Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost
September 22, 2024
Mark 9:30-37

The audio of this sermon is available here. The video of the full worship service is available on the Trinity Episcopal Church YouTube channel.

You know you’ve made it as a parent, when you can correctly install the car seat. Have you seen these modern contraptions? They’re huge. They’ve got buckles and anchors. They’re designed to be installed at precise angles with harnesses going every which way. Some detach so you can carry the kid around.  And just when you’ve figured it out, your kid grows out of that car seat and goes on to the next one. First, they’re facing backwards. Then, they face forward. Finally, you get the booster and then you graduate. And the kid just sits in the car. Now, I know, some of you are thinking. “Back in my day…” Well, good for you. 

This is a sign of something deeper going on in our culture. And I hear it from you. Parents are exhausted. Because so much of our time and energy is focused on our kids. One of the reasons we have so many car seats is because we spend so much time driving them all around. And I feel it as a parent, too. We want our kids to succeed, to be well-rounded – so they can get into good colleges, so they can get a good job. We want them in sports, in church, to finish their homework, to make friends, but only the right kind of friends, we want them to get straight A’s. We even put bumper stickers on our cars to brag about our children. Talk about pressure. Not only on the kids, but on the parents.

And I think we need to acknowledge just how different it is now, than what it was two thousand years ago. See, in the time of Jesus, families had children because they needed labor. Children were another mouth to feed until they were old enough to work. Think of those parables and stories from the gospels. James and John leave their father’s fishing business to follow Jesus, and that was scandalous. Jesus tells a story about a farmer who had two sons, and the sibling rivalry over who would inherit what. Jesus himself takes up his father’s trade. And really, this is how the vast majority of humanity has existed. In order to survive, most young women would have to get married. Most young men would have to do whatever it was their father did. Today we ask children what they want to be when they grow up. Not that long ago, that question would have been inconceivable. 

That’s what we have to keep in mind when we hear this gospel passage. The disciples are arguing among themselves – “who is the greatest?” (Mark 9:33). Nowadays we argue about whose kid is the greatest, we put them in classes and sports and after school program hoping that our kids can “get ahead.” Wanting our kids to be the greatest. But back then it was about which of the disciples, the adults was greatest. 

So Jesus points out a child. And Jesus says that whenever we welcome one such child, we welcome Jesus himself (Mark 9:37). Think of it – that child had no car seat, no parent who served as their chauffeur. No parent was making sure this kid was in all the right after school programs, or getting enough tummy time, or watching just the right amount of Sesame Street. This child wasn’t dreaming of all the different career paths they could choose from if only they got into the right college. This child that Jesus points out was just a cog in the wheel of the ancient economy. This child represents the least in society. And that’s who Jesus identifies with.

Jesus is using the child as an image of people who are vulnerable, forgotten, easily overlooked. This is not a teaching about children – it’s a teaching about how we ought to treat each other. And Jesus is making sure that we, who would presume to follow him, don’t become the greatest by lording it over anybody else – we become the greatest by serving. “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.”

Now, this has really caught my attention. Because, Jesus knows the desires of the human heart. We want to be first. We want to be the greatest. Today, we want our genius children to be top of the class. We want them to all get trophies. That’s fine. That desire to be first, to be greatest, is simply part of who we are. That’s not bad. Things go wrong, though, when we use that desire to succeed for our own purposes. The intent is okay – we should try to be the greatest. But not at the cost of someone else. Because the path to true greatness is service and humility. We become great, not by talking about ourselves, but by welcoming the people for whom the world doesn’t care – like Jesus pointing out a child. That is true greatness. I think that Jesus is calling us to tap into our drive for greatness, and unleash it for the power of good, for the sake of others.

And if we lived like that, well, the world would be a different place. It would look a whole lot less like the Kingdom of Self and a whole more like the Kingdom of God. It would be great, I think, if absolutely everybody had a fair shot of life, regardless of the zip code you happened to be born in. It would be great, I think, if everybody had clean water. It would be great, I think, if we cared enough about each other to actually care for each other. That would be great. Imagine if we put our competitive spirit to tackling poverty. Imagine if we harnessed our desire for greatness into making sure that every kid would go to bed at night with a fully belly. Imagine if we took that drive that lives within us and focus it on really addressing the mental health needs of people living out on the streets. That would be greatness. 

And, it would give us life. See, I think the reason we parents are all so exhausted is that we’re competing against each other. We want to show up to the first day of kindergarten and make sure our kid already knows how to read. We want our kid to make the varsity team as a freshman. We are like those disciples, bickering among themselves about who is the greatest. They were spending their time and energy working against each other instead of with each other. And I know, we can all put on the smile, take cute pictures and put them up on Facebook, and talk about how our kid is just the best. But, we all know, that’s is not true. It’s just a big show. Parenting is hard. It’s constant work. And the worry and the stress and the ambiguity of parenting is all too real. And we only make it worse by trying to show off. This competition is exhausting.

And that goes for everybody. I think that our culture, our political discourse, our institutions are all so exhausted because we’re all trying to become the greatest by serving ourselves, by competing. As one of my favorite theologians once said, “Competition is the watchword of the world. Cooperation is the watchword of the Church.” (F.D. Maurice)

And that, that is where I would like to leave things today. To offer a different vision of how we could live and move and have our being. By noticing each other and by helping each other. Parents, this means that if you show up to church and your kids hair isn’t combed, and there are donut crumbs all on the front of their shirt – it’s fine. We get it. Because we’ve all been there, and we’re here to help out, not to judge. And for everyone else, this means to keep an eye out for the people for whom it would be easy for us to forget, to overlook. And by noticing, you will achieve greatness. The same greatness that Jesus sought after, not by being served, but by serving.