Bird Girl, Grace and the Moral Calculus

Sermon Text: Mark 10:35-45
Full Text of Sermon

We do it all the time. We weigh all kinds of stuff searching for the fair or the just. Think of Bird Girl nearby as a pretty artistic expression of the human striving after the moral calculus. Grace scrambles that. There is no fair with grace. The equation never balances when grace is in the picture. I think that is the core of what Jesus is saying is today’s text. This is not so among you – you are to be servants. Servants always get the short end of the stick. Why would Jesus say that? Because the economy of the Kingdom is grace. Most importantly the grace of the Father. And grace is an all or nothing proposition. Either Father, into you hands I commit my spirit, or its all crap.

There were a bunch of reasons I cut it short this morning, but I had a short coda/conclusion which is primarily Psalm 49. I don’t know how this psalm never jumped out at me, but it captures the either/or, at its deepest and more forlorn, grace comes in, and it doesn’t take much to unbalance the equation. If you want a little more poetic a take, read the last page of the full text.