Poolesville Presbyterian Church
03.04.2012; Rev. David Williams
I am not, truth be told, much of a businessman. I’ve worked for businesses, far back across the long span of my working life. I dished out popcorn and movie tickets as a teen, in a floundering little independent theatre, the kind of place that showed badly dubbed Italian horror films and ran Karate Kid 2 for four straight months to empty houses. Even as a teenager, I wondered at the managerial wisdom of continuing to show a movie that was bringing in three patrons a week, as the endless repetitions of Mr. Miyagi’s muffled voice haunted my dreams. I washed dishes in academic dining halls and a little Indian restaurant, drove cabs, schlepped auto parts around on a forklift in a warehouse, and stocked shelves in a little specialty store.
I worked in a patent law firm as a clerk for a few months, but quickly realized that while 80 hour weeks and constant stress might be justified in some professions, I just couldn’t quite see it. How much of the short flicker of my mortal life did I want to dedicate to maintaining intellectual property rights on intricate japanese toilets? The answer to that question was: as little as possible. That way lies madness.
But most of my adult working life has been in nonprofit organizations and churches. The entrepreneurial dynamics of business just don’t appear to be in my genetic makeup. I look out across the landscape of my immediate family, and I see teachers and social workers and professors and government scientists and nonprofit executives...but not a whole bunch of those git-out-there-and-make-it-happen small business job creators.
I can appreciate those folk. It takes a whole bunch of courage and energy to start and run your own business. You have to be focused, and disciplined, and aware of market dynamics. You also have to be creative. And if you do all of those things, and do them with passion, you can still watch a business fail. The marketplace is red of tooth and claw, as ruthlessly Darwinian as the African savannah at dusk. Just one look across the empty storefronts in this little town speaks the truth of that. Plenty of dreams have been separated from the herd, run down, and devoured in the savage wilds of the Poolesville economy.
Some do succeed, of course. And others are wildly successful. That desire to win, to succeed, and to get as much as you can lies at the heart of our economic system. According to Nobel-prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, the entire purpose of the marketplace is to maximize profit for shareholder return. If that is the ethic that defines our whole economic life, though, what does that do to us? What effect does that have on us as persons?
This last week, a group of psychologists lead by a team at UC Berkeley released some of the results of an ongoing multi-year study of altruism, one that examines the impact of material success on giving and compassion towards others. Through a series of experiments, what this showed was that the more wealthy and materially successful you were, the less likely you were to show compassion towards others. Those self-reporting incomes over $150,000 year were more likely to use deception to “win” a game, and less likely to reveal a truth if it would impact their success. Whether this means that getting wealth makes you less moral or that less moral folks tend to be wealthy isn’t clear. Having recently done my taxes and looked at my household’s adjusted gross income, it also makes me a little concerned for my own spiritual health.
Being ruled by the desire for gain and personal benefit seems, well, to have some pretty negative consequences on who we are as a person.
Selflessness and the quest for material success are at the core of the teachings we’re receiving from Mark’s Gospel today. This collection of teachings is shared with both Matthew’s Gospel and Luke’s, although Mark presents it in a very slightly different way.
Even though Mark tends to be more hush-hush and quiet about Jesus than the other gospels, in this section both Matthew and Luke have Jesus only talking to his immediate circle of followers. Mark, on the other hand, puts this teaching out in the world, with Jesus gathering both his disciples and “the multitudes” to listen.
What he’s teaching about is how his Gospel speaks into the lives that we all lead, and how his proclamation meshes with the way we exist. As Mark took Christ’s words and shifted them into Greek for the Greek speaking world, one key term is repeated over and over again in the text, particularly verses 35 through 37.
We hear about saving life, but losing it. We hear about losing life, but saving it. We hear about getting the whole world...in the original language, gaining the whole kosmos...but losing life. And what can you give, if you’ve lost your life?
Bibles that have been translated into English don’t all agree on how to translate the word we hear rendered as “life.” The Greek term that we hear presented as life is the term psyche, and the reason that some bibles translate it as “soul” and others “life” is that this word means all of those things. It can mean the process of life, but it means more than that.
It is our person, our self, our identity, our existence, our being.
Heard in this way, it’s a bit different than the way we hear it in our language. What Jesus is challenging his listeners to do is to set aside self, and to be willing to do so in as radical a way as Jesus himself did. This came as something of a challenge for those who heard him. If your yearning was for a messiah who followed the apocalyptic model, then what Jesus was saying went radically against the expectations of the day.
It’s for that reason that Peter takes Jesus aside, because suddenly, what Jesus was saying was starting to be troubling. Teaching that the Son of man was going to die meant that those who were gathering around Jesus in the hopes that he was there to kick some Roman behind were suddenly aware that what Jesus was offering wasn’t what they’d anticipated. And as their cultural expectations were suddenly unsatisfied, they became less motivated. I’m not sure if Peter used the phrase “paying better attention to our messaging” or warned Jesus about how the optics of crucifixion-language might downmarket the brand. If he were alive today, sure, but I’m not sure marketing consultants were quite as common back in the first century. Whichever way, Jesus would have none of it.
What he warned, instead, was that a life lived in service to itself is not in keeping with the message he had come to live and teach. And this message rings as dissonant in our culture of attainment today as his rejection of the messianic warrior-mantle would have been back in his own time.
Jesus is telling us that if we’re taking what he says seriously, our identity will be woven together by the Gospel. It becomes the essence of what we are, the golden thread of grace that unifies our actions and makes us a cohesive human being. It is, personally and spiritually, the source of our integrity, and I mean that in the most literal sense of the word. It holds us together.
And when that integrity is challenged by the hunger for more, we’re required to resist it. If we yield to the desire to gain at another’s expense, then sure, we’ve gained. But we’ve lost our selves.
That doesn’t mean we can’t be entrepreneurial, or driven, or pour our hearts into making something work. Those are good things, for both businesses and...quite frankly...churches.
But the point at which we realize that our efforts have taken us away from the essence of what Christ taught, when our desire to succeed has folded in on itself and closed us off to compassion, when other human beings become adversaries to be overcome and not other children of God to be loved, that’s when we have to be prepared to ask ourselves the price of what we’re about.
Because if we we lose ourselves, what are we? All the gain in the world means nothing if we have vanished in the effort to attain it.
So here, in this second week of Lent, let’s keep ourselves about the business we’ve all been called to pursue. Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.
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