Gethsemane

Transcripts are computer-generated and may not be 100% accurate.

Okay, well good morning everybody. So good to be together with you. As Jae said, my name is Maggie Keller. I'm part of The Table team here, and our team is led by the wonderful and magnificent Debbie Manning. And Debbie Manning is on a hard-earned and well-deserved vacation this week and next week. We are glad for her, hope she's soaking up that Florida sun—and brings some of it back with her, please. But in the meantime, if you experience some kind of pastoral emergency while Debbie's out of town, I want to let you know that Cody Sanders is our pastor on call and you can find his number there. So if you experience an emergency over the next couple of weeks, you can reach out to Cody and Debbie will be back with us for Palm Sunday.

Special shout out to my 2nd-5th out here. Holla at you. I am so glad that you are here. Look, I'm gonna try to keep this short and I'm gonna tell lots of stories. Deal? Deal. Great. Okay. If anything I say today doesn't make sense, will you come find me during donut time and we'll chat about it? Okay, great. Alright.

As promised, first a story, when I was a senior in college, my very first high school friend had a baby and she was the first of our home friends to have a child. And I had no idea how to support her. I didn't know practically what you do to support someone who's going through this monumental life change. And I remember, before going back to school that fall, I sat in her nursery with her and helped her fold baby clothes and put them away. And then I went back to school and she was due in September. And I remember getting a text message one night from her husband saying, “Labor’s started. Baby's on the way.”

And I was like, what do I do? Because I would pick up the phone and call her, but she needs space. I know that. So what else do I do? Well, I was like, well, I can pray. And in true Maggie Keller fashion, I decided to be super legalistic about it. And I was like, “I am going to pray until this baby is born.” And I had no idea how long labor takes. I know now, but I didn't know then. So I thought I'll stay up all night if I have to. So all my housemates went to bed and I stayed up and I prayed out loud and I prayed silently and I prayed the psalms and I even got out the Book of Common Prayer and read through some of those passages. And sometime after midnight, I fell asleep on the couch. And the next morning I woke up and I grabbed my phone really quick and I flipped it open. Oh, I flipped it open. And there was a text message saying, he is born. He had been born while I was asleep because I did not manage to stay awake all night because I am after all only human.

And today our text is the Garden of Gethsemane, which is about that very human quality of falling asleep when you said you would stay awake. Now, before we read this passage, I just want to give you a reminder. Last week Debbie preached on being unapologetically human. It is a stated value of this community. And she took us through that earlier part of Mark 14 where Jesus comes out of the city with his disciples up the Mount of Olives, and he says to them, “all of you are going to fall away.” And Peter makes this very bold claim: “Even if everybody else does, I will never fall away.” Remember that. Remember that when we read this next part, okay? This is where we're picking up right after Peter has made this very bold claim on the Mount of Olives.

This morning I'm going to read from Eugene Boring's translation—he's a theologian—of Mark chapter 14:32-52. Feel free to follow along with me on the screens, or if you just want to take a posture of listening, that's okay too:

And they come to a place called Gethsemane and he says to his disciples, sit here while I pray. And he takes with him, Peter and James and John, and he began to be overwhelmed with horror and anguish. And he says to them, I am overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. Stay here and stay alert. And he went a little further and was falling to the ground and praying that if possible, the hour might pass him by. And he was saying, Abba, father, everything is possible for you. Take this cup from me, yet not what I want, but what you want. And he comes and he finds them being the disciples sleeping. And he says to Simon, Peter, Simon, are you asleep? Could you not stay alert for one hour? Stay alert and pray that you may not be put to the test. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. And again, he came and found them sleeping for their eyes were weighed down. They did not know what to say to him. He comes the third time and says to them, “Are you still sleeping and resting? It's settled. The hour has come. See the son of man is being betrayed into the hands of sinners. Get up. Here we go. See, here comes the one who was handing me over.”

And suddenly while he was still speaking, Judas, one of the twelve, arrives and with him a crowd with swords and clubs from the chief priests, the scribes, and the elders. Now the one who's handing Jesus over had given them a sign saying, "He is the one I will kiss, arrest him and take him away under guard." And when Judas came, he immediately went up to Jesus and says, "Rabbi," and kissed him with a show of affection. And they laid hands on Jesus and arrested him. But one of the bystanders drew his sword, struck the slave of the high priest, and took off his ear. And Jesus says to them, "Have you come out with swords and clubs to arrest me as though you're going after a bandit? I was with you daily teaching in the temple and you did not arrest me, but this is happening to fulfill the scriptures." And they all deserted him and fled. And a certain young man was following him, wearing nothing but a linen cloth. And they seized him, but he left the linen cloth behind and fled naked.

So last week, Debbie preached on the humanity of the disciples. And today I want to talk about the humanity of Jesus. We maintain this great mystery that Jesus was at once fully human and fully divine, both fully God and fully man. Earlier in Mark's gospel, we see the divine Jesus through the healings and the miracles. But here in Mark, we get to see Jesus as fully human.

In fact, I'm pretty sure that this stained glass window behind me is a depiction of Jesus in Gethsemane. What do you think? He's kind of in repose. His face is angled up to heaven. And in case there's any wonder about what he's doing, his fingers are interlaced just as we might when we pray, right? But is that what we just read in Mark? It's not, I have some qualms with this. What's the first one? What's the first problem? Lil? He's white. He's white. What color skin did Jesus have, Lily? Yeah, he was brown. That's right.

But also, does Mark tell us that Jesus was praying peacefully like this? No, Jesus is in misery, Mark says. “He was falling to the ground,” which that's, that's not a normal posture for prayer for first century Jews, but it can be the expression of desperation or exhaustion. Kiddos, have any of you had this experience where you have fallen to the ground because you cannot take another step? Grace, your hand should be in the air. Because I've gone on a hike with you before and all of my kids have done this before. Parents, you know what I'm talking about, where you're like trying not to dislocate their arm because they will not come with you. And you kinda have to drag them a little bit?

Earlier in Mark, Jesus talks about his coming death and his coming suffering, super matter of factly. But here in Mark the curtain gets peeled back a little bit. And we see how Jesus really feels about this situation. He is overwhelmed with sorrow and anguish to the point of death. Jesus is young, he is full of life. He knows he's about to die, and he does not want to.

This way that Jesus is feeling overwhelmed with sorrow and anguish. This is a very human moment, right? Have any of you been there before? Maybe yourself, maybe a loved one? We get a diagnosis. We walk through infertility. We struggle with our mental health, right? These are, these are human moments. And we feel overwhelmed in those moments with sorrow and anguish. And we feel desperate.

And so let me be clear about a couple of things this morning. When you have those kinds of desperate moments, you are not lacking faith. When you experience that dark night of the soul, you are not sinful and you are not wrong. You are in good company because Jesus had those moments too. So if you hear nothing else today, I want you to hear that if one day you find yourself on the floor, literally or figuratively in anguish and in sorrow, you are not alone. Jesus experienced the exact same thing. And maybe today that feels like good news for you. It is good news to you that when you are crushed and desperate, Jesus knows how you feel.

But in this desperate moment, Jesus tells God, "I don't wanna die. I don't want to do this." And there is something to this idea of telling God exactly what you think about the situation you find yourself in. I'm thinking of those, um, WWJD bracelets from the nineties. What Would Jesus Do? Jesus would tell God, "I don't wanna do this. Please don't make me do this."

And then Jesus prays what I think is the hardest prayer of all, "Yet not what I want, but what you want." Or maybe you've heard this translated, "Not my will, but thine be done." This is one of those verses that needs to be treated with a lot of care and unpacked fully. And if I do that right now, we will be here until Easter morning. Okay?

So I'm just gonna say this: there is a great mystery present here. And I do not claim to have all of the answers when it comes to suffering or the problem of evil or what God wants or God's will. I gave up my idol of certainty a long time ago, and I actually feel peace in the mystery in this not knowing. And maybe that resonates for you. Maybe you find peace in the mystery too.

But these words, "not my will, but thine be done," they've also been used to teach that suffering is a gift that comes from God or that suffering is somehow God's will for you. Those are really harmful things to teach. And suffering is part of a lot of people's lives, people in this room right now. And so if the theme of suffering is something you want to dig into a little deeper or you want to have a better understanding of, I'm so glad to tell you that there are people on staff who would love to talk with you about that. Both Jae and Cody have done research that dovetails with the issue of suffering, and they would love to be able to talk with you or make further recommendations for you for further reading.

But I also want to acknowledge that suffering is going to be part of the rest of the book of Mark from here all the way to Easter Sunday, the theme is suffering. Welcome to Lent everybody. But today's story is Gethsemane. And Gethsemane teaches us through Christ's example, how to suffer, but also how to accompany the suffering.

Jesus is the one who is suffering in this story, and he asks for what he needs. To most of the disciples, he says, "Sit here while I pray." Give me the gift of your presence. To the three special disciples, he says, "Stay alert and pray." Give me the gift of accompanying me in prayer. And I think that this is a marvelous example to us in our, in our right-now, everyday lives of how we can companion those who are suffering.

Many of you know that I am in seminary right now, and my current class is Congregational Care, taught by none other than our Interim Pastor Cody Sanders. And from the very first day, Cody had us practicing this ministry of presence, listening without fixing. And on the very first day, the most memorable thing that Cody said to us was, "Stop trying to fix it. Stop that!" [Jae: Amen!] It is a very human urge to want to fix things. But when we are walking each other through the suffering, through the grief and the loss of life, there are no fixes. Trying to fix things is rarely helpful. And in this story, Jesus does not say, “Disciples, I need you to brainstorm some possible solutions. Please make some recommendations to me for the problem that I find myself in.” No, he just needed his friends to be with him.

And I suspect that this rings true of your experience too. As I talk with all of you, I hear your stories, your stories of grief and loss. I hear you say, one thing that your community did well was to be there, to show up, to offer presence. Because when the unimaginable happens, there are no words. What can we say? And so the best gift you can offer someone is your presence so that they know they're not going to suffer alone.

You can do this in your immediate circles, but the ministry of presence also works in a more systemic way as well. I am thinking of our neighborhood—Jon and the kids and I live in Powderhorn Park, not far from here. And in the days after George Floyd was murdered, Powderhorn Park called for this all-hands gathering, and hundreds of people showed up to the park. We—that's a [panoramic photo], that's why my kid looks really weird in that picture. Anyways, but hundreds of people showed up to the park. And then what they did is they had us divide up into blocks. So we met our neighbors, we knew each other's names, and then we practiced mutual aid. We said, "What needs do we have? What needs are present on this block? And how can we organize ourselves to be able to meet those needs?" And that is the ministry of presence in action.

If you're like, "I'm there, I want to do this, let's go," then I would point you to the prayer vigil that happens every month here in town outside the local ICE detention center. Some of the folks from this community went to the one in November. But it happens every second Tuesday of the month—if you're keeping track, that's next Tuesday, a week from this Tuesday. And ICOM is the Interfaith Coalition on Immigration. They bring people together to stand outside the detention center. They are bearing witness and offering solidarity to the detainees and saying that this whole detention experience is unjust. And so if you want to get involved, I did put it on our community calendar and you can scan that code. But you know what, it's not the only event I put on the community calendar. I think that there are opportunities for us to offer presence at events here in town. And so I'm going to keep doing that. I will put events on the calendar that I want you all to know about. And you can choose to opt in, “This is how I want to spend my time. This is how I wanna offer my presence.”

And lest we think that it is all about us and our own ability to show up, Gethsemane reminds us that we are all human. And just like the disciples who fall asleep, we are going to fail. Jesus tells them, “the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” And I don't want you to hear the message, "The flesh is weak, so try harder, believe more, do better." That is not this message. The disciples had a Hebrew understanding of spirit and flesh. Flesh is you in your totality. Spirit is God's power.

So, if we rely only on our human ingenuity, our own resources, we're gonna fail. But the good news, Jesus is saying, is that the spirit is willing and Spirit moves among us and in us and through us. And though we are but flesh, we can be animated by the Spirit to follow the ways of Jesus even if sometimes we fall asleep or we fail.

Because that's really what's going on here. The disciples falling asleep is not about their fatigue, it's about their failure. Mark writes, they all deserted him and fled. What a curious picture of discipleship here. One disciple betrays Jesus by joining in with his enemies. Another follower grabs a sword and gets violent. And everybody, every last one of them flees. In case you ever felt like following Jesus was hard, I just want you to know you're in good company because the disciples were very human too.

This is the end of our reading today. Ugh. Does that feel unsettled and yucky to you? Like it feels to me? But this is not the end of the story. In order to get to the resurrection on Easter Sunday, we have to go through the betrayal and the arrest on Thursday, and we have to go through the state-sanctioned execution on Friday, and we have to go through the waiting and the uncertainty on Saturday to get to Sunday morning. It's the happy and the sad and the fearful and the celebratory. It's all bound up together in this story and in your story too.

I'm so glad that in the story of this community, we are willing to stand in this messy middle together. We are not trying to fix anything, we're just being present to each other. And if that idea of ministry of presence has captured your imagination, I would like to introduce you to this brand new book called Spiritual Care First Aid by Cody Sanders. It's not even out yet, right? When’s it come out, Cody? April 15th. Okay. So I want you to know about this book and stay tuned because already this week I've had conversations with Sam Manning and Andrea Johnson who head up our Community Care team. We are brainstorming ways that our community can go through this book together so that we can learn to accompany each other and care for each other even better. So stay tuned. More details to come.

Will you pray with me? God, who is close to the brokenhearted, may we sense your presence today. Jesus who suffered like we do, may we feel comforted that we are not alone. And Spirit, who emboldens us to act. may we offer our presence to a world crying out for it. Amen.