Proper 20 -- Proverbs 31: 10 - 31; Psalm 1; James
3: 13 – 4: 8; Mark
9: 30 - 37
A homily by Fr. Gene Tucker, given at Trinity Church, Mt. Vernon, Illinois on Sunday, September 23, 2012.
“TEARING
US DOWN TO BUILD US OVER AGAIN”
(Homily text:
Mark 9: 30 - 37)
(Here’s a song we used to sing, from
my days in the United States Army Chorus, Washington, D. C.)
“I wouldn’t give a bean,
to be a fancy-pants Marine,
I’d rather be a Dogface
Soldier, like I am.
I wouldn’t trade my old
O. D.s. for all the Navy’s dungarees,
For I’m the walkin’
pride of Uncle Sam.
On all the posters that
I read, it says, “The Army Builds Men”,
So they’re tearing me
down to build me over again….”
“On all the posters that I read, it
says “The Army Builds Men”, so they’re tearing me down to build me over
again….”
In the Bible that I read, it says
the Lord builds Christian men and women (and boys and girls), so He’s tearing
us down to build us over again.
Now – all humor aside – you may be
wondering what connection the last phrase of this old Army song has to today’s
gospel, from Mark, chapter nine.
Allow me to make the
connection: The song talks about – in
the phrase I’ve focused on – the process of being torn down to nothing, so as
to be remade.
· In the Army (or any military service),
one goes through some sort of initial training, be it Basic Training, or
perhaps a service academy (like West Point, e.g.) or perhaps Officer Candidate
School (known as “OCS”). Essentially, in
all these things, a person goes down to practically nothing, to being a “nobody”
in comparison to the way they were in civilian life. This process of taking away aspects of a
person’s previous identity is necessary in order to install a new identity and
a new way of being as a member of a military force.
· In today’s gospel, Jesus says to His
disciples, “If anyone would be first, he must be last of all and servant of
all.” To underscore the concept of
allowing oneself to become nothing, Jesus takes a child in His arms and says,
“Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me, and whoever receives
me, receives not me by him who sent me.”
To understand what Jesus is saying, we need to return to the culture of
the first century in Judaism…there, a child was a “nobody”. Oh, yes, children were important, for they
were a guarantee of the future, but in the estimation of the culture of Jesus’
day, they had no status at all. That’s
the point that Jesus is trying to make:
To be a disciple, one must allow oneself to become nothing, to be the
last, to be of no account.
This is not the first time Jesus has
made this point about emptying oneself, about taking the last place, about
becoming a “nobody”….we heard Him make it last week, when He made His first passion prediction (a
prediction of His suffering and death). There, he told His disciples (in Mark
8: 27 – 38) that “Whoever would follow me, let him deny himself and take up his
cross and follow me.”
Here we encounter a spiritual
truth: In order to allow God to come
into our lives, we must be willing to let go of everything, to empty ourselves.
That is the precise point of
baptism: By entering the waters of
baptism, we allow ourselves to undergo a sort of death, a burial in the waters
of the font. Here we rely on St. Paul’s
description of baptism, for in Romans chapter six he says that we are “buried
with Christ in a death like his.” As we
enter the waters of baptism, we die to ourselves, we die to our old way of
life.
And then we are raised to a new
life, in a resurrection like Christ’s (here again, St. Paul’s vision as we read
it in Romans chapter six is in view). So
the process begins with a self-emptying, a self-denial, a death. Only then can a new identity, a new life
begin.
But it would be easy to say to
ourselves, “OK, I’m baptized….I did that once, on whatever date/time/place….So
now, there’s no need to repeat that self-emptying process….it’s done.”
But the spiritual truth is that we
stand in need of a continual self-emptying, self-denial.
Why?
The reason is that the forces of
evil that we have said we would renounce at the time of our baptisms don’t give
up on trying to separate us from God’s love and God’s fellowship so
easily. These spiritual forces will try
anything and everything to come between us and God. They will appeal to our sense of pride, our
sense of thinking that we can succeed all on our own.
Whenever we think that we can make
it spiritually on our own power and by our own wisdom and insights, the ugly
head of the Pelagian heresy raises its head…Recall from my September
newsletter’s “Rector’s Rambles” column the description of Pelagianism: It was a belief that we can save ourselves
all on our own, without a need for God’s grace and power to bring it about.
Pelagian beliefs are appealing, aren’t
they?
After all, we’re intelligent,
sincere people, aren’t we? We try to do
the right thing, we try to live good and godly lives, don’t we?
If those things are true, we might
ask ourselves, ‘Then what’s the problem?”
The problem is that we human beings
are so easily deceived. We can be
deceived into thinking that what we think, do or say is just fine. But we forget that our ability to see
ourselves as God sees us is clouded…..our vision is imperfect. We have spiritual cataracts which block our
sight. We cannot see as God sees us.
So, we must rely on God’s vision of
us, God’s view of our level of righteousness, God’s measuring stick of holiness. In order to do so, we must allow ourselves to
undergo the painful process of self-denial, self-emptying. Only then can the Holy Spirit enlighten and
empower us to see ourselves as God sees us.
May we allow God to “Tear us down,
so that He can build us all over again.”
AMEN.
