Well, it seemed to go OK today; the substitute substitute priest showed up and made Jesus, and I preached. Here’s the sermon in case anyone’s interested.
22 October 2006 Nineteenth Sunday after Trinity Sermon delivered at St. Matthew’s at the Elephant, 10 am. Readings: Isa 53:4-12; Heb 5:1-109; Mk. 10:35-45
In the name of God, the one, the Undivided Trinity. AMEN.
A little boy was saying his bedtime prayers with his mother: “Lord, bless Mum and Dad, and God, (stage direction: shouting) GIVE ME A NEW BICYCLE!!!” The mother said: “God’s not deaf, son.” To which he replied “I know, Mum, but Gran’s in the next room, and she’s deaf as a post!
Prayer is something that we do a lot of in the church. We pray for the Church (because it’s in a mess these days, as always), we pray for civil society (it’s in a mess too), we pray for our own parish and our friends and relatives; we pray for the sick and the dead.
We pray a Collect at the beginning of the Eucharist, we have a Eucharistic Prayer in the middle, and prayers of thanksgiving at the end.
I’m not even counting our private prayers, or even the “Oh Lord!” we might say as the Underground train stops for the third time between the Elephant and Kennington.
What are we doing when we pray? Usually, we’re asking for something from God. Health, a new job, money to pay off our creditors, something, anything.
Sometimes, if we’re thinking about it, we pray for others: the health of a much loved friend or relative, peace in the world, or any number of things.
We’re asking for something.
James and John ask to be sitting one on each side when Jesus comes into his glory. And they don’t just ask for it, they demand it in tones that imply that he’d better actually come through with the goods. “We want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.” How bold is that?
We need to think very seriously about this. You see what Jesus tells them after they ask for this: “You don’t know what you’re asking for.” It’s not just the glory of being the closest to Jesus in heaven. It’s the glory attached to being the servant of all, and dying in the service of all.
It’s been said that “Prayer doesn’t work on God, it works on us.” That may sound rather agnostic, but it conceals a real truth. What did such a question do to the disciples? The rest of them got very angry with James and John, who I am sure didn’t like it one little bit. This prayer separated James and John from their fellow disciples. I imagine they themselves were ashamed that they’d asked such a question (in another Gospel, they are so scared of asking the question that they delegated their mother, also Jesus’s aunt, to ask it for them).
Prayer works on us in many ways. A prayer about something scary can have the effect of helping us to get through that scary bit. A prayer for something good sets the stage for prayers of thanksgiving if the good thing happens and prayers asking for courage if it doesn’t.
So what did James and John’s prayer do to Jesus? It seems a little bit like that old joke: “Why do you always answer a question with a question?” “Do I?” Jesus asked them an innocuous question in response: whether they can drink the cup that he drinks or be baptised with the baptism he was baptised. In retrospect, we know he was talking about his death but James and John don’t. Perhaps they imagined that they’d be drinking fine wine and be baptised in water as John the Baptiser did.
Instead of this Jesus tells them all, not just James and John, that the only way they will be great will be as servants of all. Not what they expected at all.
Presumably, as tradition tells us that James and John bore witness to Christ throughout their lives, Jesus’s answer had a profound effect on them, while not directly producing the result they wanted. So they asked for the wrong thing. And they weren’t rebuked for this pretty enormous request; putting themselves in the favoured position next to their Lord would be a high spot indeed and something that ordinary people could not hope for.
Should there then be any limits on what we can request in prayer? Keeping in mind that prayer works on us, not on God, I don’t think there can or should be limits on our requests in prayer. Does your situation seem hopeless? Take it to God in prayer. Have you a sick friend? Lift your friend up to God in prayer. Are you anxious about your finances or the direction your life is taking? Pray about it. Does the lack of peace in the world upset you? Say a prayer for peace.
On the other hand, will all these requests be answered? God is not in some heavenly Answer Shop, constantly providing answers and solutions to the problems that people pray about. God doesn’t stay on the other end of a celestial telephone line, writing down your requests on a memo pad for future reference and then fulfilling them as soon as possible.
Your requests are very important to you and, as you are uniquely loved by God, to God as well. But if every request were fulfilled exactly as we wish, would be necessarily be any better off? Fantasy stories have been written about the man who gets to make three wishes. The first wish lands him in trouble, the second wish gets him deeper in trouble, and only when he uses the third wish to set everything back to what it was before does his life get back on track.
This is also not a uniquely Christian theme. Does everyone remember the Greek myth about King Midas of Lydia? He was the ruler who asked for and received the favour that everything he touched turned to gold. He turned masses of items in his palace to gold and gloated on how rich he now was. Sitting down to dinner, every morsel of food set before him turned to gold as soon as he lifted it to his mouth. And finally his daughter, seeing him, ran to him and embraced him, and was turned to gold herself. Be careful what you wish for.
So James and John wished for something that would ultimately consume their lives: the opportunity of serving others from a position of strength rather than weakness, and having their lives ended by martyrdom. (A side note: according to tradition, while James was martyred by Herod Agrippa, John died a natural death on the island of Patmos-we account John an honourary martyr in part because of this passage.)
Jesus has given us a different definition here of what it is to be a slave or a servant. In Roman and Greek times, slaves were often people who were taken captive during a war. They were treated as things, not as people. They had no rights, and unless they were freed, they could be killed without penalty by their owners.
Thus saying that the person who wishes to be first among the Christian community must be the slave of all resonated very deeply within people in the early Christian community. That person would be available to the entire community, for whatever purpose they wished, even death. And yet that person would be the greatest of all.
I hesitate to apply this lesson to the modern Christian community, where bishops and archbishops (and even some Rectors and Vicars) have domestic help to cook and clean, secretaries to look after their correspondence and keep their diaries, and chaplains to ensure that their religious obligations are kept up to date. We live in different times, and being a servant does not necessarily mean being servile-as I say of my employer when the work gets tough and they make what I see as excessive demands on me and my time: “Lincoln freed the slaves!”
Being a servant in the Church means being available to your Christian sisters and brothers in whatever way you can be: cooking at the Christmas Fair, assisting at the altar, bringing someone to and from church when they otherwise wouldn’t be able to get here. All these are ways of serving the community. And we need to put those people doing this first, because they are the most important members of the community.
I would end with that old joke about the man who kept praying to win the lottery, but it has been told from this very pulpit (not, I hasten to add, by me) so many times that you would all finish it for me before I started. Let’s pray for the courage to ask God for what we need in our prayers, and for the peace that comes with accepting what we get. Amen.