Prayer: Come Holy Spirit, come.  Take my lips and speak with them.  Take our minds and think with them.  Take our hearts and set them in fire with love for you.  In Christ’s name, we ask it.  Amen.

The Hyde Park Bank in Chicago, Illinois came up with a terrific marketing idea.  The bank’s executives decided to produce a public relations brochure that would describe what they called the bank's community re-investment program.  So, they had a marketing agency create a lively poster to be displayed in public schools around Chicago, inviting children to submit pictures and essays on the topic of: “My Neighborhood.”  The winning entries would be used in the bank’s brochure.  

The bank’s president went on to say, “The responses we received stunned us.”  The bank expected “brightly colored, childish drawings of trees and houses, and funny little stories about the postman and the people on the block.”  The first essay submitted was by an 8-year-old girl named Gail Whitmore.  Gail’s first sentence indicated that the project was going in a different direction than the one the bank intended.  “In my neighborhood,” Gail wrote, “there is a lot of shooting and three people got shot.”  Another boy named Charlie wrote, “Hello, my name is Charlie.  I live in a slum.  Some people call it hell on earth and so do I.”  At the time, Charlie was twelve.

The bank president notes that the pictures are deceptively innocent, “In colorful pictures of buildings and trees and kids playing, one might see, on closer look, people shooting at each other, or a drug deal…two bright suns are shining over a playground with smiling people, one of whom is shooting a gun.”  The fact is that by the time most children living in the Chicago inner-city turn five, the majority of the children have had some personal encounter with handgun violence.  I am certain that there are parts of Austin and parts of most cities in our nation in which children live similar lives of desperation.

Our Gospel lesson today is one of two final stories recorded in Mark’s Gospel before Jesus makes his journey into Jerusalem and from there to the cross.  Our attention in Mark’s Gospel is now being directed away from Jesus’ miracles, healings, and teachings and directed toward our Lord’s passion—his suffering and death on the hard wood of the cross for the sins of the whole world—sins like the ones sadly committed too often when our children are witnesses to and subject to abuse and violence.  Perhaps more so than any of the other three canonical Gospel’s, from the beginning of this Gospel, Mark has been pointing his readers to the cross.  For Mark, it is on the cross, and there alone, that Jesus reveals to the world what it means to be God’s Son, God’s Messiah-the Savior and Redeemer of the world. 

Jesus says, “For the son of man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life, a ransom for many.”  In other words for Mark, Jesus’ divinity is understood though the self-sacrificial love he demonstrated in giving away all that he had, even his very life, on the cross, so that we might all come within the reach of God’s loving embrace.  Perhaps said more simply, in Mark’s Gospel, Jesus’ identity and purpose is rooted in the great service of giving his life for our sin on the cross. 

The heart of Jesus’ teaching in today’s Gospel lesson is a call for us, as disciples of Jesus, to become like Him in his sacrifice on the cross.  That is to become one who seeks to serve more than being served, one who is willing to give him or herself up for the benefit and welfare of others…whether a friend, a family member, or a stranger like Gail or Charlie or any one of the unimaginable number of children exposed to abuse and violence in our world.             

Because the cross is so central to understanding Mark’s Gospel and because the cross is looming before Jesus in today’s passage, I would like to use the cross as a symbol for Jesus’ teaching on discipleship.  The up and down post or beam that forms the “backbone” of the cross points toward God, drawing a straight line—the shortest distance between two points—between heaven and Earth, between Creator and creation, between the divine and the human.  The vertical beam of the cross reminds us of our need to be connected to and nurtured by God.  The horizontal portion of the cross—the crossbeam—points out sideways in both directions, extending like outstretched “arms"” as though to reach out to every living thing in the community of creation.  Arms’ outstretched in welcome is a symbol of compassion and service.  Jesus’ out stretched arms on the cross become for us the fullest example of one who came not to be served but to serve.  So we reach up to God who is our ever-present source of help and empowerment in order to reach out to those people and places that we are called to serve.

James and John, in today’s lesson, are not focused on either the vertical or the horizontal. Mark tells us that James and John approach Jesus and say, “Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left in your glory.”  James and John express no concern for a vertical connection to God or horizontal service toward others.  Instead, they are focused inward.  They are chiefly concerned with their own future status in Jesus’ ministry.  These two disciples decide to line up early for the good seats among the heavenly host.  However, rather than affirming a position of authority for James and John, Jesus accuses them both of being no different than the rest of the status-seeking, power-mongering tyrants of their own day.  Far from offering them sanctified seating arrangements in eternity, Jesus tells his disciples that they must be slaves, servants, the last and least and lowest of all, if they wish to be great.  Discipleship, Jesus insisted, is not a direct ticket to some eternal easy street.  Rather it is a commitment to life as a servant for others.  A heavenly destination of distinction is not to be the disciple’s “goal.”  Instead, as a disciple, they are called to a life of being connected to God in order to serve others.

Now James and John must have felt double-crossed, if you will, by Jesus.  There is no doubt that the disciples, James, John, and the rest, thought that being a follower of God’s Messiah would include perks, priority, privilege and position in the coming kingdom.  But they were profoundly mistaken.  Jesus did not “double-cross” his disciples in a misleading sense.  However, Jesus does call his followers, including us, to a “double-cross” discipleship—a discipleship in which we experience the power of the vertical crossbeam combined with the compassion of the horizontal crossbeam.  

It is this “double-cross” that informed Jesus’ sense of mission and enabled him to carry out his sacrificial gift of love for all on the cross.  Jesus understood, and experienced in his ultimate sacrifice, that the more powerfully vertical one’s relationship is to God, the more profoundly horizontal one’s relationship is to others.  It was as Jesus reached out and claimed his unique relationship with God as His Divine Son that he was able to stretch out his arms on the cross as the Suffering Servant, taking on all humanity's sins.   

Are you a double-cross disciple?  Is the power and passion of the vertical sustaining you for the presence and compassion of the horizontal?  Do you have a close connection with God that empowers your witness and good work in the world?

Remember the story with which I began about the surprising pictures and essays that Hyde Park Bank in Chicago collected from inner-city children.  Well, with support from the bank, a woman named Linda Waldman published the pictures and essays in a fine little book called, “My Neighborhood: The Words and Pictures of Inner-City Children.”  The book is considered both profoundly moving and disturbing.  But it is also considered inspiring, because somehow, in spite of all they have seen and experienced, these kids, exposed to poverty and violence, are full of hope: not despair or cynicism, but hope. 

I believe those children’s hope, at least in part, is rooted in God who is steadfast in his love for his children—and I also believe that God’s steadfast love is manifest chiefly through the lives and the service of His disciples—that’s you and me.  Discipleship is vertical and horizontal.  It is a call to reach up to God and out to others.  Children like Gail and Charlie’s hope rests, in part, on people like us…people like us taking being a disciple of Jesus seriously.  Amen

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