It’s Not About You

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Sermon Notes:

This sermon recording begins about 20 seconds into the sermon. The sermon begins by pointing the listener to the two verses immediately prior to the designated Scripture reading and identifying those verses as something called a Passion Prediction.

When this sermon was originally preached, it ended with a discussion around the following three questions. That discussion is not included in this recording.

  1. What does it mean to be a servant?
  2. What does it mean to be a slave?
  3. Given what those two words mean, how do we understand them in the context of discipleship?

Scripture:  Mark 10:35 – 45

James and John, the sons of Zebedee, came forward to him and said to him, “Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.” Read more…

Looking to Sunday

by Elaine Poproski

The other day my niece was expressing her frustration at her dad’s frustration every time she tries to scoop ice cream. My niece is left-handed. And their ice cream scoop is made for right-handed people. I half-jokingly told her that this is a great example of privilege. Because the world is designed for right-handed people, she is constantly forced to adapt and often does things more awkwardly than, for instance, her right-handed dad does them. He, for his part, is a great example of someone unaware of his privilege as a right-handed person and that unawareness feeds the frustration they both feel.

I completely understand that as examples of privilege go, this one is pretty minor. But I was thinking about privilege as I was reading this Sunday’s primary Scripture passage. On Sunday we’re reading from Mark 10:35-45, in which two of Jesus’ disciples ask to be placed in positions of highest honour once Jesus takes His place in the coming Kingdom of God. Understandably, the other disciples become pretty angry when they hear what’s going on because, I’m sure, they wish they’d been the first to ask this of Jesus. In the world of the disciples, they had very little privilege. They were Jews living in a Roman-occupied territory. Among their own people, it was the religious leaders of the temple and synagogues that ran things. Being able-bodied men, they weren’t the least privileged, but there was still a lot of adapting they had to do to the way their world was formed and maintained by people different from them.

Privilege is likely a familiar concept to most of us by now. It’s a term that’s been around since at least the 1930s to talk about how people benefit from unearned and often unacknowledged advantages in society based on things like race, language, religion, gender, etc. Peggy McIntosh, a women’s-studies scholar at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, has been researching and thinking about the concept of privilege since the 1980s. In a 2014 article in the New Yorker, she is quoted as saying this: “We’re all put ahead or behind by the circumstances of our birth. We all have a combination of both. And it changes minute by minute, depending on where we are, who we’re seeing, or what we’re required to do.”[1]

The disciples saw in Jesus the possibility of privilege. As part of Jesus’ inner circle, surely their lives were going to change for the better, especially when Jesus finally took the kingship that was rightfully His. And who could fault them for wanting that privileged position? Isn’t that the natural tendency of us all? Don’t we all look and wish for ways for our lives to be easier – for us to be the ones who set the norms, not the ones who have to adapt to someone else’s norms? But this is what Jesus said in the face of His disciples’ squabbling: “Whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all” (Mark 10:43-44).

As you prepare for Sunday, perhaps consider what it means to be a servant. What does it mean in the context of privilege? I’ve heard it said before that the idea of servanthood is all well and good until people start treating you like a servant. What is your experience of servanthood? How would you have responded if you’d been among those disciples that day in Mark 10 and heard Jesus say these words to you?

 

[1] Rothman, Joshua. (2014, May 12). The Origins of “Privilege”. The New Yorker. Retrieved from https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-origins-of-privilege