Mt. Zion Lutheran Church, Wauwatosa
Lay Preacher: Vince Prantil
James
3:13-4:3(a), 7-8(a)
Mark 9:30-37
Audio
sermon file:
I read the
New Testament texts for today … laced with stories of ambition … and I heard a
voice. It was a voice of Maurice Boyd, Senior Minister of 5th Avenue
Presbyterian Church in NYC ….
And he
said if you’re going to talk about ambition, you need to recognize its
ambiguity. It can be a very healthy and pretty destructive. We need to say Yes
to it and No. We blame people for having it and not having it:
We say of
her “Oh, she’s sooooo ambitious!”
And we say
“The problem with him, ya see, is he has no ambition.”
No
matter what you think about it, ambition has an energy about it … it makes our
wheels go ‘round. It can bring out the best in us: ingenuity, discipline,
determination. But, in excess, it can become immoral and demonic.
In James,
we are asked what pursuits are worthy of children of God.
“If there
were dreams for sale, what would you buy?”
We all have
dreams, don’t we? We’re all striving for something … buying something? What is
it we’re striving for? What are you buying?
… ‘cause everything you’re after’s got a cost.
Every day they cost us 24 hours and, in the end, they cost us our life.
The Masoud,
the Israeli Secret Service, says it can get anything from anybody with one or a combination of three things:
sex, power & money. What does this say about what we really want??
What
really drives us?
Is it the
promotion? the new car? the new boat? the title of “greatest”? And are we
willing to kill for it? To covet out of bitter envy and selfish ambition?
God knows
that if we ask for these things, we ask with wrong motives”… God’s not in the
wish-granting business … and God knows that these greedy motivations deceive us.
The principalities
and powers of this world lure us to become complicit in their corporate culture.
When the externalities give way to the sway of the interiority, it is possible
to get sucked into “that black hole”.
If you
want something so bad we’ll do anything to get it, they’ve really got you and
we will find our ambition becoming demonic. What drives us is our basic
principle and we can’t expect more from our basic principle than it can deliver
…
Is that
really so difficult? Well, Boyd says, then let’s make it very simple …
If
you put self at the center, you’d better prepared to be find your outer limits
… and that can be very lonely.
If
what you’re after is power … then you’d better forget about affection. It’s
difficult to be after both.
If
you’re interested in justice and not in mercy … you’d better not make any
mistakes
If
what you’re after is security … forget about ecstasy
If
you seek comfort, you might have to relinquish meaning
If
you’re consumed by your work … you’d better keep one eye on your relationships
If
you’re ruthless on the way up … don’t root for kindness on the way down
It’s hard
to be after the things we think will satisfy our earthly desires and the ones
God created us for …. What dreams are we buying? … and if we manage to succeed,
will what we get be worth what’s it’s costing us?
There’s
a great little picture book – Hope
for the Flowers … self-described as ‘a tale –
partly about life and lots about hope – for adults and others’ … in which two
caterpillars, Sprite and Yellow come upon a pile of caterpillars rising into
the sky as far as the eye can see.
“Do you know what’s happening?” one says to
another. “I just arrived myself. No one has time to explain. They’re so busy
trying to get where they’re going – up there,” came the reply. “But what’s at
the top?” Stripe asked. Again, the reply:”No one knows that either, but it must
be awfully good because everyone’s rushing there.” There’s only one thing to do
reasons Stripe and he jumps right in. Caterpillars climb atop one another,
pushing, shoving, and knocking each other indiscriminately off the pile in an
all-out effort to “get to the top”. Eventually Stripe pushes through the clouds
only to find there’s nothing “up there”. “High up there”, he concludes, “only
looked good from the bottom”. And he climbs back down.
Pastor Mohn said it very similarly back in March:
“If that’s all there is, we wind up right where we started.”
It’s a zero-sum game, you only climb the pile if you’re willing to knock your neighbor off. Our neighbor becomes our obstacle, our enemy rather than our brother, only someone in the way of our ambition for “what’s up there”.
So Stripe heads down the pile telling everyone he sees that “there is nothing up there” and that they would be so much the better for building cocoons; that they could fly if only they become butterflies. “I saw a butterfly – there CAN be more to life,” Stripe realizes.
The pile of caterpillars climbs on, ignorant of the beauty contained within each of them. There is in each of us a butterfly … and Pastor Mick said it best when he said “You need not be perfect, you need only to be the ‘perfect you’. God has had a plan for you since you were in the womb. You just have to find out ‘what that is’ because it doesn’t come with blueprints”. And we won’t find it by knocking our neighbors “off the pile” only “to wind up where we started”.
Pastor Mohn said it very similarly back in March:
“If that’s all there is, we wind up right where we started.”
It’s a zero-sum game, you only climb the pile if you’re willing to knock your neighbor off. Our neighbor becomes our obstacle, our enemy rather than our brother, only someone in the way of our ambition for “what’s up there”.
So Stripe heads down the pile telling everyone he sees that “there is nothing up there” and that they would be so much the better for building cocoons; that they could fly if only they become butterflies. “I saw a butterfly – there CAN be more to life,” Stripe realizes.
The pile of caterpillars climbs on, ignorant of the beauty contained within each of them. There is in each of us a butterfly … and Pastor Mick said it best when he said “You need not be perfect, you need only to be the ‘perfect you’. God has had a plan for you since you were in the womb. You just have to find out ‘what that is’ because it doesn’t come with blueprints”. And we won’t find it by knocking our neighbors “off the pile” only “to wind up where we started”.
What does
it take to satisfy us? Often when we reach the end of the rainbow, the top of
the pile, the pot of gold doesn’t quite have the luster we had imagined. And if
what dreams you’ve bought don’t satisfy, more of the same won’t either.
“I learned
this from my friends who have sailboats,” Boyd whispers, “No matter how big
your sailboat is, somebody’s always got a bigger one!” If I only had a bigger
house, a wealthier husband, the boss’ office … and it doesn’t work. Arguing
“which among you is greatest” is moot.
The gap between
MORE and ENOUGH never closes …
Sometimes
we know how to spend, but not how to buy. … we tend to spend on the trivial and we’re
often willing to pay a lot for it. If we equate “the pursuit of happiness” with
sex, power & money, we grant ourselves the God-given right to exploit our
neighbor or “do whatever we have to” to get what we want.
God’s
Great Joke Part I:
But, in
the end, these things don’t satisfy. There’s less on top of the pile than we
imagine. Material rewards won’t satisfy immortal longings. Worldly possessions
are not enough for other-worldly creatures.
So then
there’s things James says are worth our going after them … character, humility,
good-heartedness, sincerity. Pursuits worthy of children of God. How do you
attain these things?
God’s
Great Joke Part II: … is that …
These
things you can’t get by going after them! … and the harder you try, the farther
you are from getting them … Imagine trying to be humble and finally saying
“Wow, I’m the greatest at humility!” It doesn’t ring true.
There are
some people that are desperately trying to be happy and they’re some of the
most miserable people on Earth. Out there, there are some people desperately
trying to be original and they’re not even interesting. Because they’re after
something you can’t get for the reaching.
These
things come only by what C. S. Lewis calls “the principle of inattention” –
they can be yours ONLY when you’re not looking for them.
… you only
get these heavenly things, when you’re after something else, something ULTIMATE
and ETERNAL.
Well …
that doesn’t sound very concrete, does it?
Perhaps, the
good news is that God has endowed all of us … you and I with what Boyd called A
Lovely Ambition
… something you don’t have to try hard at all
to do or to be or to chase
… something
you are so gifted at that when you find it, it’s as if you’re remembering it
more than ever having learned it
… and when
you’re “doing this thing” … telling a story, singing in the choir, playing in
the band, helping others find their calling, dancing, nurturing K5er’s, loving
your children, … well that produces a certain kind of person, the kind that
says, well …
… it
doesn’t matter if I ever sing at the Met as long as I sing with dignity and
purpose
… it
doesn’t matter if I paint a masterpiece so long as I paint with creativity, the
best way I know how
… because when
you’re doing these ULTIMATE and ETERNAL things, those other things … humility,
sincerity, the good heart … fly up and land on your shoulder …you get all that
thrown in!!
Unsought …
it’s God’s good gift … given when least expected as described in 1 Thessalonians Chapter 3.
What do we
really value? True worship someone once said is to put the right value on the
right thing … rather than chasing after trivial things God did not create us
for …
… if you
do what you’re gifted to do, if you’re after ‘the perfect YOU’ and you do it with discipline and integrity, God says… THAT is
ambition enough
Amen
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