The 1st United
The 2nd Sunday in Lent
Scripture
Hebrew Scriptures – Genesis 17: 1-7, 15-16[1]
1When Abram was ninety-nine years old, the LORD appeared to Abram, and said to him, “I am God Almighty; walk before me, and be blameless. 2And I will make my covenant between me and you, and will make you exceedingly numerous.” 3Then Abram fell on his face; and God said to him, 4“As for me, this is my covenant with you: You shall be the ancestor of a multitude of nations. 5No longer shall your name be Abram, but your name shall be Abraham; for I have made you the ancestor of a multitude of nations. 6I will make you exceedingly fruitful; and I will make nations of you, and kings shall come from you. 7I will establish my covenant between me and you, and your offspring after you throughout their generations, for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your offspring after you….
15God said to Abraham, “As for Sarai your wife, you shall not call her Sarai, but Sarah shall be her name. 16I will bless her, and moreover I will give you a son by her. I will bless her, and she shall give rise to nations; kings of peoples shall come from her.”
Gospel – Mark 8: 31-38[2]
31Then [Jesus] began to teach [his disciples]
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. 32He said all
this quite openly. And Peter took him
aside and began to rebuke him. 33But
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.”
34He 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. 35For
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. 36For what will it profit them to
gain the whole world and forfeit their life? 37Indeed, what can they give in
return for their life? 38Those
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.”
"Nothing
Worth Doing Can Be Accomplished In a Lifetime."
If any of us still needed a reminder
of just what season of the church year we were in, there's none more startling
than our gospel lesson for today. Jesus
is looking us squarely in the eye and saying, "I will not get out of this
ministry alive." Then he bluntly
puts Peter in his place for suggesting that there might be a better, an easier,
way for Jesus to get his point across.
Looking across the millennia, Jesus presents us with the same harsh
choice: either you try to save your life
and so lose it, or you lose your life "for my sake, and for the sake of
the gospel" and only that way save it.
I don't know about you, but I don't
want to hear it. I don't want to be told
that what happened to Jesus will happen to anybody who follows him. We might not literally hang from a cross
until we die of asphyxiation and blood loss like he did. But if we claim to be Christian we will be
crucified – even if only figuratively. I
tell you I don't like it. Can't we just
skip Lent and get right to Easter? In
our Lenten study of The Heart of
Christianity, Marcus Borg tries to convince us "that there are no
serious intellectual obstacles to being Christian."[3] Oh really?
Than how are we supposed to understand crucifixion? Joining the long line of Christendom's bloodied
martyrs does not make sense to me.[4]
Turning away from being one way in the
world toward another, and wholly new, way of being, however, does begin to make
some sense. But, still, it can't be easy
and it has to be lifted out of the realm of the romantic into the realm of the
real.
In the second act of Robert Bolt's
play A Man for All Seasons, Margaret
comes to visit her father Thomas More in prison. She begs him to save his life and win his
freedom by only appearing to take the oath of the Act of Succession – i.e., by not really meaning the words
that he's been asked to say. The
dialogue between father and daughter goes something like this:
More: When we take an oath, Meg, we are holding our
own self in our own hands, like water. [He cups his hands.] And if we open our
fingers then, we needn't hope to find
ourselves again. Some people aren't
capable of this, but I'd be loathe to think your father one of them.
Margaret: It's not your fault the State's
three-quarters bad.
More: If we lived in a State where virtue was
profitable, common sense would make us good, and greed would make us
saintly….But since in fact we see that avarice, anger, envy, pride, sloth, lust
and stupidity commonly profit far beyond humility, chastity, fortitude, justice
and thought, and we have to choose, to be human at all…why then perhaps we must
stand fast a little – even at the risk of being heroes.
Margaret: But in reason! Haven't you done as much as God can
reasonably want?
More: Well, finally, it isn't a matter of reason;
finally it's a matter of love.[5]
Lent is a time for "following the
leader," for entering into our own trials in the wilderness. Lent calls us to look at ourselves honestly,
to see clearly who this Jesus is and just what, exactly, that he asks of us,
and then to follow wherever he would lead us – as best we can in the context of
the century that we live in.
At this central and climactic moment
in the story, Mark's version makes it clear that Jesus is really tempted to go
a different direction (and so are we):
to think that God's "chosen one"[6]
could somehow avoid suffering, rejection, and death, that the way of God could
mean power without pain, glory without humiliation. This, at least, is what Peter seems to think. And he speaks for us, doesn't he? Jesus has since overcome that tempting
suggestion and so identifies it as a "devil" of an idea – putting
Peter in the place where all disciples belong:
"Behind me!"[7] Disciples, finally, aren't supposed to guide,
redirect, or even protect their teachers from harm; they're supposed to follow them.
To be a Christian means that we can't
run away from our own responsibility in all of this: to pursue only what makes us comfortable or
would fill our churches, to choose spiritual, emotional or even intellectual
anesthetics in order to dull the pain of our conscience and avoid doing what we
know is right. The difference that this
often hard choice makes on us will be evident at every moment of our lives –
but especially in times of crisis. None
of us really knows the particular road that we'll be asked to take or where it
will ultimately lead. All that we are
promised is that wherever we've been blind, we'll be given a new way of seeing;
wherever we continue to stumble around in the darkness, a light is given to us;
where we remain in bondage, we're offered a way toward liberation; when we find
ourselves in exile, we'll be shown a way home; if we hunger and thirst, we will
be offered food and drink; if we're lost, there is a Good Shepherd who's come to
find us; and if we find that our hearts are closed off to so much that is good
about life, there is that One who's come to open them for us.[8] So for those of us who can find a way to make
this Lenten journey with Jesus, the power of these promises may give us,
finally, the courage to find a new way of being in the world – whatever it
might cost us.
The suffering that Jesus experienced
on the cross, ultimately led to the rebirth of faith. Many people have misinterpreted, I believe,
those words that Jesus uttered from the cross as a cry of abandonment: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken
me?"[9] He's quoting the first line of Psalm 22. And since the psalms were not numbered in
that day and age,[10] the way
in which people recalled them was for someone to simply quote the first
line. That's what Jesus was doing from
the cross. It was his way of saying,
"Remember how it ends." This psalm
that may begin with a plea for deliverance from suffering ends in triumph:
You who fear the Lord, praise him!
All you offspring of Jacob, glorify him; stand in awe of him, all you
offspring of
This
kind of hope can only be born of memory – of remembering the blessings in past
seasons giving power to the present.
The past and those who've gone before
give us hope. Like I experienced in my own
grandfather, many of you may have first witnessed the living spirit of the
Christ in the life of a beloved elder in your family, someone who may have been
cruelly misshapen with arthritis, who even so radiated a triumph that strangely
warmed our hearts. In the strength and
innocence of our youth, we were in awe to see more than victory in the weakness
of such twin afflictions as old age and disease.
But what about our future? There are far too many cynics in our society
today who contemplate the years to come, not with hope, but with careless
disregard. Many thank God that we do
live now, but we remain troubled out of concern for our grandchildren – those
of whom that poet in this same psalm has written:
…future generations will be told about the Lord, and proclaim his
deliverance to a people yet unborn….[12]
Maybe as never before has one
generation been so responsible than ours – not just to honor past generations,
but to learn how to live on behalf of those who will come after us, on behalf
of "a people yet unborn." You
and I are challenged as never before to look to the future, as well as the past,
in the living out of our days. One thing
that the birth of children and grandchildren will do for us, is to cause us to
assume that there will be a future, and then to exercise our capacity to make
that future a blessing and not a curse.
Like that initially barren couple,
Abraham and Sarah, we have seemed to assume that there would be no one to come
after us, or if there will be, that the succeeding generations will be those of
Hagar and Ishmael – strangers, and like the Muslims of the world, people to
whom we owe nothing. When you do assume
that there will be no future, and begin to actually believe the beer
commercials that tell us, "It doesn't get any better than this," then
you will begin to grab what you can, step on anybody who gets in your way,
strip the earth of its resources, burn the land, and borrow against the future,
because you no longer have any faith that it ever will exist.
But then come those promises again;
and even though our generation might now be barren in every way, even though we
know only despair and envy, we must know this:
there will be a future and generations yet unborn wait to live in the world
that you and I will leave them.
Well over half a century ago, Reinhold
Niebuhr (a very wise theologian) once wrote:
…nothing that is worth doing can be accomplished in a lifetime and,
therefore, we must be saved by hope.[13]
This
wonderful old church building in which we gather for worship every Sunday
morning, may well be one symbol of Niebuhr's wisdom. Not one of us was born when those first
parishioners gathered here at
Our responsibility, then – as it was
with Jesus – is to move through our struggles together, drawing on the hope of
those who've gone before, and through every death to a new life. Along the way we've got to try and leave some
small touch of blessing for those who will come after us. May we live out our lives here so that the
coming generations won't curse us, but will come to number us among their many
blessings.
* * *
[1] This is the ancient account that records the establishment of God's covenant with Abraham and Sarah. Unlike the later covenant with Moses, this agreement promises a relationship to a people but doesn't initiate that relationship. In fact, the heart of this agreement is the hope that one elderly couple will become the progenitors of a nation that doesn't yet exist. This is a covenant of anticipation, then, a call to faithfulness in a changed way of life.
[2] Our
reading from the Gospel According to Mark comes at a highly significant moment
in his version of the story. Almost at
the midpoint of Mark's sixteen chapters, this part is near the beginning of a
single narrative that extends all the way through chapter ten – the last
moments before Jesus' final entry into
[3] From the Preface, p. xi.
[4] It doesn't make sense, ultimately, to Borg either. In Chapter 6 (pp. 112-113) he does describe "the cross" as a way for us to understand a new way of being:
The way of the cross involves dying to an old identity and being born into a new identity, dying to an old way being and being raised to a new way of being, one centered in God.
[5] Robert
Bolt, A Man for All Seasons (New
York: Random House, 1962), pp. 140-141.
[6] To "be chosen" might be another way of understanding the concept of the "Anointed One" ("Messiah" from its Hebrew root, "Christ" in its Greek derivation): almost every earthly ruler in the ancient world had to have his (and it usually was a "he") position legitimized by a holy "anointing" by someone from the priestly caste.
Even the
coronation of Queen Elizabeth II included an anointing from an ampulla filled
with oil and it had to happen in a church at the hand of a priest. For those of you who might remember that
second day of June in 1953, the priestly role in that televised ceremony – of
literally recognizing the queen's "divine right" to rule – was played
by the Archbishop of Canterbury. You can
read the often fascinating details of the form and order of that service at
this website: http://www.oremus.org/liturgy/coronation/cor1953b.html.
[7] Mark 8:
33b.
[8] All of
these images of "sin" and "salvation" are further explored
by Borg in Chapter 9 of The Heart of
Christianity.
[9] Mark 15:
34c.
[10] In fact
the entire Bible was without chapter or verse numbers – all of that was added
much later.
[11] Ibid, v. 23-24.
[12] Op. cit., v. 30a-31a.
[13]
Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American
History (New York: Scribner's, 1952), p. 63.