A sermon by Rev. Dr. John K. Luoma
Maybe some of you saw the article in last Sunday's Beacon-Journal. It was entitled "Family Spats an Arresting Issue." Apparently fighting in families is reaching record proportions. Domestic violence cases in the Akron Municipal Courts has quadrupled in the last ten years. You heard me correctly. Domestic violence cases have quadrupled! And in Summit County Juvenile Court cases have increased nearly five times in the last ten years! What is disturbing here is not just spousal abuse. That's serious enough. What's disturbing is the rising number of family disputes into which police are being invited in. Many of these situations being situations which families have traditionally been able to handle on their own.
What is the reason for all the fighting among us? Well, that is a question that dates all the way back to the day when Cain slew Abel. And the writer of James raises the question for us today, and he gives the answer to it if we are willing to listen. James says, "Those conflicts and disputes among you, where do they come from?"
The first answer James gives is covetousness. (James 4:2-6) Covetousness is the desire for more and more possessions. We want what we do not have, and we will do anything to get it. Dave Daubert tells of the visit of an African pastor to his congregation. The pastor was visiting from Tanzania, and he was from an area where there were few material things. Even paper and pencils were a treasured commodity. He had seen a few electronic things when people visited from America but that was about it. While he was visiting, his host thought it would be a good idea to take him to one of the huge electronics stores, because he might find something useful there to take back to Tanzania. But the poor pastor was almost overwhelmed by what he saw. Walls of televisions next to walls of computers next to walls of stereos blaring out loud music. It wasn't long before his eyes were burning, his head was hurting, and he could no longer think straight. He had to leave the store. As distressing as the visit to the store was, it had a strange effect on him. He was infected with a buying disease. He wanted all the things he saw. He asked people to buy things for him, and he would get frustrated because people had things that he didn't have. Finally, he realized what was happening to him. He saw how easy it was to covet material things, and he saw the very results that James describes, i.e. disputes and conflicts. (James 4:2) His covetousness had put him at odds with the people around him. "Those conflicts and disputes among you, where do they come from?" They come from covetousness, says James, but they also come from "selfish ambition." (James 3:14) What is selfish ambition? It is the belief that our worth as a person is based on our worldly status. And we are all afflicted by this, aren't we? Even the best of us.
You may remember the story of Robert Schuller, the great tele-evangelist, appearing in Federal Court just a few years ago. He pleaded innocent to the charges, but the judge thought otherwise. He was sentenced to an informal supervision program in which he had to check in regularly with authorities for six months by phone or by mail. He also had to pay a fine of eleven hundred dollars. What had Schuller done? As he got onto his flight at the airport, he demanded special privileges; and this led to an altercation with the flight attendant. He didn't want to be inconvenienced by the same rules that everyone else had to follow. He judged that he was better than those around him, and he deserved privileges that they didn't deserve. And the result of selfish ambition is exactly what James describes-it causes disorder and wickedness. (James 3:16)
Well, too often we lapse into that kind of behavior, don't we? It is just more apparent when it happens to a person of note. We don't expect to see it in a person who knows Jesus so well. Why is there fighting among us? Certainly it comes from covetousness and selfish ambition, but I think that there is even a more basic answer than that.
And we get the answer as we listen to our Gospel story today. The answer is that we want to feel important. The story tells us that this is exactly what the disciples were arguing about that day as they were traveling with Jesus. And this is the question, isn't it? Am I important? Am I of any value? Am I of any worth? I can't tell you the number of times people come to me asking exactly that question. They say, "I feel worthless. I feel unimportant. I feel as if I have no value. If I died tomorrow, no one would miss me."
Am I important? We need the answer to that question more than any question we could ask. And the answer is not that I am important because of my possessions or worldly position. Jesus gives us the answer, and the answer comes in the form of two words: submit and serve. The only way we are going to gain the sense of importance that we need is to submit to God. We are never going to find a sense of worth in covetousness and status seeking. We will not find it in covetousness because no matter how much we have, it will never be enough. We will never find it in status seeking because no matter what status we achieve there will always be someone above us. As James says, these things will always result in disorder and disputes. In the pre-eminent statement on submission Jesus says, "If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross and follow me." (Mark 8:34)
How is it that we can do this? How can we deny ourselves? Because in Jesus we need no longer worry about our importance. Because of what God has done in Jesus, we are considered important by God. No matter what we do we cannot increase in importance nor decrease in importance before God's eyes. Because of Jesus our importance is forever established. Because that is the case, we can deny ourselves, take up the cross which is the life of love and service.
In his wonderful book, Celebration of Discipline, Richard Foster has a lot to say about the words submission and service. He says that we are a society in which we are obsessed with having things go our way. If things do not go our way, we are willing to spend days, weeks, months ,even years in a stew just because we did not get what we wanted. He contends that most fights that occur among couples, in families, and even in churches occur because we want to get our own way. We say we are fighting about principle, but we are simply fighting to get our own way. Foster contends that if we could only come to see that most things in life are not major issues, life would be so much easier.
All of which raises an interesting question: what kind of disputes are going on in our lives because we are insisting on our own way? Where are those situations in our marriages and in our families and in our congregation where we could just give in for the sake of peace and harmony? We need to submit to God, and we need to submit to each other. And Jesus not only asks us to submit, he asks us to serve.
The call to take up our cross is the call to put to death the part of us that says that our importance lies in piling up things and gaining privileges.
The call to take up our cross is the call to serve.
Foster says, "Christ not only died a cross death, he lived a cross life." He was willing to deny himself for the sake of serving others. He flatly rejected the whole cultural set-up around him which said that a person is only important if he had position or possessions. And in the very last words of our Gospel he describes the radical service to which he calls us. He says that we are even supposed to welcome children. Now that doesn't sound too radical to us, and so we need to understand it in the context of his day. To put it simply, children in that day were regarded as nobodies. They had no rights. They had no status. The only importance they had was derived from their families. And so Jesus is saying that we are called to serve even the most lowly around us.
And so to a society that says: "you must establish your own worth. You have no worth unless you have position or possessions," Jesus says, "God regards you as worthy because of me. Accept your worth. Submit to what I say. You are loved. Live a life of love and service."
Copyright 2000 by Rev. Dr. John K. Luoma