Scripture: Hebrews 12:1-4 and Matthew 16:21-26.
I have three stories in my mind this morning. One of them is mine. By this time most of you know that I was raised Unitarian, which means that I was not raised as a Christian. In fact I heard quite a number of sermons during my growing up years about how no rational, thinking person would be able to accept the basic beliefs of the Christian faith. Jesus being both human and divine, for instance. The story of how I got from that point to being a Christian minister, I have alluded to in various ways, but I have not told it completely because I am not sure I can tell it completely. It was a long and rather mysterious process.
I have said, at least in some of the small groups we have been having, that I went to a graduate school of divinity not being sure of what I believed in much less with the idea of preparing for ministry. One of my teachers must have understood something about me that I didn’t understand myself. He encouraged me, even in my state of uncertainty, to switch from the Ph.D. to the ministry program…and I did!
I remember that in my first quarter in the ministry program we were taking some courses off campus, immersing ourselves in the life of Chicago, and once a week worshiping together…and taking communion together, everyone that is except for me. I can still remember those times of not taking communion, sitting around in a circle, about 20 students in a program that was preparing people for the Christian ministry, and everyone sharing in this sacred ritual and expressing their feelings of being a Christian, except for me…and there I was, my heart pounding in my chest and beads of sweat on my forehead as the bread and wine was passed around and came closer and closer to me, until I finally would step back and take myself out of the circle. The feeling I had of being an outsider to the Christian faith and unable to bring myself to step into that circle, this was all a very physical thing. I felt it in my body.
Three years later I was being ordained as a minister in the United Church of Christ. I had come somehow to the point of being able to say “yes” to Jesus Christ, not just being able to say “yes”, but wanting to say “yes”, needing to say “yes”, feeling “yes” all through my body just as surely as I had once felt “I don’t know about this” all through my body. And not only that. I had come, unbelievably and miraculously, I had come to feel called to the Christian ministry. It had not been an easy process. Not at all an easy process. And on the day I was ordained my heart was still pounding.
One of the scriptures I chose for my ordination service was the one I chose for today from Hebrews, chapter 12. Specifically the verse that appealed to me then and that I recalled in connection with this morning was the one that said: “In your struggle against sin you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood.”
What I had in mind in choosing that passage, and that verse especially, was that I knew my faith had not yet been really tested. I had struggled, not so much against sin but with my faith. I had struggled in what I thought had been significant ways over a significant period of time. It had not felt easy to me. And here I was finally able, ready, eager to say yes to these questions I had been asking myself and that were going to be asked of me out loud at the ceremony. But I knew that wherever I was at that point and however far I had traveled to get there, there was still a long way to go. As significant as that day was to me, it was still a very small part of the total picture. I had not yet struggled with my faith to the point of shedding blood, that is, to the point of risking some significant part of myself.
That’s one story I’ve had in my mind this week. I guess our own stories are always there when we’re thinking about much of anything that has to do with our faith.
The second story I’ve been thinking about is the story of Cassie Bernall. Cassie Bernall is the young woman who was a student at Columbine High School who is reported to have been asked whether she believed in God and who, when she said yes, was shot and killed.
This story, you may recall, spread quickly across the country. It was a great news story, this courageous act of a young woman who was so committed to her religious beliefs that she would not deny them even in the face of an almost certain violent death. It appealed to many people as a human interest story. It also appealed to many in the religious community, especially in the more evangelical camp, as a kind of example of a person who was willing to witness to her faith, who was willing to say yes, I believe in God, even to the point of shedding blood. The word martyr actually means witness, and there were those who picked up this story and used it to make Cassie Bernall into a martyr and in some cases almost into a saint. There were web sites built around her, and who knows how many sermons or sermon illustrations based on this story.
As it turns out, later there was some doubt cast on whether things happened exactly the way they were originally reported. Some other people who had been in the cafeteria gave a different version of events, while some continued to insist on the romantic story that had made Cassie Bernall into a larger than life heroine of the faith.
But more interesting to me than whether Cassie Bernall really deserved all the admiration she had received was a book review I happened to read just before we left Chicago to come to Charlottesville. It was a discussion actually more than a review of a book that has been written by Cassie Bernall’s mother. I have not read the book, but the article about the book interested me, and one of the things it basically said was that even if Cassie Bernall did say “yes” and get killed for it—even if that story is true, that is maybe not the real story here.
The other story, told by Misty Bernall, Cassie’s mother, was the story of a teenager who had a very, very hard time with life—to the extent of dabbling in Satanism and various kinds of goth culture and to the extent of contemplating both murder and suicide. The story, if the account in this article is accurate, has no simple moral lesson to it. It is not an advertisement for tough love. It contains no account of magical, mystical conversion experiences, does not suggest that their miracle was the result of Cassie or anyone else giving their lives to Jesus. It was rather a slow, difficult, trying process carried out with very few aids or comforts along the way, and no certainties as to what the outcome was going to be.
At the time Cassie Bernall was killed in the high school cafeteria, she had several very long and troubled years behind her—years that were long and troubled both for her and for her parents and others who cared about her. Those years were the real story, not so much what may or may not have happened in the cafeteria that day. The trouble is that the real story is not such good copy, does not have the drama, the tragedy, or the supposed power of inspiration that the story of her murder does. The real story is a tremendously important one, but it is not a “clean” story, it is not easily told or easily understood and it has no snapshots that contain some inspiring moral lesson. As I say, I was caught by this magazine article and the story it describes, and I have had it filed away in my mind these last few months. There was something about it I have needed to hold on to.
When I was ordained, I said yes to a short list of questions about my faith and practice as a Christian. When Cassie Bernall was asked (let’s assumed this really happened) if she believed in God with a gun pointed to her head, she said yes. In neither case does the saying of yes begin to tell the story.
I tell you these stories because they have to do with how I relate and react to the gospel reading for this morning about Jesus saying that he had to go to Jerusalem where he would suffer and die. If this were some kind of glorification of violence and suffering—and Christian theology has sometimes come dangerously close to making it that, the blood of Jesus being some kind of cleansing or healing or saving agent that was required by God to wash away our sin—if the point of what Jesus was saying was simply that he needed to shed blood, then I don’t think I would be very much moved by what Jesus had to say. I would be much more likely to agree with Peter. The desire for martyrdom is a questionable thing, even in Jesus.
But that’s not exactly the way this comes to me. The way I feel this story is that Peter is wanting the spiritual high without the spiritual trouble. Peter would rather that there be no cross, and no journey. And Jesus is saying, get behind me, get away from me, get that thought out of your mind and out of my mind. Satan, be gone.
There are no short cuts in the life of the spirit. There is no magic in the life of the spirit. And there is much darkness in the life of the spirit. It’s not—in my theology anyway—it’s not that Jesus needed to suffer, as though that were his goal in life, and Peter was standing in the way. Jesus needed to say yes, just as we all do. Maybe his journey to Jerusalem was a way of saying yes, a way of responding to God’s call with his whole being. Maybe it is the resurrection that stands as a symbol of the yes he was trying to get to, and we need to remember that from where Jesus stood, he couldn’t see the resurrection very clearly. What he could see clearly is that there was no other way for him than the journey to Jerusalem.
We do not always see clearly what our “yeses” will look like, what form they will come in. And sometimes all we can do is be willing to reside in the darkness for a while, trusting that somewhere there is a yes. Faith is a long, slow process. That is one of the meanings of Lent—slow. Faith is a long, slow process, filled with effort and with trouble, with unanswered prayers, with prayers barely able to be articulated or spoken, with hours of restlessness, or worrying ourselves to sleep, or with hearing our own heartbeat and straining to listen somehow for the heartbeat of God. The crosses we are asked to take up come in all different forms. We should not underestimate what all is involved in being able to say yes. The life of faith is a long, slow climb.
I do believe we are called as a community of faith to help each other to be able to say yes. But I say that realizing how easily that can be taken in some way other than what I mean. Saying yes may mean something quite different for different people. It does not mean necessarily being able to say yes when someone asks you: Do you believe…It does mean, I think, knowing that there is something that has claimed you, someone, maybe, who has claimed you, so that we are no longer quite in possession of ourselves. We can no longer stand here and say I wonder what I should do with my life, but instead have the sense that our lives have been somehow taken hold of. “For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who want to lose their lives for my sake will find it.”
I do believe we are called as a community of faith to help each other find our own very personal ways of saying yes. I have said in several of the small groups that I have been grateful to be part of Sojourners because for the first time in my ministry I feel able to be who I am not just as a minister, but as a person. It is a wonderful gift, and my sense is that many of you are here for that reason as well, that you feel that here you don’t have to pretend to be someone other than who you are. And so I think it is very important that we in no way insist on anyone saying any phony yeses.
But it is also important that we not simply breathe our sighs of gratitude for having found someplace where we don’t have to hide some part of ourselves or pretend to be someone a little different from who we are. To think that having found such a place means that we have come to the end of our journey would be to adopt an attitude like Peter’s. We have found a place to be that is comfortable and real or whatever we need it to be. No need to strain too hard toward something else.
But the scripture for this morning and the end of the season of Lent have a different kind of message for us. We are people who are called to strain toward resurrection, called to strain toward saying yes in the sense of losing ourselves, in the sense of giving ourselves away. It is not an easy journey to make, not for any of us. We will need the help of one another along the way. May we have the strength to be able to offer that help, and the grace to be able to receive it. Amen.
Jim Bundy
April 9, 2000