Are you able......?

....to drink the cup that I drink?"

That's the question, and just perhaps a litmus test.  Jesus has been asked to gift James and John with  the two pre-eminent positions in the coming kingdom....and he was asked by James and John themselves (I am not fooled by Matthew's version that it was their mother who asked).  So Jesus asks a question back, "Are you able to drink the cup that I drink?"

For once, this is not a metaphorical question.  This is as concrete as it gets....or will get in a chapter or two when they nail Jesus to a cross.  The cup Jesus drinks is the cup of suffering out of love for his neighbors......every single one of them.

To be clear, Jesus is not asking if you are lining up for the next round of crucifixions.  He wants to know where you stand on suffering....not your suffering, but the suffering of those around you.  Looking for a way out?  Looking for protection and security?  Looking out for yourself?

Do you see the suffering around you?  Do you know their names?  Do you know how this world is built on winners and losers?  Do you care whether the hungry get fed?  People of color get dissed?  Children get abused?  The elderly get scammed?

Are you able to drink the cup that I drink?

Or as the decade old song asks, "How deep is your love?"

Not that Jesus will love you any the less if you walk away, shaking your head, and changing the locks on your heart, handing out the keys to a select few.  It's just that there are no private rooms in the kingdom Jesus rules.

Poured out for the world...........

That was the theme for this year's assembly, and I would guess to some it describes what I consider the worst stereotypes held about people of faith.  Our culture doesn't have a great deal of space for sacrifice or sacrificial giving.  Our advertising is about acquiring and achieving and attaining.......certainly not about being 'poured out for the world.'

Yet this is the very gift we have received in the life, ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus - a creating and creative God who poured life into the incarnate Jesus, taking on the limitations of our fleshly existence for the sake of those whom God created in the beginning.  Then Jesus poured out himself - giving, granting, sharing, teaching, leading, guiding,correcting, loving, healing....dying....so we might know a different way of living a full and abundant life.  Then in his resurrection Jesus carried the creation back to the Creator God.

God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit are poured out into our world - an act of love which calls into life all that is broken and lost.  No one can move in this world without the Spirit moving around, with and for their sake.  No one ....and as Paul puts it in his letter to the Romans, not even pestilence, famine, sorrow, powers, or other creatures.....can separate us from this great love of God poured out in Jesus.  When you go swimming in this world that God created you will get wet with the love of God, whether you like it or not.

But here's the amazing thing.  When you pour yourself out for others, when you give beyond politeness and even beyond 'substantial', when you love enough to forgive, when you seek the light wherever you are.....you will be transformed.  When you lose yourself, you find yourself.  When you release your deadly grasp of this life, you discover life abundant.

Others may look at all this and see people of faith as doormats and Pollyannas and a bunch of other weak, powerless, even silly images.  People of faith know that in giving we receive and in dying we are raised to eternal life.....today, tomorrow, until eternity is all in all.