Because they both started out as child actors, my father and the late great jazz drummer Buddy Rich were lifelong friends, so I know this story firsthand. When Buddy was dying, he checked in for his final time at UCLA Medical Center in Westwood. As part of the normal intake interview, the nurse asked Buddy Rich if he had any allergies.
“Yeah,” he said. “Country and Western.”
I’m very much like Buddy Rich in my musical tastes—I grew up on a steady diet of straight-ahead bebop jazz and then the 1960s LA rock sound. Over the course of my long life I have come to have some appreciation for country music, but it’s been a long, slow process, and much of it I still can’t stand.
About 20 years ago my son Oliver and I drove part way across the country together, and we did so by way of Tennessee so we could see Graceland and Sun Studios in Memphis and the Ryman Auditorium (original home of the Grand Ol’ Opry) in Nashville. It was a wonderful trip.
The night we were in Nashville, another late, great musician, the singer George Jones, was giving a concert at the Ryman, and we decided to go, more to see the auditorium than to hear the music.
Now I can’t say that George Jones is precisely my cup of tea—he specialized in the kinds of tearjerker ballads (“He stopped loving her today”) that don’t really appeal to me. And he had the annoying habit, in concert, of advertising one of his many products between songs. But he did sing a song that night that has stayed with me all these years, an up-tempo number called “Sinners and Saints”. In deference to your aesthetic sensibilities I will not sing it to you, but I will at least read you the final verse:
Nobody’s perfect, we’re just flesh and blood
One foot on the high road, one in the mud
There’s a mighty fine line between right and wrong
Don’t point your finger, don’t matter which side you’re on
The only thing different in sinners and saints
One is forgiven and the other one ain’t.
In case you dozed off for a minute, here it the refrain again:
The only thing different in sinners and saints
One is forgiven and the other one ain’t.
This deathless bit of cornpone theology came into my head as I reflected on the Gospel for today [Mark 9: 30-37]. The “saints” Jones mentions are the sanctimonious types who seem to think their life in the faith community makes them somehow better than those outside it. The song’s “sinners” are the ones who may not be so outwardly pious but who know their need of love, acceptance, and forgiveness. I’ve worked in the church a long time now, and I have to say that, for all his inelegance, George Jones got it right. One of the dangers of spending your life serving Jesus can be the illusion that doing so gives you special status in the universe.
In today’s Gospel, Jesus tells his companions something they cannot possibly process:
“The Son of Man is to be betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him, and three days after being killed, he will rise again.”
As Mark tells us, “they did not understand what he was saying and were afraid to ask him.” A doomed Messiah does not fit with their idea of the program. Imagine you have joined the Jesus movement. You go from success to success—from healings to miracles to feeding the 5,000. One day your leader tells you that instead of the triumph you envision he will instead endure humiliation, torture, and death. As the robot on Lost in Space used to say, “That does not compute.”
So instead of engaging Jesus about the prophecy of his coming crucifixion and death, they start fighting about their relative status:
Then they came to Capernaum; and when he was in the house he asked them, “What were you arguing about on the way?” But they were silent, for on the way they had argued with one another who was the greatest.
Why can’t Jesus’s companions hear him? I guess if you think you have signed on to a victory story, your biggest concern will be your own place in the hierarchy. If you’re imagining your new corner office in the Jesus tower, the idea of a crucifixion sounds crazy. It turns out Jesus wasn’t running a dress for success program. The healings and feedings were not about playing to big crowds. They were about something else. They were putting into action the wild, indiscriminate love of a God who, in spite of everything perverse we do, is coming to meet us where and as we are. And they were about living a life that puts compassion and justice way ahead of one’s own personal status.
In order to make this point to his self-aggrandizing friends, Jesus does one more shocking thing:
He sat down, called the twelve, and said to them, “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.” Then he took a little child and put it among them; and taking it in his arms, he said to them, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.”
As one who worked private schools, and I can tell you that we think of children very differently today than they did in Jesus’s day. Children in Roman occupied Jewish Palestine had no status and no rights. They were at the very bottom of the social ladder. So in holding up a child, Jesus is not being sentimental. He is radically inverting the hierarchy of sinners and saints. “If you really want to follow me,” he is saying, “you will throw your arms open to welcome those who have no earthly status.” Today it’s a child. Tomorrow it will be a prostitute, a tax collector, a widow, an orphan. The community Jesus builds is not one based on status. Or, to put that differently, the only status that matters in the Jesus movement is the knowledge that one is accepted, forgiven, loved exactly as one is right here and right now.
Back to George Jones, our guest theologian for the morning:
The only thing different in sinners and saints
One is forgiven and the other one ain’t.
The church is not an awards show. The church is a motely gathering of wounded, healed, loved, forgiven people who have somehow experienced the transformative, accepting love of God as exemplified in Jesus. To say that we shouldn’t argue over who is greatest is not to say that we don’t have special status. We do: we have the status of a child who is loved, of a sinner who is forgiven, of a sheep who is lost and then found. And we follow one who, in going to the cross, understood that standing with the likes of us sinners was more important than saving his own skin.
We tend to think of the death and resurrection of Jesus as a kind of cosmic magic trick. But in the light of today’s story about true greatness and the welcoming of one without any status, the Passion story shows its true colors. You and I follow one who lived out the deep logic of his life, knowing that so doing would bring him into direct conflict with the values of a world that perpetuates itself by honoring power, status, and privilege over the innate worth of every human being. And our job as followers of that one is to strive continually to keep ourselves open to seeing God’s image both in those to whom the world denies status but also in ourselves and those close to us.
In Jesus’s day the ones without status were represented by the child he takes in his arms. Today they are the homeless, the oppressed, the immigrant and refugee, and yes, still and always the poor. When we think we are somehow more important than those folks we have another think coming. It’s not that some people are precious and others not. It’s that everyone is precious. Human worth is not derived from one’s status or associations. Human worth is a given. Jesus was able to love and accept everyone openly and expansively because he knew their real value. He saw beyond the markers to something eternally true.
And it’s that way also for you. The inverse side of thinking you’re more special than others is to think you’re not special at all. But to deny your own value is just as false as exalting it above that of others. As we come now to gather around God’s table, each of us will be fed with what Jesus calls elsewhere the “bread of life”. This bread comes to us as a sign of the extent to which we are loved, accepted, forgiven, and valued for who and what we are, on our own terms right here, right now.
The only thing different in sinners and saints
One is forgiven and the other one ain’t.
Like the late Buddy Rich, I’m still allergic to country music. But sometimes we take in what we need to hear from a source that surprises us: a child in Jesus’s arms, a country singer in Nashville. God loves everyone—the people you love, the people you can’t stand. God loves even, and especially, you. It turns out we all get a corner office in the Jesus tower. Not because we’ve earned it, but because we are loved. And being loved is the only status that finally means anything at all. Amen
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