Pentecost 18B/lectionary 25B
Texts: Mark 9:30-37
sermon by Rev. Robert Klonowski
Faith Lutheran Church, Homewood, IL
September 19, 2021
They Were Afraid to Ask (Mark 9:32)
A few weeks ago at the White Sox game I had a good conversation with a friend of mine. I was sharing with him that I’ve had a medical situation develop with my old body recently, one of those old-age things – it’s arthritis, if you really want to know. And I was also sharing with him – and, yeah, perhaps I was being a little over-dramatic! – that I was not doing well with the news. I don’t like facing physical limitation; I don’t like that it’s come to this; I don’t like having to get help with it. I wanna be the guy who’s helping other people; I don’t wanna be the guy who needs.
My friend responded to that in what I would call a mildly sympathetic way … but not in an overly sympathetic way, by a long shot! “Oh, you don’t like being on the other side of the desk, do you?,” was the first thing he said. “Well, look at that, we get to welcome the great Bob Klonowski into the world of all the rest of us mere mortals. Bob, what makes you think that this happens to other people, and, what?, you’re too special to have it happen to you? I got news: you can be that guy who needs help, you know. You can ask, and you know I’ll be the first guy in line to do whatever I can do to help.”
I appreciated very much what he said to me there. Well, most of it, anyway. And I appreciated that last part, his generous offer to help, although I realize that some of the help he’s offering me, is assistance in kicking my behind, when I start to feel so danged sorry for myself.
In the gospel lesson this morning Jesus is helping the disciples, helping them understand discipleship. He wants the them to know where he’s going, and to know what it will mean for them to follow him. The Son of Man will be betrayed, will give up his life, and then will rise again into resurrected new life. “But,” the gospel writer Mark tells us, “they did not understand what he was saying and … [they] were afraid to ask him.” They were afraid to ask.
And so it strikes me how much trouble we get into, all because we do not ask. There’s something in us that just hates to ask for anything. Call it pride, I guess; or maybe as my friend was pointing out to me, call it our wish to deny our mortality. And it occurs to me that church culture contributes to this problem. We think Christians are not supposed to ask for themselves; Christians are supposed to do for others, right? We think that if we follow Jesus, that means making something smaller out of ourselves, right? We think that the more faithfully we follow Jesus, the less we will need or want … or ask for – for ourselves.
In our gospel lesson today Jesus reveals that kind of thinking – when we just hate to ask for anything – to be dishonest, passive/aggressive as can be, and of course bound to get us into big trouble.
First, I’m sure you noticed that right after the disciples are too meek to ask, too afraid, making themselves small as they can, the very next thing Jesus reveals to them, smokes out about them, is that along the way they’ve been arguing with one another about who is the greatest.
The lesson here is that when you deny your ambition, when you fail to ask for what you want, you walk a way that will take you into some pretty sick territory. Passive/aggressive, I called it. You walk a way that is pretty far from the way of God.
Jesus says as much, that it’s all about the false denial of ambition, when he begins his corrective teaching with these words: “Whoever wants to be first ….” Notice he doesn’t say you shouldn’t want to be first, or shouldn’t want to be great. You DO want to be first, Jesus acknowledges and affirms, but – here comes the corrective! – THIS is how you do it.
It’s not about who is the greatest; not about competitive advantage; not advancing yourself by diminishing the other. That’s where you guys are going wrong. It’s about being the last of all and the servant of all. It’s about welcoming the least of these, the marginalized, the littlest children among you. You want to be great; sure, be great! Jesus does want you to be great. Jesus does want Faith Lutheran Church to be a great community. But THIS is how you shall be great, in this community.
Ask for it. That’s another way of saying, pray for it. If I were to pray for something for you, what is it that you want? The rule is that it has to be something, for you. What can I pray for, that you want most?
You know, for many years now at the end of an evening Confirmation class with our 12- and 13-year-olds, I gather the group for prayer. There are four parts to the way of prayer I lead there, under headings that came to me from the writing of the Christian writer Anne Lamott; headings that might also have come right out of the junior high lexicon: there are prayers of thanks, for gifts from God; there are prayers of oops, which is to say prayers of confession; there are prayers of wow, expressions of wonder at what God has done; … and then, finally, there are prayers we call gimme – things we ask for, from God. Gimme.
I’ve been doing that for years, and for years now I’ve been just waiting for one of our Confirmation parents to come to me with: “You’re teaching my 13-year-old to say ‘gimme’? I assure you that kid already knows the word ‘gimme.’”
But, yeah, I am. We need to teach, teach each other – to claim and pray for what we desire from God. We all need to learn that. There’s something in us that just hates to ask for anything; as my friend at the ball game was trying to get across to me, we all need to learn to resist that! Now, it’s important to desire the right thing – we want greatness and leadership as Jesus teaches these things; not selfish, but of God, – but it’s oh, so important, to know our desire is holy, to bring our desire before God – to say it! – to know ourselves as needy, and to ask for what we want.