It’s hard to know how hard to be on the Sons of Thunder — James and John. On the one hand, they look like dimwit glory hounds so thickheaded and headstrong with ambition that we rightfully scorn them. Jesus has just finished delivering a speech on how he is going to Jerusalem and will suffer and die there as a rejected messiah. As if they hadn’t heard a thing he said, they still try to weasel for special privileges when he succeeds in reigning over the kingdom. It’s about like taking aside Governor Gray Davis just before the recall election in California and saying, Hey, when you win this thing, can we be in your new cabinet? What dunces!

But James and John are not the only dunces, are they? We are just like them, aren’t we? We all struggle with ambition: too much, too little, mostly wrongheaded.

The very word ambition has a chilly October feel to it that keeps us from saying it too often. From the Latin ambitio, it originally referred to politicians ambling about the streets soliciting votes. Webster’s definition is even November darker: an ardent desire for rank, fame, or power. And that seems to be what we have here with the Sons of Thunder. They are looking out for themselves. And after all, isn’t that what we assume we need to do — look out for ourselves?

Well, we do, but maybe our sacraments should remind us otherwise. Can you drink the cup I drink? Jesus asks. Can you undergo the baptism I undergo? The boys in his band think they can, but, like us, they take communion cup for after-dinner port rather than the thick vinegary wine in the Passover cup of suffering. We take baptism to be a blessing, a refreshing dip, something like the Nestea plunge, rather than drown our selfish ambitions in baptismal death for the love of God and the world.

William James was one of America’s great philosophers, a father of modern pragmatism, and the author of the book Varieties of Religious Experience, which has had a deep effect on the spiritual perspective of Americans today. James was honest enough with himself to admit that he wanted to be both a saint and a millionaire — anyone else? — but he worried that what it might take for him to be the latter could disqualify him from being the former. He developed a threefold hierarchy of ambition. The lowest level is material self-seeking, in which we aim to gain wealth and accumulate property and things. This is rooted in the desire for self-preservation that affords us security and comfort. But it can also separate us from our neighbors, because we have to protect what we have from loss. We become more interested in what our wealth can do for us instead of what we can do for others with our wealth. And the sad thing is that people of great wealth are not usually more comfortable than those with less who don’t care about how much they have. [Cited by Brian Mahan, Forgetting Ourselves on Purpose: Vocation and the Ethics of Ambition (Jossey-Bass, 2002), pp.45-49.]

The second level is social self-seeking. Because we all social selves, we want to please others and be pleased by others. The ambition to achieve a level of social distinction does not always go with material success, and James thinks it progress to progress to this. To be well known and to have the power of esteem in a group or of a group is part of this.

The phenomenon of celebrity is an example of social ambition. We see it in people who are willing to go on TV and do just about anything to be widely noticed. Fifteen minutes of fame, don’t you know?! Celebrity has its privileges, though. Like this past week, when Al Biernat’s restaurant hosted Goldie Hawn and her longtime beau, Kurt Russell, for dinner. Aside from the special table and doting service, Al kept the place open for them until 1:00 a.m. in order that Dallas Stars star Mike Modano could come and dine with them after the game. Now, that’s nice, of course. But I’m just wondering, what if you or I were meeting a friend who couldn’t get there until late? Would Al keep the place open for us until 1:00? Pay the staff overtime for us? I don’t think so. That’s celebrity power. Who wouldn’t want it? But consider what they did to get it. I’m not saying they are wicked, but have they contributed to a richer humanity or a healthier planet? They have made a name for themselves. They sit at the right hand and the left in the kingdom of entertainment. The very word entertainment tells us something. It comes from the Latin, meaning to keep someone in between. It’s a suspension of real life. Yet we exalt people for helping us escape life, more than teachers or scientists, or social workers, say, who try to make real life better.

Sadly, social ambition invades the church also. Martin Copenhaver is a colleague of mine in the Boston area, a pastor of a Congregational church that has also received a Lilly grant to operate a residency program for young pastors. He was once pastor of a New England church that had elderly members who remembered the day when wealthy families would send their cooks to serve alongside church members in preparing food for the needy. The tradition passed into modern times with the deacons helping out themselves. But the deacons always balked, because the bylaws said they were responsible for the “spiritual leadership” of the congregation. At one deacons’ meeting they complained they were not able to fulfill this high calling, because they were too busy delivering food to homeless shelters and washing dishes after communion. Said one deacon: I feel like a glorified butler. [Cited in Pulpit Resource 31.4 (Oct.-Dec. 2003): 15-16, from The Christian Century (Oct. 5, 1994): 893.]

Said Jesus: Whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first among you must be slave of all. For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many. A butler might be a good image for any deacon, pastor, or even lay minister.

The highest level of self-seeking is spiritual, according to James. This is the life of intellect and aesthetics and morality. The spiritual life concerns not just what it can do for the self, but more so what it does for others. The spiritual self-seeker is willing to give up material privilege or social prestige for the cause of loving God and neighbor. This faith sees beyond present struggles to the rewards that come from self-sacrifice.

And maybe this is where we might give the Sons of Thunder some slack. Maybe they have more faith than we realize but simply do not understand the cost of that faith. Close as they are to Jesus, maybe they truly believe that even though it will be tough sledding in Jerusalem, Jesus will prevail in the end and reign over the kingdom somehow, someday. Maybe they have more faith than any of the other disciples. Maybe they are saying what many of us hope for: faithfulness will surely be rewarded, whether in this life or the next.

And yet James fretted over the fact that even in this dimension of ambition, noble though it may be, we are still SELF-seeking, still thinking in terms of personal reward, even if we are willing to delay glorification by serving now. If the last shall be first, then our strategy to be first is to be last … for now. We are counting on a payday someday.

All of this fails the Jesus test. Jesus himself — though elevated by God after the crucifixion and resurrection — is still now and will forevermore be a servant. He is not sitting on his throne all day and night receiving glory now that he had done his bit. He intercedes for us now. He is still giving himself sacrificially to the world. It’s simply his nature. And he is trying to get our self-seeking nature shaped into his image.

To do that, we need to practice what the late monk Thomas Merton called self-forgetfulness. That is, we leave worries about ourselves to God. We simply learn to serve, not matter the cost. We don’t worry about how much we make or who notices us. We don’t worry about rewards in heaven. We simply serve others and find that life is a gift that comes in community with others, not by distinguishing ourselves from others.

When your daughter turns 20, as mine did this week, and you see more hair growing out of your ears than your brow, you start to think about ambition differently. I can’t speak for you at whatever stage of life you are in, but all my life I’ve had the next thing to reach for: a football scholarship, a college degree, a master’s degree, a doctor’s degree, a big and good church, a great family, things like that. Then you wake up and realize it’s all good, Martha. You have climbed every mountain in the range. What now?

What I am learning is that the point has not been about my climb at all. It has been about learning from others how to climb so that I can help others climb, too. In fact, mountain climbing is probably not the right metaphor at all. I find myself more interested nowadays in judging my ministry by how well you are doing yours. I want to see a new generation of ministers hone their skills and ply their trade, and to do it better than I. I want to help shape a Baptist church that is so true to its heritage that it is not a prisoner to it. The Baptist vision has a continual reformation embedded within it. I want to see Baptist Christians learn to read the Bible intelligently and spiritually so that we can avoid the cul-de-sacs of fundamentalist fear and liberal license. I want to see the day when every child in Dallas is ready to read when he or she starts school. Things like that capture my heart these days, and they make worrying about myself seem downright petty.
This is the 25^th anniversary of Pope John Paul II’s papacy. Even a Baptist has to admit that he has been the most formidable figure in world Christianity for this generation. You may disagree with him on certain things — and I do, on birth control, the all-male unmarried priesthood, hierarchical church governance, the inability to see non-Catholic churches as part of the true body of Christ in the world — small things like that. But he has also been a consistent voice for the poor, a reconciling agent with Judaism, an unflinching critic of godless Communism, fascism, terrorism, and even dehumanizing aspects of capitalism. He has been a peacemaker everywhere.

But when they handed out the Nobel Peace Prize last week, the committee passed him by. The winner was a deserving Iranian woman who has fought for human rights and women’s rights and democracy in her country. But what the committee values most is only instrumental for the Pope. They celebrate freedom as the highest value. He wants always to see freedom lead toward a dignity of human life and a spirit that is pleasing to God. In this sense, he is far beyond the Nobel folk. What’s more, he doesn’t care a fig about awards. He is ailing badly — Parkinson’s disease most likely; but while many think he ought to step down and retire, he considers his suffering as an opportunity to serve the Lord in weakness. The shepherd will not leave his sheep. Nice.

The only ones privileged to be at the right hand and left of Jesus in this life were two bandits on crosses next to his. I suspect that isn’t what James and John or we are ambitious for. Maybe we ought to rethink our ambition.