What Is Jesus Doing?—“Adventures in Missing the Point”

Mark 9: 30-37
A Sermon Preached by the Rev. Dr. Howard W. Boswell, Jr.
Twenty-Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time, September 20, 2009
Kenmore Presbyterian Church
Kenmore, New York

I borrowed the title of today’s sermon from a book by Brian D. McLaren and Tony Campolo.  Many of you know Tony, because we’ve used three of his video discussion series, Carpe Diem!, Curing Affluenza, and Christianity at the Turn of the Century. A prolific author and well-known speaker, I’ve heard Tony a number of times. I’ve never heard Brian McLaren, but I consider him in the same class as Tony.

I came to know McLaren’s work through the emerging church movement of which he is one of the leaders. I understand the emerging church movement to be an attempt by contemporary Christian leaders to ask the kind of questions I’m posing in this sermon series, “What is Jesus doing today? How do we follow his lead in our world?”  If you want an introduction to Brian McLaren,  I invite you to read his books, A New Kind of Christian or A Generous Orthodoxy. If you’re like me, his creativity and commitment will capture you.

Adventures in Missing the Point has a disturbing subtitle, which explains the entire book, “How the Culture Controlled Church Neutered the Gospel.” McLaren and Campolo consider a variety of issues, asking,  “Do you ever look at how the Christian faith is being lived out in the new millennium and wonder if we’re not doing what we’re supposed to be doing? That we still haven’t quite ‘gotten it’”? They express how I feel most of the time!

Yet, “not getting it” is not a new experience for followers of Jesus. I learned from a friend who works in publishing that you cannot copyright a title, so if I ever publish a book of sermons on the Gospel of Mark, I have my title, The Original Adventures in Missing the Point! Some time, read the Gospel of Mark from beginning to end. It’s the shortest gospel and you can read it in an hour.  Focus your attention on the disciples when you read it and you’ll find out what I mean.  In Mark, the disciples are dense!  They don’t get it and often miss the point!

Our passage from Mark provides ample evidence of what I mean.  After Jesus asks them who people say he is and who they believe he is,  after he tells them in no uncertain terms  he will undergo great suffering at the hands of the religious authorities and die and be raised, after he tells them to pick up their cross and follow him, after they see him transfigured with Moses and Elijah, after he casts out a demon from a boy, after all of this, he takes them back to Galilee, back to where it all began, by themselves, away from the crowds. Away from all distractions, he teaches them again, “The Son of Man is to be betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him, and three days after being killed, he will rise again.” That is what Jesus is doing as they are on the way, the way to Jerusalem, the way to the cross.

Now, let’s put this scene into terms we may understand. Let’s say the person we love the most in the whole world, our mother or father, our husband or wife, our child, our sister or brother,  whoever calls us or, even better, says to us, “Sit down, please, I have something to tell you.  I’ve just come from the doctor and it’s not good…”  This scene suggests a fraction of the impact of Jesus’ words on his disciples.  Like us, they don’t know what to say, how to react.  Like us, they don’t understand what he means and fear asking him to explain.  Like us, they’re silent before the prospect of death.

Yet, they miss the point of what Jesus says, as we do, all too often.  After hearing him predict his passion a second time, what do the disciples discuss as they make their way home to Capernaum?  Do they consider what God might be doing in all of this?  Do they question what it means for them as followers of Jesus, what difference it makes in how they live their lives?  No, when they arrive at Capernaum and enter the house, Jesus asks, “What were you arguing about on the way?”  On the way to Jerusalem, on the way to the cross, in face of the betrayal and suffering of their Master and friend, what were Jesus’ disciples arguing about: Who was the greatest?  They show some wisdom by keeping their mouths shut, because something in the way Jesus asked the question and what he said next convinced them they didn’t get it, they missed the point, yet again!

So, what were they supposed to get and what point did the disciples miss?  For that matter, what are we supposed to get and what point do we miss? Whenever Jesus sits down, he takes the position of a teacher.  I imagine that he sighs deeply, shakes his head, disappointed that we don’t get it, we miss the point of being on the way, his way.  He tells his disciples, then and now, “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.” Later, in Mark 10, when he has to explain himself yet again, after James and John ask him to give them good seats in the kingdom, Jesus will make it plain, saying, “For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.”  Yet, now, what does Jesus do?  He takes a child in his arms and tells us, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.”

Too often, when we hear these words of Jesus, we take the edge off of them by focusing on fond memories of childhood. We don’t realize a child in Jesus’ place and time was a non-person, the very embodiment of vulnerability and powerlessness.  We don’t realize in our place and time, some children are treated in the same way. To welcome the child means to take what some call “the one down position,”  to seek to serve, rather than to be served, to question our culture’s concept of status and power.

I finally decided to buy Adventures in Missing the Point,  after I read one paragraph from Brian McLaren’s reflections on leadership online.  He writes,
I admit it: I spent most of ‘80s and early ‘90s wishing I could fulfill the CEO model of Christian leadership. CEOs made it. They were unflinchingly confident, powerful, knowledgeable, larger than life. I admired such CEO-model leaders in Christendom, I attended their seminars, and returned home wildly inspired and mildly depressed.

I wondered whether Brian read my journal from the same time! Even today, when I read books or attend seminars by the CEO types, I still feel “wildly inspired and mildly depressed.” I want to be like them, but I cannot quite measure up. I want their kind of success and status, but it eludes me.  Yet, I don’t get it and miss the point!  Ministry is not about success and status. It’s not about the effective management of an organization, though that’s important to me.  Ministry is about following Jesus on the way and leading others on the journey!

Listen: I know some of you wish Kenmore Presbyterian Church could be the church it once was.  You wish the pews could be filled with doctors and lawyers, educators and executives, as it once was.  You think that it’s important to return to that kind of status,  that measure of success, that type of power, or else, it’s not worth it. Let me respectfully submit to you: You don’t get it and you miss the point. Kenmore Presbyterian Church began its life as a mission, a Sunday school to welcome children in Buffalo’s Northside.  You’ve been at your best, when you did not ask how the church could serve you and meet your needs and the needs of your family, but when you asked how you could serve one another, your neighbors in need, the larger church,     and the world.  I appreciate how long some of you have been members.  I applaud your faithful presence and leadership.  I hope you understand seniority does not excuse you from service nor does it give you permission to place yourself before others for we are all stand on the same level before the cross.

To follow Jesus today means all of us must follow his lead.  We cannot afford to miss the point he taught his disciples on the way for we walk the same way. Christianity is not about the  accumulation of power.  Whenever it has been, it’s been at its worse.  The power of the gospel has been rendered impotent by its acceptance of culture’s definitions of success and status. Instead, whenever the church asks how it may walk with Jesus “in lowly paths of service free,” it has been most effective and had its finest hours.  Its adventures were in pursuit of the point, its purpose for being, to be the living presence of Jesus, proclaiming his love and placing itself in service to the world.  Amen.

©2009 Howard W. Boswell, Jr.

Tags: Howard Boswell, What is Jesus doing?, What would Jesus do?