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WHO have you COME HERE to GLORIFY?
Jesus said to his disciples, “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.” Then he picked up a child who was running around the house and said, “Whoever welcomes a child like this welcomes me and welcomes the one who sent me.”
This is when the disciple John pipes up: but Teacher! Someone was using your name to cast out demons, and we tried to stop him because he wasn’t following us! There simply must be good order, right? We can’t have people just throwing Jesus’s name around.
Keep your servant from presumptuous sins, the psalmist pleads; let them not get dominion over me. It’s so easy to slide into that desire to control. Biblical scholar Ched Myers writes, “The way of nonviolence means being attentive to the actual dynamics of social power and privilege among family, friends, and neighbors.”[1]
Jesus is attentive. He doesn’t ignore John’s comment; he addresses it immediately.
Phil Ruge-Jones, a Lutheran scholar, notes that Jesus is still holding the little child while this whole conversation is going on. So when John tattles on a man casting out demons, Ruge-Jones suggests this translation of Jesus’s words:
“Don’t stop him, ’cause there is no one who will do a work of power by my name
and very soon after be able to pronounce misfortune on me,
’cause all who aren’t against us are for us,
’cause all who offer you a cup of water based on a name,
because you are under the anointed one, I tell you, this is the way it is,
they definitely won’t lose their reward.”[2]
Still holding the child, just to keep the focus where it belongs. This is who we’re here to serve: the most vulnerable, the ones who can’t do anything for you, the ones who seem to just be takers, the ones who don’t deserve it. We want to push those folks to the outside, but these are the very ones whom Jesus centers. We’re actually here working together, and this isn’t unimportant—this is the kin-dom of God. WHO have you COME HERE to GLORIFY?
Ched Myers puts it this way,
“Not only is Jesus willing to endorse the redemptive practice of ‘outsiders,’ but also the simplest act of hospitality (‘a cup of water’) shown to anyone ‘who bears the name of Messiah.’
John is worried about those with competing power, but Jesus is welcoming all those who do the works of mercy and justice.
John is entertaining ‘holier than thou’ delusions, but Jesus points out how his followers will often find themselves on the receiving end of compassion.
In other words, disciples have no corner on the ministry of healing and liberation, and therefore should without prejudice work alongside those whose practice is redemptive.
…This teaching…forbids the erection of exclusive and rigid social boundaries around the community of faith. Jesus seems to understand the relationship between the power of monopoly and the monopoly of power; the quickest way to undermine aspirations of social control is to keep the definitions of ‘belonging’ ultimately fluid and inclusive.”[3]
You don’t get to decide who is in or out—that’s God’s business, and guess what, you’re not God! Even if you think you can make your exclusion look righteous, God knows better. The psalmist affirms this, writing, “Who can detect one’s own offenses? Cleanse me from my secret faults. …Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my strength and my redeemer.”[4]
In the story from Numbers, about the people of God in the wilderness, Moses was so close with God that he could be honest about his exhaustion—God, these people are complaining and blaming me for their problems, and you know what? Just, if you love me at all, just let me die right here, because I have had enough of this. And there’s a whole section of Numbers that we didn’t even read where God provides the people with the meat they’ve been wanting.
And God also hears Moses’ fatigue, and God sustains Moses as a leader by bringing more leaders in: seventy elders upon whom the Spirit rested, so that they could prophesy—they could also speak for God. But no one instructs the Spirit where to go, and it turns out the Spirit landed on a couple of men who weren’t even among the seventy, who weren’t there in the tent of meeting. And Joshua runs up to tattle to Moses—stop them! And Moses says, are you kidding? No way! I wish everyone had this kind of Spirit!
WHO have you COME HERE to GLORIFY? If you’re here for yourself, you’re probably going to feel pretty uncomfortable, especially on a day like today when we’re focused on serving. We are doing God’s Work with Our Hands—that’s what the name means! There are service projects of various sorts going on today—putting together food and resources for people in need, gathering canned goods for our Little Free Food Pantry, and showing up at Tower Grove Pride to welcome people, especially LGBTQIA+ people who have been explicitly excluded from fellowship in other places of worship.
If you’re here to glorify God, this is how it’s done: by taking notice of who is pushed to the side and doing whatever you can to welcome them in, because God notices and God cares, and God through the Holy Spirit empowers us to extend that welcome and radiate that love.
We do this locally, which is important, and we also connect with churches and care for the vulnerable in other places in the world. We pray for the people who have been hurt and affected by Hurricane Helene in the past few days. We pray for people in war zones, in Sudan and Ukraine and Gaza and the Occupied Territories of Palestine.
We pray for people who were silenced long ago, like Native American children sent to boarding schools in an effort to erase their cultures and languages—the Truth and Healing Movement of the ELCA’s Indigenous Ministries and Tribal Relations unit encourages us to join in praying with others on September 30, tomorrow, in the National Day of Remembrance for Indian Boarding Schools. Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all, Jesus said, and then he took a little child—maybe one of those children sent to a boarding school, who knows?—and Jesus said whoever welcomes this child welcomes me and the one who sent me.
Who are you here to GLORIFY? If you are seeking God, seeking reconciliation and connection with God, confessing your brokenness and the brokenness of the world, you’ve come to the right place. You are part of God’s kin-dom, God’s great family of creation. That’s why our Season of Creation visual for today is canned goods, gathering what’s needed for people who are hungry, because God has given us everything we need. May our witness glorify God, and may God’s Spirit sustain us.
Amen.
Pastor Cheryl
[1] Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus, 1988, Orbis: Maryknoll, New York, page 260.
[2] Phil Ruge-Jones, “Commentary on Mark 9:38-50,” https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-26-2/commentary-on-mark-938-50-5 sourced September 28, 2024.
[3] Myers 262.
[4] Psalm 19: 12,14
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