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.