The Big Picture



Proper 24B


God of grace, forgive the blindness of our spirits and help us to see the way you are leading us.  Amen.

It is always amazing to me how prone we can be to focusing ourselves on mundane, minute details, when we’re faced with real problems.  I catch myself doing that in my own life all the time.  My primary response to stress is usually to focus in on details.  If it feels like the world is falling apart around me, I don’t look to hold up and rebuild the world – instead I focus on gathering my notes and my research on the subject and making sure my files are in order and building a schedule or a plan.  The more stressed I become, the more mired in details I become.  And the reality beneath it is pretty easy to unpack.  When I feel out of control, I look for something I can control.

There are certainly worse ways of dealing with stress, but if I’m not careful, it can become a way of sort of distracting myself from the bigger issues – disassociating myself from where my focus might be more productive.

As we read our discreet passages of scripture from week to week, one of the challenges we sometimes have is seeing these snippets of stories in the context of the wider story.  It’s a little easier during some of the bigger seasons of the year – Advent, Christmas, Lent, Easter – those seasons focus us on some aspect of the bigger story.  But this time of year – when we’re focused more on the teachings of Jesus than we are on the major life cycle, defining moments of Jesus – this time of year it can be tempting to see each week as a stand-alone event.

This week, the disciples are walking along together on a road.  James and John pull Jesus aside and try to manipulate their positions in the new world order Jesus is building.  Of course, Jesus tries to make them see that their focus is misplaced.  There are bigger issues at hand than who gets the glory and who is most favored.  But then the other disciples get wind of what’s going on, and they get angry.  Why should James and John get all the glory?  Why should they be favored above anyone else?

Before long, the community was starting to unravel, and all over some details that didn’t even really matter in the larger scheme of things.  Jesus has to try to bring them back into focus.  It’s not about who is stronger or better or more beloved.  In fact, the sort of orders and stratifications that you imagine don’t even make sense in this world we’re building.  What you thought was the epitome of the good, now doesn’t mean anything.  And what you thought was the epitome of failure, may actually set us on the pathway to the larger goal.  To follow Christ, we have to reorient ourselves to a world that is foreign to us – at least with the tools we have to understand it at this point.

But this unraveling doesn’t happen in a vacuum.  Throughout the snippets of the story that we’ve been reading through these past few weeks, the tension in the community of Jesus has been building.  We’re nearing the end of the tenth chapter of this gospel, but we’ve read nearly the whole thing, and frankly, a good bit of it has been pretty uncomfortable.

It started with the teaching on divorce.  And while the teaching itself may be sort of uncomfortable for us, the discomfort for the people following Jesus really had more to do with the way the lesson came about.  The religious leaders raised the question.  And it wasn’t because they wanted to learn.  It was because they were looking for a way to trap Jesus and to get him in trouble.

From there, the disciples did what they thought they should be doing and they tried to keep the unimportant people from getting in Jesus’ way.  They assumed that children would have no value, and there was important work to be done, so they held them back.  But Jesus rebuked them.  He said, “Let the little children come to me.”  And suddenly their own understanding and position as leaders of this growing community was called into question.

Then, as we read about last week, Jesus dropped the bomb on the people that simply following the rules of the faith wasn’t enough for this movement.  Sure, it was a good place to start, but if you’re already doing that, he told them that it was time to take the next step.  He said, “You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor… then come, follow me.”

Peter chimes in, thinking now he’s golden.  We’ve already done that, he says.  We’ve already left everything behind, and now we’re here at your side.  We’re following where you lead.  Surely, we are doing enough – surely we have pleased you.  Then Jesus says that they can’t begin to fathom the depth of upset and change that’s coming.  But also, that they can’t begin to fathom the good that will grow out of it.  Even when they’re on the right track, they’re far from any real understanding of what they’re in for.

The lectionary planners then had us skip over a few verses before what we read today, but it’s a song you all know.  Jesus once again foretells his death and resurrection.  He reminds them that they are pressing on toward Jerusalem, and when they get there, it’s going to be rough.  The religious leaders will do everything they can to tear us down.  And the only way through this path is through violence and destruction.  Our movement, at least as we’ve built it, will die.  And through that death, God will make a new way.

So, by the time we get to James and John, and eventually to all the other distracted disciples that we read about today, they’ve been cooking a good long while.  They’re ready to boil over.  And that’s basically what happened.  They get mired in their petty arguments and they miss the whole point of everything Jesus has been saying this whole time.  James and John get a bad rap as the instigators of this discord, but the whole community had a hand in it.  They all took the bait and showed their own cards in the process.  Their anger at the brothers’ foolish request revealed that they were actually no better.

And I have to imagine that at least some of this is the result of the tension that had been building and the hard lessons being taught that they must not have wanted to hear.

This is one of those times when the saints of the faith aren’t lifted up as ideals to which we all should aspire.  Instead, they show themselves to be no better than we often are.  They show themselves to be flawed, self-interested humans.  They show themselves to be liable to the same kinds of pettiness and self-destruction that we sometimes see in ourselves when we’re confronted with difficult situations.

The fact is this is a difficult season in the life of the church.  Not just this congregation, but the church throughout the world.  We survived a pandemic, but we didn’t make it through unscathed.  We’re surviving political polarization, but it seems to be growing exponentially each day to heights we never would have thought possible just days before.  We are living in profound uncertainty, and if we’re not careful, we could find ourselves relying on our own coping skills and strategies, and missing the bigger picture that badly needs our attention.  If we’re not careful, we, too, could become mired in minutiae.  We, too, could miss the point.  We, too, could squander the gifts of Christ who is still graciously teaching us and calling us into depth and truth.

And that’s the point of reading these stories and studying these lessons again and again, year after year.  We are separated from them by centuries – millennia, even.  And even though so much of our day to day lives is so different from theirs, the human condition is still largely the same.  We still long to make meaning out of our experiences.  We still need the teachings of the faith to hold us up in uncertainty.  We still need the grace of God to help us get over ourselves – to help us reach new heights.  We still need the teachings of Christ to help us start to grasp the nearness of God, and to remind us that we are not alone on this journey.

We can still get lost in the weeds.  It might even be temporarily comforting for us to do it.  But God is calling us higher.  God is calling us to the vista – the big picture.  And Christ is showing us the way.  Christ is still showing us the way.  This community, like all communities, won’t always get it right.  But through Christ, we will get it.  With faith and perseverance, and with grace that we can’t earn, but that God always still provides, we will get it in time.  Amen.

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