Sermon Text: Romans 4:13-25, Mark 8:31-38
Second Sunday of Lent, 12 Mar 06
There is a passion play put on every year during Lent at the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, CA that would dazzle Disneyland.
Centurions ride through the audience on white Arabian horses; Pilate feeds his pet tiger while questioning Jesus; donkeys and dancing girls accompany Jesus on Palm Sunday; the resurrection is accompanied by fireworks and a light show; and the women at the tomb are greeted by angels who fly forty feet above the audience. There are thunderstorms, earthquakes, smoke, and lights, all live and in color in the Crystal Cathedral in this passion play which just happens to be called the "Glory of Easter" (Michale R. Linton, "Smoke & Mirrors at the Crystal Cathedral," www.leaderu.com/ftissues/ft9706/opnion/linton.html). But the Glory of Easter is nothing more than special effects if we skip over what it means to be the Messiah of God.
Today, Peter is our teacher in the reading from the Gospel of Mark. Of course, Jesus is doing the teaching, but we are really learning from Peter, because we're so much like Peter. Fred Craddock says that people read the bible to find themselves in the pages. When we run into Peter in the Bible, we see ourselves. And we learn just a little more about ourselves.
It starts out looking so good. It's as if we can all cheer Yes! when Jesus asks his disciples, "Who do you say that I am?" and Peter gets it! Peter has been following Jesus -- this Jesus who teaches, and casts out demons, and heals lepers, calms the storm, raises the dead, feeds the 5000 and walks on water. Jesus asks the big question -- "Who do you say I am?" And Peter has the right answer. He says the Messiah! And we're glad for Peter. Peter the rock. Peter, the leader. Peter, who builds the church. But it's only two verses later that we see that Peter doesn't get it!. Peter -- and we are all like Peter -- wants a messiah made in his own image, not according to God's plan.
So Jesus began to teach all of them. "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 3 days rise again." He said all this quite openly, the scriptures tell us. No metaphors, no "destroy this temple and in three days it will be rebuilt." No raising of Lazarus as a prefiguring of his own death and resurrection. Just straight language.
Look Peter, this is how it is: I am going to suffer; the whole establishment, everyone with any power is going to call me a liar, and abuse me in all sorts of ways before they kill me. Then I will rise from the dead.
Peter doesn't like what he hears. So Peter rebukes his teacher. Talks back. Tells his Lord and Messiah that he doesn't' know what he is talking about. The Messiah can't possibly be headed for such an end. He's got to be wrong.
Poor Peter. Don't you just love him? The things he does and he says -- he doesn't mean to be the way he is. He just can't help it sometimes. Remember what Paul said about himself? "For I do not do what I want but I do the very thing I hate." He could have been talking about Peter. Poor Peter.
But don't you just love Peter -- he is so much like us. Despite his confession of faith -- his words -- I believe you are the Messiah -- he doesn't understand what it means to be God's messiah.
And so Jesus rebukes him. In fact calls him Satan -- who in Mark's gospel is anyone who is an adversary of God. Get behind me Peter, get in line, be my follower, you're called to be a disciple. Get your focus on divine things, not human things.
Do you wonder what Peter did then? Did he hang his, turn red with embarrassment, walk off to the side, grumble about Jesus and his way, wish he had never quit the fishing job to follow this guy? Did he get mad, stomp off, wonder why he was wasting his time with someone who didn't seem to know the first thing about being a messiah -- God's chosen one who would save Israel?
But then Jesus isn't just talking to Peter anymore, or to the disciples. He turns to the whole crowd and says to everybody: "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." The cross of Christ is for everyone!
And how can we call this good news? The modern Christian church doesn't want to hear this news. Phillip Reiff from the University of Chicago observed not long ago that any church or preacher who keeps preaching on the cross is not going to grow.
"The preacher will not be a success and the church will not grow," he says, "because in our culture what we are interested in is success, not sacrifice" (Fred B. Craddock, "Why the Cross," Cherry Log Sermons, Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001, p. 79-80). Those words are going to make some of us uncomfortable.
Like Peter we want to get to the victory part and skip the defeat. But unless we understand the absolute defeat of the cross, we won't comprehend the absolute victory of the empty tomb.
Peter was only the first in a long line of humanity that has not understood the cross. Whenever we find in human history or in ourselves that we are using the cross to abuse or victimize, we can be sure we are not understanding the cross. For centuries, women have been urged by the church to put up with abuse as a matter of Christian sacrifice, Christian virtue. It's your lot to bear, your burden to carry, to put up with a husband who beats you, or an alcoholic who drinks up the children's meals. That is not Jesus' way of the cross.
Or in 19th century America, it was very common for white preachers to hold worship services for slaves and to preach to them that slavery was their cross to bear, their way of following Jesus. That is not Jesus' way of the cross.
What does it mean to carry the cross?
We live in an age and a place where we have a quick fix for everything. Happiness is our goal. Suffering is something we avoid at all costs, and try to cure when we can't avoid it any more.
We want our religion the same way. We want to make a pledge and have it return to us tenfold in blessings. We want to be protected from sacrifice, have security. Focus on the glory, gain the victory. Avoid the cross and its suffering and sacrifice at all costs. To really understand the cross, we have to be able to step out of our culture. Suffering can teach us if we let it.
If we look at the Romans text from today, we get from Paul in just a sweep of a few verses, the lessons from Abraham. The story of Abraham and Sarah is a story of endurance and you can bet there was some suffering for both of them. It was years from the time God first started appearing to Abraham and making his promises -- of being the father of nations, having numerous descendents. But 24 years after God starts making promises -- Sarah is still barren. And they've been wandering in the desert -- nomads all this time. But despite all of this, Abraham still believes in the God who "gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist." "No distrust made him waver," Paul tells us, "but he grew strong in his faith." "Being fully convinced that God was able to do what he promised."
That kind of faith lets us take up our cross and follow Jesus. And only when we follow Jesus -- do we begin to understand how the absolute defeat of Jesus on the cross teaches us more about God than anything else in the whole Bible.
In another one of his letters, Paul says "we proclaim Christ crucified" and even though that might sound like foolishness, that is the power of God.
The offertory that we heard sung today by our soloists says in music what Paul says over and over in his letters about the power of the cross.
The power of the cross goes beyond Jesus' willing to be faithful to the end. Christ crucified is not just a man who endured suffering. Not just a good man, a great philosopher, a healer, a miracle worker. Christ crucified tells us that our God is the God who enters into our suffering with us. Alfred North Whitehead calls God "the fellow sufferer who understands." When we carry the cross, we also come to Calvary where we see God in the midst of deepest places of human suffering.
Fred Craddock tells a story that gives us an image of this God who suffers with us. He says: "Sometimes a child falls down and skins a knee or an elbow, then runs crying to his mother. The mother picks up the child and says -- in what is the oldest myth in the world -- "let me kiss it and make it well," as if mother has magic saliva or something. She picks up the child, kisses the skinned place, holds the child in her lap, and all is well.
Did her kiss make it well? No, no. It was that ten minutes in her lap. Just sit in the lap of love and see that mother crying. "Mother? Why are you crying? I'm the one that hurt my elbow." "Because you hurt," the mother says, "I hurt." That does more for a child than all the bandages and medicine in the world, just sitting on the lap.
What is the cross? It is to sit for a few minutes on the lap of God, who hurts because we hurt (Fred B. Craddock, "Why the Cross," Cherry Log Sermons, Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001, p. 82-83).
The cross is the only way to Easter.
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