He started it. John the Baptist, that is. So, blame him if you don’t like what he did. Maybe we could say that he simply continued what began way back with the Old Testament prophets. Their prophecies unsettled and angered people, but oddly enough, they didn’t draw attention to their own eloquence or perceptiveness. They pointed to God’s word. We Christians might say they gestured towards Christ even if they didn’t know it. They pointed to something beyond themselves. They pointed to God.
But it was John, that wild rabble-rouser, who really started it. During the time that he was baptizing, his disciples came to him, a bit disturbed that Jesus was also baptizing and drawing a crowd to himself. Presumably, this would draw people away from John. John, after all, had come first. And that’s when John said it, putting into words what the great line of prophets had done from the moment they were called by God. He must increase, but I must decrease. I’m not the Christ, he said. John added his own finger to that bold line of prophets, pointing not to his own work or to himself, but to Christ.
Yes, John the Baptist started it. And Jesus’s apostles, in the aftermath of his death, eventually learned how to keep John’s spirit alive. When the apostles were spreading the Gospel to the ends of the earth and Paul healed a man who couldn’t walk in the city of Lystra, the crowds were amazed. They claimed that Paul and his companion Barnabas were gods. But they pointed away from themselves. He must increase, and we must decrease. We’re merely human, they said. The miracles are simply signs that point to the work of almighty God, not to us. John the Baptist opened that can of humility. Blame him, if you want to.
But the disciples weren’t always so humble. Look at the twelve on the road with Jesus in Mark’s Gospel, arguing about who’s the greatest. They’re concerned with being great, not with being faithful. And all this just after Jesus’s tells them quite clearly that the way to the cross requires self-denial and suffering. The disciples still don’t even understand what Jesus is saying when he speaks of his future passion and death. They refrain from asking him what this really means because they don’t really want to know. They just want to be great. At this point, they can only point to themselves and not to Jesus. They must increase, and he must decrease.
The disciples, as we so often do, think in terms of lines. Someone, of course, needs to be at the head of the line. Someone needs to be great, indeed, the greatest. And of course, that means that everyone else will fall behind, and someone will be dead last. Some student needs to be at the top of the class or the most popular or the most likely to succeed. Some politician needs to be the winning candidate. Some priest needs to be known for growing their church the fastest or having the most TikTok followers. Someone in the top one percent needs to be the richest person alive. And in a oddity of statistical greats, some big city needs to be the poorest one, like Philadelphia. Life has its pecking order, so get in line.
But Jesus mixes it all up when he says that the first must be last and the servant of all. He takes a line and begins to turn it into a circle. And then he does something even more spectacular. He doesn’t tie it up. He leaves it open, and he does yet one more thing that truly confounds the disciples. He invites a child into their midst and puts it smack-dab in the middle of the circle.
To us, this seems like a cute little exercise, like a children’s sermon where all the kids come forward so the adults can marvel at how child-centered the church is. But this is not what Jesus does. Imagine, instead, that Jesus takes the convicted felon on death row or the migrant who’s escaped from Venezuela or the poorest of the poor and puts that person in the center of the open circle and embraces that person. That’s what Jesus does. The child in his day barely qualified as a person. It was the one with no rights, who was constantly at the mercy of adults who often failed to care properly for the child. This child—this utter outcast in society—is placed at the center of the circle. Then Jesus says that to welcome this one, the one at the end of the line, is to welcome Christ himself.
And this is when Jesus does the most surprising thing of all. He continues what John the Baptist started and points away from himself to God the Father. Even the Son of Man, the Lord and Savior of all, doesn’t put himself at the front of the line. Yes, John the Baptist really started this whole mess. Whoever welcomes the child welcomes Christ. And whoever welcomes Christ welcomes the One who sent him, that is, God the Father. The line has become a circle, and at its center is God.
To be a Church that’s true to the values of the kingdom, we must stand in a circle and not a line. Outside the walls of this church, we can’t avoid standing in lines, whether it’s at CVS or the Phillies game. We can’t avoid getting in line to see whether Harvard will accept us or whether we’re next up for the transplant. Lines are the reality of life, and we must stand in them. And yet, Christ asks us to stand in those lines as if they can be shaped into circles of welcome. They’re circles that always have space for one more person to stand.
But along the waiting line of life, there’s a common emotion, and it’s usually not happiness. It’s stone-cold fear. Fear is the mechanism that ossifies lines and makes some great and others least of all. Fear is what causes us to hunger for tribal greatness at the expense of the greatest well-being of all people. Fear is what propels us to rush to the front of the line no matter how many others we have to trample on. Fear is what causes us to point to ourselves and not to Christ. Fear is what causes us to look some people in the eye when it’s just her and me but ignore them completely when we’re around the more important or popular. Fear is what has turned even the Church’s three orders of ministry into a rat race of ladder climbing. Fear turns open-ended circles into lines.
This fear starts with a nagging sense that we aren’t loved enough by God or that we must appease God to earn his love. And if we’re not loved enough by God, then we need to be loved by someone else. And to earn that love from someone else, we begin pointing to ourselves more and more, and the circle of inclusion becomes a line where some are great and others are not even human.
When we put a child or a despised immigrant or a condemned felon or an unhoused person at the center of our circle, we have nothing to gain. It’s simply a gesture of pure love. Loving the poorest of the poor will get us nothing in the world’s straight line. It won’t get us a promotion or a raise or tenure. Genuinely welcoming the poor and the stranger is the most selfless act of love possible because it has no ulterior motive except putting God at the center of the circle.
If our life in community at Good Shepherd is to be Christlike, then it must be an ever-expanding circle, not a closed one but one in which there’s always room for another to stand. It’s a circle where only God is at the center. All that we do and all that we are points to God, not to ourselves. In this circle, our own personal preferences and opinions can and should be voiced but are never given undue weight to the exclusion of the good of the whole. In this circle, no person is silenced, no matter how little money they make and even if they’re standing at the end of line. In this circle, the newest person to the group is valued in the same way as the person who’s been here for decades. In this circle, the need of the person on the other side of the circle is ours, too, and we’re always willing to take one for the team, despite any inconvenience it might cause us.
We can do all this only if the center of this circle isn’t fear. Fear would only warp it into a line. At the center of this circle is selfless love in the face of Christ, who we see is actually pointing to God the Father. In this life in community, we can only point away from ourselves and to God, who stands at the center of our open-ended circle. Yes, John the Baptist started it all, and we must keep it going. With every fiber of our being we should let the circle remain a circle and not be forced into a line. And in this circle, there’s always room for one more.
Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost
September 22, 2024