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Sunday March 8, 2009 "Sacred Calling" Mark 8:31-38 |
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Location: Blogs Brad's BlogBrad's Sermons |
 | | Posted by: Brad Miller | 3/9/2009 12:45 PM | In his book “Whistling in the Dark”, Frederick Buechner posits that after his baptism, Jesus spent 40 days in the wilderness asking himself what it meant to be Jesus. And in a similar way, Christians use the 40 days of Lent to ask themselves what it means to be Christians.
That is is why I love Lent.
Now, there’s a sentence you hear don’t very often: I love Lent. A good friend of mine who is also a minister once lamented to me that he was sick and tired of all the dreary, mournful, soul searching of Lent. “Don’t people know that Easter is coming?” he asked. “Why can’t we have a little more celebration during Lent?”
He’s right of course. Easter is coming. For that we are grateful and we will most definitely celebrate come Easter morning.
But I disagree with part of his premise. The fact is, Easter cannot be truly appreciated unless we use the season of Lent to try our best to understand what it all means. If it is all sweetness and light, we have missed not only what has been done on our behalf, but what is expected of us. Seeking those understandings is hard work. Work that should not be touched on lightly. Seeking those understandings requires some soul searching and asking some hard questions. Questions like, “What does it mean that I call myself a Christian? What is required of me when I choose to be a disciple of Christ?”
Today’s scripture has two distinct scenes that are linked together by Jesus’ need to explain what is about to happen, to him, to his 12 disciples, to all who choose to follow him.
The first scene actually has a back story that illuminates things just a little bit. Immediately prior to the scripture read this morning, Jesus and his disciples were gathered at Caesarea Philippi, home to pagan temples and pagan shrines. In the midst of these differing sites of worship, Jesus asked his disciples who people were saying that he was. The responses were what you expect: some people say you are Elijah, returning to restore Israel. Some say you are John the Baptist, returning to prepare the way for the messiah. Jesus then said to his disciples, “Well, that’s all fine and good, but who do YOU say that I am?” To which Peter replied, “You are the messiah.” From that moment on, Peter’s response became known as “The Good Confession” and is now even incorporated into our denomination’s membership ritual.
This is a very important point. Peter knows who Jesus is. After months and months of traveling, of hearing sermons and sitting in on synagogue lessons, listening to cryptic parables, this passage shows us clearly that, Peter got it. Peter understood what would take some people years and even centuries to grasp: Jesus is the messiah.
Which makes the first scene of today’s gospel account that much more perplexing.
Still at Caesarea Philippi, Jesus was more explicit about what was going to happen in the coming days. Using language that the disciples would have understood as relating to their Hebrew roots and the coming of the Messiah, Jesus told them that he would undergo great suffering, be scorned by the leaders of the temple, and be killed, but would rise from the dead three days later.
Then Peter takes Jesus aside to speak privately with him. Can you see it? The rock upon which Christ’s church would be built, the first of the disciples to openly acknowledge what none had dared utter, the most mercurial of the 12, took Jesus by the elbow, and said something like, “Jesus, can we step over here and talk a minute?” Leading him away from the others, he began: “Don’t be saying stuff like that! C’mon, you want to scare these people half to death? Do you think you’re going to attract followers by telling people that you are going to be persecuted and killed? C’mon Jesus, give this some thought would you!”
In another situation, I think Jesus might have laughed and shook his head and said, “Peter, Peter, Peter, you are a good man, but you don’t get it, do you? You say I am the Messiah, but you have a preconceived notion of what that really means. You need to let go of what tradition tells you the Messiah will look like and pay attention to what I am saying!”
But in this situation, Jesus’ time among them was short. The things that he prophesied were about to come true. So, instead of talking gently to Peter, Jesus erupted.
“Get behind me Satan! You have it wrong: this is not about what humanity wants to have happen. It is about what God has ordained!”
Did Peter really get it? Would we have gotten it?
Jesus broke away from Peter and called to the rest of his disciples to gather around, along with the crowd that was with them. Then, strongly, directly, Jesus answers one of the hard questions that we still ask today: “What do I have to do to be a Christian?”
Here is part of the answer he gave: “If you want to follow me, deny yourself and take up your cross and follow me.”
Okay: I’ve got one part of this down: follow Jesus. I even have a pretty good handle on what cues are out there for me to follow: I am to exhibit the compassion that Jesus exhibits. The grace and forgiveness extended to me by Jesus is a model for how I should treat others. The total and inclusive love that Jesus offers the world is the love I should offer all of humanity. I get all that. I may not always live up to Jesus’ example, but I get it.
Embedded in this scene, however, is an instruction from Jesus that tells me one more time why I love Lent so much, and why the soul searching hard questions of Lent are necessary. The instruction is this: “…deny yourself, take up your cross and follow me.”
I have probably heard this instruction or a variation on this instruction a thousand times in my life. But during Lent, I do not simply skip past it, saying in my head, “Yeah, yeah, I get it…there are costs to following Jesus.” No, because it is Lent and I am in the midst of asking and answering hard questions, I try to let the meaning of that instruction sink in.
Imagine: you are one of the crowd and you just heard Jesus say, “deny yourselves, take up your cross and follow me.”
First, what does he mean: deny myself? Our Roman Catholic brothers and sisters focus a large part of their Lenten disciplines on this one phrase: deny yourself. Put your own interests aside, do something that takes you out of your comfort zone or don’t do something that you normally would do and use that denial as a way to remember the sacrifice of Jesus on your behalf. I grew up in a heavily Roman Catholic area. Protestants were in a very distinct minority, and so, just by osmosis, my Catholic friends had quite an influence on my view of things. Lenten self denial is one thing that I have tried to practice, largely because of that influence. So, at various times I have given up alcohol or desserts or meat for Lent.
But in the last several years I have begun to look at this denial of oneself a little differently. Jesus instructed us to deny ourselves. While I still practice the discipline of self denial at Lent, I try to pick things that I can continue after Lent. Things that will keep me healthier or more focused for the long haul, not just for these 40 days.
The other way I have begun to change my interpretation of self-denial is to get away from defining self-denial as simply refraining from things that are harmful, and instead think of ways that I can become less self-centered and self-absorbed. I am not always successful in this regard, but I think this is part of what Jesus is telling us here. Because when we are less self-centered, our needs become secondary to the needs of those all around us. In sacrificing some of our own comforts, we put ourselves in a better position to truly serve the needs of those with whom we come in contact. And in serving those with needs greater than our own, we are most definitely following the model that Jesus presents for us.
But what about the other of that phrase: “take up your cross….”
Today, the cross has become for us the emblem of Jesus’ sacrificial behavior on our behalf. But our cross is clean, and gold, and smooth and shiny and symbolic. Jesus cross was rough and wood and ugly and real.
So it is not surprising that the people in the crowd that day might have heard something much different than we do today: to them, the cross was a very real instrument of violence and of death. The crowd that day would have been well acquainted with the Roman custom of crucifixion on a cross.
Think about how different it would be if Jesus was talking to us today and he said, “strap yourself into an electric chair and follow me.” We’d probably think twice, wouldn’t we?
You know what? I don’t think Jesus was saying, “if you follow me, it is inevitable that you are going to experience a death like mine…so be ready for it.” But I do think he was saying, “You will have to sacrifice in some way to be my disciple. Your cross is not necessarily my cross. But they are born of the same thing: sacrificial love and faith in God.”
As the passage continues, we read Jesus’ words: “What will it profit a person to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?” That is something we must pay attention to: how we live our lives matters.
When we become so self-centered as to focus only on our own creature comforts, our own success, our own well being, you know what? That is not living. That is existing.
Without community, without fellowship, without the support that comes from others, our lives are shallow and empty. When we know true community, when we know true human fellowship, when we understand what it means to be present for others, just as they are present for us, we are on the way to a life of fulfillment and purpose.
And at the heart of that life is understanding the nature of our individual crosses. The cross of Jesus is not our cross. Jesus was the only person in the history of humanity who, through his sacrifice, could save humanity. Nothing we do can achieve that goal. But within each of our lives are opportunities to follow the same sacrificial pattern by giving of ourselves, by denying ourselves, by letting go of some of our self-absorbed, self-centeredness. Every day we encounter opportunities to give ourselves over to sacrificial acts of love, compassion, justice and peace. Those opportunities are our cross: to do for others because Jesus showed us the ultimate form of doing for others.
I love Lent.
It is too easy to celebrate the feel good story of Easter and forget that we are not asked to simply believe, but to act out our beliefs in sacrificial, loving, ways. We are not asked simply to observe, but to follow. This is our calling. It is our sacred calling. Because on that day when Jesus felt the need to explain what was expected, he did not say, to the 12, “this is what you must do to be an apostle.” He did not gather priests around him and say, “this is what you must do to be a priest in my church,” He did not say to the crowd gathered there, “this is what you must do to be my disciple.”
No. Jesus said, “If ANYBODY wants to be my followers….”
ANYBODY.
We have been called. How will we respond?
Let us pray: Gracious God, we struggle with what it means to be called into your sacred fellowship. We struggle with how we are to act. We struggle with how we should treat others We struggle with our self-centeredness. Yet, we want to be worthy of your call. We want to act in ways that honor you. We want to treat others as you have treated us. We want to turn our attention away from ourselves so that we might be there for others. Help us. Strengthen us. Guide us during these 40 days that we might take up our crosses and follow you. It is in your holy name we pray. Amen.
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