Sermon, Sun 1 March - 2nd Lent - 'A cross-carrying community'

For those who didn't get to church, and those who'd like to use it as a reflection tool, here's the sermon from Sunday past.

Readings:

Romans 4:13-25

Mark 8:31-38

SERMON  ‘A Cross-carrying community’

Let’s pray:

may the words of my mouth, and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer.  Amen.

It was all so upside-down.

Madness.

There’d been miracles:

healings,

the feeding of multitudes.

Surely, surely these were signs that God was with them.

People everywhere had heard of him -

were speaking of him,

   were speculating about him.

Who was he,

this wandering rabbi performing wondrous deeds?

‘Who do you say I am?’

he’d asked his closest followers.

And, in a moment of startled insight,

Peter found himself uttering words that generation after generation

had yearned for, had longed for:

‘You are the Christ.’

Four little words,

weighed down by a myriad of hopes and expectations,

and chief among these: liberation.

Liberation from illness,

from hunger...

and indeed, Jesus had shown his credentials there,

but beyond these,

a liberation from the yoke of oppressive empire

that echoed down through centuries

of having been in thrall to other empires:

Egypt

Persia

Babylon,

and latterly, Rome.

‘You are the Christ’

expressed the hope for a new David -

a deliverer anointed by God to free the Jewish nation from

the tyranny of Rome,

a deliverer who would visit God’s judgement upon those

who would dare to crush his chosen ones;

 ‘You are the Christ’ came with expectations of a warrior Messiah,

who would avenge the wrongs done to Israel

and restore Israel to her former glory;

who would resurrect national pride from the gutters of inglorious, humiliating subjugation,

and cause other nations to humble themselves and bow down -

to pay homage.

But...

it was all so upside-down.

Madness.

‘You are the Christ.’

Four little words that are immediately seized upon by Jesus

to teach those closest to him just what it is to be the Christ.

What follows is plain speaking - blunt talk.

In no uncertain terms, the disciples are disabused of any notions

of glory they may have had when thinking of the nature of Messiahship.

No amazing escape across a miraculously dried sea-bed,

no joyous return from exile,

no heroic, battle-hardened warrior leading God’s people

to victory over Rome.

Jesus’ description of Messiahship is completely counter-cultural,

and utterly shocking:

a Messiah rejected -

a Messiah...killed.

And Peter is unnerved by this teaching,

so much so that he pulls Jesus aside and rebukes him -

because suffering and dying Messiahs

make absolutely no earthly sense at all.

Which is exactly what Jesus picks Peter up on when he says:

‘you do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of men.’

Quite a turnaround for Peter:
from profound insight to utter confusion.

From ‘you’re the Messiah’ to

‘but not that kind of Messiah!’

But it gets more alarming:

there’s talk of picking up one’s cross -

not only does the Messiah suffer, so too, do his disciples.

No power, no prestige:

rather, a call to put aside personal gain;

a call to a very different kind of faith -

a faith not built upon material symbols of earthly success,

but grounded in the God who gives life to the dead and calls into being things that were not.

It was all so upside-down.

Madness.

It    still    is, in the eyes of the world.

To deny self,

to deny gain, fame,

to let go of our preconceptions of success and of what we think

a Messiah should be:

to choose, instead, a very different way of being.

But we don’t do it alone -

as followers of the Christ -

as Christ’s body here on earth -

we are called communally to pick up,

and carry our cross -

we are a cross-carrying community.

Nourished, strengthened,

and sustained by the One we follow -

and at whose table we feast -

we are called to give of ourselves to God

and to others.

To be real, authentic:

understanding that to be fully human

is to allow ourselves to be vulnerable,

to open ourselves up to the possibility of pain and of hurt

just as God, in Christ did.

To follow, in faith, is to love sacrificially:

love our friends, yes, but love our enemies as well -

to seek ways of reconciliation.

To pick up one’s cross and follow in faith

is to call out political expediency

which relies on scapegoating those who are the most vulnerable in society

in order to gain votes in a ballot box;

it’s to engage in society,

to question the growing gap between rich and poor;

to uncover and challenge abuse of power

both on a grand scale and, at the domestic level.

To pick up one’s cross,

in the words of Archbishop Oscar Romero, is to:

enter ‘into the reality of a child,

of the poor,

of those wearing rags,

of the sick,

of a hovel, ....of a shack.

It is going to share with them.

And from the very heart of misery,

of this situation,

to say to them,

“You aren’t trash.

You aren’t marginalized.”

It is to say exactly the opposite,

“You  are valuable.”

For Romero, picking up his cross and walking in faith,

challenging oppression, and speaking out on behalf of the poor

in El Salvador, resulted in his assassination in the middle of worship.

As a cross-carrying community,

we are not called to look the other way when we see others hurt,

we’re called to get involved,

just as God, through the incarnation,

got involved with the whole human race.

It was all so upside-down.

Madness.

Returning to the conversation between

Jesus and his disciples for a moment:

In the midst of all this odd talk,

this overturning of cherished definitions of Messiah,

it’s interesting that one quite significant detail appears to get lost:

so shocked are the disciples,

that they seem to miss what Jesus says immediately after he’s told them that he’ll be rejected, suffer, and be killed:

they miss the bit about

‘and after three days,  rise again’.

As we pick up our crosses,

we discover that in the very act of giving our lives -

through sanctified love of God and neighbour -

we discover what it is to truly live;

that in giving, we discover that we truly receive.

As we walk towards Jerusalem over the course of this Lenten season,

nourished and strengthened for the journey by the

bread and wine of communion:

let us pick up our crosses,

walk in faith,

walk with our brother Jesus ‘in paths of love and justice.’

For this is the way of the upside-down kin-dom of God -

the community of faith.

Madness, perhaps,

but a life-giving,

love-giving madness

that chooses to give glory to God,

being fully persuaded that God has the power

to do what he has promised.

Amen.