Taking Up Your Cross

Taking Up Your Cross The Dover Church
September 13, 2009 –15th Sunday after Pentecost
Scripture: Mark 8:31-38

In the congregational church of my youth, the cross was not central to our faith. We certainly didn’t talk about the cross, suffering and self denial a lot that I can remember. We didn’t sing about it either, as the Pilgrim Hymnal has very few cross hymns in it. Looking back, I realize that you actually had to look quite hard to find a cross in our sanctuary.
As opposed to the quite prominent cross we have here in the Dover Church, ours was a little brass table cross in the middle of our communion table. Even the candles on the table dwarfed our little cross. By comparison however, everything and everyone in the room was completely overshadowed by the towering center pulpit which rose right behind the table and drew all our eyes upward to the equally conspicuous Bible open on it. No one ever said so, but it was clear to me that the Word of God was more important than the cross or communion.
The more I tried to get my mind around the cross as a boy, the more inconvenient it became. For the longest time I thought the crucifixion was either a tragic mistake, as in they killed the wrong guy, or that it was just a blip on the radar screen compared with the other stuff. This idea was certainly reinforced by our yearly church calendar of worship, on which the blip did not even appear. We hopped directly from the victory parade of Palm Sunday, to the tune of “Ride On, Ride On in Majesty,” to Easter’s opening fanfare of “Christ the Lord is Risen Today.” Some of us went to Maundy Thursday services, but one had to go out of one’s way to do that. And Good Friday or an Easter Vigil? That was for Catholics.
Speaking of Catholics, I can still remember it like it was yesterday, the first time I went to the Church of the Immaculate Conception with my friend, Richard Houlihan. Talk about culture shock! There was Jesus, hanging up there on this huge cross with blood running down his side. All along the walls were these things called stations of the cross, with pictures of soldiers whipping Jesus and women crying. I wasn’t quite sure what the Catholics were up to, but I knew it was not what we were up to at the congregational church. The whole thing seemed so un-Christian compared with the Christianity I knew, which was all about peace, love and being nice. This was decidedly unpleasant, with conspicuous pain, violence and death.
The truth is that for the longest time I did not know what to do with Jesus’ lesson for us this morning. It was like a bucket of cold water in the face for me, this challenge of Jesus, his call to suffering and self-denial, the invitation to lose one’s life to save it. And then there are all the repeated musts of our Gospel lesson this morning. Musts tend to rub New England Congregationalists the wrongs way, “Oh, I must, must I?”: “The Son of Man must undergo great suffering…The Son of Man must be rejected…The Son of Man must be killed…and after three days rise again. If any of you want to be my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. Those who want to save their lives will lose it, and those who lose their lives for my sake, and the sake of the gospel, will save it. Those who are ashamed of me and my words, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in his glory.”
Point by point, this lesson did not work for me. Jesus had me pegged. I was ashamed of Jesus and his words. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “shame” as “feeling a painful emotion arising from the consciousness of something dishonoring, ridiculous, or indecorous in one’s behavior” or “being in a situation which offends one’s sense of modesty and decency.” That’s exactly how I felt. This Jesus just did not fit in to my comfortable, successful and well-meaning life and faith. I was put off by the violence, which seemed somehow indecent or ridiculous, so down and dirty, so unpleasant, so opposed to the Gospel of love and light I heard in church and the wonderful life I lived at home. It seemed so negative. I believed in progress, achievement and building a life for myself, not suffering, self-denial, cross carrying, crucifixion, or losing my life. If anything, I was running as hard as I could in the opposite direction and doing alright, thank you very much.
On top of that, I knew about all the evil that had been done in the name of the Cross, all the wars, massacres and ignorance: people of color, women, the poor, the weak, the victims of all kinds of violence, all told to accept their oppressions as their cross to bear, and so on. It was all so opposed to everything I stood for. I wanted Jesus to be like Clark Kent emerging from the phone booth as Superman: “No. You don’t have to accept any of this. God is not doing this to you. Don’t use the cross as an excuse for your circumstances, your inability to do anything about them, or your passivity in taking action. Misfortune and misery and burdens and bad luck come our way, but we need to pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and get with it.”
Which was easy for me to say. Being a white man from an upper middle class, comfortable home in a nice town, with a good education, good health and the wind in my sails, I didn’t know the first thing about misfortune, misery, burdens or bad luck. But then the most remarkable thing happened. I stumbled along the way. I had some misfortunes. I hit a couple walls. I suffered some losses. I didn’t always get what I wanted and sometimes met with outright rejection. Stuff came out of nowhere and just knocked me off my feet. For the longest time I did my best to ignore those missteps and slaps of life. Just dust myself off and start again. If things got really frustrating, I’d get angry or frustrated, but I would channel all of that into positive action. “Frustration, anger and negativity are counter-productive. They bog you down. Real men don’t get bogged down or cry about it.”
And then, one day, I can’t remember exactly when it was but I do know it was in the midst of a really rough patch for me, all the “downsides” of my life finally caught up with me. Maybe it was this one big blow. Maybe it was the cumulative effect of all my losses which I had been suppressing for so long. I do know that it was the grace of God. For the first time, the reality of my stumblings, my losses, my rejections touched me and it really hurt. For this first time, I felt the feelings and I stayed with them.
And then two things happened. First, I felt a power that I knew would get me through it all and into something new. I suddenly had a flash of 20/20 hindsight in which I could see how my life had unfolded. Every loss had opened to some new life. Every dead end had turned me around some new corner. Every disappointment had given me new clarity. Every rejection had lead to new possibility. There had been times when I had prayed, but there were plenty of times when I had just gritted my teeth and slogged my way forward. It had not been pleasant either way, praying or slogging my way through it, but suddenly I knew that I had known the power of the Resurrection, the power of the risen Christ to bring life out of death. Christ had been at work my life and finally I saw it.
But that was not all that happened. While I was down there in my misery and getting a feel for it, I began to feel for other people, people whom I had tried to ignore because their feelings, emotions, tragedies and miseries would mess up my nice little life. The more I allowed myself to feel, the more I saw and the more I saw the more I felt. And the more I felt the more alive I felt because I began to know that they were me and I was them. Everyone else was no longer the competition or the problem. We were all in this together, beloved children of God. I knew that the risen Christ who had brought me through the little deaths of my life would give me the courage, confidence and strength to go be with others as they lived their Good Fridays. It wasn’t up to me. Christ was already there. I just had to jump in.
In short, it took me a while but I finally opened up to life, not just to the life I wanted but to all of life, and it was the cross that did it. Paradoxical isn’t it? The whole losing your life to find it? That suffering can lead to salvation? But I’m probably not telling you something you do not already know, am I? I am sure that most of us gathered here today have suffered serious losses in our lives? Who among us has not lost a loved one? Who among us has not known broken friendships or sibling relationships? Who among has completely escaped the pain of divorce? Health challenges? Depression? Addiction? Career frustrations and deadends? The list goes on. That’s life isn’t it, real life? Not the life we planned for sure, but the life that comes at us anyway. Just as all of us have known suffering in our lives, I am confident that you also know what I had finally come to know. That all the times you have suffered so much in your lives, didn’t you find yourself coming into something new on the other side? If you were open to it and didn’t just shut down in denial or grief? Some new and abundant life on the other side, something unexpected? You see. You know. Maybe all you really need is to call it by its real name.
The cross is not about everything ending up alright. No. It’s not about coming up roses or about peaches and cream all along the way either. The cross is about embracing all of life with faith, hope and love, knowing that God in Jesus Christ has been there before you and will be there with you. When Jesus tells us that we must take up our cross and follow him, what he really means is that by the power of the living God we need not run and hide from life. This is the must of God. God does not turn away or get bogged down. God walks into life with all of us. And we are invited to follow. This is the Good News of Jesus Christ! Thanks be to God!