This is the sermon I preached on Sunday Sept. 27 at St.Timothy Lutheran Church. The text is Mark 9:38-50. Today's gospel continues where last week's left off. The theme is still that of discipleship. Jesus teaches his disciples that ministry involves service and sacrifice and illustrates this by the disciples' wrong attitude. There are a couple of things going on as background to the disciples' desire to control how God works. Earlier, the disciples were unable to cast a demon out of someone. Then along comes this person whom they do not know. What does he do? He successfully casts out a demon. How do Jesus' disciples respond to this? For one thing, they're jealous. Then just like little children, they go running to Jesus to tell him how this man was not following them. Does the disciples' verbiage strike you as odd? Wouldn't you think that their concern would be whether or not he was following Jesus? The man was not part of their group! The twelv...