Sermon Title: "Seated at the Headtable"
Date: October 18, 2009
Minister: Rev. Charles Ensley

Lesson:  Mark 10:35-45

Tell me you haven’t done this; I know I have:  You approach the entrance to the hotel ballroom.  Maybe it’s a wedding reception, or a charity dinner, or a business banquet.  You look at the number on your nametag or placecard and then you scan the seating chart to see where your table is.  The first thing you notice it where it is located in relation to the headtable.  Maybe it’s close; good, you rate!  Or maybe it’s in a far corner, or near the back door.  You’re either a little miffed, because you didn’t rate a closer seat, or you’re secretly delighted.  Thank goodness!  I’m near the door.  I can duck out as soon as the speaker finishes, or the awards are given, or before the loud music starts. 

Now the brothers James and John, the main characters in today’s lesson, weren’t anything like that.  Not at all.  They didn’t need to look at the seating chart to see where their table was.  Because they wanted to be seated up front, on the dais, seated at the headtable on either side of Jesus, “one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory.”

I don’t get these guys.  In the verses just preceding today’s lesson, for the third time in Mark’s Gospel, Jesus tells them, “See, we are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be handed over to the chief priests and the scribes, and they will condemn him to death; … they will mock him, and spit upon him, and flog him, and kill him; and after three days he will rise again.” (9:33-34)

Do James and John try to talk him out of entering Jerusalem, ask how they could prevent this gruesome death, ask what they can do for him?  No, they make it sound like no more than Jesus is going to take a few days off, and after he rises again, they want to be sure to be seated at his right and left hand.

Wasn’t it just four Sundays ago and just one chapter ago that the disciples were on their way to Capernaum, and Jesus found them arguing among themselves about who was the greatest?  He told them then, “Whoever wants to be first must be the last of all and servant of all.”  (9:36)  I’m sure you remember that; it was the theme of my sermon on September 20th.

And what of the other ten disciples in today’s story?  When they heard the brothers’ request, “they began to be angry with James and John.”  Probably because they thought they were just as worthy of being seated at Jesus’ right and left hands in his glory.

They just didn’t get it.  To say that any of their requests of Jesus were audacious, presumptuous, out-of-place is absolute understatement.  But, if truth be told, if we were one of the followers of Jesus, would we have understood any better than they what lay ahead for him?  Would we have understood what he meant when he said he would die and in three days rise again?

Instead of scolding them, Jesus—who usually seemed super-understanding of their inability to understand what he was talking about—each time the disciples misunderstood when he spoke of his impending sacrifice, he patiently explained to them that following him means thinking of themselves as people who:

• deny self for Jesus’ sake and for the sake of the gospel, risking and accepting worldly shame (8:34-38);
• are focused on Jesus and his words above all others (9:7);
• remain humbly dependent on God’s power to do God’s work (9:14-29);
• do not play the games of competitiveness, one-upmanship or glory grasping but choose the role of least of all and slave to all (9:33-37);
• relinquish control for who does what and how they do it in the kingdom; in other words, giving up the need to be God’s quality-control experts (read: control freaks) for anything that’s done for God (10:38-41);
• keep children at the center of their work, even when it appears distracting (9:36-37, 42-48; 10:13-16); and
• do not become overburdened by possessions but receive the gift of the hundredfold promise (10:17-31).

(André Resner, Jr.  “22nd Sunday After Pentecost, Year B.”  The Lectionary Commentary: 

The Third Readings:  The Gospels, ed. Roger E. Van Harn, Grand Rapids, MI;  William B Eerdmans, 2001.)

Looking out for others, thinking of them first over self, serving them all seem of supreme importance to Jesus.  That is how he lived out his life, and that is how he challenges the mere mortals of his day, and today, to live.

A number of you have likely read Greg Mortenson’s non-fiction bestseller, Three Cups of Tea. (Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin.  Three Cups of Tea:  One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace … One School at a Time.  New York:  Penguin Books, 2006)  In it, he describes his attempt to climb the world’s second-highest mountain, K2, located on the border of Pakistan and China.  Known informally as “The Savage Peak,” for every four people who reach the summit, one dies trying to get there.  After 78 days of struggle against the mountain, he got within 600 meters of the summit, when failing strength and sickness forced him to turn back.  A wrong turn ended him up in a primitive Pakistan village, where the hospitable villagers nursed him back to health.

As Mortenson recovered, he noted their children had no school.  He saw 82 kids kneeling on frosty ground in the open, trying to learn with only a traveling teacher.  Upon his return to California, Mortenson was determined to build a school there.  There are too many details for me to describe all the struggles he faced in meeting that challenge, but he succeeded, and as of last year, he and the organization he founded had established more than 78 schools in rural and often volatile regions of the two countries, providing education to more than 28,000 children who live where few opportunities existed before.

Today, Mortenson is one of the few Americans who is warmly received throughout Pakistan and Afghanistan, because he’s seen as one who has come to serve without power and without seeking position and prestige.  He shows that greatness isn’t about how many people are serving us but about how many people are served by us. 

Barbara Brown Taylor, in her sermon on this text, sums it up best: 

“We have heard this teaching so many times that it is all but lost on us.  The end of the line is the best place to be.  The lowliest job is the one to covet.  Those who serve are luckier than those in power and lovers of God get less status, not more.  It is incomprehensible in terms of the world we live in.  Things simply do not work that way.  The only way to make any sense out of it at all is to think of it as some sort of intermediate stage, like boot camp or parole.  Do your time as a servant with no whining and win two good seats in the kingdom to come.

“‘It doesn't work that way,’ Jesus tells them one more time.  He is not pretending to be a servant until the time comes for him to whip off his disguise and climb onto his throne; he is a servant through and through.  The good seats are not his to give.  He does not even have one himself.  Someone else is in charge of all that, someone he is too shy even to name, whom it is his sole pleasure and purpose to serve.

“He is not in it for reward,” Taylor concludes.  “He is in it for the love of God, which promises him nothing but the opportunity to give himself away.  The best seat he will get this side of the grave is a throne full of splinters, and when he is hung out on it to dry by the powers that be, it will not be James and John on either side of him but two unnamed bandits, one on his left and the other on his right.”  (Barbara Brown Taylor, Gospel Medicine, Boston:  Cowley Publications, 1995, pp. 43-44).