SERMON FIFTH SUNDAY OF LENT – YEAR B “A CURIOUS PARADOX” JOHN 12:20-33 / MARCH 22, 2015

sermon

fifth sunday of lent – year b

“a curious paradox”

john 12:20-33 / march 22, 2015

Let us pray:  May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable to you, O God, our strength and our redeemer.  Amen.

“Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.”    One of my favourite Christian writers, Frederick Buechner, offers his thoughts on this passage of scripture which I’d like to share with you

 “....doing the work you’re best at doing and like to do best, hearing great music, having great fun, seeing something very beautiful, weeping at somebody else’s tragedy – all these experiences are related to the experience of salvation because in all of them two things happen:  firstly, you lose yourself, and secondly, you find that you are more fully yourself than usual.   

A closer analogy is the experience of love.  When you love somebody, it is no longer yourself you is the centre of you own universe.  It is the one you love who is.   You forget yourself.   You deny yourself. 

You give of yourself so that by all the rules of arithmetical logic there should be less of yourself than there was to start with. 

Only by a curious paradox there is more.   You feel that at last you really are yourself.   

The experience of salvation involves the same paradox.   In Matthew’s gospel Jesus put it this way:  “Those who lose their life for my sale will find it.”    You give up your old self – seeking self for somebody you love and thereby become yourself at last.  ‘You must die with Christ so that you can rise with him’, Paul says.   You do not love God so that, tit of tat, God will then save you.  To love God is to be saved......you do not love God and live for God so you will go to heaven.    Whichever side of the grave you happen to be talking about, to love God and live for God is heaven,  is eternal life. ...  ‘we love,’  John says, ‘because God first loved us.’  Who knows how the awareness of God’s love first hits people.  Every person has his or her own tale to tell, including persons who wouldn’t believe in God if you paid them.   Some moment happens in your life that you say “yes” to right up to the roots of your hair, that makes it worth having been born just to have happen  --laughing with somebody until the tears run down your cheeks,  waking up to the first snow,  being in bed with somebody you love.”

Buechner concludes, “Whether you thank God for such a moment or thank your lucky stars, it is a moment that is trying to open up your whole life. 

If you turn your back on such a moment and hurry along to business as usual, it may lose you the ball game.  

If you throw your arms around such a moment and hug it like crazy, it may save your soul.”   

Jesus’ saying about loving our life and thereby losing it, about hating our life in this world and thereby gaining eternal life, indicates that there is one way we lose ourselves which is destructive   - when we adhere to wordly values vis a vis God’s values; and there is another way we lose ourselves which, ironically, gives us true and meaningful and full life, which is the life  that is in right relationship to God.   

The fact of the matter is that it’s not always a pleasant thing to lose oneself for the sake of conforming to God’s will, God’s way and thus to be saved; that is to be fully and truly who we are meant to be.    

Some of you may recall that old black-and-white movie, On the waterfront, starring a young Marlon Brando. This film classic explores union corruption and the struggle for integrity within human life and relationships.   An early scene depicts a murder in the street in front of a cathedral.  The victim’s sister rushes into the street and kneel’s by his lifeless body. 

A priest representing us religious folk emerges from the church. 

He looks fearfully about, rushes to the young woman, and pleads with her to flee with him to saftey in the church.  She turns angrily to him and with emotion-laden voice says, “God does not hide behind cathedral walls.”     God calls us to places and situations that may, like in the scene from on the waterfront, put us at risk for the sake of the other – a kind of ‘hating self’ so as to be true to the way and the will of God, a way of losing self for God’s good purposes, so we might be even more than we normally would be.

Some Greeks came earnestly seeking Jesus  - the one who had caused such a commotion in Jerusalem.   They wanted to see and hear and to know this one who spoke of the kingdom of God and raised Lazarus from death. 

They wanted to be a part of that kingdom of life.   

And they got their wish.   They saw Jesus.   He didn’t perform any miracles for them.   He invited them, as he does us, to follow him even though the path might lead through suffering and death.   Those who want to see Jesus today, what do they want to see? – Crowns without crosses, discipleship without sacrifice, love without hate, service without cost or pain?   

Jesus was prepared to suffer and die in service to God and humanity, and lose himself this way rather than fleeing and hiding,

Thereby saving himself only to lose his real and authentic self.      Jesus’ crucifixion, as John’s gospel declares,  judges “the world” and drives out the “ruler of the world.”   The world (kosmos) here is not synonomous with God’s creation, but is rather the world that exists in estrangement from God and is organized in opposition to God’s purposes.  The ‘world’ is a superhuman reality, concretely embodied in structures and institutions.  This ‘world’ aggressively shapes human life and seeks to hold human beings captive to its ways.   Kosmos is probably best translated as “the system.”   And this system is driven by a spirit or force (“the ruler of the world”), whose ways are domination, violence, and death.   Indeed, in this scripture text, the crucifixion is interpreted as an exorcism,

in which ‘the system’ is judged and its driving force  (its ruler) is ‘cast out’  by means of the cross.  

We live within a system that consumes and consumes even though we know such consumption is not giving us life, and we know it is killing others in sweatshops throughout the system.   We live in a system shaped by hierarchies of winners and losers.  And the spirit that drives such a system creates the structures and institutions that perpetuate oppression and injustice.   Another aspect of the system that is particularly prevalent in our contemporary context is violence.  

The ‘myth of redemptive violence’, as Walter Wink describes it, is the primary myth of the system.   According to this myth, the way to bring order out of chaos is through violently defeating “the other.’ 

And the way to deal with threats from enemies is by violently eliminating them  -- as the system seeks to do to Jesus.   This myth plays itself out everywhere in our culture.  We see it in the old, almost archetypal, Popeye cartoons in which Popeye restores order by eating his spinach and beating up Bluto.  We see it in video games and movies that train our children in this myth from their earliest days.   More seriously, we see it in acts of terrorism and in nations’ response to terrorism.  

Many of us have trouble even imagining alternatives to this myth  -- a grim signal of our captivity to it.  Throughout his journey to the cross, Jesus enacts his freedom from this myth, refusing to respond in the system’s own violent terms.   On the cross Jesus publicly and dramatically judges the system by exposing it for what it is – not the divine regent of the world, but an opponent of God’s purposes; not the way of life, but the way of death.   And by exposing the system in this way, Jesus drives out the force behind the system; for once we have seen the system for what it is, we begin to be set free from its captivating ways.  

We are set free to die to a life shaped by the system, in order to live fully and freely in the way of Christ.

Martin Luther King jr.’s  non-violent campaigns illustrate Jesus’ work.  When the white powers-that-be turned the hoses and dogs on the marchers – and the images splashed across television – the reality of white racism was graphically and publicly exposed for all to see.  And King knew exactly what he was doing:  “let them get their dogs,” he shouted, “and let them get the hose, and we will leave them standing before their God and the world spattered with the blood and reeking with the stench of their Negro brothers.”    It is necessary; he continued “to bring these issues to the surface, to bring them out into the open where everybody can see them.”   And King was to some degree successful.  Once exposed, the spirit of racism began to lose some of its power over many people.

According to John, Jesus’ death and resurrection is a judgement against the imperial powers and ultimately – and paradoxically – a victory over them.  It has been observed that the language of elevation and glorification for Jesus is reminiscent of roman imperial propaganda.   Indeed, the whole discourse in John about Jesus’ elevation and glorification may be seen as an ironic enthronement in which Jesus by his death on the cross offers the ultimate challenge to roman authority.  

John alerts us to the seductive power of the world.   But there can be no compromise.  Jesus is king.  The emperor is not.   As we walk the final days of lent through holy week, this truth both sustains and challenges us as we contemplate Jesus’ death and resurrection.  May we not lose ourselves in the ‘madness’ of worldly goals and ambitions; rather, may we lose ourselves in our love of God and our following of Jesus Christ so that we might be more fully alive, more real, filled with the abundant and eternal life God yearns for us to have.   Thanks and praise be to God. Amen.

Major Resources:

“Weekly Sermon Illustration:Salvation” by Frederick Buechner in http://frederickbuechner.com/content/weekly-sermon-illustration-salvation

“The Sermon: An Approach” by Raymond Bailey in Word & Witness, Vol. 97:2 (Year B), p. 80.

Editor:  Paul Scott Wilson.  Liturgical Publications Inc.  New Berlin, WI.  1997.

“Homiletical Perspective” by Charles L. Campbell in Feasting on the Word, Year B, Volume 2,

pp. 140-145.   Editors:  David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor.  Westminster John Knox Press.

Louisville, Kentucky.  2008.

SERMON FOURTH SUNDAY OF LENT – YEAR B “LIFE IN THE LIGHT” JOHN 3:14-21 / MARCH 15, 2015

sermon

fourth sunday of lent – year b

“life in the light”

john 3:14-21 / march 15, 2015

Let us pray:  May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable to you, O God, our strength and our redeemer.  Amen.

Have you ever seen one of these signs?   I have seen them in a variety of places but most often, while watching sporting events.   Sidney Crosby has just scored on a picture perfect break away, and there is John 3:16 perfectly positioned, right behind the net, ready for the TV replay.   Or Jose Bautista hits a home run ball over the centre field fence, and there’s John 3:16 again hanging from the upper deck in full view of the TV cameras.  John 3:16 has been at the Stanley cup finals, the world series, the super bowl, and always manages to get perfect seats for getting on TV.   People bring John 3:16 to the game because John 3:16 is good news.

“For so loving the world, God gave God’s only son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” the reason you see this scripture sentence in so many places is that many say this line is the heart and soul of the gospel, the good news of Jesus Christ in miniature.

The whole message about Jesus and the church and Christianity, they say, can be summed up in this one sentence.    Of course, the thing about summary statements is that they have to be unpacked.  You have to take the summary keywords and expand upon their meaning, in order to bring out everything the statement has to say.  And different people unpack John 3:16 with different understandings.

One way that this verse is understood, a way I think is very common in north American evangelical Christianity, goes something like this:   God loves the world so much that God wants to save it, rather than destroy it. 

Now, the world deserves to be destroyed: because of sin, because of rebellion against God’s commandments, the world needs to be punished, and the punishment for sin is death.  But because God loves the world, God wants to save the world – or at least a part of the world – and not destroy it after all.  So God gives Jesus to die on the cross, to suffer on the cross the punishment that should rightly fall on us, so that we won’t have to be destroyed.  and if you believe this, if  you accept this as true that Jesus died for  your sins and that God will no longer punish you, then you are saved, then you are rescued from perishing when the world is destroyed,

 and you are given assurance of eternal life in heaven with other faithful people who believed like you.    I think that’s the way a lot of people who hold up their “John 3:16” signs understand the meaning of that famous verse.

But this understanding is not without its problems.  It seems to set up a dichotomy in God between judgement and love.   It seems to draw a big dividing line between those who believe and those who don’t, between those who will get into heaven and those who will be made to perish.  

A candidate for ordination included in her statement of faith the certain conviction that God’s love extends to all people.  A few sentences later she affirmed that those who place their faith in Christ are saved.   One of her examiners, noting both declarations, asked, “which one is it?”  So, does God love all people, or only those who have faith in Christ?   the gospel reading today seems to contradict itself:  on the one hand it states,  “God did not send the son into the world to condemn the world...”  yet on the other hand we read, “those who do not believe are condemned already...”    well, which is it?

There is another way to unpack John 3:16?    Here’s what I think it means: God loves the world. Period.

No judgement, no punishment, no destruction.   God loves the world. 

God created the world for love, so that God could share the gift of love with something that was not God, so that God could nurture the universe into evolving and growing and developing creatures that could love each other and could love God back.   That doesn’t mean there’s no such thing as sin.   it doesn’t mean God makes no judgement and no distinction between what is loving and what isn’t loving.   But it does mean that God does not simply destroy sin; it means that God has made a solemn promise, a covenant, to deal with sin not by destroying it but by loving it into redemption and reconciliation.  

God loves the world. 

Remember this gospel according to John would have been received, in the first instance, by those who were believers in God – the God revealed in the Jewish scriptures and in the letters of Paul and the stories and writings of Mark, Luke and Matthew.     They were those who were anticipating that this God of Israel would be doing something new and wonderful through this one called Christ – the anointed one, the messiah.   John was saying, “Look, what you have been waiting for, what you have been hoping for – has now arrived.  God has sent to you Jesus, the Christ, as a light for your life.

If you reject him, then you are rejecting your hopes and dreams and turning away from the light that God has sent to you.   

John is not talking to or even thinking about people of other faiths; he is concerned about a Christian faith community.    Essentially he envisions two categories of persons who are ‘condemned’ because of their rejection of Christ – firstly those who miss out on the fact that their long held hopes and dreams have been fulfilled in Christ and they just can’t accept it – and secondly those who reject Christ because they have chosen a life contrary to what belief in Christ is all about.     In John’s gospel the word ‘believe’ is always an action word.   It is something you do; it is not simply giving cognitive affirmation to certain propositions.  Believing in Jesus Christ means living like Jesus Christ, following his way, living out his values, imitatiing his example.    

So God has no intention of condemning the world; God loves the world.   To be sure, there is still judgement.   Our God is a just God who demands justice.  Our God does not want us to live in darkness, and so has shone light into that darkness.   And coming into the light will always involve some judgement – some of it we bring upon ourselves, some of it God will reveal.  But, in Jesus Christ, God is not interested in condemnation.    

When we let that light guide our way, let it expose our ‘dark side’ and reveal our shortcomings,  there is the strong possibility that we will be changed as we learn and begin to live as taught and exemplified by Jesus.

Our lives become filled with divine love which, as our gospel reading today declares grants us eternal life.    Now,   eternal life is not something that only refers to life beyond death, but is something we can begin to know and experience in this world, in this life, here and now.    The Greek phrase that John uses here, which has been translated as ‘eternal life’, literally means “the life of the ages”; and what the phrase points to is a vitality, an aliveness, a creativity that endures throughout all times and places.   age after age,  era after era,  year after year, day after day, even moment after moment, things change, the world is full of changes, governments rise and fall, weather systems form and disperse, people come and go, health waxes and wanes.    Things change, and yet through all that change there is something that endures, something that is always there, some fundamental creativity out of which all the changes come and into which all the changes return.   That steady, trustworthy, always-there creativity is what John calls “the life of the ages,”  or “eternal life,” 

The life that comes from God and will not let us go.   Eternal life, if we understand it this way, is a quality of vital creativity that we can come to know in the justice and peace and love we work for here and now, with each other, in this life  -- and that will endure with us as this life changes and opens up into a height of life, a heaven of life, beyond anything we now know.  

“For so loving the world, God gave God’s only son....”

It was God’s love that sent Jesus to the world, where he taught that love is not merely for those who look and think and believe like us, but even for our enemies and those who persecute us.  It was love that stirred the first century church to open its doors not only to Jews but also to gentiles, not only to those deemed worthy but also those marginalized by society:  the lame, the blind, the leper, the poor, the ritually unclean.   

even in our own day, when established powers have sought to limit God’s love by the exclusion of others from full participation in the community, divine compassion for the oppressed and divine passion for justice have called forth prophets to declare that God’s love includes all, regardless of age or race, nationality or creed, gender or sexual orientation.   

For God so loves the world, for God so loves you – each and every one of you personally and collectively –

Loves you – so much that God gave God’s only son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but have eternal life.  Thanks and praise be to God.  Amen.

(“Pastoral Perspective” by Paul C. Shupe in Feasting on the Word, Year B,Volume 2, pp.116-120.

Editors:  David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor.   Westminster John Knox Press.   Louisville, Kentucky.  2008.

“John 3:16” by the Rev. Dr. Paul S. Nancarrow in Trinity Church Sermons.  http://trinitysermons.blogspot.ca/2012/03john-316.html

“What Saves You” by The Rev. Emily K. Rodgers in Preaching – Word & Witness, Vol. 06:2 pp. 35-36.   Editor:  Paul Scott Wilson.

Liturgical Publications Inc.  New Berlin, WI.  2006.

SERMON – THIRD SUNDAY OF LENT – YEAR B “TEMPLE TANTRUM” JOHN 2:13-22 / MARCH 8, 2015

sermon – third sunday of lent – year b

“temple tantrum”

john 2:13-22 / march 8, 2015

Let us pray:  May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable to you, O God, our strength and our redeemer.  Amen.

“Gentle Jesus – meek and mild...”    that image of Jesus has been a popular one.    The picture I showed the children earlier  was quite like the one I remember when I was a child – often it was framed and hanging on a wall  in Sunday school classrooms.  In it Jesus appears  so  gentle and serene.    As a youngster I imagined Jesus would be the perfect parent --  never raising his voice or getting upset.    “Gentle Jesus, meek and mild...   

my favourite theologian, N.T. Wright, states that many popular depictions of Jesus portray him as:  “a hippy peace-child, a delicate flower of a man...  why would anyone want to hurt him?   Maybe because he’s so annoyingly sweet and precious; but that’s not the story of the gospels.”  Instead Wright says, “we should be looking for a ‘crucifiable’ Jesus, a Jesus who does something so provocative as to make the...leaders of the day murderously hostile.”  And that’s exactly the Jesus we find in today’s gospel passage.    Jesus has been traveling to Jerusalem, and now he has arrived there - 

 arrived at the very centre of religious and political life in Israel.  Jesus enters the temple, what Wright calls the “beating heart of Judaism.”   The temple was the centre of everything:  of worship and music, politics and society.   It was the place where Israel’s God had promised to live in the middle of the people.  It was the focal point of the nation.   And Jesus chooses one of the most important times to enter it:  Passover, the holiest of all religious celebrations commemorating when god delivered the Israelites from captivity in Egypt.    ---   And then mayhem ensues. 

Jesus takes deliberate, calculated action.    He goes and makes a whip of rope.  He comes back and drives the merchants out of the temple.   People are running.  Animals scatter all over the place.   Money is flying. Tables are being knocked over.    So, what is going on here?    I had better state first what’s not going on.   Notwithstanding the sermon title, Jesus is not just losing his temper or having a hissy fit.   Jesus does not need an anger management course.  

There is anger here, to be sure, but it is a righteous anger, not an impulsive one.    Jesus’ action in the temple is a planned, well thought out, orchestrated act of protest.  

This act of Jesus is an act of disruption – not so much a disruption of the events of that day in the temple, but an act of disruption that cut to the core of the historic Jewish faith and all it stood for.   It was a moment of crisis for the people of God.   Jesus was saying that the old way of doing faith was no longer appropriate, that the heart of faith had become lost in the ritualism, that it was passion for god that had sold out, not pigeons for sacrifice.   Jesus is confronting the people of god with a deeply uncomfortable truth – this was a moment for them to re-assess.   Was it enough for them to be tied to their rituals and customs or did they need to find the heart of their faith once more?   

Now, I have to say, it’s important to say, that Jesus was not opposed to Jewish tradition and not opposed to the rituals of Judaism per se.  Jesus was a Jew, born and brought up steeped in the law and ways of the synagogue.  And it was because he was a devoted Jew that he overturned the tables in the temple.  

He was acting in the line of the prophets, in the line of Micah who, hundreds of years before had written: 

“Will God be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousand rivers of oil....God has told you what is good:  and what does God require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God?”  

Jesus was acting in the line of the prophets, in the line of Amos who challenged Israel with these words: 

“’Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them,’ says God, ‘but let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an everflowing stream.’”   Jesus was acting in the line of the prophets, in the line of Jeremiah who proclaimed:  “do not trust in the deceptive words,

‘This is the temple of God’.  But act justly.  Do not oppress the alien, the orphan and the widow.  Do not go after other Gods.  Then I will be with you in this place.”

Micah, Amos, Jeremiah -- they knew, and Jesus knew - that true faith cannot ever be expressed through empty rituals but that the rituals we undertake must be an expression of the real worship of our lives:  justice, kindness, humility, non-oppression, care for the marginalized, faithfulness and righteousness.   If our worship does not engage these attitudes and actions,

it is not true worship.   God is not primarily interested in beautiful worship, God is interested in true worship – and the two are very different indeed, though not mutually exclusive.  

But, by the time Jesus visited the temple on that day,

The leaders of the people had lost sight of the difference.  The purity rituals had become rituals of discrimination:  

Jews in the inner court, gentiles in the outer court; men in one section, women in another; sacrifices the poor could afford, sacrifices the rich could afford.  In the beauty of the ritual, the heart of purity had been lost and that is what made Jesus angry, and, as a prophet, he had to take a stand.    Theologian Marcus Borg has said, “in the message and activity of Jesus, we see an alternative social vision:  a community shaped not by the ethos and politics of purity, but by the ethos and politics of compassion.”

Those making this holy pilgrimage to Jerusalem at Passover – for many a once in a lifetime opportunity – had to purchase animals for sacrifice; they could hardly be expected to bring their own.  And the animals for sale in the temple courts were guaranteed to be sacrifice-approved animals of the proper kind – without blemish.  The moneychangers were needed  because it was prohibited at the temple to offer money that bore the image of a person or a God.   The official roman coins were imprinted with the image of Caesar, so anyone with this impure money needed to trade it in for pure money. 

Pure animals, pure money, pure bodies – these were required to enter further into the temple courts;

This purity was required of those wishing to offer their sacrifices to Yahweh.   

Now you don’t come across many churches these days that have purity requirements for those who wish to come in to worship.    Or at least they wouldn’t admit to having purity requirements.   

Alice Walker wrote a story entitled, the “welcome table” about a woman who wanted to go to church and worship God.    She walked right on up the steps and into the cold sanctuary.  The minister shook her hand and said, “You know – this is not your church.”    Eventually, the ushers threw her out the door.  Seems the woman wasn’t neat enough or clean enough or white enough to worship in that church.   You might have heard stories of these churches with unwritten purity codes.   Places where the welcome sign is out, but you’re not really welcome if you wear the wrong clothes or use the wrong terms or drive the wrong car or have skin the wrong colour or have a partner of the wrong gender.    I know that some of you are here in this church because you feel like you can come as you are.   This is a place where lots of different kinds of people are welcome to come and seek God.  

Our mission statement says in part that Augustine is an inclusive, affirming Christian community, that it is a welcoming sanctuary for seekers and skeptics, that invites others to be part of our community,

That seeks, among other things, to be inclusive, welcoming, caring and respectful.        And I believe that is an ethos, a way of being, that we strive to maintain and even improve along the way.    Perhaps we can do a better job in some areas;  for instance -  ensuring those hard of hearing  are made to feel more welcome;  or perhaps those  with particular disabilities could be made more welcome;  maybe those who would look to different styles of worship or ways of gathering might be made to feel more welcome.   

Even those of us with the best intentions can set up purity requirements without even knowing it.   Even in welcoming, loving, accepting congregations such as ours, I think it doesn’t hurt to hold onto this image of Jesus, whip in hand.   Any entrance requirements we might be tempted to make, Jesus stands ready to strike them down.   This is part of the message of this story for sure – this key story from Jesus’ life that has made its way into all four gospels: God does not appreciate efforts to regulate who can enter the temple. 

Now the temple in those days was not simply ‘a’ house of God; it was ‘the’ house of God  -- the place where God lived.    Jesus, in his actions, is seen to desecrate the outer court of the temple in a way that prevents people from meeting the purity requirements for entering.  

The religious authorities confront him; they ask him by what authority he is doing such things.   He starts talking about destroying the temple and in three days raising it up again, a veiled reference to himself.    Consider, if God is inside a building, the people who control access to the building control access to God.   I think that is what Jesus was upset about.   it wasn’t that people were trying to make a living.  It wasn’t about commercial transactions somehow defiling the temple.   Jesus was angry because the authorities were trying to control access to God – who could approach God, some getting fuller access than others by virtue of criteria set by human authority and not Gods.    In naming himself as the temple, Jesus locates the divine presence within himself, instead of in a building that can be controlled.   Maybe this is why, while the other three gospels put this story at the end, John has it near the very beginning of Jesus’ ministry.   so we can see this temple walking around talking to, and touching all of the people who would never, could never, have walked into  the temple –   the blind, the lame, the lepers, women, gentiles.    All of us, every one of us, has unfettered access to God – God -whose ways are made  known, whose love is revealed, whose very presence shines forth in the one we call Emmanuel – God-with-us -  our saviour, Jesus Christ. Thanks and praise be to God.    Amen.

Major Resources:

“The Ritual And Reality” by Darryl Dash in Dash/House, November 23, 2013.

http://dashhouse.come/sermons/2013/11/22/the-ritual-and-reality-john-213-22

“Jesus in the Temple” by Joanna Harder in Spacious Faith, March 11, 2012.

http://spaciousfaith.com/sermons-etc/new-testament-texts/john-213-22-jesus-in-the-temple/

“Jesus Cleanses the Temple” in http://www.stmaryslinton.org/node/118

   

SERMON SECOND SUNDAY OF LENT – YEAR B “THE FORK IN THE ROAD” MARK 8:31-36 / MARCH 1, 2015

sermon

second sunday of lent – year b

“the fork in the road”

mark 8:31-36  /  march 1, 2015

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable to you, O God, our strength and our redeemer.  Amen.

Yogi Berra, legendary baseball player, once quipped, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”  

Here, early on in our journey through the season of Lent, we come to a fork in the road.   Here, in the eighth chapter of Mark’s gospel, the story of Jesus breaks in half.    This is where the story ends.   This is where the story begins.  It all depends.   It all depends where you are going and which direction you are traveling and who you are following.    Jesus and his disciples are traveling through the villages of Caesarea Philippi. 

The landscape doesn’t look particularly imposing, but if you drop a ball in the first part of the eighth chapter it bounces back to Galilee where the story of Jesus began with his ministry of healing, preaching, confronting and ousting  evil, calming storms, feeding multitudes.    If you drop a ball in this, the latter part of the eighth chapter, it rolls all the way to Jerusalem, it rolls all the way to the foot of the cross.

The disciples have come to a fork in the road and they want to take it.  They want to follow Jesus; they have been following Jesus.   Later Peter will blurt out,

“We have left everything and followed you!”    They want to follow Jesus but when they hear him talking about suffering and death their hearts sink within them; suffering, rejection, death, who would choose that direction?    No one would.   They want to follow Jesus and they don’t want to follow Jesus.   They have come to the fork in the road and they want to take it. 

This fork in the road is where many would part company with him, but Peter doesn’t want to part ways.  

He doesn’t want to take the fork in the road that leads away from Jesus; Peter only wants supportively to improve on Jesus’ plan.  Peter wants to chart a course for Jesus that avoids suffering, rejection, and death.  It’s a helpful suggestion.   I mean what are friends for?    Jesus’ best friends and followers understand this.   They remove the cross from their sanctuaries because the symbolism of the cross is so unpleasant, so off-putting, so negative.  They want a symbol more positive,

A worship more buoyant, a faith more attractive.  

What Jesus is selling here in Ceasarea Phillipi just won’t sell.   Peter knows that.  Many churches see things the same way.   

This passage  in the eighth chapter of Mark points us to the contrast between what has been called the ‘theology of glory’ and the ‘theology of the cross’.  

The theology of glory is built on what appears to be self-evident about life and on assumptions about the way one would expect God to act in the world.  

The theology of the cross, however, is grounded in God’s self-revelation in the weakness of suffering and death.      We can imagine the scene.  Peter walks over to Jesus, puts his arm around him, takes him aside to set him straight about messiahship.  We might imagine Peer saying to Jesus, “suffering, rejection, and death are not on the agenda.  Prestige, power, and dominion are the agenda.    It’s David’s throne we’re after, ruling the nations with power and might.   We signed on for a crown, not a cross!”    Jesus hears peter out.  Then, turning and looking at all of the disciples, he rebukes Peter  and what a rebuke it is!   Peters comments are, for Jesus, evil, even satanic.  Peter’s words remind Jesus of his own personal temptations, and of the  forces beyond him that set out to change his course, to turn him away from the cross to another kind of messiah.   The truth about who God is often contradicts what persons expect God to be.  He truth is God’s mercy is given to sinners, not reserved for the righteous; God’s strength is exposed in weakness, not displayed in power;

God’s wisdom is veiled in parable and paradox, not set out in self-help maxims; God’s life is disclosed in death.  Thus it is that Jesus says those who want to save their life will lose it, while those who lose their life for the sake of the gospel will save it.   God is not conformed to human expectations or desires, for God is found in uncertainty, danger, and suffering  - precisely where human wisdom perceives God’s absence.  

Contemporary theologian Douglas John Hall writes about a theology of the cross that is set over against a North American culture of official optimism, national progress, technological advance, personal fulfillment, and church growth.   Plumbing the depths of such an understanding of God is difficult when dominant expressions of Christianity prize success and effectiveness in corporate life, personal fulfillment, and deliverance from pain.  A theology of the cross declares that faith is not certainty, hope is not mere optimism, and love is not painless.  This may not be a welcome message in many churches who have done away with the cross in their sanctuaries.   Mark’s gospel rules out a faith built on a romanticized portrait of a tolerant Jesus who only helps and heals and welcomes.   Anthony Padovano wrote of Jesus’ suffering this way:  “it was not a love for suffering which Christ reveals, but a love which prevails in suffering.  

It is not the physical death of Jesus which is redemptive, but the love of Jesus for us even unto death.”      

Out of his love of God and love of neighbour Jesus said what he did, lived as he did, and did not deviate from that path even when that path led to Jerusalem and the excruciating death that awaited him.     It’s a denial of ‘self’ as Jesus put it.  

We might expect God to do for us what the world tells us we need:  to be self-seeking, self-enhancing, to be self-concerned, self- actualiziing  - for our own benefit,  our own success,  our own individual betterment and progress.    But this scripture text declares the hard truth that to follow Jesus we are to give up ‘self’.    

As Jesus and his followers prepare to go to Jerusalem, Jesus tells them to give up their lives, in other versions, to leave the ‘self’ behind.  Don’t pack your ‘self’; leave it here in the fork in the road.  leave ‘self’ here because you can’t take it with you; leave ‘self’ behind because it’s too large to pack, too heavy to carry; leave ‘self’ behind because you wouldn’t know what to do with it once you get there.   So, how can we leave our ‘selfs’ behind?   How do we ‘deny ourselves’?   The ‘self’ inside me is me. 

This ‘self’ is what decides for me.  This ‘self’ chooses to go this way or that way.   How do I, how do we, leave this ‘self’ behind?  A Zen master once asked his pupil,”show me this ‘self’ you’re always talking about so much?” 

If we could haul out our ‘self’ as a specific thing or object, we could leave it behind like a forgotten toothbrush or a misplaced key, but our ‘self’ is precisely what we cannot get out of, get loose from, depart from.   How do we do that?  

Well I believe this is a life-long task.   It is a matter of living and growing into the likeness of Christ, a matter of letting go of ‘self’ and taking up – shouldering -- our own cross as Jesus says.    The ‘cross’, by the way is not some personal problem we have, some difficulty or burden in our lives.   Rather, the ‘cross’ is something we bear because we follow Jesus.   Jesus, in his rebuke of  Peter, is saying that he does not promise  that by following him  things will go better for us.  That is the desire of the ‘self’.   Rather, he promises that in following him, we will find our way to God.  

When we follow Jesus we may find ourselves traveling to the Jerusalem’s of our world and our lives – places where there is oppression, corruption, those in power pre-occupied with selfish concerns.    And being in such places and times bringing with us gospel values which we dare to express  in word and action can bring to us suffering and rejection.   Very few of us, thankfully, will ever suffer anything even remotely close to bodily harm or death for the sake of our faith?   

One who did – Christian Martyr – Dietrich Bonhoeffer – wrote this in his publication entitled, letters and papers from prison:   “it is only by living completely in this world that one learns to believe.  One must abandon every attempt to make something of oneself.  This  is what I mean....taking life in one’s stride, with all its duties and problems, its successes and failures, its experiences and helplessness.  It is in such life that we throw ourselves utterly in the arms of God and participate in the sufferings in the world and watch with Christ....   that is faith...and that is what makes a person and a Christian.  How can success make us arrogant or failure lead us astray, when we participate in the sufferings of God by living in this world?” 

In this forty days of Lent, we may contemplate not only the wonderful power of the cross of Christ, but the power inherent in taking up our own crosses too.  Opportunities are daily before us, times when we may give our lives sacrificially to acts of love, compassion, justice, and peace, even in the face of the same imperial forces of sin and death that confronted Jesus.

I invite you, in this Lenten season, and in our faith journey beyond, to  travel together.   We take the fork in the road, traveling with divided hearts, clinging to self yet following Jesus, hoping to lose ourselves but fearful of what would be left of us,  -- but we travel together.

“I always love to begin a journey on Sundays,” said the great author, Jonathan Swift.   “I always love to begin a journey on Sundays,” he said, “because I shall have the prayers of the church to preserve all that travel by land, or by water.”  We pray for each other; we do not pray for our ‘selfs,’  but pray that we might leave them behind on the way.   We make our journey following Jesus—enclosed and embraced  -- in our prayers for each other.   Amen.

Major Resources:

“The Art of Losing Our “Selfs”, by Patrick J. Willson in Preaching – Word & Witness, Vol. 03:1 (Year B), pp.75-76.   Paul Scott Wilson, editor.   Liturgical Publications Inc.   New Berlin WI.  2003.

“Theological Perspective” by Joseph D. Small and “Homiletical Perspective” by W. Hulitt Gloer in

Feasting on the Word, Year B, Volume 2, pp.68-73.  David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor, Editors.

Westminster John Knox Press.  Louisville, Kentucky.   2008.

“Suggestions For Preaching” in Emphasis – A Preaching Journal for the Parish Pastor, Vol. 26,

Number 5, p.51.CSS Publishing Company, Inc.  Lima, Ohio.  1997.

“Proclaiming the Text” in Pulpit Resource, Vol. 245 No. 1 Year B, pp. 31-32.  Editor:  William H. Willimon.

Wood Lake Books.  Winfield, BC.  1997.