18th Sunday after Pentecost

Text: James 3:13-4:3, 8-9 ; Mark 9:30-37
Grace, Peace, and Mercy from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
We live in a society obsessed with success. The world’s wisdom is always centered on getting ahead, on reaching the right place and position to be happy. Fame and success become the necessary elements that breathe life into the social environment of corporate ladders and powerful positions of influence. We are possessed by the pursuit of the “next bigger thing”, a mentality of infinite growth within an environment of finite resources. This fosters divisions between the have-nots and the fulfilled, the rich and the poor, the able and unable. And we pass through life accepting such conditions and playing its game, even when we know that our humanity is somehow demeaned by such a structure. This is where the world’s wisdom has led. Even children are sometimes not spared the influence of these dynamics, they are taught very young to pursue this route as a matter of course. Some months ago in the Boston Globe, it was talked about how in many Massachusetts communities there is an overbearing pressure for young kids to reach the top schools like Harvard and MIT and the like. This in turn has created a mental health crisis in our young people, where the pressure to succeed grinds their sense of self. Life becomes about filling up your curriculum vitae for the next step of supposed life-success. The world makes them become dependent on the idea that achieving this or that career or social goal will make them happy or great. This creates an environment of competition, where people are ranked and subjected to differing scales of worth. I am great and happy if I am worthy to get this prized job, or that scholarship, or to make this team or that competition. That is the core of worldly wisdom, to be happy, you must be great, and to be great, you must be #1, or top dog however you want to call it. You can see how this can easily become an end justifies the means existence. As James remarks, selfish ambition is the seedbed of wickedness.

However, God’s wisdom is not the wisdom of the world. God’s wisdom is even at odds with the world. Every one of us is a carrier of worldly wisdom, we take for granted the standards that the world sets for human beings. But God’s way is the way of fools according to the world. God’s way is the overturning of what the world considers wise and great. Following Jesus is to allow yourself to be shocked by the crazy things that God does. According to worldly wisdom, no sane person would do what God does. So if you are going to church to be normal, I’m sorry to inform that we are a rather strange folk. The world asks: who is the greatest? And worldly wisdom might say: well of course, those on top: the rich, the powerful, the ambitious, the achievers. But in church we affirm the complete opposite: “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.” What confrontation! The world often peddles to us the need to be the one being served, the one paid deference to, yet God in Jesus Christ says: you want to be great? Then forget yourself, be among the last, even the supposed losers, but above all, serve all with love. Not very sound career advice. Not much of a life-plan either. Yet this is what the Gospel proclaims greatness to be. It is the opposite of worldly greatness. To be last, and serve all. That is where God and true life are found.

The Brazilian priest and educator Fr. Julio Renato Lancellotti I believe encapsulates perfectly what this vision statement of the Gospel is: “I do not struggle to win. I know that I will lose. I struggle to be faithful until the end. My perspective is failure, because if I don’t fail in this system, it is because I have adhered to it”. When we become great as Christ calls us to be, we will become failures in the world, but we become failures for the sake of love. We become failures because we adhere not to the structure that declares winners and losers, but to the overwhelming compassion that sees every human being as God’s beloved child. For the great reality that is so easily missed, is that in the face of everything we are all that child that Jesus props up among the disciples, our true identity is in recognizing and living our vulnerability and powerlessness, but not as something to reject and abhor, but rather as a connecting point to all human suffering. You establish fellowship with the one thing that unites us all: our vulnerability to die, to be hurt, to be subjected and impoverished by the battering waves of life. But inhabiting this fundamental weakness of ours, and even learning to love it, to empathize with it, then we start being shaped by divine wisdom. Greatness in life then is not about being honored, it is about how deep does our love go. Greatness is faithfulness to the belovedness of every human being, from the first to the last. Is every child in our schools learning that each of them is beloved irrespective of their achievements? Are we seeing in our day to day the child that God loves in each and every person? To abide in this Gospel vision is to radically change our perception of what is essential.

This lesson reminds me of this book I’ve been going through titled Tattoos on the heart, by Fr. Gregory Boyle SJ. If there is a sign that the Kingdom of God shines through those that are last in the rungs of society, it is the ministry of Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles, California, founded by Father Boyle. Homeboy Industries works to rehabilitate and socialize former gang members by employing them and showing them that they can build a new life on the legal side of things. This work started by a church in one of the poorest and most violent neighborhoods in LA. Father Boyle and church members noticed that they had gang members meeting around the church building, and instead of calling the police or shooing them away, they started building relationships with them. They saw them not as the hard exterior and bravado they showed, but rather as the child many of the church ladies saw grow up playing soccer in the corner. Part of Fr. Boyle’s ministry is to dig deep through the layers and walls built around the soul of each gang member, for them to discover their own belovedness, that they are in fact human and capable of loving. And from Fr. Boyle’s perspective this is very hard work. It is incarnating the real mission of the church that becomes in Fr. Boyle’s words: The place that heals and convenes the Who’s who of everybody that is nobody. It is not easy to disentangle a whole lifetime of ingrained worldly wisdom that tells them that gentleness and mercy are a weakness, that they are not worth people’s attention because they have been abandoned by those closest to them, or by the society at large. Fr. Boyle has made over 30 years of ministry to gang members, and right now it is the largest rehabilitation program for gang members in the world, but it requires one essential element. It requires the true greatness of the Gospel message, it requires listening to this voice that calls the last of society first and bring them in and sees them and loves them. It requires repenting of our short sightedness and to embrace the belovedness of every person, even a gang member with a record. Reading these accounts, one can learn how to weep for all these lives that are lost because in the world we are so busy with our own ambitions. This is the movement of God in our midst. Learn to weep, touch the wounds, be where the hurt is, and share your love at exactly that place that is most uncomfortable. Being last is not easy, but it is where Love does its work. Jesus’ love took Him to the cross: He was last among the last. He did not forsake where love took Him. For each and every one of us, He took in the lastness. He died among gang members. This love that embraces so incomprehensibly, do you want it? Jesus invites you to expand your fellowship, lay down the ladder of worldly ascent and instead use the one of divine ascent, which instead of going up, goes down to where the last among us are. This life, it is here given for you freely. This is no place for the status quo. Let your love be transformed here and now, and reimagine the world anew.