Preached on the Twenty-Second Sunday after Pentecost (Year B), October 20, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Martin Pommerenke.
Job 38:1-7
Psalm 104:1-9, 25, 37b
Hebrews 5:1-10
Mark 10:35-45
When the Ten Heard This They Began to be Angry, by KPB Stevens
One way to render the answer Jesus gives to James’ and Johns’ sophomoric desire for ranking in today’s Gospel is as Eugene Peterson transliterates it. In his version of the Bible, The Message, Jesus replies, “You have no idea what you’re asking... Are you capable of being baptized in the baptism I’m about to be plunged into?”
What a question for us today.
I’m a person that loves being beside and in water. The chaos and beauty of the tumbling waves speak to my soul. I love the image here of plunging.
What if we translate Jesus’ question like this: Are you powerful enough to be plunged into the plunging of my own doing that I will be plunged into? It’s a question for them and for us about whether they really know what’s coming and how they will respond.
When I think of this question, I remember back to June of 2020. I was standing on South Beach in Point Roberts. There on that early spring day in the warmth of the sun glittering on the water, I looked across the sea to the San Juans and beyond.
It was 2020, and I had come to the water to ask what had become of me and of the world.
The three months of what felt like unfathomably long pandemic isolation, necessary as they were for the health of everyone, had bent even the strongest spines. Mine too. I think the epidemic of loneliness that plagues our society became far worse for the very fortune ones able to continue working - and working from home at that.
In June of 2020, when the isolation orders had lifted, I was changed. We all were, and yet there was still a sense of confusion and unknown. We were on the edge of a new world. We knew we’d be plunged into something.
Standing there looking out - finally, after months stuck in Renton, I was on the shores of my home village. I wondered what would would happen with me, my seminary studies, my call to the priesthood, even my own long-term relationship. Had I fled back to my gorgeous place just to watch life and everything fall apart?
Standing at the edge of the sea became for me a lived metaphor for looking out with melancholy across the abyss of crisis.
Yes, I had come to the water because I’d already been plunged into a plunging that was somewhere between my own doing and someone else’s. I was looking to find identity amidst chaos. So I had come home, I had come to the sea, I had come to the water.
I had come to the water to ask, What has become of me? What would become of me? Of us? Of it all?
In their own way, James and John in our story today are facing their own existential crisis. They too, had come to the water - had come to crisis, for this is what the water is: roiling, fearful, hope. I think it no accident that Jesus speaks of baptism and plunging.
We might dwell awhile on the question James and John asked: let each of us sit, one on the right hand and on the left in your glory. Behind their request of Jesus they’re asking, what will become of us?
They’re so like us now, aren’t they? These hot-headed brothers - Jesus calls them “Sons of Thunder.” In crisis, they’re asking which one of us rivals will sit sit on the right - the dextrous, grabby side that gets stuff- and which one one on the left - the aristocratic side that gets to have choices.
Mark’s Gospel is all about power and authority. In their ask, James and John are exercising a kind of interpretive power that comes from framing a question. They’re asking Jesus not just to rank them ahead of the other disciples, even ahead of Peter, but to decide between them as brothers.
They’re trying to get ahead so they’re ready for what’s coming. Because Jesus had just reminded them again that the end is coming. For the third time, he told them plainly that he is going up to Jerusalem to be humiliated and killed.
Can we cut them some slack? They were facing a time of serious unknown, just like we were in June of 2020. A vague sense of worry and hopefulness all mixed together. Maybe in denial, certainly in anxiety, they asked Jesus about their ranking try to get ahead of what was coming, to get a handle on things.
Jesus doesn’t take the bait. He never does. Instead, he has them face their identity crisis squarely: who do you think you are, desiring this plunging of mine?
Have they forgotten? Jesus has just said he’s going to die. Do you really want a piece of this action? A slice of what I’m choosing? Jesus asks.
Are you ready to take the plunge?
When we come to the water, when we are in crisis, on the brim of chaos and hope, we ask ourselves if we are ready to be immersed into life’s wild, restless sea, as a hymn goes. We bravely wonder what will happen if it all falls apart. Jesus, give us our identity, tell us who we might be. This is the longing behind their desire, and ours, to be ranked.
We, like those brothers, think in our anxiety that when we know the ranking, when we do the ranking, we’ll have a better handle on what’s coming. Before we will be plunged into the plunging.
When Jesus asks them if they will join him, in being plunged into the deep end they say, “We are able. We have the power.” But what kind of power?
Our culture is a juridicial one that wants to rank each other amongst the good and bad. We all want this. To know our place in the pecking order. The tough times are when the clever ones climb the most.
Some of our feelings today are not unlike what I imagine James and John felt. Election Day is coming. For many of us, it’s a hazy time of dread. The rhetoric has gotten more hateful. We’re anxious, even fearful. And like James and John, we’re zealous about it all.
This week, Bishop Phil echoed what Father Stephen has already urged us to do - to vote - to participate in this process. This ranking, this choosing, is a necessary thing in the mess and scariness we’re biting our nails about.
Among those to be ranked are some who want us to go back to a time of greatness. Others would have us question who those times were great for. It’s not a partisan question to ask: what kind of greatness are we ranking? Will we choose to rank with the greatness in mind that is Jesus’ way?
Now, some of us are children of rage, like those brothers, those “sons of thunder.” Righteously angry, or just plain angry, many of us when facing crisis say the same thing. We have the power. For those on the margins, this can be a rightful claiming, a self-empowerment that demands what has been denied them.
For those of us like me who are traditionally-abled, cisgender white men, the claim “we have the power” is as true as it is dangerous.
So - Jesus warns us that those who want to be first will become slaves of everything. We who have the power become trapped in a self-created web of subjugation. When we dare to crave power, we manipulate and injure all the living to maintain it.
The way of Jesus, though, is that of servanthood. We have an icon of this in the Church: deacons. Deacons show us that making our own selves - and America - great again is about being humble servants.
Servanthood isn’t about being subservient. Deacons kick tail and take names, reminding us that stewardship is the only way to greatness. A stewardship that surrenders to the plunging, surrendering to God in it all.
Servants, deacons, show us by their lives that to really be Jesus followers, we have to give it all up to God, because all of it was made by God, belongs to God, and returns to God.
Is this time in your life like mine in June of 2020? Are you, are we, at the edge, in the sun, looking out at the abyss, into crisis? Like James and John, I wonder, and maybe you wonder, what has become of me, what has become of us, even as we have no idea what is coming.
Like them, we have a song we sing at water’s edge. A song many of us who grew up evangelical know well. It was written by Marsha Stevens of BALM - Born Again Lesbian Music. When we’ve come to the water, when don’t know who we are, we may feel abandoned, and unknown, so we sing to Jesus:
You said you’d come and share all my sorrows,
You said you’d be there for all my tomorrows.
But I’ve come so close to sending you away.
But our Savior says to us:
Come to the water, stand by my side
I know you are weary, you won’t be denied
I felt every teardrop, when in darkness you cried.
And I strove to remind you that for those tears I died.
Have you, like me, come to the water? Thirsty and longing and wistful, because we are not the same people that we were, because we wonder what has become of us after we’ve gone through it all?
Standing at the sea, looking out at the beautiful terror, the abyss, maybe we realize we have come to the the river. The Jordan river.
So we renew our baptismal vows, even amidst anxiety: we will be the church, resist evil, proclaim the Good News, love our neighbor, strive for justice and peace, respect the dignity of all the living.
Yes, we have come to the water at this time and this moment. Do we have the power - Jesus power - to be plunged into the plunging done by and to ourselves?
We who follow Christ know that we have already been baptized into water that is dangerous, but water we can be saved from - not by our own faithfulness, but by the faithfulness of Jesus. This is an alien power - for the power is not ours, but Christ’s.
Christ says to us today that true power at the edge of the abyss doesn’t come from where we think. It doesn’t come from tyrants, but from the one who made himself the least, whose death and resurrection we have been plunged into. We have come to the water, and with Christ at our side, the vista of crisis before is as lovely as it is broken and unknown. Christ gives us his power to be servants, to be deacons.
Let the water of the abyss, the vista of the unknown, the roiling waves of melancholy crisis remind us of our baptism. We’ve already been plunged into what saves us. Plunged into this water, we have given up being the first, we have become great, we have the power.