I should probably say also that Jimmy’s words came to me by way of a member of our church staff who e-mailed them to the other baseball fans among us, and there are several of us who might be loosely classified as “rabid” baseball fans based on the discussions that sometimes distract us from matters of church calendar in our weekly meetings.  I had a thought when I read those words from Jimmy Rollins, a thought that later another of the staff made clear in her response. 

“That’s like our staff,” she said.  “That’s like us.”  “Yes,” I thought, “that’s what I felt and should have said.”  But maybe it was better said by someone else on staff, not me.  “You do your job, I’ll do my job . . . egos aside . . . we actually like each other.”  All that is true about us.  We’re not actually trying to “win” something, but we are trying to work together toward one purpose.  And in that way we’re a little like a team trying to pull together for a common goal.

And isn’t that what all of us are about?  All of you, all the members of the congregation, along with us, pastors and support staff, working together for one greater purpose beyond any one or even a few of us?  Are we not all pulling together for the will of God in this place and time?  Isn’t that what all our committees, all our meetings, all our worship and education and outreach and fellowship – isn’t that what all of this is about?

No baseball team can win every game, and no congregation can always succeed in the higher purposes to which it has been called, but I believe that in the major areas, time and again, we come together in ways that glorify God.  By saying that I hope I’m not sounding prideful, for that is not what I intend.  I rather wish to sound grateful.  For I know that all we are and all we have is God’s gift to us, individually and collectively.  And for all of that I am grateful for God above, around, and within us – the ever present Spirit of the Living God.

I received a thank-you note this week from the daughter of David and Elisabeth Gelzer on behalf of her family for whom we made our Fellowship Hall available a week ago Saturday to celebrate David’s 90^th birthday.  As I said last Sunday morning in “our life together,” it was a splendid party marking a major milestone in the life of a man of faith of whom I have seen few equals.  But as grateful as we have been for David among us, so, too, has David been grateful for our presence in his life. 

After decades in the mission fields of the Cameroon in Africa and later in Taiwan, from which he was expelled for dissenting political activity, the Gelzers retired to the community of Morganwood here in Swarthmore and joined this church.  We must have been quite a culture shock for people who had spent most of their adult life in third-world conditions, but you wouldn’t have known that except for their own modest lifestyle and that they opened us to the realities and needs of far-flung places that our hand of outreach might actually touch and make a difference.  The World Mission Task Force was David’s baby, and after giving it birth he nurtured it until the day he left here for his home at the Rydal Presbyterian retirement home.  Our four mission co-workers – three of whom will be with us soon on three successive Sundays – were his creation.

Given that mutual history of support and engagement with the greater world through this church community, the note I received from Charlotte, the eldest of the five Gelzer children, came as no real surprise but with gratitude nonetheless.  “We know,” she wrote, “how rare it is to find as rich and fully vibrant a church community as Swarthmore Presbyterian Church, and [we] are grateful for that goodness in our parents’ lives.”  How truly lovely, I thought, for, among other worthy purposes, sharing goodness would be our goal.

And yet, with this morning’s Gospel story before us – the story of James and John, the first two disciples called by Jesus, the disciples who show us so clearly how they are not “team players” at all – we must confront our own human tendencies at times not to play together, but to pull apart even as the ones Jesus thought worthy enough to call among his inner circle did when their humanness got in the way of their divine calling.  It’s what someone has called the “Zebedee DNA,” referring, of course, to Zebedee, the father of James and John, and the genetic inheritance present in his children and, by extension, in all of us.  For in some ways all of us are sons and daughters of Zebedee, though our fathers have borne different names.  We share that human DNA to act like James and John sometimes.  And when that happens in the church community, it seems particularly sad, for one might expect better of those whom Jesus has laid his hands upon and called to be his resurrected body in the world.

A theologian of somewhat higher credentials than Jimmy Rollins’, our own “father” of Presbyterianism, John Calvin, claimed that the story before us this morning contains what he calls “a bright mirror of human vanity” because “it shows,” as he says, “that proper and holy zeal is often accompanied by ambition, or some other vice of the flesh, so that they who follow Christ have a different object in view from what they ought to have.”

And indeed, the problems of vanity, ambition, and other vices are not limited to followers of Christ.  These problems are as old as time and as current as the daily news.  It is a common insight and accusation that those who would lead often seek their own benefit and glory rather than the benefit of others. 

But Jesus was all about offering us an alternative to what Walter Wink has called the “domination system,” the kind of political and social structure in which a few dominate the many.  The world has been and still is filled with such examples of national, community, and family life gone awry in this way.  People take advantage of each other.  Taking advantage of others is a common human failing which is often easy to do when power imbalance invites abuse.  Jesus reminds his disciples that they – that is, we – are called to emulate his example.  The one with obvious greater power is not to “lord” it over others.  Even though we call Jesus “Lord,” his way with us is not as it is for so many “lords” of the earth, others of considerably lesser power who nevertheless pretend to have the power to dominate.  We are to put our own selfish ambition aside in the service of others, just as Jesus did.  “For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.”

Maybe the disciples – especially James and John about whom the story is told –thought that if Jesus seemed so close to them – so loving and caring and compassionate – they might be able to ask a very special favor of him, granting them special places of honor in the presumed hall of triumph.  They must have imagined something sumptuous like Herod’s palace in Jerusalem.

They’re like little children who ask someone to promise them something with the enticing caveat that “I’ll be your best friend.”  How often have we heard that from children at play?  And, as children sometimes don’t have the vaguest notion of what they’re asking for, neither do James and John.  It’s like you better not wish for something you might get. 

Knowing how the story ends, we modern readers of the Bible can’t help hearing about the places to the right and left of Jesus and thinking of the two thieves on crosses to Jesus’ right and left on Calvary.  Isn’t this part of what Jesus means when he asks them, “Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?”  “We are able,” they respond glibly, incredibly ignorant of what they’re saying, stars still glittering in their eyes.

The other ten disciples, of course, are no more comprehending.  It’s all a rather sad moment along the journey Jesus takes through Mark.  But Jesus doesn’t toss his disciples aside; he sticks by them, continuing to try to enlighten them to their true purpose and goal.

And so it is when we stumble along the way and begin to look at each other with less than understanding eyes and compassionate hearts, when feelings are hurt and egos bruised.  Let me give you an example.  It has to do with our struggle over the past three years or so to come up with a Sunday morning schedule that might better meet the needs of our members and more faithfully fulfill our calling as a worshiping and learning community.  The idea originally emerged from the church study task force.  Voices had spoken for a schedule that provided a full hour for education of children and adults separate from the time for worship.  Few could argue with that concept.  Many of us grew up with such a schedule, even in the North.  I make that geographical distinction because, even now, the farther south you travel in our country the more common it is to have completely separate times for worship and education on a Sunday morning.

That’s the schedule I grew up with.  I know it well from my childhood, and it’s something I participated in nearly every week until I left for college.  If it was Sunday, my family was in church.  There was no question about it.  We weren’t “super” religious in any kind of obviously pietistic way; it’s just what many of us did on Sunday morning.  Our culture supported it.  There were no organized sports on Sunday.  Nothing much happened on Sunday mornings then except the ringing of church bells calling us to our appointed place.  There were people then who weren’t Christian, of course, and didn’t follow such a Sunday morning practice, but not much thought was given about that.  Sundays were made for Christians who went to church.

Much has happened since then, of course.  Many would grieve what we have lost.  But, like it or not, times have changed.  At least I know that when people come to church now they really want to; that among all the other attractive options open to them on a Sunday morning, they choose to worship God in a sanctuary set aside for that purpose.  You see why I am grateful for your constant and faithful presence.

But times have changed in still other ways.  Many of our extended families no longer live nearby, and now we have the means to travel to see them.  Or we spend a good portion of the year at our other home in the mountains or at the shore.  As a child I lived in a less affluent community than Swarthmore so I didn’t know anyone in my home church who owned a second home.  We stopped our lives from the labor of the week and spent Sunday mornings in the only second home we knew, our church home.  That’s the way it was then in some communities from which many of us come.  And a schedule that accommodated that way of life is very familiar.  We can begin to believe that that’s the way we “should” do it now.  But I’ve learned in the several decades of my life that telling others what they “should” do is fraught with difficulty, if not with failure.

But we tried something new for us here anyway.  And, I must say, that though churches are often mocked by the old adage that says “but we’ve always done it that way before” as an excuse not to change, Swarthmore Presbyterian Church is quite willing to try something new, to give it a “go,” if you will.  It’s one of our better attributes it seems to me.

But this schedule change tested some of us in ways we might not have anticipated.  Even some of our leaders who voted to put it into place found living with it more difficult than they expected, surprising them.  For some of us it didn’t matter at all.  What’s all the fuss about?  But for others it was like pulling out an old coat from the closet and finding that either it had shrunk or the body trying to wear it had changed.  There was considerable discomfort, even pain, especially for families with smaller children. 

Such people are not more important than others, but they are as important as others.  They are as important, for instance, as our older people for whom we have kept the summer worship at 10:15 rather than moving it back to the earlier time we used to have.  It was one of our older and long-time members who spoke for a host of others when she told us that older people often need more time in the morning to get going.  And she reminded us that the 9:15 time had been set originally because it was cooler in the early morning in an un-air-conditioned sanctuary.  Air conditioning – a good invention that has made its way into churches since my youth – renders that consideration moot.  So we made that decision for our older people, even though some of us might have preferred an earlier hour for worship so we could get on our way and have a longer day for summer fun.  Many players, but one team.  We need to accede to the needs of others, especially when theirs might be more critical than ours.

Ultimately all these matters are “pastoral” matters, and by that I don’t mean that they belong to the pastors only but that they are decided with full recognition of the impact our decisions have on large blocks of our congregation, for we are many players on the same team and we need good people at every position, as our esteemed shortstop reminds us this morning.  Or, as John Calvin does in reminding us that as human beings we are prone to hold up before us “a bright mirror of human vanity” which “shows that proper and holy zeal is often accompanied by ambition, or some other vice of the flesh, so that they who follow Christ have a different object in view from what they ought to have.”

Or even as Paul reminds us in those unforgettable words from First Corinthians, chapter thirteen, where he suggests that in our frail mortality we often take a shortsighted and somewhat selfish view of a much larger picture.  You know, where he says that “now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face.”  In the translation many of us used fifty years or more ago, it was: “For now, we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face.”  In both ways of saying it, the face-to-face part remains the same.  It must be that someday we will not merely be looking at our own distorted image in a mirror, but we will see God face to face, and then we will see the whole picture just as God sees us fully even now. 

I wonder sometimes what James and John and the other ten may have regretted when they met their Maker.  We can’t know those things, of course, certainly not now.  But what we do know of them when they stood where we stand now might yet be instructive for us on the way.  Amen.