Mark 9: 33-37; James 3: 13-18

Muhammad Ali was a magnificent boxer and a likeable colorful character.  He is still extremely popular.  One thing he wasn’t was humble.  He simply said: “I dance like a butterfly and sting like a bee…and …I am the greatest.”  After the final in women’s Olympic soccer last summer, the victorious US players pulled out T-shirts out of nowhere which simply said:” Greatness has been born.” That made me intensively uncomfortable, especially since the Japanese players were taking their loss with so class. I couldn’t understand that the Swedish coach would be okay with that.  No, greatness has not just been born. “You just won the match.”  Even in politics this plays out: why does every American presidential candidate have to say that the US is the greatest country on the face of the earth.  What this means is that all other countries are inferior and less than worthy.  Can’t it just be a “great” country or a “wonderful” country.  Perhaps my discomfort comes from growing up among a people that was kind of embarrassed about nationalism and having lived in South East Asia for almost a decade. Of course other other countries are not above those kind of statements either.

One of the true greatests, Martin Luther King once said:” Everyone has a chance to be the greatest, because everyone can serve.” This takes us straight into the Gospel of Mark where Jesus teaches his the disciples about servanthood.  Jesus asks them what the disciples had been discussing among themselves on the way to Capernaum.  They are sitting inside a house.  They don’t answer. There is silence, because they are embarrassed. They know enough about Jesus to know that he’s not going to like what he’s going to hear.  But He knows that something’s up. They had just been talking about who the greatest is among them.  It is so typical of human beings, even when they are serving God they still have to compete. There still has to be this rivalry. Doris Kearns Goodwin, a well known presidential historian wrote a book entitled “Team of Rivals” about Abraham Lincoln and how he gathered these people who opposed him into his cabinet and somehow made it work. They all wanted to be the greatest, but self-deprecating Lincoln was somehow able to lead them.  Lincoln never ceases to amaze. Most people don’t do that. They keep their rivals at a distance or try to outsmart them.  Friends, I don’t think as Christians we have this competition thing worked out.  We believe in competition in sports and in the market place, but we know it is unseemly when it occurs outside of those two areas. Rivalries are easy to get into, pathetically so.  There is a man who runs the UPS store near my house. When he heard Andrew was considering going to the University of Oregon, he was dismayed. “We can’t have him going there,” he said with a straight face. He was a graduate of Oregon State you see. They call it the “civil war” in Oregon.  When I was at SMU we used to play soccer regularly with foreign students and one time with set up a game with the foreign students at archrival TCU, an hour away.  When we won quite convincingly, we thought we were quite something. We kind of got into that contrived school rivalry. Never mind that the other team didn’t get much playing time.  It was just silly.  Ah, We were young.

Friends, if competition were to be pure, and it never is, that it should be open being the best we can be.  Yes, it’s okay to study your opponent and find out what you are better at, because that means training our analytical skills. But competition in a Christian sense should be a battle between our better self and our worse self, our alert self and our complacent self, our angels and our demons.  Competition is not about turning the other into something inferior, but about turning ourselves into something even better. This is not easy to do, because it is much easier to find someone to look down at, then it is to improve. We don’t have to do anything, just find someone less capable than us.  It is the difference between the internal competition in ourselves or the relative competition with another.

Friends, competition will always be there.  It’s the way of the world.  But it’s our competitiveness we must examine. James reminds us of how unhealthy we are when we are jealous and envious. He says in his customary frank manner: ”For where jealousy and selfish ambitious exist, there is disorder and every evil thing.”  We must know the difference between the need for competition in the world and obsessive competitiveness. I believe what it comes down to is really our deep lack of self-worth. We measure ourselves by looking at others, which is a recipe for disaster.  Jesus turns it all upside down.  The one is the greatest is a servant.  This is really encouraging.  The key in our greatness does not lie in our ability to vanquish others, but in our decision to be a servant.  So, that is the real question for the Christian then, not how we can be above others, but how we are willing to be a servant.  Friends, if you serve others and God, you are great.  The more you serve the greater you are, but only God is the greatest. Thanks be to God.