Whose Glory?

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  I want to start out by sharing a little something about myself, something that is deeply true of me as a maker, listener, and lover of music: I am a huge liner notes nerd. I grew up in the CD era–just barely catching the tail end of cassettes, such that I remember buying Bad Hair Day by Weird Al Yankovic on tape from a Blockbuster Music in a strip mall (and if that sentence didn’t send you back in time then we can chat about Laserdiscs later)—but with both cassette and CD, I would spend the afternoons of my pre-teen years lying on my back in my bedroom, listening to albums front-to-back and reading the tiny typed liner notes in my hand, learning the secrets of who made what sound and how in the breakup song that’s bringing tears to my eyes even though I haven’t started dating yet. This was pre-internet, so the images I had available of the musicians who were rocking my world were pretty much limited to what was in the album art. Sure, sometimes a band would do a photo shoot for a magazine, but more so for the pop stars on MTV than the dorky piano bands I was enjoying.

  Part of this fascination was just, “As an aspiring music-maker, how do these amazing things get made?” Why does Nirvana’s Nevermind sound SO GOOD? The media insists it’s these three guys—or, to be honest, plenty of people thought it was just Kurt—but the liner notes told a different story. When I looked at the pictures, they told me that great music is made by singular figures of greatness, these towering stars; but when I looked at the liner notes, they told me that it took a whole village of engineers, mixers, a random cymbal guy, a cellist, a background singer who swung by the studio, buried deep in the mix.

  I carried this sort of bifurcated view of the music industry—the work we celebrate versus the work we conceal–for a long time. Who gets the credit, who gets the glory, and who’s doing the work. But it wasn’t until I started working with pop producers in New York that I learned that the efforts to reduce group work to individual genius are very much intentional on behalf of the industry. We hide writers of pop songs, players of drums and bass and all the stanky rhythm instruments that let us dance, and on purpose create narratives that deposit all creative responsibility and credit in the hands of the top billed person. Why? Because people want it. It’s a monument to the glory of individual greatness, and it sells because we crave it.

  It is that deep-seated, very human desire to witness and participate in individual greatness that I want us to use as a lens through which to view this gospel scene. Jesus has just told his disciples of the inevitability of his death. They’re on the road to Jerusalem, the very place where Jesus tells them he will be seized and murdered by the authorities. When we hear James and John making this request of Jesus, to sit at his right and left hand, it’s coming in a moment of fear, an anticipation of loss. The lectionary actually had us starting at verse 35, with the request, but doing so unfairly maligns these two disciples, I think. There’s a very real fear of losing their friend, their teacher, in the air. Jesus has just told them what is to come, and so when he asks them if they will drink from the same cup, it’s not some cryptic reference—they were JUST talking about it.

  And James and John weren’t just a couple of nobodies! Besides Peter, James and John are the only other disciples regularly mentioned by name at all the important events in the gospel of Mark. They’re the third and fourth disciples whom Jesus calls, after Simon-Peter and his brother Andrew. Did you know they’re also the only other disciples besides Peter to receive nicknames from Jesus? (I always wanted to be a nickname kid… at summer camp I remember all the cool kids getting names like Turbo or whatever, and me just wishing someone would assign me something, preferably with a Z or a K in there) But James and John, in the same conversation where Jesus calls Simon “Peter, the rock”, he gives them one of the coolest tandem nicknames I’ve ever heard: Sons of Thunder! I’d love to see their liner notes… But you know, according to Mark, these Sons of Thunder were right there with Peter for all the tough stuff: resurrecting the official’s daughter in Capernaum, the transfiguration on the mountaintop, praying in the Garden of Gethsemane. In fact, just last week we heard of them admonishing folks who drove out demons in the name of someone other than Jesus, only to be admonished in turn by Jesus himself (Mark 10:17-31)! Point is, they are present, they are inner circle. When I hold all that in my hand, their request doesn’t seem quite so ludicrous or selfish. In fact, I start to see inklings of courage and bravery in there. They’re willing to do the work.

  And yet! Jesus says No to the promise of glory, No to the right and left hand seats. He seems to say, You can do the work but it’s not up to me who sits here, who receives the glory. The attention, the credit. And then the other disciples get mad! Angry, even! Interesting how one or two person’s aspirations to individual greatness can turn a whole group in on itself. I wonder what kinds of things they grumbled. Did they accuse them of being gauche, tacky? Selfish? Or did they, too, desire a portion of the glory?

  The text doesn’t give us these answers. What it does give us is Jesus’ answer, an answer that he gives in response to seeing infighting among his disciples:

  “You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them.”

  The Gentiles, an outside group. Not just a specific group, but actually a broad term for the variegated peoples conquered by and assimilated into the Roman Empire. Remember that one of the central tensions for ancient Jews in an occupied Jerusalem was the question of assimilation: Should we blend into the zeitgeist and enjoy greater security, or should we refuse to assimilate and risk retaliation? So when Jesus brings up Gentiles—basically everybody else—know that differentiation is danger here. And yet, despite the risk, Jesus levies this criticism that I think is much more cutting and incisive than it first seems. Look at that phrase, “those whom they recognize as their rulers”—do you see that complicity, that participation called out in between the lines? The active verb there is “recognize,” which puts a certain onus on the ruled. In that tiny turn of phrase, Jesus implies that the Gentiles are, at least to an extent, choosing this. And what is it that they choose? For someone to lord their power over them, to equivocate greatness with tyrannical impulses. It’s a form of power, a shape of power, an ancient thread that runs through the scriptures. A former professor of mine referred to it like this: there is power and there is power-over. There is power in love, in truth, in sacrifice; and there is power in putting someone else down. The power of cooperation versus the power of conflict. In this great story of a non-coercive God accompanying and guiding us through the ages, one of the central challenges has always been how to interpret the holy power of God without confusing it with the human invention of power-over.

  “But it is not so among you,” Jesus continues, “but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all.”

  How’s that for power dynamics? How’s that for hierarchy? In a way that is just so human, so understanding, Jesus seems to acknowledge that seeking greatness is built into many of our hearts. Some of us want it for ourselves. Some of us just want to see it, to be near it. And that’s as true for the Gentiles as it is for the disciples, as it is for the American electorate, as it is for anyone who wants to pretend like Nirvana was a Kurt Cobain project instead of a band of collaborators. But instead of quashing the impulse towards greatness, Jesus redefines what greatness is. He’s saying, Look, out there they have this one idea of what makes a person great. It’s not like that in here, for us. They’re choosing that model, and we’re building a different one. And here’s what I especially love about it: this isn’t just a moral critique, it’s a system! Because everytime you serve someone, you voluntarily relinquish your power, such that the pursuit of this greatness is in the same instance a rejection of the other kind. It is circular. It is peculiar on purpose. It is stable and sustainable not because of one great leader keeping everything in place, but because of the constant motion of whoever’s on top moving themselves to the bottom through love and service.

  “For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

  For us Christians, this must be the definition of greatness. If we sign ourselves up to be ruled by tyrants—even if those tyrants aren’t one of us, even if we don’t want the glory for ourselves but instead want to gaze upon the magnificent monument—we betray this fundamental aspect of Jesus’ call. And that’s not just sad because we ignore our friend and teacher; Jesus doesn’t demand obedience for obedience’s sake, but because he is showing us a path to our greatest flourishing. The rigidity of tyrannical rule doesn’t allow for the vast multitude of human experience and expression that God crafted in each of us, in the totality of us. Tyranny demands a homogeneity, a sameness in culture that is a direct denial of the holy diversity baked into creation and affirmed throughout the Bible.

  Somewhere along the way, we lost sight of that. Some say the shift happened way back when Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity, suddenly rocketing it from radical splinter group to state religion. Some say that American Protestantism is on its own particular journey these last few hundred years, accruing the dark baggage of colonialism, Manifest Destiny and slavery while also riding high on what a (theoretically) representative democracy can accomplish. Unlike Jesus and the twelve, we actually do have political power! We can vote and shape our society! And indeed, while we’ve still got a long way to go in terms of how we distribute it, we really have generated a massive amount of prosperity. And yet this temptation to go back remains constant, perhaps louder than ever these days. This temptation to chase a certain kind of tyrannical glory rises and recedes through the decades, but it never really goes away for good, does it? “Just this once, just this one time,” we tell ourselves, “We’ll use that power to set things right, and then we’ll put it away for good.” In each age, we confront ourselves again.

  In a few weeks, we’ll find out what the American people have chosen this time. If you’re scared, stressed, distracted, fidgety—well, me too. And I know that many of us have very strong feelings about what outcome we want for our country. That’s not wrong—so do I. But as we continue to get out the vote, have these conversations, advocate for our candidate, I want to say something explicitly, perhaps bluntly: the broad traditions of American Protestantism don’t often prepare us for outcomes other than victory. Outcomes other than triumph. Sometimes, we get so caught up in the theology of an assured victory that we get blindsided into despair when that victory doesn’t materialize. And it’s easy to feel alone in that despair. Hear me when I say, You are not alone. We’re still here, as a church, as disciples. And in fact, in a month we’re gathering to have our own internal vote on denominational affiliation, our own democratic process of consensus building and trusting. Sure, we bicker about who sits where, who deserves credit when and why, probably some of us wish we had a super cool nickname, but that’s as old as our tradition itself. But If you are feeling the creep of that election despair, remember that the inaugurators of the Way did so from a position of zero political power. The power that the rest of the world recognized as “great” did not rest in the hands of either Jesus or the twelve. I’m sure they had feelings about who was emperor, too! But what did Jesus do with the disciples? He brought them back to a place of service. Look for who needs help and go to them. There will always be people who need help, regardless of who sits atop the throne, regardless of who claims to be great. Let us go to them. After all, didn’t dear Mr. Rogers tell us something about helpers? “When I was a boy,” he said, “and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’” When the scared, the vulnerable of the world look up from the news, may you, may I, may we all be found among the helpers.