Teapots, Great and Small

Lent 5:                                                                                                                                        Mark 10: 32-45

Christ our Lord, you refused the way of dominion and died the death of a slave. May we refuse to lord it over those who are subject to us, but share the weight of authority so that all may be empowered in your name. Amen. Janet Morley

I don’t perceive myself as having much power these days; my children are grown and gone, my key ring has only two keys-my front door and my car. There is no doorway on which to affix my name with title. But I have to admit that I am a person in North American culture who has privilege. I am educated, I am white, I am healthy; we almost own our home, we have health insurance, we employ people to help with house and yard, to cut our hair, to dry clean our clothes. All of those privileges give me a kind of authority in the larger culture that I can use for better or worse.

I caught a glimpse of the way authority can be used for empowering or lording it over someone when reading one of my favorite mystery series by Alexander McCall Smith about the No.1 Ladies Detective Agency in Botswana. Mma Precious Ramotswe began the agency and owns it. She has a thoughtful and centered sense of herself and her place in the world. She has employed and trained Mma Grace Makutsi, a younger women who has pulled herself up from poverty by hard work and skill, to be her secretary and assistant detective. It falls to Mma Makutsi to make the tea for the office and adjoining garage business each morning, one pot for Mma Ramotswe who drinks red bush tea, the other of ordinary for everyone else. The larger pot is the one Precious loves, so the red bush tea is made in that. Yet when Mma Makutsi comes to her and asks that for the sake of efficiency that the larger pot be used for the ordinary tea, Mma Ramotswe recognizes that this is an opportunity for her privilege to be let go, for power to be shared, for fairness to be practiced. “I am happy to change,” she says. (The Double Comfort Safari Club, p. 200.)

It’s such a small thing to give up one’s entitlement to the biggest teapot, the most comfortable chair, our place in the line. Yet we, as Mma Ramotswe did, sometimes have to stop and think about it. After all, we are entitled we have earned it, it comes with our territory, or our age, or our place at the table. Yet in this Lenten journey, we are asked to examine the places where we are cling to our prerogatives, where we use our privilege to go first, where we demand a kind of attention that supersedes the needs of others. Jesus refused to hang on to his divine privilege, didn’t even look for friendship and approval among the movers and shakers of his location, but rather among those to whom his presence, attention and power made a life-changing difference.

One pronounced way that we lord it over others in the Church is to pay attention to and to seek to be noticed by Important People, ones who are on the right  side, ones who are well-known, ones who can recommend that we move higher up in the circles of acceptance. Many of us have had the experience of trying to talk to one who is looking for someone more important to be with even as we are talking to them. And we have been on the other side of the equation, talking on our cell phones while we deal with service people, turning a deaf cry to the yammering of those who are constant critics, failing to recognize someone in the community because they are not on our list of worthiness.

In the next week I know I will be in the company of people who have lost their jobs, people who are recovering from illness, people who are grieving; people who are wounded by the Church and feel betrayed and hopeless; people who have much less than I do. I pray to have the heart to listen attentively, to notice who they are, and to share my cup of tea with them for Jesus’ sake. I am happy to change.