By: Dana Cassell

Mark 10:35-45

My good friend Lauree died last month. She was 90, enjoyed good health right up until the end, and died on her own terms, just like she lived.

And she sure did live. Lauree was one of the smartest people I’ve ever known, and her mind was creative and powerful. But she also grew up on a farm and learned early on the value of physical power, too. She lived with sheer will and an extra measure of delight.

I only met Lauree a dozen or so years ago, when I moved to Manassas and got invited to join her writing group. But over the years, I learned a lot about her life.

Lauree was born on a Brethren family farm in Manassas, Virginia. She went to Bridgewater College, then spent several years working for the Church of the Brethren as a regional youth coordinator. She entered Brethren Volunteer Service and worked for six years rebuilding ecumenical trust in Germany after the war.

When she came back to the United States, Lauree went to the University of Chicago for both her master’s degree and a PhD. She bounced around a bit after that, married a man and had two children – she gave birth to one of them in China – and ended up teaching theology at Bethany Theological Seminary. After her marriage ended, Lauree found love again, this time with another brilliant Brethren woman.

Somewhere around 1990, multiple women came forward with allegations of sexual abuse by another member of the Bethany faculty. Lauree and her partner, who was working as a denominational executive, believed the women and worked toward an accountability process for the abusive leader. Their work was not welcomed by their employers, and I think – though I need some confirmation – that part of the blowback included outing them as lesbians in a relationship.

In 1991, pushed out by leaders who did not want to hold this particular abusive man accountable for his actions, both Lauree and her partner left their jobs in the Church of the Brethren. Neither one ever returned.

I met Lauree twenty years after all that happened, and it took several years into our friendship before she told me the details of what went down. Even then, she didn’t elaborate. I know it was a big loss, to lose the church that she grew up in, spent her life serving and attributed so much of her formation to. But Lauree didn’t talk much about it. Instead, she loved to talk about books and ideas, politics, her grandchildren, and her sprawling gardens.

But she’d always listen to what I had to say about the church, with an open mind and genuine interest.

My story sort of parallels Lauree’s, fifty years later. I grew up in the Church of the Brethren, spent years in BVS and ministry, paid my rent with the church’s paychecks. The church was a huge part of my formation, too. But when I started speaking up about men in power abusing that power, the church didn’t welcome it. And when I officiated a wedding for two women last year, the church removed my ordination, and I left. Like Lauree.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Lauree’s friendship and mark on my life these last couple of months. She knew she was at the end of her life, and she invited me to visit her, which meant I got to tell her how important she has been to me. I am pretty sure that if I hadn’t known Lauree and her story, her rich life and how much joy and delight she found in living even after being cast out from the institution that formed and shaped her, I would not have been as free to make the choices that I did. I would not be DELIGHTING in this post-ministry life I’m leading now quite as easily or deliciously.

Knowing Lauree and her story liberated me to live with integrity in ways I can barely even articulate, now.

When I told her that, a couple of weeks before she died, she said “well, that sort of leaves me breathless.” Which is much more of a compliment if you don’t know that it was her lungs that were leading to her death.

In the very last line of this morning’s scripture passage, Jesus says something that theologians and priests and pastors have seized onto and built out into entire soteriologies and creeds. And I think it has to do with what Lauree has meant for me, in my own life.

But let’s back up a little bit.

The lectionary has had us dwelling here in Mark’s gospel for weeks, now, and I, for one, am tired of it.

I’m tired of it because in these chapters, the same thing happens over and over and over again. Mark’s gospel would not get through the first round of editing if it were to be published today, because it is so daggone repetitive. But there’s purpose in it; Mark is making a point. JESUS is making a point. And the disciples JUST. DON’T. GET. IT.

Three times – in chapter 8, chapter 9 and here in chapter 10 – Jesus explains to the disciples that he is about to undergo some real suffering: he’s going to get arrested, put on trial and sentenced to death. And he will, in fact, die. And he will also – get this – be resurrected on the third day.

Jesus tries again and again to explain this to his friends, but they simply refuse to hear it. Every time he tries to tell them about this, the disciples do some knuckleheaded thing: Peter rebukes Jesus, the whole gang starts arguing about who is Jesus’ best friend, and now, here come James and John trying to wrangle a promise out of Jesus that they can sit at his right and at his left when he takes his throne in glory.

And every time, Jesus has to redirect the disciples and explain to them, AGAIN, that the kingdom of heaven doesn’t work like that; that in the Kingdom, the first will be last and the last will be first, that the way to be a leader is to serve everyone. That his kingdom is an upside down one, counter to everything they thought they knew about power.

This time, Jesus chides James and John and tells them that while it’s true that most worldly leaders do lord it over their subjects and fall into tyrannical behavior. THEY – Jesus and his disciples – are bound to a different way of living.

“…whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all,” he tells them.

And then, he drops this infamous line: “For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

Whole swaths of Christian believers have come to understand Jesus’ death as a “ransom,” a price paid to an angry God to release all the rest of us from his wrath, or a price paid to the Devil in order to satisfy some debt that all of humanity owed. There are entire books, whole denominations, vast libraries of hymnody that understand Jesus’ death this way.

And there are other places in scripture that do seem to imply that Jesus’ death was a way of satisfying some eternal debt that humanity owed to either God or the Devil. But here, the Greek word translated “ransom” is “lutron,” and it only occurs here and in Matthew’s telling of the same scene in his gospel. Nowhere else in the New Testament.

And, more importantly, Jesus is not talking about settling some debt owed to anyone here in this passage. He’s talking with his disciples who he is trying to invite into the liberated way of living as servants instead of being captive to their selfish notions and needs, their self-centeredness.

Jesus says, “look, I am here to be the servant of all, not finagle my way to the right-hand of earthly power. I keep telling you that I am going to DIE because of this, and you keep arguing about who is first among you, how you can manage to get a little bit of my glory. I keep telling y’all: the first will be last. The most powerful are those who serve. Rich people have a hard time entering the kingdom of heaven. I’m not here to become a tyrant like the Roman rulers; I’m here to serve.

AND I’m doing it so that YOU can do it, TOO.”

The Son of Man is here to give his life as a ransom for many. To set you free not from an existential debt to God or the Devil, but from your own self-centeredness that keeps you from living lives of mercy and service.

I don’t know about you, but this reading of what Jesus means when he says his life is a ransom for many makes a whole lot more sense to me than the Christus Victor or penal substitution theories do. I don’t understand why God would require her own creation to pay up, or why Jesus would make a deal with the Devil in the first place.

But I DO understand how powerful it can be for someone to model a life of servanthood, mercy and integrity. I understand how Jesus’ life, lived in communion with God and in service to his fellow humans, his life that was cut short but not ended by the oppressive powers that cannot abide mercy and truth-telling, how all of that might liberate us to live like he did.

I understand it because I have experienced it, time and time again. Lauree is one example – someone I knew and loved whose life of integrity and truth-telling became instructive for me, a clear model for what’s possible and how. That there is a lot of life after the loss of status, community, and identity. That maybe some parts of us do die but other parts of who we are get to burn brighter. That the world is bigger than we think, and joy is possible in lots of different ways.

Knowing Lauree liberated me to live with more integrity and trust that I would find new life after loss. Her life became a ransom for mine, in ways she could never have imagined.

I wonder who has liberated you like that, whose life has made yours possible, whose witness has proved to be a ransom for many.