Sermon: It's Not Weird, It's Different

St. Columba's Inverness, CA

October 20, 2024

22nd Sunday After Pentecost

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I’m honored to be here with you today, to be welcomed so wholeheartedly by this community. I’ve had the opportunity to meet many of you by now and had the joy of hearing some of your stories in depth.  

(For those who don’t know me yet, my connection to St. Columba’s began in May when I traveled here to do research for my Doctor of Ministry dissertation on contemplative communities by way of interviewing some of you and observing what you do here.)  

This is now my third trip out to Inverness in the last five months, so I think it’s safe to say I’ve been fully sucked into the vortex that is St. Columba’s. 

I knew it from the first day I arrived and the first conversations I had with you—this community is special. And you know how it is, when you find something special. You simply want more of it in your life. So, here I am. 

I believe there is a bit of that longing to be near something special in the story we read today in Mark’s gospel. The disciples James and John approached Jesus and asked him to allow them to sit at his right and left hand, next in line to him in the coming Kingdom. When the other disciples heard this, the text says they began to grow angry at them.  

Now, I’ve always heard this explained as a grab for power. These brothers wanted positions ruling alongside the future king in his glory and the other disciples were angry at this audacious request. I think that is part of the story. We see time and time again that the disciples misunderstood the kind of Kingdom Jesus wanted to build, that they were looking for a powerful, political Messiah Jesus was never going to be.  

But I think there’s more to this request than looking for some leadership position in a new empire that will overthrow the current one. The disciples had gotten a glimpse of something truly great. They’d heard his teachings and seen the miraculous things Jesus could do, and they’d tasted it themselves—what it was like to be leaders in this movement. Earlier in chapter 6, Mark tells us: “They went out and preached that people should repent. They drove out many demons and anointed many sick people with oil and healed them.” 

Then they came to Jesus asking to be given seats of honor, to be validated as part of this great work Jesus was doing. Don’t we all want that—to belong to something great? To be in the inner circle? To be seen as valued, as worthy? 

It’s our human nature—this desire to be special. And our culture teaches us early that this means being the best. Want your parents to be proud? Get good grades, be the perfect child. Want lots of friends and to get picked first for all the teams? Be the best at whatever sport. Be cool, fit in…and on and on this goes through our lives—the cultural conditioning that stokes our natural desire to be loved, to belong, to be enough.  We learn it in our religious cultures as well. Want God to be pleased with you? Do all the right things to earn God’s favor.  

Jesus knows this is in our hearts and he knows it’s the way of the world. Instead of rebuking James and John, he called the other disciples over and gave them all a lesson. 

“Yes, I know the way the world works, the way of hierarchy and ladder climbing and worrying about who is best,” Jesus was saying. “But it is not so among you; 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.”  

The gospel of Mark is full of the theme of reversal – turning our ideas of the way the world works and who God is – upside down. Here the author of Mark gives us a sneak peek inside a reordering of relationships in the the Kingdom of God. This is what a life of discipleship should look like – contrary to our natural and cultural tendencies to always elevate our own interests.  

Doing anything against our nature and our cultural conditioning is just plain hard work. I learned a thing or two about it when living in the Middle East and South Asia. 

In 2017 my family moved to Dhaka, Bangladesh to support the work of a non-profit working in economic development and education. I thought, “I’ve got this.” We’d lived in Egypt previously and I’d spent significant time visiting and living in India.  

But life in Bangladesh threw me for a loop. Everything was foreign—from a complex language with a completely different script and syntax to figuring out how to navigate the most densely populated city on earth through a combination of bicycle rickshaws, auto rickshaws, and complicated bus systems that you literally jumped from as they kind of slowed to a stop. I’ve truly never felt so helpless or out of place, like a complete toddler.  

There were all kinds of cultural differences that we just couldn’t wrap our Western minds around. I can’t tell you how many times I told our then six-and eight-year-old children, “It’s not weird; it’s just different.”  

Toilets that are holes in the ground that you squat over - “It’s not weird; it’s just different.” 

Stepping out into the 6 lanes of traffic, just dodging and weaving between cars to get to the other side like a game of frogger - “It’s not weird; it’s just different.” 

Cow heart curry – “Okay kids, I’ll give it to you. That one is a little weird.” 

But truly, one of the hardest things to grasp was the necessity of having someone work in our home. We were told by our boss that the first thing we should do was to hire an ayah—someone to cook, clean, and be with the kids when we were at the office.  

It was a cultural expectation for us as rich foreigners—and believe me, as little as we believed we had, in a country where most people live on $1 a day, we were rich. We would be seen as arrogant if we didn’t offer someone a job when we could afford to and there were things we just couldn’t do as foreigners that out ayah could handle for us. 

I’ll never forget the first day Afea came to work in our flat. She spoke more words in English than I did in Bangla—and that was about three. Our communication consisted mostly of pointing at things and baffled looks. We would call down to our office to find someone who could translate so she could explain simple things to the ignorant American—things like, “No you bought the wrong kind of rice. I said long grain rice. This is short grain only used for fried rice. Don’t you know there are ten different kinds? I can’t possibly make curry with this.” I felt like this was never going to work. 

It felt even worse when we tried to explain the situation to our friends back in Georgia. We knew this was a cultural expectation to hire a house helper. But we couldn’t quite get that concept across to others—“Wait, what—is she like a servant?” they’d ask. 

In our culture, this idea of “servant” has a strange mix of connotations. We elevate servant leadership as some ideal but then we often think of being a servant the way our friends did when they talked about Afea – as the help, as less than. 

In Christian culture, we often talk about service in similar ways, but servanthood is about far more than an act of volunteering or cleaning up after an event or a donation we make – things we can easily check off our list so we can say we were a good Christian with a servant’s heart.  

Afea—this quiet, kind, funny, Muslim woman who faithfully showed up at our flat five days a week for a year and a half to work—taught me what it really means to be a servant. And it had nothing to do with the cooking or cleaning.  

As vivid as the memory of Afea’s first day with our family is for me, it is nothing compared to the memory of her last day with us. Those conversations that began with awkward pointing and an inability to understand each other were night and day to the tears we cried as we held onto each other in the early morning hours of our last day in Dhaka. 

 For nine months she showed up every day with a smile on her face—no matter what was going on in her life. And her life was not easy by any stretch of the imagination. She lived in a single room slum-house. She worked hard to put aside money for her daughter’s school fees in a country where girls often stopped going to school to get married not many years older than her 7-year-old daughter. Her son, at 14, had stopped going to school and was a day laborer. Her husband was a rickshaw driver who would sometimes steal the money she brought home to support his drug habit. 

In the early days we fumbled to figure out our rhythms and how to communicate with each other. She patiently showed me everything, like the helpless child I was in her culture. She taught me the names of foods and spices and showed me how to make them. She stayed long past the time her work was done because she wanted to see Aidan enjoy the snacks she made just for him, the only ones my picky son would eat. She wanted to sit with Nadia, to braid her hair and make her chai. She just wanted to be with us, giving of her precious time. 

I don’t know when the switch occurred—when Afea became the first person who could understand my fumbling Bangla, who I could carry on a full conversation with. But it did. As strange as our friends back in the U.S. had thought it was having someone work in our home, our friends there in Bangladesh now looked with curiosity on our relationship with Afea. Most people kept their house helper at arm’s length. She was an employee after all. 

We did not, could not, ever see Afea this way. It’s a funny thing – in South Asian culture you don’t call someone older by their first name. You call them a version of Auntie or Uncle. And my kids truly saw her as an Auntie. This wasn’t a formality. She was family. 

We celebrated Muslim holidays at her home, and we introduced her to Christmas at ours. We did what we could to help with tuition. She turned around and used some of that precious money to buy chocolates for our kids. When our son was sick, Afea made him homemade remedies. When her daughter was sick, she came to sleep in our bed during the day and we’d read books together—her grasp of English growing faster than my grasp of Bangla.  

The language barrier never did fully go away. There were things I wanted to say to her that I just never could. But she knew our family better than a single other person in that country. She wasn’t just there in our home. She was truly present. She was always curious, always asking how we were, what she could do for us, how she could pray for us. She never stopped showing up and showing us selfless love in whatever ways she could, with whatever little she had to give. She never stopped making us feel we belonged there—part of her culture, part of her family.  

Of all the goodbyes we said when we left Dhaka to move back to the U.S., saying goodbye to Afea was the hardest. She showed up at 4:30 that morning, literally sat in our living room until we walked out the door with our all our worldly possessions in hand, refusing to leave until we were out of sight. “Tomakay bhalobashi. Washtini Awi—I love you, I miss you.” Thanks to Afea, these words I know how to say in Bangla.  

Jesus tells the disciples, concerned with their own value and worth, with belonging and favoritism: “Whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all” adding as an example of this kind of servanthood that “the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.” 

In my evangelical upbringing, I heard a lot about Jesus’ life being a ransom for many – verses like this pointing to the cross as payment for our sin. That’s not what Jesus is saying here. In this context, Jesus is talking about power and servitude, not about sin or our need for forgiveness.  

The Old Testament equivalent of the word Greek word lytron meaning “ransom” that Jesus used here is often used when referring to the liberation of people, not by means of payment, but by divine strength. One example would be when God says to the Israelites in Exodus 6:6 – “I am the Lord, and I will free you from the burdens of the Egyptians and deliver you from slavery to them. I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with mighty acts of judgement.” Here, God is acting to deliver people from an oppressive order into a new way of living—making them a new people, a new community. 

Jesus is therefore declaring that he will give his life to free people from oppression and captivity to another power. They won’t be slaves anymore to this nature of always looking to be worthy, to be the best, to climb over one another. He is restoring them to membership in the community that corresponds to God’s reign. In this Kingdom, last is first and we can live contrary to nature and culture that says we must claw our way to recognition.  

In this Kingdom, Jesus says to be great is to be a servant, using the Greek work diakonos. That certainly challenges normal expectations—this idea of serving others, but Jesus pushes further. He goes onto say that the be first is to be a slave. Slaves were at the bottom of the social ladder, with no rights at all. This is the Greek word Doulas. The feminine version of this word is Doula – a female slave. 

We certainly recognize that word, Doula - It began to be used in the 1970s to name a role that has existed since antiquity, a person who accompanies another in a time of transition– the most common being times of birth and death. 

A doula walks with someone at a moment when a person is at their most vulnerable. These liminal spaces of walking with a mother as she gives birth and accompanying someone in their final moments requires deep compassion, listening, and care. It’s not about the doula at all in these moments. In fact, they almost must disappear. After building a relationship of trust and care, they are there to serve the person in their most difficult time, to lay down their life to do this holy work.  

That’s the kind of servanthood Afea embodied in our lives—and I pray we did in return for her and her family. That little community we built in a fifth floor flat on the other side of the world was truly something rare and special and a reminder to me of what it looks like to lay down your life for another.  

You see, Jesus isn’t talking about who does the chores no one wants to do when he says we must be servants and slaves to be great. He is describing a completely different way of living than the one dictated by our desire to be first and best. In Christ, we’re free from that oppressive need to try to earn our worth.  

Being a disciple—being part of the Body of Christ—is not about who does the menial tasks or the heavy lifting. It’s about being vulnerable and transparent. When we feel out of sorts, do we show up honestly and ask for help? Are we present enough in this space together to see the needs of others, the ways we can walk with each other through the hard, holy moments?  

I believe, in this place, the answer to that question is often yes. Like I said, I saw it the first time I came and it’s why I keep coming back. Indeed, I spoke of this rare and beautiful embodiment you are of the Body of Christ in a presentation I made about my research at the 40^th anniversary conference of Contemplative Outreach just a few weeks ago in Atlanta. I spoke about the intentionality it takes to truly live out what it means to be the mystical body of Christ in this world – and how I’ve seen your leadership and your people – working to be just that. 

But oh, how easy it is to slip into our old natures and cultural conditioning—to forget we belong, that we’re loved, that we’re enough. It doesn’t come naturally to us, and everything in our culture teaches us to live contrary to this. To live in community with a “what’s in it for me?” mentality is easy.  

It’s so much harder to lay down our lives over and over for each other, to keep showing up and doing the real work of being a Beloved Community. Thank God we don’t do it on our own strength and we never do it alone. 

So, St. Columba’s—may you be diligent to continue in this hard and holy work and may Christ be ever more real to you to you as you walk out this messy, beautiful journey of discipleship together. Amen.