The Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Rally Sunday - September 17, 2006

Sermon by Pastor John Marboe

The Holy Gospel according to St. Mark. (Mark 8:27-38)

Jesus went on with his disciples to the villages of Caesarea Philippi; and on the way he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” And they answered him, “John the Baptist; and others, Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets.” He asked them, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter answered him, “You are the Messiah.” And he sternly ordered them not to tell anyone about him.

Then he began to teach them 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.”

The Gospel of the Lord.

Grace to you and peace from God our Father, from our Lord and Savior, Jesus the Christ.

What does it mean to deny yourself, to pick up your cross, to follow Christ—Jesus’ words in our Gospel this morning—have you ever thought seriously about that? What does it mean to deny yourself, to pick up your cross, and to follow Christ?

It’s probably impossible for us today to hear those words in the same way that the disciples would have heard them. Today, the cross has an almost romantic feeling to it. We have crosses everywhere. We put them around our neck, they give us comfort; we make them out of gold and silver, we give them away as gifts, as reminders to our Godchildren that God loves them, that they are good and loved; as symbols of God’s love and forgiveness. Big gold crosses hang around the necks of those involved in hip-hop culture, and they call it “bling.” We speak quaintly about the crosses that we bear. “Oh, the crosses.” “Oh, my cross to bear: my forgetful spouse; my relentless schedule; my unappreciative children; my being unappreciated, in general; the fact that it always falls to me to get the job done.” “Oh, my cross to bear!”

But to try to hear these words of Jesus, in the context that they were spoken, is actually pretty disturbing, because a cross was an instrument of death. A cross was a government-sanctioned tool for killing criminals. Unlike, say, the guillotine, which killed swiftly and with a minimum of pain, the cross was meant to torture, to kill a person slowly and as painfully as possible. That’s what a cross is. Crosses were not used in hidden places, down in dungeons or away in prisons, away from the public eye. They were used in the most visible places—up on hills or alongside busy roads—so that everyone could see and be afraid. And people were afraid.

Just look at Peter’s response to Jesus in the Gospel. Peter had just been commended by Jesus for declaring him the Messiah; and then Jesus tells the disciples that he must suffer and be killed. Now, Peter was no dummy. That could only mean death on a cross for someone like Jesus, deemed to be challenging the authority of Rome. Peter, in response and out of fear, does an unthinkable thing for a disciple. He grabs Jesus, pulls him aside, and begins to rebuke him. But Jesus says after that, turning to the whole crowd around, “Whoever would follow me, let them take up their cross and follow me”—shocking, stunning—“follow me to the death. Lose your life, then you’ll save it.”

Religion is a dangerous thing; religion is dangerous. Some of us recall the ‘70s when there seemed to be so much extreme religious activity going on in this country. That was a time when Jim Jones arose with the People’s Temple and gathered all kinds of people to himself, and then moved them down to Guyana and got them to commit mass suicide.

And there were the Moonies, and even more than the Moonies themselves, there were stories about the Moonies. Now, I grew up in Alexandria, Minnesota; we had no idea what a Moonie was. We had no idea what a non-Lutheran was, for goodness sake. But the Moonies—in my high school, stories went around about the Moonies being a kind of zombie-like people that would hold hands and block cars on deserted country roads, and then when you stopped they would kidnap you. It wasn’t true, of course, but we thought it was. But there were the Moonies, the followers of Reverend Sun Myung Moon.

At the University of Minnesota, where I attended, there was a group, a rather strange group, called The Ascended Masters, a kind of quasi-Christian sect. And there was another group called The Destroyers, who also thought themselves Christian. There was even a group called Fire Escape—kind of an interesting metaphor—the idea being that you’d better run or you’re going to end up in the flames of hell. There was the ever-popular Campus Crusades. Now, when was a crusade ever a good idea?

I have to admit, though, to you, however, that I did get caught up in the religious fervor of the time at the University, and I became for a time part of an organization that—get this—was going to save the world by living radically dedicated lives of discipleship, and getting others to do the same, by taking up our crosses and following. This was an important passage for us.

Well, it didn’t work. We didn’t actually save the world. Many of you were part of the world at that time. Did you happen to notice how we were saving the world? Probably not. It was, however, an honest shot at trying to respond to these radical words of Jesus, however misguided we were, to deny ourselves, to pick up our crosses, and to follow.

Now, over the years Christians have tried it all in the name of discipleship—some of it bordering on the bizarre. And, even more bizarre, the church honors many of those bizarre attempts as saintly. Take, for example, Simeon the Stylite. You may know about Simeon the Stylite, that fifth-century saint, Syrian saint, who just outside of Antioch decided that he was going to express his discipleship toward Christ by climbing up a 60-foot column, and there he perched for 40 years, not coming down. The platform on the top of the column was not big enough to lay down, and so there he stood, or sat, for 40 years. Or so the story goes. Now, it doesn’t matter whether it really happened or not, the church made him a saint based on that story.

Then there is one of my favorites, Bruder Klaus, a favorite saint in Switzerland, who centuries ago, just outside of Lucerne, left his wife and many children to go out into the countryside and live in a hermitage. And there he lived for the rest of his life, having no contact any more with his family, and living, it is said, on only daily Eucharist. Bruder Klaus, made a saint by the church for taking up his cross and following.

Taking up one’s cross to follow Christ has come to mean, for many, radical denial of the body. Celibacy as a requirement of holiness is big in church history, and not just for the Catholics; think of the Shakers. Holy war, thought to be a way of picking up one’s cross radically and following. The Crusades. The Crusades, holy war, as following Christ to the cross. On the other extreme, absolute passivism as a way of picking up one’s cross and following Christ. Reform-upon-reform in the church; and in the present-day, Christian family life, mega-church movements, as a way of picking up one’s cross to follow. Christian politics, right and left, as a way of picking up one’s cross and follow. Christians have tried it all in the name of discipleship.

Well, where do we stand? How do we make sense of Christ’s command to take up our cross and follow? And it won’t do to think Jesus wasn’t saying anything very radical, that he just wanted everyone to be nice, to be decent, law-abiding Lutherans. There’s way too much edge in the image of the cross for that. He said, “Take up your cross and follow.” And the cross really was an instrument of death.

People have attempted to live this command in every conceivable way, from the sublime to the bizarre, to the cruel and the violent. And what people invariably do with this passage is to make it a call to all Christians to a heroic imitation of Christ, a complete denial of the self for the world’s redemption. Well, with that interpretation, I disagree. Now, listen closely because I am about to challenge nearly 2,000 years of mainstream Christian interpretation of this passage.

My assertion is that Jesus was not speaking to us. He wasn’t speaking to you, or 9to me. He was speaking to his actual disciples and to any who wanted to keep walking with him to Jerusalem, because, for those people, there was going to be, potentially, an actual cross. If they followed him to the end, chances were they would end up dying with him, on a cross next to him, on Golgotha. Now, I’m not saying that you and I don’t have hard choices to make in life, that in some ways have to do with or are likened to Jesus’ choice was the cross. I’m not saying we don’t have to sacrifice for the greater good. I’m not saying that we don’t have to metaphorically, or, God forbid, maybe even literally, lay down our lives for those that we love, or for what we believe in. I am saying, however, that not every Christian carries a cross. To think that way either trivializes the cross or it brutalizes people. The cross, for us, is not a martyrdom to be embraced. It is, rather, what Christ did for us. It’s been done.

There are still crosses everywhere: injustice, inhumanity, hatred, violence, genocide, hunger. You know it as well as I; we see it on the news every day. But these are not your crosses to bear for the whole world. There was one Messiah, and you are not him.

Shall we assist our neighbor in need? Yes. Shall we live generously and compassionately? Absolutely! Shall we work to reduce greed and want in our world? You bet. Shall we give our lives completely away for the salvation of the world? Too late! It’s already been done.

We are not called to be messiahs. The cross is human brutality, torture, and pain. And when you really think about the story of Christ, really think about it, Jesus was sent to the cross at the hands of those who felt the most righteous, the most religious, and the most pious, those who thought themselves following God most self-sacrificially. Those are the people who sent him to the cross. And God save us from such crosses. And, even more, God save us from inflicting such crosses on others. Christ bore the cross, once, for all. He warned his would-be followers, Peter and the rest, that the same fate would be theirs if they stuck with him—which leads me to my last and most important point: They didn’t. They didn’t stay with him. They avoided the cross. And Jesus died alone, for everyone—for them, for his killers, and for us.

Amen.