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.
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