The Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 20B, September 20, 2015; The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz
Proverbs 31:10-31 Give her a share in the fruit of her hands and let her works praise her in the city gates.James 3:13-4:3, 7-8 Show by your good life that your works are done with gentleness born of wisdom.
Mark 9:30-37 Welcomes…welcomes…welcomes…welcomes.
O God of radical welcome, grant us the strength, the wisdom and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.
Hello! I’m so glad you’re here! Happy New Year! Part of the fun of living in an interfaith family like the family Emmanuel Church makes with Central Reform Temple is that we double our holidays! This sanctuary is still humming with the celebrations of the Jewish New Year that began last Sunday evening. So we enter this place today in the midst of the prayers of the Days of Awe – the high holy days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. The themes of the Days of Awe are hope, reconciliation and repair – in individual lives and in the world – the Days of Awe are days of reflection, renewed commitment, and action.
Some of you heard me last Sunday night quote the great Abraham Joshua Heschel, who said “the beginning of awe is wonder, and the beginning of wisdom is awe…awe is a way of being in rapport with the mystery of all reality. The awe that we sense or ought to sense when standing in the presence of a human being is a moment of intuition for the likeness of God which is concealed in [the human being’s] essence… The secret of every being is the divine care and concern that are invested in it. Something sacred is at stake in every event.” [1] I believe that is true whether the event is most welcome or entirely unwanted, whether the event unexpected or long-awaited, something sacred is at stake in every event.
We have three lessons from scripture before us that speak to something sacred being at stake in every event. The first, from the conclusion of the Book of Proverbs, is a beautiful description of a successful woman who does everything well. Before you get your undies in a knot about the patriarchal bias about the capable wife, I’ll tell you that in Hebrew, the word for woman is the same as the word for wife – ishah. The word for man is the same as the word for husband – ish.) She may be a good wife, but Bible calls her ishah-chayil. When chayil is used to describe men in the Bible, it’s translated “mighty.” [2] So my complaint is not with the ancient Book of Proverbs; it is with the modern translation of “a capable wife” when it’s far more accurate to say “a mighty woman.”
Sadly, the passage doesn’t mention that she ever rests, but we can be assured that this faithful woman rested from productivity one day out of every seven. Historian Amy Oden notes that this passage also doesn’t say anything about this woman’s worth being derived from her man. It doesn’t list pregnancy or childbirth among her key credentials, nor does this long passage mention her physical appearance. [3] Instead, we hear a long list of events – of business transactions and giving generously to those who are poor, stretching her hands out to those in need. Clearly, for this woman, something sacred is at stake in every event.
The Letter of James teaches that wisdom is made manifest in deeds of generosity and kindness – and that “one of the greatest gifts of wisdom is its capacity to lead [people] to a peaceful resolution of a conflict.” [4] James assumes conflict – indeed, is written in the midst of conflict. The letter attributes conflict to a disease of the human heart, wherein the healing comes from turning to Love in a way that is generative and has integrity of purpose. [5] If the beginning of wisdom is awe, then the end of wisdom is harmony. The way between awe and harmony is “extraordinarily rigorous,” and it is both our obligation and great honor to follow it, knowing something sacred is at stake in every event.
You know, Jesus’ earliest followers were called, “People of the Way.” At Tuesday morning Bible Study this past week, the “Early Morning Skeptics” mused that Jesus’ disciples might have been better known as “People who argued on the Way.” The Gospel of Mark explains that Jesus was teaching his disciples things they didn’t understand and were afraid to ask him to explain. They were arguing with one another along the way, and when Jesus interrogated them (the word is stronger than just inquiry or asking), they were silent – they didn’t want to tell him that they had been arguing about who was the greatest – who was superior.
I wonder about what they’re afraid of – afraid that Jesus will bark at them maybe. Perhaps they were both afraid to go with him and afraid that he might leave them behind. Afraid to admit that they don’t fully grasp what’s going on, that they don’t get what he’s talking about, that they’ll seem stupid. He asked them what they had been arguing about on the way, and they fell silent. They had been arguing, along the way, arguing on their spiritual journey, about who was the greatest. Now I’ve always imagined that it was an argument where each one was asserting superiority. I imagined something like, Peter saying, “I’m the greatest because I’m solid as a rock, Jesus said so.” And John was saying, “No, I’m the greatest because he calls me the Son of Thunder,” and so on. But they might have been arguing that another was greater – a little like the old Smothers Brothers routine where Tommy tells his brother Dick, “Mom always liked you best.” Or arguing something like, “you should really take the lead on this because you’re better than I am.” Or they might have been arguing that they as a group were better or worse than another group. You know, arguing about how “our group is better than, or not as good as, that other group.” In a way, it doesn’t matter whether the disciples were thinking they were individually or collectively better or worse than another. It’s arrogant to believe that you are better than another. It’s also arrogant to believe that you are not as good as another. It is an affront to the Holy One who made each and every person so marvelously well.
Then Jesus called the twelve for some further instruction. Jesus’ “call” to the twelve is actually the word for a rooster crow. It’s a wake-up call – an alarm. Jesus sits down and says, “whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.” He turns the “better than” or “worse than” argument on its head. Jesus teaches them that the measure of greatness is not expertise or intelligence or money or power. The measure of greatness in the realm of God is servanthood – service to others. Greatness is not measured by being served – greatness is in serving like the mighty woman in Proverbs. This was (and still is) a very subversive message, an empowering message to be teaching to people who didn’t have any political or religious or financial power.
And in case his words aren’t scandalous enough, the story goes that Jesus took a little child in his arms and said, “whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the One [6] who sent me.” Here Jesus is asserting an identifying connection between God and himself and a little one. Jesus is identifying himself and the Holy One with one who is at the bottom of the pecking order for honor or significance, who is most powerless and inconsequential, weakest, most vulnerable, lowliest, most marginalized, socially invisible, a non-person. Jesus is asserting that welcoming such a relative nobody is welcoming him, and welcoming him is welcoming the One who sent him. Jesus and God and the child are One. Did you hear the word welcome four times when the Gospel was read? The Greek word means receive, accept, greet with hospitality.
The thing is, there are always people in our midst who need welcoming – people who are outside circles of influence, outside of the various mainstreams of our society, outside of the mainstreams of our church, or our politics, or our religious rituals, who need welcoming, and in whose eyes we will find God. Welcome means much more than tolerance or perfunctory acceptance. My guess is that most of us know the difference in how it feels to be endured rather than embraced. My next guess is that most of us know what it’s like to live in the margins in at least one aspect of our lives, even if we don’t wholly occupy that space. I bet each of us has at least one part of who we are that dwells in the margins – one part that is unaccustomed to being welcomed with open arms. It is that part Jesus is teaching us to embrace, receive, greet!
Here Jesus is teaching that leadership is about giving radical welcome and inclusion to one outside any circle of influence, by virtue of cultural or political or financial constructs. It’s about embracing someone who you think probably isn’t going to do a thing for you. Even more startling is the idea that our capacity to receive those who have been most marginalized is a measure of the our capacity to receive the Holy One. This is true whether we are talking about parts of our own selves, parts of our immediate circles of concern, parts of our commonwealth, parts of our world. This is not theoretical. Worldwide, the number of refugees displaced by military and economic violence (about 60 million) is larger than any time since World War II – and half of those are children. [7] We, who are People of the Way – even People Arguing on the Way, have both an obligation and a great honor to respond with welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome, knowing something sacred is at stake in every event, and in every child of God. I want to close with the prayer for children by Ina J. Hughes:
We pray for the children
who put chocolate fingers everywhere,
who like to be tickled,
who stomp in puddles and ruin their new pants,
who sneak Popsicles before supper,
who erase holes in math workbooks,
who can never find their shoes.
And we pray for those
who stare at photographers from behind barbed wire,
who’ve never squeaked across the floor in new sneakers,
who never had crayons to count,
who are born in places we wouldn’t be caught dead,
who never go to the circus,
who live in an X-rated world.
We pray for children
who bring us sticky kisses and fistfuls of dandelions,
who sleep with the dog and bury goldfish,
who give hugs in a hurry and forget their lunch money,
who cover themselves with Band-Aids and sing off-key,
who squeeze toothpaste all over the sink,
who slurp their soup.
And we pray for those
who never get dessert,
who watch their parents watch them die,
who have no safe blanket to drag behind,
who can’t find any bread to steal,
who don’t have any rooms to clean up,
whose pictures aren’t on anybody’s dresser,
whose monsters are real.
We pray for children
who spend all their allowance before Tuesday,
who throw tantrums in the grocery store and pick at their food,
who like ghost stories,
who shove dirty clothes under the bed,
who never rinse out the tub,
who get visits from the tooth fairy,
who don’t like to be kissed in front of the school,
who squirm in church or temple or mosque
and scream in the phone,
whose tears we sometimes laugh at and
whose smiles can make us cry.
And we pray for those
whose nightmares come in the daytime,
who will eat anything,
who aren’t spoiled by anybody,
who go to bed hungry and cry themselves to sleep,
who live and move, but have no being.
We pray for children who want to be carried,
and for those who must.
For those we never give up on,
and for those who never get a chance.
For those we smother with our love,
and for those who will grab the hand of anybody
kind enough to offer it. [8]
That’s the end of the Ina Hughes prayer, but it isn’t the end of my prayer. I pray, too, that each one of us will be kind enough to offer our hands, our heads and our hearts in welcome, knowing something sacred is at stake.