These verses show us two men from Jesus' inner circle asking him for a favor. They didn't understand the nature of his so-called "glory", so they assumed he was going to Jerusalem to overthrow the Roman governor and re-establish Jewish home rule. They asked for the privilege of having places of honor and power, the seats on his immediate right and left, when he took his place as judge and ruler.
Halford Luccock, one of the great preachers of the twentieth century and a professor of preaching at Yale Divinity School, said of this request, "This is the final form of unacceptable prayer. It was sincere; it was earnest; it was wrong. James and John were asking Jesus to fit into their plans." "Prayer is always unacceptable when it says to God, 'You do what I want.' Christian prayer says rather with Jesus, 'Your kingdom come, your will be done.'"
For me these verses from Mark's Gospel point to two themes: prayer and status. On the vast and crucial subject of prayer, we can understand it simply as communication with God. Last night I officiated at a wedding in downtown Philadelphia. The ceremony took place in the library of a medical school. The bride was the step-daughter of a long-time friend of mine. I enjoyed getting to know the couple as I met with them a couple of times to talk about marriage and the kind of ceremony they wanted. They are a delightful woman and man.
At the rehearsal dinner Friday night, I met many of their friends, young people in their twenties for the most part. A young woman told me she went to college with the bride. She said she majored in communications. I asked her what that involved, in part because I know so many young people enter college with the intention of majoring in communications. She said she chose that major because she hoped to get into broadcasting, probably television, although radio would be a back-up possibility. I told her I thought she was a good communicator—steady eye contact, careful listening, asking follow-up questions. She seemed surprised by the compliment and said she didn't think about that aspect of communicating.
That led to a couple of interesting stories told around the table, and I heard them against the background of prayer, which was in my mind because I knew I would be talking about it this morning. A man at the table identified himself as the employer of the groom. Both men are attorneys. The man at the table, whose name was David, is the principal in a law firm practicing in several counties in southern New Jersey. He said that when the groom, whom I will call Keith, joined the firm, it had been the practice to end each day with a meeting in the office reviewing cases and "de-briefing." Keith suggested they change that and exchange frequent emails throughout the day instead, something the owner of the firm said improved productivity and creativity enormously.
I said, "It sounds like you gained a lot." David nodded in agreement. "But it also sounds as though you may have lost something," I continued. "What's that?" asked David. "What you only get in face-to-face communication," I said. "Facial expressions, body language, and the possibility of putting a hand on someone's shoulder or arm."
David's wife, who is a clinical psychologist, beamed. She said "I've been telling him that. Maybe he'll hear it from another man." It was a friendly conversation. David is not a high-powered corporate lawyer. He's just a little rumpled and very easy to be with.
The conversation about emails and personal contact encouraged a woman at the table to share a recent experience of hers. She's of my generation, working hard to keep up with technology while understanding its dark side as well as its bright side. She said she needed some work done on the central processing unit of her desktop computer. She contacted a small company recommended by a friend. A man came to her home, took away the unit and promised to return it in a few days.
The company kept its word, called her to say the technician was on his way to her home. When she went to the door, there was the man who had disconnected her computer standing now with her central processing unit under one arm, and a cell phone to his ear with his other hand. He went to her desk and began connecting the unit, mostly with one hand while he continued to talk on his cell phone. The conversation was about a family member who was undergoing a minor medical procedure.
After several minutes the woman said to the man, "Stop. Either talk on the phone or set up my computer. I don't want you to do both. I need to know you're concentrating on what you're doing and I want to ask you questions while you plug things into different outlets. And I'm paying for your time." To the delight of the clinical psychologist at the table, the woman said, "I'm learning to be more assertive, especially with people who talk on cell phones and do text messaging while they're supposed to be interacting with me."
Most of us in this room this morning know what it's like to pray as though we're sending emails to God. I find myself standing on the 79th Street platform of the subway waiting for the infamous number 1 train to take me to Penn Station. I hear myself saying, "C'mon God, you know I have a train to catch." That's the equivalent of sending God an email. It's somewhat impersonal.
At a more serious level, many of us have pleaded with God in a deeply personal way for things we felt we desperately needed, asking that someone's life be spared or that someone experience healing, praying that employment be found, requesting that a way open up out of a dead-end situation. And there's Biblical precedent for that kind of prayer. What I have come to understand is that if such prayers are to be uttered in the spirit of Christ, they need to be offered in the context of Nevertheless, Your will be done. Not my will, but yours, O God, is the essence, the core, of prayer as I now understand it.
The whole subject of prayer cries out for a series of sermons, not just part of one on a given Sunday morning. For now it's enough to say that asking for favors like the one James and John asked for is a misuse of a valuable spiritual discipline. It's not the same as pouring out to God a deeply felt need on behalf of others or on behalf of oneself.
Prayer at its best for me is an unhurried interaction between me and the Creator/Redeemer I know as God. Other people may use different names. In that kind of prayer, I re-discover my status as a creature, a wonderfully made and totally worthwhile creature, but still a creature—and not God. The poetic creation story in Genesis helps us remember that the ongoing human sin is the attempt to play God and forget the limited nature of our power as human beings. Sit in on an open AA meeting if you want to hear some eloquent testimony in that direction.
Simply being in the presence of God in prayer reminds me that God cares about the people I care about, that God feels my pain as well as my pleasure, that God invites me to be part of what God wants for the world-peace with justice, and relationships of love and trust between a woman and a man, between a woman and a woman, between a man and a man, and in families and other groupings of people.
That points to the other focus of James and John's request to Jesus for places of honor in his reign of glory. Any student of psychology knows we human beings have a built-in need to feel valued, even important, to at least one other person, and hopefully, to more than one. That need gets distorted when it hasn't been met adequately in childhood. And so we have people on "power trips" as we sometimes say.
Clearly there is a need for political power, and in a democracy that power is shared rather than concentrated in one person or a few persons. Things get interesting when people pursue political power as a way of satisfying their need for feeling valued and appreciated. It's a little sad when men and women work very hard to acquire great wealth, fame, or physical beauty in the hope that they will thereby find personal fulfillment. It doesn't work that way.
It took James and John some time before they discovered that the man they asked to grant them the favor of privilege in his kingdom was the lens through which they could come to understand their inestimable worth in the sight of God. We are all dearly loved by God just as we are. Jesus refocused James and John's attention on the path his life had taken and would continue to take—a path with its origin in healthy self-awareness of God's love and its direction toward mutual service and care.
"I am among you as one who serves," he said. And he invites us to find meaning in the ways we share the love we receive, in the ways we care for neighbors in need, in the ways we respect the earth, in the ways we protest greed and humiliation.
The value system of God's realm is vastly different from the value systems of most human civilizations. Someone once said it's as though God sneaked into the display windows of a huge department store and changed all the price tags, indicating as cheap all the things we label expensive, and labeling as valuable all the things we regard as cheap.
Friday night as Nancy and I were leaving the rehearsal dinner, which was in a second floor restaurant in a downtown Philadelphia building, we saw a line of people waiting to get into a club which occupied the below-ground space of the building. There were the velvet ropes and a man at the door deciding who could get in and who couldn't. That decision is usually made on the basis of people's appearance or social status. A relative of the bride jokingly asked me if I wanted to try to get into the club. That brought out the preacher in me. I said (with a smile) "I'm not about to give that guy the right to decide my personal worth. I only give that power to God."
Which is a good way to end this sermon.