Matthew 20: 20-28
Rev. Dr. Fritz Ritsch, Preacher
It may be disturbing to members of St. Stephen how easily your pastor can come up with a topic for a sermon on Children’s Sunday. My topic this morning is the movie “Thor,” about the Norse Thunder God. And since our Old Testament reading today was the Ten Commandments let me assure you that the movie makes clear that Thor is not a god, but an extra-dimensional being, and so I’m not in violation of the First or Second Commandments.
I went to see “Thor” not expecting much. I was never a big fan of the comic book when I was a kid—all these Norse gods running around spouting “thees” and “thous” like bad actors in a high school Shakespeare play.
But the movie was unusually good. Thor’s father is Odin, the king of an extra-dimensional kingdom called Asgard; and centuries ago, Odin and his fellow beings saved the Norse people from the Frost Giants. The Norse people remembered Odin and company as gods. Odin is preparing his son Thor to be king. Odin gives Thor a hammer called Mjolnir, which has great power.
When the Frost giants attack again, Thor forgets all of Odin’s lessons of diplomacy and looking at the big picture. All he can think is “Teach the Frost Giants a lesson!” His arrogance and impetuousness create a terrible crisis.
Odin is furious. Kings, he says, aren’t supposed to act rashly; they’re supposed to be wise and cautious! Odin punishes Thor by separating him from his hammer and sending Thor to earth, bereft of his powers, a normal human being. Odin also sends the hammer Mjolnir crashing to earth, saying, “Whosoever holds of this hammer, if you be worthy, you possess the power of Thor.”
Thor finds himself on earth, where some people attempt to befriend him but his arrogance and disdain turn them off. He is frustrated that he is so powerless, and hears that his hammer has crashed to earth nearby. So he finds it, and confidently attempt to pull it out of the rock it has fused to. He cannot—because he is not yet worthy. And what’s striking is he’s not yet worthy—to POSSESS THE POWER OF THOR. He’s not yet worthy TO BE HIMSELF.
This has always been one of the key teachings of Jesus, as Jesus says in Matthew 10: 39: “those who find their life will lose it; and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.” When I was a teenager, everybody was on a quest to “find himself or herself.” We had this sense that if we just knew who we are, fully and completely, we’d be completely happy and satisfied with life and filled with the personal power that we always felt like we were missing in our lives. We’d have self-confidence and self-assurance and the ability to do anything we wanted to do—if only we could find ourselves.
Thor has thought that he has found himself—and he is stunned that he cannot reclaim Mjolnir. He’s further stunned when someone comes from Asgard to tell him that his father has died, and that Thor can never return. Both are lies, meant to keep him from becoming king, but he doesn’t know that. Humbly, he accepts that his lot is to live on earth, just one human among the billions, and he begins to change his life.
Thor begins by getting to know his new friends—listening, rather than engaging in his persistent bragging. Asking what they want, instead of always telling them what he wants. He learns to cook. He gives good advice. And when a crisis comes to the little town where he lives, his first thought is for the other people there, getting them to safety. In the end, he offers up his own life to save the lives of his friends. I don’t want to spoil the movie for you if you haven’t seen it, but let’s just say that, it’s at that moment that Thor finds himself—the moment when he willingly gives himself up.
What Thor, the Thunder God, the one-day King of Asgard, needed to learn, was humility. He needed to learn his place. Ironically, only in that way could he truly recover Thor’s power. Only by learning humility, could Thor find Thor.
In our scripture today, we learn that two of Jesus’ disciples had what’s known today as a helicopter mom. She swoops in to make sure her children are getting a fair deal from this new messiah they’re following. “I just want to make sure my boys are clearly recognized for the A-students they are and that they get all the glory they deserve,” she says.
Jesus shakes his head. The road to glory isn’t glorious. It’s the road of the cross. It’s the road of humility—it’s the road of serving others—it’s the road of taking care of other’s needs rather than looking out for your own.
That’s not a popular message these days. We all want to raise our kids to be completely self-actualized geniuses who are good at everything and who get all the credit they deserve for every ounce of potential they have. We don’t want them to fail at anything. We want them better than everybody.
But the education experts and the psychologists warn us we aren’t preparing them for real life. They need to fail. They need to be humbled. They need to try new things and make mistakes. And they need to learn how to pick themselves up when they fall, rather than us swooping in to save them at the last minute.
They need to fail a few times at pulling Mjolnir out of the rock before they finally get it right.
Jesus adds something far more important to that. The road to glory in the Kingdom of God is humility and self-sacrifice. The road to finding yourself is to stop looking out for yourself—to stop looking for what’s best for you, and to start looking for what’s best for the other people. The road to finding yourself is to stop looking for yourself and to start looking for God. The road to glory is the road of humiliation. The way to be a king is to learn to be a servant.
But we need to understand what’s meant by “glory” and “king” and “finding yourself” here. It’s not literally true that you’ll get lots of glory and praise and success and money and fame and celebrity status if you start acting all humble and self-sacrificing. We need to recognize that loving others and serving others, loving God and serving God, putting the needs of others first and the needs of ourselves last—we need to recognize that those things are good in themselves. We aren’t doing them for the reward at the end. We are doing them because they are the reward. They’re what make us feel happy and satisfied and like our lives are worthwhile.
Think about it—when our youth went to Chicago to serve that inner-city church this past summer did they receive lots of accolades? Big newspaper articles? A MacArthur grant? Scholarship money? No. but what they got was a sense that doing good was its own reward—that doing good is what Jesus wants of us—that doing good gets us closer to being ourselves.
Some of you knew a good friend of mine and Margaret’s, Wendy Wilkie. We knew her because her kids and ours were in Kids Who Care, a local musical theater company. We met Wendy when she’d already been in a long struggle with breast cancer and was apparently in remission. But it came back.
She was frustrated with cancer—she felt like fighting it took up all her time, wrapped her up in herself, made her self-involved. She wanted to help other people. So she started a company called Cuisine for Healing, “a nonprofit organization committed to making nutritious, delicious food readily available to people combating disease while providing education about the power of healing food” and whose vision is “A world where cancer and other related illnesses are prevented, treated and even eliminated through the power of healthy food.” (www.cuisineforhealing.org)
Wendy and I had a long, wonderful conversation a couple of weeks before she died. She was pale and wan, low-energy and a shadow of her former self, but all that did was bring out this amazing smile that she seemed always to have the last few months of her life.
She talked about how starting Cuisine for Healing had given her so much joy because she knew she’d done something that was helping so many people, and helping other people quote “made it all worthwhile.”
“You mean—dying?” I asked. “It makes dying worthwhile?”
“Yes,” She said.
I was taken aback by that–humbled. But she clearly meant it.
I miss Wendy. I wish she was alive. I’m sure that, the afternoon we were talking, Wendy would have preferred not to be dying but to suddenly completely recover. It’d be fun to see her personally bouncing around, enjoying the success of Cuisine for Healing, being with her family, getting congratulated for the good work she’d done. But she’d gotten something more valuable than that.
She’d let go of herself and in the process she found herself.