“Leading through Service”

Rev Dennis Ryle 20/10/2024

Readings - Job 38:1-7, 34-41, Mark 10:35-45

A Contemporary Reflection - Ancient Wisdom

Praying the prayer Jesus taught his disciple with Abwoon  d’bwashmaya 

https://youtu.be/zKBALDmEUBI

Prayers of Orientation and Affirmation

Mighty and powerful God,
through Jesus Christ our Savior
you come to save people in all times and places,
offering them new life in your presence.
Give us open hearts to receive your Chosen One,
that through him we may dwell with you
as faithful and committed disciples.

Sovereign God,
you make us for each other,
to live in loving community
as friends, sons and daughters,
sisters and brothers, wives and husband,
partners and companions.
Teach us to choose love
that is committed and devoted;
teach us like little children
to wonder and to trust,
that our loving may reflect the image of Christ. Amen.

Hymn  TiS 650  “Brother, Sister”

Sermon

To tease fresh meaning from a familiar text – I occasionally resort to poetry. Theology is as much an art as a science. Theology is as much at home with the composer’s baton, the sculptor’s chisel and the painter’s palette, as it is with the scholar’s exegesis, the debater’s apologetics and the archaeologist’s brush.

I find dabbling in poetry sometimes reveals fresh insight to a text. In contemplating this incident on the road with Jesus and his disciples, I tried rewriting it in the style of a Shakespearean sonnet and then a Henry Lawson style bush ballad.

I was a little more successful with a pantoum. The pantoum derives from a south-east Asian literary style that is structured in a way that repeats key elements of the topic as its story unfolds, thus revealing subtle relationships within the story.  Let’s hear an interpretation of the text in pantoum style

They wanted to be bosses
Lords of the purple circle
To be successors of the greatest One of all
For he had signalled his demise

Lords of the purple circle
Willing to drink from his cup
For he had signalled his demise
They did not know what they asked

Willing to drink from his cup
Surrendering life for the sake of all
They did not know what they asked
That to lead is to serve

Surrendering life for the sake of all
To live life fully in the way of the Christos
They did not know what they asked
They wanted to be bosses.

 James’ and John's approach to Jesus for favour strikes at the core of our being. It is a universal human trait to seek significance throughout our brief life span. James and John are no different from any of us who have sought to advance our standing, seizing whatever opportunities arise and seem within grasp along the way.

Jesus’ response to their request is both compelling and confronting.  They have been with him long enough to grasp his way of living, indeed they cannot “unlive” his way. But the depth of it is still beyond them. Fulfilled understanding yet eludes them. They needed to marinade a little longer in the Way before they became full-flavoured.

And it is the “cup of suffering” from which they say they are willing to drink that holds that marinade.

As we gathered for worship today we opened ourselves to an appreciation of what creation theologian Matthew Fox calls the Via Positiva,  the sheer joy of the cosmic bounty of being in God and of God. We have the capacity for our wits and focus and love to be sharpened through our attention to the breadth of living that surrounds us. The band of disciples that accompanied Jesus throughout his daily Galilean ministry were discovering the sheer expanse of this Kingdom of Heaven that was so central to his discourses. They were part of it, Jesus had made them apprentices, and they had gone out healing and teaching and serving from the same essence as their Teacher. They were living out of the daily breathing and praying of the Abwoon d’bwashmaya.

But they weren’t there yet.

And largely, claims Fox, neither are many descendants of the last 300 years of Christian spirituality. We are more motivated by a trophy cup than a cup of suffering. We are more prone to crowning egos than surrendering them.

Fox wants us to reclaim a lost Via Negativa.

“When the Via negative is ignored, the prophetic voice is invariably silenced. Life becomes superficial, easily manipulated, and ultimately as boring as it is violent. And, above all, cheap. For while the Via Positiva teaches us the cosmic breadth of living, of our holy relationship to stars and atoms, to royal persons and to blessed bodiliness, the Via Negativa opens us to our divine depths. When one has suffered deep pain and allowed the pain to be pain, one can visit the Grand Canyon and learn that it has nothing on the human person who is even deeper and more powerfully carved over millions of years by the flowing tides of pain.”
(Original Blessing, p130)

We have largely looked askance at such expressions of the Via Negativa. Visions of medieval hairshirts, starving and self-flagellation repulse us, not the least because we intuitively discern that such practices feed a martyr complex that inflates the ego rather than reducing it.

The cup that Jesus lays before his ambitious disciples is real however, and just as he taught them to pray the Abwoon d’bwashmaya, he would teach them to drink from his cup, a cup so painful that, in Gethsemane, he would ask that it be taken from him.   

Just as Christ in full humanity entered its suffering, so too must those who wear his name.

“Suffering is the badge of the human race,” said Mahatma Ghandi.

It seems James and John, together with the disciples that were angered by their presumption, had yet to embrace this reality, and that to continue to be steeped in Christ’s Way, they would need to come fully to terms with it.

Moreover, this suffering had a refining purpose. In the Way of Christ’s kingdom, to lead, or rule, is to serve. To serve with integrity is to know the world’s suffering. To know the world’s suffering, we must fully embrace our own pain.

Suzanne Guthrie “The Edge of Enclosure” blog

The Alchemy of Suffering

To be engaged with the world is to suffer. Even after the painful trauma of birth is over, a little child suffers the pains of the digestive system learning to manage itself, first teeth breaking slowly through the gums, the panic as mother incomprehensibly leaves the room even for a moment. In the best of economic and social circumstances, there is always sickness, tragedy, death, unexplainable twists of fate, love-sickness, home-sickness, hurtful disagreements, mental illness, the death of loved ones. Add poverty, war, natural disasters, political oppression, and brutality and you have life. How can I bear this suffering?

Christians, who ritually embrace the suffering of Christ and the world in worship can nevertheless devolve into Why did God do this to me? Why isn't God answering my prayers? during a bout of suffering as if God is a personal necromancer and prayer a magical incantation.

By concentrating on the exclusively personal in this way I can avoid the questions pertaining to both theodicy and personal responsibility as a human being. If I wallow in Why did God do this to me? I don't have to worry about someone half 'way around the world, or even down the street, for that matter.

But the moment my suffering meets your suffering, the moment our eyes meet, an alchemical change takes place. I am in you and you are in me. Suffering makes us one. I help bear your suffering and you help bear mine. Learning to suffer with you, I learn empathy for others I don't know. Suffering opens my soul to love.

And when my suffering and your suffering meet God's suffering, we become one in that suffering, incarnate in the world, bearing this suffering with the Holy Unknowable. Christian practice helps me to trust living in the incomprehensible vortex of the cross. My suffering, your suffering, God's suffering, bringing forth new life. And new love. How can I bear this joy?
  
A CALL TO TRANSFORMING DISCIPLESHIP      The Arusha Call to Discipleship 2018
 
As disciples of Jesus Christ, both individually and collectively we are called by our baptism to transforming discipleship: a Christ-connected way of life in a world where many face despair, rejection, loneliness, and worthlessness.
 
We are called to worship the one Triune God—the God of justice, love, and grace—at a time when many worship the false god of the market system.
 
We are called to proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ in word and deed—the fullness of life, repentance and the forgiveness of sin, and the promise of eternal life—in a violent world where many are sacrificed to the idols of death and where many have not yet heard the gospel.
 
We are called to joyfully engage in the ways of the Holy Spirit, who empowers people from the margins with agency, in their search for justice and dignity.
 
We are called to discern the word of God in a world that communicates many contradictory, false, and confusing messages.
 
We are called to care for God’s creation and to be in solidarity with nations severely affected by climate change in the face of a ruthless human-centered exploitation of the environment for consumerism and greed.
 
We are called as disciples to belong together in just and inclusive communities, in our quest for unity and on our ecumenical journey, in a world that is based upon marginalization and exclusion.
 
We are called to be faithful witnesses of God’s transforming love in dialogue with people of other faiths in a world where the politicization of religious identities often causes conflict.
 
We are called to be formed as servant leaders who demonstrate the way of Christ in a world that privileges power, wealth, and the culture of money 

We are called to break down walls and seek justice with people who are dispossessed and displaced from their lands—including First Nations people, migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers—and to resist new frontiers and borders that separate and kill.
 
We are called to follow the way of the cross, which challenges elitism, privilege, and personal and structural power.
 
We are called to live in the light of the resurrection, which offers hope-filled possibilities for transformation.
 
This is a call to transforming discipleship.
 
This is not a call that we can answer in our own strength, so the call becomes, in the end, a call to prayer:
 
Loving God, help us not to conform to the patterns of this world but to be transformed by the renewing of our minds.  Give us a new imagination so that we might live in ways that do not compute to the logic of materialism and militarism.  Make us into holy nonconformists so that we might see the dominions of this world transformed by your grace.  AMEN  
      Common Prayer, p. 421 
 
As we carry these words into our day
May we cast off our old nature,
so that the spirit of our minds may be constantly renewed; 
clothing ourselves in that new nature
that was created to resemble God’s,
with all righteousness and holiness springing from the truth.
     Ephesians 4:22-24