PEOPLE'S CHURCH OF DOVER

Mark 8:27-38                                                                             What  Is  Your  Purpose?
Sermon September 13, 2009:  People’s United Church of Christ, Dover, DE:  The Rev. Dan Griggs

            Jesus said: 

Ouch!  This is one of those passage in the Bible that makes me feel uncomfortable.  Isn’t life’s purpose something to do with taking your talents and skills and using them to make a moderate level of comfort for yourself and your family?  Isn’t life’s biggest project sustaining your own, putting back some for retirement, and then on the financial basis you’ve created you can do something to help others?  To use Jesus’ own language, don’t you have to love yourself before you can love anybody else?  So what is this that Jesus is saying:

He’s really pushing hard!  And the Gospel of Mark places these words  right after the first time Jesus told his disciples that when they get to Jerusalem he will be crucified.  Oh—that cross!  So Peter, who had just that moment confessed faith in Jesus as the Messiah now objects to Jesus’ interpretation of the Messiah’s work.  Surely the Messiah wouldn’t die—the hoped-for one was supposed to win.  But Jesus answers that Peter’s thinking was governed by Satan’s agenda, not God’s agenda.  And now he says not only to the apostles but also to “the crowds”—that is, to us as well—that

            Clearly the twelve apostles found this as difficult as we do:  that’s why Jesus “went on before them” to Jerusalem—and they followed.  Either Jesus’ words have to be lightened up somehow, or we who want to follow Jesus need to be attending to our purpose. 

            So the question is:  What is your purpose?  All this talk about “saving” my life means “losing” it   points to whatever I think my life is about.  Who am I becoming?  Who are you becoming?  How is God working on you?  What is your purpose? 

            He and I were sitting in the breezeway between the house and the garage, in chairs suspended from the ceiling.  It was a pleasant summer afternoon.  We could hear voices and cooking noises coming from the house.  As we talked, he told me what his purpose was.  He said,

That’s what he told me.  Now I like enjoyable things as much as anybody, but to have a man whose life is given totally to pleasure   be so forthright about it   took me by surprise.  I just wonder if I’m being as honest about my purpose as he was that day about his.  He really didn’t care about anybody else, and he wasn’t ashamed to say so.  Oh, he could turn on the charm any time, any place, to get what he wanted from you;  but he was always in it for himself.  He was “saving his life.” 

            “Whoever is willing to give their life, invest their life, share their life, challenge their life—that is the person who will save it.”  We can see this teaching as a call to self-denial; but we have to be careful talking about self-denial, because, after all, not many people can sustain that kind of focus.  The Apostle Paul thought he could—by remaining single, devoting himself to prayer and ministry, carrying out his apostolic mission; but the people who worked with Paul, and the people in the churches that Paul started often thought he was a pain in the neck.[1]  The one who collected Paul’s letters had to write the Book of Ephesians as an introduction:[2]  otherwise the people in the churches that had known Paul wouldn’t have read his letters again.  But Paul knew this about himself.  In his Letter to the Romans he came clean:

Well, at least Paul tried.  But he and a lot of other people as well have thought that the “church” should eat up “life.”  He thought that personal faith meant super-holiness.  And the irony is that this attitude is exactly the same as my conversation partner in the breezeway:  that is, he can run over everybody to enjoy what he wants.  One is super-holy, the other is super-selfish; and neither one really grasped the depth and beauty of what Jesus was about:

There’s something in Jesus’ words that goes to the core of who you are and what your basic principle is.[3]  What is your purpose?

            I think of a Christian’s life as a kind of journey of discovery.  Most of us were baptized as infants and grew into our own faith, and then kept growing (or not).  I was eleven years old when I confessed my faith in Jesus and received baptism, but I didn’t know what all the words meant.  I thought I did, but only over the process living half a lifetime have I come to understand what Christian discipleship is for me, Dan Griggs, living my life as a disciple of Christ.  You do your dead-level best and succeed; and then you discover that your success wasn’t success at all, it kept turning in on self.  So you begin again to listen. 

            The story of Jonah is about working hard at what he thought was right, only to discover that he had worked himself into the belly of a whale; because Jonah wasn’t listening.  He had accepted the job of a prophet, and then he had decided for himself what a prophet ought to do.  He had good reasons for deciding that a prophet ought to oppose the Ninevites:  hadn’t God given the blessing only to Abraham’s descendants?  And weren’t the Ninevites, the Assyrians, Israel’s enemy?  So Jonah refused to preach repentance to Nineveh, because it was the capital city of the Assyrians, full of pagans.  Everything about his religious training said he was right; but he wasn’t listening.  As the story goes, God sent him to those pagans, and he was a cross-purposes with what God was up to.  He didn’t really believe in the still-speaking God, and so he failed at the crucial moment. 

            What do you do when you fail?  Well, then you have to learn to live on “grace”; and you have to let God be gracious and use you wherever you end up.  Jonah ended up sitting in the desert on a hill opposite Nineveh, waiting to see if God would destroy the city.  His purpose had failed, just as Peter’s purpose failed when he tried to persuade Jesus that he was going to win and not die.  So here sits Jonah, sulking because God didn’t do what he thought he should.  The sun rose and bore down on him, and God was gracious to him where he was:  God caused a gourd plant to grow up and shade him from the heat.  The word the original text uses suggests that it was a caster-oil plant[4]—quite appropriate for what Jonah was feeling and thinking.  But it kept Jonah alive:  that’s grace. 

            The kind of self-denial we’re looking for, then, is a turning away from your self, from selfishness, even when it looks for the world like making peace, or saving the Messiah’s life, or standing on God’s side in some political conflict.  And so I don’t see this kind of “cross-bearing” as carrying the sorrow or the stress that naturally comes as we live and grow older:  when Jesus speaks of a “cross” he means the “cross” that I do not choose for myself.  Then is when your real “purpose” makes itself known, your real basic principle. 

            But most days your purpose is hard to see.  I go from day to day, do my work, try to put back something for tomorrow.  I make friends, engage in continuing education in my calling, spend time with my wife, remember when my children were still little, talk to my grandchildren on the phone, celebrate another birthday.  And what am I learning about who I really am, about goodness and truth and beauty?  What’s happening on this journey of discovery I’m on?  --that you are on?  What is your purpose?

The irony is, like Jesus’ apostles, we can’t get there.  We aren’t even sure we understand.

            But we do have this question that goes to the heart of our discipleship:  What is your purposed?  I need to get clear about my basic principle, and pay attention to what God is up to around me and with me.  As for the rest, I have to depend on God for that.  Maybe, just maybe, God is working on me and working through me anyway—like Jonah.  I do not have to be “successful” (whatever that might look like), and I don’t have to be right (God doesn’t judge on the basis of what’s in my belief system);[5] I just have to be faithful.  I just have to stick with it. 

            I believe that this is the “pearl of great price,” that came across the pearl-merchant’s counter, and he saw it for what it was, and he sold everything he had to buy it.[6]  You are a pearl merchant of living.

AMEN