LENT 2, 03/08/2009

Sermon on Mark 8:31-38, by David Hoster

Then 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." [NRSV]

As Christians, we have a very clear picture in our heads of what taking up our cross means, and we have a clear idea of the very positive things achieved through crucifixion. When we hear Jesus tell us to take up our own cross, our minds go to images of Jesus dragging his cross through Jerusalem, Jesus framed in a noble tableaux by the other two crosses with his mother and her friends at his feet, Jesus redeeming the world in an act of profound meaning and importance. Because we have such a clear and noble picture of crucifixion, it's likely that we will think of "taking up our cross" as a sacrificial but noble act well within the range of possibility for us.

But did Peter and James and John and the others see the same thing you and I see? If you had mentioned crucifixion to them they would have pictured fields with hundreds of corpses tied to crude stakes, flying insects and carrion birds everywhere, the stench unbearable, the deepest human instinct to flee and get as far away as possible. I doubt they were able to see a noble reason for taking up a cross. I really get it when Peter waved his arms in the air and shouted, "Anything but crucifixion!"

Jesus certainly wasn't on the same page as his closest followers. Suppose he had told them, "OK, guys, complete this sentence: ‘If you want to be my follower, you must...'"

What do you think they would have said?

One of them, not necessarily the swiftest, might have said, "...do a good job!" That's what they did every day on the mission. Publicists, advance men, roadies, arranging for the team's food and lodging. And, of course, master the talking points so they could close the deal after Jesus made his pitch.

We understand about doing a good job as a way of following Jesus. It's what we do to keep the church doors open. It's the response of the disciplined mind.

But another of the disciples might have said, "...learn the rules and keep them!" Don't just talk the talk...walk the walk. More than doing a good job-it's being personally faithful and obedient to the higher vision. Yes, they understood that Jesus was challenging the old laws and rules aof the priests and scribes and Pharisees, but surely that only meant that there would be new rules to follow.

We understand this approach perfectly, as well. The church is the past master of inventing rules for people to obey. It's the response of the disciplined will.

Finally, one of the others might have shouted out, "...be enthusiastic!" In other words, do and say all of those other things, but with verve, gusto and joy. Talk the talk, walk the walk, but make it convincing with the energy of passion.

We understand this approach in church life too. Even we Episcopalians, who can rightly be accused of being a little stiff, have caught on to the need for enthusiasm. It's the response of the open heart.

Mind, will, heart...the disciples have totaled up all the things that make them confident that they're followers of Jesus. So, too, we churchgoers. With the disciples, we smile expectantly at Jesus waiting for an approving nod and a pat on the back. It comes, instead, as a slap in the face, a dash of cold water, a shock, when Jesus says, "No. If you want to be my follower, take up your cross and follow me."

In a stunned silence you can hear a fly buzzing and the occasional pin drop. Jesus has just asked you to see, touch, sample the texture of the thing that will take your life. He induces visceral terror. In a flash, you stare into sheer nothingness. It makes you want to turn away.

Of course you want to turn away. When Jesus asks us to take up the cross, he asks us to do something we're not prepared to do. Literally. Physically. Materially. We are not trained for it, have no experience of it, cannot even imagine it.

Jesus is asking us to take hold of the world without us in it.

So we turn away. We turn away by making the cross look like a sacrificial struggle, a noble tableau, an act filled with transcendental meaning and importance. Those things make the cross something, but the cross is nothing.

We cannot grasp nothing. We can only imagine our death as another event within our lives, like Tom Sawyer, in his hiding place, gleefully watching everybody's response after they think he's drowned. Even if we're not there, we're there.

But, as Wittgenstein said, death is not an event within life. Death is the boundary of life. When we pass that boundary, we're not here any more, and that's unimaginable for us.

We have never known the world apart from our presence in it and we're materially unable to entertain a mental image of the world without us in it. We are the sum total of everything that comes to us through our senses within life. We are the totality of our present world, and we cannot take our minds into a future with something in it we have never known.

Nor, if you stop and think about it, do we have any better idea of the world before we were alive. Julius Caesar, Henry VIII, Thomas Jefferson, even Jesus Christ are names and descriptions in books, words from speakers, pictures still or moving, mental images of people we've never known who nevertheless, in the theater of our minds, look and act like people we've actually known. When we say that we know these people existed, we only believe that because of things in our world that have given us, at best, second, third or fourth hand experience of them.

In other words, the only thing I've known in all my life is that I am everything I can know or ever will know.

Now that's an idea that you just might think the Son of God would challenge, wouldn't you? Challenging that world of self-as-everything will take a little more than the disciples' easy responses of mind and will and heart. Acts of mind and will and heart reinforce the self that authors them, so Jesus must push us to lose that self because the world of self-as-everything shoves aside the one who truly is everything: God.

When Jesus says that we must take up our cross, he is offering us the one way we have of getting beyond ourselves and melding into the larger everything that really is everything. He is not describing life after death (which, in our imagination, is only an odd, denatured continued existence for ourselves with familiar props like harps and clouds). Rather life outside of death, life beyond life. Not mind, heart or will, but the existence of our souls with and in God.

So death stands between us and God. Well, not really death itself. Our failure to come to terms with death stands between us and God.

So Jesus asks us to come to terms with death. To take up the cross, to see, touch, sample the texture of the thing that will end your entire world. Jesus asks us to cease creating our own world and submit ourselves and the entire world of our experience to that greater power which will end it. Jesus asks us to do that voluntarily, knowingly, intentionally. Jesus asks us to take up the cross.

Because here's the thing that Jesus doesn't say, but only implies. You're going to be on one side of that cross or the other. You can be on the side of the cross that ends your world and takes you fully to the real God you've only known in tiny drips and drabs through words in an ancient text, the unexpected twinkle in an eye, a sunrise that caught you just right. Or you can be on the same side of the cross as all those heavy hitters in Jerusalem who preserved the world of themselves-as-everything by nailing God to it.

Either you're on the cross or God is. Take your choice.

Either my inability to picture the world without me in it means that I trust only my own consciousness as my world's creator, making me unable and unwilling to let God be God. Or I submit my world to the reality of its non-existence and open myself to the timeless creator of my self and everything that exists beyond my self.

It takes more courage than I have experienced in my existence to do that.

It takes the reality of Jesus, the reality of Jesus on the cross. It takes facing fully, frankly, honestly that it will be either Jesus or me on the cross.

Lent is about making peace with your death. That's why we smear ashes front and center on your brain on Ash Wednesday. That's why we give things up for Lent in a symbolic and very partial enactment of the ultimate act of giving up our lives. That's why we contemplate the sins of ours that nail Jesus to the cross instead of us.

We do those things so that, when the time comes, we just might be able to take up our cross and follow Jesus to Calvary and there surrender ourselves into a larger world than the one we can ever know on our own. We trust ourselves to the God who created the whole and real world. And we find life beyond life with Jesus on Easter.

I wish I had more advice for you about the road map for taking up your cross, but I've never been there. None of us has ever been there, and nobody can describe it for you, make it an event within your life, and take away the edge of terror.

All I can tell you, in all faith, is that Jesus comes from beyond your world. When you get past the many figments of your imagination that you have made of Jesus, you will get on the same side of the cross where he is.

The other side.

The right side of the cross.

The good side of death.

Rev., Rector David Hoster
St. George's Episcopal Church
Austin, Texas, USA

E-Mail: david.w.hoster@gmail.com

(top)