Proper 24

Mark 10:35–45 (NIV84)

35 Then James and John, the sons of Zebedee, came to him. “Teacher,” they said, “we want you to do for us whatever we ask.” 36 “What do you want me to do for you?” he asked. 37 They replied, “Let one of us sit at your right and the other at your left in your glory.” 38 “You don’t know what you are asking,” Jesus said. “Can you drink the cup I drink or be baptized with the baptism I am baptized with?” 39 “We can,” they answered. Jesus said to them, “You will drink the cup I drink and be baptized with the baptism I am baptized with, 40 but to sit at my right or left is not for me to grant. These places belong to those for whom they have been prepared.” 41 When the ten heard about this, they became indignant with James and John. 42 Jesus called them together and said, “You know that those who are regarded as rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. 43 Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, 44 and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all. 45 For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

There’s a theme to explore in this passage about the true nature of greatness.

You could probably write that sermon yourselves.

James and John try to get in early and make a request for positions of privilege in the Jesus administration

In Matthew’s version it’s their mom that asks Jesus, I’m not sure which is worse

Either way, it causes infighting amongst the disciples, maybe because they want positions of privilege too

So Jesus, being Jesus, uses it as a teachable moment and explains that in the kingdom greatness is flipped from how its understood in the world.

The great aren’t those who have claimed power to Lord over others

The great are those who serve

The head gives himself for the body, the way up is down, and the last shall be first

We could spend an hour looking at the reality of our world obsessed with gaining power to Lord over others

But there’s something else here that I want us to meditate on.

It’s the question Jesus poses in response to their original question.

It’s been said that Jesus often doesn’t answer people’s questions directly because they aren’t asking the right questions.

He’s not concerned with slotting people into a hierarchy, so he redirects and asks

“Can you drink the cup I drink?”

And THAT is a provocative question.

So provocative, that one of my favorite thinkers, Henry Nouwen, wrote an entire book meditating on it.

It’s called “Can You Drink The Cup?” and I’m going to lean heavy onto his words to guide our own contemplation.

He writes in three sections

Holding the Cup

Lifting the Cup

Drinking the Cup

Let’s talk about holding the cup first.

Obviously drinking from a cup carries great symbolism in the scriptures

We read about the cup of God’s wrath in Isaiah

In Rev 14:8 we read -”Fallen! Fallen is Babylon the Great,’ which made all the nations drink the maddening wine of her adulteries.”

Jesus often talks about offering a cup of water to those in need

Drinking from a cup represents embracing the consequences of whatever is inside

It would stand to reason then that we might want to pay attention to what we’re drinking. This idea struck Nouwen.

Holding the cup of life means looking critically at what we are living. This requires great courage, because when we start looking, we might be terrified by what we see. Questions may arise that we don't know how to answer. Doubts may come up about things we thought we were sure about. Fear may emerge from unexpected places. We are tempted to say: “Let's just live life. All this thinking about it only makes things harder.” Still, we intuitively know that without looking at life critically we lose our vision and our direction. When we drink the cup without holding it first, we may simply get drunk and wander around aimlessly.

Holding the cup of life is a hard discipline. We are thirsty people who like to start drinking at once. But we need to restrain our impulse to drink, put both of our hands around the cup, and ask ourselves, “What am I given to drink? What is in my cup? Is it safe to drink? Is it good for me? Will it bring me health?”

There are two main challenges that present themselves.

One: the cup that I am given to drink might not be the same as everyone else’s.

In fact, we can be sure that it isn’t. No one’s is the same.

“Just as there are countless varieties of wine, there are countless varieties of lives. No two lives are the same. We often compare our lives with those of others, trying to decide whether we are better or worse off, but such comparisons do not help us much. We have to live our life, not someone else's. We have to hold our own cup. We have to dare to say: “This is my life, the life that is given to me, and it is this life that I have to live, as well as I can. My life is unique. Nobody else will ever live it. I have my own history, my own family, my own body, my own character, my own friends, my own way of thinking, speaking, and acting—yes, I have my own life to live. No one else has the same challenge. I am alone, because I am unique. Many people can help me to live my life, but after all is said and done, I have to make my own choices about how to live.”

“It is hard to say this to ourselves, because doing so confronts us with our radical aloneness. But it is also a wonderful challenge, because it acknowledges our radical uniqueness.”

The second challenge is that the cup is inevitably filled with a mix of sorrow AND joy.

Nouwen explores this A LOT, with beautiful explorations of how sorrow and joy are inextricably linked together in life.

And we know this to be true.

I wish I could convey all of his meditations, but there’s too much there for our time this morning.

But the questions present themselves: Can we stop trying to run from sorrow or deny our pain? Can we find joy woven into it?

Holding the cup is largely about ACCEPTING what is inside for US

“Drinking the cup of life is fully appropriating and internalizing our own unique existence, with all its sorrows and joys … True sanctity is precisely drinking our own cup and trusting that by thus fully claiming our own, irreplaceable journey, we can become a source of hope for many.”

Let’s talk about LIFTING the cup. Here, Nouwen is imagining a communal setting.

Think about a big Italian dinner and everyone has their unique glass of wine and you lift your cup, which you’ve embraced and accepted, and you offer a toast to others and others do the same.

You are drinking your cups in community.

The cup of sorrow and joy, when lifted for others to see and celebrate, becomes a cup to life. It is so easy for us to live truncated lives because of hard things that have happened in our past, which we prefer not to remember. Often the burdens of our past seem too heavy for us to carry alone. Shame and guilt make us hide part of ourselves and thus make us live half lives.

We truly need each other to claim all of our lives and to live them to the fullest. We need each other to move beyond our guilt and shame and to become grateful, not just for our successes and accomplishments but also for our failures and shortcomings. We need to be able to let our tears flow freely, tears of sorrow as well as tears of joy, tears that are as rain on dry ground. As we thus lift our lives for each other, we can truly say: “To life,” because all we have lived now becomes the fertile soil for the future.

But lifting our cup to life is much more than saying good things about each other. It is much more than offering good wishes. It means that we take all we have ever lived and bring it to the present moment as a gift for others, a gift to celebrate.

Finally, DRINKING the cup is the act of doing, the act of living.

Nouwen points to three contexts in which we drink our cup.

In silence.

This is the discipline of solitude and stillness, away from the noise and the pressures that color our acceptance of the cup

It’s the quiet where we are able to attend to our inner lives and hear the voice of God and rest

It is also the place where we accept the unique cup we have been given

With the word.

He doesn’t mean the Bible, he means sharing and verbalizing and processing with others.

To know ourselves truly and acknowledge fully our own unique journey, we need to be known and acknowledged by others for who we are. We cannot live a spiritual life in secrecy. We cannot find our way to true freedom in isolation. Silence without speaking is as dangerous as solitude without community. They belong together.

Speaking about our cup and what it holds is not easy. It requires a true discipline because, just as we want to run from silence in order to avoid self-confrontation, we want to run from speaking about our inner life in order to avoid confrontation with others.

In our actions.

We are intentional in acting in ways that are faithful to the unique calling the Lord has given us to drink.

James and John were asking the wrong question.

Hastily they responded to Jesus without really knowing what they were saying.

But they would learn along the way.

The paradox of the kingdom is that we’re called to lose our lives in order to find them.

We’re invited to follow Jesus through death trusting it’s the way to life.

We’re invited to drink the cup with no assurance of EXACTLY what’s inside, believing it’s the cup of salvation.

And so it’s important that we see the effects in the lives of others who have gone before.

Nouwen, who dedicated his life to caring for the handicapped and vulnerable, talks about learning to accept his own life, offer it to others in community, and live in an integrated way.

He chose the downward path of service.

But because he did he is able to share things like this.

“Salvation is not only a goal for the afterlife. Salvation is a reality of every day that we can taste here and now. When I sit down with Adam and help him eat, chat with Bill about our next trip, have coffee with Susanne and breakfast with David, when I embrace Michael, kiss Patsy, or pray with Gordie, salvation is right there. And when we sit together around the low altar table and I offer to all present the glass cup filled with wine, I can announce with great certainty: “This is the cup of salvation.””