Today’s reading from Luke
marks a slight improvement in the disciples’ attitude from last Sunday. This
time, on hearing Jesus talk about his death and resurrection, they still don’t
understand him but rather than rebuking him openly they switch to the silent
treatment. Actually, come to think of it, I’m not sure if that’s an improvement
or not. And, just to be sure that we get that the disciples aren’t very good at
this whole disciple-ing thing, and to make matters much worse, they start to
act like children arguing about who is the greatest as they walk toward
Capernaum.
I think this is a man thing. I can say this, I think,
because I am one. I’ve known a lot of one-uppers, most of them men, and when I
was younger I used to be one a lot more than I am now. There’s something about
the transition to adulthood, finding our place in the world, that makes men
(not only men, but mostly men) enter into these squabbles over and over again
about truly stupid things.
I knew a one-upper who was so bad in college that we used
to make up outrageous, impossible things about ourselves or about people we
knew or whatever and throw them out to see how he could possibly one-up that.
It became a running gag that I’m not sure he was ever aware of. That was
exceptional but not really that extraordinary. I’ve worked with enough high
school youth to know that claiming superiority over one another is just the way
they interact.
But I think we’d expect better of the disciples, which is
probably unfair, because in spite of how they are portrayed in film and art
these guys were actually 18, 19, 20, maybe 23, 24 years old. I’m not old enough
to call people that age “kids” (ask me in twenty, thirty years) but they were young
men. They were, in short, at precisely that age where competition forms the
basis for their relationships. They didn’t bond over coffee at the corner
store; they bonded over wrestling with each other or kicking each other’s butts
at ping pong—that kind of thing.
* * *
I’m a competitive person. Tomorrow we head off to the Twin Cities where I’m going to be playing in the Minnesota Open chess tournament this weekend (I know, how cool am I!?), and if I happen to lose a few games I’m probably not going to be very cheery for a little while. Chess is the worst, because you have nobody to blame but yourself. There’s no chance involved, no weather or referees to blame, there’s nothing but you and your inadequacy.
Most of the competitions we face—whether it’s sports or
whether it’s school or whether it’s applying for a job or even dating (and,
yes, that is a competition of a sort)—have winners and losers. You get a “D” in
science and you feel like a loser. You get into Yale and you feel like a
winner. You can’t get a job and you feel like a loser. You get a boyfriend or
girlfriend and you feel like a winner. The disciples are simply expressing
themselves in that world of winners and losers.
The problem is that Jesus is telling them not so
subtly—more like he’s beating them over the head with it—that the kingdom of
God is for losers. It isn’t for
winners. Winners have their reward. Losers: they’re the ones who have ownership
in God’s kingdom. And Jesus’ demonstration for a loser in this case is a child.
We love to romanticize children, so that when Jesus calls
the child to him in today’s reading we think of how cute this is and how we,
too, value children for their purity and goodness of heart… Let me tell you,
that’s bull crap. Children are not pure and are most certainly not good at
heart. They want things from you all the time, and when they don’t get them
they throw a tantrum. If you pulled the kind of things my daughter pulled on a
daily basis you’d be institutionalized. Children are needy and poor and, as cute
as they undoubtedly are, they exist to use you for whatever resources they can
wring out of you. And it is to such as these that the kingdom of God is given.
Not because they’re pure but because they are completely dependent. They are
losers. Without status, especially in the ancient world, children were
literally property.
Today is Ash Wednesday, which is the ultimate day for
losers. It’s a day where we come forward for the words, “Remember you are dust
and to dust you shall return.” These words tend to speak differently to
different people. I used to think they were depressing. It used to feel like
they were law. I used to think that it was awkward and embarrassing to be told
that not only am I dust but that I will one day be reduced to dust again. I thought
it was a big downer. But at some point my feelings changed, and, yes, I still
feel some of that. I still feel the weight of those words, but nowadays this is
one of my favorite days in the church year, because I experience the weight of
those words as freeing. I am dust. Thank God. I am not God. I am not the
greatest. I don’t need to worry about climbing the ladder, about being better
than someone else. I don’t have to one-up anybody. All I have to do is to lose
my life for the sake of the Gospel. All I have to do is return to dust.
It’s a legacy thing. It’s natural to want to leave one—to
be remembered for being great in something or another. I recently discovered I
am a direct descendant of a man named Thaddeus Surber who was one of the
preeminent ecologists of the early twentieth century. That’s neat. You can
Google him and find his work, even for sale on Amazon. That’s a cool legacy,
and it means something to his descendants. But it does not change anything in
God’s eyes. For righteousness in God’s kingdom it took Thaddeus dying, which he
accomplished in 1949. It took becoming a loser.
We aren’t remembered for who we truly are anyway. Great
men and women typically leave collateral damage all over the place. We know too
well about the awful people politicians and celebrities can be, but even if
they aren’t mean and ugly people themselves the pursuit of excellence tends to
turn us on ourselves. Whether it’s Robin Williams or David Foster Wallace or,
this week, it was Dave Mirra, depression can make people who look great to the
rest of us into fragile creatures. Suicide is not sadness winning; it is
greatness taken to an extreme, which is to say it is the self overcome by
itself.
We are dust. We are losers. We are children.
And we’re all in this together. The dust that makes us up
is the dust of those who have gone before—quite literally. It’s one of my
favorite useless bits of info that you are made up of atoms that once were part
of Abraham Lincoln and Genghis Khan and Caesar Augustus. You are atomically the
same. Which is partly why it so stupid to play the game of asking who is the
greatest. We are all one in Christ. We are made losers—something Donald Trump
can get on board with only he, too, is right there with us (leading the charge,
actually, I think). We are losers made into winners because of the very thing
the disciples cannot understand. Of course they would argue about who is the
greatest! That’s the thing people do when they don’t get resurrection.
Amen.
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