Rays of resurrection

October 18 

Mark 10:35-45

Every so often, I can tell my kids are plotting something.  They disappear for a while, and then they come back with big grins on their faces.  “You ask her.”  “No, you ask her!”  They hem and haw for a while.  Maybe harken my memory back to some exemplary behavior or action from the past that makes them worthy of merit.  Then they speed into their proposal, rushing headlong into the arguments against whatever they suspect my objections might be.

Today the plotting children are James and John.  They’ve been huddled together off to the side of the group of disciples just out of hearing distance.  Their voices hushed, eyes furtively glancing periodically at Jesus.  This has been going on for some time.  Too long.  Then they finally come out, shoulders thrown back with resolve, each nudging the other to be in front, poking the other to speak first.  Finally they pull out the familiar child’s ploy: “Promise us you’ll say yes to whatever we ask!”  Jesus may not be a parent, but he is no fool. He knows better than to make any such promise.  And so he asks warily, “What are you guys up to?”

And they blurt it out: “Let us sit at your right and left hands in your glory!”  And as soon as the other disciples hear that the Zebedee brothers are angling with Jesus for places of honor, they all get mad, because of course, they’re all kicking themselves for not having asked first.

Little do any of them realize that in a short two weeks the only people on Jesus’ right and left sides will be the thieves crucified next to him.  It’s hard to tell from the blurb we get, but this conversation between Jesus and the Zebedee brothers comes as they are setting out for Jerusalem for the last time.  Jesus has just been telling them about what will come next - how he’d soon be betrayed and put to death.  And this is the third time in Mark’s Gospel Jesus has predicted all this, but every time the disciples push away the idea of Jesus’ suffering and dying.  As they’ve all proven over and over, that ending does not fit at all into their plan for Jesus, or for themselves.  They’d much rather talk about the crowns and the glory, the seats of power.  They’d much rather skip over the hard parts straight to the resurrection.

At first glance the disciples sound a little shallow, but they aren’t, not really.  They believed in Jesus when few people did.  They’ve given up everything to follow and have been incredibly strong and constant.  They’ve spent years on the road, always on the go from town to town, helping the hurt and lonely people that make up the bulk of Jesus’ ministry.  They have stayed faithful to him despite the jeers from the doubters and the threats from the powerful. They’ve listened to his stories and tried to understand them, and they’ve heard his teaching and tried to live into it.  It isn’t that they are in it only for glory, it’s just that they still don’t understand what Jesus is up to.

And they are afraid.  They are so incredibly afraid.  Afraid that this person that they’ve given everything up for may not be exactly what they expect.  Afraid that this person they have learned to love more than anything may not always be with them.  They are afraid of the pain and suffering and rejection that he talks about.  They are afraid of the unknown.  They are afraid of the vulnerability that he models and afraid of his expectations for them.  And they’d sort of prefer to take a short-cut through all of that stuff to reach the part where Jesus rises again in glory.  They’d much rather bypass that impossibly agonizing piece, thank you very much, and join him when the suffering is done.  All they want is some security.  Some peace.  A future when all this talk of rejection and suffering and death will be a distant memory.  You can’t really blame them for that, because I think most of us here would very much like the same thing.

The problem is, of course, that trying to pretend that suffering and insecurity don’t exist doesn’t work.  Trying to avoid pain and vulnerability doesn’t work.  There aren’t short cuts to resurrection.

Social media has proven that for us.  Look at Facebook, for an example, with 890 million daily active users and $12 billion in revenue last year.  Facebook claims that it’s mission is “to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.”  But research shows that the more time we spend “connecting” with “friends” on Facebook, the emptier and lonelier we feel.  Even as we are carefully broadcasting a scripted image of ourselves that is interesting, thoughtful, and without flaws (unless they are incredibly clever), we are all the while comparing ourselves to the images and statuses of our so-called friends and confronted with the events we weren’t invited to, the accomplishments we haven’t attained, the imperfection in our children and our marriages.  All we achieve most of the time is the illusion of connectedness.  And maybe the illusion of having it all together.

Don’t get me wrong.  There is plenty that is good about social media.  I get to watch my distant cousins’ kids growing up.  I get to keep up to date with the graduates from our youth group.  I get to find out about significant changes to peoples’ lives - births, deaths, marriages.  I am reminded of birthdays.  I learn about things going on in the world that I might not otherwise come across.  And sometimes I get pointed to interesting articles, great books, ideas for sermons.  But rarely do I feel connected to my “friends” on Facebook.  Rarely do I come across anything that feels very real.  Mostly I just come away feeling vaguely dissatisfied.

Until this past week, that is.  I’m so glad that I was paying attention when two striking posts made it into my feed.  First there was an acquaintance who just moved with the military and wrote: “I’m so sick of moving.  We are never going to have friends.”  Within a few hours she had dozens of truly loving responses — reassurances, stories from experience, invitations and phone calls.

And then there was the brave post from a clergy friend from seminary: “Today I head back to full-time work after an 8-week leave of absence.  On Facebook, all can look shiny and pretty, and I hope it’s not overly indulgent to share that various pressures at work and home led me to profound exhaustion that triggered a dive into depression.  I am so grateful to my children, friends, wardens, staff, parish, and diocese who loved me back to joy.  Solitude was a necessary part of that journey, and in it, I experienced Jesus knitting ever-closer.”  The responses were stunning, full of love and prayers and concern and celebration that she was coming out of her darkness.

With both of these posts and what followed after, I felt like I was witnessing resurrection.  Real resurrection that only comes after having slogged through the pit of self-doubt and uncertainty and fear and pain and loneliness.  Not the thin, cheap parody of resurrection that Facebook and the rest of the world so often offer us.  And it felt upside-down and counter-cultural and shocking and scary, and yet perfectly as it should be.  It felt a little bit like Church.

Because I think that is exactly what we are called to be as the Church.  This Christianity business of ours is nothing if not an upside-down and counter-cultural thing.  We have to admit our vulnerability in order to receive strength.  We have to face death before we can experience resurrection.  Our model of leadership is one of service to others.  We don’t come to church to show off how well we have our acts together, but to be called out of our old ways of doing things, and out of the world’s way of doing things, into a new way of being.  Into wholeness.

I just finished a book that came out recently written by Rachel Held Evans, called Searching for Sunday: Loving, leaving and finding the Church.  

The writer grew up in the evangelical church and then felt it was too black-and-white and too exclusive and ended up making her way to the Episcopal Church.  I love her description of what the Church can be:

"We come as we are - no hiding, no acting, no fear.  We come with our materialism, our pride, our petty grievances against our neighbors, our hypocritical disdain for those judgmental people in the church next door. We come with our fear of death, our desperation to be loved, our troubled marriages, our persistent doubts, our preoccupation with status and image.  We come with our addictions … [and] our differences….  We come in search of sanctuary, a safe place to shed the masks and exhale." (p.71)  “All we have are imperfect people in an imperfect world doing their best to produce outward signs of inward grace and stumbling all along the way.  All we have is this church - this lousy, screwed-up, glorious church - which, by God’s grace, is enough.” (p.256) 

May we be that Church, for each other and for the world; rays of resurrection light even as we stumble along.  Amen.