PECULIAR VICTORY

September 29, 1991

8:30 and 11:00 a.m. Worship Services
John M. Buchanan

Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago

Scripture
Tsaiah 52:13-15
Mark 9:30-37
",..wWhoever wants to be first must be the last of all and servant
of all." -Mark 9:35 (NRSV)

——

"What a pity," author Annie Dillard says, "that so hard
the heels of Christ come the Christians. There is no breather).
The disciples turn into the early Christians between one rush€d
verse and another. What a dismaying pity, that here co the
Christians already." [Incarnation, Contemporary Writ On The
New Testament, Ed. Alfred Corn, p. 36]

They were silent, Mark reports, tho disciples-of-Jesus-
becqme-early-Christians, and in the be ing looking so familiar,
Y were uncharacteristically
assed by their utter lack of tact,
sensitivity and appropriateness. They had shamed themselves and
they had nothing to say. And, I think, they were stunned into
Silence by the raw challenge of what he said to them. It is not
often that religion rises out of the pastel, genteel garden the
world assigns it and strikes our senses with full passionate

bloom. But it did this day and they were absolutely silent, as
we should have been too.

What does it mean to follow Jesus? is the defining question
for Mark. And for one-half of his small book he answers that in
terms of teaching and healing and walking behind Jesus as he
travels between the small villages of Galilee. And then one day
he asks, "Who do you think I am?" When Peter answers "the
Messiah," Jesus explains for the first time that being the Messi-
ah is a very different matter from what they had been taught to
expect. It would mean reorienting life, giving life away, pour-
ing life out, suffering, dying. Following him to Jerusalem was
the equivalent of picking up a cross and carrying it.

He continues with the thought walking along the road in
Galilee: following means denial of self, sacrifice, suffering.

That evening, in the common house in Capernaium they used as
home and headquarters, he asked: "What were you arguing about
this afternoon?" It had been a petty thing at first, a small
disagreement, the exact nature of which they had forgotten. But
it had escalated, egos got involved, and an inconsequential disa-

greement, and became combat: Suddenly the real issue emerges
over the primal matter of who had the power and authority, who
was right and who was wrong, who would be number one. When his

question focused on what had happened they were too embarrassed
to respond. Here he was, patiently trying to bring them along,

talking about giving his life away, and they're arguing over who
is number one.

Annie Dillard is dismayed. "What a pity that on the heels
of Christ come the Christians. Who could believe in them?"

It is an important moment. He sits down - which is always
the signal that official teaching is about to happen - and says
something so stunning they remained in silence.

“Whoever wants to be first must be last and the servant of
all."

Their families must have been there too. ---Children play-
ing, toddling around, noisily. He picked one of them up, held
the child in his lap and said:

"Whoever welcomes a little child, welcomes me - and the one
who sent me."

Greatness measured by service. Intimacy with God a product
of opening your arms to the weakest, the least influential, the
powerless? It's a peculiar way to look at things.

It is a direct and dramatic challenge to the world's assunp-
tion that greatness is a product of power and strength and size.

And that is an assumption which is deeply embedded in our
culture.

Greatness - equals power - equals winning - equals beating
someone. Do you notice that every athletic victory, regardless
of how modest, elicits the now familiar response: "we're number
one" — even if it's a battle for last place? How curious that
little leaguers conclude that winning a game means - we are now
pre-eminent, if not omnipotent. How unfortunate that there have
to be rules in professional sports prohibiting what was once

unthinkable, namely taunting and humiliating your defeated oppo-
nent.

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What is it about us? "It seems that we need an enemy to
define ourselves," observes Professor Betsy Flowers of the Uni-
versity of Texas [see James Autry, Love and Profit, p. 103]. It
may be that what we did to Iraq was geo-politically necessary,
and if it had to be done, it was good to do it quickly, but it is
a very curious kind of patriotism that attaches greatness - and
feeling good about ourselves again - to finding an enemy to beat.

It is a pathology, I would submit, this commitment to
greatness through obliteration of one's enemies, and it infects
the culture from top to bottom. We must be number one.

James Autry, recently retired CEO of the Meredith Corpora-
tion, has written a book that is receiving a lot of attention,
under the title Love and Profit. Autry objects to this ideology
which finds its way into corporate life and sees business as a
battle which demands total commitment to your competitor's de-
mise. In an essay on "Winning Redefined" Autry tells about
reflecting on a sales meeting he attended and how one of his
managers tried to motivate her peers. "I'm into winning" she
said, "so let's get out there and kick a little."

Autry has written a very different book. "Management is a

matter of love," (13) he proposes and advises that if you don't
care about people you should get out of management before it is
too late... "Save yourself a heart attack and save many people a

lot of daily grief." (17) Autry thinks the Vice President for
Human Resources should be called Vice President for Caring. (77)
And just when you think this is simply a sentimental version of
your garden variety how-to-do-it management primer, Autry goes in
deep and it sounds as if good management really is serving the
very people you are trying to manage. "Listen" he advises. "Pay
attention." Care for people by knowing when a son receives a
scholarship or a parent dies.

Jesus said greatness is measured not by the standards the
world always uses, but by service. And then in case they thought
that was a harmless abstraction, he brought a child into their
midst. Now his Hebraic culture valued children but the larger
culture did not. In Graeco-Roman culture children were expend-
able, ignored, not nurtured, often simply abandoned. One of the
first Christian service projects was the adoption of abandoned
children in the Roman Empire. So when he brings this child in as
an example of service he is saying something about the kind of
service he means - namely service... listening to... paying
attention to... taking seriously the needs of those who have no
power, no authority, no public worth, no political clout.

And I found myself thinking that maybe that hasn't changed

much: that within the sub-culture of privilege,- the one which
you and I inhabit - children are valued, but they really aren't

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valued at all by the culture at large when it expresses its
priorities politically and economically. To be a minority and
poor and a child is to be in a lot of trouble in our nation at
this point in our history. And I found myself musing that author
Alex Kotlowitz has done a very Christ-like thing in writing There
Are No Children Here, by bringing into our midst two children
actually, Lafeyette and Pharoah Rivers who, with their mother,
LaJoe, lived in the Henry Horner Homes in Chicago: and who - if
we look at them for very long, by reading the book Kotlowitz has

written - will stun us, too, into an embarrassed and shameful
Silence:

"If I grow up, I'd like to be a bus driver" Lafeyette puts
it: "if," not "when" I grow up, because he has made the adjust-
ment to a sub-culture in which children don't make it to adult-
hood - some not at all, and very few to an adulthood that in-
cludes anything so grandiose and splendid as driving a bus.
Lavoe gave the book its title by responding to Kotlowitz's sug-
gestion about studying her children and home and then writing
about it. "But you know there are no children here. They've
seen too much to be children." And like many CHA mothers began
to pay $80 a month for burial insurance for her two boys and four
year old triplets because by the summer of that year, 1987, 57
children had been killed in Chicago - five in Horner, including
two who died from smoke inhalation when firefighters had to climb
14 stories because the elevators were broken (p. 17).

Let Alex Kotlowitz bring the children into our midst:

"Lafeyette had promised his mother he wouldn't let
anything happen to Pharoah. But for a brief
moment, he thought he had lost hin.

“Three days after Lafeyette's birthday, gunfire
once again filled the air. It was two-thirty in
the afternoon; school had just let out. As Lafey-
ette and his mother hustled the triplets onto the
floor of the apartment's narrow hallway, a drill
they now followed almost instinctually, they
caught glimpses through the windows of young
gunmen waving their pistols about. One youth
toted a submachine gun.

"The dispute had started when two rival drug gangs
fired at each other from one high-rise to another.

"Prom his first-floor apartment, Lafeyette, who
had left his fifth-grade class early that day,
watched hopefully for Pharoah as the children
poured out of the Henry Suder Elementary School,
just a block away. . Panicking, many of the young-
sters ran directly toward the gunfire. Lafeyette

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and his mother screamed at the children to turn
back. But they kept coming, clamoring for the
shelter of their homes.

"Lhafeyette finally spotted his brother, first
running, then walking, taking cover behind trees
and fences. But then he lost sight of him.
"Mama, lemme go get him. Lemme go,' Lafeyette
begged. He was afraid that Pharoah would run
straight through the gunfire. Pharoah would later
say he had learned to look both ways and that's
why he'd started walking. 'My mama told me when
you hear the shooting, first to walk because you
don't know where the bullets are coming,' he
explained. LaJoe refused Lafeyette's request to
let him go after his brother. She couldn't even
go herself. The guns kept crackling.

"Meanwhile, the police who at first thought they
were the targets of the shooting, had taken cover
in their cars and in the building's breezeway.
Passersby lay motionless on the ground, protected
by parked vehicles and a snow-cone vending stand.
Then, as suddenly as it began, the battle ended."

{p. 17, 18]

Jesus said - Whoever wants to be first must be last of all
and servant of all, and then he brought a child in and said -
this is what I mean: You will follow me you will be faithful to
the God in whose name I speak as you serve and receive and love
and celebrate the weak and helpless and vulnerable. I am enor-
mously grateful to the young women and men of our armed services,
and I loved the parades, but I hope and pray for a day when na-
tional greatness will be measured by how well we are doing with
Pharoah and Lafayette... and that we will have a parade on Michi-
gan Avenue when the elevators work at Cabrini-Green.

It's a challenge to his church which, with embarrassing
consistency, measures greatness just like the world does...pursu-
ing conversions as if they were sales contracts, presenting the
Gospel of Jesus Christ as if it were a crusade over Jihad, win-
ning by overcoming theologically, ecclesiastically, numerically -
the other people. A great church means a big, strong church,
with a big budget... There is an incident in an Albert Camus
novel [(L'ktranger] in which "a priest, trying to convince an
unbeliever, pulls open a drawer, takes from it a silver crucifix,
and brandishes it to reinforce his argument. Jesus, comments the
teller of the story, did not call us to wave the cross, he called

us to carry it." [see John V. Taylor, The Go-Between God, fp.
139]

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So maybe churches decline not so much when they are under
official persecution, as when they forget why they exist. Per-
haps there is simply no earthly reason for a church to exist if
it does not live out the greatness defined by Jesus.

Jesus challenged the fundamental assumption of most of the
religions of the world. Religion ordinarily suggests that the
highest and holiest to which mortals can aspire is
communion/fellowship with God. But Jesus taught that when you
serve others in his name, you are in the presence of God; that
the religious life is not sequestered from the world, but busy in
the world, with its sleeves rolled up, holding in its arms those
no one else pays any attention to.

Now - a cautionary note. Every minister has discovered that
in the congregation every Sunday are people who have allowed
themselves to be used and exploited and somehow thought the
Christian faith wanted them to submit to that. We never used to
speak about, so most of us didn't know it existed; but in every
congregation are women who have been abused ~ or who are being
abused and who rationalize it using passages like this one, and
the ones that urge denial of self, and suffering service of
others as a religious good. In The Dance of An er, Harriet
Lerner calls it "de-selfing." "It happens when one person,
often a wife, does more giving and going along, and does not have
a sense of clarity about her decisions and control over her
choices." ([Weavings, May/June, 1991, p. 20]

That's not it. Abuse of any kind is not what Jesus meant at
all. In fact, it would have made him very angry. Service is not

service unless it is freely given, in love, without any coercion
at all.

And a cautionary note about compromising greatness and
blaming it on religion. Jesus was not endorsing mediocrity. In
fact, he didn't criticize his disciples' desire to be great. He
simply redefined it in terms of service and sacrifice. When you
think about it that is what greatness requires, whether it's
performing heart surgery, playing the pipe organ or putting a
ball through a hoop, greatness means selfless dedication and lots
of sacrifice.

So - what does he want? What is his purpose in this pecul-
iar approach to life? Jesus wants his followers to learn about
living for others. Jesus wants his followers to discover and
define themselves in terms of service to people in need. Jesus
calls would-be-disciples to an adventure which begins by leaving
behind all the assumptions, even about religion. Jesus - and
this is stunning - wants us to forget about even our own salva-
tion so he can save our souls.

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And that's the deepest mystery of all: that in forgetting
about ourselves we find ourselves;

that in living for others, life begins to be meaningful;
that in serving the children, we are served;
that in dying, there is life.

Have you ever heard of anything more incredible than a great
God who loves and who will suffer in love for the creation, for
each of the creatures, for each of us? A Lord who reaches out
in humble love to everyone - everyone who is unloved, everyone
who is weak or in some way powerless, everyone who is in any way
vulnerable? An amazing Lord, whose love is so broad and big
that it includes us all in its strong embrace?

"Who can believe in the Christians?" Annie Dillard asks.
"They are smug and busy, just like us... They are not innocent,
they are not shepherds and fishermen in rustic period costumes,
they are men and women just like us, in polyester (and wool).
Who could believe salvation is for these rogues? That God is for
these rogues?..."

Unless, of course...

Unless Christ's washing the disciples feet, his service for
them, means what it could, possibly, mean: that it is all right
to be human. That God knows that we are human... and we are
God's people anyway, and the sheep of God's pasture."

It is the mystery of our faith. It is the challenge - the
imperative - and the promise -

Whoever would be great ... must be the servant of all.

Amen.

- 9/29/91