October 17, 2021 – Proper 24 (21st Sunday after Pentecost)

In his book Jesus Among Other Gods, Ravi Zacharias relays a story that Sir Isaac Newton, the great scientist and mathematician, had a dog that he loved very much. Wherever Newton went, the dog went with him. One time he had worked for months on a theory about the nature of the universe, working late into the night by candlelight. His worktable was covered with papers, which were in turn covered with formulas and theorems and conclusions. Late one night, Newton got up from the table to leave the room and the dog jumped up and bumped the table, turning over the candle, which set Newton’s papers on fire. Newton returned to the room to find years of work gone up in flames. He put out the fire, then sat on the floor and wept. The dog nuzzled up to him and licked his face and Newton hugged his dog and said, “You will never, ever know what you have done.” 

In Genesis, the story is that when Eve took the fruit from the tree and when Adam took the fruit from Eve; things fell apart. And God looked at Adam and Eve with great sadness and said, “You will never ever know what you have done.”

The reality is that what began in Adam and Eve keeps showing up in the Bible. Over and over, God’s people play out a personal little Garden of Eden in which they discover their all too common capacity for doing things that tear God’s creation apart. And we read about how God kept on weeping and shaking God’s head and telling the people, “You have no idea what you have done.”

No matter how hard Jesus tried to explain that to follow him meant following the way of the cross, someone didn’t get it — their personal little Garden of Eden story came into being and they began to look after only themselves and their needs and interests and pleasures and desires. In today’s Gospel reading, it is the sons of Zebedee, James and John, who totally missed the message of servanthood. Instead, they sought to establish themselves in positions of power and privilege. And Jesus shook his head sadly, saying, “You have no idea what you are doing, do you?”

Many moons ago, when I was young and knew everything and had neither the time nor creativity to really mess things up in life, I didn’t worry too much about the sinfulness of humanity in general or my own badness. I’m older now (against my hopes!) and I don’t even like to think about the ways that I have been less than I meant or hoped to be. I haven’t just failed to do good things, but on occasion, I have done bad things. I knew I was doing bad when I did it, yet I did it anyway. And I don’t know why. I have no excuse other than the fact that I am human and that is what humans do sometimes. I don’t blame anyone or anything else — not my mom or my dad or my environment. It was just me and my life and an occasional fit of general sinfulness. I’m sure that I have no idea how badly I have disappointed God and harmed others. I don’t even know what I have done.

Just like Adam & Eve, James & John, and millions of others, I have a real need for a voice from outside myself who will neither condone nor condemn but will rather love me for who I am. Each day we meet that voice, that God, in Jesus, in the one who “offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to the one who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverent submission. …  he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him” (Heb 5:7-9).

I have another confession to make — if there’s a reason I might ever need anything, I have a real problem with throwing it away. I’m trying to get better and accumulate the “stuff” virtually so that I don’t pack my house with stuff, but it’s still there because “You just never know when you might need it.” Of course, my husband isn’t really keen on this, and he protests constantly that you have to be able to find “it” in order to use “it” when you need “it.” I think I know where all my “its” are. Brian will ask me about where something is, and I will say something like, “It’s in the spare room, in the blue tote, in a plastic bag inside the cardboard shoebox.” And I’m usually right. It drives Brian insane to no end.

The truth is that God is, I think, a bit like me — a bit eccentric, and maybe a bit of a hoarder. God shares my passion for saving things and my awareness of everything I had saved. God doesn’t do the expected and normal thing and condemn useless and unholy trash to hell. Instead, where others may see worthlessness, God sees something worth saving and hanging on to, something worth taking a risk for, something worth making a great effort for, something worth dying for. And God knows where all that saved stuff is (much better than I ever could!). God cares about that which God has saved. And it is God’s will that it all be saved, because God made it all, and God loves it all, no matter what it has done.

The Gospel — the Good News — is that it is because of our great need and God’s great sorrow and anguish over our great need that Christ came into the world. The words in today’s reading from Isaiah were written many years before Christ. They were written about the Suffering Servant of God. After the suffering and death of Christ, the early Christians remembered these words from the Hebrew Scriptures and realized how perfectly they described what Jesus had suffered and what God had done through Jesus, for them and for the whole world: “he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed” (Is 53:5).

The question of whether or not God loves us and cares about us has been answered once and for all by Christ upon the cross. A more important question for us today is to ask if we are being obedient to our call to take up our cross and follow. 

Since today is a day of stories, let me relate one more: The Ryman Auditorium in downtown Nashville was for a long time the home of the Grand Ole Opry. It was originally built as a church, for a famous evangelist named Sam Jones. The story is that Jones was holding a “quitting meeting,” during which people confessed their sins and swore off drinking, and smoking and cursing and running around with people they weren’t married to and other misbehaviors. The meeting had reached an emotional high point when Sam called on one ultra-righteous woman in the congregation and asked her what she was going to quit. She said, “I ain’t been doing nothing, and I’m going to quit that too.”

In response to the Gospel, God calls upon us today to “quit doing nothing.” God calls upon us to stop seeking greatness — to stop arguing about who is best and deserves the best spot — and to start seeking to serve. We are called to give ourselves for others as Jesus gave himself for us. We are called to care about the hurts and pains of others as Jesus cared about our hurts and pains. We are called to live lives of obedience to Jesus’ call to us to take up a cross and to follow him into the world with hope in our hearts, with acts of love in our hands and with words of grace and promise on our lips. How will each of us respond today to God’s call to take up our cross and follow and to “quit doing nothing”?