The Twenty-Second Sunday after Pentecost; Sermon, October 21, 2018
This sermon was preached by Seminarian Dillon Green who is currently a Junior (First-Year) at Virginia Theological Seminary. You can find him on Facebook. Dillon is sponsored for ordination to the Episcopal priesthood by St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Manhattan, Kansas.
What are we truly afraid of? That’s the question I found myself asking this week after reading the Gospel. In last week’s passage, if you’ll remember, Jesus tells the rich young ruler to sell everything he owns, to give it to the poor, and to come and follow him. The rich man goes away in shock, grieving as he goes. The disciples, too, are perplexed. Peter reminds Jesus, “Look, we have left everything to follow you,” to which Jesus replies, “The first will be last and the last will be first.” Right after that, in between last week’s and this week’s gospel, we’ve got Jesus predicting his death and resurrection for a third time. Enter James and John, the sons of Zebedee. “We want you to do whatever we ask of you,” James and John say to Jesus. You can almost hear the suspicion in Jesus’ voice when he answers them. “Okay… What is it you want me to do for you?” “Grant us to sit one at your right hand and one at your left.” Jesus tells them he’s going to die and be raised again, and this is the question they ask. Give us assurance. Give us security. Give us glory. Remember, when Jesus calls them, they’re in a boat with their father, and they leave him to follow Jesus. They leave their family, they leave their jobs, they leave the world as they know it behind, and they move into a life of following Jesus which looks nothing like what everyone else around them is doing. What motivates their need for assurance and for security? What motivates ours?
I have a feeling that we in Kansas can sympathize with James and John. For the past two years we’ve been in the search process for a new Bishop, wondering what the future might hold for the Diocese of Kansas. Some fellow congregations, full of our Kansan siblings in Christ, of necessity are acutely aware of the future’s uncertainty. It’s natural and profoundly human for us to be asking questions like this, to be asking Jesus to do whatever we ask of him, and to desire, as do James and John, some knowledge of what is to come. And, in fact, Jesus, in response to
James and John’s questions, and in the face of our own fears and anxieties, does not rebuke, but offers exactly what James and John ask for, but not in the way they or we expect.
I, too, can relate to James and John. Before I came to Kansas, I was having a not-so-minor freak-out about what I was going to do with my life. I had spent my undergraduate years assuming that what I wanted to be was a French and Spanish professor, so that’s what I prepared for. Ultimately what scared me away was uncertainty and fear, about whether I was ready for grad school, uncertainty about the future of higher education. I decided, out of those fears, that I would take nursing classes to become a nurse. A solid job, needed everywhere, that pays well and that would give me a degree of autonomy over myself and my own decisions about where I would live and work. After a year of classes, though, something inside me wouldn’t rest, so I decided not to finish the program. Again, I found myself directionless, with no idea of what I wanted to do and only an idea of what I didn’t. My friend Will told me about the position at Kansas State. I had never been to Kansas and had no certainty of what this job would look like. I interviewed, got the job, and moved to Kansas all within the span of six days. I spent my first year here thinking I would leave to go to optometry school, until I was hit with this sense of call, here at St. Paul’s, at Canterbury, at Camp, working with the youth program. It’s an ironic path God has set me on now, because, though I got here from a fear of uncertainty, I am now in one of the most uncertain processes. When you’re in the pre-ordination process, you are meant to enter with a willingness to hear God’s voice in your life, to be truly open to a yes or a no from your discernment committee, from the commission on ministry, from the Holy Spirit. Any step along the way that might happen. Even still, once Bishop Bascom begins, she could decide to freeze the ordination process until she gets an idea of the diocese and gets settled into her office. Not that she will, but that possibility of uncertainty is ever present in this journey toward ordination.
Reflecting on these moments in my life, on this process, I see now that it’s when we are most uncomfortable that we are most ready and prepared to hear God’s voice in our lives. It’s when I was distressed and without direction that I was able to receive Will’s suggestion and come to Kansas, a decision which I can confidently tell you has changed my life. So it goes here in the Diocese of Kansas. We are in a state of change and transition, and it may feel at times like we’re a little off kilter. But it is at those times of discomfort that we are most able to hear God’s voice. And it’s with that knowledge that we can be confident that we have listened to God’s voice, and that God has directed us to the faithful leader we have elected in Bishop-elect Cathleen Bascom. But, as exciting as elections are, we know that discomfort doesn’t dissolve at the ballot box, and that the work already begun must continue on.
What motivates our need for assurance, for security, if not fear? What are we truly afraid of? It’s the fear of discomfort, and from this fear springs forth a host of others. The fear of embarrassment. The fear of not being provided for. The fear of awkwardness. The fear of uncertainty. The fear of death. In response to this fear of discomfort we build walls of money, of education, of autonomy around ourselves to minimize it or, if possible, to neutralize it altogether. But God shows us another way. Jesus himself feared death, as our reading from Hebrews today alludes to. “In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications with loud cries and tears to the one who was able to save him from death.” He cries to the Father, and the Father, who hears him, doesn’t save him from death and discomfort, but makes him perfect in death and makes him our hope for eternal life, because God offers us only one kind of certainty, the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Jesus says in today’s gospel, “The cup that I drink you will drink, and with the baptism with which I am baptized, you will be baptized.” This is the certainty of Christ for us, the sacraments. Every time we take the Eucharist and every time we renew our baptismal covenant, we are living into Christ’s message for us here, that we take comfort in the uncomfortable. This life won’t feel or look like what the world thinks is certainty, and it won’t be comfortable. In fact, it will most certainly be uncomfortable. But it will bring into reality God’s kingdom, in which the first will be last and the last will be first. It is said that death and taxes are the only two things certain in this world. But Jesus answers back. The only two things certain are death and resurrection. Amen.