Jesus offers not the "Ladder of Success" but the "Chute of Service."

Remember when you were little? When you were too small and young to do certain jobs or chores around the house? How exotic, exciting and enticing those tasks appeared. If only you were big enough to run the vacuum cleaner! To push the lawn mower! To wash the really high windows! Two-year-olds love to get pint-sized brooms and mops and sweepers acting out all the work that goes along with them. But somehow the allure fades fast.

Then, as we grow older it slowly begins to dawn on us that as we give more of our lives to working our way up the "ladder of success," the problem with finally getting what we want is that then we've got it! The longed-for prize becomes just another new responsibility, another step on the ladder. "Success" is still somewhere else. Or as an old French proverb puts it: "You not only have to want what you want, but you have to want what you want leads to."

Unfortunately, we've also been willing to strap our Christianity our missions, our ministries, our churches, our souls onto the rungs of this same success stepladder.

What makes for "spiritual success"? According to the secular success model, it must mean reaching huge numbers of people; being able to broadcast the gospel as far and fast as possible; developing church programming that thrives and grows; finding a harmonious, beautiful, forward-looking, upward-thinking church home for worship. Surely these are the marks of a "successful" ministry and mission.

But if they truly are the marks of Christian success, then Jesus himself must necessarily be counted as a colossal failure.

Instead of establishing a "Center for Jesus' Teachings" which could pull students and wisdomseekers from all over to a central location, Jesus chose to wander the countryside hardly spending the night in the same place twice the crowds always trying to catch up to him.

Instead of organizing a hierarchy for training scores and scores of followers, Jesus chose only 12 disciples and provided them only with strange, "on-the-road" instruction.

Instead of playing up his miraculous strengths, the wonder and power of his true identity, Jesus chose to appear before the world almost anonymously, as a simple, dusty craftsman, rabbi-of-sorts and out-of-sorts leader.

Today's gospel text offers a perfect example of Jesus' failure to capitalize on a scenario ripe for success. But not Peter. Although stunned and scared, Peter at least recognizes a golden moment when he sees one. If no one else will, he will carpe the diem. Even if this vision does not last, at least they can build shelters which will stand on this site after the light fades and the heavenly visitors depart. Here the sukkots, or booths, could stand, monuments to a great success a place where believers and doubters could come and recapture the experience. Once Peter, James and John spread the word about this transfiguring event, people would flock to the site, a mega-movement would develop, and Jesus' mission would become a great "success."

But Jesus rejects this success scenario completely. Indeed, there really is no such thing as "failure" or "success" for Jesus. "Failure" and "success" are the Devil's inventions and intentions. Jesus never worried about struggling up or slipping down any ladder. Jesus was concerned only with lowering himself toward those in need and extending himself forward into God's service.

If success is a ladder, then service is a chute and a carpet a chute of free-falling grace and a "magic" carpet because it can continue to unfurl and unfold without end. Commitment to a life of service means parachuting into the war zones of the world and extending the "welcome mat" of God's love and sacrifice to the door of every home and every heart. This is the mission Jesus offers us: downwardly mobile, forward-reaching service, not upward-struggling success.

"Successes" are those things that can be calculated, calibrated, counted-up. Service is never quantified. The point of serving is to offer yourself without counting the cost or tallying the results. In Jesus' "parable of the sower," he speaks only about our responsibility to sow, to be out there spreading the news. It is God's responsibility to reap. We are called to plant the seed, but we cannot guarantee the harvest. As mere humans we cannot possibly know the results of our sowing until the eternal harvest, which is brought about by God. We will be judged, not by the results of that harvest, but on the sincerity of our sowing.

Grab your chute and carpet. Give up that ladder.