October 18, 2009
Grace Church
Rev. Robert E. Hensley

Job 38:1-7 [=34-41]; Psalm 104:1-9, 25, 37b; Hebrews 5:1-10; Mark 10:35-45 

      Let us pray.  Most Gracious God, we are always in need. We too quickly forget all that you have done for us. We forget that you are with us in both good times and bad. We forget that you are always close at hand, ready to listen even when we don’t know the words to say. We come today to sing, to pray, to hear again your words of grace and love. Help us in this time feel your loving presence.Amen. 

      Those of you who were here last Sunday will recall Bishop Harris’ story of the man who walked across Niagara Falls on a tight rope, ultimately with a wheel barrow.  I have a similar story to share with you about a strong young man at a construction site who was bragging that he could outdo anyone in a feat of strength. He made a special case of making fun an older workman by the name of Morris. After several minutes, Morris had had enough. “Why don’t you put your money where your mouth is?” he said. “I will bet you a week’s wages that I can haul something in a wheelbarrow over to that outbuilding that you won’t be able to wheel back.” 

      “You’re on, old man,” the braggart replied. “It’s a bet! Let’s see what you got.” 

      Morris reached out and grabbed the wheelbarrow by the handles. Then, nodding to the young man, he said, “Okay then…get in.” 

      Earlier this year many of you will remember that Jim Norton led us in a book study of Greg Mortenson’s story as told in the book “Three Cups of Tea.”  Now, if Greg Mortenson is motivated to do good deeds by the example of Jesus, you might not ever know it by reading his book. He not only makes no mention of such motivation, he makes no mention of Jesus, at least not as having anything to do with Mortenson himself. Even though his parents were Lutheran missionaries in Tanzania, where he grew up, he makes no claims that he shares their faith.  

      However, if you wanted an example of someone who takes seriously Jesus’ injunction to love your neighbor as yourself, you would not go wrong looking at Mortenson’s example.  But you would most likely have to look for him in a high-altitude neighborhood. 

      For those of you who don’t know the story, Mortenson joined the U.S. Army as a young man and was trained as a medical corpsman. That, coupled with a love of adventure, later led to Mortenson being included on mountain-climbing teams, which were always eager to have a medic along.

      In 1993, he was part of a team ascending the world’s second-highest mountain, only slightly lower than Mt. Everest. That peak, known only by its map coordinates as K2, is part of the Karakoram segment of the Himalayas. It is located on the border between Pakistan and China. Informally, K2 is known as “The Savage Peak” due to the difficulty of climbing it. For every four people who reach the summit, one dies trying to get there. 

      While all climbers want to get to the top of the mountains they tackle, in Mortenson’s case, he had an additional incentive. The previous year, his 23-year-old sister, Christa, had died from a massive seizure after a lifelong struggle with epilepsy. Mortenson intended to dedicate his conquest of K2 to her memory.  As it turned out, however, he honored Christa with far-more-lasting results. 

      After having struggled for 78 days against the mountain, which included helping rescue another climber, Mortenson got to within 600 meters of the summit. But then failing strength and altitude sickness forced him to turn back. A local guide helped him off the mountain, but they got separated when Mortenson made a wrong turn. He ended up in the primitive mountain village of Korphe in Pakistan. Too sick to go on, he stayed there under the hospitable care of the villagers while he recuperated. 

      The people of Korphe belong to an ethnic group called Balti. Many of them, like the more well-known Sherpas of Tibet, work as high-altitude porters for climbing expeditions. But one important difference between the two groups is that the Sherpas are Buddhists and the Baltis are Muslims. 

      While recovering his health and strength in the village, Mortenson observed the harsh realities of the Balti way of life. They live in isolated, remote mountain valleys and subsist on marginal crops of grain and small herds of yaks. Because of the altitude, the climate is severe. Medical care is almost nonexistent, and people die from things that would be routinely treated and cured in other places – even other places in Pakistan. Among the Balti, children under 12 months of age have a 35 percent mortality rate, primarily due to diarrhea-induced dehydration. During the brutal winters, villagers retreat into tiny basement dugouts and spend six months huddled together, with only smoky yak-dung fires to keep them warm. 

      For the children who do survive, there are frequently no schools. In Korphe, Mortenson saw 82 children kneeling on frosty ground in the open, trying to learn. The Pakistani government provided no teacher, and the villagers couldn’t afford one on their own. They shared a teacher with a neighboring village, but he was in Korphe only three days a week. The rest of the time, the kids gathered in the open to work on the lessons the teacher had assigned. 

      Though he had no money and no idea how to raise any, Mortenson resolved to build a school for the village. When he returned home to California, he took a job as an emergency room nurse and started sending letters to celebrities and anyone he could think of who might help with the school. That attempt failed, but eventually a man who’d made a good bit of money in the semiconductor industry (and was also a climber) read about Mortenson’s quest in a climbers’ newsletter. That man contacted him and donated the necessary money. Mortenson then went back to Pakistan, purchased building materials and rode in a trunk to get them near Korphe. From there, Mortenson had to solve the considerable problem of getting the materials to the remote mountain village while fending off tribal chieftains and others who tried to shuttle the supplies toward their own uses.  

      It was the people of Korphe themselves that solved the final part of the logistical problem. A rock slide had blocked the road some 18 miles away. But the men of the community, accustomed to hauling heavy loads on their backs for climbing expeditions, moved the materials that same way. One photo in Mortenson’s book shows the men with massive loads of lumber on their backs, laboring toward their village.  The most surprising thing about it is that they all have these great big smiles on their faces. 

      It was during this ordeal, that the Balti and other Pakistanis became convinced that Mortenson had no ulterior motives and had come to do only good. 

      After the school was built and his promise was kept, Mortenson returned to the States but continued to be haunted by the needs that he had seen in the mountain villages. To make a long story short, Mortenson resumed raising money so he could help other villages build schools. He kept returning to Pakistan, and eventually to Afghanistan as well, to build more schools. As of last year, he and the organization he founded had established more than 78 schools in rural and often volatile regions of the two countries. He not only raised the funds for and constructed the buildings but often raised the money to pay for teachers and learning materials. Those schools provide education to more than 28,000 children (including 18,000 girls) in regions where few, if any, opportunities existed before. 

      Mortenson has not personally profited financially from any of this. Although he now draws a salary from his organization, it is small. He has faced considerable dangers, including an eight-day armed kidnapping by a Taliban group. It eventually let him go after becoming convinced of his good intentions. Some of his captors even gave him money for the schools! In 2003, Mortenson escaped a firefight between feuding Afghan warlords by hiding for eight hours under a load of putrid animal hides. He has been the target of two fatwas from Islamic mullahs who didn’t like his helping girls receive an education, has been investigated by the CIA and, after 9/11, received hate mail and even death threats from Americans for helping Muslim children receive an education.  

      But by his determined efforts, his selfless actions and his willingness to meet people where they are without trying to impose on them some other agenda, Mortenson has gained the trust of Islamic leaders, government officials, military commanders and tribal chiefs in both Pakistan and Afghanistan. They see him as a humble hero. 

      What’s more, many observers on both sides of the Atlantic believe that in the long run, it is efforts such as this to build bridges instead of fight battles that will help reduce terrorism throughout the world. 

      The title of Mortenson’s book, Three Cups of Tea, refers to an old Balti proverb: “The first time you share tea with a Balti, you are a stranger. The second time you take tea, you are an honored guest. The third time you share a cup of tea, you become family.”  And Mortenson has drunk a lot of tea in little villages throughout the world’s most rugged and remote regions. 

      We might even call it humble tea, and it is too bad that James and John didn’t drink some that day mentioned in today’s gospel lesson, as they neared Jerusalem with Jesus and the other disciples.  It is hard to imagine what was going on in their minds that led them to come to Jesus with what, from the perspective of what they should have known by that point, was a ridiculous request: “Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory.” It was ridiculous because, if you read it in context, you see that Jesus had just told the disciples, for the third time, that he was going to be arrested and killed and then would rise again. 

      So where were their heads? Weren’t they listening? Didn’t they get it? It’s as if James and John skipped right over the stuff about suffering and went straight for the resurrection, which they were obviously clueless about as well.  But more than that, their request for special seating in the kingdom of God reveals that they had misunderstood much of what Jesus had said. If you go back to Mark 8:29-30, where Peter declares that Jesus is the Messiah and Jesus doesn’t disagree, and then start reading from there, straight through to today’s passage.   It appears that once James and John understood that Jesus was indeed the Messiah, they stopped listening and didn’t hear anything else.   As commentator André Resner Jr. points out, in the intervening verses Jesus tells his disciples that following him means thinking of themselves as people who: 

• deny self for Jesus’ sake and for the sake of the gospel, risking and accepting worldly shame (8:34-38); 

• are focused on Jesus and his words above all others (9:7); 

• remain humbly dependent on God’s power to do God’s work (9:14-29); 

• do not play the games of competitiveness, one-upmanship or glory grasping but choose the role of least of all and slave to all (9:33-37); 

• relinquish control for who does what and how they do it in the kingdom; in other words, giving up the need to be God’s quality-control experts (read: control freaks) for anything that’s done for God (10:38-41); 

• keep children at the center of their work, even when it appears distracting (9:36-37, 42-48; 10:13-16); and 

• do not become overburdened by possessions but receive the gift of the hundredfold promise (10:17-31). 

      Yet even after all that, James and John ask for places of special recognition!  

      What they failed to do was drink from the “cup” that Jesus was offering them (v. 38).  And their quick response that they were able to drink of the cup from which Jesus drank suggests that they may still have thought that it was going to be filled with royal wine.  

      Mortenson, however, discovered that the cup of service is often filled with humble tea. He needed to drink of the life experience of these people he was with and not sip from some special private stock.   Only in that way could they be the hosts and he be the servant. Indeed, in their primitive circumstances, the yak milk they used to flavor their tea wasn’t always fresh. But that was how they had to drink it, because it was all that they had, and Mortenson drank it with them.  

      That was to become a metaphor for his work among the Balti and others. He lived among them in the same conditions they did, and because of that, they embraced and supported his work, they worked alongside him and they loved him. Today, Mortenson is one of the few Americans who is warmly received throughout Pakistan and Afghanistan, because he is seen as one who has come to serve without power and without seeking position and prestige. He shows that greatness is not, is in fact is never, about how many people are serving us but about how many people are being served by us. 

      James and John eventually learned that lesson, too, and they went on to faithfully carry the gospel as servants to others.  

      We who want to be Jesus’ disciples also are called to drink the cup the Lord puts in front of us, humbly, seeking not to be served but to serve.  Amen. 



Sources: 

Central Asia Institute, ikat.org. 

Mortenson, Greg. “The Balti porters: soul of the Karakoram.” Mountain Hardware, Fall 1999. gregmortenson.com/Articles/1995-99Articles/Fall-99MtnHardwear.html. 

“Greg Mortenson.” Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Mortenson.  

Mortenson, Greg, and David Oliver Relin. Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace ... One School at a Time. New York: Penguin Books, 2006. 

Resner, André Jr. “Twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost, Year B.” The Lectionary Commentary: The Third Readings: The Gospels, ed. Roger E. Van Harn. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 2001.