Shell Game

From the Soapbox

Shell Game

A SERMON BY David Zahl

[Jesus asked his disciples], “What were you arguing about on the road?” But they kept quiet because on the way they had argued about who was the greatest. Sitting down, Jesus called the Twelve and said, “Anyone who wants to be first must be the very last, and the servant of all.”

He took a little child whom he placed among them. Taking the child in his arms, he said to them, “Whoever welcomes one of these little children in my name welcomes me; and whoever welcomes me does not welcome me but the one who sent me.” (Mark 9:33-37)

T

here’s a book I’ve been enjoying called The Status Game, by the British journalist Will Storr. His main thesis is that human beings are extraordinarily imaginative creatures who can use almost anything to symbolize status. Money and social media followers may be the first such markers that spring to mind. But there’s also one’s neighborhood, taste in literature, number of dinner party invitations, advanced degrees, political views, body mass index, golf handicap, busy-ness. There’s the brand of shoes you wear, where your kids go to school, who gets to go on a private trip to space first— and, of course, who sees through status games the quickest.

Those of us in the church, of course, are not immune to this at all. We play all sorts of status games, from attendance and tithing to how many hungry mouths we feed and how much money we give away—all sorts of things. Status games, it would seem, are built into our brains. They take place within groups, even within families—who is the most beloved child, et cetera, et cetera.

According to Storr, the question is not if we’re playing status games, but which ones we’re playing. Another way to put it is that we share a tendency, mostly an unconscious one, to turn the good things in our lives into ladders. Some of us have even turned the pandemic into one. I was talking to a pastor last week and he said, “I really felt it was important that I came out of the pandemic not only okay, but that my church would be doing better than ever, and my family would be at their peak, and I would be crushing my career. Ridiculous as it sounds, I wanted to win COVID.”

Today we’ve come to a passage in Mark’s Gospel where the disciples are playing a status game. Jesus says, “What were you arguing about?” And they respond, “We were arguing about who was the greatest.” This happens immediately on the heels of the transfiguration, in which Christ was revealed in glory on a mountaintop. On the way back down, Jesus is asked to heal a young man, which he does, in full view of his disciples. If you were one of the followers in attendance, you might have thought, “Gosh, we’re on the gravy train. This elevator’s going to the top. And if it’s going to the top, I want to be at the very top of it.”

By the way, I highly doubt that Peter is looking at John here and saying, “Hey buddy, I think I’m better than you,” or that Mark is looking at Matthew and saying, “Actually, I’m probably a little bit more important than you are.”

No, I’d wager that Jesus is inferring what’s going on. After all, status games rarely take place on the surface. It’s more, “How did you spend your summer? Which beach did you go to? Huh, that’s interesting. Well, I went to this other beach,” which naturally is much fancier. Or, “I got clearly a lot more vacation than you did.” “Oh, well, I didn't, because I work much harder than you do,” which of course translates to “I’m better than you.” “Oh, you served in the military? Well, did you see any action?” We can infer that these kinds of statements are status games, even when they’re not overt. There’s subtext.

This is not unique to today, and it’s not unique to Facebook. In his book, Storr references an anthropologist named William Bascom, who in 1948 tells of a Micronesian island called Pohnpei, where there was a status game that was played with yams. Yes, that’s right. The men of Pohnpei would furiously compete to grow the largest… yam. Every year in overgrown, remote plots they would raise around fifty yams in secret. They would creep out of bed in the middle of the night to tend to them. A single one of these yams could take ten years to grow, reach more than four meters in length, weigh over ninety kilograms, and require twelve men to carry into the feast using a stretcher. They weren’t kidding around! At the annual feast, the guy with the largest yam would be declared number one.

So this sort of thing happens all the time, in all places. Which means that if you are caught up in status games and think you’re the only one, you’re not. We all play them. We’re playing them right now in fact. Isn’t it a relief to know that you are not the only one who feels the need to jockey for position constantly?

Why do we do it, though? What makes status games so alluring? Well, in the simplest terms, everyone needs to feel like they’re worth something. We all ask the question: Do I matter? We ask it of our loved ones, and we ask it of society. We ask it of our bank accounts, and we ask it of our bosses. We need to know that we’re enough.

And so, in pursuit of an answer, we seek to win some kind of contest. If we lose the first one we try, then we change the game and play one we can possibly win or at least be competitive in. If you’re a kid and you’re not so great in the classroom, then maybe you can excel on the sports field. If you’re not amazing on the sports field, well perhaps physical appearance is the place where you can stand out, and if your physical appearance isn’t really the best, maybe you can be the funniest. And if you’re not very funny, then maybe you can be the sarcastic one who sees through everything, and if you can’t see through everything, well, then you just get really sad.

I’m not just saying this. For the people who don’t feel like they can win anything, the mental and emotional consequences can be dire. Because we’re addicted to status. We’re drawn to it because we see it as a means of love. We believe that we are loved according to our status.

What we find out—and what every single wisdom tradition will tell you—is that status games are shell games. They don’t work. That is, the love and value we believe our status will bring us never comes. We know this in our heads, but that understanding seldom makes it to our hearts.

In September 2021, the great JapaneseAmerican tennis champion, Naomi Osaka, made a stunning confession. At the time she was the highest paid female athlete in the world. She’d won the U.S. Open in 2018 and 2020, but the following year for her had been rife with well-publicized mental health struggles. After losing in the third round of the U.S. Open in 2021, she held a press conference. Here’s what she said: “I feel like for me, recently, when I win I don’t feel happy. I feel more like a relief. And then when I lose, I feel very sad. I don’t think that’s normal.” And then she started crying. “I honestly don’t know when I’m going to play my next tennis match.”

Osaka had earned gazillions of dollars, worldwide acclaim, and the admiration of millions. And yet if we are to take her at her word, her triumph in the status game had ushered in a situation where maintenance became so crushing that she wanted to give it up altogether. Hope, it turns out, does not lie at the top of the status ladder.

Jesus responds to his disciples’ status obsession with a striking alternative. What he says is simple, and he says it a lot: “Anyone who wants to be first must be the very last,

and the servant of all.” To illustrate his point, he takes a child on his lap and says, “Whoever welcomes one of these little children in my name welcomes me.”

A note on first century children, though: don’t think of them as Instagrammable, cute little kids; think of them in tatters, children who have been overlooked and neglected, with a very runny nose and sticky fingers—a little gross in fact. Today we tend to venerate children, and we forget how, well, disgusting they can be.

If you want to be first, Jesus says, then be like this child, who’s powerless, who’s dependent, who has no political or economic power. The point he’s trying to drive home is that the Christian answer to the question of whether we really matter is not status. It’s belovedness. You are loved, like this child: unconditionally and eternally, in spite of the fact that you bring nothing to the table, in spite of the fact that you are losing— and will lose—whatever status game you’re wrapped up in.

And these words, you know, are coming from the one who was willing to lose every status game for your sake. The one who actually had the highest status possible, yet did not consider it something to be prideful about.

Perhaps you’ve heard of the infamous English politician, John Profumo. John Profumo served as the secretary of state for war in the early 1960s in the U.K. He came from a very aristocratic background—high status, in other words.

During his tenure, Profumo had an extramarital affair with a 19-year-old woman who was simultaneously engaged in an alliance with a Russian attaché. This Russian turned out to be a spy. And so when this was found out—in spectacular fashion, with photographs and all, basically the original tabloid scandal—Profumo was humiliated on every front page as an adulterer, a liar, and a man of such poor judgment that he had mindlessly cavorted with enemy spies. He was disgraced and stripped of all public dignities in 1963. In the years after, his name became an English euphemism for people who’d really blown it.

John Profumo never knew political power again—and he never asked for it. In the wake of the scandal, he did something extremely confounding. He did the very hardest thing for any politician, preacher, or author to do: he went away. Really went away. To be specific, he went to a place that helped the poor, a rundown settlement called Toynbee Hall in the East End of London. At Toynbee he did social work—and not just the good stuff. Profumo did the grunt work, washed dishes, cleaned toilets. He visited prisons for the criminally insane.

Profumo’s service, however, wasn’t for show. It wasn’t a step on the path toward some political redemption. He didn’t give interviews. He didn’t go on television. He never wrote a book. For the next 40 years, he simply worked at Toynbee Hall.

Slowly it became known what was going on there, to the extent that, in 1995, when the who’s who of the British establishment was invited to celebrate Margaret Thatcher’s 70th birthday, Profumo received an invitation. The powers-that-be decided to use the opportunity to show him what they really thought of him. You might think that they were just going to pay lip service to this man who is now living a life of quiet servitude, that he’s going to be sitting on the outskirts of the party. Instead, Profumo is ushered to the front of the hall and seated next to her majesty Queen Elizabeth—at her right hand, the seat of highest honor.

In 2006, the Daily Telegraph wrote that when he died at 91, “No one in public life ever did more to atone for his sins; no one behaved with more silent dignity, as his name was repeatedly dragged through the mud, and few have ended their lives as loved and revered by those who knew him.”

You see, John Profumo had fallen off the ladder. All of his status had been taken from him. And what he discovered in that place was something much better than a new ladder. He discovered love. He discovered Jesus Christ.

So is this just some lengthy sermon about giving up your status and renouncing your club memberships? No, because even if that was my point, it wouldn’t work. I mean, I’ve never seen someone not accept an admittance to the highest status college or club or what have you. People pretend to, but you can never really quit the status game. It’s that addictive and that intoxicating.

But where you can’t, and where I can’t, Jesus nonetheless does. When he pulled that child into his lap, he was ultimately talking about himself. He was saying, I am last. I am the one who is betrayed into human hands, who was killed and three days later rose again. I am the one who came not to consolidate godlike status, but to give it away, even to those who are hellbent on accruing it at all costs. I am here to descend to a world that is asphyxiating itself trying to ascend, a world obsessed with winning the shell games that cannot be won.

And so, to answer the question—the ultimate question, always on our minds— the question of do I matter, do I matter, Lord? Well, what he says to you and to me this morning is yes. Yes, you matter, my child. You matter so much. You matter this much, pointing to the empty holes in his hands, the wounds in his feet, the pools of undying love in his eyes. Amen.

BILL BORROR holds the Arthur Schopenhauer Chair of Happiness and Positivity— not a teaching position, just a chair his grandfather stole from a burned out and bitter clown. Bill and his wife Laura live in New Jersey where he is a pastor, professor, and church consultant. They have six amazing children and six exceptional grandchildren and can still successfully name all of them on demand.

SARAH CONDON lives in Houston, Texas, where she leans into failures and is terrified of success. She co-hosts Mockingbird’s podcast The Mockingcast.

TASHA GENCK MORTON is a wife, mother, and pastor, among other things, and has almost certainly dropped the ball on something as she’s writing this. But by the grace of God she goes.

MADDY GREEN is a wife, mother, and overeager DIYer, she is also a notorious user of comma splices.

BRYAN JARRELL runs Mockingbird’s Twitter and Facebook pages, and is also the pastor of Epiphany Anglican Fellowship in Ligonier PA. His big successes are his wife Beth, son Tom, dog Ginger, and the second baby arriving in August of 2022. His big failure was once buying a PT Cruiser. ALI KJERGAARD dwells in Washington, D.C., where she can be found jogging around the monuments trying to get the perfect sunrise picture with her really burned out phone. When not musing about failures and successes, she muses about books, her crazy city, and how to make the perfect scone.

NATE KLUG is a poet and Congregationalist minister. His most recent book is Hosts and Guests.

GRACE LEUENBERGER feels most successful when she is able to finish a tube of chapstick without losing it. She lives in Kent, Ohio, with her golden retriever and spends her free time baking, running, and watching wholesome British television shows.

JOSEPH MCSPADDEN is a writer and editor whose work has appeared at Style Weekly in Richmond, VA, and okra. magazine. When asked to write a short bio that referenced the theme of success and failure, he produced a 3500-word tome on failure; as for successes, all he could conjure was “Jesus wept.”

GRANTLAND J. ROLLINS lives in Arkansas and in reinforced aluminum. Unsatisfied with failing at evangelism, he now stinks at—but still enjoys—curating yard art and playing bingo, as well as doing life, doing sleep, and doing queso.

BEN SELF owns a coffee mug that says “World’s Okayest Teacher” but tries not to let such accolades go to his head. When he’s not wrangling deranged middle schoolers, he enjoys sleeping, complaining, hiking, eating pie, scouring Spotify, and days when he doesn’t ruminate gloomily on humankind’s unmitigated failure to mitigate climate change.

STEPHEN SEXTON’S first book, If All the World and Love Were Young, was the winner of the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2019 and the Shine / Strong Award for Best First Collection. He has been awarded the E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, and was the winner of the National Poetry Competition. Cheryl’s Destinies was published in 2021.

OLLIE SILVESTER is an illustrator and all ’round daydreamer from Bristol, UK. He loves to draw from the mundane and the moments in between moments and is always trying to document the nonsensical humor found in the everyday, the color within the seemingly drab, the noise within the quiet and the quiet within the noise. TODD D. STILL (Ph.D. Glasgow) is Dean and Professor of Christian Scriptures at Baylor University’s George W. Truett Theological Seminary, where he has served since 2003. A Texas native, he enjoys big skies, church choirs, spring (wild)flowers, and being married to Carolyn, his wife of 32 years.

KAREN STILLER is author of The Minister’s Wife: a memoir of faith, doubt, friendship, loneliness, forgiveness and more (2020). She hosts the Faith Today podcast, and lives in Ottawa where her dining room table is covered in books, newspapers, story notes, and a giant dispenser of hand sanitizer.

SARAH HINLICKY WILSON is associate pastor at Tokyo Lutheran Church, which is surrounded by tons of neon and excellent diners. She publishes orthodox theology and heterodox fiction through Thornbush Press, and tries to snare her dad with theological whoppers on their podcast Queen of the Sciences.

DAVID ZAHL is the director of Mockingbird, editor-in-chief of the Mockingbird website, co-host of The Mockingcast, and probably one of the two or three most successful licensed lay preachers in the Episcopal diocese of Virginia. Top ten for sure. Then again, between the ages of 12 and 14, he was cut from three basketball teams in two different countries, so let’s not jump to conclusions.

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