Sermon given by Laurel Oberstadt-Petrik on Sunday, October 20, 2024 at University Lutheran Church. Texts for the service were:
This recording begins with Laurel’s reading from the Gospel of Mark.
Transcript
What if you went up into an attic…climbed the rickety ladder to a room filled with dusty antiques and prizes from yesteryear….pulled the string hanging from the ceiling to turn the light on…then, bathed in its pale glow, you open an old wooden trunk with a creak. Inside there is a family heirloom: the prized porcelain teapot with the apple print. You pick it up and rub the spout three times, wishing with all you heart for…
Well? What did you wish for? Money? Rest? Glory? Peace? Power?
This might sound like a New England-ish take on Aladdin or another genie story. But I think what it tells us more about is the way we often treat prayer—and, by extension, the way we often treat God. How often have you thrown out a desperate prayer to please please please make this thing go my way? Be it a train arriving early so you’re not late, or finding a parking space that’s close to where you’re trying to go…Maybe it’s that a headache or even heartache would go away…Maybe it’s a plea that this election season would be safely behind us, our preferred candidate safely ensconced in the seat of power? These wishes, these prayers, don’t come from nowhere—they are the pleas of our hearts and spirits. But our hearts and spirits don’t always align with the will of God.
Each week we pray together the prayer Jesus taught us: Our Father in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. I think these words contain a clue for us, a bit of theology we don’t often consider. On earth as it is in heaven: this phrase tells us that God’s kingdom, God’s will, hasn’t yet come to earth in the same way it has in heaven. Things on earth are not perfect according to God’s will: big shocker there!
In the Job text we read today we hear that we were nowhere when God laid the foundations of the earth and listened to all the morning stars sing together as the heavenly beings shouted with joy. God is the one who may lift up God’s voice to the clouds so they would listen; sending forth the lightning so it too will go where God tells it. God set into motion the rhythms, the cycles of this world: geologic and atmospheric processes so ancient and longstanding we can barely fathom their moving parts. And yet.
And yet we have begun and continue to tear this wonderful, beautiful world apart. The reason that God’s will is not done on earth as in heaven? Human greed. Human avarice and malice. We have created our own way of doing things. We have replaced God with ourselves. We pursue growth: on and always forever. Progress for progress’ sake. Profit margins increasing; wealth of the richest and most powerful people, increasing; stocks rising in value; all on scales we cannot really wrap our heads around and at the cost of this planet and the many many lives on it, human and nonhuman alike.
Within the past 3.5 weeks, two major hurricanes have struck this country. Catastrophic flooding in Appalachia left many without electricity or water, or access to food, healthcare, and other basic human needs. I have friends in the area who only just got their water back a few days ago, but it’s still not drinkable. And there are many more folks in the region who still lack even that.
Look, you don’t need me to remind you of the fact that the climate is changing. The fact that the high tomorrow is 79 degrees in late October attests to that. But maybe you need a reminder of the interlocking systems of empire, systems of greed and malice, put into place by humans. By us.
No by you personally. But you contribute, in little ways, and benefit in many others. Last week Pastor Carrie preached on the things that take possession of us, be it power or privilege or the comfort of just plain stuff.
In our gospel reading today we hear the same message. James and John have come to Jesus, and frankly treated him like the magic teapot at the beginning of this sermon. Jesus, they say, please do whatever we ask of you. And Jesus appeases them, just for a bit. “What is it you want me to do for you?” They want positions of power and glory. They want the spots where they’ll be served first, the places of comfort and convenience. So, Jesus asks them this: “can you drink the cup I drink from? Or be baptized with the baptism with which I am baptized?” To which they say yes.
But what is this cup and this baptism? What does it mean to drink the cup Jesus drinks from? It is to follow him and the example of his life. It is to sit with the outcasts, feed the hungry, serve the blind, the lonely ones, the people everyone looks down upon or casts out. It is to walk alongside them the way Jesus did, looking at them not with pity but with love. Yes, friends, it is to love our siblings in Appalachia and Florida and the south. To drink Jesus’ cup means loving them with everything you have, your whole life. Your money and your time, and yes, your prayers. To love them, and the marginalized of this world all the way to self-sacrifice, and even, death.
Dearest friends, our prayers must align with the will of God. We must cast our cares and our wishes on Jesus, the one who authors and perfects our faith. For it is with Jesus that these cares and wishes are molded into the will of God. We must grow more and more like Christ by walking in his steps. Grow more and more in the image of God as our truest selves, so that the way our hearts are moved looks like Jesus. We must grow to drink the cup that Jesus drinks. We must remember our baptism, the one Jesus, too, was baptized with.
For it is then that we will look most like Jesus, when we give our whole selves and put to death the wishes for convenience, for glory, and for comfort.
This is the good news, beloved people of God: Jesus came to show us what it is not to be served, but to serve. And Jesus offers his life for us that there might be grace when we slip up in our humanity. Amen?
So don’t despair. There is hope found in the God who set the very foundations of the heavens in place and is making all things new, including you and the person next to you, your sibling in Christ who sits in these pews.
Hear again the good news: We are called to be conformed to God’s will, becoming more like Jesus and more like our truest selves. And there is grace for us to drink Jesus’ very cup.
May it be so.