A sermon by the Rev. Guillermo A. Arboleda, written for and delivered at All Saints' Episcopal Church, Tybee Island, GA, on Sunday, September 22, 2024, the 18th Sunday after Pentecost (RCL Proper 20, Year B).
Primary Bible Reading
Mark 9:30-37
30 They went on from there and passed through Galilee. He did not want anyone to know it, 31 for he was teaching his disciples, saying to them, “The Son of Man is to be betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him, and three days after being killed, he will rise again.” 32 But they did not understand what he was saying and were afraid to ask him. 33 Then they came to Capernaum, and when he was in the house he asked them, “What were you arguing about on the way?” 34 But they were silent, for on the way they had argued with one another who was the greatest. 35 He sat down, called the twelve, and said to them, “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.” 36 Then he took a little child and put it among them, and taking it in his arms he said to them, 37 “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.”
Becoming the G.O.A.T. in God's Eyes
By the Rev. Guillermo A. Arboleda, Program Manager for New Starts, ELCA
Who is the greatest? I am a big sports fan, and one of my guilty pleasures is watching those sports debate shows like First Take on ESPN, where commentators go back and forth every day about seemingly any topic. If there is nothing interesting happening in the news, they can always come back to this debate question about greatness: Who is the G.O.A.T.? G.O.A.T. is an acronym that means “Greatest Of All Time.”
Your answer about who the GOAT is depends on what criteria you think is most important. If we are debating basketball players, your priority might be championships, so you argue for Bill Russell, who won 11 championships in his 13-year NBA career (1956-1969). Or your priority might be individual accomplishments so you argue for Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who won a record 6 Most Valuable Player (MVP) awards. Or your priority might be dominance over the rest of the competition in the league, so you argue for Michael Jordan, who led the Chicago Bulls to 6 championships in an 8-year span in the 1990s. Or you value some combination of all of these, plus longevity, and argue for LeBron James, who will begin his 21st NBA season next month and has too many accomplishments to name here. (The image above also includes the late, great Kobe Bryant.) Or maybe you are pulling for a superstar from the WNBA like Diana Taurasi, Lisa Leslie, Sheryl Swoopes, or reigning Finals MVP A’ja Wilson, whose résumés stack up favorably against those men in the NBA.
(Side Note: I apologize if basketball isn’t your thing. In brainstorming for this introduction, I considered using examples from baseball, tennis, swimming, and even acting and singing. We can catch up on those after church, if you’d like.)
In today’s Gospel story, Jesus’ disciples got caught red handed having a similar debate. But they weren’t arguing about athletes or celebrities. They were arguing about themselves. Who among us is the greatest? And what do you think their criteria were? I led our fishing crew to catch the biggest haul of the year. I just won Fastest Net Mender for the third straight year. Or maybe they were bragging about their discipleship. I have been following Jesus for the longest. Jesus invites me to go inside with him when he heals people. I once answered one of Jesus’ questions without him rolling his eyes at me.
But my hunch is that none of the disciples argued that they were the greatest because they were the greatest servant. Maybe because that’s something of an oxymoron. You cannot brag about how humble you are. Because Jesus gave a very different set of criteria for measuring greatness: “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all” (Mark 9:35). You heard that right. To be the G.O.A.T. in God’s eyes, you must be a servant to all.
This is the opposite of the message we most often hear in society, whether we are talking about the 1st century Roman Empire or the 21st century United States of America. We usually talk about greatness as a zero-sum game: I am great because you are worse than me or We are great because they are worse than us. There are winners and losers, like in sports. Professional athletes are lauded for having a single-minded focus on winning and a willingness to step on or over anyone who gets in their way. But that mindset is harmful and destructive (especially off the court).
The Letter of James clarifies for us that worldly greatness is built on “bitter envy and selfish ambition,” that is, greed and lust for more power, wealth, privilege, or prestige (James 3:14-17). The Wisdom of Solomon gets even more descriptive in some of the verses that our reading skipped over. Wisdom 2:9-11 tells us that the ungodly say to themselves, “Let no meadow be free from our revelry; everywhere let us leave signs of [our] enjoyment, because this is our portion, and this our lot. Let us oppress the righteous poor man; let us not spare the widow or regard the gray hairs of the aged. But let our might be our law of right, for what is weak proves itself to be useless.” The ungodly demonstrate their “greatness” through power over the weak; taking advantage of the poor, widowed, and elderly; and exploiting and polluting the earth. The ungodly treat everything like it is their portion to use as they see fit, rather than sharing equitably with all of God’s creatures.
Worldly greatness leads to destroying your enemies and eliminating any opposition. That is why Jesus’s life was at risk and why he would eventually be “betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him” (Mark 9:31). That kind of greatness is fundamentally self-interested and self-centered – not focused at all on servanthood. That is not what God wants for us. That is not how we ought to live.
If we want to be great in God’s eyes, we need to flip greatness upside down. We need to reorient ourselves away from self-centeredness and toward community- centeredness. We need to learn to “lift up the lowly” (Luke 1:52) and serve those in need. We need to pay attention to the needs of others and allow ourselves to be last sometimes.
This is why Jesus immediately picked up a child after saying this. He said, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me” (Mark 9:37). Children are weak. Children are needy. They are not always easy to love. But they also teach us the virtues of humility and servanthood. They teach us, at least sometimes, to place others’ needs ahead of our own. Admittedly, you can’t serve others all the time and you do need boundaries in your life to care for yourself. But most of us are not so self-giving that we don’t need this lesson.
The key here is that humility is not weakness; it is greatness. Servanthood is not weakness; it is greatness. Love for one another is a form of greatness. Our self-sacrifice for the good of the whole is how we become great. So if we want to compete for greatness, for that title of G.O.A.T., then let’s become last and servants of all. Amen.
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