I saw the confusion. Do not worry. We had a bit of a printing error this week. Sarah printed the Lent 1 readings in our Order of Worship. I assumed she had made a mental note about us celebrating Quintard last week and just thought we were picking up with Lent 1. It turns out Candida’s list of readings and servers had Lent 1 in there. The scarier thing, of course, is that three of us read it by Thursday of last week, and none of us caught the mistake. I caught some footnotes and removed them, but I did not catch the readings. The good news, though, is that you have all read what you would have heard at a church that was doing normal Lent 1 activities and heard what should be happening today. I told 8am folks that they would help steer me for you. I would preach on Lent 2, but I would be comfortable with the suggestion to back up a week. It was a unanimous recommendation that I not preach a different week and sermon for you.
I shared with them that at the beginning of the week, I wanted to preach on laughter. The OT reading appointed for the day deals with Abraham and Sarah being told that they are going to have a baby in their late 90’s. Their response is to laugh at God’s promise. I know we are in the season of Lent and laughter seems inappropriate when we are bewailing our manifest wretchedness, but we never enter Lent without knowing how this story ends, in spite of ourselves. For some, the Gospel may produce a great deal of awe, but we should also understand the joy and laughter that should come as we revisit Holy Week and are reminded of Jesus’ love of each one of us, in spite of our wretchedness, and His Will to free us from the oppression of sin.
By the end of the week, though, God had pushed me back into the Gospel reading again. What made it ironic was the fact that Brian and Joshua and I did not do Greek this week, as Brian and Valerie were visiting their son out in California. Habits die hard, though, and I found myself playing around with my Greek even as the Church around us was struggling with what it means to be a disciple of Christ. In that way, this is probably a vaccination against some of those discussions that dishonor Christ in the world around us and a bit of attunement for you to have ears that hear the questions asked by those whom you encounter in your daily life, work, and socializing. At 8am, I warned them that all this was contingent on me being attuned to God and His message for us this day, but they all brushed aside that warning during coffee. So, don’t worry that you do not have the reading. It’s my job to make sure you can follow along.
Our assigned reading comes from the end of Mark 8. That means it is right before the Transfiguration of Jesus and eight chapters after most of the stories we read during the season of Epiphany. Understand, Peter and the disciples have had eight chapters worth of watching Jesus and listening to His instruction. Just like you and me, they had their favorite miracles which proved to them that Jesus might be the Messiah, God’s chosen One to lead His people. I have reminded us all repeatedly that Pilate put to death somewhere around 275 false messiahs. What would it take for you to believe that this Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah in light of all those false prophets? All those with Jesus have come to at least hope, if not believe, that Jesus is the One chosen by God in spite of Roman oppression and in spite of the false claimants.
The story takes place in Cesarea Philippi. That is significant because it was a goal of Herod the great to turn the area into a destination city on the eastern side of the Mediterranean. Can’t get to Rome and see the beautiful temples there? Come to Cesarea Philippi and see glory that outstrips that of Rome. As a reminder that people are people and that there is nothing new under the sun, the emperor gave the city to Herod the Great, who proceeded to undertake a marbelization of the city and to build a glorious temple to Caesar. Yes, politicians scratching each other’s backs and aggrandizing one another is not a unique, modern American problem. In the midst of these beautiful and popular pagan temples, Peter has confessed Jesus to be the Messiah.
Like Peter, Jesus’ question is emphatically posed to you and me and every disciple who follows in the footsteps of Jesus. As you are all tired of hearing, the Greek verb contains the pronoun subject in it. Think ego eimi—I, I am. When Greek writers add a pronoun to the verb, the pronoun is being emphasized. Jesus has asked all His disciples who they think He is. He does not want to hear what others are saying, He wants to know Who those with Him think He is.
The same question is put to you and me. Who is Jesus? Jesus is not interested in us parroting what others say about Him. He wants us to answer this question for ourselves. Our answers have all kinds of implications, right? Do we know what a Christ or Messiah truly is, if that is our answer? If not, why do we give it? If so, why do we not live our life as if we believe our own answer? Put a bit harsher in this season of Lent, if we believe He is who He says He is, why do we resist His authority? Why do we not live as He instructs and commands us?
After that confession, Jesus begins to teach His disciples for the first time that He will go to Jerusalem, be betrayed by those in power in Jerusalem, killed, and rise from the dead on the third time. He will teach them this three times in total before the events happen. All will struggle with this until it happens. Rome excelled in killing. They knew how to make people suffer. And those whom they killed were not like Wesley in The Princess Bride, they were all dead!
Peter, who has witnessed miracles enough to believe Jesus is the Messiah, then protests. Jesus rebukes Peter for saying something along the lines of “Lord, let this never happen to you.” We can all understand Peter’s statement. Peter does not yet understand how God will be glorified in Jesus. Peter expects a glorious King rather than Suffering Servant. What’s worse, Peter knows that dead people do not rise from the dead after three days. It simply does not happen.
For His part, Jesus is rebuking Satan as much as Peter. Satan has tempted Jesus, as you all read in your Orders of Worship this morning, with the opportunity to avoid the pain and suffering and still gain glory. Unfortunately for Satan, but fortunate for you and me, Jesus understands that the glory offered by Satan is vain and pales in comparison to what God offers. God will bless and raise Jesus, in spite of the humiliation, torture, and death that He will experience precisely because He was obedient! And that glory and authority He gives to Jesus will be eternal. If death cannot contain Jesus, what will?
Make no mistake, though Peter and the others are well-meaning, they are absolutely wrong. If Jesus does not experience what He first tells them here, God’s plan of salvation will not be completed. The stakes are enormous. And they are so focused on the way the world does things, they cannot perceive that God has His own way of doing things. God values the suffering servant in a way that the world cannot understand nor tolerate, whether one lives under 1st Century Roman oppression or 21st Century America.
Then comes the meat in Mark’s story today. After the rebuke and reminding us that Peter’s and our efforts to protect Jesus are of Satan rather than God, Jesus brings His disciples together and begins to teach them what it means to be His disciples. Those in the Church around us are still misunderstanding or willfully ignoring Jesus’ instruction, right? On the one hand, we have people proclaiming to be disciples of Christ insistent that God is calling them to rule in His Name, that we are being called as a nation to be a Christian nation. Such people unironically believe that America is the new Israel, the people of God, but are so out of step with what God demands and expects of His people that they miss the dangers inherent in such a claim. “Christian” politicians unironically claim that God has called them to rule in His name as He did the judges of old. Somewhere along the long, they have forgotten the lessons of the Judges. Could they turn Israel back to God? Every now and again. But really turn the people back to God in their hearts? No. That was a task for Messiah. Somewhere along the line those politicians have forgotten Jesus’ instructions and Paul’s reminders, or simply choose to ignore them because they are inconvenient.
Just to remind you, what happens when God’s people in the OT sin, don’t repent, don’t catch the warning signs or meanings of the curses, and willfully continue on their way? That’s right. Exile. God holds His people accountable. How often does God judge Israel for ignoring Him, for doing things according to the world’s teaching rather than His torah? Do we as a nation really want that kind of responsibility? Do we Christians in America really want that responsibility and the consequences of disobedience? And by the way, whose denominational flavor provides the right seasoning for such work? I am guessing the ladies here and those men who recognize that women are created in the image of God might not think a number of recent statement by ”Christian” leaders or politicians who self-identify as Christian represent the mind of Christ or in any way, shape, or form glorify Him. Do we want them governing? I don’t. But I am equally sure they would not want me or you governing. They think we cannot say a prayer unless it is written down nor do anything without a martini in our hands, right? And heck, let’s be honest, many would not even count us as Christians. As long as we are so divided, who can best represent God to our country? Who can best represent what are God’s instructions to His people and their own denominational rule?
Thankfully and mercifully, Jesus gives us the instructions in our pericope today, but He does it in a unique way. Now, teachers among us be patient. We are going to violate the rules of English grammar. You and I are all big on subject verb agreements and avoiding tense shifts in our writings and conversations. Greek is not bound by those rules as are we. Mark writes that Jesus gave three verbs to describe true discipleship. Interestingly, the first two verbs are written in the past tense and the third verb is written as an ongoing action. That means the first two are spoken of as having happened to completion in the past, but the third verb is ongoing indefinitely. Were we to be more faithful to Jesus’ words, and they would be in red letters in some Bibles, our translation today would be something along the line of denied yourself and your cross picked up, keep following Me. But that pesky word we translate as deny is much stronger in Greek than English. It is almost literally “destroy.” Now, I get why our translators use softer language, but Mark chose his words, inspired by the Holy Spirit, to teach us what Jesus taught him and the other Apostles. “Destroyed yourself, picked up your cross, keep following Me.”
All of us have egos, right? We all want to think we are super important to God. We are. He proved that to us by coming down to us, living among us, and dying for our sins. We know just how much He values each one of us! But, and this is a hard lesson for some of us, He is unwilling to leave us as we are. Just as we good parents try our best to help our children grow up to be good adults, God is always parenting us to grow into the stature of how He created us before we chose our ways over His. Put differently, our sin, and the sin of the world around us, has marred the glory or blurred His image in us that He intended for each and every one of us to bear! But we get so attached to who we are in this world, we get so seduced by the false glory of the world, that we trade lasting glory for things the world values. Jesus reminds us here that must be destroyed in us. He says it softer in other places – you cannot serve two masters, for example. But Mark has no time for dissembling. Jesus in his Gospel is always immediately on the way to the Cross. We must destroy ourselves before we can become truly Christ-like.
Luckily for us, we have the Sacrament of Baptism in our BCP. At our best, churches are always drawing people into relationship with Christ, we are always baptizing in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. But in the course of that liturgy, we destroy ourselves, right? We ask them if they intend to turn from sin and to God. Once they express their assent, the celebrant pronounces that they have been baptized into Christ’s death and promised a share in His Resurrection, right? Yet how counter cultural, and how counter church here in the United States, is this idea that we destroy ourselves to become disciples of Jesus? And the more privileged we are, the more comfortable we are, how much more difficult than for those oppressed or on the margins? Yet, what is Jesus instruction here?
The same is true for the picked up our cross. You and I live in 21st Century America. We cannot understand the agony and the humiliation of a cross because it is simply not part of our culture. On those instances where we allow capital punishment, we endeavor to be “humane.” We may differ over our definitions of humane, but we are not big into suffering. Our goal is generally to provide as quick a death and as painful a death as possible. Rome had other goals. They wanted those crucified to suffer. They wanted their loved ones to be humiliated by the punishment. Rome was power! Crucifixion is what happened when one took on the throne. And there was nothing anyone could do to stop them! Even at the end, on what we call Good Friday, it appears that Rome has conquered yet another messiah in Judea. Want to call yourself your God’s appointed ruler in our Empire? We will crucify you naked as a spectacle for all to see. And there is not a thing in the world that you can do, or your God can do, to stop us. We will nail you naked to a tree and no one, absolutely no one, will help you.
Cross bearing is hard, my friends. Cross bearing is costly. It is, as we would say using Mark’s grammar, what helps destroy us. The outside world sees it and mocks us for it. We get our fifteen minutes of fame in this world by heroic or, far more likely, extreme and scandalous behavior. But Jesus instructs us, those among us who have been baptized into His death and promised a share in His Resurrection, to bear the pain, to bear the suffering, to bear the humiliation of a cross in imitation of His salvific work among us! How many of those “Christian” leaders bear crosses for Jesus? How do they suffer? How do they alleviate oppression? How do they call the world to the saving embrace of Jesus? And we wonder why fellow citizens are repulsed by their claims to be “the one” or “the ones” to govern in His Name.
The good news, of course, is that Jesus instructed His disciples, all of us from Peter to those not yet born, knowing that we would fail. Jesus instructed us knowing we had stubborn hearts and slow minds. And still, He went obedient to that Cross on our behalf. Still, He endured all that suffering and humiliation upon which we focus during Holy Week, that you and I and all in the world who were drawn to Him, might be freed from the oppressions of our sins and be reconciled to our Father, that we might become the person whom He created and fashioned when we were yet unborn, that we might become that image bearing child He wants us to be!
Again, our Baptism and Eucharist liturgies reinforce this ongoing nature of following Him. Until He calls us home or until He returns, this following Him is always ongoing. We try to do those things He calls us to do, and we try to avoid those things He commands us not to do. What happens when we fail in either? We repent and return to Him and try again. That call to repentance is in our Baptismal liturgy and our Confirmation liturgy. Nobody fails to be reminded of that call in our church! The outside world cannot understand what happens as a result of God’s grace and indwelling Holy Spirit, right? “You mean you just say you’re sorry and try again? That’s stupid.” Good, I see nods. Repentance is more than “I am sorry,” right? It means we recognize what we are doing leads us and others from God. We will to turn back to God and do things or avoid things, trusting in His guidance and instruction even when we do not fully understand. And educated a bit by good preaching, we hope, encouraged by those in fellowship with us, and nourished by His Body and Blood, we are sent back out into the world to do the things He has given us to do. We repeat that, we repeat Jesus’ instructions in Mark 8 today, each and every time we gather, right? But how many of us pay attention to it? How many of us notice it? And if we, whose very liturgy recalls to mind Jesus’ instructions from Mark today, pay no attention, how well do we think those in the wider Church, who hear only upon what the pastor wants to focus, are reminded? And we wonder why “Christians” pick up guns to guard our borders and shoot undocumented immigrants and think it God honoring. We wonder why pastors con their congregations into buying them more jewelry and think it God-honoring. We wonder why our local “Christian” politician thinks the meaning of Christmas is a family picture complete with their weapons. And we wonder why others are not drawn to the love and mercy of God.
Thankfully and mercifully, my friends, the Church somehow makes Her way from generation to generation in history. I will sometimes joke tongue in cheek that THE biggest miracle before us is that the Church still exists. God has depended upon men and women and boys and girls like you and me to share His Gospel. God has depended upon men and women and boys and girls like us to destroy ourselves, to destroy ourselves, to pick up our crosses, and to keep following Him. Yet despite our tendencies, despite our innate desire to do things our way rather than His, still He continues His plan of salvation in the world around us! Heck, let’s be honest. He carries out His plan of salvation through us, despite all our shortcomings, our sins, and even our disbeliefs. He carries out His plan no matter how much we rebel. But such is His power and such is HIs mercy that He can use people like us to draw others into His saving embrace. We, who know our faults, who know our sins, who know our failures intimately, can be used by God in His magnificent plan of salvation! All we must do is destroy ourselves, pick up our Cross, and follow the One, Jesus of Nazareth, who is the pattern of holy living, and who lived the life instructed by God, that all might return to Him. And freed from those pressures of success, reminded of His deep love for us despite ourselves, you and I are sent back out there to draw others into this incredible promise and hope.
All of it begins with these instructions of Jesus. Destroyed yourself, picked up your cross, and follow me. The rest is truly up to Him!
In His Peace,
Brian
