The First United Methodist Church of Napa, CA
March 8, 2009
The 2^nd Sunday in Lent

Scripture Readings:
Hebrew Scriptures – Genesis 17: 1-7, 15-16¹

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 Sarah 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 Lesson – Mark 8: 31-38²

³¹Then [Jesus] began to teach them 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.”

“Answering the Call Will Mean Challenge and Change.”

Listening changes us. When we open up our hearts to welcome in the wisdom, truth, insight, opinions and ideas of others, we expand and stretch our world. We change. Some part of us disappears, gives up in surrender; we are, quite literally, transformed. Our gospel lesson begins with the words, “Then he began to teach them….” Listening to and then choosing to follow in the footsteps of Jesus can do that – the very soul and spirit of our being is forever changed.

Thomas Berry puts it this way:

The universe is composed of subjects to be communed with, not objects to be exploited. Everything has its own voice…[everything.] [Unfortunately] we don’t hear voices.³

What do we hear of the voice of Jesus anymore? For that matter, what’s the voice of an ancient patriarch named Abraham to us? He’s only the paternal ancestor’s voice of three of the greatest religions of the world: Judaism, Islam and Christianity.

Taken together today’s scripture texts speak of a Creator’s promise to turn barrenness into fruitfulness, of a kind of dying that brings new life. For those of us who walk in the shadow of the cross on this Lenten journey, these are words that ask us to live a new life as faithful witnesses in a broken and sin-filled world – whatever that might cost us.

Not many of us here know what it costs to be a farmer. In most third-world countries, where agriculture is the only way to make a living, the land is handed down from generation to generation. What often happens, though, is the continual subdivision of that family land among all of the children; ultimately it means that each family is trying to live on a below-subsistence level of farming. Most of the other families in these areas of the developing world are in the same situation; and many are interrelated by marriage.

When circumstances get to the desperate stage, with malnutrition now becoming a factor, a village conference might send a few men out after the harvest to search for virgin land – sometimes up to 200 miles away. They look for land with enough room to expand and settle a significant percentage of their village. Many councils among the elders, along with ongoing reporting, reactions, and endless discussions, become part of the planning process. Then at the next harvest a number of people from the village – usually the men – set out to start clearing the land and erecting new huts. The others – usually the women and children – stay at home working doubly hard with the plowing, planting of seeds and maintaining communal gardens. Only after the next harvest will an agreed upon number of families move to the new site. This process may go on for the next few years until the old village has just enough people again to more than maintain a comfortable lifestyle for the families that remain, while the new village becomes a thriving community.

It’s in this way that villagers of the third world act as a community – weighing what’s best over against what isn’t in helping them achieve a measure of quality in their lives. When it seems to make sense to them that they would be better off embracing change, instead of fighting it, they move. We may be at such a place in our own lives and culture when we should do the same.

Against what many in his tribe considered foolhardy, Abraham was confident that he’d heard God’s instructions to move away from the boundaries of his community. The seemingly absurd promise of children to this elderly couple – let alone descendants becoming great nations – was taken seriously. Abraham’s confidence in God came to be justified beyond his wildest expectations.

Those of the early Christian community came to believe in an equally improbable promise of God’s: that a carpenter’s son from Nazareth would be embraced by many as Savior of the world. Through the incredible – the ridiculous and even absurd – God sometimes chooses to act on behalf of a greater good. A woman as old as my own mother giving birth to a great nation sounds, well, unbelievable at best! And yet for us to look upon a man condemned to be crucified on a cross as a common criminal, and still call him Savior, seems to be just as delusional.

But it doesn’t end there. Now we hear:
“If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”

Read out of context, and from a post-modern western point of view, this strange invitation to discipleship could be heard as glorifying suffering, submissiveness (especially by women), as an encouragement for us to become victims. The fact is, this is exactly the way that many people in the church have been encouraged to interpret this story over the years. It was supposed to be the way that we could be imitators of the Anointed One – the Christ. So let me state as clearly and as unequivocally as I can: that kind of a reading or hearing of the gospel story is a distortion.  Period. For now, let me tease out some stuff on just two of Mark’s issues: suffering and the cross.

Mark does not glorify either subservient behavior or suffering. Neither is he issuing a call to us that we should embrace such a thing as a lifestyle. What he does make clear is that one particular cause of suffering – persecution by the powers-that-be if you become a challenge to their authority – is a very real possibility. And those who have chosen to follow in the way of that humble Galilean, Mark’s call to them is to remain faithful to that way, and the way of God, in the face of any persecution or suffering that might come their way.

It’s probably safe to say that people of the first century viewed suffering quite a bit differently than we do. We’ve come to reject suffering as a normal, everyday part of life. It’s something we’re supposed to get rid of, take a pill for, enter into therapy over, to overcome just as soon as we can. But the people of the ancient Near East viewed suffering as a normal, if unpleasant, part of life. It was part of the human lot, part of everyday existence. And why wouldn’t it be? With at least 80% of the population living at subsistence level or below, with hunger and disease or being sold off into slavery all common experiences, crushingly high taxes a daily reality, and families in constant danger of losing their land to cover rising debt, suffering was simply a part of life.

“That is how Rome managed it”, comments Stephen Patterson, New Testament scholar and Fellow of the Jesus Seminar. He says,

Rome’s purpose, especially in the provinces, was to suck up as many of the province’s resources as it could without provoking it into revolt or killing it off altogether.  It slowly siphoned the life out of places like Palestine.⁴

No wonder the “expendables” then and now train their children to be able to endure suffering; for them it’s an important survival skill.

So Mark’s message, that the in-breaking of God's empire on earth, portraying Jesus and his followers as having the power to end all suffering and bring health, life and safety for everybody, was a compellingly desirable thing!

And make no mistake: crucifixion was a terrible way to be executed. What’s more, Rome meant for it to be cruel and shameful, even if it were an accepted and legal means of execution. Anybody questioning Roman authority was, from that empire’s perspective, a potential criminal or, at the very least, an unnecessary troublemaker – somebody to do away with. And political authorities then, as many still do today, believed in pre-emptive strikes against all possible threats – even if they only imagined them.

Nobody in the ancient world would ever have sung: “When I survey the wondrous cross, on which the Prince of glory died….” That’s 17^th or 18^th century middle-class piety. Neither would Jesus’ early disciples ever have said, “Well, that’s just her cross to carry!” or “God has laid on him a heavy cross!” or “You just have to learn to accept your lot in life; it’s your cross to bear!”. The harsh reality in Jesus’ day was that taking up your cross literally meant that you had to pick up a cross beam as big as you were and carry it out to the place of your own execution, where you would be nailed or tied to it, then hoisted up onto the upright pole (or often just the stump of an olive tree) and left to die of asphyxiation or blood loss.

As Joanna Dewey, professor of Biblical Studies at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts has said:

Clearly, Mark portrays crucifixion as the painful death that it was…. No ancient audience could miss the reference to execution, or think of the cross as a general reference to all human suffering....  Following Jesus (was) both blessing – the ending of much human suffering – and incurring new suffering at the hands of those who will do their best to destroy Jesus’ followers.⁵

So, the image of the cross was and is never meant to be some kind of exhortation to endure suffering. Violence, of any kind, destroys life. The crucifix wasn’t an icon of early Christianity; the fish was.⁶ The cross isn’t even installed as a symbol for “Christian” congregations until early in the 5^th century – and then thanks to Constantine, not Mark.

Neither is the cross meant to become indoctrinated into an eternal principle of sacrificial atonement or some delusional idea of a kind of supernatural rescue by God. Think about it for a moment. When the cross is seen that way – as the preordained means by which you and I are redeemed – then God has to be implicated in the death of Jesus. God becomes, then, not the One who suffered alongside of Jesus, but the one who was his executioner.⁷

For us to “take up” our personal crosses does mean, it seems to me, that you and I are being invited to remain faithful to the life, teachings and way of Jesus – no matter what it costs. It means to be true to him and to his way of being in the world in the face of any kind of betrayal, persecution, suffering or even execution, by the political authorities of the day.

The call to that kind of discipleship, then, was a tough call. Your life could depend on it. The call to discipleship, now – today – can also be a tough call. For now, here in the depths of Lent, it’s a call to be on a spiritual journey. It’s about scattering and planting seeds of faith, while living with the kinds of questions that have no easy answers. And where that demands honesty and authenticity, it’s a call to recognize “right behavior” (orthopraxis) – how we act, instead of “right doctrine” (orthodoxy) – having somebody else tell us what we should or should not believe. It’s about making forgiveness reciprocal instead of exacting penalties or promises from each other. And it’s a call to accept an invitation to be engaged in radical and inclusive love of one’s neighbor.

This is the Spirit that calls us today. It’s a call to even accept a man who was condemned and executed as a common criminal and be able to call him Savior. But it goes beyond the way each of us may understand and name this rabbi from Nazareth. It’s a call to discipleship. It’s a call to action.

So Mark’s 1^st century story does offer us some guidelines, even resources, for our own 21^st century struggle to be his disciples – to be the church in our own day and time. In the end, though, we’re not only going to have to work it out for ourselves, we need to do it together. Ultimately that’s both the challenge and the blessing of discipleship. If we are to claim the name “Christian” we can expect and accept nothing less.

A long, long time ago, and without any clear knowledge of the history that he was about to make, Abraham set out on a journey. In today’s story about Jesus you and I are called – in much the same way – to set out. And just as Abraham moved from a settled locale into a time of nomadic wandering, the call of the Spirit today is leading us, as well, into a time of bold change. It may uproot us from our comfortable places of privilege here in Napa County, and into the cross-cultural shock of third-world ministry. This compelling vision might turn us more intentionally toward ministry with and among the disadvantaged poor, the abused immigrant, the struggling illiterate, the alcoholic and drug addict, the frail elderly or the chronically ill. A comfortable latte or a cozy chat with friends at the fellowship hour may need to be exchanged for leading a class for those needing to learn English as a second language; it may mean lobbying the legislature on behalf of equal rights – anything, but it will be focused and intentional involvement in the surrounding community in the name and spirit of Jesus the Christ. Whatever it might be, answering that call will involve challenge and change – or it isn’t a call to be a Christian at all.

Yet, may it happen; and may it happen here.

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