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The View from the Graveyard

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The View from the Graveyard: Mark 13:1-8

Sunday November 18, 2012 St. John Episcopal Church, Northampton MA

“As he came out of the temple, one of his disciples said to him, “Look, Teacher, what large stones and what large buildings!” 2Then Jesus asked him, “Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.”

3When he was sitting on the Mount of Olives opposite the temple, Peter, James, John, and Andrew asked him privately, 4“Tell us, when will this be, and what will be the sign that all these things are about to be accomplished?” 5Then Jesus began to say to them, “Beware that no one leads you astray. 6Many will come in my name and say, ‘I am he!’ and they will lead many astray. 7When you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be alarmed; this must take place, but the end is still to come. 8For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be earthquakes in various places; there will be famines. This is but the beginning of the birthpangs.”

The great myth of archeological detective work (which seems at least partly to be true) goes like this: the Archeologist James Deetz and his friend Ted Dethlefsen sat in the cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts. It was a hot, late summer afternoon in 1963. Deetz had returned to Massachusetts to teach at Harvard’s summer session and Dethlefsen was his teaching assistant. After a day in the hot sun digging and excavating, the two men found a spot under the cool trees in the old Concord graveyard. And they scrounged up some cold beers. Leaning back on the trees, looking out over the centuries of gravestones, the men noticed the carvings on top of the graves. Carved in the cool granite, the oldest gravestones had a face of an angel of death, wings stretched out, head like a skull, with “with blank eyes and a grinning visage.” They looked in another direction. The slightly less old gravestones had carved cherubim, sweet baby angels with calm faces and pleasant smiles. The looked in third direction, to the graves from a time in between-and the carvings were mixed- not quite the face of death, not quite a baby angel, but something in between. The heads of death had morphed, changed. The cruel teeth on the skull changed into a sweet, heart shaped mouth. The wings of the angel of death became like a halo of hair. And then it clicked. Sitting under the late summer sun among the dead, cold beer in hand, Deetz and Dethlefsen saw what our 18th century forefathers and mothers had done: “the grim death’s head designs are replaced, more or less quickly, by winged cherubs.” The saw it that day in Concord, and found it in Boston and Cambridge and Plymouth and Stoneham. And then it became clear why: “The period of decline of death’s head’s coincides with the decline of orthodox Puritanism. “As the Christians embraced the great awakening, they turned from the fear of death to the hope of eternal life.

May we see something new before our very eyes this day. Let us pray…

We joke and speculate about the “signs of the apocalypse” all the time. You heard it before the election: Governor Romney’s nomination was a sign of the end, as were candidates Bachmann, Gingrich, Santorum, Cain, Paul, Perry. You heard it after the election: President Obama’s election is a sign of the end of America, and thus clearly a sign of humankind as we know it. You hear it from Christian Zionists who point to the violence in Israel and Palestine as signs that Jesus is coming back next Tuesday. You’ve heard, or hopefully you avoided, the crass diagnosing that Hurricane Sandy was punishment for East Coast liberalism, Hurricane Katrina was vengeance for New Orleans debauchery, the earthquake in Haiti was a warning sign against voodoo and the epically offensive fellow Christian Rev. Jerry Fallwell declaring that the attacks on 9/11 were prompted by “ the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America.” In America, we have created a hearty industry for manufacturing signs of the apocalypse and the outrage Olympics that follow. Perhaps you’ve even heard of the closure of Hostess snacks and end of the Twinkie, a food product designed to survive a nuclear bomb, as a sign of the apocalypse. For nearly 20 years, Sports Illustrated magazine has run a column called “Signs of the Apocalypse” chronicling the worst behavior in sports. This past August, Massachusetts even made an appearance in the column when the minor league baseball Worcester Tornadoes’ game was delayed an hour because repo men took the team’s uniforms and equipment for failure to pay a cleaning company. We’ve made a secular sport of reading the signs of our times.

And yet.  And yet, we are called to read the signs of our times. As we approach the end of the Church year and the beginning of Advent, the readings turn darker. In our Gospel reading today, Jesus and the disciples exit the temple in Jerusalem one of the disciples says to him, “Teacher, what large stones and what large buildings!” Jesus asked him, “Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another, all will be thrown down.” Silence. Say way, Jesus? The Disciples are on a perfectly pleasant tour through the temple, taking photos of the impressive building and Jesus whispers, “ain’t gonna last.” The Disciples are square in the middle of a massive change of the dependable institutions of religious life in their time and they’re looking to the stability of buildings and institutions. Sound familiar, Church?

But then the scene changes in the Gospel of Mark. Jesus moves them to a new place. The disciples are pressed right up against the massive stones of the temple, all they can see is what’s in front of them.  And Jesus takes a step back.  Jesus leads them from the chaos of the city and decamp for the Mount of Olives in East Jerusalem. Up the hillside they climb.  If you start to watch the geography of Scripture, it will tell you something about where God is leading God’s people. Take a step back.

We get too close. We get too close to the things that are overwhelming our field of vision. Or put rightly, things overwhelm our field of vision because we are too close And that thing becomes all we see. You know this. You know you have to move back to see things “right-sized.” We who find help in the twelve-step programs learn this idea of getting ourselves and others “right-sized.” But when our perspective is off, dust bunnies on the floor become signs overwhelming signs of lack of consideration from our housemates. Traffic jams when we have somewhere important to go become furious signs of the entire cosmos plotting against us. Final exams become the entirety of our educational career and indicators of all the potential of our whole lives. The woman taking an eternity in the grocery lines is a sign of how little she regards my precious time. A recent acquaintance forgetting our name becomes a crushing sign of our invisibility. When we’re standing right next to this thing in our lives that threatens to overwhelm us, in order to see what it really is and how big it is, we need to step back. The scientist Carl Sagan writes, “It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”  Through a telescope that reminds us how small our own planet is, Sagan finds perspective.  Jesus moves the disciples from their vantage point next to the temple wall to the Mount of Olives to get the right perspective.

Jesus moves the disciples, back away from the thing that’s overwhelming them and up onthe mountain so they can see below. God has gifted this parish with your unique position across from Smith College and overlooking Northampton below. What does that mean for your ministry in this place? Those of us who are thinking about organizational change, turn to Ronald Heifetz’s “The Practice of Adaptive Leadership” that encourages leaders to move between the dance floor and the balcony to get the right perspective.  Or do you remember that final scene from the Secret Garden? Once the spell was broken, her uncle laughing, and the garden was “open, awake and alive,” the young girl Mary’s perspective changes as she declares, “If you look the right way, you can see that the whole world is a garden.”  But this is more than just seeing flowers instead of weeds or putting on rose-colored glasses. Sometimes we need the perspective of death.

Jesus moves the disciples up and away from the city, but most importantly he took the disciples up the Mount of Olives in East Jerusalem. Even by the time Jesus gets there, Mt. Olivet had already been used as a graveyard for centuries. The graves of ordinary Jews and ancient prophets surround the disciples. Something about being among the graves, among the dead helps get the perspective right. A colleague tells the story of a fellow priest who used his simple wooden casket as a cedar chest for blankets and sweaters. Maybe that’s living a little too close to death. And because I’m a guest preacher, and I doubt any of you heard this story from earlier sermon, I can tell you my best story of living with the perspective of death: My friend Ashley’s grandmother drove around with death in her trunk.  Next to the shovel and first aid kit, in the back of that cavernous Cadillac trunk, sits a granite headstone. When Maureen’s first husband died, the gravestone carver offered her a deal if she purchased her headstone at the same time. And as a good Yankee, she took the deal. Maureen keeps her gravestone in the trunk of her car, needing only to fill in the final date, driving around Connecticut with this weight in the back so that she has a little more traction on slick winter roads.You can drive around with death in your trunk if you’ve got resurrection before you.

You who struggle like all us sinners to practice the Christian life know that we have to go through Good Friday to get to Easter Sunday. And in our death denying culture, we do the most radical thing: Proclaim that death is not the end. We declare that the grave is not our final resting place. Though we grieve, we push ourselves to proclaim that even though buildings will crumble, and stone will fall upon stone, our trust is not in buildings and stones, but in the Risen Christ. We are the people who first carve the angel of death onto our graves but move to chisel out images of cherubim and seraphim.

Those first colonial gravestones anxiously warned the living with such epitaphs as “my youthful mates both small and great/ come here and you may see/an awful sight, which is a type of which/you soon must be.” But, later gravestones, with pleasant angels hovering over the dead, proclaimed “here cease they tears, suppress thy fruitless mourn/his soul—the immortal part—has upward flown/on wings he soars his rapid way/ to yon bright regions of eternal day.”

The discipline is getting yourself to a place where you can see things right-sized. Some find that’s a place of silent prayer when you can let all those crazy thoughts run through your head and get clear. Sometimes it’s the silence of church, or library, or bedroom or per. We have some wisdom from our fellow Christians and our tradition. But only you know where your Mount Olive is. Where do you need to go to see life and death clearly? The good news is that Jesus wants to lead his disciples to a place where we can see clearly, a place where we can see clearly where we are to put our trust.  (preach resurrection)

In the depths of despair, from the graveyard, we practice the discipline of resurrection. We practice and sing it and say it and live it until it becomes true in our live. In 1871, the attorney Horatio Spafford lost all his financial holdings he invested in property in the great Chicago Fire. His only son died later that year. In 1873, Spafford sends his family ahead of him on a family trip as he stays behind to attend to these financial losses. His four daughters drowned in a ship crossing the Atlantic to England, leaving only his wife alive, who sends back the telegram reading “saved alone…” And yet. And yet, he wrote the text for the hymn, “It is well with my soul.” Not because it was yet true, but so it would be. If you’d like, join me.

When peace like a river, attendeth my way,
 When sorrows like sea billows roll;
 Whatever my lot, Thou hast taught me to say,
It is well, it is well, with my soul.

It is well, (it is well),
With my soul, (with my soul)
It is well, it is well, with my soul.

From the graveyard we see. From the graveyard we sing. May it be so, Hallelujah Amen.

When Heaven Tastes like Jello Salad

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When Heaven tastes like Jello Salad: A Homily for All Souls Requiem

Christ Church of Hamilton and Wenham

Sunday November 4, 2012 6pm

Isaiah 25: 6-9 6On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear. 7And he will destroy on this mountain the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all nations; he will swallow up death forever. 8Then the Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces, and the disgrace of his people he will take away from all the earth, for the Lord has spoken. 9It will be said on that day, Lo, this is our God; we have waited for him, so that he might save us. This is the Lord for whom we have waited; let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation.

The only thing, the only thing that got me through that day was Jello salad. Lots and lots of Jello salads. After decades of suffering in body and spirit, my aunt Sarah died in 2005. The youngest of three sisters, Sally Worth Eddy slowly deteriorated as the MS took her mobility and parts of her mind. A house she could no longer live in, a young son she could no longer care for, a marriage that could not survive under the strain of such sickness. My mother and my aunt had become Sally’s caretakers and it took a huge toll on their lives too. I remember the grim Thanksgiving dinner we had at the Boston Market on a strip of highway before returning to the nursing home- where Sally was the youngest resident by decades. There were glimpses of joy in Sally’s old drawings, or her friend Saul visiting, memories of summers in Indiana or songs still remembered, but all in all, illness and the shroud of death wrapped tighter around Sally’s body and threatened to break the spirits of those around her. The funeral was at a small United Methodist church near Detroit. I participated in the service somehow, but just barely. The grief and injustice of a young woman dead and a son without a mother, sisters left bereft was just too much. After the unremarkable service, dazed we dutifully filed into the fellowship hall. Before us on thin, worn tablecloths were small ham sandwiches on squishy white rolls dressed with iceberg lettuce and mayonnaise, green bean casserole made with cream of mushroom soup, neatly cut lemon squares, all prepared dutifully by the women’s guild. And then a sight that my East Coast family and I had never seen before: an entire table filled with Jello salads, as in the technicolor rainbow after the flood: cherry Jello with sliced bananas suspended in the ruby glow, orange Jello with manderin oranges sliced into squares so you could pick them up with your fingers, Lemon Jello with crushed pineapple artfully shaped in a Bundt pan mold, green Jello with shredded carrots threatening to escape and finally raspberry blue Jello with swirls of white Coolwhip, making the whole thing look like the froth of the ocean as imagined by a 4 year old. Such joy, such color against the drab institutional green of the fellowship hall walls. My sister and I walked through the crowds, politely greeted the other mourners, but giggled ever time we snuck a glimpse of the bounty of Jello laid before us. “On this mountain, the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich foods… ” Let us pray…

We live among the living and the dead. As I pulled into the parking lot of the cemetery on Cape Cod to visit my great uncle’s grave, I saw a feast. She had parked her car right up along side of the grave. Pulled out a beach chair, one with the nylon webbing supporting her body as she sat low to the ground. She set up an umbrella to shade her from the August sun. She set out a bowl of water for her yappy Pomeranian and some gave him a bone. From the front seat of the car, she pulled out a large cup of Dunkin Donuts iced coffee and a bag of muffins. And she plopped down in the beach chair next to the grave and started talking.

We live among the living and the dead. The memories of the dead sneak up on us. Every time I begin to type an email to someone whose name begins with “E” my colleague Fr. Ed O’Flaherty’s name fills in. Autofill on my computer adds in his name even though this faithful friend has been dead for almost a year. It happens every time I try to send an email to someone whose name begins with “E.” But I cannot bear to delete him. It’s as if by deleting this email address that goes nowhere, I would be deleting this faithful Jesuit priest who dedicated his life and ministry for the unity of the Church. I know that’s not true, but still his name remains in my address book.

We live among the living and the dead, and today our discipline is to remember all who have gone ahead of us while we remind ourselves that God promises life eternal. Earlier this week, an older woman I met at one of the parish visits I make on behalf of the Massachusetts Council of Churches sent me a note inviting me over for a spaghetti dinner. “When you call,” Millie wrote, “don’t mind Jim’s voice on the answering machine. I just like hearing him there. ” Years after Jim’s death and his baritone voice still greets those reaching out to his widow.  All Souls is the Church’s way of gathering up our snapshots pictures, email addresses with no one on the other end, voices on our home answering machine and holding these precious loved ones together.

Perhaps what is so remarkable about the All Souls Requiem is not just the names on our tongues, but those unknown and those whose faith is known to God alone. On All Saints we remember the well known. On All Souls, we remember the lesser known and the unknown. The winning design of the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington DC taught us the power of remembering all of the names. All Souls invites us to recite the names of the dead. All Souls also gives us the liturgical equivalent of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. A place to remember all those who have died who have no one to remember them. I think of an elderly relative who said to me recently, “I’ve outlived all my friends. Who will come to my funeral?” Today we do the holy work of the Church remembering the friendless, the unknown, the forgotten and the lost. We pray for those for whom the weight of life felt so heavy they cold not imagine another year alive.  All Souls is the respect we pay to the dead and the reminder of life to us who still mourn.  The accent mark is on the All- all Souls. Not just some of the souls, but all. Even the souls we found grating in life, we remember them today. All Souls frees the deceased from the plasticizing of automatic sainthood and allows us to have complex feelings about the dead. Again and again, the Church reminds us that we are bound together not by our own choosing but by our common baptism- all the souls. Not just those who worship like you, look like you, vote like you. But all the souls that are precious to God- Fr. Ed and Jim, Sally and the unknown one in the tomb whose loved one brought iced coffee and conversation.

It’s that same universal commitment that shows up in the reading from Isaiah. Proclaiming a vision of the heavenly banquet, Isaiah declares “On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feat of well-aged wines, of rich goods filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear.” So far removed from the writing of this text, it’s hard to remember how revolutionary this would have sounded to the Israelites- a feast for all peoples. A feast for All Souls.

In that vision from Isaiah, God promises to destroy “the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all nations; he will swallow up death forever.” You know what it is like to live cloaked in the shroud of death. You know what its like to face Death, in the words of the United Methodist Bishop William Willimon “that great Omnivorous thing” Death. You know what’s its like to live so close to death that you are not sure that life is possible. In that Canaanite world, death would have been personified as the god Mot who devoured all around him. Instead, Isaiah proclaims the paradox that God himself will “swallow up death forever.” We live with this strange paradox in Christian life: to look suffering and death squarely and not turn away, but yet to remember that death does not have the final say. We live wearing our baptismal robes and our burial shrouds.

Sometimes it’s easier to wear our burial shrouds than our baptismal robes. My friend Ashley’s grandmother drove around with her burial shroud in her trunk.  Next to the shovel and first aid kit, in the back of that cavernous Cadillac trunk, sits a granite headstone. When Maureen’s first husband died, the gravestone carver offered her a deal if she purchased her headstone at the same time. And as a good Yankee, she took the deal. Maureen keeps her gravestone in the trunk of her car, needing only to fill in the final date, driving around Connecticut with this weight in the back so that she has a little more traction on slick winter roads. But sometimes our death-defying culture isn’t so literal as Maureen. We twist and contort ourselves to stay looking younger, deceiving ourselves that we are farther from death. We have a thousand euphemisms to say someone is gone without naming the cold hard truth of death. We proclaim our desire to die at home comfortable with family and friends, but so fear having these conversations with our doctors that we struck the language for consultations about our death from the Affordable Care Act. As we turn towards Tuesday and the weighty ballot question facing Massachusetts voters to authorize doctors prescribing medicine to end life, I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means for Christians to die well unto the Lord. As a country, we live with a shroud of death, or as Isaiah put it “the sheet that is spread over all nations.”

But in the heavenly vision that Isaiah puts forth, God destroys our shroud of death and like a father gently tending a child, wipes away the tears from all faces. In the Revised Common Lectionary, that ecumenical innovation that asks the divided Church to read our common scriptures on the same day, one of the other time we get this reading is on Easter Day.  We are a people trained to say death and resurrection in one breath. Or in the words of Johnny Cash’s final album, “Ain’t no grave can hold my body down.” I attended the funeral of Presbytera Susanna Maheras last year, the wife of a Greek Orthodox priest. It was so thoroughly not Protestant. No lengthy eulogy about the dead, though there were many wonderful things to say about this faithful woman. Rather, the entire liturgy seemed designed to remind the mourning parishioners of what they already know but in a time of mourning have a hard time remembering: death is not the end. You may not feel it, but we will proclaim in for you today, even at a funeral. This is part of the paradox of Christian life: Even as we remember the dead today, we look to the heavenly banquet to come. Even as we taste the broken bread, we proclaim the risen Christ. Even as we mourn the dead, we rejoice in the living.

We live wearing our baptismal robes and our burial shrouds. We confess that sometimes our shroud of mourning wraps around us so tight that we cannot escape our grief.  We confess that as we mourn the deaths of those we love, with throats sore from our wailing and our tears, we cannot speak the words of Martha to proclaim “Yes, Lord, I believe.” We confess we do not have strength to proclaim it and we lean on the voices around us who recite “we look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.” We confess we are tired, hungry, worn out by the weight the death and sin that surrounds us. We confess that our sometimes forget what that heavenly banquet tastes like….And then it sneaks up on us as we eat that first sweet spoon of pineapple Jello. You do not have to end your weeping, but know that God desires to wipe away every tear. You do not have to have the strength to say the names of your dead today, but know that the Lord knows and cares for All Souls. You do not have to have the taste of heaven on your lips today, but you are invited to eat the bread of heaven.

Livestronger: Lance, Jesus, the Fame Monster, and Glory

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Livestronger: Lance, Jesus, the Fame Monster and Glory

October 18, 2012

St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in East Longmeadow joint service with East Longmeadow United Methodist Church

“James and John, the sons of Zebedee, came forward to him and said to him, ‘Teacher we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.’ And he said to them, ‘What is it you want me to do for you?’ And they said to him, ‘Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory.’ But Jesus said to them, ‘You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink or be baptized with the baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?’ They replied, ‘We are able.’ Then Jesus said to them, ‘The cup that I drink you will drink; and with the baptism with which I am baptized, you will be baptize; but to sit at my right hand or at my left hand is not mine to grant, but it is for those whom it has been prepared.’

When the ten heard this, they began to be angry with James and John. So Jesus called them and said to them, ‘You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be a slave of all. For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.” ~ Mark 10:35-45

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When it was good, it was very, very good. In cycling lore, it’s known as “the Look.” By 2001, Lance Armstrong had already won the Tour de France twice, and beaten testicular cancer. But he was not yet won seven. And cycling was not yet a well-known sport. In 2001, 10 days into a month of racing, the competitors turned to the mountains.  The route up L’Alpe d’Huez forced the riders to go through 21 switchbacks over 120 miles to ascend the mountain. Over his years of training, Lance had learned to keep his facial expression still. No pain, no emotion. And no way for other teams to read how Lance was doing. But on that day, Lance looked off, strained, tired. The whole day, Lance stayed towards the back and the German 1997 winner Jans Ullrich lead. The cyclists at the front of the pack work harder while those in the back can draft. The cyclists had been in the saddle for hours and still were only half a wheel apart. But when Lance’s US Postal Service Jose Luis Rubiera took off, Ullrich knew something was wrong. Rubiera led, Lance followed, and took the lead. And then came “the Look.” Out of the saddle and up on his pedals, Lance turned his head and looked back at Ullrich. Three, four, five seconds he held the stare. Lance turned his head, focused on the road and took off. And then off to lead and ultimately win the stage 1:59m ahead of Ullrich. And win 2001 Tour and 7 Tours, becoming one of the most dominant athletes in the history of cycling. Lance made for beautiful television and inspiration. When it was good, it was very very good. And then it got bad.

Let us pray…

You know you’ve made it big when you can get by on just one name and we all know who you are talking about: Barack, Mitt, Oprah, Ellen, Gaga, Polycarp, Pedro, Pele, Lance, Jesus. James and John want their name in lights.

These two brothers come to Jesus, sort of corner him when they’ve got some time alone. The Gospel writer Mark here identifies them as ‘sons of Zebedee.’ But elsewhere in the Gospels James and John are nicknamed “sons of Thunder,” and Lord knows you don’t get a nickname like that based on your subtlety. “Sons of light morning mist” or “sons of gentle breeze,” they were not. You know people like this- where the filter is off and they just say what they are thinking, sometimes actually say out loud what everyone is thinking.  James and John get Jesus alone and say to him “we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.” “Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in glory.” Jesus, when you win the race and climb up the podium, we want you to give us the silver and bronze.  We want the good seats. We’ll meet you at the finish line. And we’ll bring the champagne. Have a good race.

James and John’s naked ambition is a bit like our exposed super-ego. Want, want, want. Jesus, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.  We want power. We want fame. One commentator called them, the “Sons of Entitlement.” I want because it’s owed to me. I want even if it isn’t owed to me. Richard Rohr’s recent book on the spiritual and the twelve steps is designed for everyone, not just the sober and the drunk. Rohr’s argument is that all of us live in a culture of addiction. We want, want, want. James and John are not separate from us. They are us. Maybe more so, maybe more brazen.  But they are asking the things that we might be too polite to say: I want. And really, if asked honestly, I want to stand in glory without the hardship to get there.

Now there’s nothing wrong with getting clear on what you want. But the discipline of the Christian life is checking that want against the model of Christ. “whoever wishes to be first among you must be a slave of all.” The Good News is this: Jesus meets our desire, even our unhealthy desires, with compassion. When James and John are behaving badly, Jesus doesn’t scold, but asks to hear more. Jesus asks, “what is it that you want me to do for you?” and then he explains.  “annoyingly patient” in the words of one commentator.

The United Church of Christ pastor and writer Lillian Daniels has said, “Anyone can find God alone on a picturesque mountaintop, the hiking trail, or the sunset. The miracle is that I can find God in the company of other people who are just as annoying as I am.” Here, Jesus gives us the model for tending the people who are just as annoying as James and John. James and John do a bit of what we all want- asking for what they want without the filter.

James and John don’t want glory, they want fame.

The Fame Monster is not just the title of the 2009 Lady Gaga album. The Fame Monster is an ancient idea from the Roman poet Virgil.  For the ancient Romans, Fama was the goddess who offered renown. She begins small and fearful, but grows larger and more menacing and the rumors grow.  When she was angry, she spread rumors. The poet Virgil paints the picture of the fame monster as a giant winged creature that lurked above the city, stepping from building to building. She lives in a home with 1,000 windows so she can always hear what is going on. She is made entirely of wings, feathers, eyes and tongues. As the wings rustle and she makes her way across the city, secrets and rumors float to the city below. Not thunder- whispers, rumors. She repeats, and repeats. She pries information out of the mortals and whispers it above the cities again and again until it floats down to the celebrity-watchers below. Fama is seductive, compelling- and she never sleeps. In Virgil’s words, she “had her feet on the ground, and her head in the clouds, making the small seem great and the great seem greater.”

James and John are great. They want to be greater.

But Fame is not what we get from following Jesus. We are offered glory, something lasting, something eternal. Something more lasting than the quick rumors the Fame Monster scatters over the city. The glory that Jesus offers his followers is different than fame and worldly renown. Fame is a monster to be continually fed. Glory grows among the nameless and the humble. Glory is not a monster, but a servant.

By this point, the other disciples have come over and realize that James and John are angling for their own benefit, looking for a shortcut to Jerusalem. And the ten are angry. James and John are trying to call “shot-gun” on the disciples’ tour bus, as if there are only one or two special seats. But the math of heaven doesn’t work like that.  For Christians, there is not just one front seat, but all the seats are front seats.  More than that, the good seats are for those who are servants. The good seats are not earned by fame but my service. Shoot, the good seats aren’t earned! When Jesus calls the disciples together he says “You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. But it is not so among you; whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be a slave of all.”

Jesus looks out at their current political system and says “not that.” In the Greek, it is even possible that Jesus is being ironic- he’s not just talking about the “rulers” but “those who seem to be rulers” or those “so-called rulers.” For those rulers, their power is held by keeping others down. Jesus says, we’re going to lead differently, we’re going to work differently together. Our great ones are not going to be great by force and might; Our great ones will be a servant.

For those of us who love cycling, this is why the downfall of Lance Armstrong is so heartbreaking and crazy-making. Perhaps more than anyone in recent history, Lance moved cycling from being this weird, niche sport to something that many people knew about. At his best, Lance inspired people to get on their own bikes. At his best, Lance was the warrior who beat back the cancer monster. But as the documents and testimony of teammates finally all came out, Lance was also a ruler of the US Postal Service Cycling Team that lorded it over his teammates. Teammate after teammate tells of being pressured and forced into the team discipline of doping and secrecy. These other cyclists who considered themselves disciples of Lance were told that if they wanted greatness, they had to come under Lance’s discipline- and that included taking drugs, blood doping, lying and cheating. This week, at the US Olympic Cycling training center, a maintenance worker was seen scraping a quote from Lance off of the wall. Lance had said, “I was sure to come under attack from my adversaries, but what they didn’t know was how specifically and hard I had trained for this part of the race. It was time to show them.” The fame was fleeting. But the fame was so thorough that it slipped into our vocabulary. Someone who was far and away the best at what they did was dubbed Lance. You could have “the Lance Armstrong of needlepoint.” Never say, “the Jesus Christ of needlepoint.”

Because everything that we have as a culture is set up against the kind of servanthood and glory that Jesus asks of us. Neither Mitt nor Obama would be elected if they advocated for servanthood and self-sacrifice. (and while neither candidate has seriously addressed the issue of poverty during the debates, you can view the National Council of Churches effort to record their views here.) No corporation would be guided by the belief that “whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant.” But this is why we need the Church. This is why we need your churches as a witness to another way of being. The Fame Monster is so powerful in our culture of addiction. Your witness as a Christian to a different way of living is what allows others to imagine another way of being. Your unique, small life of servanthood, of mundane visits to 3 grade choir concerts and nursing homes, meeting anger with compassion, of meeting shortcuts and fame-seekers with patience is the counter-image to the fame monster and culture of domination. Your unique, patient, compassionate witness of Servanthood in this corner of the planet is the image of Christ.

The pictures are terrifying and strange. Bald men in track jackets lurch towards her, pulling her oversized sweatshirt. A tall, thin young woman, her hair blowing back as she moves forward is at the center. Her eyes look ahead, not to the men grabbing at her clothing. And even now, looking back through the grainy photographs of our history to 45 years earlier, you can still see clearly the paper number pinned to her chest: 261. “Give me those numbers and get the hell out of my race!” he yelled at her. Glory and servanthood go against every one of our instincts for power and fame. You want glory? Glory is not sitting on the throne at Jesus’ right hand. Glory is not 7 Tour de France victories at the expense of ruling over your teammates. Glory is getting spat upon, pulled apart, shoved out of the race and continuing on. Glory is a 19yr old journalism student Katherine Switzer attempting to become the first woman to run the Boston Marathon in 1967.

Whatever race you are facing this day, may we too run or ride the race in glory. Amen.