March 19, 2000
2nd Sunday of Lent
Year B
Theme: Discipleship requires the giving of our lives so that we can save
our lives.
You know, during the season of Lent, we are constantly, constantly,
reminded of what it means to be a disciple of this Jesus of Nazareth—the
Lectionary, which is the 3 year cycle of Biblical passages that we follow
as a church, keeps pointing out what it means to follow this Christ. I
keep hoping that passages like the one we have before us today won’t
keep showing up, but they do, despite, for me, the real difficulty of
preaching on topics like choosing suffering instead of safety. Let me say
that again—and I hope that it raises the hairs on the back of your neck
like it does me—that we are asked here, in this passage, to choose
suffering instead of safety. Jesus says here in Mark 8 these words, “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.” Let me make this clear…Christ is asking us here, in
this powerful moment in the Gospel of Mark, to choose suffering—and
anyone in the first century would have known what that meant—to
choose the cross is like us choosing the electric chair in this century—it
would be like pulling the switch to start the current flowing into your own
electric chair. Folks in the first century knew what he was saying—
choose suffering. It sounds almost sadistic, doesn’t it? Choose
suffering, perhaps even death, over safety…lose everything for me, lose
everything for me, Jesus seems to be asking his disciples. How can
Christ ask this of us, its like saying to us, “Jump in front of an upcoming
bus!” But the reality is that moments like these in the Gospel stories
remind us our lives are not meant to be about safety, that our lives are
not even meant to be quests for happiness. Moments like these, when
Jesus tells his disciples that they must exchange what they thought they
wanted, for something they knew they didn’t want—moments like these
remind us that life is about exchanging safety, maybe even happiness,
so that, oddly enough, we can find the life we thought we were losing
when we picked up our cross. Jesus is asking us to give up our lives so
that we can be given those lives back again. Find your life by giving it
away, choose the cross and find peace, exchange your safety for
suffering—and, oddly enough, you’ll find the safety you never thought
possible. A mystery wrapped in an enigma, as the old saying goes.
And you know, enigmas and mysteries are fine, but what kind of God ask
us to give up safety, even give up happiness, for the sake of cross? Why
would God ask us to do such a hard thing, to choose suffering rather
than safety? Why does it take the cross, why does it take suffering to
gain our lives back? And I know I’ve been saying this a lot lately—it
seems to be my favorite thing to say during the Lenten season—I have
absolutely no idea why that is true. I don’t know why we find our lives in
the midst of our suffering, in the midst of suffering that seems to be
ripping our lives apart. Somehow it happens that way.
The only thing I can figure is what Jesus hints at in the first part of this
passage—where he is arguing with Peter about the suffering that Jesus
must experience in the coming days ahead. In this odd moment
everything seems to get turned upside down. Jesus rebukes Peter for
saying that Jesus as the Messiah CANNOT suffer, that it isn’t in the plan,
and that Jesus has got the whole thing wrong. In rebuking Peter, Jesus
says these really remarkable words: “For you are setting your mind not
on divine things but on human things.” Now, listen to the assumptions
going on here. Peter is assuming that to be a Messiah is to be a person
full of power, to be a Messiah means you have the power to never suffer,
that you have the all the power on heaven and earth and hence, you
never have to suffer like humans.
For Peter, to be human is to suffer—which is not in the plans for
someone like the Messiah, who comes from the divine. But Christ turns
that all upside down—he actually tells Peter that his assumptions are all
wrong—what he thinks of as divine things are actually human things and
what he thinks of as human things are divine things. For Christ, the
desire for power over others, the desire for safety, is a human thing, a
sinful human desire, whereas to choose to suffer is a divine thing, to
choose the cross is a divine thing. Surely it makes more sense for a
Messiah to be aloof, to be like a Ruler, a King or Queen, in a beautiful
palace, away from the suffering of all those who simply don’t have as
much. A ruler, a Messiah shouldn’t have to suffer, is what Peter is
assuming here. No, Jesus says, no—to be a Messiah, to be God given
flesh and blood, is not to be aloof and far away from suffering—for
Jesus, to be the Messiah is to be involved with the real world, to be
involved in the joy and pain of the real world, to involve yourself in the
muck and beauty of this world. Jesus thinks the desire to get power, to
get material stuff, to find safety so that you will never have to suffer ever
again is the sinful desire to remove ourselves from the world that God
has created, to remove ourselves from involvement in the world, so that
we will never have to hear the cries of the poor and suffering from our
high, safe palace windows. Instead, Jesus chooses the divine way—and
he asks Peter to choose the divine way—which is involvement, intimate
involvement with the world, intimate involvement with each other, intimate
involvement with the poor and the outcast, intimate involvement with all
of God’s creation, even when it causes us suffering. You know why we
are asked to be involved with the world, why we are asked to pick up our
cross instead of choosing the safety of being bystander? Do you know
why? It’s because God has chosen the cross, it is because God has
chosen NOT to be a bystander to what She has created. When we
choose to exit out of our palaces of safety, when we choose to exit out of
our palaces of privilege and safety, we really do choose to act as God
acts in this world—we choose to be intimately involved with the world, a
world that is a wondrous mixture of joy and pain, a world where our
happiness is often tinged with sorrow,
a world where love is beautiful and complex and ambiguous—it is a world
that God is intimately involved with, it is world that God is incredibly
immersed in, it is a world that Christ calls us to when he asks us to pick
up our cross. And you know what? It is our involvement with the world,
with all of its beauty and pain, that we find our lives, that we find the
reason why we were created. By picking up our cross, by choosing to do
what God what does in this world, by choosing to immerse and be
involved in creation by loving and crying rather than by remaining aloof,
by seeking justice rather than being silent, by staying with our pain and
suffering and that of our friends until resurrection comes rather running
away from it all—it is in that choice that we find ourselves, we gain the
world, we gain the peace that comes from attending to the wonder of this
world. We simply find our lives. We are, I think, called during the
season of Lent, more than any time in the Christian calendar, to choose
to throw our lot in with creation, and to trust that our salvation is not
found in safety, but in picking up our cross, and finding ourselves being
transformed by that experience. Why should we do it? Because we are
in relationship with a God whose does the same thing—a God who
chooses involvement over safety, an involvement that sometimes means
suffering. So, here we are, during the season of Lent—we are called to
pick up our fear and pain, our suffering—we are picked up our own
cross, just as Christ picked up his cross, and we are called to go with
that cross, trusting that what we will find at the end of the journey is our
resurrection, that what we will find is what we have always been
searching for, our very lives. Amen and amen.
