Doing Our Chores

Sermon preached at Church of the Good Shepherd, Federal Way, WA
www.goodshepherdfw.org
by the Rev. Josh Hosler, Rector
Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 20B), September 22, 2024
Wisdom of Solomon 1:16-2:1, 12-22 ; Psalm 54 ; James 3:13-4:3, 7-8a ; Mark 9:30-37

One of the minor perks of becoming a priest was that I became eligible to attend the annual clergy conference of our diocese. As a team player with lots of love for my colleagues, I thought this was great. But when I got there, I discovered how easy it was to feel insecure about how things were going in my own ministry. I wanted to hear about successes in my colleagues’ congregations, but those successes also made me jealous, so then I would share my own successes.

And it wasn’t just me. It turns out that the clergy conference was notorious for a culture of one-upmanship born of insecurity, and I was falling right into it. This prevalent, ongoing dynamic had long made some clergy none too excited to attend.

Then COVID happened. And at the first clergy conference after the lockdown, poof, abracadabra … the one-upmanship was nowhere to be found. It was clear that every last one of us was the walking wounded, and suddenly our greater instinct was to listen to and care for one another.

One-upmanship can always find a way back into any human system. I’m certainly proud of the way we at Good Shepherd handled the pandemic. Our decision to use Zoom as our primary gathering space worked out really well and mostly held our congregation together, and I love to tell that story! But believe it or not, that was years ago now. All our congregations made their own best decisions based on their own context and the people involved, and some of them are still having a rough time. Others are now growing greatly in membership and have healthy Sunday school programs again, and that’s a nut we haven’t yet found a way to crack. So before I go bragging about how great Good Shepherd is, I always need to remember that 2021 clergy conference.

“Everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about. Be kind. Always.” It’s likely you’ve heard this before—it’s a quote from novelist and TV personality Brad Meltzer. Or to put it more poetically, we can quote the Letter of James: “Who is wise and understanding among you? Show by your good life that your works are done with gentleness born of wisdom.”

It’s so easy to become disillusioned. Somehow we think we have a right to succeed in life. But God didn’t make the world that way, and indeed, I don’t think God is much interested in helping us achieve what we call success.

If you don’t like that message, well, there are zillions of churches out there that will tell you exactly the opposite—maybe even that God is ready to put a Ferrari in your driveway if only you’ll think positive for once. And they’ll quote this same passage: “You do not have, because you do not ask.” Of course, they might leave out the next sentence: “You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, in order to spend what you get on your pleasures.”

And please notice what I’ve just done: I’ve suddenly set up Good Shepherd as better than zillions of other churches out there. Whoops.

“Who is wise and understanding among you? Show by your good life that your works are done with gentleness born of wisdom.” Maybe we could rephrase it this way: “Just get out there and do good work, and don’t be concerned with what others think of you for doing it.”

On Wednesday night Ashlee Gee and company will begin a six-week Zoom discussion group on Christianity and the Enneagram. The Enneagram is a nine-point personality inventory we can use for our personal learning and growth and for understanding the motivations of others who are different from us. As someone who identifies strongly with the number 3 on the Enneagram, I really, really need to absorb the Letter of James. I am competitive by nature, and that’s one of my least favorite things about myself—that, and the fact that I actually care what other people think of me. So to those of you beginning that class, you know at the outset where your priest stands—and falls! For better or worse, I’m a Three.

But most of the time I am truly less interested in winning than I am in being understood. I pray that this may be true for all of us.

We can look, then, to the gospel, where we find Jesus having a lot of trouble making himself understood. He tells his disciples as plainly as possible what’s about to happen to him, but they stick their fingers in their ears: “La la la la! We’re not tryin’ to hear that! Our Messiah needs to be a winner, but you’re talking about losing! That makes no sense, so we’ll just wait for you to come to your senses! La la la la!”

And what happens next? The disciples get into an argument about which of them is the greatest.

I understand that this wasn’t an uncommon thing for young men to do in social groups in ancient times. Honestly, nothing’s changed—look at the slang term “GOAT” (“Greatest of All Time”). And which hip hop artist is really the best, Drake or Kendrick Lamar? Smack-talking has long been a way to assert dominance—and to quell our own insecurities. But we see the dire places it can go—places where we believe that we can only be OK if others are not. No, it takes work and maturity to come to an understanding expressed well by Taylor Swift: “We all know now/We all got crowns.”

Sounds like the Kingdom of Heaven to me. And if we all get crowns, that means we don’t actually need to earn them by shoving others off the throne. I guess that in God’s reality, there are participation trophies!

Today we heard Jesus’ second prediction of his death. Last week we heard the first one, and Peter’s reaction to do it, which led Jesus to refer to him as Satan. It turns out that if you’re going to follow Jesus, first you have to accept that he wins by losing. Next, you’ll have to accept that this is the pattern for living that he offers to all of us. We can take it or leave it, but if we insist on being winners in life, eventually we’re in for a rude awakening. Once we accept that we must all be losers, even of our very lives, we can let go of our obsession with being the greatest and put our focus back where it belongs—on loving one another today and every day, which, it turns out, is also to love God.

Today Jesus gives us a fresh example of what it means to win by losing. He takes a little child by the hand and says, “See this kid? If you’re going to follow me, you need to extend your welcome to children.”

Did Jesus mean this literally? I’m sure he did, and I’m sure he also meant it in other ways. In the ancient world, children had it pretty rough. From the time they were born until the time they could actually do chores around the home, they were just a straight-up burden. And child mortality rates were so high that parents knew it was unwise to get especially attached to them. Best wait until they’ve survived the ubiquitous childhood illnesses and gained upper body strength and hand-eye coordination. Then they can actually become useful—real people, not just potential people—and eventually, they can inherit and carry on the family name.

There was not as yet any of this sickly sweet Victorian notion of children being a symbol of pure and utter innocence, unfettered by the messiness of humanity. There were no airbrushed paintings of angels helping cherubic tots cross the stream without slipping on the rocks. Our ancient ancestors were far more realistic.

I think that when Jesus said to his friends, “You need to welcome children in my name,” it must have sounded ridiculous. Other people’s kids were none of their business. So there would have been a lot of head-scratching, because this was a parable. It turned their world upside-down. If children must be honored and welcomed in Jesus’ name, what does that say about adults? Distinguished, wealthy adults? Kings and emperors?

It’s hard work understanding parables, and it can only happen in conversation with our actual lives. So what does Jesus’ parable say to you in our own context in which at least we hope that every child is wanted, loved, cherished, and nurtured? Where we recognize that all children are fully human and not second-class creatures?

Maybe welcoming children means something different to us than it did to Jesus and his disciples. And maybe that’s OK. Maybe the parable transfers well into other cultures, other times, other realities. Maybe there’s something here about respecting the dignity of every human being—something that would have made no sense at all in the ancient Roman Empire—not to any people or tribe or nation.

Maybe for Jesus’ disciples, though, it just meant that everybody’s a loser. And our work is to welcome and love losers. This might even be a chore.

And that’s kind of where I’ve been trying to get for some time now … to our chores. James would have us do our chores. Jesus would remind us of all we have in common with children, and that probably means we need to do our chores. We need to do our part to belong to the family.

And what, says Jesus, is our primary chore? Picking up a cross and carrying it. When we take up a burden that we choose, knowing full well that we can set it down anytime we need to, we can call that “doing our chores.” It’s how we thank God for that eternal participation trophy—no, not really for the trophy, because in retrospect that’s a silly metaphor and I was just trying to be relatable.

Rather, by doing our chores, we say back to God, “Yes, we see now the wisdom you give us. We all belong. We are all eternal, and you love every last ridiculous one of us in all our particulars.”

We are all children doing our chores. But your particular chores may be invisible to me, and mine to you. And so we must be kind to one another. Amen.