Great

James 3:13-4:3, Mark 9:30-37

September 24, 2006

Rochelle A. Stackhouse

“It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood, a neighborly day for a beauty, would you be my, could you be my, won’t you be my neighbor?” Anybody out there know whose theme song that is? Right, Mister Rogers, the late Fred Rogers whose television neighborhood gave so much to two generations of American children. If you’ve never seen it and you’re having a bad day sometime, find where it is on your local PBS station, usually around noon, and you will find your day change in an instant for the better. Fred Rogers was also a Presbyterian minister, one of my models for ministry, and I will never forget the first time I met him. I was standing with a group of adults and several small children waiting for an elevator at Princeton Seminary. The doors opened, and to our great surprise, out stepped Fred Rogers. As the adults all spoke to him, he completely ignored us and stooped down to address the children standing there first. Only after he had spoken to each one of them did he stand back up and speak to the taller people in the room. Other folk who knew him well told me that was always his pattern. A tall man, he regularly stooped down to see the world at the same level as children did, and that is part of what made him the great interpreter of the world to children that he was.

When was the last time you stooped down for any amount of time, bad knees not withstanding? If you have ever needed to sit in a wheelchair, you can get that perspective, too. The world is a very different place when you are low in it, either physically or socially or economically. Have you ever seen a child lost in a crowd? Do you remember the Katrina pictures of the elderly in wheelchairs in New Orleans? Have you ever been somewhere where you don’t speak the language and are desperate to communicate and, no matter how many degrees you carry, people look at you like you are stupid? Have you ever stood in line yourself or with someone else to apply for what we used to call welfare? These are stooping places and times; places and times where the world we thought we knew and the things we thought were important change.

Jesus’ disciples stood tall, all caught up in deciding who was going to get the corner office in the heavenly court, who was going to be seated in the place of highest honor at the messianic banquet, and whose title was going to reflect how respected they were by God and their community. We know that routine from academia or corporate America, or even sometimes the church. James tagged that attitude perfectly: envy, ambition, boasting, conflicts, disputes. Are you getting pictures in your mind?

So Jesus called them aside and told them to stoop. And they bent over, but he said, “Lower!” So they bent a little at the knees, but he said, “Lower!” And when they seemed to be having trouble, he stooped all the way to the ground, low enough to be at the level of a small child, a person so invisible in that world that the disciples had not even been aware of her presence. Actually the Greek word doesn’t indicate gender, but I like to imagine it was a girl child because they were even more invisible at the time than boys. I imagine Jesus saw the world so clearly from her perspective, saw the long legs around her and the loud voices and the hard work she was expected to do as the lowest person on the rung of her family, her society. Jesus also saw her, not as a category or label or commodity, but as her. That would be new for her, outside her immediate family anyway. Then he lifted her up, not to get her out of the way, but to put her in the middle of the conversation, to give her a gift of welcome, of love; he put his arms around her.

In another place, Jesus tells the disciples they need to be like children, but here he says they need to be the servants of children. Even in our society, whose economy seems inordinately focused on children, those who serve the youngest children: day care workers, pre-school teachers, nannies, foster parents, are often among the lowest paid and lowest status workers. So even though children have a different place in our society, we still value those who serve our children less than those who do other “useful” jobs like playing football. But the model Jesus presents for his disciples as a way of determining greatness is the one who not only welcomes, but the one who serves the lowest of the low, the “least of these” as Matthew’s gospel puts it. We are called to stoop, not just to see the world from the perspective of those on the bottom and so adjust our own priorities and our society’s priorities, but also to be their servants, to be, in James’ language, “willing to yield” a bit of our race for success and greatness in the world. When we do, we often discover, in the immortal words of William Sloan Coffin, that even if you win the rat race, you are still a rat, and that maybe the richest life after all is found by stepping out of the race.

Stoop. Let me tell you a story about one of the greatest people I know. Ben’s foster mother. “She takes sick children and makes them well.”

I don’t know if this woman is a Christian or not, but I guarantee that after we both die, I will be serving her at the heavenly banquet.

Stoop. I just spent two days caring for my mother following her knee surgery, so I know that the image of stooping might seem difficult for some folk to follow; she won’t be doing much physical stooping for a while. But these waters here that washed over Sophie today, those of us who have been touched by these waters have a source of lubrication for our inner knees that can enable us to stoop low, even when doing so runs counter to the values of the world around us. These waters can clean the lenses of our eyes so that we can see the low ones around us whom we need to receive, to welcome, and to serve. These waters can sometimes be the cold splash in our faces, to wake us up from the illusions of greatness we may buy into, either thinking ourselves great or thinking we can never be great because we don’t meet the criteria for greatness we see in the media or our institutions. These waters make our bodies lighter so that it is easier to yield the heaviness of the race in order to step out and serve.

Remember, my friends, that you are baptized, and stoop. Amen.