Sunday, September 23, 2018

Pentecost 18, Year B (2018)


Proper 20 :: Jeremiah 11: 18–20; Psalm 1; James 3: 13 – 4: 3, 7–8a; 9: 30–37
This is the homily given at St. John’s, Huntingdon, Pennsylvania by Fr. Gene Tucker on Sunday, September 23, 2018.
 “HOW TO BECOME A NOBODY”
(Homily text:  Mark 9: 30-37)
This morning’s Gospel reading sets before us a stark truth. It is a lesson in “How to become a nobody”. For that is the lesson Jesus is trying to get His disciples to understand as they made their way back to Capernaum.
Our Lord is pointing toward the mysterious process by which a person enters the kingdom of God. The process can be expressed in a number of different ways, but, in its most basic form, it is this:
Each one of us must empty ourselves in order to enter the kingdom.
The Lord expresses this truth in a number of different ways. For example, He said:
“If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.” (Mark 8:34b) [1]
“Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” (Matthew 10: 39b)
“Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. (John 12: 24: Jesus is speaking of His own death.)
But the Lord isn’t asking us to do anything that He, Himself, hasn’t already done. The Lord set aside every right and position He possessed from before the foundation of the world in order to become fully human. Compared to the glory He possessed in heaven before being born of the Virgin Mary, He became a “nobody” when He took up our human condition. This truth is expressed in St. Paul’s words, found in his letter to the Philippians: 
“Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself by taking up the form of a servant.” (Philippians 2: 5–7a) (Italics mine)
With this background in mind, let’s return to our text from Mark.
A wonderful scene unfolds before the disciples as Jesus takes a child into His arms, saying, “Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me, and whoever receives me, receives not me but the one who sent me.” (Verse 37)
This incident has been captured in a familiar painting.
Beyond the tenderness of the action, a deeper truth is to be found, and the lesson Jesus is conveying has to do with the culture of the society in that day and time: Children were nobodies back then.
Such a regard for children might seem odd to us today. In that culture, children were a person’s future. In that sense, their attitudes match ours pretty much. But a child was a nobody until that child reached the age in which they could become a full inheritor of God’s covenant. That happened at about the age of thirteen or so, in a rite known as Bar Mitzvah.
Jesus sets before His disciples an object lesson:  If you want to become my disciple, if you want to be a part of God’s kingdom, then you will have to become a nobody. You’ll have to empty yourself completely.
The stark disconnect between the disciples’ conversation along the road, in which they argued among themselves as to who was destined to be the greatest, and Jesus teaching about the nature of discipleship, couldn’t be greater.
In Baptism, we undergo the process of becoming a “nobody”. We enter the waters of Baptism, dying to our selves in the process by imitating the Lord’s death. (See Romans 6: 3 – 9 for St. Paul’s wonderful explanation of this process.)
But then, we are raised to a new life, and we are counted as God’s children. We become a “somebody”, a somebody special and unique in God’s sight, as we emerge from the waters of Baptism.
The process of self-emptying, of becoming a “nobody”, is repeated all throughout our walk with the Lord. It is a necessary part of the reason for confessing our sins, acknowledging that we are unworthy, though the things we have done that fall short of God’s holiness, and through the things that we have failed to do, that we are completely helpless to help ourselves out of our spiritual predicament. The process of self-emptying comes whenever we say the words, “Not my will, but yours, be done”, as the Lord said in the Garden of Gethsemane before He suffered and died for us. The process of self-emptying happens whenever we follow God’s call to do something, something that is for His benefit and for the benefit of others, even though God’s call may entail sacrifice and hardship for us.
Becoming a “nobody” is, strangely and oddly enough, the way – the only way – to become a “somebody” in God’s sight.
AMEN.


[1]   We heard this text in last Sunday’s Gospel.