2018-02-26
Brooke Strong
Scripture: Mark 8:31-38
Maybe, just maybe, we’ll decide today that we don’t want to follow Jesus. Or that we can’t. Maybe it’s just too difficult. Maybe it’s just too demanding. I confess that what we hear in today’s passage from Mark’s gospel makes me want to run for the hills. This is not a day I particularly enjoy being a preacher. Sometimes this whole faith thing just seems too hard.
I find myself today wanting to help Jesus out a little. “Jesus,” I think, “you really could have been a lot more effective when you started teaching your disciples how to follow you. You could have offered prizes to people who did the faith right. You could maybe have told them how happy it was going to make them. Some cheery songs, some confident reassurance, a stirring affirmation of everyone. I don’t really know anything about marketing, but it’s pretty clear that you could have done a lot better job selling your product.”
“Why,” I want to ask Jesus, “why are you so hard on Peter? He’s your most loyal side-kick. He responds right away when you invite him to follow you. He stays with you for your whole ministry. He’s your MVP, your rock—in fact, you named him that yourself. Why don’t you reward him? Why don’t you praise him for all the good stuff?
“Instead, when you start telling Peter how to follow you, you’re hard as nails on him. I mean, when you ask who he thinks you are, he answers right! He tells you you’re the Messiah. Can’t you let him know he nailed it? Can’t you praise his perceptiveness and smarts?
“But no! Instead, you get into this spitting match with Peter. You tell him he doesn’t get it. You totally rain on his parade. You’re like the biggest Debbie-downer ever! Why tell him you’re going to suffer? Why go into this mopey monologue about how everything’s going to fall apart, and you’re going to be arrested and go to trial and be found guilty and then killed? If you think that makes you appealing, you are totally out to lunch. I could find tons of preachers who would do a much better job of lifting us up, of giving us hope, of making us want to follow you. What a sorry excuse for a messiah you appear to be!
“So Peter lets you know it. Of course he’s ticked. This isn’t what he signed on for. This isn’t the lifestyle he was looking for. I can see him grabbing you by the arm and pulling you off to the side. I can hear him saying, ‘Come on, Jesus, this is ridiculous! What put you in such a bad mood? Why are you being such a pill? Smarten up. Get with the program. Tell us something we want to hear.’”
And what about for us? Is this teaching of Jesus really what any of us wants to hear? Is it energizing and enlightening? Is it an effective motivational speech? Hardly. Here we are on this Lenten journey together, and, if you’re like me, you want some inspiration. We want to be told that this will be fun. Or at least rewarding. We want to know that we’re going to get something out of it. And all we’re told is that we’re not supposed to pursue or hold onto anything we really want. “You’re not in the driver’s seat,” Jesus tells us; “I am. Don’t run from suffering; embrace it. . . Self-help is no help at all. Self-sacrifice is the way, my way, to saving yourself, your true self” (Mark 8:34-35, The Message).
And much to my chagrin, I’m the preacher this morning. I’m the one charged with laying this out there for us. I want to say, “Hey Mark, your turn!” I can see why Susi went on sabbatical. She probably didn’t want to deal with this any more than I do.
So I’ll do my best with this bracing insistence that suffering is good and that self-denial is where it’s at. But when I think of sacrifice, this is where I have to start. When I was a parent of two young boys, there were days I thought I couldn’t go on. Yes, I knew they were a huge blessing. But I was also drained by their constantly repeated “No,” by their refusing food that was healthy, by all the ways they disrupted the life Mary and I had. I vividly remember being awakened yet again one night by a wailing infant, and putting my pillow over my face and screaming into the pillow, “I can’t do this anymore!” I had had it. I wanted peace. I wanted my life back. Sacrifice? No, but thanks anyway.
And sometime in there, in the midst of those sleepless nights and demanding babies—sometime in there it began to dawn on me that I was not the first person to deal with all this, and that, in particular, my own parents had certainly been tested in the same way. I was once that crying infant who didn’t give my parents the rest they craved. I was once the baby in the bathtub splashing water all over my mother. I was once the recalcitrant two-year-old who savored the word “No.” Sometime in the course of my own parenting, I realized that I, too, had tested all the limits, and that someone—my mother and father—had loved me through it all.
I remember my mother saying once that having children teaches you not to be selfish. When a baby is crying in the night, you have to put aside your own needs to tend to this helpless infant whose very existence depends on you. That baby isn’t feeding herself. He’s not changing his own diapers. Without me or someone to hold and to smile at that child, that baby is going to struggle mightily in life. I am that baby’s lifeline, just as my parents were my lifeline. I would not be who I am without my own parents sacrificing themselves for me.
So, much as I might like an easy, pain-free, undemanding existence, I have spent a good part of my life slowly realizing that so much of the richness of life is dependent on our willingness to stick it out through the desperate times, the times of greatest challenge. I remember countless happy childhood times, of course. I remember playing tennis with my mother and racing on the beach with my father. I remember concerts and fun vacations and soothing bedtime stories. Those are a rich part of my childhood. But those times are memorable, in large part, because those same fun parents stayed with me when the times got tough. They took me to the hospital when my neck hurt so much I thought I would scream. They listened to me when I struggled through my identity crisis. They bore with me during all the struggles of my life. Or to put it in terms of the gospel, they sacrificed themselves for me, they gave themselves to me at the hardest times of my life.
And when I remember that, I begin to get a glimpse of what Jesus is talking about. Now I come to see: it’s when we give up a part of ourselves for others that life is at its richest. In our clearer moments, we can see that that’s the way others have been with us. And what Jesus is saying to us is: look at the way you have been graced by others who gave up something for you. Now go and do the same. Because that’s life at its best.
The great theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer once wrote that, when Jesus calls people, “he bids [them] come and die.” Come and die: on the surface, it’s not all that appealing a call. But what Jesus invites us to is a way of life in which we, not hate ourselves, but in which we stop focusing so much on ourselves, and in which we see ourselves as part of a larger whole. The world doesn’t work if I’m the only one who thrives, or if it’s only people like me who flourish. It’s as we all blossom together that the grace of God abounds. Or as Martin Luther King, Jr. so eloquently put it: we are tied in “an inescapable network of mutuality” (“Letter from Birmingham Jail”).
Just look at some of the most pressing social issues of our time. The #MeToo movement that began last fall was a recognition that countless women, as well as a number of men, have been victimized by sexual violence and assault. Too many men with power have been acting as though they’re the only ones who matter. Numerous courageous people have come forward to say, “This won’t do.” Self-seeking power and lust? They need to be left in the dust. Life is not about the ego-centered perceived needs of the perpetrators. All lives are to be treasured. When Jesus bids us come and die, it means that no one is to be sexually exploited and abused for the sake of another’s twisted satisfaction.
In this Black, or African-American, History Month of February, we remember the egregious sins of a nation that has prospered for far too long on the backs of slavery, and, even to this day, a grotesque, systemic inequality. People of color have far too often been exploited for the selfish gain of others. We whites have profited from limiting the educational and vocational opportunities of people of color. We are only beginning, in this society, to explore the privilege and benefits that have come to some of us without our even being aware of them. When Jesus bids us come and die, we are bid to let such unjust economic inequalities go. We are bid to value all lives equally.
My guess is that all cultures have to fight a variety of battles to counter what appears to be an innate tendency for us to value ourselves more highly than we value others. We so often blithely go about our lives pursuing our own self-interest. And then #MeToo happens or Rosa Parks happens or the Stonewall riots happen. Or, a week and a half ago, Parkland, Florida happens, and suddenly it’s as though a tipping point is reached. Traumatized, grief-stricken, angry students make it clear that whatever we’re doing regarding guns, it’s not working. No one knows exactly what to do to solve the problem, of course, but some ideas do have notable traction.
In December, during the season of Advent, I cited the thinking of Nicolas Kristof in this matter of gun violence. At the risk of repeating myself, I think many of his ideas are non-ideological, thoughtful, wise suggestions. Kristof prods us to think of gun safety as a matter, first of all, of public health. If we were to treat guns the way we treat automobiles, says Kristof, we wouldn’t ban guns, but we would “work hard to regulate them—and limit access to them—so as to reduce the death toll they cause.” Rather than focus on “gun control,” he suggests that we focus on “gun safety” or “reducing gun violence.” Using auto safety as a model, Kristof urges “constant efforts to make the products safer and to limit access by people who are most likely to misuse them.”
Kristof urges several policy changes, among them universal background checks, since 22 percent of guns are obtained without one; protection orders, so that people with a history of domestic violence can’t have them; banning people under 21 from having guns; storing guns safely, under lock and key; and banning bump stocks which mimic automatic weapon fire. He even suggests the possibility of making “smart guns,” which will fire only after a fingerprint or PIN is entered, so that if your gun is stolen, no one else can use it.
“Look,” says Kristof, “we all agree on some kinds of curbs on guns. Nobody believes that people should be able to drive a tank down Main Street, or have an anti-aircraft gun in the back yard. . . . So the question isn’t whether we will restrict firearms, but where to draw the line and precisely which ones to restrict” (The Plain Dealer, Nov. 12, 2017, p. E5). As I said in my sermon in December, “the living Christ calls us to . . . an unrelenting care for life and creation” (see sermon of Dec. 10, 2017). Living with such care as our byword is a form of sacrifice. It asks us to give up some other things we may value. When Jesus bids us come and die, we are bid to travel roads to a less violent, more peaceful society.
No matter how we look at it, when Jesus bids us come and die, following the living Christ mandates a raft of cultural changes. There are also personal behaviors that make for the sacrificial landscape Jesus imagines and calls into being. The parent who stays up most of the night with a sick child is one who has, in a sense, to use Bonhoeffer’s metaphor, died for the sake of healing. The spouse who stays with and cares for a partner during decline from physical illness or dementia is one who has died for the sake of covenant commitment. The Federated women and men who share their gifts at St. Paul’s Church or by knitting blankets for people who are sick or by visiting people who can no longer get out of their homes—these people have, in a sense, died to their own self-interest in order to brighten the lives of so many others. The neighbors who, even in the throes of exhaustion and frenetically busy lives, take a meal to a couple with a new baby, as so many friends have done for our son and daughter-in-law—they too have, in those moments, died to self-interest in order to make someone else’s life easier.
I didn’t want to preach on this passage today. It just seemed too hard. But now I see it differently. In dying to ourselves and sharing with others who may be in need, we are doing the work of Christ. We are shining a beacon of love where it needs to be shined. We are building the grace-filled house of God. And in the process, we are also beautifying the gardens of our own lives. What a reminder on this day when we commission Federated’s lay leaders! May we die to our own narrow self-interest, and go and give, and know in that generous giving the sublime love of God.