Sermon, by Pastor Joel
Twenty-Second Sunday After Pentecost
October 20, 2024
Isaiah 53:4-12
Psalm 91:9-16
Hebrews 5:1-10
Mark 10:35-45
The context of this sermon is
100% written by a human
One afternoon, a young man stood on the Brooklyn Bridge, contemplating his own death. He was stopping traffic, and people were getting angry: Come on! Jump already! one cyclist called to him. On the catwalk of the bridge, an NYPD detective named Peter Keszthelyi, carefully stepped over to the young man. “I am not here to hurt you,” he said. The young man told him that he had no job and no place to live. He wasn’t even 25 years old. “You might seem like you are alone, but you are not alone,” the detective reassured him. Below them the cars kept honking.
This story still stays with me years after first reading it, and I want to return to that scene on the bridge, but first: How do you feel when you hear it? For my part, I feel sadness for the young man, and admiration for the detective. I struggle with the frustration of the people in the traffic jam, with their own concerns and life demands – but perhaps my struggle is guilt. Who among us hasn’t reacted first out of our own convenience without considering the needs of another? There are three characters participating in that desperate moment on the bridge - all acting in their own way: the young man so despairing he can’t see any other way out; the bystanders, hostile about being put out by someone else’s pain; and the detective compassionately trying to save the man on the bridge. I know which character I want to play, and I certainly know who I don’t want to be.
These days, we are obsessed, it seems, with our feelings. How do you feel? We talk about keeping our spirits up, about the power of optimism, about the burdens of our anxieties, about the limitations that come with feeling blue. These last few weeks, we have seen the disciples overcome with their own emotions – jealousy over someone’s healing in Jesus’s name, anxiety about their own needs being met, fear about the future that Jesus is facing. (And last week, of course, Jesus told us not to worry – yet, as we know, even the words of Jesus cannot release us from our worry.)
There is no doubt that our mood impacts us, and that there is strength to be found in a cheerful demeanour. But have we shifted too far in the wrong direction? We are not defined by how we feel. We are defined by how we act.
Jesus, as I often say, was an action kind of guy. We never have a sense that he spent a lot of time sitting around, contemplating his mood. In fact, if his ministry had been all about giving good speeches and telling interesting stories, without serving, healing, and helping people, what value would it have had? In this morning’s gospel, we get the same call to action. If we want to be great, we must be a servant. If we want to feel good about ourselves and the world around us, we must do something: we must shift the gaze from our navel to our neighbour.
First of all, one of the key problems with relying on our feelings is that they are confusing, and subject to change, even from one minute to the next. Something happens and we go from happy to sad, from calm to angry. Actions, however, are concrete - they are the beginning of feeling, not the end of it.
Science has come around to Jesus’s point of view, finding that meaningful action helps ameliorate the anxiety we feel about climate change or politics. Sitting at home, obsessively churning through social media, only makes those negative feelings worse. But getting out to vote gives us an outlet for our worry. Rallies or marches surround us with people who feel the same and are willing to be examples of action. Doing something – being a servant – doesn’t just make a difference in the world. It makes a difference for us.
That doesn’t mean, as some popular self-help books have suggested, that we must always surround ourselves with positive people to feel positive. How could we truly be servants if we never risked exposure to unhappy circumstances or people who disagree with us? Believing this, incidentally, would exclude you from doing any version of the work performed by Detective Keszthelyi. And surely, our communities need more people like him, not fewer.
But that’s the point Jesus makes over and over again: the gospel is tough. We can’t expect to feel good all the time carrying it out, but we can always rely on optimism to charge us up. Doing good takes a long time; the world doesn’t change in an instant. We have to believe in the power of little steps. Because otherwise, frankly, it’s all about us, and our actions are subject to the whim of our feelings.
In one way, it is a circular argument; actions lead to feelings and feelings lead to actions. In psychology, researchers have been using a test called the “Social Interest Scale” to figure out the variables of traits of people who exhibit high levels of empathy for humanity. For instance, one question asks participants to rank which groups the person believes are more important: Africans, for example, or Canadians. Those who score high on the scale ranked them the same. But the people who scored high also knew more about humanitarian issues; they had taken the action to educate themselves about the world. They gave more to humanitarian causes. Their empathy had been fed - and made resilient - by service and knowledge.
Back to the bridge: In the end, as The New York Times story reported, the young man changed his mind; he came down from the ledge to give life another chance. His feeling was changed by the compassionate action of another. If that police officer had not arrived, you have to wonder if another passerby could have done the same, by serving the needs of another, instead of heckling. Either way, on some days, this detective, who saves people for a living, might prefer that he had an easier job, that he didn’t have to confront so much pain. But this is what Jesus would call a higher calling to action – rather than a slave to our feelings. Instead, we choose to be driven, and defined, by our action.
I always hold onto a wise piece of advice that I was given many decades ago, by all three of my mentors, senior pastors all, when I was just starting out in my ministry. All three have said to me at one time or another, “Joel, when you’re feeling like a pile of [uselessness], go out and visit. Pick yourself up and go.” In that visit, that action of service, you will find the secret to Jesus’s advice to set worry aside. I have followed this advice over the years, many, many times. And each time, sitting with someone else in need has taken me out of my own head, rescued me from the bondage of my own negative feelings.
The choice is ours, Jesus says. If we rely on how we are feeling on any given day - exhausted after a day of work, anxious about some personal trial, irritated with our partner - we would accomplish little. But the lesson of the gospel is the power of positive action. And that is the choice Jesus is talking about: To give up or to go on. To be the heckler on the sidelines or the voice of reason. To be slaves chained to feeling and sentiment, or servants defined by deeds. Jesus didn’t just know this, he set the example. It is action that defines us. Action that saves us. Action that frees us. Amen.
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