Stumbing Along

It’s a little disconcerting, sitting down to write a sermon on a passage that you’ve already preached on twice, to find that neither time did you say what you’d planned to say. Of course, only preachers have that problem... Maybe only 60-something preachers have that problem.

But more generally, I suspect getting caught by surprise is something that happens to everyone... you’re sailing along, doing everything you’re supposed to be doing, and all of a sudden something that you should have anticipated pops up and causes you to rethink your whole perspective and maybe even change your plans.

Has it ever happened to you? Have you ever started a project, or a book, or a journey, and gotten completely derailed by something you could have dealt in advance if you’d been paying attention and covered all your bases?

I suspect the disciples were more than a little taken aback when Jesus sat them down that day in Capernaum, picked up a child, and said, “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all,” and then “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.” [v. 35, 37]

But of course they shouldn’t have been surprised, they should have figured it out by now. They should have been able to put the pieces together. After all, Jesus had already demonstrated that he wasn’t impressed by power or wealth. Jesus had already told them to deny themselves and take up their crosses. But they were still focused on their own agendas, they were still running along the same track they had been on ever since Andrew had gone tearing off to tell his brother Peter that they had found the Messiah.

But all the “shoulds” in the world couldn’t override the expectations they had about the coming Messiah. Those expectations were practically hard-wired into their brains. By this time those prophecies were part of the Jewish DNA. So if Jesus was going to be a king, they as his closest associates were of course going to be princes. Or at least some sort of privileged elite. That was the way things worked. Yeah, Jesus had told them the road to the palace was going to be a little rocky, but that was only to be expected, and besides, they were from good sturdy stock and could handle a few inconveniences.

In the meantime, what was wrong with fantasizing a little about the forthcoming rewards? It was a harmless enough way of easing the hardships of the journey, it wasn’t as if they meant had any ambitions apart from Jesus, hadn’t they proved their loyalty? They weren’t really fighting over who was the greatest, they were just speculating about what their roles would be. There’d surely be enough to go around.

But, of course, they knew Jesus didn’t like them talking like that; that was why they were embarrassed when he called them on it.

I was embarrassed, too, when I realized that I had already preached on the passage, and wasted a great deal of time deciding whether or not to just rework what I’d already said or try to think of something new, or what. It was like all of a sudden being confronted with three directions to choose from, and no clue of which one to take.

The first sermon was on humility, and service to the unimportant, from the first part of the passage. The second sermon was on avoiding sin by doing radical surgery on the soft spots in your life. Today’s sermon, the third one, was originally going to be on getting humility right. That is, developing real humility rather than just acquiring a set of habits that make you look good or feel spiritual but actually don’t get at the root issues.

But then I started wrestling with the angles, looking deeper, challenging myself to review my thinking to see why I was coming at the text from each different perspective, and found myself caught by the notion of how much of a hold pre-conceived ideas have on us.

Remember that it was the disciples’ basic assumptions about what the Messiah was supposed to do and be that kept getting them into trouble with Jesus. And those two statements, about service and children, were his direct response to those faulty assumptions. And, of course, we almost always look at the passage about the children solely in terms of how unimportant they were, and how the disciples needed to learn to give up their self-importance in order to be true followers of Jesus. But the I started thinking about the passage in Luke about needing to welcome the kingdom of God as a child...

And then it struck me that children are illustrative of something besides humility and insignificance...Children don’t have pre-conceived notions of how things are supposed to be.