Sermon: Three Cups of Humble Tea
A Sermon Delivered by The Rev. John D. Painter at Centenary United Methodist Church
Metuchen, New Jersey October 25, 2009
Text: Mark 10:35-45
James and John, the sons of Zebedee, came forward to him and said to him, “Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.” And he said to them, “What is it you want me to do for you?” And they said to him, “Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory.” But Jesus said to them, “You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?” They re-plied, “We are able.” Then Jesus said to them, “The cup that I drink you will drink; and with the baptism with which I am baptized, you will be baptized; but to sit at my right hand or at my left is not mine to grant, but it is for those for whom it has been prepared.”
When the ten heard this, they began to be angry with James and John. So Jesus called them and said to them, “You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes 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 a ransom for many.” —Mark 10:35-45, NRSV
I am always grateful when persons recommend good books for me to read. Over the past few years, I have been exposed to some really excellent literature as a result of your suggestions. Bob Carlson has named any number of books, but among those, the one I remember best is The Devil in the White City (Erik Larson). I’m still struggling with Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana (Anne Rice), Bob. City of Joy (Dominique Lapierre) was an especially powerful read rec-ommended by Lester Gesteland. I can’t tell you how many folk recommended The Shack (Wil-liam P. Young) to me, and after reading it earlier this year, I have passed on the suggestion to many others. Mary Ellen Heim’s nephew, Don Carkuff, to whom I recommended The Shack, in turn suggested I read Same Kind of Different As Me (Ron Hall & Denver Moore)…and now I also pass on that one to others.
It was Muriel Harris and Tookie Bacon who first gifted with me an audio version of Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin. Not long after receiving their gift, Alison Williams asked if I had read the book, and suggested I do so. So I read it this past summer. Alison said she really wanted to talk about this provocative book with others…and, as it turns out, our Centenary Book Club members will be discussing Three Cups of Tea at their next gathering at 7:30 PM on Friday, 13 November. I must tell you that my decision to preach about the book today and the Book Club’s selection of it for their November meeting were purely “Godincidental.”
If Greg Mortenson is motivated to do good deeds by the example of Jesus, you wouldn’t know it by reading Three Cups of Tea. He not only makes no mention of such motivation, he makes no mention of Jesus, at least not as having anything to do with Mortenson himself. Al-though his parents were Lutheran missionaries in Tanzania, where Mortenson grew up, he makes no claim that he shares their faith.
Yet, if you were looking an example of someone who takes seriously Jesus’ injunction to love your neighbor as yourself, you would not go wrong looking at Greg Mortenson. But you’d likely have to look for him in a very high-altitude neighborhood.
Born in 1957, Greg Mortenson joined the U.S. Army as a young man and was trained as a medical corpsman. That, coupled with a love of adventure, later led to Mortenson being included on mountain-climbing teams, which were always eager to have a medic along.
In 1993, he was part of a team ascending the world’s second-highest mountain, just slightly lower than Everest. That peak, known only by its map coordinates as “K2,” is part of the Karakoram segment of the Himalayas. It’s located on the border between Pakistan and China. Among mountain climbers, K2 is known informally as “The Savage Peak” due to the difficulty of climbing it. For every four people who reach the summit, one dies trying to get there.
All climbers want to get to the top of the mountains they tackle, but in Mortenson’s case, he had an additional incentive. The previous year, his 23-year-old sister, Christa, had died from a massive seizure after a lifelong struggle with epilepsy. Mortenson intended to dedicate his con-quest of K2 to her memory. As it worked out, however, he honored Christa with far-more-lasting results.
After 78 days of struggle against the mountain, which included helping rescue another climber, Greg Mortenson got to within 600 meters of the summit. But then failing strength and altitude sickness forced him to turn back. A local guide helped him off the mountain, but they got separated when Mortenson made a wrong turn. He ended up in the primitive mountain vil-lage of Korphe in Pakistan. Too sick to go on, he stayed there under the hospitable care of the villagers while he recuperated.
The people of Korphe belong to an ethnic group called the Balti. Many of them, like the more well-known Sherpas of Tibet, work as high-altitude porters for climbing expeditions. But one important difference between the two groups is that the Sherpas are Buddhists and the Baltis are Muslims.
While recovering in the village, Greg Mortenson observed the harsh realities of the Balti way of life. They live in isolated, remote mountain valleys and subsist on marginal crops of grain and small herds of yaks. Because of the altitude, the climate is severe. Medical care is almost nonexistent, and people die from things that would be routinely treated and cured in other plac-es—even other places in Pakistan. Among the Balti, children under 12 months of age have a 35-percent mortality rate, due primarily to diarrhea-induced dehydration. During the brutal winters, villagers retreat into tiny basement dugouts and spend six months huddled together, barely kept warm by smoky, yak-dung fires.
For the children who do survive, there are often no schools. In Korphe, Greg Mortenson witnessed 82 kids kneeling on frosty ground in the open, trying to learn. The Pakistani govern-ment provided no teacher, and at a salary of $1.00 a day, the villagers couldn’t afford one on their own. They shared a teacher with a neighboring village, but he was in Korphe only three days a week. The rest of the time, the kids gathered in the open to work on the lessons the teacher had assigned.
Though Greg Mortenson had no money and no idea how to raise any, he resolved to build a school for the village. When he returned to California, he took a job as an emergency room nurse and started sending letters to celebrities and anyone he could think of who might help with the school. That attempt initially failed, but eventually a man who’d made a good bit of money in the semiconductor industry (and was also an avid mountain climber) read about Mortenson’s quest in a climbers’ newsletter. That man contacted Mortenson and donated the necessary money. Mortenson then was able to return to Pakistan, purchase building materials and ride in a truck to get them to a spot on the road near Korphe. However, a rock slide had blocked the road some 18 miles away from the village. From that isolated spot on the road, Mortenson had to solve the considerable problem of getting the materials into the remote mountain village while fending off tribal chieftains and others who tried to shuttle the supplies toward their own uses.
The people of Korphe themselves solved this final part of Greg Mortenson’s logistical problem. The men of the community, accustomed to hauling heavy loads on their backs for climbing expeditions, moved the materials that same way. One photo in Mortenson’s book shows the men with massive loads of lumber on their backs, laboring toward their village…with great smiles on their faces. During this ordeal, the Balti and other Pakistanis in the region had become convinced that Mortenson had no ulterior motives and had come to do only good.
After Mortenson’s school was built and his promise was kept, he returned to the United States but continued to be haunted by the needs he’d seen in all the mountain villages. To make a long story short, Mortenson resumed raising money so he could help other villages build schools. He kept returning to Pakistan—and eventually to Afghanistan as well—to build more schools. As of 2008, he and the Central Asia Institute he founded have established more than 78 schools in rural and often volatile regions of the two countries. He not only constructed the buildings but often paid for teachers and learning materials, too. Those schools provide education to more than 28,000 children (including 18,000 girls) in regions where few opportunities existed before.
Mortenson hasn’t profited financially from any of this. Although he now draws a salary from his organization, it’s small. He has faced considerable dangers, including an eight-day armed kidnapping by a Taliban group. It eventually let him go after becoming convinced of his good intentions. (Some fighters even gave him money for the schools!) In 2003, Mortenson es-caped a firefight between feuding Afghan warlords by hiding for eight hours under a load of pu-trid animal hides. He has been the target of two fatwas from Islamic mullahs who didn’t like his helping girls receive an education; he has been investigated by the CIA; and, after 9/11, he re-ceived hate mail and even death threats from Americans for helping Muslim children receive an education.
But by his dogged efforts, his selfless actions and his willingness to meet people where they are without trying to impose on them some other agenda, Greg Mortenson has gained the trust of Islamic leaders, government officials, military commanders and tribal chiefs in both Pa-kistan and Afghanistan. They see him as a humble hero.
What’s more, many observers on both sides of the Atlantic believe that in the long run, it’s efforts such as his to build bridges instead of fight battles that will help reduce terrorism throughout the world.
The title of Greg Mortenson’s book, Three Cups of Tea, refers to an old Balti proverb: “The first time you share tea with a Balti, you are a stranger. The second time you take tea, you are an honored guest. The third time you share a cup of tea, you become family.”
Greg Mortenson has drunk a lot of tea in little villages throughout the world’s most rug-ged and remote regions. You might even call it “humble tea,” and it’s too bad that the Sons of Zebedee, James and John, didn’t drink some “humble tea” on that day when they neared Jerusa-lem with Jesus and the other disciples. It’s difficult to imagine what was going on in their minds that led them to come to Jesus with what, from the perspective of what they should’ve known by that point, was a ridiculous request: “Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory.” It was ridiculous because, if you read it in context, you see that Jesus had just told the disciples, for the third time, that he was going to be arrested and killed and then would rise again.
So where were their heads? Weren’t they listening?! Didn’t they get it? It’s as if James and John skipped right over the stuff about suffering and went straight for the resurrection, which clearly they didn’t really understand either. But more than that, their request for special seating in the kingdom of God reveals that they had misunderstood much of what Jesus had said. Go back to Mark 8:29-30, where Peter declares that Jesus is the Messiah and Jesus doesn’t disagree. Start reading from there, straight through to today’s passage. It appears that once James and John understood that Jesus was indeed the Messiah, they stopped listening to anything else. As a com-mentator, André Resner Jr., points out, in the intervening verses Jesus tells his disciples that fol-lowing him means:
• thinking of themselves as people who deny self for Jesus’ sake and for the sake of the gospel, risking and accepting worldly shame (Mark 8:34-38);
• thinking of themselves as people who are focused on Jesus and his words above all oth-ers (Mark 9:7);
• thinking of themselves as people who remain humbly dependent on God’s power to do God’s work (Mark 9:14-29);
• thinking of themselves as people who do not play the games of competitiveness, one-upmanship or glory grasping but choose the role of least of all and servant to all (Mark 9:33-37);
• thinking of themselves as people who relinquish control for who does what and how they do it in the kingdom; in other words, giving up the need to be God’s quality-control experts (read: control freaks) for anything that’s done for God (Mark 10:38-41);
• thinking of themselves as people who keep children at the center of their work, even when it appears distracting (Mark 9:36-37, 42-48; 10:13-16); and,
• thinking of themselves as people who do not become overburdened by possessions but receive the gift of the hundredfold promise (Mark 10:17-31).
And after all that, James and John ask for places of special recognition! Unbelievable!
What they failed to do was drink from the “cup” that Jesus was offering them (Mark 10:38). And their somewhat glib answer that they were able to drink of the cup from which Jesus drank suggests that they thought it was going to be filled with royal wine.
Greg Mortenson, however, discovered that the cup of service is often filled with humble tea. He needed to drink of the life experience of the people he was with and not sip from private stock. Only in that way could they be the hosts and he be the servant. Indeed, in their primitive circumstances, the yak milk they used to flavor their tea wasn’t always fresh. But that was how they had to drink it, and Mortenson drank it with them. “Sometimes serving Christ means drink-ing tea laced with sour yak milk.”
Tea laced with sour yak milk became a metaphor for his work among the Balti and oth-ers. Greg Mortenson lived among them in the same conditions they did, and because of that, they embraced and supported his work, they worked alongside him and they loved him. Today, Mort-enson is one of the few Americans who is warmly received throughout Pakistan and Afghani-stan, because he’s seen as one who has come to serve without power and without seeking posi-tion and prestige. He shows that greatness isn’t about how many people are serving us but about how many people are being served by us.
James and John eventually learned that lesson, too, and they went on to faithfully carry the gospel as servants to others. We who want to be Jesus’ disciples also are called to drink the cup the Lord puts in front of us, humbly, seeking not to be served but to serve.
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PRAYER
All too often, O God, we want honor, we want credit for our hard work, but that isn’t what the kingdom of God needs. We know that, but it goes against everything that is within us. Even if we can manage to be humble, we want people to acknowledge it! Lord, take from us our pride. Help us humble ourselves and become a servant to the least and the lost, in Jesus’ name. Amen.
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