A Cross Full of Grace

Ephesians 2:1-10 (NRSV)
You were dead through the trespasses and sins in which you once lived, following the course of this world, following the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work among those who are disobedient. All of us once lived among them in the passions of our flesh, following the desires of flesh and senses, and we were by nature children of wrath, like everyone else.
But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ -- by grace you have been saved -- and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the ages to come he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.
For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God -- not the result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.

One of the prominent mid-century theologians of the 1900s, H. Richard Neibuhr, looked around at the kind of Christianity that was being preached in his day and he was not happy. What he saw was a Christian establishment that had emptied the teaching of Jesus and the cross of all of its power. The Church had no way to challenge the powers and principalities of the day because it preached a good news that overcame no obstacles and which did not require any real change in those who became Jesus’ followers. Niebuhr said that the Church was preaching something like this: “A God without wrath, led men without sin, into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.” Ouch.

Niebuhr must have felt something was missing and the things that were missing were wrath, sin, judgment and, most importantly, the cross. What’s left when you take all these things out? An easy form of grace – cheap grace, if you will. A grace which claims that nothing within us has to die and nothing is required to enable us to live. As the public radio humorist Garrison Keillor once said, with this sort of theology sin and evil and all the things that God rejects in us are reduced to a matter of miscommunication.

Not that these words we have lost as a church -- wrath, sin, judgment, and the cross – are easy words. Not at all. They are not the sorts of words we postmodern people like to hear. You can’t draw a crowd to hear about wrath and sin these. Well, maybe you can, but perhaps not for the right reasons. But to ignore them is to make a huge mistake and the passage we have from Ephesians this morning will not let us forget them. Just about all of them are there and the ones that aren’t are lurking in the background.

So here’s my point today. I’m not going to hold out and try to create some suspense. The whole sermon is right here: grace doesn’t mean that “it’s all good.” Grace means that something has to die so that we can truly live. And the cross is where we find that costly grace. If it is NOT true that something must die so that we can truly live then the cross is the most absurd and empty symbol we have. But if it IS true then the cross is the point on which all eternity turns. If it IS true then the cross is the place we must go to discover what it is that God would have us to do and who God would have us to be. If it IS true then this sermon series on the cross is not just Alex’s little project, it’s the key to the universe.

O.K., maybe I’ve set the expectations a little high for this sermon, but here goes. There is a story that is told of a man watching a butterfly struggling to emerge from a cocoon. He watched for quite a long time as the butterfly worked and worked to release itself through a small hole. Finally the man decided that he would help that butterfly and he got a pair of scissors and snipped away the side of the cocoon and the butterfly emerged. But it looked strange. Its body was swollen and its wings deformed. It should have flown after just a little while, but it never flew. It was forced to crawl about for the rest of its short life.

Why would this be? Because an essential part of the butterfly’s development is the struggle it must go through to emerge from the cocoon. If it is spared this struggle it never develops the strength and the form it needs to be the creature God intended it to be. In seeking to preserve the butterfly from pain, the man condemned it.

The lesson that is usually drawn from this little story is that God gives us problems so that we can learn and grow from them. These things make us stronger, the lesson goes. I think there’s another theological lesson here, though. We should not try to filter out the painful parts of the gospel in order to present a Christian message that is more pleasing to the sensibilities of the world around us. We will have to reinterpret them for each new generation, yes, but the cross is a mystery into which we must be led if we are to get at the heart of what God is doing with us and with the world. We’ve got to struggle with the cross if we are going to learn the truth about what’s really going on. If we’re going to fly, it’s going to take a confrontation with the cross on which our transformation was begun.

Now the writer of Ephesians knew that if was going to take something radical to help us see ourselves through God’s eyes. Paul knew that the power of the lies that hold us. He was not afraid to say that we are living in a world constructed by lies and deceit and death-dealing powers. We’re living in enemy-occupied territory, he says. That’s something C.S. Lewis has said in Mere Christianity, too – something we have been reading in the Wednesday night class. When we are in the grip of the powers of this age, Paul says, we are as good as dead. The powers of this age are seductive. They tempt us to follow our passions and desires away from God. Our passions and desires are not all bad, by the way. God created us with passions and desires. It’s just that we tend to forget where they are supposed to be directed, which is back to God, and we follow them down some pretty harmful dead ends. That’s why Paul condemns “the passions of the flesh” and “the desires of the flesh and the senses.” We follow them to our own destruction and we discover that we have become tangled in all sorts of things that our better selves knew were not good for us. This is where God’s wrath comes in. God says “no” to the evils of this world and yet, before we know it, we are “children of wrath,” according to Ephesians.

Now, I admit this is a pretty old-fashioned way of talking. We don’t talk about the passions of the flesh very often these days. Before you know it we’ll be talking about the dangers of licentiousness and the fleshpots of Egypt. This is not language that we hear very much anymore.

But just because we don’t hear it doesn’t mean that we don’t deal with it. We can’t go through a day without running into temptations that remind us of how our impulses and desires can go astray. Advertising preys on our desires by presenting us with images of sex and power and sophistication to entice us to define our lives by what we can buy and own. Restaurants and convenience stores offer us calories and saturated fat that can ruin a diet in the space of one meal. Our endless supply of media possibilities means that we can be endlessly distracted. We move from television to cell phone to computer to iPod, never having to interact with the people around us, never having to share a meal with the people we profess to love.

Then there is the favorite myth of the Eastern Shore – the myth that there is nothing to do here. And even if Wal-mart were to show up tomorrow it would not fix this one. We will always be tempted to believe that things are more interesting, more complex, more attractive someplace else. Going across the bay will not cure the problem of despair and that is the temptation that our illusions lead us to.

There are also those old favorites, too, on the hit parade of passions of the flesh. Lust, greed, adultery, sloth, lying, hardheartedness, tearing the tags off of mattresses despite the dire warnings – there are all kinds of ways we can get into trouble.

So there is some truth in that old language of Ephesians. Our desires can be perverted. We do find ourselves, despite our best efforts, enmeshed in the problems that we fault others for. We are children of wrath.

But Ephesians doesn’t end there. In fact, it talks about all of these problems in the past tense, which is a very strange thing since we are dealing with them in the here and now. “You were dead,” it says, “through the sins and trespasses in which you once lived.” But God was not content to leave us that way. It’s strange because it sounds like we’re walking in on a story that someone is narrating about our lives while we’re still living it. “Wait a minute!” we may want to say. “When did this happen?”

The answer is: “It happened on a hillside outside Jerusalem two thousand years ago.” It happened when we were dead through sin. It happened when we weren’t thinking about God. It happened when we weren’t ready. It happened when we didn’t deserve it. It happened because God was merciful. It happened because God is God and God is just. And God does not let evil prevail or endure or have the final victory. It happened when God made us alive together with Christ Jesus and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places.

Now watch what’s happening with the verbs here. It’s really going fast now. First, we didn’t know when God stepped in to transform us and to open the way to us from death to life. That happened then…before…long before we knew what was going on. On that cross God reconciled us to God’s own self. God made us alive. All past tense verbs. But then God raised us up and seated us with Jesus in the heavenly places. Wait a second! Those are still past tense verbs. That can’t have happened yet, can it? When were we raised up? When were we seated in heaven? I think I’d have noticed if something like that happened! I think I’d have taken a picture. I think I’d have asked God to autograph a napkin for me or something. When did this happen?

It happened on that cross. It started when God became flesh and dwelt among us. It started with the incarnation. It started when our lives became inextricably entwined with Christ’s. But on that cross God did all that was needed to raise us up from the sin and death into which we had fallen. Christ died for us and we died with him. Christ rose for us and we rose with him. If Christ is seated in the heavenly places at the right hand of God, there must be a place for us as well. It is not something we have to earn or merit. It’s something that came by a totally unexpected means. It came by grace.

Grace. We have been saved by grace through faith. That’s a very Methodist thing to say. Grace that met us before we had a chance to say yea or nay to it. Grace that claimed us before we could speak our first word. Grace that transforms us and justifies us and makes us right with God. Grace that makes us fit for a life in God’s presence. Grace that makes us holy. Grace that transforms the world. This is the thing we encounter on the cross of Jesus – a grace so amazing that we can only cooperate with it or reject it to our own damnation. If the cross is what we claim it is it presents us with a choice that we cannot escape. If God has saved us through grace and through the sacrifice of Jesus, then that grace is the most important thing in the universe. We can either cooperate with it or turn away and live a life that can only be an impossible contradiction. We can try to resist that irresistible grace. We can try to claim that we know best or know better. But we cannot rob the cross of its power. And we can only be a pitiful holdout in the face of grace’s overwhelming and ultimate victory. Like those Japanese soldiers who were found on isolated islands in the Pacific for many years after World War II who believed that against all evidence their nation had not lost the war, we can go on believing that the battle is still on and that God might yet lose, but who are we fooling but ourselves? And what can we do but fall?

One of my favorite saints is named Columba. Columba was an Irish saint of the 6th century who was so Irish that he inevitably got into a fight with his abbot and vowed to leave Ireland behind. He got into a tiny coracle, a boat made of twigs and leather, with twelve of his disciples and set off across the wild Irish Sea toward what is now Scotland. When he landed on the far side he went up on a hill and looked back to make sure that he could no longer see Ireland. When he was sure that he couldn’t he ordered his men to burn the boat on the beach.

Whether or not he knew that he had landed on a small island or not is an open question. He was on Iona, which became and remains a place of Christian pilgrimage to this day. But what impresses me is Columba’s determination that he was not going back. Once he was convicted of his purpose…once he knew what God was calling him to do…once he began his journey in the footsteps of Christ there was no turning back. And something had to be left behind…something had to die…nothing could remain of his old self that was twisted and distorted by lies. Once he knew the truth, the cross was all he had to cling to. Columba and his disciples went on to make disciples of Jesus all across Scotland and he started a mission that soon spread all over the northern part of England and into Europe as it was in the middle of the Dark Ages.

God knows we have a lot of things to leave behind. We have boats to burn and thing that must be put to death. The good news is that all that we need to truly live has already been done. The only thing we need to truly live has been given. In Jesus Christ and his cross we meet the one thing in the universe that has the power to turn lies into truth and death into life. In the cross we meet God’s grace and it is given for you and for me and for the whole of this wild and wonderful, suffering world. The choice for us is cooperation or contradiction. What are you going to do?

Thanks be to God.

At Cross Purposes with the World

1 Corinthians 1:18-27
For the word of the cross is foolishness to the perishing but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. As it has been written:
“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise
and the shrewdness of the shrewd I will thwart.”
Where is the wise one? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Hasn’t God shown the wisdom of the world to be foolish? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through its wisdom, God was well pleased through the foolishness of preaching to save the ones believing. Since the Jews ask for a sign and the Greeks seek wisdom, we preach Christ crucified a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Gentiles. But to those called, Jews and also Greeks, Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God, because the foolishness of God is wiser than the wisdom of humanity and the weakness of God is stronger than the strength of humanity.
Take note of your calling, brothers and sisters. Not many of you are wise according to the flesh. Not many are powerful. Not many are well born. But God has chosen the foolish things of the world in order to shame the wise and God has chosen the weak things of the world in order to shame the strong things. God has chosen the low things of the world and the despised things, the things that do not exist, in order that the things that do exist might be made ineffective, so that all flesh should not boast before God. But from God you are in Christ Jesus who became for us wisdom from God and righteousness and holiness and redeemer in order that, just as it has been written:
“Let the one boasting boast in the Lord.”

This is the third week of my Lenten series of sermons on the meaning of the cross for us today. Did I tell you why I was led to do this series? In part it’s because of the season. Lent is a good time to focus our attention on the cross. But partly it’s because I always trip over the cross. I like to think I’ve got a handle on what it means that Jesus came and died on the cross. I like to think I know and can explain why it is so important. But at its heart, the cross is a mystery, a stumbling block that is never content to rest easily within a well-constructed theology. So I need to keep coming back to it. I need to keep reflecting on why it is so crucial to my faith and to our salvation. And I figured you must be wondering the same thing, otherwise why would God lead me to talk about such a terrible thing for six weeks?

Actually this week the C.S. Lewis class was talking about the cross and atonement – God’s action in Christ to reconcile the world to God’s own self. Lewis says in Mere Christianity that he was never satisfied with the atonement image he had as a child and he wasn’t sure that anyone had a way to express exactly how this whole process works – how God uses the cross to open a way for us to repent and return to God. Finally he says, “We believe that the death of Christ is just that point in history at which something absolutely unimaginable from outside shows through into our own world.” And the unimaginable thing is that God is paying the price for our forgiveness and redemption.

Unimaginable. Some might even say foolish. What sort of God is it that acts like this? What do we do with this cross when it scandalizes us? That’s the question I want to explore today. And what I have to say is this: Jack Nicholson was right: We can’t handle the truth. But the truth can handle us. We can’t handle the truth, but the truth can handle us.

So four rabbis are out playing golf and as they play they are having a very vigorous theological debate over some very important point. Three of the rabbis agree on the issue, but the fourth disagrees. The three in agreement are adamant that the one dissenting rabbi has no idea what he is talking about. Obviously he hasn’t studied the scriptures well enough and hasn’t prayed hard enough to understand why he is so wrong. Finally in exasperation the rabbis look up into the heavens and say, “O Holy One, we are certain that this man is wrong but if he is right, please send us a sign.”

At that moment a lightning bolt strikes a tree near them, a huge gust of wind blows in, the earth shakes with an earthquake, the fourth rabbi’s face begins to glow and a voice from heaven says, “Heeee’s riiight.”

The three rabbis look at one another and say, “O.K., so now it’s three to two.”

We can’t handle the truth. That’s where I want to start today. We can’t handle it. When it comes to the truth of the cross we just can’t get our minds around it and we just can’t comprehend how much it turns our world upside down.

Now if you are a visitor today, you’ve probably been into a church before and seen how prominent the cross is for Christians. But suppose you had no familiarity with the cross and you walked in to a church like ours. Especially if you knew what it was, an instrument of torture and death, you might think it was a pretty shocking thing to put in front of a congregation. You might think, “My goodness, what sort of thing goes on here? What sort of place is this that puts so much emphasis on a symbol of death? There is something really unusual going on here.”

When you think of it from the perspective of the world, it is a really unusual thing going on here. This is a culture that glorifies success and denies death. This is a culture that can’t abide weakness and that loves cleverness. This is a culture that likes comfort food and comforting images. There’s nothing cuddly about the cross.

If we think about too much we might even start to apologize to our visitors for putting that right out front. And then we read 1 Corinthians as we just have, and we might get embarrassed about that, too. It’s not the sort of text you want to break out for visitors. Because what it says is that we Christians are foolish, weak and pretty insignificant. That’s not what you want to tell company, now is it? Christians are foolish, weak and insignificant? Please excuse our Bible. It’s a little too honest sometimes. There are other passages that say other things. Really! We have stories about rainbows and sheep and giant prophet-swallowing fish, too. But actually, when you get right down to it, those stories have some pretty rough edges, too. We’re just going to have to face this text and face this cross and not be apologetic. If you are visiting you get to see us for who we really are.

The writer of those words to the Corinthian Christians knew a little bit about power and weakness. Paul had been a very well-respected, powerful leader. He used to persecute the Christians. But he had his world turned upside-down by an encounter with Jesus and suddenly he was leading the Christians, including the ones in Corinth.

But First Christian Church of Corinth was a difficult congregation. They fought about everything. Spiritual gifts, church hierarchy, sexual ethics, idols, speaking in tongues, leaders, what color the new carpet was going to be, who was going to be the hospitality chair, whether or not to install indoor bathrooms…you name it, they were fighting about it. So Paul had to keep writing letters back to them to straighten things out. We benefit from all that writing because Paul talks about what’s really important to him in these letters. And the one thing that is most important to him is the cross.

It’s important to the Corinthians, too, but somehow they had gotten the message all wrong. Somehow they came to think that the power of the cross was something that would lead them to have power over other Christians. Paul hears about this and he says, “You silly Corinthians! Don’t you get it? The cross is a scandal! There’s nothing arrogant about it. Just look at it. Jesus died on that cross. Don’t you realize how goofy that makes us look in the eyes of the world? Here we are worshipping a savior who showed his power by dying on a cross! This cross is foolishness to the world!” And that, Paul says, is a good thing! And it’s still foolishness to the world and it’s still a good thing for us.

Because the cross turns the world upside down. You want powerful signs, you get a crucified savior. You want wisdom, you get foolishness. You want Easy Street, you get a narrow path. It’s not what the world expects from a savior at all. But this, Paul says, is exactly how God operates. God shows weakness, but somehow even God’s weakness is stronger than the greatest strength the world has to offer. God shows foolishness, but somehow even God’s foolishness is wiser than the greatest wisdom the world can muster up. God is saving the world the unexpected way.

But these are Corinthians. They’re a little thick and maybe they haven’t quite gotten the point yet, so Paul talks to them directly and this is the embarrassing part. “Look,” he says, “let’s be honest. You’re not exactly the best-looking group in the world. Not many PhDs in this crowd. Not many titans of industry. Not many folks of presidential timber. Not many rich folks. You Corinthians are pretty ordinary folks, really, for the most part. And you’re not making many waves in the pool.”

But guess what—God came for you. Because that’s what God does. God has a history of doing this. God chooses the foolish things of this world to shame the wise. God chooses the weak things of the world to shame the powerful. God chooses the low and despised things of the world, even things that don’t really exist to overturn what does exist. (By this point you can hear the Corinthians saying, “OK. OK. We get the picture. How bad do you have to make us look in order to make us feel better, Paul?”)

Then Paul throws in the kicker: It has to be this way because God didn’t want us to start thinking that we can be saved by our own efforts. We had to learn to trust what God has done for us. That’s what the cross is about. It reminds us that our salvation is not something we could have expected or earned or merited. Jesus had to show us the way and make the way and be the way for us into the life of God.

Now why is this good news? That is what I’m supposed to be offering here is good news. It’s good news because there are a lot of times when we are not feeling powerful and wise and on top of things. There are a lot of times when it feels as though nothing is going right. There are times, aren’t there when the words don’t come out right, when the things you do only seem to make things worse instead of better, when you can’t please your parents no matter how hard you try, when you can’t please your kids no matter how hard you try, when the customers are demanding, when the dinner is burned, when the milk is spilled, when the homework is wrong, when the paycheck is too small, when your experience is too limited, your knowledge too scanty, and your body too feeble. When you blurt out the wrong answer when the teacher calls on you, when you forget your wife’s birthday, when the cat throws up on the carpet – there are days like that, aren’t there? So what can be better news than the knowledge that the kind of person who has days like that is exactly the kind of person Jesus came to save.

And it’s deeper than that. You know it’s deeper than that. Because it’s not just the minor inconveniences of life that demand a savior, it’s the deep-seated sin of our lives and the engrained habits that are leading us away from God. There are the wounds and pains of our long separation from God, the source of our lives. We know that there is something wrong and the truth that God offers us is the cross and we…we can’t handle the truth.

The science fiction movie The Matrix is not a movie I would recommend for family viewing. It’s a little too fascinated with violence. But it is a film that invites a lot of comparisons with the Christian story. In the movie an office worker by the name of Neo is living with this nagging sense that there is more to life than the drab life he is living. He just can’t put his finger on what’s going on.

Then one day he is caught up in an adventure at the invitation of a mysterious visitor named Trinity. She takes Neo to meet a man named Morpheus who helps Neo give words to this feeling he has. Morpheus says to him, “Let me tell you why you're here. You're here because you know something. What you know, you can't explain. But you feel it. You've felt it your entire life. That there's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is, but it's there...like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad. It is this feeling that has brought you to me. Do you know what I'm talking about?”

Then Morpheus gives him a choice. He holds out his hands and there are two pills – a blue one and a red one. The blue one will make him forget that he had ever been there and he can go on with his life. But the red one offers him the chance to stay…to follow the “splinter in his mind” and to discover the truth that he has suspected all along but has not been able to get a handle on. Neo decides not to go back. He chooses the red pill and the adventure begins.

It’s not too much of a stretch to say that the cross is like that splinter in the mind that reveals to us the truth. It is a stumbling block and foolishness because it is so at odds with the world and the way it works. It stands at cross purposes with everything the world holds dear. We can ignore it and go on with the nagging sense that we are ignoring some great truth about ourselves and what God intends to do with us…or…we can cling to it and follow Christ wherever he will lead us.

The thing that Christians claim is not that they are so different from the world, but that they are telling the truth about this world in which we find ourselves. The truth is that the world is a messed up place where wars are waged and relationships are broken, where people hurt one another intentionally and unintentionally and where the poor and the hungry and the neglected are devalued as less than human. That’s true. But the deeper truth is that God has created this world and that God refuses to leave it alone. In fact, God has entered this world to transform it, to remake it, and to remind us of who we are. Christians know that they are not any better or worse than the rest of the world – they simply face the world armed with a powerful knowledge – that they are not defined by the fallenness of the world and by their sinfulness. They are not valued for the terrible things they have done. They are known and defined and valued for the way they are viewed by God – as children of God redeemed by Jesus Christ.

The cross is not an easy thing. It’s not a cuddly thing. It’s not something we can easily accept. We can’t handle the truth of the cross. But the truth can handle us. The cross is the mark of our new identity in Christ. It tells us who we are when we forget. It doesn’t let us blink at our failures, but it also doesn’t let us wallow in despair. We are God’s children who have put on Christ. That is a reminder that no matter who we are or where we’ve been…no matter what we’ve done or how we’ve failed…no matter what our gifts may be…no matter what, we are claimed by God and given this new identity. The truth has entered our world and though human wisdom can never comprehend it, it can comprehend us. As Paul says later in his letter to the Corinthians: Now we see in a mirror dimly, then we shall see face to face. Now we know only in part, then we will know fully, even as we are fully known.

Here we are and there is the cross. It presents us with a choice. Do we let our gaze stray from this and refuse to follow where it may lead – do we take the blue pill…or do we take the red one…do we give ourselves to the Christ of the cross and risk what transformation and change he may ask of us? The bad news is…you can’t rely on your wisdom and power and status to take this path. The good news is…you don’t have to rely on your wisdom and power and status to take this path. God has provided all that we will ever need. And what God has provided looks like a cross. Thanks be to God.

Is there a cross for me?

Mark 8:31-38
Then he began to teach them that it was necessary for the Son of Humanity to suffer much and to be rejected by the elders, chief priests and scribes, and to be killed and after three days to be raised up. He spoke quite openly about this.
But, taking him aside, Peter began to rebuke him. Turning and looking at his disciples, Jesus rebuked Peter and said, “Get behind me, Satan, for you are not setting your mind of divine things but on human things.”
Calling to the crowd with his disciples he said to them, “Whoever wishes to follow behind me, let them deny self and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life must lose it but whoever loses their life on behalf of me and the gospel will save it. For what good does it do a person if he or she should gain the whole world and yet forfeit their soul? What can a person give in exchange for their soul? Whoever is ashamed of me and my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of that person will the Son of Humanity also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his father with the holy angels.”

I grew up in Virginia, in the South, and I have come to realize that Southerners have a unique way of speaking. It’s not just the accent, though that is certainly unique it’s the phrases, too. For instance, Southerners have a reputation for politeness and gentility. But the truth is, as someone once pointed out to me, Southerners can be pretty direct and even cutting. You can say anything you want about a person in the South in polite company as long as you put the words “bless his heart” or “bless her heart” on the end. “Hannah Bricklebank wears the most hideous clothes, bless her heart.” “Johnson Furloines is a selfish, dishonest businessman, bless his heart.” It’s almost as if they can’t help it. Bless their hearts.

Of course the Eastern Shore has its own phrases that I’m getting used to. Once I got beyond the lingo about ‘come heres’ and ‘born heres’ I had to get used to what ‘across the bay’ meant. I’m still not sure what that means. Sometimes it means Norfolk and other times it can mean California. It doesn’t really matter. Unless it’s Salisbury, the whole rest of the country is “across the bay.” And I’ve picked up a few other phrases, too, some of which are really colorful – like “He’s so ugly he could crack a clam in ten feet of water.” That’s got to be an Eastern Shore original.

But what I was talking about was Southern phrases and another one that I picked up on growing up was a biblical phrase, which is not surprising since Southerners have laced their speech with words from the Bible. “That’s her cross to bear” or “That’s his cross to bear.” This phrase comes from the scripture text for this morning where Jesus is talking with his disciples and he tells them, “Whoever wants to follow behind me, let them deny self and take up their cross and follow me.” I want to talk this morning about what Jesus means by taking up our cross to follow him, but think about how you may have heard that phrase used in everyday speech. When I was growing up it came about in social settings where people were lamenting the things that others had to put up with. As in: “Myrtle Philpott sure has a disagreeable husband, I guess that must be her cross to bear.” Or “Corny Perdue has had that limp since birth. I guess that must be his cross to bear.” People using that phrase may have been pointing out real instances of suffering but after awhile I began to suspect that they were draining the cross of its meaning. Having a hangnail may be painful, but it is not the same thing as taking up the cross. Listening to your folks tell the same joke to a friend for the 154th time may be annoying, but it is not the same thing as taking up the cross. Even having a physical illness or a difficult relationship is not the same thing as taking up the cross. If we’re going to talk about what it means to take up our cross and follow behind Jesus, it’s going to look a little different.

But here’s what I want to say today as we continue this sermon series on the meaning of the cross for us in our day and time: Finding out what it really means to take up our cross not only means that it is different from what we’ve thought, but we are going to be different if we take it up. What the cross is all about is transformation. We love that word. We want transformation for ourselves and for our world. But the only thing scary about transformation is that it might actually happen and are we ready for what transformation will require of us?

You’ve probably heard the story of the hiker who was walking in the mountains when he slipped and slid off the edge of a cliff. Fortunately there was a root sticking out of the edge of the cliff that he was able to grab as he fell. He cried for help but no one heard him. He looked down below him and saw that it was hundreds of feet to the rocky bottom below.

His hands were growing tired and he knew he couldn’t hold on much longer. Finally he turned to the heavens and said, “Is anybody up there?”

A loud voice came from the sky. “Let go of the root.”

The man thought for a minute and then looked up again, “Is anybody else up there?”

We want something different, but like the man hanging on for dear life, we’re afraid of what living differently will require of us.

Especially when we hear what Jesus says to his disciples about the way of the cross. In this passage from Mark, Jesus has just been talking with his disciples about who he is. He had just finished healing a blind man, and it was an interesting healing because it’s the only healing story we have where it takes Jesus two times to bring a person to wholeness. At first Jesus spits onto the man’s eyes and lays hands on him and asks him if he can see. He says, “I see people but they look like trees walking.” So Jesus has to lay hands on him again so that he can see clearly.

That is a metaphor for what’s happening with the disciples. They have some sense of who Jesus is. When Jesus asks them who people say that he is, Peter is able to say, “You are the Messiah,” the promised savior of Israel. But they still don’t fully get it. They can’t see what sort of Messiah Jesus is, and they won’t until after his crucifixion and resurrection.

It’s not for want of telling them. As Mark’s gospel goes along Jesus tries to tell them directly exactly what is going to happen to him as they go up to Jerusalem. “It must happen this way,” Jesus says. “I am going to suffer and to be rejected by the religious leaders and to be killed, but after three days I will be raised up.” It’s just not something that they know how to deal with. They probably didn’t sign on for duty to follow Jesus to death.

Peter is disturbed enough that he takes Jesus aside and begins to rebuke him, to set him straight. But Jesus knows that Peter and the other disciples need an attitude adjustment. They are still trying to follow Jesus in their own way. They are wandering down their own imagined paths of what discipleship requires. They need a new focus and the focus has got to be on him walking toward Jerusalem and walking toward the cross. That’s why he tells Peter, “Get behind me, Satan, because you are not focused on the right things. You are holding on to your life when you need to set it aside. You are blinded by your own sense of how this is going to play out, when you need to see where I am going and where you are going. Get behind me.”

Then he gathers the crowd together with his disciples to tell them what it means to follow. He has called them to follow before. They dropped their nets and their tax collecting and their ordinary lives before, but he is offering them a choice once again. “If you want to follow me,” Jesus says, “you have to leave yourself behind, take up your cross, and follow me.”

Now remember, this is before Jesus’ crucifixion. We hear this passage with very different ears because we live on this side of Jesus’ death. For Jews living in a land of Roman occupation the cross meant humiliation and suffering. It was not a Jewish means of capital punishment. Crosses were what the Romans used to make a statement. There are horrific records in the history books about roadways lined with dead and dying men on crosses – lifted up for all to see, especially for those to see who might be thinking of opposing the empire. To be crucified on a cross was to suffer greatly, to be rejected by even your own people. Jews would consider a person crucified to be cut off. When Jesus ask those who followed him to take up their cross, this is what it symbolized -- suffering, rejection, and being cut off from all that they had known before. That’s what the disciples objected to – a savior who did not fulfill the hopes they had for him. What they were going to have to do was to put to death the hopes they had so that they could claim the hope that would know in Jesus.

I realize how this sounds. It sounds like I’m saying that Christians ought to have a thing for suffering. It sounds like we’re glorifying the pain and the rejection. It sounds like I’m saying that living in the shadow of the cross is living in a shadow and there are way too many shadows in the world already.

But I don’t think that’s what I’m saying. Oh, it’s serious alright. What Jesus is talking about is something so serious that it demands our lives. It demands everything we’ve got. That’s the whole point of his language about those wanting to save their lives must lose it and those who lose their lives for Jesus’ sake will save it. Following Jesus is not something you dabble in like a weekend hobby. Jesus doesn’t want an hour of your time on Sunday morning, he wants you – body, mind and soul.

But the point is not to go out and heroically suffer because that’s what Jesus wants from us. That’s not it at all. We wouldn’t know where to begin to do it right. And if we designed the project – the heroic suffering project – we would inevitably fail because once again it would be us determining how to do it and the whole point of Jesus’ conversation with the disciples here is to tell them that they cannot do it on their own. They can’t see clearly as long as they are designing the project. Not one of them would have chosen the path that Jesus took. Nobody would have designed a salvation story with a savior who does what Jesus did. They need to give up their control of the story and their control of their lives so that they can see what Jesus is up to.

When I was in Dallas recently I heard a sermon by Tyrone Gordon, pastor of St. Luke’s Community Church in Dallas. Dr. Gordon was using the text of Jesus calling to Peter on the Sea of Galilee to come to him walking across the water. I had heard that text a thousand times in my life but I really heard it when Dr. Gordon talked about it because he said the thing he realized about this story was that if you want to walk on water, you know what you have to do? You have to get out of the boat. And the boat the disciples were in was one of their own expectations and their own visions and dreams and it just wasn’t big enough. They couldn’t imagine what Jesus was going to do with them if they just got out of the boat.

Most folks fault Peter for his faithlessness once he gets out on the water. When he loses sight of Jesus, he begins to sink below the waves. But Peter did something that none of the other disciples on that boat in the storm-tossed sea was willing to do – he got out of a perfectly good boat and started moving toward Jesus. If you want to walk on water, you got to get out of the boat.

I have to tell you that there a lot of us in the church today who are walking around with a boat people mentality. We pay lip service to the Christ who came and died on a cross. We talk about how that cross liberates us for life and life eternal. We talk about how the world is being transformed. But we live as if the only things we are capable of doing are the things that we can do with our own capacities, talents and energy. We say that we believe in the power of the Holy Spirit, but we live as if our horizons were very small indeed.

The cross that Jesus talks about seems to signify the limit, the end, the utter boundary of human capacity. When we see the cross we see the place where human life is shown at its most frail and futile. What could be a better revelation of our mortality than the cross?

But Jesus asks us to take up our cross, not so that he can show us that we are weak, but so that he can reveal to us where our true strength lies. On that cross God takes our humanity to the limits and overcomes it. On that cross death is accepted but conquered and drained of its power. When we stop thinking about what we can and can’t do and start to think about what God can do with us, we begin to get the “outside the boat” mentality. If we want something we’ve never had we’re going to have to do something we’ve never done and that is to trust that Jesus is sufficient, to trust that God is capable, to trust that though, yes, the flesh is weak, the Spirit is willing and able and alive and at hand and in our midst. If we want to walk on water, we’ve got to get out of the boat because that is where God is.

So when we say something as foolish as “that’s my cross to bear” it had better not be for something as mild as the patience we need to listen to a complaining customer. The cross we have to bear is one that demands our entire lives. For many of us that will not mean dying for Jesus, though when I heard about the death of the Christian peace activist, Tom Fox, in Iraq last night it was a reminder that some people still do die for their faith. But the greater tragedy would be if we never live for Jesus…if our lives never looked any different because we never had a transforming encounter with the God who loves us enough to ask that we give all that we are to follow Jesus. If we never know that sense of risk and adventure and fullness of life that comes from putting ourselves where we would not be if the gospel we proclaimed were not true. Our lives are a gift. Each one of you is a wonderful, precious gift of God. And what should our lives be but a response of thanksgiving and self-offering to the God who gave us life?

I’m a great believer in the presence of God in our midst. I believe that within each one of us is the smoldering desire for God which only awaits a spark. I believe that, though we may have been battered and bruised and wounded by things we have done and things that have been done with us, we have yet the capacity to respond to God and to step out of the boat.

That’s not me calling. That’s God calling. You’ve got something to do in the footsteps of Jesus. You’ve got a whole new life waiting in the company of the disciples who follow after him. All you have to do is…all you have the rest of your life to do…is to take up your cross and start walking. If you want something you’ve never had, you’ve got to do something you’ve never done before. Get out of the boat. Thanks be to God.

Crossing Through the Water

1 Peter 3:18-22
For Christ also suffered for sins once, the righteous for the unrighteous, in order that he might bring you to God, dying in the flesh but made alive in the Spirit, in which also he went and proclaimed to the spirits in prison, who disobeyed when, in the days of Noah, God waited patiently during the construction of the ark until a few, eight souls, were saved through water.

Now this type is fulfilled as baptism saves you, not as a removal of dirt from the body, but as an appeal to God for a good conscience through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, who is at the right hand of God, having gone into heaven where angels and authorities and powers are made subject to him.

Have you ever been to an event where there was just something out of place? A few years ago I did a wedding for two of my students from UVA. The wedding was held at my old church in Unionville which was my first pastorate. Bethlehem Church is a classic country church on a back road, the kind of place where you might expect to see horses and cows in the field and cats and dogs roaming the village. What you wouldn’t expect is to find cats and dogs inside the church.

That’s just what happened on Sarah’s wedding day. I was in the back with the groom and best man waiting for the procession to begin. The bride had walked around to the front of the church and the bridesmaids had already come to the front. The doors in the back were opened and in came…a yellow tabby cat who proceeded to the altar where a chase ensued. Fortunately the organist had enough experience to keep playing until the cat could be evicted and the wedding could continue. It was not what anyone expected and it was certainly the case that the cat was out of place.

I feel the same way sometimes about the cross. Now you are probably saying, “How could you feel that the cross is out of place, Alex?” It is our most important Christian symbol. It is a reminder of the most important stuff of our Christian faith. It tells us what we believe and who we are. How could you feel that it is out of place?

It’s just that it’s such a dramatic statement and I forget sometimes how dramatic it is. For us, in our day, we are used to seeing crosses almost as brand images, like the Nike swoosh or the McDonald’s arches. When we see them we know instinctively – that’s a church or a Christian. We are far more likely to see crosses as fashion accessories these days than we are to see them for what they really were – instruments of cruelty, degradation and death. We are not shocked to see it in the same way that people living in the days of the early Church would have been shocked. The equivalent for us would be to have a hangman’s noose or an electric chair hanging over the altar. The cross was meant to signal suffering and death.

Which puts it at odds with so much of what happens here on a Sunday morning. When I think of worship here on Sunday morning I think about healing and hope. I think about connection and conviction. I think about the joy we experience at a baptism…the music of the band or the choir…the good news from people witnessing to what God has done in their lives…the warmth of the passing of the peace. When we were asking you a few weeks ago about what things you most appreciated about Franktown Church almost universally we heard: the warmth, the family feel, the welcome, the sense that anybody could find a home here. And there above it all – in just about every room in this building but especially here – there is the cross, “an emblem of suffering and shame,” to quote the old hymn.

So why is it there? Paul said that his mission was to “know nothing but Jesus Christ and him crucified” [1 Co. 2:2]. Why is that? What is it about this cross that makes it so important to us and why do we keep clinging to the old rugged cross? What could it possibly mean for modern people – even postmodern people – like us who live such different lives from those early Christians?

That’s what I want to explore with you during these six weeks of Lent as we move toward Holy Week and the remembrance of Jesus’ crucifixion. We’ve got a cross out in the courtyard. Our colors have turned to purple, a color associated with royalty, but also a color associated with self-reflection and suffering. It was a purple robe that the soldiers put on Jesus when the mocked him and beat him. It’s a good time for us to remember what the cross means for us and not to let it become part of the furniture around here – something we take for granted instead of something that changes the world.

So today we talk about baptism. Now you might think that baptism is an unrelated topic. Baptism is a sacrament that seems to be more about life than death. Communion – now that’s something that reminds us of the cross. We tell the story, as we will do in a few minutes, of how Jesus gathered with his disciples and suffered and died and left the meal as a memorial of what he had done and as a sign of what is to come. But baptism? In our tradition baptism is often about babies and new life and initiation into the community of faith. What does baptism have to do with the suffering and the cross?

Well, let’s listen to what Peter says to us in the reading from this morning. Peter was writing to a church that knew something about suffering. It was a persecuted church. Their gatherings were times of hope and warmth like ours are but they were also conducted under the shadow of oppression and the threat of death from the ruling authorities. Peter was writing to encourage them and to give them the model of Jesus. In this passage he tells them that though they suffer, Christ also suffered and his suffering was liberating. Christ suffered for sins once and for all, the righteous for the unrighteous. What Jesus did he did for their sake, to bring them closer to God. They had been far off, but they were brought close by Jesus. The cross was, for them, a highway back to the God that they had left behind through the effects of sin. So Peter tells them their suffering has to be seen in the light of Christ’s suffering. Their “cross” has meaning and purpose because Jesus’ cross had meaning and purpose.

Peter also tells them that Jesus’ suffering was also not the whole story and their suffering won’t be either. Christ died in the flesh but he was made alive in the Spirit. There is the promise of resurrection even in the death on the cross.

Here is the amazing thing about what Jesus did on the cross: It was not dependent on the faithfulness of those he died for. In fact it was “while we were yet sinners that Christ died for us” [Rom. 5:8]. In fact, it was because of our faithlessness that God came among us in Jesus to walk the road to the cross because we may be faithless but God is always faithful…always seeking to save.

This is why we Methodists believe that Christ didn’t just die for those who were good or those who were chosen. Christ didn’t just die for those who could make it by their own wits and efforts. Christ didn’t just die for the righteous. Christ died for everybody and because of that your salvation didn’t begin the moment you decided to become a Christian. You weren’t redeemed by anything you did. Your salvation began on a cross on a hill outside Jerusalem some 2,000 years ago. Your salvation. And when you finally get around to claiming it as your own, that salvation becomes complete. Jesus came for the sins of the whole world and he came for you.

That’s also why we Methodists baptize infants. You know that’s one of the things that we do that makes us different from our Baptist brothers and sisters. We baptize infants because we believe that they were claimed a long time before they were able to say anything about it. They were loved a long time before they got here. And they live under that promise a long time before they can claim it for themselves.

We baptize infants, and those who are mentally challenged, and those who cannot respond for themselves because we believe that there is never a time when God has not claimed us and offered us grace. Baptism is God’s mighty act uniting us to Christ’s suffering and death so that we can experience the new life and resurrection that Jesus has to offer us. It’s not just a bath, it’s a mighty act, like Noah and his family and all those creatures on the ark, we are being saved through the water. We are challenged to respond to this gift of grace. If grace is truly working in us we will want to respond…we will have to respond to what God is doing in our lives. That’s the role of confirmation and the rest of our lives – we are called to claim this salvation as our own, to claim Jesus as our own. But it begins with God’s movement toward us in this water.

That’s why Martin Luther, the great reformer, made such a big deal out of baptism – it’s what allowed him to move forward in confidence through each day. Whenever a child was baptized he would instruct his pastors that they were to make the sign of the cross over them as a reminder that they lived in the shadow of that cross, a reminder that every battle that needed to be fought was already won through Christ’s work. They had gone through the water with Christ and the cross was their ark, bringing them to the new life they were given in Jesus’ death and resurrection. Whenever Lutherans make the sign of the cross it is for them a remembrance of their baptism.

That’s a liberating thing to hear. We still live in a world of suffering. Though I am baptized I know that it does not make me immune to the pains of the world. Every day I see people I love who are facing deep crises and deep needs. I watch Jim and Lynda Hewitt, two of the most spiritually-connected people I know, going through heart-breaking challenges as they have faced cancer and grief. I see people in our congregation who deal with problems and trials that they would never ask for. I know, in my own life, how hard it is to watch my children face illnesses and problems at school. Being a Christian does not remove us from suffering, but in the shadow of the cross that suffering is seen in a new light. It’s not as though Jesus is there saying, “You think you have problems? Look what I went through!” That’s not it at all. What we know is that we find a place to take all those pains because we are united to Jesus. Suffering is a moment on the way to resurrection. All these broken pieces of our lives, all these loose ends, will all be gathered up. We have that promise. And when it seems beyond us, that’s fine, because it is. Baptism reminds us that God has been there first and Jesus has won the victory.

We know suffering here, but you also know that Christians around the world are suffering. In many places it is not an easy thing to be a Christian. President Bush was in India this week and praising a tradition of religious tolerance there, but India is a difficult place to be a Christian these days. Christians have deep roots in India but pastors and missionaries are being beaten and killed. In Nigeria there are horrible conflicts between Christians and Muslims that are threatening to break apart the country. In Palestine and Israel the small Palestinian Christian population which only a few years ago was 20% of the population has dwindled to less than 10% because of persecution. The days of suffering Christians have not ended.

In addition there are many places where Christians live in poverty and need. For them the cross is not an embarrassment or out of place. It is a sign that Christ is present with them in the midst of their trials.

A few years ago I went to the city of Reynosa, Mexico as I was preparing to take a group of college students on a mission trip. On the last night of my visit the director of the mission work took me to the newest church that the Methodist Church in Mexico is building. It was just getting dark as we headed over so that I could barely see, but what I saw was bad. The area where the church was located was on the site of the city landfill. This was not the old landfill, this was the current landfill. Reynosa is a city of one million people and this is a huge landfill. Squatters had set up shanties all over this landfill. There were no street lights and no municipal services. Every day people would go out with carts tied to mules and collect trash to bring back to the landfill so that it would grow.

In the fading light I could see hundreds of children playing in the dirt streets surrounded by trash. Along the river I could see islands formed by the dumped trash and on those islands, more shanties. 20,000 people lived in this place that offered absolutely nothing to those who lived there. And it was all less than one mile from the border of the United States.

But this is where the Methodist Church of Mexico had decided to build a church. Of all the places they could go with their limited resources, they chose to go to the dump among people who had nothing. But there it was: El Sendero Iglesia Metodista – The Way Methodist Church. It was three buildings surrounded by a wall that made a nice oasis in the middle of this neighborhood. One building was a dining hall that served breakfast to children every morning. One building was a clinic offering services to those who would come with many diseases aggravated by the living conditions. And the last building, in the center, was a church with a prominent cross and the symbol of the Methodist Church of Mexico which is a boat sailing through a sea to salvation.

Christians don’t glorify suffering. Movies like The Passion may make you think that we do, but we don’t. There is no glory in suffering and death. But we know that God has come to us in Jesus Christ to overcome even suffering and death. We have crossed through the waters with him. We have found new life in him. We are no longer relying on our own powers, but on a power greater than every foe in the universe. Love is stronger than death. Passion fierce as the grave. Many waters cannot quench love. Thanks be to God.