In his book, Hide or Seek, James Dobson tells of a time when John McKay, the great football coach at the University of Southern California, was interviewed on television, and the subject of his son’s athletic talent was raised. Son John was a successful player on his dad’s team. Coach McKay was asked to comment on the pride that he felt over his son’s accomplishments on the field. His answer was most impressive: “Yes, I’m pleased that John had a good season last year. He does a fine job, and I’m proud of him. But I would be just as proud if he had never played the game at all.’

Dr. Dobson goes to on to say this: “Coach McKay was saying, in effect, that John’s football talent was recognized and appreciated, but his human worth did not depend upon his ability to play football. Thus, his son respect if the next season failure and disappointment. John’s place in his dad’s heart was secure, being independent of his performance. I wish every child could say the same.” (quoted by William J. Vamos, First Presbyterian Church, Elkhart, Indiana, “What Happens When You’re Not Number One?”, Pulpit Digest, p. 2117).

The problem is that our society doesn’t function the way Coach McKay would have us function. Another college coach story is more typical. His team had won every game of the season thus far – 5 straight – he was savoring every word of praise coming from the college president. “Would you like me as much if we didn’t win?”

“I’d like you as much,” said the president, “I’d just miss having you around.” Unfortunately, human worth in our society is carefully reserved for those who are winners. One of the beautiful things that has happened in parenting; and the resources that are available for parents, is an emphasis on self-esteem. Parents need to learn how to value a child, not in terms of the child’s performance but to value the child for who the child is. We’re being taught, in parenting, not to say to a child, “bad, bad boy,” or “good, good girl”, because they’ve done something bad or good but rather to talk about the fact that we’re disappointed or happy about what they’ve done. The idea is that we not connect performance so intimately with the child, making the child feel that worth is lodged in his or her performance.

We’ve come to a place in our society when people believe that it is unacceptable not to be Number One. Good people are, by definition, those who have succeeded few people ask how — and bad people are defined as those who have failed. So success becomes the ideal and failure the manifestation of moral inadequacy.” (William J. Vamos, Ibid.)

But this is no new problem. It started a long time ago. Mark, in our Gospel lesson, tells the story of James and John seeking places of honor in the fellowship of Jesus. The request was, “grant us to sit, one at your right hand, and one at your left, in your glory.”

That’s an expression of blatant ambition — these two disciples of Jesus wanted to be his chief ministers of state maybe their ambition was kindled because more than once Jesus had made them part of his inner circle, the chosen three. You remember that he had taken James and John, along with Peter, with him, up on the mountain of transfiguration. He would also take them into the Garden of Gethsemane and asked them to share with him that most crucial of all nights. Maybe they were a little better off than the others. We learn from the early part of Mark’s Gospel (1:20) that James and John’s father was well enough off to employ hired servants so it may be that they rather snobbishly thought that their social superiority entitled them to this first place. In any event they show themselves as men in whose hearts there was ambition for the first place in an earthly kingdom. (William Barclay, The Gospel of Mark, pp. 266)

It’s interesting that Matthew tells this story in a different way than Mark. In Matthew the request for the first place is not made by James and John, but by their mother, Salome. Could it have been that Matthew felt that such a request — such blatant ambition — was unworthy of an apostle. So, to save the reputation of James and John, he attributed the request to the natural ambition of their mother.

I’m a parent. I am not unaware of mother’s and father’s being ambitious for their children. How often do we see the ambition of parents placed in their children’s lives? But, I’m going to take Mark at his word here and believe that James and John were the ones who asked for that place of honor.

There’s a story about a court painter painting the portrait of Oliver Cromwell. Cromwell was afflicted with warts on the face. Thinking to please him, the court painter omitted the warts in the painting. When Cromwell saw it, he said, “Take it away! And paint me warts and all!” It is Mark’s aim to show us the disciples, warts and all. And Mark was right, because the 12 were not a company of saints - (when we define saints in the stereotypical way). They were very ordinary men. It was with people like ourselves that Jesus set out to change the world. (William Barclay, The Gospel of Mark, p. 263)

So, it’s an issue with which we all must deal, even as the disciples of Jesus had to deal with it - the desire to be Number One, and what happens when we’re not Number One.

I

Before we get to the heart of this, let’s go back a bit. Jesus had dealt with the question before. The first part of chapter 10 Jesus had talked about receiving the Kingdom as a little child. Is there anything closer to being number one than a child? Grandparents know that, even better than parents do, don’t they?

Isn’t it a shame that we lose that?

What freedom would be ours if we could remember this that God created us. God loves us. We’re all special to God. Jesus gave us some graphic pictures of it. “Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap, nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?” (Matthew 6: 26)

Jesus even went so far as to say that the hairs on our head are numbered. And you remember the story He told of a shepherd who left the 99 sheep safe in the fold and went out to find the one lost sheep that had gone astray. If we would only remember each one of us is precious to God; unique, unrepeatable miracles of God, precious not because of what we have achieved, or the place we have in society, or the amount of money we’ve accumulated, or what others think of us…we’re precious because we’re God’s creation. God loves us. We belong to Him.

But we don’t remember it. So we must press the issue of James and John’s distorted notion of being #1.

II

Let’s nail down the fact that there is nothing wrong with ambition; it is blind ambition that ruins our lives.

There’s nothing wrong with ambition. In fact, some of us need more of it. But if you are Christian, ambition can blind you to another person’s need...

“We live in an age in which ambition has been raised to the highest virtue, and all other things are sacrificed to it. I believe one of our biggest problems, if not the biggest problem in the Methodist Church today, is ineffective leadership. And a big part of that problem is laziness.

Clergy are not ambitious for the Gospel – for the church to be a dynamic and growing fellowship.

Of course, we have confused place and performance. We may be ambitious for a place in the church, but we are not willing to pay the price performance in ministry requires.

So, there’s nothing wrong with ambition some of us need more of it.

But – and here is the rut – ambition can blind us to another’s need.

People like Michael Korda can write books on how to be a success that read like manuals for waging guerilla warfare. He says moral considerations are not only indifferent, but they get in the way.

Get rid of them. He says people are dispensable. He says even associates, the people you work with, should be seen as potential enemies. . .we live in ... and have to survive in that kind of world. How do we do it?

There are those who have pointed out the folly of it all. Blind ambition is the stuff of tragedy – from Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” and “King Lear” to Theodore Dreiser’s American Tragedy to Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby to Miller’s Death of a Salesman and most recently the confessional books coming out of the Watergate crisis, Charles Colson and John Dean, whose book was entitled Blind Ambition.

“There is ample evidence that blind ambition ruins lives. (We could spend our time talking about) ways of being successful in this life without being ruthless. (But Jesus) did not come to show us how to be successes. We can figure out how to do that. He came to show us that there are some things not be sacrificed to success.

“Contrary to some preaching you hear nowadays, (the kind of preaching that was the keynote of Jimmy and Tammy Bakker), being Christian does not guarantee that you’re going to be a success in this life. Don’t be taken in by the “prosperity gospel” of so many TV preachers. (Jesus) said there are times in this life when you have to choose between being a Christian and being successful. You may end up first being a Christian (I know some highly successful people – the church has a lot of them – #1 people even by the world’s standards…who are dynamic Christians). But you may end up being first by denying Christ. It depends on how you get there. They were ambitious which was alright, but it blinded them, which is wrong.” (Mark Trotter, “For Status Seekers”).

And that brings us to our final focus for today: the true glory that Jesus shares with us... the #1 place he gives us.

I almost entitled the sermon, “The Weight of Glory” because there is a weight – a burden – to Glory that Jesus offers us – a weight that many of us don’t seem to bear.

When James and John made their request to have the first place – to sit on his right and on his left — in his kingdom, Jesus said to them: “You do not know what you’re asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or to be baptized with the baptism with which I am baptized? (verse 38)

Barclay reminds us that these two symbols – the cup and the baptism — are Jewish metaphors.” It was the custom at a royal banquet for the king to hand the cup to his guests. The cup therefore became a metaphor for the life and experience that God handed out to men. “My cup runneth over,” said the Psalmist (Psalm 23:5), when he spoke of a life and experience of happiness given to him by God. “In the hand of the Lord there is a cup,” said another Psalmist (Psalm 75:8), when he was thinking of the fate in store for the wicked and the disobedient.

The cup then speaks of the experience allotted to men by God. The other phrase which Jesus uses is actually misleading in the literal English version. He speaks of the baptism with which He was baptized. The Greek verb baptizein (as used here), means submerged and it is regularly used of being submerged in any experience.

For instance, a spend-thrift is said to be submerged in debt. A drunk man is said to be submerged in drink. A grief-stricken person is said to be submerged in sorrow. So the metaphor is very closely related to a metaphor which the Psalmist often uses. In Psalm 42:7 we read, “All Thy waves and Thy billows are gone over me.” So the expression, as Jesus used it here, had nothing to do with technical baptism. What He is saying is, “Can you bear to go through the terrible experience which I have to go through? Can you face being submerged in hatred and pain and death, as I have to be?” Jesus was telling these two disciples that without a cross there can never be a crown. The standard of greatness in the Kingdom is the standard of the Cross.” (William Barclay, The Gospel of Mark, The Daily Study Bible, p. 261—265).

And what is that standard? Jesus answers us in the last verse of our scripture lesson, vs.45:

“For the Son of man also came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

We can’t, in a minute or two, describe all that such living looks like. But here is a broad outline from two secular sources.

“A number of years ago a brilliant psychologist named Abraham Maslow began a new kind of study in the field of psychology. As he studied the works of the great pioneers Freud, Jung, and Adler, he concluded that the problem with psychology was that it tended to be oriented toward people with problems. It was preoccupied with pathology, with mental illnesses, with abnormal behavior and attitudes. While it was true that great strides had been made.... still Maslow felt something was missing. Maslow believed that psychology should also study the healthiest, happiest, most radiantly alive people. He began to devote himself to this study. He turned not to the depressed or psychopathic or the paranoid or the compulsive persons but to the enthusiastic positive actualized people who are part of history and of the present community. He found this to be a fascinating study.

Around our neck or pinned to our lapel are not signs of being number 1 – no matter how much they cost us. The Cross in our hearts which leads us to serve others and give ourselves in ministry is the badge of those who are first in Jesus’ kingdom.

These fulfilled or “actualized people” had no common educational, financial, racial, or geographic links. These exceptional people cut across all lines - but they had one great dimension in common. Without exception those who seemed to be living forward into the potential with which they were created which was what Maslow meant by “actualized” - were those who gave themselves whole-heartedly to a cause greater than themselves. Their satisfaction was ultimately not in things or in position or in power but in people. They were all doing something that helped other people. Maslow came to regard this as a universal fact for actualized people.

Some years later a man named George Gallop made a related study of highly committed persons across America. He studied thousands of persons of different races and economic groups. He found that the highly committed persons had four distinct characteristics that distinguished them from the general population.

1. The highly committed group was far happier than the general population.

2. In the highly committed group, family life was far stronger. The divorce rate was noticeably lower than in the general population.

3. The highly committed group tended to be more tolerant of people of different races and religions than the general population. They were far more accepting of others.

4. The highly committed group was far more involved in working with the community than the uncommitted or nominally committed group. Forty-six percent in this group was working with the poor, the homeless, the elderly, or those who in some way were rejected by society.” (Dr. Joe A. Harding, “Surprised by Joy!”).

Well, that’s at least a hint of it. The weight of Glory that is ours and it is a glory that gives meaning and joy when being #1 as the world often defines it leaves emptiness and even tragedy – the weight of glory that is ours is joining Christ in serving and giving our lives for others.