explain the situation to me, he diverted his attention from his daughter who was really hurting, physically and emotionally. Somewhere in all that, I said the wrong thing. Something about giving attention to the daughter's very obvious needs instead of the father's. Whatever I said, it was the wrong thing. It triggered an explosion of anger in the dad like I'd never seen in before. With a fire in his eyes that looked lethal, he jumped up from his seat, physically pulled me off of the sofa, shoved me out the door and threw me off of the porch. I have never in my life felt as humiliated nor as frightened as I felt that night.</p> <p>Looking back, I've come to understand some of all that transpired that evening. Something an older minister tried to help me understand the next morning. He said that the scariest thing for parents is when they begin seeing in their children the behaviors they've exhibited. Whatever I had said had awakened those fears in that father. Is it any wonder where the son learned to beat the daughter? I now realize that, in that moment, though he had called for help, it was so important for that father to appear competent to me. I had said something that questioned his competence in a very vulnerable moment and he threw me out of the house. The really odd thing was that the next Sunday, he came to church, his old smiling and laughing self, acting as though nothing had ever happened. We never talked about it that night again. Proving or feigning competence was far more important, to both of us.</p> <p>By the way, if you're trying to prove how great and competent and capable you are today, how's it going?</p> <p>I have come to largely accept the fact that the church is not God; it is a very human place. That's because, whatever we are in life outside the church we will bring into the church, one way or another. Jesus is listening to our whole conversation, with life and the church, all along. Until we bring our real life conversation into the church and confess it we are forced to expend an unholy amount of life's energies keeping our real life passions well hidden, so that, when Jesus questions us about it, we fake-turn a deaf ear.</p> <p>This very week, I have had three conversations with members of our church that have reminded me that, when I am standing in this pulpit and talking to you, it's easy to forget how much people are hurting in their lives beyond what they appear to be in church. These conversations have reminded about the truly desperate situations of some people's lives. The only difference between those people I talked with and me, and some of you, is how much they have now been forced to admit their reality, at church of all places. I have come this week to admire them, their bravery, even to envy them. They are finally in a place where they can confess that they aren't the greatest. Think of how much pressure is off of them now!</p> <p>What's hardest for me is navigating the vast expanse between the high ideals of the gospel and the very human reality of my own life. Yet, Jesus actually gives me hope, because he helps people like me and you find a way to true greatness, no matter how that measures up to anyone else.</p> <p>Measure your life, the real life you live, maybe the life no one but you knows about, the life where you feel weakest and most vulnerable and least confident, by the words Jesus has given us. "Whoever wants to be first must give up the dream of being first and choose to be last." Don't measure your life any longer against what people oftentimes expect of you for no good reason. Measure it against Jesus' expectation. We are so good, by the time we've been in church all of our lives, thirty, forty, fifty years or longer, at pretending a holiness that is not ours. A pretended holiness that masks an unexpressed passion to still win and beat everyone else out at whatever it is we do that is in constant competition with the true call of Christ on our lives. It is our pretenses that keep us from confessing our desperation to God.</p> <p>This text is not the only time we will discover paradoxes in the Bible. These words of Jesus recorded in Mark 9 mirror some words he spoke as recorded in Matthew 18:3. "I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven" (NIV). Yet, later, Paul writes, "When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me" (1 Corinthians 13:11, NIV). So, which is it? Are we supposed to be child-like in order to experience all the gospel promises? Or, are we supposed to be competent adults?</p> <p>The truth is, some people never do grow up. They remain forever children, and it's a truly sad thing to see. Scott Peck once wrote that the most important choice we ever make in life is the choice to move from childhood to adulthood. Some people never make that choice. Then, Jesus comes along and says, "Unless you become like a child, you'll never discover true greatness." Jesus would call on us to grow up into spiritual adulthood. Yet, while his call is to grow up, it is never about moving up. When Jesus called on us to become a child, it was a call to dependence on him while making responsible choices in the ways we live, think and speak.</p> <p>We are given two powerful images. One is of people who claimed to be followers of Jesus, primarily concerned about who was greatest, arguing with each other in the presence of Jesus. The other image is of Jesus taking a child, drawing it close to his breast, thereby modeling for us not only what servanthood looks like, but what faith looks like. If you want to think of the position in life to which Jesus would have us aspire, this is a good one. Disengaging from the battle and the argument of greatness and just resting in his arms. Resting! Resting. Like a child. Which life position would you prefer?</p> <p>You've heard me speak of my dog, Beau, on occasion. We had family over the other day and they pointed out to us how much Beau's walking like an old dog now. It broke my heart. I'm around him every day, I don't see the changes that happen gradually. Beau is eleven, which makes him seventy-seven in dog years. He's beginning to lose his sight and his hearing and it's breaking my heart because, in his face, he still looks like a puppy. I can't stand the thought of losing him. The truth is, when we moved, we had to buy him some doggy steps. Beau sleeps in bed with us at night. That's about as much of that part of my personal life as I'll tell you. But, he does. There are a number of issues there. Perhaps I ought to go to therapy for that. But, Beau sleeps in our bed with us.</p> <p>The bed has gotten too tall for Beau and we had to buy him some doggy steps so he could climb up into the bed at night. At first, Beau didn't trust the steps. Maybe he didn't know to use them, or he didn't like them or something. When he would try to get up the steps, he kept falling on his back, onto the hardwood floor. Who could blame him for being wary about the steps? He kept trying to jump from the floor onto the bed and then falling, all the while avoiding the steps we paid good money for to help him traverse the otherwise impossible distance. Somewhere along the line, he finally surrendered to his own reality and started using the steps. He has become quite adept at it. It's a hard thing to admit the truth, that you're not strong enough and competent enough to climb the ladder everyone else says you should climb.</p> <p>The thing I remember most about the day I fell at the football stadium was how important it was to me to get up quickly. You remember, don't you, when you were sixteen or seventeen? It was so important to be competent, solo. I was really, really hurting, lying there on the concrete, stunned from head to toe. But, I knew, no matter what, I had to get up before anyone could get there to help me. You see, I had already lost most of my dignity. I just wasn't going to lie there until what was left of my dignity was completely stolen away by someone having to pick me up. As much as it hurt, I struggled to my feet.</p> <p>What I am coming to learn on the back side of life is that we will know we are coming to faith when we're so far down we can't get up on our own anymore and we have to admit it.</p> <p>When we're that desperate, that's when we finally meet God.</p> <hr WIDTH="100%"> </td> </tr> <tr> <td> Glen Schmucker, Pastor </td> <td> <div align=right>  September 24, 2006 </div> </td> </tr> <tr> <td COLSPAN=2> Copyright © 2006, Glen Schmucker </td> </tr> </table> </body> </html>