Even if you are not a “senior” whether you’re in prepubescence, adolescence, middlescence, elderescence, or senescence all of us experience “senior moments.”
You intentionally set out on a mission to get something — forgotten car keys, replacement printer paper, a fresh cup of coffee — and suddenly you get waylaid by some wayward distraction. You encounter a co-worker with a sudden crisis. A kid has a meltdown. (These two “crises” can be eerily similar). Someone texts you, while another someone arrives at your desk, and simultaneously the phone rings, all in the same moment.
After dealing with these interruptions you find yourself standing in a room with no idea why you are there. What were you after? What was your agenda? In the hallowed ivy-league tradition of absent-mindedness, you just had a “senior moment.” You pointedly and purposefully search your mind and reassemble your thoughts in order to figure out why you are standing where you are and what you were intending to do.
“Senior moments” are reset moments. And busy, bustling lives require reset, reassessment moments. We need to take the time to reconfigure and reconsider just exactly what it is we are pursuing and why we are pursuing it. This sermon this morning is a “senior moment.”
In this week’s gospel text there are definitely two very different “things” being sought after. As soon as Jesus started his Galilean ministry he had marvelous, amazing experiences. He cast out a demon and he immediately proceeded to heal Simon Peter’s mother-in-law. He then “cured many who were sick . . . and cast out many demons.” Good start!
But “in the morning, while it was still very dark,” which was Jesus’ favorite time of day, Jesus found himself in one of those “senior moments.” Needing to regroup and re-gather his thoughts, his motives, and his mission, Jesus “went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed.” Jesus knew he needed to be at home with himself and with his Father before he could bring it home with others and to the world. Jesus made “early and dark” and sometimes “late and light” (dawn and dusk) a special time for prayer and “reset” throughout his public ministry. Jesus programmed into his life “senior moments” — a time apart, a time to turn off the spotlight and turn away from his disciples, to sort through the minefields of miscellaneous “stuff.” For Jesus a “senior moment” meant a reset and reconnect to his Father and to the singular focus of his mission: “For God so loved the world.”
The disciples lost their focus by getting sidetracked by Jesus’ first spectacular triumphs. When Jesus went out to pray and seek some quiet time with his Father, his headline hunting disciples tracked him down: “Simon and his companions hunted for him.” The disciples were like insider “Papparazzi.” They wanted everything that Jesus did in their sight. They wanted everything that Jesus did in their control. The disciples wanted Jesus to be theirs, not the worlds. The disciples wanted first dibs on everything Jesus did.
When you are made part of an “inner circle” you expect to have the inside track and “inner insight.” Jesus’ disciples were no different. And yet when Jesus left them in the middle of a great triumph to go out and reset, they sought him out in an effort to call him back in so they might keep enjoying the enthusiasm of the moment.
The disciples were in the mix, but they were not in the zone. Mark’s text makes their search fairly desperate — “they hunted for him.” When Jesus’ disciples finally located their missing Master, they berated him: “Everyone is searching for you,” they declared. They made this declaration, not as praise but as approbation.
But what the disciples were really searching for was their own agenda. They were trawling and prowling for their own success and stardom. Their personal egos were the scent dogs on that search for Jesus. They were not looking for their master and redeemer. They were looking for their public relations manager.
One of the most famous of the U2 songs is the 2007 “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.” Sometimes, when we are looking for Jesus, we are not sure what it is that we are looking for. Are we searching for meaning, or a new mortgage? Are we searching for redemption, or a new and better relationship? Are we searching for forgiveness, or a way out of a bad relationship? When we address Jesus are we addressing God or are we dressing our ego?
The ego is the part of our psyche that takes care of our personal lives. Our ego is important, it must be healthy, just as our blood pressure must be at a good rate, and our blood sugar must be within normal bounds. But unlike those medically measurable variables like blood pressure and blood sugar, our ego rates are not so easily accounted for.
Our ego can give us confidence and the power to move through the obstacles that life sends us. But our ego can also block us from the greatest power we might possibly access. Kenneth Blanchard, a CEO/leadership guru is known for his moral disqualification of the CEO EGO. As a Christian, Blanchard has also proclaimed that the greatest ego faux pas is to “Edge God Out:” “E-G-O”.
“Edging God Out.” EGO. Ego is what motivated Jesus’ disciples to seek him out in his “senior moment” of prayer and berate him with the scolding message “Everyone is looking for you.” At this extremely early moment in Christ’s ministry, no one was “seeking him out” except his ego-obsessed followers, his hanger’s on who desperately did not want to be hung out to dry.
Ironically Jesus’ moment of prayer was never a “hide-out” time. In fact, Jesus was never more open and accessible than he was when he was in prayer with his Father. It was during the Transfiguration, his most amazing moment of prayer, that the disciples personally witnessed and welcomed the power of Jesus’ connection to the divine.
For Jesus, and for all his disciples, prayer is not a time to “hide out.” Instead it is a time where our own ego gets jettisoned and instead of “Edging God Out” we “Engage God Only.” Our select, singular, “senior” time with God is the time we get rid of our ego — our “edging-God-out” tendencies and temptations — and instead open ourselves to “Exalting God Only.”
This is a new kind of ego, a Jesus ego, a God-concentrated and committed ego that “exalts God only.” A bad ego edges God out. A good ego exalts God only. God has exalted Jesus to God’s right hand. Or as the Apostle’s Creed puts it, he is “seated at the right hand of the Father.” An “ego” that “exalts God only” is an ego that is constantly pointing to Christ, not to itself; an ego that boasts and brags about Jesus only, not about oneself; an ego that turns the eye of the camera on others, not just takes selfies; an ego that lives the power of the risen Christ, not tries to live out of its own strength; an ego that lives these exalted words “Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the world” and “Receive the Holy Spirit.”
In the Jewish religion there are 613 commandments. After the holocaust, some say there are now 614, the newest addition being “Thou shalt not forget.” According to the Talmud, the Hebrew numerical value (gematria) of the word "Torah" is 611, and combining Moses's 611 commandments with the first two of the Ten Commandments which were the only ones heard directly from God, adds up to 613. When Jesus was asked what was the “greatest commandment” of the 613, he gave what appeared to be a dual answer. But it was really only one commandment: the commandment to love. Jesus’ response to the Pharisees’ question “What is the greatest commandment?” was this: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This was the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and Prophet hang on these two commandments” (Matthew 22:36-40).
For some people within and without the church today, the second commandment to “Love your neighbor” has eclipsed the first commandment to “Love God,” making the second commandment the first and only commandment. But God and neighbor, Jesus and justice are not two separate commandments. They are conjoined twins, Siamese truths. What makes the two “one” is the word “inasmuch:” “inasmuch as you do it to the least of these, you do it to me,” Jesus said (Matthew 25:40-45). We are to see Jesus in every person we meet, in every neighbor we have. Once you “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind” there is no possible way you cannot “love your neighbor as yourself.” Loving God fully cannot make it possible to do anything other than to “love your neighbor.”
Jesus did not give us two “Great Commandments.” Jesus only gave us one all-encompassing Great Commandment. The supposedly “two parts” to Jesus commandment are really only one. They bring together the love of the divine and the human. The love of God and the power that enables us to love all those diverse, difficult, deviant people we encounter here on earth. Christianity is not to be confused with Niceianity. When we “love our neighbor” we are not being nice to someone we think is awful. Rather, we are recognizing that Christ himself is present somehow and somewhere in that person in the lens of our life.
A New York business executive had a good collection of paintings in his office, one of them being the Leaning Tower of Pisa, which hung over his writing desk. For a long time he noticed that it persisted in hanging crooked despite the fact that he straightened it every morning.
At last he asked the night office-cleaner if he was responsible for its lopsided position each morning that he came to his office. "Why, yes," he said. "I have to hang it crooked to make the tower hang straight.”
“God writes straight with crooked lines,” goes an old Portuguese proverb. My crooked lines, the crooked lines of your life, God can turn into a narrative that leads straight to goodness, beauty and truth. The story of the Bible is the story of God writing straight with some very crooked lines: “you meant it for evil, but God turned it to good” (Gen.50:20). The story of this church is the story of God writing straight with some very crooked lines. The story of your life is the story of God writing straight with some very crooked lines: God can make all things, even the crooked things, “work together for good for those who love God” (Romans 8:28).
But first you have to turn your crooked lines over to Him. Have you had that “senior moment when you’ve reset your life and reassessed who’s in charge of your life? Has that “senior moment” led you to trust your life to a power greater than anything you can grasp or think? Turn over to God your crooked ego that “edges God out” with scribbles, and watch God scribe something straight and true and beautiful with an ego that “exalts God only.”