Picking Up Your Cross

 

Mark 8:31-38     Lent 2

 

“Deny yourselves!  Take up your cross!”  we hear Jesus say.  Oh, my.  Maybe someone copied that down wrong?  The problem with that hope is that Matthew, Mark, and Luke all share this story.  “If any want to become my followers,” Jesus tells us, “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.”  Pick up my cross?  Life is hard enough!  I’d much rather hear, “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28).  But this is what our Revised Common Lectionary, the set of readings that guides our worship, gives us for today.

This morning’s reading from Mark is a curious one, and you have to feel for the disciples. Our Gospel begins with Jesus predicting his own suffering and death.  Of course, the disciples were afraid, and fear almost always clouds our thinking. Peter had just confessed Jesus as Messiah, and now Jesus explains just what that entails. Jesus taught his disciples that he would suffer greatly, and that he would be rejected by those whom the religious community held in high esteem.  He told them that he would be killed.  By now, the disciples’ minds must have been reeling.  When Jesus said that he would rise after three days, what was that supposed to mean? All this news was shocking.  It was so devastating that Peter said “No! This can’t happen to you! There must be another way!”  Peter’s reaction resulted in Jesus calling him “Satan.” Then, calling the crowd to come and listen to him, too, Jesus said, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”’

Let me make this perfectly clear.  Jesus is not condoning abuse.  This text has been used to justify inflicting injury on partners or family members, and to keep them subservient and submissive.  God has created us to flourish, and Jesus came in human flesh to confirm that.  Jesus said, I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly (John 10:10). God desires all our relationships to be ones in which we lift each other up, not tear each other apart.

What do you think of when you hear, “Deny yourselves”?  Do you think about giving up chocolate for Lent?   Maybe denying yourself means that life should be hard, and we should not have any pleasure.  Or maybe denying yourself means to deny those parts of ourselves that we don’t like.  Deny your fears.  Pretend you can handle anything that comes your way without help. Or maybe, as our culture teaches us, denying yourself means that you must be someone else, someone you are not.  You should be thinner than you are, and appear younger than your years total.  Maybe denying yourself causes you to think about all those things that you should do to be different than you are.  “I should do more than I do.  I should not make mistakes.  I should write better sermons.”  What are your “I shoulds”?    Put all those “shoulds” that you tell yourself together and you come up with a person who is not you.  Deny yourself.

Jesus did not pretend to be other than who he was.  In fact, if we follow Jesus, we become who God created us to be.  If we follow Jesus, we realize that denying ourselves means that we open ourselves to the needs of others.  We give ourselves away in love.  To deny ourselves means that we are not the center of our universe.  There are times to put others first.  If you have ever been in a healthy relationship, you understand that love expresses itself both in generous giving and in receiving.  Our experience is that the more we give of ourselves, the more we receive.  When our St. Stephen community looks out for each other, we find joy and happiness.

This is how Jesus lived.  He loved people even when they misunderstood who he was, and what he said.  Jesus even loved those who did not follow him.  “Take up your cross” means that our love is a generous love, not one that is destructive or self-serving.  It’s a love that seeks the good of the other, and not glory for oneself.  “Those who want to save their life will lose it,” Jesus said, “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?” (Mark 8:35-36).  This life of which Jesus speaks is one of an abundance of love and of forgiveness.

The deep secret of Jesus’ hard words to us, Barbara Brown Taylor writes,

…is that our fear of suffering and death robs us of life because fear of death always turns into fear of life, into a stingy, cautious way of living that is not really living at all.  The deep secret of Jesus hard words is that the way to have abundant life is not to save it but to spend it, to give it away, because life cannot be shut up and saved any more that a bird can be put into a shoebox and stored on a closet shelf….[Jesus’ words are] not an invitation to follow Jesus into death but an invitation to follow him into life, both now and later on.  To be where God is—to follow Jesus—means receiving our lives as gifts instead of guarding them as our own possessions.  It means sharing the life we have been given instead of bottling it for our own consumption.[1]

St. Francis captured the essence of this in his prayer:

Let me not seek as much
to be consoled as to console,
to be understood as to understand,
to be loved as to love,
for it is in giving that one receives,
it is in self-forgetting that one finds,
it is in pardoning that one is pardoned,
it is in dying that one is raised to eternal life.

 

In the name of Christ, let it be so.

 

~Pastor Cheryl Ann Griffin

 

[1] Taylor, Barbara Brown.  The Seeds of Heaven.  Louisville:  Westminster John Knox Press, 2004. 79-81.

I Love You. You’re Going to Die.

Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21    

Ash Wednesday

 

It’s been 73 years since Ash Wednesday fell on Valentine’s Day. Valentine’s Day is a lot more fun when it falls on Mardi Gras, which is always the day before Ash Wednesday.  But today is Valentine’s Day, and Ash Wednesday. Chocolates and champagne, or ashes on your forehead?  Do you want to hear “I love you,” or hear “you’re going to die.”?  As my husband likes to say, when given a choice, take both.  We might as well, for this is what God gives us this year, “I love you; you’re going to die.”

Most of us don’t like to be reminded that we are going to die.  But I know that there are at least 84 people who do.  That’s the number of people who have downloaded the app, “WeCroak.”[1] (You just can’t make this stuff up, or at least I can’t.) At unpredictable times, just like death, you are sent notices that read, “Don’t forget.  You’re going to die,” or “The grave has no sunny corners.” These are the less graphic of the notices.  According to the app developers, the program is meant to encourage contemplation, and meditation.  It is supposed to promote calm. (This explains why only 84 people downloaded it!)  The concept for it was inspired by a folk saying that in order to be happy, one must contemplate death five times a day.  What better way than to have your phone remind you?

The ashes imposed on our foreheads tonight will remind us that we are going to die.  Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.  It’s a reminder that God made us out of perishable stuff.  One of the creation stories in the book of Genesis tells us, Then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostril the breath of life; and the man became a living being (Genesis 2:7).  That God made us is what gives us holiness.  It’s the perishable stuff, our bodies, that get us in to trouble. We are both saint and sinner, and while we have difficulty holding these two things together, God does not. Tonight, God says to us, “I love you.”  Tonight, God reminds us, “You’re going to die.”

God shows God’s love for us in and through his son, Jesus, who lived among us proclaiming that love through teaching, and healing and forgiveness. We killed him for it.  These forty days of Lent that begin tonight will lead us to Jesus’ death on a cross before we get to the glory of Christ’s resurrection.  Tonight, we will be marked with the cross of Christ in the form of ashes.  Just as we do not want to be reminded of our death, we do not want to face our sin.  It’s hard and uncomfortable to examine all the ways we fall short.  Tonight, we come head on with both.

I think it is the honesty of Ash Wednesday that makes it my favorite liturgical day.  These forty days of Lent begin with our confessing to God, to each other, and to the whole company of heaven that we have sinned by our own most grievous fault. While God loves us with God’s whole heart, we confess that we have not loved God with ours.  We have given our hearts to things that cannot love us back, like money, or social status, or pride.  Our values and our measures of success are not quite in line with God’s.

Even when we do things that God would have us do, such as give money to the poor, or pray, or fast, Matthew reminds us that we have a propensity to do so for the wrong reasons. That’s why Matthew tells us not to let the right hand know what the left hand is doing.   We look for praise and honor and love not from God, but from each other.  We are like children yelling, “Watch me!  Watch me!”  Our desire to be noticed is the result of sin. Jesus tells his disciple, “Do not be like the hypocrites.” The word “hypocrites” literally means “performers.”

This evening, we, with Christ, begin our journey to the cross, before we continue on to the resurrection.  Listen again to part of our Invitation to Lent:  We begin this holy season by acknowledging our need for repentance and for God’s mercy.  Do you hear the hope in our invitation?  We begin.  We start. Tonight is our chance to come clean, to die to our sin, and to begin again.  By admitting our sins, we become open to God’s working in us.  Being loved by God, and accepting God’s love, we are set free.  We are free from having to win, and from having to prove ourselves lovable.  We are free from needing the approval and admiration of others.  And if we are free from, we are free to.  We are free to focus on helping others.  We are free to love those who are not like us.  We are free to forgive.  We are free to become who God created us to be. We are free to dance without fear that someone will see us.

Tonight, we will receive ashes in the form of a cross, while hearing the words, “Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”  The marking of the ashen cross is placed on top of the cross made on our foreheads at our baptism.  Before we are reminded that we are going to die, we are marked with the cross of baptism, in which God claims us as his beloved. There is nothing that can change that, even our refusal to love God with our whole hearts.  As St. Paul tells us in his letter to the Romans, neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord (Romans 8:38-39).  On this Valentine’s Ash Wednesday, God reminds us, I love you, and even your sin won’t change that.  You’re going to die. But even death won’t tear you out of my arms.

~ Pastor Cheryl Ann Griffin

[1] Bosker, Bianca.  “The App That Reminds You You’re Going to Die.”  Technology.  January/February 2018.  Accessed on the web.

Ups and Downs

Mark 9:2-9     Transfiguration

Do you remember the movie, “Bruce Almighty”?   God gave Bruce some god-like powers.  One of the ways he abused these powers was to lasso the moon, and drew it closer to the earth so that his girlfriend would stand in awe looking at it, and fall more deeply in love with him.  Even the oceans desire to come closer to the moon, drawing up to it in waves over and over again.  The fact is that the moon does at times come closer to the earth than at others.  When a full moon is at a point in its orbit at which it is nearest to the earth, it appears 14% larger and 30% brighter than it usually does.  This is called a “Supermoon,” and we were blessed this year to have had three of them. Did you see one of the trinity?  Were you captured by its glorious, bright fullness against the dark night sky?   The contrast of the light and the dark enable us to see the fullness of both.

Light figures prominently in our reading and our liturgy. Today is Transfiguration Sunday, the conclusion of Epiphany.  “Six days later,” we read, “Jesus took with him Peter and James and John, and led them up a high mountain apart, by themselves.”  Six days ago, Jesus had told his disciples that he would go through tremendous suffering, and that the elders, chief priests and scribes would reject him.  He told the people that he would be killed.  He said that he then would be raised in three days.  Not understanding, Peter rebuked Jesus.  “Get behind me, Satan,” Jesus responded to him.

Now, almost a week later, Jesus took Peter with him, and James and John, too.  The four of them trekked up the mountain.  When they reached the summit, Jesus’ appearance changed.  His clothes became dazzling white, even brighter than new improved Tide could make them.  Jesus was transfigured right in front of their eyes. The disciples saw this man, the one they thought they knew in a different light.  He suddenly was more.  Just as the moon reflects the light of the sun, Jesus reflected the light of God. What an odd contradiction that the brighter Jesus appeared, the less clearly the disciples saw him.  Seeing Jesus as both divine and human was confusing.

Then Moses and Elijah appeared.  With these heroes of the faith, representing the law and the prophets, we are connected to God’s story.  Moses and Elijah  were not dazzling in appearance as Jesus was.  God bless Peter, who in his characteristic exuberant misunderstanding, blurted out, “Let’s make three dwellings, one for Moses, one for Elijah, and one for you. Let’s stay here forever, right on top of this mountain.”   Maybe he thought that if they stayed on the mountain, Jesus would not have to suffer and die.  They could live with this view from the top, where life was full of light, forever.

Just then, a voice came from out of the cloud that overshadowed them.  “This is my Son, the beloved.  Listen to him.”  With these words we are brought back to Jesus’ baptism when we hear  a voice came from heaven, saying, “You are my Son, the Beloved,” just as Jesus was coming up out of the water.  In our story today, on top of the mountain, Moses and Elijah were not there after God spoke out of the cloud.  Only Jesus remained, but Jesus was all they needed.

They could not, as Peter had hoped, stay up there on the mountain. They had to come down.  Isn’t that true for us, too?  We have moments when we think we are on top of the world.  These times of happy dancing feet don’t last.  Peter, James, and John returned to the ups and downs of their everyday lives.  They came back to a place where people get sick, and hearts break.  They returned to where babies are born, and people die.  The good news is that Jesus came down with his disciples to the place that holds both elation and despair, moments of excruciating pain and deep happiness. The Jesus who was at the top of the mountain was also with them in the valley.

But even though we come back to our ordinary lives, we are different. We cannot be bathed in the light of Christ and stay the same.  The light of Christ illuminates the shadows and exposes the lies the world tells us, and the ones we tell ourselves.  These perpetuated untruths are things such as we are sufficient unto ourselves, and what happens to people we don’t know does not impact us.  These beliefs are part of what the Franciscan priest Richard Rohr terms “the False Self.”  He explains, “Your False Self is your necessary warm-up act, the ego part of you that establishes your separate identity…”[1]  Our False Self contains the qualities for which we strive to prove our worth, like being smart or rich or popular.  We end up using the same criteria to judge others worthiness.  Our False Self keeps us entering fully into a relationship with God.  Our True Selves recognize God’s presence not just with us, but with others.

When Jesus went back down the mountain, to walk with us in our sinfulness, he reminded his disciples that he would die, and be risen from the dead. Through the cross, Jesus chooses to show God’s love for us. In our baptisms, God joins us to Christ’s suffering, death and resurrection.  “Every time you choose to love,” Father Rohr writes, “you have also chosen to die.  Every time you truly love, you are letting go of yourself as an autonomous unit and have given a bit of yourself away to something else… ”[2]

As Jesus was transfigured through God’s light, we are transformed and called through Christ. We are called to love others as God loves us.  And, I know this is really hard for Lutherans, we are called to tell them that God loves them, that Christ died for them, and we are to speak the words out loud.

The moon is about 238,855 miles away, and yet we see its light shining on all the earth.  The light of Christ is closer.  Can you see it?  Christ is as close as the baptismal waters, and the wine and bread.  Christ is close enough to touch in the passing of the peace, and hear in the reading of the scripture.  How can we come this close and not be changed?

~Pastor Cheryl Ann Griffin

[1] Rohr, Richard.  The Immortal Diamond. San Francisco:  Jossey-Bass, 2013. 64. Our True Selves recognize God’s presence not just with us, but with others.

[2] Ibid., 65.