‘But many who are first will be last, and the last will be first.’ Some of you may be aware that I am on the slightly competitive side when it comes to Games and Sports. If you didn’t know and were at the Silver Lake Winter Retreat held in our church basement last weekend, you may have learned that around some of the Games tables. So given this personal character flaw, it is interesting for me to reflect on church baseball. I was a part of the First Mennonite slow pitch team in the Mennonite Slow Pitch League for about 30 years. It’s been more of a hybrid team, made up of players from several different churches, even with the one church team name. Soon after I came to St Jacobs, several SJMCer’s joined that team for the Tuesday or Wednesday games at the Bloomingdale Ball Diamonds, including at different points Devin Martin, Dave Weber, Kevin Derksen, Chip Bender, Zac Klassen, Michael Lutzmann, Chris Kloetstra and myself. We tried to get Ryan Clemmer, but he was already a part of the Elmira team, that usually wins all of their games, and well… You see, that is a bit of the problem with this team – over the years, it rarely won, and always ended up on the B side of the league. In fact, at one point, the team made some bright yellow team jerseys, that simply said, picking up on the church team name: ‘The Last Shall be First!’ (show the shirt).
Rachel still insists that being on a team that usually loses has been a good spiritual discipline for me, especially when our kids were young and I would take them to all the games. It was good for the kids to see a Dad who knew it was okay to lose – that the First was actually Last. You would think her question to me when I came home from a game would be the typical one you would expect – ‘Did you win?’ But that was a mute question. In fact, it was the wrong question. Her question would be ‘Did you have fun?’ or ‘did the kids enjoy watching the game… and enjoy the playground?’ or ‘Who did you meet and talk to this time?’. I slowly learned that the question about winning was the wrong question to ask. There were a series of much more important questions that lay underneath that gave the real meaning to why I have always enjoyed playing in this league with that team and found it so satisfying. Last summer, the whole league folded, after some post pandemic struggles for attendance. I was sad. As I reflected, I realized what I missed was not the winning, which was so rare anyways, but I missed the fun of the game, the companions on the field, the banter and jokes and deeper conversations, and the connections to the players on all the other teams and churches. I missed the community that formed each week and was strengthened over time. The baseball team was a place of belonging, where you could be yourself and enjoy the fun and genuine camaraderie of the team, while doing a little bit of exercise, which isn’t really that much with slow pitch. I learned over time to ask the right questions. In the end, we were all winners, no matter what the score was and who won the game, and the Last truly were the First!
Our story today of the rich young man is all about questions – in fact, there are 6 questions asked – 3 by the young man, 2 by the disciples and one early on by Jesus. The more Chris and I looked at these questions, the more we realized that it is the questions that drive the passage forward, but also that both the young man and the disciples were asking the wrong questions. They need the responses by Jesus to get to the right questions, the real questions. With the early question back by Jesus, and by how he responds to each of these mis-guided questions, Jesus pushes us all to go deeper, and get to the real questions that lie underneath. It reminds me of one of the big learnings I had from working with Don Penner when he was interim pastor here recently. He would often say that ‘The issue is not the issue.’ You have to look underneath to what is really going on for someone. The question is not really the question. You have to get to the right questions that bring us deeper. So this morning I want to walk us through the story again and each of the 6 questions and see where that brings us.
The story begins innocently enough. There is a young man who comes up to Jesus and asks him ‘What good deed must I do to have eternal life?’ Jesus responds to the questions with a question ‘Why do you ask me about what is good?’ In other words, ‘what are you really asking me?’ What is going on underneath for you that makes you ask this question about what is good. This isn’t just about you trying to find a good deed to do right now in your life, is it? There is more going on here. The issue is not the issue. The question is not the real question.
Jesus continues ‘There is one who is good. If you wish to enter into life, keep the commandments.’ Jesus is already pointing towards life, to what could be life-giving for this man, if only he can go deeper with his questions, with his search for meaning. The young man asks his second question, a follow up, ‘Which ones? Which commandments?’ The man is simply buying time here. He already knows the commandments. This is not really what this is about. I love watching Jesus here. He plays along. He lists the key commandments, and adds ‘love your neighbour as yourself,’ knowing all along that this man knows these too and does them. Jesus lets these questions spin out, to see where they might lead the man if he starts more serious self-reflection. We then get the man’s 3rd question – ‘I have kept all these; what do I still lack?’ Now we are getting somewhere. Now we are getting closer to the heart of the man’s real questions. This man knows that he is lacking something – that there is something missing in his life, that he tries to do all the right things, that he keeps the commandments, and yet he lacks meaning and purpose and direction. He is getting closer to the right question. With this opening, Jesus talks to him about what he most treasures in life and how those very treasures, the things he holds on to most tightly, in this case, his possessions, are the very barriers that prevent him from following Jesus, prevent him from living a more abundant life. Notice how Jesus says ‘If you wish to be perfect,’ where earlier it was just about being good. I don’t think this is because Jesus somehow demands perfection from us, but rather that for this earnest young man, this is what gets him to go deeper, to ponder deeper… and for him, he cannot bring himself to let go of what binds him, to let go of what he treasures to follow, and he goes away grieving. I wonder what we treasure? I wonder what we hold on to too tightly?
Now the disciples are watching all of this and getting more and more concerned, especially when Jesus adds this bit about it being easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God. Chris did a great job unpacking that metaphor and exaggeration by Jesus. These are the very people that the disciples look up to, that society looks up to. As the Believer’s Church Bible Commentary phrases it ‘From their point of view, wealth was a sign of good standing with God. If the rich (the blessed) don’t make it into the kingdom, where does that leave the rest of us?’ (Richard Gardner, Matthew, Herald Press, 1991, p.196) The disciples are astonished and ask their first question – ‘Then who can be saved?’ Or really, what about us? We are doing everything we can aren’t we. To which Jesus responds ‘For mortals it is impossible, but for God all things are possible.’ Just maybe it isn’t about what we humans do by our own efforts, or even our own good morality, it is about what God does, and God’s grace, making the impossible, possible. ‘No one achieves salvation on their own.’ (Ibid)
Peter, always the one to speak up, asks the last question – almost a protest. I can hear anger and frustration in his voice. ‘Look, Look Jesus, we have left everything and followed you. What then will we have?’ They are not getting it. They still think this is about them, and what they may have given up and sacrificed to be good, to be perfect. And it sounds at first like Jesus is going right along with them, staying at their level. He talks about those who have followed sitting on the 12 thrones, and that anyone who has left house, family, children, fields will receive a hundredfold and will inherit eternal life. Just when the disciples are getting smug. Just when they think they have finally asked the right question, Just when they think they have things wrapped up. Jesus speaks his final sentence – ‘But many who are first will be last, and the last will be first.’ It’s not adding up how you think. Just when you think you are first, you are last. They had asked the wrong question. And Jesus pushes them deeper, pushes them to look to God, to grace, to what only God can make possible. I suspect they too left Jesus that day confused and grieving.
So what are the kinds of questions we should or could be asking ourselves and asking of God. Are they the right questions, or do we too need to be pushed to go deeper, to look at what’s really going on underneath for us. At this point in the sermon, I could easily ask a bunch of questions about wealth and riches and lifestyle choices and how we live in the world economically – as individuals and as a church body. That could easily be the right question for us and lead us into all sorts of deeper conversations. This is typically where we go with this passage and so many others like it in the gospel, and that is a good thing. Jesus talked so much about money and possession and wealth and poverty and what are ethics should be around these.
But there was a different question that got under my skin this week and pushed me to go deeper – personally, spiritually. It came out of the MCEC Pastors Learning Circle I have been a part of for the past 2 years – a group of pastors who get together monthly to share and pray for each other, after studying a book together. We have learned to trust each other in this group through our regular meeting and sharing. We also walked through and grieved together the sudden and tragic death of one of our members, Kendra Whitfield Ellis from Waterloo North, in July of 2024. We are close. We have been reading ‘The Vulnerable Pastor – How Human Limitations Empower our Ministry’ by Mandy Smith (IVP Books, Downers Grove, IL, 2015) In various ways, the book has invited us to take seriously and get in touch with our limitations as pastors, our vulnerabilities, our very humanity and to see that as the very gift we might have to offer in ministry if we allow God to work through those and despite those.
This past week, I was asked to lead our conversation on chapter 10 – ‘How Vulnerable Pastors Measure Success.’ That’s the question that got under my skin. How do you measure success as a pastor? It feels so much easier in other professions – You do your work well and a house gets built, or a business does well, or a patient is cured of a disease, or a whole class passes into the next grade with greater knowledge, understanding and skills. It is all much more nebulous as a pastor. You walk with a congregation and their spiritual care and worship and pastoral needs over the long term, and it is hard to put a finger on what has been accomplished and what the markers of success might be. Mandy Smith writes that often the metrics of ministry success have been the three B’s – buildings, bodies and budgets (Ibid, p.150) – did you successful navigate a building project, bring in more souls for the kingdom and balance all your church budgets? She suggests a more helpful way to think about this is faithfulness and concepts of thriving and abundant life – bearing fruit. So is measuring success even the right question? Maybe Jesus would push us deeper too. Why do you ask that question?
I invited each of us to spend a few minutes on our own and simply list those areas of ministry that we feel anxious about and feels unsuccessful, where we sense failure, and then list places where you see the abundance of God. It led us to some very deep sharing with each other. I won’t share all the specifics, but the areas of anxiety had to do with feeling inadequate, with not ‘doing’ enough – enough pastoral care, enough programming, enough visioning, enough good content in sermons, or about our worries – about a shrinking or aging congregation, about whether our youth will claim faith, about how to respond to people who stop coming to church, about particular challenging pastoral care situations, about the Church at large being in a challenging time in our world right now. One person shared the image of a pastor being like a Clydesdale Horse, moving so slowly, too slowly? when the needs and the congregation and the world are moving as fast as a race horse. We could have become overwhelmed with not measuring up, not being ‘successful’, with not acing the Three B’s, with the limitations of our own humanity. But then we started to share about where we have seen God at work and where we have experienced the abundance of God – in life giving worship services and series, often led by many people from the congregation, in coming out on the other side of significant congregational transitions, or conflicts, or losses or changes and being okay, in new community connections, in the depth of meaning around both funerals and new births, in leadership emerging from surprising people in surprising places, in new vision that seemed to come as gift, more than throughs some made up process, in gestures of love and support and community, in trusting God more. We had gotten to deeper questions, to what we might lack, but also to a God who provides, to maybe the right questions. Mandy Smith uses the ministry image of a vineyard with lasting fruit born of faithfulness. So often we have not been the ones as pastors to plant the seeds or even water them, but rather to witness their surprising growth. God makes the impossible, possible, the last becoming first. Mandy Smith writes ‘And as we look for signs of health and growth, we are surprised by what we did not plant. We learn to have peace with what is in our hands and what is not. We certainly work hard but with a deep appreciation that the seed, the ground, the rain, the sun, even the worms are out of our control. This peace teaches who God is – and that it’s not us.’ (Ibid, p.160). She invites us as pastors, in vulnerability and honesty, to be present with people and to be peaceful – and then God can work in and through us, because of and in spite of us. (Ibid, p. 162). Asking the right question, had moved us to a deeper place.
What are the questions stirring in your souls today, this week, this year? If you were going to come up to Jesus and his band of disciples, what question would you ask, and what response might Jesus give you. Is there a deeper question underneath your initial question that begs to be heard, to be voiced, that you might not recognize right away, but know deep down is the real question, the right question? What question has gotten under your skin? Is that the question that might lead you to more abundant life, and to living life with more vulnerability, honesty, and openness? And living life with more hope, more presence, more generosity, more faith, more trust and more love. For mortals it is impossible, but for God all things are possible. But many who are first will be last, and the last will be first. May it be so. Amen.