Take up Their Cross

 

Sunday, March 8^th, 2009

Lent 2B

Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton VA

Mark 8:31-38

Theme: Living a life of sacrifice

 

“³¹Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. ³²He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. ³³But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”  ³⁴He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. ³⁵For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. ³⁶For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? ³⁷Indeed, what can they give in return for their life? ³⁸Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.”

 

I believe that we as humans are, with a few exceptions, optimistic beings.  We have to be, in order to go about the business of everyday life, engaging in relationships, planning for the future, scheduling appointments, activities, events, our LIVES …

 

That is why there is something fundamentally jarring about receiving news to the contrary of those plans – news that a loved one is going to die, or that a special event has been cancelled, or that the expected schedule of the day or of the week has been dramatically rearranged.  We experienced some of that this week with the snowstorm and cancellation of school and other activities throughout our community. 

 

If you are sitting with a loved one who receives a diagnosis that spells out that in a certain amount of time, the chances of their living beyond that timeframe is unlikely, your mind begins to play through a whole series of scenarios.  Multiple possibilities – all laden with hope, with an intrinsically optimistic notion that this might be the exception to the rule.  It establishes the constant backdrop of ‘but it might not happen to … THIS person’. 

 

And depending on how the diagnosis plays itself out, with greater or lesser speed, with more or less effect on the life of the person involved and those who surround them, that hope, that optimism will reinstate itself repeatedly.  And it is all the more present when one feels deeply for the person involved. 

 

I can only imagine that that must have been what prompted Peter’s response to Jesus’ beginning to teach him and the other disciples that he was going to undergo great suffering, that he was going to be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and that he was going to be killed.  I’m pretty sure that if I had been following Jesus around for nearly three years, had been listening to him preach and teach, had watched how he dealt with people, and with powerful people especially, if I had heard those words come out of his mouth, I would have stopped listening at ‘killed’, and completely missed the ‘and after three days rise again’ part. 

 

And yet, we need to step back from identifying so closely with Peter for a minute.  For all the good intentions that he most definitely had, Jesus’ response to PETER is one that puts in stark perspective the choices that we are faced with not just at momentous occasions in our lives, but throughout the day, in seemingly inconsequential decisions we make that color our perspective and lull us into an illusion of comfort and safety that is simply not to be expected as followers of Christ. 

 

We’ve heard it before.  Peter’s telling Christ ‘This talk of you being killed is nonsense, you are destined to lead Israel back to it’s former glory as in the days of King David’ uncovers for us that, even this late in his ministry, the disciples had not yet grasped the fact that Christ’s Kingdom was of the now and not yet variety, not the here, beginning as soon as we kick the (Romans, Assyrians, Greeks, Egyptians, Babylonians, Communists, Secular Humanists, Protestants, Catholics, Democrats, Republicans, Liberals, Fundamentalists) out.  The inclination to set ourselves against those with whom we might disagree on one level of existence and call THEM the enemy and wish THEM to fail is easy, expedient, and usually clearly definable; much more so than naming and defining something WITHIN OURSELVES as just as corrosive, just as lethal, just as anti-Christlike as anything we would find OUTSIDE ourselves might be. 

You see, Jesus was not just ticked off at Peter’s assumption that he was going to transform, just as he had a short while before, from an itinerant preacher, travelling from town to town, talking to people and healing them of their sicknesses both physical and spiritual, into some phenomenal military and political leader, able to rally the forces of a pitiful little backwater outpost to defeat a world power, but I think he was as upset at the fact that those were the only terms in which Peter understood what power – even transformative power – was. 

 

We can become so locked into this physical worldview, the one that tells us that power equals might.  That the ability to crush the enemy is the only way to understand what it means to hold – and wield – power.  We live in a world that is built solely on that premise.  With a few notable exceptions, exceptions that could be counted on one hand, our history is one of conflict and bloodshed based on the premise that the one who dies loses.  Christ tells us there is another way: the way of suffering. 

 

There is no indication in scripture that the suffering was to ONLY be borne by Jesus.  While it was his and his alone to go to the cross, his affirmation that we are to be prepared to suffer as he did, with a purpose and an end in sight, is one that we need to take to heart not only individually, but as a community as well.      

 

Jason Patrick, Pastor at Menokin Baptist Church, opened his message this morning with these words:   

 

“Mark Twain, a better theologian than most give him credit for, once remarked concerning the Bible, “Many people are troubled by those passages of Scripture that they cannot understand, but as for me, I always noticed that the passages in Scripture that trouble me the most are those that I do understand.” The hard or difficult words of Jesus Christ do not perplex us because we do not understand them but because we do understand them and we find them so difficult to follow and obey.”     

 

Why would it be so difficult for us to follow these words of Jesus?  Why do we NOT take his words to heart and apply them to our lives?  Just as Christ’s suffering birthed the church, this community of faith charged with living out his life and breaking in his Kingdom on earth, so our suffering must be centered on creating … on extending, on introducing and inviting others to become a part of this body, made up of flawed, sinful people who are in the process of being redeemed through the suffering of the one who called each of us by name, who knows us and loves us despite those flaws and those sins, and who calls us to change.

 

What does this mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton?

 

Jesus’ rebuke of Peter had more to do with knocking some sense into Peter than with exposing and rejecting him for speaking what are ultimately satanic words about the destiny of Christ.  Jesus didn’t kick Peter out of the band of disciples for what he said.  He kept him in and kept teaching, kept communicating to him, kept that connection between them that ultimately resulted in the transformation of Peter into the fearless miracle worker we read of in Acts.  Peter allowed Christ to radically redefine his life.

 

Following Christ means allowing him to radically redefine for us here at Jerusalem what life – TRUE life – really is.  It is not about acquiring wealth and being comfortable, it is not about having the security that we will be here tomorrow, much less in a year or two years.  Following Christ redefines security in terms of what redemption brings – a sure and certain hope that we will be in the presence of Christ no matter what happens to us.  While Jesus redefines life for us, he also gives us the freedom to interpret that true life into real and tangible ways that WE can grasp, that WE can understand, that WE can engage and act on.

 

Jason gave another illustration:  

 

Mother Teresa heard of a family whose nine members were starving to death. She hurriedly obtained some rice and went to the family, giving them enough rice to prepare a meal. But the woman divided the rice into two piles, placed one in a bag and started to leave. Mother Teresa asked where she was going. The woman said she was going to visit another family who she knew was starving also. This starving woman, who was likely a Hindu, is a much better follower of Jesus Christ than I am—and I am so brave to say, a much better follower of Christ than are most people sitting in church pews at this very moment. God sent His only Son into the world because there is something drastically wrong with the world. There is something very wrong about the fact that we can eat three meals a day and not feel and act upon the conviction that people are starving.     

 

So what does our cross look like?  What form does our particular charge, our specific responsibility take today?  And will we bear it as faithfully as Christ did?

 

Let’s pray.