So I want to invite you to open your Bibles, if you would, to
Matthew chapter 20, Matthew 20. Now Jesus was going up to
Jerusalem and on the way he took the 12 aside and said to them,
We are going up to Jerusalem and the Son of Man will be delivered
over to the chief priests and the teachers of the law.
They will condemn him to death and will hand him over to the
Gentiles to be mocked and flogged and crucified.
On the third day he will be raised to life.
Then the mother of Zebedee's sons came to Jesus with her sons
kneeling down, asked a favor of him.
What is it you want? He asked.
She said. Grant that one of these two sons
of mine may sit at your right and the other at your left in
your Kingdom. You don't know what you're
asking, Jesus said to them, Can you drink the cup?
I am going to drink? We can, they answered.
Jesus said to them, You will indeed drink from my cup, 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 by
my Father. When the 10 heard about this,
they were indignant. Indignant with the two brothers,
Jesus called them together and said, You know that the rulers
of the Gentiles Lord it over them, and their high officials
exercise authority over them. Not so 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 for many.
Her name is Mary Solomi. You might know her as Solomi or
the other Mary. She showed up with the group of
disciples and women that had been following Jesus.
She was Mary's the mother of Jesus sister.
So sometimes she's called the other Mary, and here she is as
Jesus's auntie, showing up with her two sons and kneeling.
This is a mother's request. How many of you know that your
mother prays for you? I wonder what her requests are
like. This is a prayer request.
She's kneeling at the feet of Jesus.
She's going low so that her sons can rise up.
She wants good things for her kids.
How many of you had an internal reaction as you read the
scripture? Like, oh wow, how dare she?
I mean, how would you feel if your mother showed up in front
of the president of UBC on Maine Mall and dragged you along and
knelt in front of the president and said, President Makan,
please give my daughter a job here in your office.
Anybody volunteering for that? This is a little awkward.
She is kneeling in front of Jesus.
She is going low so that her kids could rise up.
It's a reasonable request, isn't it?
Maybe in terms of family, she's looking around at those 12
disciples. She's heard them talking that
Jesus says they're going to Jerusalem.
But maybe they're all still missing the point that Jesus is
going to Jerusalem to go low, that Jesus is going to Jerusalem
to suffer and be raised up, and his his rising up will first be
on a cross. But it is a reasonable request
if you think that Jesus is going to have a physical Kingdom in
which he rules. And who would be the best to
help him? Not those other 10 disciples who
seemed to not have it all together, but her two sons,
James and John, the sons of Zebedee, known as the Sons of
Thunder. They've got it together.
They would be the best bodyguards on either side of
Jesus, at his left and on his right.
Keep this in the family, Jesus. So maybe it's a reasonable
request that she's looking around and saying who's going to
be the most helpful to Jesus. She wanted her kids to be
helpful to Jesus. Maybe you're like, oh, Craig,
she came and asked for a favor. Why are you having such a good
opinion about her? It is in our nature these days
to assume the worst of those who seek a position.
We assume the worst of politicians.
We assume the worst of those who say I want to lead a group.
Please don't assume that. Even if people do, hey, let it
go like water off a duck's back and come to the small group
Leaders workshop today, we assume the worst of people who
rise up in the club in order to be elected.
We're like, who do they think they are?
Well, at the best, the best option is that in some way they
want to be helpful. They think they can make a
difference. And so they're standing up.
Or perhaps they're going low. Yeah.
Ronald Rolheimer or Roll Roll Heiser has three stages of
discipleship. They're almost like 3 stages of
life. They're each three immense
struggles of our life. The first struggle he calls
essential discipleship. This is the struggle to get our
stuff together. This is the struggle to get it
together. It all goes well until puberty
hits, and then it's like, what kind of creature have I become?
How do I get my life together? Some of you call this adulting.
You keep putting it off. You're like, I'll just take more
classes, more classes, I'll just get another degree.
And then somehow in the mix it starts to happen that you have
to start getting your life together.
You have to start organizing. I can go to bed, I can wake up,
I can take on responsibilities. I can do things.
I can pay my bills, bills. I can.
I can do these things. Essential discipleship is just
what we've all been invited into.
But Jesus is inviting us into another level of discipleship,
and that's mature discipleship, the struggle to give our lives
away, to become a person who looks not just after ourselves,
but looks after others and gives our lives away.
There isn't just a morning where you wake up and you're suddenly
that person. But this is the longest section
of discipleship, if you live a while, is that this generative
discipleship of becoming a person who gives your life away,
where you learn more and you face the struggle of how will I
give my life away while I'm earning a fair bit of money?
How do I give it away? I have all these skills and
abilities in my life. How do I give it away?
Wow, I have these children in my life.
How do I give myself away to them?
Wow, my parents have gotten older.
How do I give myself away to help them in the latter years of
their life? Wow, I have this responsibility
in this company. How do I give myself away
without losing myself in this place?
This is the struggle of mature discipleship.
It is the struggle that Jesus disciples were facing.
It was the struggle that even Mary Salome was facing.
How do we give our lives away? What is required in order to
give our lives away? Do I require a position or do I
require a posture? What is required in order to
give my life away? The third stage is this radical
discipleship, and it's the struggle to give our deaths
away. I barely understand what he
means, but you can go read about it in his book called Sacred
Fire. Jesus models all three of these.
In fact, we're inviting you this summer into a reading challenge
that will invite you into a consideration of all three
stages of discipleship. The first book we're inviting
you into is called Theo of Golden Great Story by Ellen
Levi. It's a fictional book.
No slide. We're inviting you.
We'll have the slide next week. Debbie made a beautiful slide.
We're going to use it next week. But Theo of Golden, we want to
invite you to read a fiction book.
How many of you have read a fiction book in the last year?
Oh, a few of you are reading books.
I'm so excited. Wow, that's really exciting,
right? Wow.
We want to invite you to read this.
The second book is called The Return of the Prodigal Son by
Andre Nuen and this one you'll you'll really start to get the
connection on discipleship. We'll talk more about these
books. I learned this morning that if
you have Spotify premium Spotify as a student, both of these
books are already available there for you to listen to.
I know like, wow, it's already there, but I tell you, I am old
school. If I'm not driving the van, I
really like to hold my book and read.
So I encourage you order a copy and read it because we want to
invite you into a lengthy conversation about this kind of
discipleship. Sometimes you just need to see
it in a story. Sometimes you need to process it
in the stories and art of others.
And so we're going to invite you into both of those this summer,
these three stages. Where do you see yourself?
Are you still struggling to get your stuff together?
Are you struggling to give your life away?
Or have you been blissfully unaware that this is actually a
struggle to give your life away? You still wanted to be a taker
rather than a giver. This is the shift, because you
can miss this and you can be 75 years old and still being a
taker and not a giver, it's possible to miss it.
Teresa of a villa, she said this.
When one reaches the highest degree of human maturity, one
has only one question left. How can I be helpful?
I actually learned in university
that this was a really difficult question to fulfill.
I don't know. Somewhere along the way, we had
been challenged to sort of ask the question, how could I help
you? I was hanging out in the Baptist
Student Union. There was hardly anyone there.
No one was there. The sun was shining.
It was a beautiful day. And I was in the lobby and in
walked an older man with a suitcase.
This was before suitcases with wheels.
This was just a suitcase that he was carrying.
He had a straw hat on. And he came in and he did not
look like the average university student.
So I asked him how can I help you today?
And he said I need a ride. I said OK.
And so then I took him for a ride.
Like, I drove him for 50 miles to this little tiny town that
had one tiny little hotel, and that's where he was booked to
stay. And on the way, I learned all
about his life as a record salesman.
And then I drove back to Athens and on the way back I was like,
God, why did I ask that question today?
I really wasn't looking forward to a drive.
But I must admit that was really interesting.
I met a really interesting person.
How can I be helpful? Do you know the 10 did not like
this at all? When the 10 heard about this
event, which they weren't very far away, they were.
They were just just a stone's throw away at this moment.
They were indignant with the two brothers.
They couldn't bring themselves to be mad at Mary Solemi.
I mean, that's Mary's sister, the mother of Jesus.
But they could bring themselves to be mad at those two guys,
those two brothers, because why? They've gotten ahead of them in
line, asking to be useful to Jesus, asking for a special
place with Jesus. And they were a bit competitive.
Sometimes I wish the disciples here were a little more
competitive, but they were competitive, and so they also
assumed something treacherous about the hearts of their
brothers, their fellow disciples.
They were indignant. And what Jesus shows us next,
and how Jesus addresses it, is that Jesus shows us that he sees
into the hearts of those 10 men, and he sees a problem about what
they see about being useful to Jesus.
Jesus wants to reframe their quest.
So he says, you know that the rulers of the Gentiles Lord it
over them, and their officials exercise authority over them.
Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become
great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be
first among you must be your slave.
This is how Jesus says we can be helpful to him.
If you want to be helpful to Jesus, don't seek the position
that creates power to Lord it over others.
Instead, seek the posture that allows you to serve and even be
the slave of others. You will go low and be raised
up. If you go low, you will be
raised up as great. If you go low, you will be
raised up as first on occasion. Sometimes that may result in a
position. Sometimes that might even result
in a job. Sometimes we're reluctant to
take a small job because we say it's beneath me.
But God is using it to form you as a person so that he can raise
you up. And even others can say, oh,
there's some essential skills in your life.
There's essential qualities in your life.
And they give you a chance. Jesus seems to indicate the same
thing, that being useful to Jesus is not about lording it
over others. Being in charge, being control,
taking, taking, taking is usually what those positions are
about. Not so with you.
It's such a simple phrase. Would you?
Would you turn and say it to your neighbor?
Not so with you. Some of you imagined that you
were going to get married and that finally there would be
somebody who would do what you told him to do.
Not so with you, Jesus says. Not so with you.
Some of you imagined that you were going to get married and
finally there'd be somebody to just take care of you all the
time. In a way that's sort of true,
that the invitation in marriage is mutual submission, that we
move towards the other so that we go low to see how to serve
the other. And when we are equally doing
that in occasions and over the course of our lives, then our
marriage is great because first things have been addressed.
This plays out in so many areas of our lives.
Some of you were so excited you were going to have children and
now there'd be people to do the chores in your house.
And you just discovered, no, they just create more chores.
Even the dishes have babies just on their own.
They're, they're just multiplying there all the time.
The struggle in our lives is to figure out how to give our lives
away without resentment, without bitterness, to give our lives
away without anger and rage, to give our lives away, even our
forgiveness away. This is the invitation of Jesus
in a way. Jesus is on a mission very much,
he says, just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but
to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many.
He's saying, this is how I want you to live.
I want you to live the way I lived and I struggled.
Is this Jesus on mission, or is this Jesus's motivation?
St. John of the Cross says that if
you want to live into this second area of discipleship, you
must let your life become saturated with the vision of
Jesus in action, and then you must let your life mirror his
motivations. Jesus's motivation is to serve.
Jesus's motivation is to give just like his Father in heaven,
just like the Spirit of God, and to give his life specifically as
a ransom for many because many have been taken hostage.
Many have been kidnapped from the life that they were intended
to live. Their life has been derailed and
they've been snatched up. And he's like, I'm going to pay
the price for their freedom. I will be there ransom.
And this is what we know. Jesus left his throne to take
this cup of suffering. He asked these two disciples,
James and John, even even Mary, I believe, was present for this
question. Can you drink the cup?
I'll drink. Can you drink the cup of
judgement that I'm going to drink?
Can you drink the cup of suffering that I will drink?
And in their eagerness they said, we sure can, We can do it.
And Jesus says you will. You will drink that cup.
But not yet. The Scripture later says in Luke
that Jesus withdrew on a night before he was betrayed.
He had taken some disciples, Peter, James and John, to pray,
and he withdrew about a stone's throw.
How far can you throw a stone? Jesus knew that what he was
really facing, he had to face alone.
And sometimes in this middle area of discipleship we feel
alone. It feels lonely and really
sorting out how to give our lives away, how to live
purposely. It feels lonely sorting out what
you're going to major in and then where is your career going?
It feels lonely. You have to disengage.
About a stone's throw away, you can see your friends there.
They're sleeping and you're praying, you're pondering,
you're wondering, how is my life going to be useful?
And Jesus knows that there is a cross in his destiny.
And he kneels before the Father, and he says, Father, if you're
willing, take this cup from me. Yet not my will, but yours be
done. Jesus left a throne to drink
from the cup. He went low to do something for
you and for me. We had been taking ransom.
Those of us who know we're being tempted, those of us who know
that we've already succumbed to temptation, those of us who know
that we don't have our stuff together and our life is a mess,
know we need a daily prayer of Jesus the Rescuer.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a Sinner.
This showed up in the 5th century in Egypt, scratched into
the cell of a monk, one of the desert fathers, and then it was
popularized all across Europe and now around the world.
And if you've been following with Lectio 365, you've been
able to pray this during Lent. So I'm going to invite you to
stand with me. It's a three times prayer.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a Sinner.
Would you pray it with me? Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God,
have mercy on me, a Sinner. Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God,
have mercy on me, a Sinner. As we come to the table, we hear
the words of Peter reminding us that Our Calling is to be holy
because God is holy. And it was not with silver or
gold that you were redeemed, that you were rescued, that you
were ransomed from an empty way of life that had been handed
down to you. But instead you were rescued,
redeemed, ransomed with the precious blood of Christ, a Lamb
without blemish or defect. He was chosen before the
creation of the world, but was revealed in these last days for
your benefit. Through Him you believe in God
who raised Him. So now your faith and your hope
are in God with those helping with the Lord's Supper come
forward.