Scriptures: Romans 12:9-21 and Matthew 16:21-28
Let me begin this morning with just a few words about the process of preaching which may or may not be of the slightest interest to you, but which I feel the need to say anyway.
For the two and a half years that I have been preaching at Sojourners, I have by and large been preaching on topics that suggested themselves to me from the world around us, or from things going on in the church, or from things going on in my mind, or things going on in the minds of worship committee members and planning partners. The point is that I’ve been starting with topics that for some reason have attracted my attention, and then frankly I have gone to the Bible to look for scripture passages that may be related to that subject matter.
The danger in doing this is that you can fall into what is referred to as proof-texting, meaning that you go looking for passages that will support what you intend to say regardless, and then the Bible becomes a tool the preacher uses to support what he or she wants to say and surround it with an aura of authority. Two things, I hope, have kept me from falling into the grosser forms of this practice. One is that I try to be consistently aware of this danger and consciously choose passages that are not just friendly to what I want to say or that are old favorites. The other is that very often when I go looking for Biblical passages I don’t really know yet what I want to say and therefore wouldn’t know what to look for as a proof-text even if I wanted to. I am often in need more of help than of support, so I look for a passage that may shed some new light on a topic or give me a little different twist or way of looking at things. I have to say the Bible does often function that way for me. It gives me different angle on something I’m thinking about.
This fall, starting today, I’ve decided to go about this slightly differently. As many of you know there is something called “the lectionary”, which is a schedule of Bible readings for every Sunday of the year—four of them: a reading from the Psalms, a reading from the Hebrew scriptures, a reading from the various writings of Paul and others, and a reading from one of the four gospels. It is called a “common” lectionary, meaning that churches from many denominations all over the world follow this schedule in their preaching and educational programming. We are starting this fall to use a new curriculum for our Sunday School which is based on this revised common lectionary, and which you will hear more about. As part of that decision I committed myself to preaching, at least sometimes, on the basis of these scheduled readings. The two readings that were read a few moments ago are two of the readings for today. There are some drawbacks from my point of view in doing things this way, but there are also advantages, and one of them is that we may end up dealing with things that we otherwise wouldn’t think of. All of which is a long way of saying that I find myself preaching today on a topic for no particular reason, except that it appears in the scripture reading for the morning. In that sense I feel like what I will be doing for the rest of this sermon is a kind of a Bible study.
On the other hand, the words of the bible are never just ancient truths or eternal truths just dropped down in our midst that mean the same thing no matter who you are or where you are. They always have a specific context, and that context is not Palestinian society of 2000 years ago. Well, it is and it isn’t. It is also and most crucially us. If the Bible is a living word at all, it is a word that takes on meaning only in relation to who we are and the things that matter to us. So whether the starting point is the subject matter of our lives or the Bible, the point is to end up with some kind of creative engagement between us and the scripture.
So this morning we have this reading from Matthew. One verse from that reading particularly turned my head. “Then Jesus told his disciples, ‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” How do I, how do we, relate to those words? That, I say to myself, is a really good question. The first thing that it occurs to me to say about that verse is that I know we are not all in the same place in relation to it. In fact, (forget about the rest of you) I am not in the same place in relation to it—I don’t mean not in the same place as someone else, not in the same place within myself. I find myself with some mixed feelings here.
First of all—this is what struck me first and most forcefully this time around—there is this business about self-denial in connection with crosses. I have been told by women who found themselves in abusive relationships that they had been told by Christian ministers that it was their Christian duty to stay in the relationship and accept the abuse and who used this very passage to justify what they were saying. One person in particular I have found always comes to mind, and whenever I read this passage, I think I will always think of her. She was told in no uncertain terms that Christ commands self-denial and that this was her cross to bear. I can tell myself all I want that this minister sinfully misused the Bible, but the fact remains—this is beyond my control—that when I encounter this passage, the memory comes back to me.
Self-denial is not always and everywhere, and for everyone, a good thing. For people in positions of power, and for anyone who already has lots of self, self-denial is almost certainly a good thing. For people who don’t have power, and who don’t have an excess of self to go around, and whose sense of self is held together if at all only with great effort and maybe with great cost, self-denial just doesn’t seem the right word to bring. Who are you talking to, Jesus, I want to say, and then I start thinking about which category I fall into. Am I one who needs to be opening my heart to these words, or resisting them with all my strength?
And there are a host of other ways in which the cross has come to be associated with suffering that cause it to be, as Paul elsewhere said it would be, a stumbling block. It has been used as a symbol in acts of violence and intimidation. It has led crusaders. It has been burned on lawns. It has been used in the forcible conversion of Jews and indigenous people, and sometimes in murderous campaigns of extermination. For many people in the world the cross is anything but a symbol of sacrificial love and therefore for many Christians to be willing take up the cross in even a symbolic sense is to say the least an ambiguous undertaking.
For some others it may be ambiguous just because it stands not so much for Jesus but for the institutional church and for all traditional forms of religion. Many of the so-called mega-churches, which have aimed to appeal to people turned off by the institutional church of a previous generation, have self-consciously not displayed a cross in their worship space. It’s not because they are trying to move away from Christianity as such. In many cases their theology is quite evangelical or conservative, to use convenient labels. But maybe the cross just represents a certain churchy style, which may not be as evil or as harmful as crusades or cross-burnings but which for some people is in its own way toxic.
And then there is the whole theology that surrounds the cross with images of blood sacrifice and that assumes that Jesus was sent to suffer the penalty, which someone had to pay for all the misdeeds of our sinful humanity. For some people this means that the cross stands for a kind of glorification of suffering that they don’t want to be a party to. I am one, as many of you know, who finds that theology objectionable. And in any case, I can’t help but think to myself, suffering will find us often enough and in its own time. There is no need for us to go looking for it. Why would Jesus tell us to volunteer for it?
Now I do not assume that everyone shares these resistances and reservations—not even everyone in this room. As I said, I know we are in different places about such things. Some people here may be wanting at this point to scratch their heads and ask what all the fuss is about. For some people the cross is not, never has been a symbol of hatred or violence, is not and never has been a symbol that in any way glorifies suffering or asks people to accept suffering that is unnecessary or unjust, is not and never has been a symbol of stifling, stuffy, churchiness. For some people the institutional church has not been stuffy or stifling, but has been a place of joy, a truly safe place, a port in the storm. For some people the cross has meant not so much suffering as such at all but an example of love that was truly unconditional and an invitation and an inspiration to aspire to that love in our own flawed ways of loving. For some people the cross is simply but profoundly a sign of our identity as Christians, nothing more but nothing less than a symbol of our desire to live a “Christian” life, however we can best understand that at any given point in our lives. Those of us who have been baptized have been marked by that sign. Some of us have grown up marking ourselves with that sign. Some of us wear some form of that sign on our bodies, on cars, on walls, something that identifies us to ourselves and perhaps to others as a follower of Christ.
It has occurred to me that this offers one way for us to understand what the scripture is saying to us today—that to pick up the cross for us today here at Sojourners would mean simply to recommit ourselves to a self-conscious pursuit of what it means to be Christian, not so much as an individual matter (what it means for me to be a Christian) but what it means to be a Christian community. The invitation to pick up the cross can be read as nothing more than an invitation to remember who you are.
It would be an appropriate time for such a message. Here we are at the end of the summer, in the process of re-gathering ourselves, as a community, about to celebrate a past, and about to consider some major decisions about our future. In this context maybe we simply need to hear this scripture as a call to consider what all is involved in being a Christian community. Not that we know what the answers would be, but that we don’t celebrate the past or look toward the future without that clearly in focus—for instance that we don’t view the past just as how we have grown numerically or financially but that we look prayerfully at how we have or have not fulfilled our calling to be a Christian community of faith.
The curriculum materials, by the way, suggest that the words of Jesus should not really be understood as directed at individuals. Deny yourself and take up your cross can indeed be a hurtful message if it is meant to apply to individuals, but if it directed at the whole community it can become an invitation to pick up the cross together, which means sharing one another’s burdens and making clear to each other that we do not need and are not meant to shoulder our burdens alone. It is a good insight and offers us a valid way to read the scripture.
But it also occurs to me that even in this matter of having a Christian identity we are not all in the same place. So far as accepting the call of Jesus to follow him or even wanting to be a follower of Jesus, so far as considering ourselves disciples or Christians, we are not in this room by any means all at the same place.
Again there may be some cause for head scratching here. If you are a Christian church, isn’t it safe to assume that people who go there think of themselves as Christian, see themselves as followers of Jesus, hopefully recognize ways they have failed but have no problem with the term Christian as describing who they are or hope to be.
I understand Sojourners to be a Christian community but in a spirit that is slightly different from that. While wanting to be an authentically Christian community, we are also a place that want’s there to be a place among us for people who do not see themselves that way—who perhaps see themselves as aspiring to be human more than aspiring to be Christian, who may have enough doubts about certain beliefs that they are hesitant to say they are Christian, who may not have yet quite decided how large a role or how central a role Jesus is to play in their spiritual lives. We are a diverse community in more ways than one. And if that means that we are not as secure in our Christian identity as we otherwise might be, that’s o.k. In fact I believe it’s a good thing in at least the sense that we can never take that identity for granted.
What we can do is recommit ourselves to each other as sisters and brothers, recognizing that on even some of the most basic matters of faith we are in very different places, even to the extent that where some of us are will be mystifying to others of us. In light of that, I think we need a different image of what following might mean for a community like this. Following tends to imply that there is someone out front blazing the trail, shouting out directions or orders, telling everyone what to do, where to turn, and so forth.
I don’t know, but maybe that image gets in the way sometimes for some people. Maybe it makes it seem like there is only one way to be in relationship to Jesus. He is out there in front and we are back here as a follower. What if there is a different way to imagine what following is all about. What if Jesus is not imagined as a leader who is out front giving instructions or orders with followers expected to trail obediently along behind. What if, instead, Christ is imagined in the midst of the people, and we are a circle of people all around, all of us standing in different places, standing in different kinds of relation to the cross, to Christ himself, to the invitation to be a disciple, but all of us equally a part of the circle, committed to one another. Like picking up your cross, following is a common adventure, not an individual one, and none of us is so good at following that we can afford to disdain others who follow in a different way or that we can exclude those who aren’t even so sure they want to follow.
And what if following is not even so much following Christ’s example or heeding his words, following his orders if you will. What if it is more about moving together, in our mostly all too human ways, toward that reign of God Jesus spoke of, and others too, where justice rolls down like waters and where people and nations have learned to live in peace. When he says follow me, I do not hear him saying “obey me” or even necessarily to think of yourself as a Christian. I hear him calling us together to seek the reign of God and assuring us that, bidden or unbidden, he will be among us, in the midst of our journey together. Amen.
Jim Bundy
September 1, 2002