Used ATV for Sale

Matthew 20:20-28

You know your day is not off to a good start when your All Terrain Vehicle plunges through the ice and into the lake. You can be pretty sure that it’s not going to get much better when you drive your new Ford pickup truck out on the lake to get the ATV out, and the front end of your pickup lands in the slushy hole left behind by the ATV. It officially becomes a bad day when you call your friend with the bulldozer, and while he does manage to get the ATV out of the water, his dozer gets bogged down in the soft wetlands at the edge of the lake. By now, of course, one of your thoughtful friends has called a reporter from the newspaper, who obligingly comes out to take some colorful photos of your predicament.
Your bad day goes from bad to worse when you call a heavy winch tow truck to the scene, but the skillful worker who shows up can’t budge anything, and you have to wait until another day to see if they can get the mess cleared up. But wait, this is the bad day that keeps on giving: the DEC officers who are on the scene are pretty sure that you won’t be fined for the leakage of any oil or waste fluids, but there is the matter of bringing multiple vehicles across the fragile wetlands and doing some significant damage to the shoreline. It all happened on Cossayuna Lake earlier this week, and the hapless ATV owner will have a whopper of an ice fishing story to tell his friends for years to come.
I can just hear him now: “Everybody else is out there catching fish, and when I wasn’t trying to snag one or the other of my vehicles out of the drink or the muck, I was too busy catching flak from the DEC to do any fishing.” The Times of Ti, on the other hand, posted photos of grinning fishermen hoisting their trophy Lake Trout for the cameras, but the only photos our hapless victim will have to post will be the ones of heavy equipment hoisting one or the other of several vehicles from the drink.
In a similar vein, you know your mission plan isn’t off to a very good start when you lay out your vision for the short term future, and one of your carefully selected staff takes you off to one side to tell you that you have it all wrong. We talked about Peter last week. Just after he came up with the answer Jesus was looking for, Jesus praised him up and down and told him that the entire future of the organization was going to be built on the bedrock foundation of Peter’s exceptional insight and wisdom. When Peter took Jesus aside to tell him that he had the mission picture all wrong, Jesus gave him a blistering rebuke that would sting for the rest of Peter’s life.
You can be pretty sure that your mission plan isn’t going much better when two more of your top-level management types ask for a private session so they can work out some of the particulars with you. Behind closed doors, they want to know if you’ll do a favor for them. In Mark’s gospel, they come across as being cagey and shrewd, something you might expect from the leaders of an agency that’s about to break the Messiah business wide open. Immediately after Jesus has told them that the son of man will be betrayed, condemned, mocked, spat on, flogged, and killed, these guys want to make sure of their place in the organization. Listen to how they phrased their request:
Teacher, we want you to do something for us, and we want you to do whatever we ask.
These guys are sharp, aren’t they? In some ways, they remind me of my daughter when she was a lot younger coming up to me coyly and asking me to do a favor for her, but she wants me to commit to saying “yes” before I even know what she wants. Before we get too rough on our hapless heroes, though, we have to remind ourselves that we’ve all done this sort of thing. We don’t come right out and ask someone to do something for us. Instead, we lead gently into the conversation by asking them if they’ll do us a favor. Once they say, “sure,” they’re hooked, and we can ask them if they can give us a hand, say, in helping us fish our ATV out of the lake.
Jesus, who was an expert at reading people, knew that something was up, and point blank asked them what they wanted before he committed to anything. It turned out they want the top two positions in this new kingdom thing that Jesus had going. In today’s lingo, we would deny that they were being self seeking. Instead, we would proclaim them as brilliant strategists, being pro-active in what they wanted for themselves. In certain camps of Christianity, they would be hailed as living illustrations of the “name-it-and-claim-it” approach to prayer. For those who prefer to use the words of Jesus as part of their rationalization process, they might well have argued their case this way:
Jesus, didn’t you tell us once that if two or more of us agreed about something here on earth, that it would be bound in heaven? And didn’t you say something another time about giving us whatever we asked for? Here’s what we want: we want to be your go-to guys. We want to be numbers one and two, and even number two is okay, because it just means that one of us is going to try harder. So what do you say? Is it a deal?
Jesus, who is no doubt still reeling from the reality of what he has to face in the near future, may have been wondering if things could get any worse with this bunch of self-seeking, immature people who apparently have little or no clue as to what he is up against. So here’s mama, along with her two boys, asking for the power chairs in the new corporate office they’re envisioning. Let’s not be too hard on mama, either. After all, what loving and thoughtful mother doesn’t want the best for her kids?
Jesus responds to their request with a flabbergasted remark. You don’t know what you’re asking. Can you drink the cup I am going to drink? The only way we know anything about this cup is because we’re on this side of the story, and we know the terrible ordeal that is awaiting Jesus and those who are called by his name. James and John, on the other hand, really don’t know what they’re asking. They think they know, and what they are looking for can best be described by these words: power and prestige.
Who are these two guys, anyway? Do we know anything else about them? Luke tells us in chapter 9 that on their last trip with Jesus into Jerusalem, the disciples ran into some opposition in a Samaritan village. Because the people in the town didn’t want to have anything to do with Jesus, they refused to welcome Jesus, which was an explicit insult. James and John, we’re told, went up to Jesus with an urgent request: Lord, do you want us to call down fire from heaven to destroy them? Jesus in turn rebuked them.
So when Jesus asked them if they could drink the cup he was going to drink, here’s what I think it meant to James and John. In the Old Testament, the “cup” was the symbol for God’s wrath. James and John, and probably everybody else in that crowd that day, fervently believed that Jesus had come to earth as God’s instrument of wrath and retaliation against the hated Romans and against anyone and everyone else who stood in the way of God’s glorious kingdom on earth. What they would have heard, then, was Jesus asking them if they really thought they were up to the task of being God’s executioners. The passage from Luke supports this kind of reading.
Their answer makes perfect sense from this reading of the interchange: “Of course we can!” Who wouldn’t want to be able to call down fire from heaven when someone insults us or betrays us or makes our lives miserable? Like the guy in Cossayuna who now has an extremely wet ATV, a new pickup truck teetering on the brink of a slushy hole, a friend’s bulldozer mired in the muck on the shore of a sensitive wetlands area, and a heavy winch tow truck spinning its wheels, Jesus is about to see things go from bad to worse.
James and John, having heard what they wanted to hear (and not what Jesus was trying to tell them), have by now gone back to the other disciples to let them all know just how crafty and shrewd they are. Not that they would brag on themselves, because guys just aren’t like that, but they might have let it slip that Jesus agreed to part of their request. As skilled as they were about reframing things to make them sound really, really good, they might have said something like this:
We just got out of a private meeting with Jesus. He wanted to know what he could do for us, if there was anything special he could do to reward us for the work we’ve been doing. “Now that you mention it,” we said, “there is one little thing, but it’s not that big a deal.” “Name it,” said Jesus. So we told him, “all right, if you insist, we wouldn’t mind being your number one and two guys.” Then Jesus asks us if we can drink from his cup, and we say, “bring it on.” So get this: Jesus is going to let us drink from his cup. What do you think of that?
Both Matthew and Mark tell us exactly what the other disciples thought of it: they were indignant. Not shocked, or repulsed, or amused by their lack of understanding, or supportive, or understanding, or anything resembling pity for their foolishness. They were indignant. In other words, each one of them had been hoping for honored positions. Every single one of them had not only entertained themselves with that kind of thinking, they had all reached the conclusion that they were the ones deserving of that kind of honor, not these other nutcases.
Fortunately for the nutcases back then and for those of us who have a sneaking suspicion that we, too, can become disturbingly self-absorbed when times get tough, Jesus demonstrated remarkable forbearance by not calling down some fire from heaven. Instead, he patiently taught them.
You know from personal experience that the rulers of the world lord it over the people they serve, and their government officials exercise unfair authority over the people under them. But it’s not that way with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be your slave; just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom.
All of which raises an enormous question begging to be asked: were the disciples really so dense that they didn’t understand what Jesus was driving at? While it’s fun to poke fun at them, I don’t think they were the least bit stupid. I think they were stunned. Jesus was telling them things they didn’t want to hear: horrific, terrifying, traumatic things that would change their lives forever. Rather than sit with news like that, they responded the way that most of us would respond: by reassuring themselves that they had made the right decision to follow Jesus, and telling themselves that the work they were doing had significance and value.
So it is when we find ourselves seemingly staggering from one crisis to the next, sometimes in the same day, the same week, the same month, or the same year. We become so preoccupied that our brains don’t seem to function the way they used to. We hear ourselves saying the most ridiculous things. The simplest chores become long, complicated ordeals. But because we feel we need to be strong for others, we prefer not to let on that we’re hurting, because that might make us look and feel weak.
In those times when we can’t figure out why these things are happening, and we can’t seem to make sense out of the setbacks or the tragedies that life brings us, it helps to have a sense of humor. And it really helps to exercise our faith, believing that if anyone can bring something good out of the worst that life can bring us, it’s God. That’s one of the reasons I keep going: I want to see what God does with the painful stuff in my life. By the way, keep your eyes peeled for a classified ad for a used ATV. Be careful if it uses these words: VERY CLEAN ATV FOR SALE.

Order of Service
March 8, 2009

Welcome, Announcements, Joys & Concerns
A Prayer for Peace NC #588 (vs. 1)
Opening Prayer
Leader: God of promise, we come as your people, rejoicing in the abundance of your love.
People: Give us faith to answer your call.
Leader: Strengthen us to hope against hope.
People: God of the journey, let your word guide our ways.
Leader: Guide us into a deep and abiding trust.
People: Lead us on a journey toward wholeness, that we may become your holy people, faithfully doing your will.
Leader: May the abundance of your promises strengthen our faith, that we may faithfully follow you.
People: In this time of worship, open our hearts, our minds, and our hands so that we may love you and your creation in the way that Jesus did.
Hymn NC #26                        We Worship You, God
Responsive Prayer
Leader: Holy God, you promise to speak to us in a still, small voice, but our world and our lives are so loud that we find it difficult to hear you.
People: You offer a voice of reassurance and an invitation of welcome, yet we are often too busy to receive your blessing.
Leader: Too often we pour out our concerns to you, but do not pause long enough to listen for your reply.
People: When we hear your words of faithful promise, but are tempted not to believe, forgive us.
Leader: When we listen to voices of the crowd and the false promises of advertising, call us back again to your steadfast path.
People: When we cannot quiet our lives or our minds long enough to be aware of your presence, invite us once more to pause in the green pastures and spend time near the still waters.
Leader: Forgive us, God. Have mercy on us. Help us to have the wisdom of Samuel and be able to say, “Speak, God, for your servant listens.”
People: Remind us afresh of your enduring mercy, and that you are always ready to give.
Leader: Help us to receive your abundant grace, so that we may share it graciously with others.

Pastoral Prayer, Lord’s Prayer

Hymn NC #193                      In The Cross Of Christ
Psalm 31:14-24, Genesis 9:8-17, Matthew 16:21-28
Sermon               Used ATV for Sale
Offering, Doxology, Dedication
Hymn NC #436       God Of Grace And God Of Glory
Benediction
Leader: Steadfast in purpose, God in Christ calls to us,
People: Offering protection from the night, and love that empowers us for the day.
Leader: Christ longs to draw us close,
People: That we may know God’s love, overflowing with strength and tenderness,
Leader: With love intent on embracing the world. Go now to live in the assurance of God’s promises. May the abundance of God’s blessings be with you now and forever.

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