Svetlana Khorkina, of Russia, was expected to take home the gold as the champion woman gymnast at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney.  By every standard of measurement she had it made.  Every standard except one.  This past Thursday Svetlana and several other lady gymnasts saw their Olympic hopes dashed.  It was not because they were poorly trained or because they were uncommitted.  It was just that their landings on the other side of the vault horse, after breathtaking airborne flips and twists, were predetermined to failure. Someone had done some sloppy measuring leaving the vault 120 centimeters high instead of the standard 125 centimeters.  (“Gymnasts get shorted on vault,” Dallas Morning News, Friday, September 22, 2000, 15B)  The difference that made, not just in the Olympic standings but in the careers those standings usually prescribe, can be measured in distances further than five centimeters can stretch. 

Now, I don’t understand gymnastic vaulting.  I wouldn’t know a vault horse if you lassoed one for me and let me ride it.  But, what I do understand is that whether you end up where you hope your dreams will take you or not is about more than taking good aim.  Sometimes, where you end up is largely determined by how you get started.

When my grandparents celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary in 1975, during my senior year at Hardin-Simmons University, I took my college sweetheart to meet them.  She and I thought we were going somewhere and it was time to let the family in on it.  But, after the reception, about halfway back from Houston to Abilene, it was getting late and I got tired so we switched drivers.  I figured it was the safest bet all around.  But, after my nap I awoke to a strange road I’d never seen before even though I’d made that drive many times.  Somewhere along the way she’d gotten lost and, instead of waking me to ask directions, just kept driving out into the night wherever her dreams seemed to be taking her, and us.  We ended up getting back to campus extremely late and, not long afterwards, decided to take separate forks in the road ourselves.  It turns out that she enjoyed driving too much, if you get my drift.

Now, in that case, I was fortunate.  More than halfway into a relationship that was not healthy we were able to make a midcourse correction that took us both better places in the long run.  But, once the preacher says you can kiss after the vows and you turn to face your new life, something has been launched that has a trajectory all its own.  Where it ends up will have a great deal to do with how itgot started.  By the way, if you are considering marriage and you don’t know what I mean by what I just said, please allow me to encourage you to give some more time to the considering end of things.  In gymnastics and marriage, and, as it turns out, even in church, whether we ultimately hit that toward which we believe we are aiming has a great deal to do with the trajectory that sets our course. 

That’s what James was saying to the early church.  His words, through twenty centuries of history, have never lost their punch.  He is writing, mind you, to church people.  Whatever they had intended when they first formed their fellowship, things had taken a wrong fork in the road.  Things were in disarray.  People were miserable.  Can you believe this?  People were actually arguing and fighting with each other, in the church!  So, in order to begin the process of sorting it all out, James demonstrates how something that was intended for one purpose got perverted to another by tracing the trajectory of their motives.  “Those conflicts and disputes among you, where do they come from?  Do they not come from your cravings that are at war within you?  You want something and do not have it; so you commit murder.  And you covet something and cannot obtain it; so you engage in disputes and conflicts.  You do not have, because you do not ask.  You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, in order to spend what you get on your pleasures.”  (James 4:1-3) 

Let’s be sure we get this.  These were frustrated people.  Their personal unhappiness was spilling over into and making the church sick.  And, to make matters worse, their frustrations were compounded by the fact that, when they stopped fighting long enough to pray, even God was not answering their requests for relief.  It was all because, James said, “you ask wrongly.”  Their motives were wrong.  Whatever they wanted, no matter how good it might have been, they wanted for the wrong reasons.  They wanted, from each other and from God, in order to enrich themselves.  They couldn’t get what they were aiming at, in other words, because their purpose, the point of origin, was evil.Think about this the next time you pray.  God always measures the significance of our prayers from their point of origin so that what makes a request holy or not is largely determined by what you purpose to do if God actually says yes.

Years ago, when I was a youth minister, some very needy men stopped by our church in Abilene one day and asked for money.  Well, our church didn’t give out cash to anyone for anything.  We offered them gasoline and food.  They wanted money.  When we wouldn’t give it to them, they lowered the amount of their request.  Just a little, they said.  They finally argued themselves down to one dollar and fifty cents before they just gave up and drove off.  It wasn’t the money they wanted that was necessarily bad.  It was what they almost certainly intended to do with it that didn’t get them what they wanted.

It’s interesting that I remember that story, now, in terms of what this scripture is telling me about my ministry here and our church’s future.  This is a crucial time in our church’s life.  No one who is familiar at all with our church’s history is unaware of that.  And, it’s not crucial as much because of what precedes this moment as it is because of some very significant decisions we’re in the process of making about our future.  In a sense, we’ve drawn a line in the sand and said we’re starting over from this place.  What got us here, we’ve rightly concluded, though not irrelevant, is not as significant as where we now intend to move.  Perhaps it is that way in your own life or in your business or in your marriage.  There are two questions we all must ask and answer because we will live with the consequences of our honesty or lack of it.  What do we really want from God and why do we want it?  Let’s please be very careful how we answer those two questions.  Exactly what is it we want from God and why? 

The disciples were clear about what they wanted.  Greatness.  That was simple.  Jesus, Mark’s gospel says, is coming to a critical fork in his own road.  It’s time for him to begin turning his attention toward Jerusalem.  “‘The Son of Man is to be betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him . . .,’” Jesus said.  The disciples didn’t understand what he was saying.  But, instead of stopping to ask for a greater sense of direction, they just kept moving right on down the road to where their own dreams seemed to be taking them. 

Later, Jesus asked them about their dreams.  He already knew.  But, every time Jesus asks someone about something he already knows you can be sure he wants them to own up to it.  “‘What were you arguing about on the way?’” Jesus asked.  They wouldn’t answer.  Honesty would have been humiliating.  While Jesus had been talking about dying, they could only talk about winning.  “On the way,” the scripture says, “they had argued with one another who was the greatest.”  Here they were arguing about who would win the gold when Jesus was trying to tell them that the only reward for those who finished the race with him would come as wood in the shape of a cross. 

One question we have to ask and answer is whether we want the gold or the wood.  The difference between those two can’t be measured in centimeters, only in terms of eternal significance.  All of which adds the real twist to the whole standard by which God measures the difference between winning and losing.  In the Kingdom of God, those who go for the wood, in the end, get the gold.  “‘Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all,’” Jesus said.  He who wants the gold must aim for the wood. 

So, here’s the trick to achieving greatness in the eyes of God.  If your primary concern is greatness then the first thing you have to give up is the passion for greatness.  In God’s eyes, greatness is measured more in terms of service than status.  So, the way to greatness, greatness that lasts, is through serving others, Jesus says. 

Let’s get practical.  You want a great marriage?  Become a servant.  Serve your wife.  Serve your husband.  I’ve never seen a marriage where two people were committed to serving each other where there were any arguments over submission.  Somehow, all these arguments over who should submit to whom get lost along the way in marriages where two people are more concerned about loving than who is in charge.  Don’t be surprised if this is hard at first.  One day a man decided he would do something different to show his wife how much he loved her.  On the way home from work he bought a beautiful bouquet of flowers.  When he got home, instead of just walking in, he rang the doorbell so he could surprise his wife.  When she opened the door, she looked at him and just started crying.  He couldn’t believe it!  “Honey, what’s wrong?” he asked.  When she finally settled down, his wife said, “This morning the toilet overflowed and ruined the carpet, one of the kids got in a fight at school, I had a wreck on the way home and now, of all things, you show up drunk!”  If you commit yourself to serving your mate you may not be understood at first.  But, it’s the only way to greatness.

Do we want a great church?  From what the Bible has said, the first thing we must do if we want to be a great church is stop worrying about being a great church.  If we lose ourselves in serving people, whatever greatness we need will come to us along the way and the rest doesn’t matter.  At least it shouldn’t.  In the Olympics, if you want to be great, you’ve got to beat everyone else out.  If you want greatness as Jesus defined it you have to find ways of helping everyone else win even if you lose. 

Tony Compolo, who will be with us a year from now, tells the story of a friend of his who was the president of a prestigious college.  At the peak of his career he had to resign because his wife was stricken with Alzheimer’s.  Even though her decline was rapid and many friends encouraged him to put her in an institution he quit his career to take care of her.  In fact, her decline was so terrible that most days she didn’t even recognize herself in the mirror.  One friend encouraged this man not to leave his career by reminding him that she didn’t even know who he was anymore.  This faithful husband then said, “No, she doesn’t know who I am.  But, I know who she is.  She’s the same woman I married.  And, I promised her I’d be there for her ‘until death us do part.’”  This man has gone from leading a university to changing his wife’s diapers three or four times a day.  He sacrificed greatness for goodness and, it seems to me, got both in the end. 

Jesus said that’s the way it works.  “‘Whoever wants to be first must be last

of all and servant of all.’”  If you want to be a somebody you have to risk being a nobody.  Only the one who could care less if everyone thinks he’s a nobody will ever be somebody in the Kingdom of God.

Thirty-five years ago Keith Miller penned these words.  “I was afraid that if I . . . began to venture forth in faith, God would send me to the mission field . . . which would of course mean Africa, India, or some remote place . . ..  But . . . I have seen why it is that I have always thought of the ‘end’ of the earth’ as some far-off place.  It is because the center of the world has always been wherever I am.  But where is the end of the earth from God’s perspective?” -  (Taste of New Wine, Word Books, Waco, 1965, p. 127.)  

The only reason so many of us stay so miserable and frustrated and angry is because for too long we’ve measured the center of the world from where we stood instead of from the cross upon which Jesus died.  That’s why we keep landing in places that only make us more miserable than when we started.  Our measurement of success if off from the beginning.  Jesus has given us a different standard of measurement.  It’s a ruler in the shape of a cross.  It’s made of wood, not gold.  In this world, nobody wants wood.  To be somebody you’ve got to get the gold.  In God’s kingdom, the place where only what is eternal matters and where peace and joy reign and love transforms, you have to go for the wood to get the gold.  That’s how you vault the distance, the eternal distance, from nobody to somebody. 

Care to vault, anyone?