Obedience to the Present Moment
A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the 21st Sunday After Pentecost by the Rev. Holly Huff, Deacon.
James and John want to be great. They come to Jesus asking for a favor. It’s sort of a cosmic favor, at least as they see it, and really it’s more demand than request. They say, “Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.” Jesus turns, listens, and responds to them with loving, bemused attention, “All right, what is it you want me to do for you?” James and John want front row seats in the kingdom, and they want to be powerful in the way they imagine Jesus is powerful. “Grant us to sit one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory.”
What does it mean to be in Jesus’ glory? When we think of glory and greatness, fantasies of success, honor, accolades, money, power, reputation start to run across our vision; as if we were wearing virtual reality goggles and suddenly starring in an action movie. When we think of what it would mean to be glorious and great, we imagine how it would feel to be big, big enough that we are finally no longer afraid. Big enough that we are not subject to human weakness and suffering but in control, able to lord it over others. We fantasize about life and reality answering to us, serving us, and doing whatever we ask. This is I think the sort of glory James and John are imagining, and when we’re honest we can see the same desire for control in ourselves, usually not because we lust for power in itself but because we are afraid, we are afraid of what might happen to us in an uncertain world where nothing is guaranteed and no one is safe.
Jesus hears James and John’s request–slash–demand and tells them, “You don’t know what my glory is.” “You do not know what you are asking.” Jesus’ glory is something different than prestige or power, and it has to do instead with how he moves in the world, how he lives each moment, even and especially the difficult ones, in intimate, unbroken connection with his Father: “Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, and be baptized with the baptism with which I am baptized?” He asks.
The cup and the baptism here are usually taken to refer to the crucifixion and death that are to come, and they do—Jesus prays “Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me—nevertheless, your will be done” and he drinks the cup presented to him to the dregs. Going to his death on the cross as a sheep to the slaughter he does not flinch but plunges into that baptism, and so it is that new life splits the waters of death, sin, and despair.
But the cup and the baptism here point to more than the way Jesus is to die. Drinking the cup or being baptized are not just an event in the future but a way of being, now and always. The cup that Jesus drinks is the receptive, attentive obedience he embodies in every moment. Turning toward whatever life brings, fair or foul, in accepting, self-forgetful love is his baptism. He is drinking the cup now, being baptized now. “Can you drink the cup that I drink, and be baptized with the baptism with which I am baptized?”
To this weighty question James and John reply, “Yep! We are able.” with a blithe self-assurance that makes me suspect they still don’t get it. Receiving with open hands whatever life brings is one thing when everything is coming up roses, but quite another when facing the changes and chances of life as we so often are: when the baptisms presented to us each day are the loss of job, a difficult diagnosis, the sudden death of a loved one, or a confrontation with intractable injustices as cruel as they are mundane. How do we respond when the cup before us is the isolation and anxiety of living through this pandemic time? or when the cup holds a growing realization of the devastation human beings have wrought upon “this fragile earth, our island home”?
Very often, our response to suffering is to not respond. We deny responsibility; we turn away. Averting our eyes, we become very busy with urgent errands we’ve just remembered. Armed with our sedatives of choice, even those as apparently harmless as Netflix or Solitaire or refreshing the news, we attempt to re-settle these uncomfortably raw encounters with reality numbly—and safely—under the surface. If this is God’s glory, it seems too much for us to bear.
Learning to turn toward whatever life brings without shrinking back even from what is painful or difficult is the work of a lifetime. A lifetime of prayer, in fact. In prayer, we practice this receptive, obedient posture, even literally: unclenching the jaw, lowering the shoulders, uncurling our fists, opening to whatever the present moment holds, trusting that God has brought us to it. Through spiritual practices, in daily prayer, worship in community, immersion in Scripture, honoring our neighbor, and giving away what we have first been given, we are learning, slowly, to live as a slave of all, a servant of every moment, even when that means being a suffering servant, becoming obedient to life and reality, not seeking control or escape into fantasy but listening, answering the call, doing whatever life requires.
Remember obedience means simply to listen, not just with the ears but wholeheartedly, holding nothing back. Jesus “learned obedience through what he suffered”: even at the extreme outer limits of human experience, he says yes. Jesus’ death is continuous with his life: it is the natural playing out of the way he has been in the world. He turns toward the world, not as a tyrant exerting control but he turns toward the world as a servant of the present moment. “Whoever wishes to become great must be a servant.” Taking the form of a slave, Jesus became obedient, became attentive, aware, loving, and receptive, even at the point of death.
To live in obedience to the present moment, to turn toward it fully and do what life requires of you is not merely passive, by the way. This is not a policy of self-destructive non-intervention. Living as a servant of the present moment does not mean, for instance, that one should remain in a situation of abuse. That would be an avoidance of the truth, actually, a turning away from the reality of God’s desire for your flourishing into love and a denial of the harm being done to the souls of both people in an abusive relationship! Receptive, obedient listening to God and to one’s life will at times prompt us to act, to intervene, to cooperate with God’s grace to effect change. But that’s only possible after first encountering the situation just as it is, listening to it, praying through it. Prayerful action from this place is then not a reactive batting away of discomfort with what’s real but an action that flowers from our non-discriminating, loving attention to the reality of what the moment requires. As James Baldwin puts it, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
To face our lives is to drink the cup, and share in God’s glory. Jesus is calling, “Take up your cross and follow me.” “Take up your life, and follow me. Come sit at my side. Shoulder the pains and sufferings that are already present to you, which you seek so desperately to avoid.” Why do we retreat from reality? We are afraid we will shatter under the weight of our suffering and the suffering of others. But our fear, our fear does not protect us. The truth is, you are already suffering, and that’s not the worst thing that can happen to a person. You never bear it alone—Jesus has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows. He is bound to us in love, he is with us in trouble, and he knows how to comfort his people.
Our fear of suffering will not protect us from it, and we can’t cut ourselves off from pain without also stifling our capacity for joy. St. Irenaeus famously said, “The glory of God is a human being fully alive.” Not a human being afraid and numbed out, squinting at their life between their fingers, but a human being fully alive, open to the whole of life, highs and lows, joys and sorrows. A human being fully alive is obedient to reality, answering the present moment by freely giving themselves to it. Yes, this means taking down our protective defenses and opening to suffering, but God has descended to the realm of the lost and the dead and has promised never to leave us there alone.
The final question of the catechism in the Book of Common Prayer in the section title “The Christian Hope” goes like this: “What is our assurance as Christians?” That we will never suffer? No. That God the divine fixer will arrange it so we prosper financially, “succeed” in our relationships, and never get sick and die? No. Certainly we will die, and certain too that we will suffer. “Our assurance as Christians is that nothing, not even death, shall separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Our assurance, our security in an insecure, inscrutable world where nothing is certain, is that whatever happens, in every experience, God is with us. Jesus’s whole life shows us the love of God in human flesh, incarnate as God with us, and his suffering and death express it most dramatically. God in Christ goes to the grave, descending below all things in order that God’s creating, redeeming, sustaining love may fill all things and bring them to perfection—that is, to completion, and wholeness. Drinking the cup, Jesus shows us that there is no point so painful that God opts out, holds back, or turns away, saying no, there I will not follow you. “Because you are bound to me in love, I will deliver you. ... I am with you in trouble.” “I will never let you go.” And so, secure in God’s perfect love, we can answer Jesus’ question—“Can you drink the cup that I drink?”—with an older and wiser James and John—“Yes, we are able, with God’s help.”
How would our lives change if we turned and faced them, stepped back from the delusions of grandeur and fantasies of avoidance to become obedient to what’s right in front of us? The truth is, we are little, and we are suffering. And God is still with us. And in the backwards logic of the kingdom of God, to be great is to be little. The lilies of the field do not toil neither do they spin; they simply sway with the wind, doing what lilies do: planted on their patch of ground, weathering rain and sunshine alike, alive to all around them. And they are more gloriously arrayed than King Solomon in all his jewels.