Scripture: Matthew 11: 28-30; 16: 21-28
Christopher, our older son, gave permission to tell this story. It's a story that gets
recounted whenever one of his college friends comes over for dinner and the comfort level
is high enough to allow our family humor to reveal itself.
Long ago and far away, long before he grew to be 6'4", Chris had just learned to
ride a bicycle. Having conquered the sidewalk, he was ready for wider expanses. Near our
home in Dayton, Ohio were the grounds of a Methodist seminary with big parking lots. So
off we went on a family walk. Ken rode a Big Wheel. He was age three and stayed close to
Mom and Dad. Chris was six and, with new-found freedom, rode on ahead, wind sailing past
his face, pedaling his new blue bicycle.
Two parking lots away, riding fast and free, he rounded a curve, hit a patch of gravel
and was thrown to the ground, tumbling end over end. We raced as fast as we could go to
the accident scene, but it was two parking lots away. By the time we got to our first
born, Chris had collected himself. He had scraped knees and a bloody nose. Nonetheless, he
sat stoically and only a few tears leaked from his eyes. He received pain threshold
genetics from the Anderson side.
Sighing he said, "I've had a hard life. My goldfish died. My cat ran away. Hoppy
died." (Hoppy was a pet rabbit who met an early demise). He went on, "And now I
fell off my bike. I've had a hard life. What did I do wrong?"
Now his parents have compassionate hearts and he was our own flesh and blood, but that
pained observation struck a funny bone even as it hit us right between the eyes. Barbara
and I looked at each, stifled our smile and fussed over our fallen child.
"I've had a hard life. What did I do wrong?"
We enter this universe believing that good will be rewarded and evil will be punished.
Then someday whether we are six or 16 or 26, we hit a patch of gravel, scrape our noses on
the hard asphalt and our innocence is lost. We wonder what we must have done or left
undone until we come to the hard realization that goodness does not inoculate us from
pain. You can do everything right, pedal free and hard, enjoy the wind across your face,
and still get hurt.
If riding a bicycle teaches us that truth, then a thousand other mishaps along life's
journey do so as well. Sooner or later, our nose hits the ground or our life hits a wall,
and we are shaken with the painful truth that goodness is no protection from suffering.
But it's not just life that teaches us that good is no protection from pain, but also
the One we seek to follow. Jesus was as good as it gets and he suffered all kinds of pain,
not simply physical pain, but also the pain of the heart and of the spirit. Rather than
escaping from this pain, he faced it. He embraced it and by so doing he revealed to us a
stunning new way to live.
"Take up your cross and follow me," he urges. Yet most of us either can't or
won't agree to do that. It hurts too much to face those sad and sorry dark places, and so
instead we construct our version of truth that if we are very, very good, God will protect
us. God will spare us. God will keep our coming and our going and we will live forever.
It's a massive distortion of the Gospel, but it is as human as human can be.
So we cling to our delusions in all the ways we do. Religion becomes a panacea for our
aches and pains or, when that doesn't work, we try the latest gadget or the shopping spree
or something else to numb the pain. Like Peter, we cannot fathom that, to live fully, we
must squarely face our own Jerusalems, pick up our crosses and go to those places that we
most want to avoid.
Jesus breaks the bad news to Peter and the other disciples. He was going to be killed,
he told them, and worse, he would be tortured and humiliated. When that time came, they
were not to misunderstand and believe that his suffering and death were some horrible
mistake, but rather God's hand was in it. God hand was working to bring from pain and
suffering, something of God, something lasting, something eternal.
He tried to get the point across to them, to warn them, to help them get ready and to
help them find the courage to face their fears. He tried to get them to see to the other
side but they couldn't see. Peter couldn't see. He only heard the part about suffering and
death. In the face of his own anxiety that mushroomed out of control, he blasted away at
Jesus. "God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you."
It's sheer speculation why Peter reacted with such vehemence. My guess is that he had
found in Jesus a center for his life, a comfort and a love that he had never known before
and the prospect of losing that was more than he could bear. He could not bear to see
Jesus die, because it would leave Peter alone, alone with his own fears and the big fear
of his own demise.
"God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you." Because you are as good
as it gets, and if such goodness leads to death happening to you, it can happen to me. It
can happen to anyone and no one is safe. If Jesus is this exposed, then so am I. No big
daddy or big mommy in the sky will rescue me.
"No! God forbid it!"
Jesus lays in to Peter with unmatched strength: "Get behind me Satan!" Wow!
These are fighting words. There's nothing harsher in all the Gospels. The money changers
in the temple market get called a brood of vipers, but that's mild compared to what he
hurls at his own disciple, "Get behind me Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; for
you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things."
It's quite a charge to be called Satan. By the use of this potent name, Jesus zeroed in
on how serious the temptation to avoid suffering is, to want to be spared, to get around
and avoid at all costs that which terrifies us.
It wasn't as though Jesus didn't understand or empathize; he did. His own prayer in the
garden before his arrest revealed that he himself knew great fear: "Father, if it is
possible, let this cup pass from me."
But Jesus did see beyond the darkness. He saw a glimmer of light beyond fear, beyond
suffering, beyond death itself. Because he saw, he knew his calling was to walk toward it,
instead of running away.
He invited the disciples into this same calling by summoning them to follow him, not
only to love with his love and heal with his touch, but to confront their fears as he had
confronted his own and to choose to embrace their suffering as he chose what is right over
what is safe. He told them, that "if they wanted to save their life, they would need
to lose it. But if they would choose to lose their life they would save it."
"Pick up your cross," he said. "Pick it up. Whatever it is."
The cross was not a religious symbol to the disciples. It wasn't a nice shiny pendant
hanging around someone's neck or a polished wood image decorating a church sanctuary.
Crosses lined the Roman highways into Jerusalem with some dead or dying soul to terrorize
the population into obedience to Caesar. Today no one today hangs little electric chairs
from their necks or decorates sanctuaries with syringes symbolizing lethal injection, but
that's what crosses were - instruments of intimidation and death. The Roman overlords were
counting on people believing that the worst possible thing in life was death and that
people should do everything in their power to avoid it.
When Jesus urged his disciples to pick up their crosses, he was saying that there are
worse things than death in the world and that fear might be the best candidate. Because if
you allow to fear to run your life, then you might as well bow down and worship it and let
it dominate you. That what Caesar wanted. He wanted your obedience rooted in fear. If fear
becomes the plumb line by whether you choose to live this way or that, believe this way or
that, then when you come to the end of your life, which every one comes to, you will
discover that you never really lived.
Jesus offers them another choice. He says surrender your fear. Surrender your fear to
God. Stop listening to the voice that says, "Be careful. Avoid conflict. Capitulate
to the powers and temptations of this world." He says, "Pick up your cross and
follow me."
He says, "Lose your life. You'll gain it." He says, "I give you no
guarantee of safety, but I will give you life."
Here we are in warm and sunny Southern California . I don't expect that to follow Jesus
means that we should all go out this afternoon and get ourselves killed. Some have. We
call them martyrs. Some indeed risk their very lives this day in various places around our
troubled globe in Pakistan, in Bethlehem, in the Kashmir.
I think that by calling us to pick up our crosses and follow him, Jesus had a broader
understanding. He didn't say go out and find a cross. He said pick up your own cross. He
had a pretty good idea that each of us has one or more strapped to our ankles that cause
us to stumble and trip most every day, and we have a pretty good idea what it is. Pick it
up. Stop pretending it isn't there. It's banging around, giving you bruises, sending
slivers in everyone's direction. Pick it up. Pick up the wretched, disgusting, heavy thing
and embrace it. Find out there is more to life than being afraid.
Our own crosses have nothing to do with fearing the Roman imperialists, but each of us
has something that causes us fear. Maybe it's the fear of admitting that you're not
perfectly in control, or that some addiction is dominating your life, or that some painful
memory seems too much to bear and it paralyzes you. Maybe it's the fear of revealing who
you really are or confronting those who you know will criticize you if say it the way it
is. Maybe it's the fear of an illness that isn't going to go away, or a relationship that
will never be restored, or an injustice that crushes you or a loved one.
Whatever it is that scares you to death, so that when it comes around you offer to bow
down to it, to be cowered by it, to be controlled by it and you will to do anything if it
will just leave you alone, that is your cross. Pick it up. Look at it. Turn it around and
examine it. Don't pretend that it should have never happened to you. Pick it up. If you
avoid it, it will kill you. Pick it up. Right there in your clutched hands, in the worst
darkness of your deepest fears, is the door to new life.
Right there in a miracle of the faith and grace and transformation, Jesus comes and
says, "Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will
give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in
heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is
light."
Right there is a miracle of grace: what was heavy, becomes light; fear turns to
courage, and you are set free.
"So pick it up, cast away your fear, and follow me." That's what Jesus tells
us to do. Amen.
