Sermon from July 15, 2001
It has been several weeks since we read Mark together, and it has been several months since we reviewed the general flow of Mark's story about Jesus. In order not to lose the forest for the trees, let's take a minute and remember how Mark has constructed His Gospel.

In chapters one through four Mark establishes the authority of Jesus. He does this by means of a series of episodes that record deeds and words of Jesus that work together to picture a man of immense authority over other men, over disease, over the demonic and over inanimate nature. He claims authority to forgive sins and calls Himself Lord of the Sabbath.

His authority does not go unchallenged, and in the end powerful people reject His authority by putting a most uncongenial spin on His miracles, which they do not deny. But on the whole His deeds and words persuade great crowds of people that He is a man of authority to be reckoned with. He claims that what He does and says gives proof that the kingdom of God has put in an appearance in the life of Israel.

His intimate circle of twelve men put into words the question that certainly arose in people's minds, as they experienced Jesus' authority. Huddled in their boat in shock and relief, they looked at Jesus and asked, "Who is this?"

Chapters 5-8 give the first installment of Mark's answer. Jesus declares Himself to be and public opinion agrees that He is a prophet in the mold of the great prophets of Israel. He does the deeds of a prophet, speaks to Israel like a prophet, and faces the dangers of a prophet. The feeding of the 5000 suggests that He is more than a prophet, although no one as yet can put a finger on what that is.

As chapters five through eight unfold, the twelve disciples grow in importance. They are quite faithful to Jesus, although they remain uniformly dull as to the meaning of His authority. Toward the end of chapter eight Jesus asks them point blank, "But who do you say that I am?" Peter got it right when he said, "You are the Messiah."

In Mark 8:31 Jesus opens the third section of Mark in an unexpected, disheartening way. He agrees that He is the Messiah and then tells that He is destined to be rejected by Jewish religious authorities, to suffer and die and to be raised from the dead. Let's first put these verses in their proper context. In Mark 8:31-10:53 Mark develops his theme of a suffering Messiah by repeating a threefold pattern three times in these two chapters. Here is the pattern.

Jesus' prediction of His suffering and death is always the first part of the pattern. The second part is always some inappropriate, uncomprehending response on the part of His disciples. The third part of the pattern is always Jesus' reply to the disciples' response in which He challenges, encourages, and teaches them what it means to be followers of a suffering Messiah. Then, a story or series of episodes follows, which reinforces what the disciples need to learn.

The key to the third part of the pattern comes in Mark 8:35. Jesus laid down there the radical principle of what it means to be followers of a suffering Messiah. "Whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it." In that statement He completely inverts the values of ordinary life. In chapters eight and nine, as we have seen, Jesus applies that inversion of values to specific areas of human experience.

Conventional ways of thinking hit a wall when Jesus said He was a Messiah, who was doomed to die. In His replies to the disciples' inappropriate, uncomprehending responses to that prediction Jesus says in effect, "Now that I have your attention, let me remake your mind by showing you how the kingdom of God really works." Every inversion of values He makes offers a bracing alternative to the frame of mind we typically have in ordinary life. The episodes we read today and next Sunday speak to the attitudes that determine whether we will live by His words in some meaningful way.

The sanctity of the Church depends on its capacity to receive and live by the words of Jesus that we hear in Mark 8-10. Now, when we hear these words of Jesus, our first response may very well be, "I can't do that." His words give us a vision of human life that is worthy of persons who are made in the image of God. At the same time they set the bar so high that doing nothing about them will seem the only realistic thing to do; but if we do nothing about them, the sanctity of the Church will be diminished.

Maybe you cannot swim the English Channel, but you can swim to the other side of the pool. So, a better way to respond to Jesus' words is to ask ourselves, "How can I live by these words in some meaningful way?" Doing that depends on what we do with what we hear today and next Sunday.

The setting for these words gives no hint of their pivotal power. Verse 13: People were bringing little children to Jesus to have him touch them. Pastors and politicians alike like to hold babies but for dramatically different reasons. For politicians babies hold a key to a citizen's vote – a perfectly honorable motive. For pastors babies serve as icons of the kingdom of God – as we shall see. But we pastors have to learn that. Left to our natural instincts, we understand only too well the reaction of the disciples.

People were bringing little children to Jesus to have him touch them, but the disciples rebuked them. Back in Mark 9:37 the disciples had already seen Jesus take a child in His arms and say to them, "Whoever welcomes one of these little children in my name welcomes me; and whoever welcomes me does not welcome me but the one who sent me."

He was directing His disciples to their true greatness by teaching them to give priority to the powerless, and who is more powerless than a child? Their greatness would show itself, He said, if they interrupted their important affairs in order to welcome one of these little children and give that one child their undivided attention.

Furthermore, Jesus was making it clear that giving priority to the powerless, gives priority not only to the powerless but also to Christ; and whoever gives priority to Him gives priority to "the one who sent me."

The disciples didn't get it. We need not be smug about ourselves, because what Christ was trying to teach them and us is not easy to get. Their failure to get it did seem to try His patience. Verse 14: When Jesus saw this, he was indignant. It has been a while since I said anything about Jesus' emotions, so let me seize the moment to remind you something. Mark, more than any other Gospel, gives us insight into Jesus' inner life. He reports compassion, anger, fatigue, frustration, sadness and impatience. Mark's portrait of Jesus reveals a most human Savior.

Then, out of the ordinariness of human emotion comes another of His statements that wakens the depths of human experience. He said to them, "Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these." It is so unreasonable that it startles listeners into awareness. His next statement, no doubt meant to clarify, seems only to darken counsel.

"I tell you the truth, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it." And to dramatize the point he stopped what He was doing, took the children in his arms, put his hands on them and blessed them.

Jesus' disciples, like other Jews in the first century, knew the word kingdom had to do with power and governing – the power, they would say, to throw off Roman rule and become self-governing under God. They believed the moment had arrived when the promise of the prophets had come to pass. They believed Jesus was the Man who would bring it to pass. Only if we read the gospels against this background of revolutionary fervor and national hope can the story of Jesus of Nazareth have its full impact on us.

They got one thing right. When scripture talks about the kingdom of God, it is talking about a massive power struggle. The issue of that power struggle is this: "Whose authority will hold sway over human life?" So, how are they to make any sense of Jesus when He says, "Anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it"?

It is easy to think that He is just exaggerating to make a point. We need not doubt that He uses exaggerated language, but in this case He is summoning us to a most literal childlike quality. The minds of children, we like to say, are little sponges. Children are always listening, watching, always learning. They have a whole world to discover, and without a critical spirit and with an opennes to reality in whatever form it presents itself to them they set about to discover it and make it their own.

"You," says Jesus, " are like that. You have a new world to discover – the kingdom of God. Open your ears, open your eyes, don't take things for granted. Don't be a fault-finder. Don't be a know-it-all. I am asking you to start over, to rediscover, like a child, the world as God intended it. I want you to be part of the restoration of all things."

Jesus means the same things as the Apostle Paul, when he wrote, Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is – his good, pleasing and perfect will (Rom. 12:2). Do you remember Ephesians 4:23-24? You were taught ... to be made new in the attitude of your minds; and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness.

Receiving the kingdom of God like a little child means renewing your mind so that you can rediscover the world as God intended it. That is what it means to enter the kingdom of God. The inversions of value that dot the landscape of Mark 8-10 have the power to renew our minds, if we allow them.

We must allow them. The old ways of thinking will only perpetuate the world as we have known it. If we want to participate in the world to come, we must begin now to learn ways of thinking that will shape human existence, when God's love and authority extend their sway over all things.

There is something in our habits that makes it difficult for us to receive and be changed by the inversions of value that dot the landscape of Mark 8-10. We, like the disciples, care about God and the kingdom of God, but we tend to domesticate God. For example, one of the destestable things about theology is that we talk about theological issues as if talking about them were a hobby, like building model airplanes or collecting stamps. We talk as if we were masters of these mysteries. I sometimes think we should talk about them only in whispers and in dark rooms, lest the secret of the universe fall into the wrong hands. We are chummy with realities that do not invite that kind of familiarity.

Churches, like ours, tend to take all the mystery out of spirituality. Look around you. What could be more ordinary than the faces you see and the conversations you take part in? The pastor may say that in this very room for a few shining moments heaven and earth intersect with unpredictable results, but our ordinariness threatens to suck all meaning out of such words.

"Earth's cramm'd with heaven,
and every common bush afire with God;
but only those who see take off their shoes.
The rest sit round and pluck blackberries."

We must talk about theology. We have to meet together. The domestication of the mysteries takes place precisely because we can only see the ordinariness of it all; we can only talk as if it were all nothing more than a religious hobby. The statements of Christ startle the lethargy of the ordinary, like a sudden clap of thunder in the dead of night. They throw cold water on the sentimentality or the boredom of the familiar.

Lose your life if you want to save it. Be last if you want to be first. Pluck out your eye if it causes you to sin. Be like a baby if you want to rule the world. People heard those words and were wondering how they were going to rid Israel of the Romans. They did not quite see how Jesus' inversions of value were going to accomplish that. People still hear those words and wonder how they will cure our personal and social ills. Some people hear those words and waken to a wonder they had missed only moments before.

What if we became a congregation of people whose minds were being renewed like that? We would proceed at different paces from each other. We would all experience failure, and so what? Amid our failures would grow successes at receiving the kingdom of God like a little child. We would live out in meaningful ways what it means to lose your life if you want to save it; to be last if you want to be first; to pluck out your eye if it causes you to sin; to be like a baby if you want to be part of the kingdom of God.

The great question here, as always in the kingdom of God, is: How much do we want it? "Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for it," said Jesus. The question of our desire for the kingdom of God and eternal life will occupy our attention next Sunday. In the meantime we must not allow our fears to turn us aside from pursuing with all our hearts what it means to be followers of a suffering Messiah.

As we follow Him, our Maker will be gently, imperceptibly bending us just enough so that we can sustain eternal life within our community and within our souls. We will begin to come right at last. I ask again: What if we became a congregation of people whose minds were being renewed like that? Amid the seductions of unparalleled liberty and unprincipled pleasure the calling of the Church is "to embody an alternative order that stands as a sign of God's redemptive purpose in the world," (Hays, 196). So much of the work has already begun in us. As God continues His work in us, let us work with Him in unity of spirit and purpose.