Sermon for February 25. 2018
Lent 2B – RCL
Jesus began to teach his disciples 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.
He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke
him. But 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.”
He 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. For 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. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world
and forfeit their life? Indeed, what can they give in return for their life?
Those 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 have to admit that I can have problems with this passage from
Mark. The problem is not in what is says
but more in what some in our society do with the passage. This is a passage that gets tossed around to
justify the most awful things that happen to people. It ranks right up there for me with the trite
saying that God would never give you more than you can handle. Or that “God just needed another angel” in
response to a loved one’s death. This
passage gets used by some when people have things like cancer or other diseases. People will say things like “Oh that is your
cross – you just need to bear it. God is
testing you.” And I am here to call BS
on that talk. God does not give us
cancer, death or any other of a multitude of maladies as our personal crosses
to test us and see if we are worthy of heaven.
That is not what this passage is about.
Jesus in this passage is, once again, being counter-cultural to
the expectations of his day and indeed the expectations from our day. Jesus is telling Peter and the other disciples
that he is to go through a testing that they will find hard to imagine. Jesus is telling them, and us, that the Love
that came down on Christmas would be hung on a cross, not to die but to show
humanity that there is no way to kill that love. Nothing – powers and principalities, deeds
and actions of crazed killers, or power from empire – nothing will kill the
Love that came to us in the form of a small vulnerable child on Christmas.
Peter – the Peter I love because he is just so human. The peter who at one moment gets that this
Jesus is the Messiah – the one who will save them from empire. The next moment this is the Peter that
rebukes Jesus for telling his followers that empire and those in power will
attempt to put Love to death – death on the cross. Peter responds to Jesus’ truth telling the
same way many of us would respond. No
Lord, that must never happen to you.
Peter, like us, wants God to operate out of a place of strength. Peter likely expected at the end of Jesus
time healing and calling people to this radical notion that God wants nothing
more than for us to Love God and to Love all of God’s creation, that at that
time Jesus would call the avenging Angel army to put down the empire and
install Jesus as the King over creation.
That God would operate out of the position of power and strength to
forcefully bring God’s kingdom to fruition.
And that is not at all what Jesus is telling the disciples. Jesus instead is telling them that God will
triumph out of a place of perceived vulnerability and weakness. And Peter does not like that and frankly most
of us don’t either. We want a muscular
God. We want an avenging God. We laud the powerful and we put down those we
perceive as weak.
Just look at our international celebration of athletics, the
Olympics. We celebrate those who get
Gold medals and put down the losers. It
gets so bad that one of the women on the Canadian Hockey team immediately took
off her silver medal because Gold was the only medal that she was worthy to
accept. I am not putting down the
Olympics in the slightest. I love
watching some of the competitions – I am especially fond of the figure skating
events over some other activities that seem to me are a little like watching
paint dry! But the Olympics are not all
about strength. They are about
determination to succeed when the odds for success are low. They are about many wonderful stories of real
people taking on huge risks to make it to a world stage where they might,
against pretty tall odds, they might be crowned the winner in their sport. And that crown may only last a few years
before the next person comes along that can do more spins, more jumps, more
dance, and they take the new crown.
So what is Jesus asking us to do when he says we need to take up
our cross and follow him if it doesn’t mean to suck up our infirmities and get
on with life? What if it doesn’t mean
that cancer is a test to see if we are worthy of getting to heaven? What if Jesus is turning this muscular God
idol upside down and telling us that we need to share our vulnerabilities in
order to join and holdup those who are also going through hard times? What if Jesus is trying to model to us that
our real humanity comes not from always projecting a façade of strength and determination but of
sharing our own vulnerabilities so that we can accompany our fellow travelers
through their travails?
David Lose, a preacher I follow said of this passage, “I think
the call of this week’s passage,
particularly amid the brutality and violence that seem to permeate the world,
is to be willing to embrace the pain of others – rather than explain it, simply
seek to comfort it, fit it into some larger plan, or even merely decry it – trusting
that God is in the midst of our brokenness, working for and calling us to life.”(http://www.davidlose.net/2018/02/lent-2-b-take-up-your-cross/)
A call to embrace the pain of others. Isn’t that what we see Jesus doing over and
over again in the Gospels? Jesus
embraces the pain of the paralytic and the paralytic is healed. Jesus embraces the pain of the outcast and
sits down with them for table fellowship – and heals the person that has been
told by the religious authorities and the secular authorities that they are
unclean and unworthy. Jesus does not
tell the sick or the outcast that their particular “illness” is their cross and
that if they bear it for a bit longer then they will be accepted. No God embraces humanity and wants nothing
more for us than to Love God and Love our fellow humans and to be Good stewards
of this Good creation that we inhabit.
David Lose continues to say “I have been struck over my years of
ministry that perhaps the one thing that unifies us most fully is that each of
us has experienced brokenness: it may be the abandonment of a parent, the betrayal
of a loved one, the loss of a child, the death of a dream, the oppression of
those who hold power over us, or any number of other things. Yet this fact
remains: to live is to struggle, to hurt, and to experience loss and
brokenness.” It is not our strength that
unifies us much of the time but it is our shared vulnerability. We hold our vulnerabilities and hurts close
to our hearts and frequently only share out of a position of trust and love.
We will never be able to help bring God’s dream of love to
fruition if we insist on ministering to people by showing them how strong we
are. We will never solve violence by “hardening”
our schools and other institutions. We
will only bring God’s dream of Love to fruition by being willing to minister
from that place of vulnerability.
Perhaps, just perhaps, then we will be able to show people that their
vulnerabilities are not their personal crosses that they must endure. Disease, homelessness, hunger, and mental
illness are not tests of a vengeful God that we are called to forcibly
fix.
That is why some of the most powerful ministries that I have been
involved with are not about fixing people but are about being with people,
accompanying them. When I spent 9 months
as a hospice chaplain it was not about fixing people but it was about being
with people on their journey. Being a
Stephen minister was not about fixing people’s problems but is about being with
them and opening our hearts to them to accompany them on their journey – and
that does provide healing. It may not be
the miraculous healing of Jesus where the paralytic takes up his cot and walks
for the first time in many years at a single command. But it does provide healing – especially when
we are able to join those we minster with in that place of vulnerability.
In our Gospel lesson Peter was not understanding what Jesus was
telling his followers. Peter could only
hear the part about death and that did not square with his notion of a
Messiah. Peter was, more than likely,
not hearing the part about Jesus rising in three days to prove once and for all
that the love of God cannot be killed.
Unlike Peter in this story we know the ending. We know that although we tried to kill the
Love that came down on Christmas that love refused to die. That is the promise of Easter.
This lent we are invited to find ways that will allow us to join
others in their humanity, in their vulnerabilities, so that we too can offer
healing. So that we too may point to the
Love that refuses to die. The love that
loves us not only in our strengths but also, and perhaps for us more
importantly, love us in our vulnerabilities and weaknesses.
Amen
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