The Best

Scripture: 1Peter 2:9-10; Mark 10:35-45.

It’s just too obvious, isn’t it? Too obvious how far off the mark James and John are in the scripture for this morning, how completely clueless they seem to be as far as anything Jesus was about. First they come up to him and say “Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we want you to do.” Not a good start. But Jesus plays along. “What is it you want me to do?” They say, “Grant us to sit one at your right hand and one at your left in your glory.”

Now, what could they have been thinking? Didn’t they realize how foolish they would appear, and how out-of-sync this was with the teachings of the man they called teacher? If they had sat down and tried to plan a way to make themselves look as silly and selfish and small-minded as possible, they could not have done a better job. Such shameless self-promotion is not usually very attractive, and it’s especially unattractive in a disciple, and especially noticeable when it’s Jesus you’re talking to. Shameless self-promotion is unattractive in any context. So are related qualities such as a desperate need to be in the limelight, or to be honored, or to win or be #1. James and John, unfortunately for them, could be accused of all of that. But of course they are not the only ones. And such people are not confined to the Bible.

When I first began to imagine this sermon, it was some months ago, back in 1999, and my thinking was occasioned at least partly by all those lists that were coming out. The 100 best movies or rock and roll songs or novels of the 20th century, the most important events of the millennium. And so forth. So I was thinking: What is this need we have to identify “the best”? Why is there this urge to name the top 10 or 50 or 100 anythings? Why do we seem to care so much who is the #1 football team in the country, even to the extent of endless debates about how that is to be determined, even to the extent of caring week by week and even before the season starts, who’s #1. (I know there are some of you who couldn’t care less.) Or why do we seem to care so much who’s #1 in the presidential sweepstakes this week. Why do rankings and winners and even temporary leaders play such a large part in our lives? Charlottesville, one of the top ten places to live on the east coast. UVA, one of the top ten hospitals in the country—or whatever the blurbs really say. And isn’t all of this a little like James and John asking to occupy the seats of honor?

Now before I go any farther, I have some confessions I need to make. I do enjoy games and sports, and I have always felt that a good deal of my sense of ethics was developed on ball fields as I was growing up. I also like to win. Whatever I am playing as a participant, I would rather win than lose. Whatever team I am rooting for, I would rather have them win than lose. And I did pay attention to some of those lists. I checked to see how many of the movies I saw, and in the case of the novels I made four categories: those I had read, those I had at some point thought about reading, those I had at least heard of, and those I had not heard of. So I am in no way “above it all”. I am part of it all, as I suspect most of us are in one way or another. And I can say things to myself, like: “It’s just a game.” “It’s all just for fun.” “It’s harmless entertainment.” No need to get overly serious here.

But then there are also some questions that keep bugging me. When does harmless entertainment cease to be harmless? When does the emphasis on winning have consequences that are not so harmless? And at what point do attitudes from the area of sports spill over to other areas, as when we come to approach the political process as though it were a sporting event? The boundary lines between games and life may not be so clear after all.

There are some important issues connected with all this, so many in fact that I can’t begin to really discuss them all, and I have found in thinking about it that one thing leads to another, and so my mind and spirit is not clear about all this, but my spirit is concerned. Let me just touch on a few matters by way of scratching the surface.

I’m thinking, for instance, of the tendency we have in the United States to talk and to think about ourselves as the greatest country on the face of the earth. I hear politicians use phrases like this all the time, and I am always disturbed…disturbed partly because I sense they don’t really mean it, that it’s just something to say that sounds good and proves their love for their country. But partly I think I’m disturbed because maybe they really do mean it and because it is such a widespread and deeply held feeling in our culture. We are the best. We are the greatest nation in the world.

If we were playing a game and trying to determine the top, #1 ranked country in the world, we could probably come up with a lot of good, convincing reasons why the United States deserves to be rated #1. I’m not going to suggest what they might be. I’m also not going to argue against the United States being the greatest country in the world, because it is the debate itself that I am questioning. I am suggesting that to talk in that language, to even think in that way is to do something like what James and John were doing when they asked to sit next to Jesus in eternity. Wanting people to know we’re the best. Wanting to have it confirmed so that we know inside that we’re the best. Wanting God to know we’re the best.

I have not traveled a lot outside the United States. Each time I traveled, once to Egypt and Israel and twice to Guatemala, I was fortunate to encounter individual Christians and groups of Christians who had a lot to offer to me about what it means to be a Christian. As North Americans traveling in third world situations—a term that in itself is bothersome to me, by the way, though we all use it and have some sense of what we mean by it—as North Americans traveling in third world situations we are made aware, I have been made aware both of the extraordinary wealth we enjoy, and of the spiritual poverty of much of our lives. In each case I was going with church sponsored groups who started out feeling like they wanted to help, and many of us returned knowing that although we North Americans have many ways to help, there are also many ways in which we are in need of help, our churches, as individuals. We have much to learn from Christians in other places. And I returned from each of those trips thinking in new ways, wondering what it means for me, for all of us, to be Christian in North America. I’m still thinking and wondering. What I’m not thinking about is whether the United States is the greatest country on earth. It is pointless in the light of the spiritual questions that face us. It is not only pointless. It is something we need to get rid of as a first step in dealing with the spiritual questions that face us as North Americans.

On a different level, greatest-ism (as I called it when I first tried to describe to the worship committee what I was thinking about for preaching today) affects us in our explicitly religious life as well. I am not going to talk about this too much today, because I did talk about it some back a few months ago when I was giving my candidate sermon here in November. But I am going to talk about it some, because I think we need to say what I am about to say clearly and often.

Jesus Christ is not the only way to God, nor even necessarily the best way to God or road to heaven. The kind of arrogant attitude that Christianity is the best or the truest religion may not be expressed too often in just so many words, but it is implied in much of Christian theology and practice. The assumption that a person’s health, wholeness, or salvation depends on having a firm belief in Jesus Christ as the way to health, wholeness, or salvation is responsible in the extreme for such things as crusades and anti-Semitism and in more subtle ways for an unfortunate and inaccurate division of humanity into categories of believers and non-believers. Even if it is held without any fanfare, the idea that Christianity is in possession of the answers to life’s riddles, while others have by definition not yet arrived at that privileged point—that idea infects the Christian community with a spiritual arrogance that prevents us from walking humbly with our God.

A few weeks ago, I chose the verses from first Peter in connection with understanding ourselves as people of God. “Once you were no people, but now you are God’s people.” Today I asked for those verses to be read again because of the statement (which I ignored in the earlier sermon) that says: “You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation.”

I chose that because it represents so well the ambiguity in much of the language we hear and use, and the ambiguity in the way we think about ourselves. If the statement that you (we), the Christian community, are a chosen race means that we are somehow closer to God, favored by God, or in any way spiritually superior, then we need to dispose of those words and the thought processes that go along with them.

If, on the other hand they mean that we simply have a calling, individually and together, if it means that we have a calling that has nothing to do with being better or best, then maybe we had better hold on to those words and take them to heart.

That brings me to the personal level, not so much how this concern affects us out there at the national or international level, or at the level of church and religion, but how it affects us inside, how it affects our souls, if you will.

This has a lot of angles to it, doesn’t it? This business of trying to be best or wanting to be best as people. Our need or desire to be good, really good, better than most people, at something. Our striving for excellence. The perfectionist tendencies some of us may have. The lifetimes we spend trying to live up to the standards someone else has set for us—parents, teachers, society, who knows where the standards all come from. The standards we set for ourselves, and who knows where they come from. Our needs to be recognized, singled out for who we are or what we have done, something we have done. All of this is hard to sort out as to what of all this is healthy, what may be unhealthy, and so forth. And I’m not going to try to sort it out.

But just a thought or two. It may be understandable if there is something inside us that is like James and John, wanting to be separated from the crowd, wanting to have our names called so that we can come forward and be honored and have our existence validated. The scripture reminds us that the disciples were subject to such desires. And in a culture that seems to be so much based on winning, on being #1 or among the top 10 or 25 or 100, that attaches so much importance to awards and rewards, it may be very understandable if there is that little tendency in us that wants to be called forward.

Even more understandable though is the reaction of the other ten disciples in the story, who were perturbed. Maybe they were perturbed because they thought they should be the ones called forward instead of James or John. But I prefer to think that they were perturbed because in making their request James and John were betraying the heart of what this movement was all about. I prefer to think that the other disciples were not upset because they wanted to sit in those chairs of honor but because they felt they had been called to be part of a movement where there were no such chairs, in eternity or anywhere else, that instead they had understood the call of Jesus to be to take their place in a circle where each person is different, but where no person is better or best, and where each person knows that her or his name has already been called and that he or she is honored as a child of God.

We have been chosen by God to be part of that circle, called by God not to step forward but to join hands with sisters and brothers. How blessed we are to be chosen in this way, to be part of the circle. Amen.

Jim Bundy
March 19, 2000