The Pull of God’s Love

Sunday, September 22, 2024 – Mark 9:30-37 also Jeremiah 11:18-20, Psalm 54, James 3:13—4:3, 7-8a

Several years ago, when I left the corporate world to become a performing singer and songwriter, I was also doing some consulting work. I’d had a long career in marketing and communications, and so I used all of my skills to make a living. One of my clients was a man named Ken who had a consulting firm called Pull Thinking.

He argued that the most powerful forces in nature are “pull” forces rather than “push” forces. No one likes being pushed or forced to do anything, but we’ve all experienced being drawn like moths to a flame by something that attracts us. What attracts us acts upon us as a pull force.

That’s also a key idea in what’s called process or open and relational theologies. Those theologies say that God doesn’t act coercively on the world but instead lures the world forward through loving persuasion. In Ken’s Pull Thinking system, a company works most effectively when it can clearly state the customer-oriented reason for its existence, and then align everyone else in the company toward that purpose. The purpose itself then acts as a kind of magnetic “pull” force that draws everyone forward without the need for managerial threats or coercion.

I would describe it this way.

We can think of the company as an arrow directed toward the target of the purpose to serve a customer’s needs. The employees who are closest to the customer are at the point or head of the arrow, those who support those employees are behind them in the shaft, and mid-level managers are like the fletching feathers at the base of the arrow that stabilize the flight of the arrow. Behind the arrow is the archer or leader of the organization who provides the initial guidance and uses the power of the bow to pull everyone together around a vision and then releases the arrow to do its work.

Ken is on to something that’s supported in the biblical story when he teaches that the most effective managers lead from behind. We see this in our gospel where Jesus says, “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.” We see a similar sentiment in the text from the book of James, where he writes that “the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy. And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace for those who make peace.”

Nowhere in these texts does it say that “might makes right.” Nowhere does Jesus glorify coercive power or say that “he who dies with the most toys wins.”

Instead, Jesus pulls a child toward him and says that “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.” Now I’ve seen commentaries that use that text to urge churches to welcome children into worship and let them be children rather than well-behaving robots. And believe me, I support that thinking.

But I don’t think that’s what Jesus is concerned with here. In the culture of his time, children were not held in high esteem. Remember, in previous periods and surrounding cultures, children were sacrificed at altars. We know that’s true in Abraham’s time, because he’s not entirely shocked when he hears God ask him to sacrifice his son, Isaac.

Jesus is speaking to a culture where children and slaves are the least powerful and most vulnerable people. They aren’t the ones that status-seeking people invite to dinner or pay much attention to. But Jesus says, “Whoever embraces one of these children as I do embraces me, but beyond that they also embrace the God who sent me.”

Start at the bottom with the least powerful, he’s saying, not with the top-dog CEO, and everything else will fall into place.

It’s because his disciples were arguing about who was going to be top dog in Jesus’ kingdom that he makes this point. But we might wonder why they were even arguing about that in the first place. I think it had to do with fear.

Remember, the disciples following this Jesus were witnessing miracles. Hungry people being fed, lame people walking, and blind people seeing. They watched the power elite getting more and more antagonistic and questioning Jesus at every turn. After all of this, Jesus tells them that he’s going to be betrayed, killed, and will then rise from the dead. How could their brains even take that in?

I think they must have been terrified. And where do humans go when we’re afraid?

We tend to go toward power and control. Heaven forbid we feel vulnerable and uncertain. We can’t bear that, so we grasp for power.

Jeremiah is terrified, and so he demands that God destroy his enemies. Our psalmist wants God to destroy those who are spying on him. It’s no wonder that when Jesus’ disciples feel vulnerable in a situation that seems to get riskier and less predictable every day, they fight about who has the most status. They start jockeying for power.

We do that too. We’d rather conquer our political opponents, calling them satanic or evil, than to seek peace with them by understanding their deepest needs and fears. We can’t risk being vulnerable because we’ve chosen a political tribe over our God identity of shared humanness.

What is the way out of this destructive spiral? James gives us a good word. He tells us that “the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy. And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace for those who make peace.”

James tells us we must submit ourselves to God. Not to any political party or candidate. Not to any political or economic system. Doesn’t God desire peace? Doesn’t God desire us to love each other, as God loves us?

Jesus said that he came so that we may have life and have it abundantly.

He spoke the truth, and lived God’s truth, and that made him many enemies. And God did not destroy Jesus’ enemies to prevent him from being crucified. There was a bigger truth, a bigger vision, a bigger target that God was aiming for. Jesus submitted himself to that vision.

What is God’s vision for us today? Is it a vision of peace where all people flourish? What might happen if we pointed ourselves like an arrow toward the target of what God desires, rather than what our egos desire? How might our world change if we started making peace?

What might happen if we aligned our hearts with the pull of God’s love?

I recently learned of a type of prayer that Mark Gregory Karris calls “conspiring prayer,” because in this kind of prayer, the praying person focuses on working with God to create healing activity in their own lives and in others’ lives. Conspiring prayer is prayed with God rather than to God to jointly overcome what needs healing with love and goodness.

Let us now conspire with God to heal God’s world!