The world is divided into two types of people, those who divide the world into two types of people, and those who don’t. Or so the people who divide the world into two types of people would have us all believe.
Take, for example, the famous division between those who see the glass as half empty and those who see the glass as half full, the supposed unbridgeable chasm between pessimists and optimists.
Except you have that dude who drinks directly from the milk carton, with no glass involved, probably your grandson. Then there is me. Like an infamous t-shirt, I neither see the glass as half full nor as half empty. I just think “Goody! Room for more wine!”
And here, in a nutshell, you have a part of my core theology. The other part comes from the country song that declares “God is great, beer is good, and people are crazy.” But we’ll leave that for another day.
And seriously, before you start to think I might have a problem, I can assure you that I drink more milk than anything else, just not directly from the carton. And lots of coffee. Possibly too much coffee, if that is a thing.
Today’s reading from the gospel according to Mark connects two critical concepts in the life and teaching of Jesus, though it is often reduced to that moment with the child at the very end, a maudlin Sunday School vignette, Jesus on a felt board in the church basement, though the Sunday Schools have long been silent, not only in the 16% of the US that identifies as white Mainline Protestant, but increasingly in the smaller 14% that identifies as white Evangelical Protestant. Notice that there are more white Mainline Protestants than white Evangelical Protestants, for the success of fundamentalists is an excuse for inaction not a reality on the ground. And the “nones,” “spiritual but not religious,” and pseudo-religions like Goop and CrossFit outnumber us all these days, especially among Millennials and Generation Z.
The two foundational concepts in our reading are humility and personal sacrifice, which is to say selfless service. The child symbolizes an open mind, humility, vulnerability, for salvation comes through vulnerability, which we really don’t like.
All of the stories we receive about Jesus come from our side of his public torture and execution and the resurrection experiences of his disciples, the ways they experienced him as still with them. We can only see Jesus through that lens, through the meaning they constructed of that event. And while we’ve attached the names of disciples to two of the gospels, that is nothing more than a convenient fiction. There are no contemporaneous accounts of the ministry and teaching of Jesus.
Those who wrote down the story of Jesus did not know him. Like the Jesus Seminar, we are left to discern whether gospel accounts feel right, fit the religious and cultural context, fit the events we know are true. Today’s message, about service and humility, about sacrifice, makes sense within the context of the Hebrew prophetic tradition and within the socioeconomic context of Judea under military occupation, even if the resurrection prophecy is a later addition.
Jesus was a revolutionary. A religious revolutionary. A socio-economic revolutionary. A political revolutionary. Jesus was not a satisfied man.
A satisfied person does not take on powers and principalities. A satisfied person does not create. A satisfied person does not try to change the world.
Now, I’m not talking about that two-dimensional Jesus. I’m not talking about Jesus who exists solely to appease the ego of an angry God in some circular act of murder, which, by the way, is not in today’s reading from the earliest gospel. No mention is made of sacrificial atonement here. The crucifixion is here, just not the toxic myth about it.
I’m also not talking about that Jesus who is so far removed from humanity that he ceases to serve as a guide for our lives, this Trinitarian personhood that is all cosmic and co-eternal. And I’m certainly not talking about the white capitalist Jesus of so many perverted fantasies.
No, I’m talking about the dude in the gospels, the one who whips the wheelers and dealers in the Temple, and makes the privileged uncomfortable enough that they get rid of him, that they attempt, unsuccessfully, to crush his rebellion.
Not satisfied.
I’m not saying not happy, though, believe it or not, being happy is not actually the purpose of life, not the spiritual purpose, not the biological purpose. The notion that God just wants everyone to be happy is modern American bunkum, the egotism that creates a God to worship us instead of the other way around. There are certainly moments of joy, moments when Jesus, corporeal and cosmic, is happy in God’s good creation, surrounded by companions he loves.
And not “not satisfied” in the all-too-common form of hubris, the “I know better than everyone else” way that would sort of make sense for Jesus as omniscient God but not so much for a street preacher from Galilee.
Humility is a core Hebrew value, a core Jewish value, a core Christian value, captured in Micah 6:8, and this very passage talks about humble service and sacrifice.
No, Jesus is not satisfied in the same way the Good Samaritan of his parable was not satisfied, not satisfied to walk by a man suffering in the ditch. Not satisfied that anyone should needlessly suffer. Not satisfied with the harm humans inflict on one another. Remember, that man did not trip and fall into the ditch. He was beaten and robbed.
There is room for more wine in the glass of human existence.
Not the pessimism that simply sees things as broken, in decline.
Not the optimism that ignores the brokenness in the world, that glosses over the experience of the person in the ditch.
Christianity, for me, faith, for me, is about what might be.
IS half full. IS half empty. Might be completely full. Might runneth over.
The Way of Jesus is cranky impatience, a cranky optimism. Anything else is Christianity, not Jesus.
We are smart enough to create a world in which humans can thrive and reach their full potential without destroying one another or the planet.
I believe it. I believe it with every ounce of my being.
That is what drives me. That is why I am standing here in front of you.
Not because I have all the answers, that I wish to impose my will. I’m pretty certain that if the world worked the way I want it to, it would be a complete mess.
I believe WE, together, can get there, but only if we step out of our fear.
I don’t love America for what it has been. We have never lived up to our potential, to what we say we believe. White supremacy was hard-coded into our Constitution and still is. Our prosperity was built on stolen land and stolen labor. But we have seen glimpses of what we might be, places and moments when we have come together in a common yet diverse humanity to serve and to celebrate, to bind up what is broken, to create a shared story.
I don’t love Christianity for what it has been, I mean, there is some beautiful stuff back there like Bach and the Sistine Chapel, some amazing people like Julian of Norwich and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, but by and large, Christianity has been infected with a chronic case of institutionalism, that disease that makes preservation of the institution more important than the purpose of the institution, and preservation of the institution means either cozying up to power or seizing it for yourself. Neither really has anything to do with Jesus.
But I love what Christianity might be. A celebration of a good and mysterious Creator we name as God and the experience of radical and transcendent love in the person of Jesus. A world where we live into the command to “be not afraid,” letting go of the ways our fear poisons all we do.
The might-be of faith, cranky optimism, holy imagination, always facing forward, room for more wine. Now let’s save the planet before all the vineyards burn.
God is great. Beer is good. And we are just crazy enough to believe we can do it.
Amen.