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Later this morning we are
going to gather in the parish hall for our “Homecoming” lunch, to mark that
summer vacations are over and our whole community is coming together again in
this, our spiritual home. And after lunch
we are going to have a sort of fair in celebration of the work that we are
coming together again to do. Leaders and
representatives of the many working groups that are active in the congregation
will be there so we can recognize each other and share information and
generally rev our engines for another year of worship and learning and service. It should be a lot of fun and the thing that
is most exciting about it for me, personally, is not just that it gives us a
chance to see how many different kinds of ministry are being done, with how
many different leaders, but that all of us together form one ministry.
I was thinking about that this
week as I was reading today’s lesson from the Gospel of Mark, and it struck me
that this story gives us a way to describe what that one ministry is, the
ministry of St. John’s Petaluma, and of the church in general. It gives us one idea, to sum it up, which is “discipleship.” Whatever formal shape our different
ministries take, in the parish organization or outreach programs in the
community, or simply attending worship and saying our prayers and putting
something in the offering plate, all of us are called to be disciples of
Jesus. This story is, in some ways, the
essential passage in all the gospels about what discipleship means, and Jesus
begins his instruction on the subject with two questions: first he asks his
disciples, "Who do people say that I am?" and then, after they have
answered, “But who do you say that I
am?”
Taken together, these
questions imply that his disciples must know Jesus in a way other people don’t. There are lots of opinions out there on the
street about who he is, and that’s as true today as it ever was, but that’s
different from the true knowledge that comes from intimate acquaintance. So one way of understanding discipleship, and
the ministry of the church, is that it is about telling the world something
about Jesus that it doesn’t know. That’s
the approach that Peter takes, and he’s not the only one. There are still a lot of people for whom
discipleship means saying as loudly as possible that Jesus is the Messiah, the
Son of God, Our Lord and Savior, and so on, in hopes of getting everyone to
agree. But as far as Jesus is concerned,
what we say about him is not that important.
In fact, he sternly orders his disciples not to say anything. What does matter is to trust him enough to do
what he does, and to follow him on the way of life that is really worth
living.
And that means making a
journey. We have to go through
something. And the thing we have to go
through, says Jesus, is the cross. Now in
this passage he talks about the cross in two different ways. First, as a fact that is going to happen to
him. In this way he makes clear that
whatever else we think we mean when we say that he is the Messiah, it has to
include that he suffered, and was rejected by the people who were supposed to
know about God, and was killed, and on the third day was raised. And all that’s true, but if we only think of the
cross in these terms it can become just another opinion about Jesus.
So he also talks about the
cross symbolically, and the thing about symbols is that, unlike facts, you have
to do something with them. You have to dialogue
with them and make your own decisions about what they mean for you. When Jesus talks about the cross this way it
is no longer a fact we can consider from a distance. If we want to be his disciples, we have to
pick it up, and put it on our shoulders and start walking.
I’ll be honest with you—as
many times as I’ve heard this saying, it still makes me afraid. It makes it sound like being a disciple of
Jesus means signing up for pain. And I’m
afraid of pain. One of my earliest
memories is of screaming and crying at the doctor’s office when my mother took
me in for my shots, not from the pain of the injections, but from fear of them
before they ever happened. But what if
this teaching is not about gritting our teeth and psyching ourselves up for an
extra big helping of pain, so that we might gain some reward from it later? What if it is about transforming our
relationship to our pain that is already here?
What if it is about accepting it,
and really looking deeply into it, rather than trying to push it away or blame
it on others? What if it is about taking
up the suffering we already have, simply because we are human, and carrying it
to God?
That makes me afraid, too, but
with a different kind of fear—not the fear of pain per se, but the fear that the Hebrew wisdom tradition calls the
fear of the Lord: the fear of
laying aside my conventional assumptions about the purpose of life, and what
makes for happiness; the fear of losing the image of myself that I have
constructed with such great care so as to be accepted and admired by the people
around me; the fear of losing the things I’ve acquired with that image—possessions,
position, and esteem. It is the fear of looking squarely at the face I try to
hide from others, the vulnerable, aging, needy, sometimes deeply sad, often conflicted
and confused face of the person that I also am.
And it’s the fear of knowing all that and still having to make the decision
that no one can make for me, the decision I have to make again every day,
sometimes under the pressure of great doubt—the decision to have faith.
Jesus invites us to become his
disciples, and to make that decision, as he has, and to choose a life centered
on God. But with that choice the illusions of the
false self are sacrificed, the attachment to the un-life is broken. The promise of Jesus is that this is not only
a process of dying; it is also rebirth. From
acceptance of our own suffering we become sensitive to the suffering of
others. We also become aware of how much
of it, theirs and ours, is needless.
There is that which is the inevitable consequence of life in a mortal
body in a world of continual change. But
there is also the great mass of suffering that is due to the misuse of human
freedom. There are the self-inflicted wounds
of self-destructive vice, of fruitless anxiety, of revolt against that which
cannot be changed, and of clinging to what cannot remain the same. And there is the suffering we inflict on each
other, in personal acts of cruelty, coldness, and abuse, and in systems of
collective violence, exploitation, and injustice.
The knowledge of needless
suffering inflicts its own kind of pain.
Perhaps the sharpest wound it gives is the vision of liberation. Because to see how much suffering is needless
is to see how much better everything could be.
It is to awaken the deep yearning for a better world, the burning desire
to do better, to be better than we have before.
And that is also a cross to bear.
To act on that desire requires effort, against our natural inclination
to drift with the tide of time. It
brings us into conflict with powerful enemies, the inner demons and the outer tyrants
who are fearful and resistant to healing and change.
And it means living with failure,
with constant reminders that our capacities are limited, that even with heroic sacrifice
we will always accomplish less than we imagine we could and less than the world
so badly needs. But Jesus, the crucified
and risen, has a message for his disciples, a message for them to administer to
everyone. It is that failure of this kind
is nothing to be ashamed of. This desire
is for something better for the world is not naïve, this effort to realize it is
not wasted, this suffering for its sake is not futile, because God is faithful
in ways we cannot be. And in Christ, God
shares the desire, shares in the effort, even shares the suffering.
