God's Economy and the True Measure of Glory
A Sermon by Paddy Cavanaugh, Seminarian, on the Twenty-First Sunday after Pentecost (B), October 17, 2021.
Isaiah 53:4-12; Hebrews 5:1-10; Mark 10:35-45
Good morning St. George’s, to those of you whom I have yet to meet, my name is Paddy Cavanaugh and I have the distinct privilege of having been invited to serve as your seminarian this year. As a rule I try to avoid talking too much about myself when preaching because the lessons are typically far more interesting, but I thought you might like to know a bit about how I got here and so I want to tell you a story that connects it with today’s readings.
In a previous life, before I started wearing funny vestments, I wanted to become an academic in the field of intellectual history. I fell in love with the discipline for the rich, poetic ways in which it sought to tell the story of humanity’s wrestling with our most profound and unsettling questions. I got pretty good at the discipline and I also got pretty good at navigating the dynamics of power that are at play in practically every field, whether you are applying to colleges, buying or selling a house, or asking your boss for a promotion. I’m sure you know them well. When interviewing for competitive graduate programs or fellowships I learned that it was advantageous to be able to tell a clever joke and to know what the department’s strategic priorities were in order to best sell myself for the job. I would never tell any explicit untruths, but I was also deliberate in the things I chose not to share. For instance I did not mention that securing a powerful and respected position as a tenure track professor would make up for my own feelings of inadequacy about having grown up in a working class family, or that being able to traipse around Europe doing research sounded like a far more glorious life than teaching at an underfunded public high school like the one I attended. It wasn’t something I was particularly proud to admit, but I knew that my own desire to be respected and valued motivated my career path as much as my desire to contribute to a project I believed in.
In today’s Gospel reading, it is easy to laugh at James and John’s lack of tact when they ask Jesus to secure positions of authority for them at his right and left hand. The request is all the more absurd when we remember that Jesus has already told the disciples not once or twice, but three times that he was going to be handed over to suffering and death once they reached Jerusalem. We can tell where the story is going when Jesus answers their request with a question of his own: Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with? They answer the question with an overenthusiastic, “yes!” even before they know what they are agreeing too. The story becomes less amusing when Jesus goes on to warn them, saying “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 slave of all.” Had any interviewer responded to my vain attempts to charm and impress with such an arresting response, I’m not sure if I would be obliviously dumbfounded like James and John, or if it would shake to my core. And here we hear these challenging words coming from our Lord Jesus.
In his ethical writings the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche talks about the concept of a will-to-power. The will-to-power, says Nietzsche, is a fundamental driving force behind all human behavior and action. That to be alive and to be human means to seek out authority and domination over others for the purpose of our own material gain. Jesus recognizes this very human tendency and instead offers us another path to follow, a will-to-serve.
Jesus’ offer is an inversion of the worldly power structures which dominate and alienate us from God and neighbor. Rather than accumulating and lording worldly power which leads to material wealth but spiritual poverty, our Lord invites us to participate instead in an inverted model of power and community in which “the first among you must be slave of all.” The ethic of our world tells us that there is a proportionate relationship between our productive capacity and our individual worth. The better our grades are, the types of schools we are accepted into, the jobs we perform, the number of people we manage, and of course the amount of income we earn in relation to others is the normative societal measure our worth. However Jesus, the suffering servant, as he is depicted by Mark, presents us with a radically alternative ethic.
In God’s economy, our individual value is not based on anything we’ve ever accomplished or failed to accomplish, you are valued first and finally because you are a beloved child of God. End stop. It’s one of the few things I can promise you confidently because it’s God’s promise. You are valuable because you are a beloved child of God. And because that is also true of our neighbors, the true measure of glory is the measure of how well we serve those around us who are also God’s beloved. How we use our resources and standing in the sacrificial service of God and neighbor is the true measure of our work to bring about God’s glory.
I know you that you know that to use the resources of the community to build a beautiful organ is not just for our own indulgent musical pleasure, it is so that we may sing the praises of God and others may hear the glory of God’s kingdom.
To invest what we have into the children and youth of the community is not just for us to have a legacy to be proud of, it is to form disciples and apostles who will share the glory of God’s kingdom.
To be servants to our unhoused, underfed, or undocumented neighbor is not just so we can satisfy our desire to be charitable people, it is because Jesus tells us that they are the glory of God’s kingdom.
The glory of God is a costly, sacrificial glory. It demands a sacrifice of this worldly ethic of power in place of Jesus’ ethic of obedient servanthood made perfect in suffering. We see this ethic in Isaiah’s poetic movement from themes of humiliation to exaltation, from immense suffering to joy unspeakable. The author of the letter to the Hebrews speaks of it too when they write that “Jesus learned obedience through what he suffered; and having been made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him.” And finally from our Lord himself when he spoke of the cup he took for us. What then of this cup? The cup in the psalms is a literary euphemism for both suffering and joy. Christ took on the suffering of the world wrought by systems of power and domination and turned them into our joy through his priestly self-sacrifice because, as he reminds us, the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve.
The cup Christ takes and invites us to take is none other than the cup of discipleship in the way of the cross.
The cup which we are served at this table signifies sacrificial servanthood, which is the way to eternal life.
It is a cup of both joy and suffering not because God wills us to suffer, Lord knows in this year we have endured plenty, but because servanthood in the way of the cross is a risky affair. It may not mean death on a cross, like it did for many of the apostles, but to take the cup is to accept the challenging call to overthrow the mundane status quo of domination and replace it with a holy economy of service in liberating love.
The good news is that we are never alone in this labor. We are called to be servants with those sitting to the left and right of us. With the glorious company of apostles who came before us. With all the holy saints and martyrs on earth and heaven above who labor with us. And with celestial choirs of angels who sing of God’s glory in songs of eternal praise. Most of all we have in this labor the empowering grace of our Lord, the suffering Son of Man who stooped down in love to show us how to serve. For this position there is no application deadline, no SAT score, no need for references or resume. All one needs is a willing spirit and knowledge of God’s unshakeable love for you. By the blood of Christ’s atoning sacrifice poured out for us in this cup you are accepted as living members into the body of Christ and are God’s beloved forever.
Though we, like the disciples James and John, may feel woefully unprepared to drink of this cup, Jesus beckons us still, saying “drink this all of you, this is my blood of the new covenant which is poured out for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins.” So come, receive the love which God has already poured out for you. The Kingdom is in need of servants. Amen.