Pasadena Presbyterian Church Sermon Text
September 14, 2003 

"The Path to Freedom"
Preached by The Rev. Dr. Mark Smutny

Scripture:  Psalm 19; Mark 8: 27-38

(34) If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. (35)  For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it."

- Mark 8:34-35

Our family is beginning another round of college applications now that Ken is in his senior year of high school.  The impending empty nest gives me pause to reflect on such questions as, "Is this possible at my age?" There is both excitement for what lies ahead for our son and also our anticipatory grief that we will miss his daily presence in our lives.

It is also a time to reminisce and go back almost 300 years and recall the good old days my first few weeks of college when students were given the opportunity to decide whether or not to join one of the fraternities or sororities that permeated campus life at my alma mater.  As my fading memory recalls, each fraternity promoted itself as unique.  Each one went to great lengths to extol its attractions the first few weeks of school with special weekend orientation events. It was the year before the movie Animal House was released, so you can imagine the character of these special events.  My new friends and I visited a handful of the fraternities.  As far as we could tell, each one's uniqueness centered around 50 or 60 guys in a frat house on Friday nights drinking beer, telling crude jokes, and reviewing the incoming freshmen females.  Testosterone flowed as freely as the beer.

I declined to go through freshman rush and, instead, joined the Political Science Club which had all of five people in it.  We were all serious students.  One was the student body president.  Two got elected to the student senate.  We'd have an occasional beer on Friday night, but mostly we sat around talking about the great issues of the day.  We were the ones who later got invited to sit on administration committees instead of waking up Saturday afternoon with a hangover from last night's unique and special beer party.  

We were a little odd.  We were viewed with suspicion for being too serious.  We had difficulty attracting numbers to our club for obvious reasons: our requirements for being a part of our group were too high: 1) you had to be responsible, (2) you had to be interested in politics and, (3) it helped to be a good student.   

In our Gospel lesson, Jesus outlines to his followers what the high requirements are for joining his club.  They're not easy.  "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me." Peter, the spokesperson for the disciples, clearly doesn't have a clue when he hears that following Jesus will be difficult.  By every criteria, following Jesus is not an easy thing to do.  It requires intense internal reflection that leads to drastic changes in the way one leads one's life.

To be a follower of Jesus begins with the understanding of what it means for Jesus to be the Messiah.  "Who do you say that I am?" Jesus asks Peter and he asks the same of us.  "Who do you say that I am?"  For Jesus to be the Messiah meant that he focused his attention on the people who were marginalized, those who had little or nothing for themselves.  He hung around with the rejects of his time.  Peter failed to understand that to go with Jesus would be to go to those people and places that conventional wisdom and popular opinion would say were forgettable. 

Peter had a different expectation of the meaning of messiah.  In his mind, and even in the minds of the religious authorities, there was an expectation that God would send someone to wage a great apocalyptic battle against the axis of evil, the Roman Empire.  They were wishing, hoping and praying for a decisive military victory that once and for all would rid the favored nation, God's own people, from their enemies.

Instead they get Jesus.  They get a guy who demanded what must have seemed far too much for them to bear.  If you are going to join my club, he says, you have to love your enemies. You have to mingle with those who the majority culture says are unclean and, most of all, you have to give up your life and take on a radically different and new life. 

This is what it means to follow Jesus.  By the example of his life and the courage of his death, he sets a new standard for moral and ethical behavior.  He says the rule of love will be the plumb line for your life, the boundary for your behavior, the law written in your heart.  As disciples of Jesus Christ we are called to accept God's grace into our lives and then become new creations in obedience to the rule of love. 

When there is a tough decision to make, we turn to God, not to a public opinion poll.  When we look for a model of leadership, we turn to the Lord of life, not the governor or the President or an actor.  We live not by the lowest common denominator but the high moral ground.  We become a part of the solution to today's problems by choosing, not the easy path, but the difficult one.  

With all the coverage of this past week's second anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon that has so much focused on the memories of those who lost their lives, the quagmires of Iraq and Israel/ Palestine, and the continuing cycle of hatred and vengeance, there are other stories, less newsy, but more profound, which illustrate that to follow Jesus is to take not the easy path, but the right path.  

There were two women on that fateful day, best friends from Boston, who had planned a vacation together In Los Angeles along with one of the women's little girl.  At first they were all scheduled to be on the same flight, but one of the women decided to use her husband's frequent flyer miles and left on a different flight.  The mother and daughter were killed on the first flight that crashed into the Trade Center and the friend on the second plane.  

Their families, in response to this tragedy, model to the world what it means to be a follower of Jesus Christ.  Instead of getting caught up in the cycle of resentment and vengeance that has so gotten hold of so many, these families established a foundation in memory of the little girl that sponsors programs to bring together Muslim, Jewish and Christian children to teach peace, tolerance and understanding.  Though their decision must have been difficult and their grief must still be profound, it was the right thing to do.

To follow in the footsteps of Jesus is always difficult. "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me."  A few chapters after Peter's encounter with Jesus in today's lesson, it becomes obvious that the disciples don't get it.  They began vying for who among them will be greatest in the kingdom.  Will it be the most respected?  The smartest?  The one who has accumulated the most?  Jesus silences their arrogance by lifting up a child and saying to these "little ones belong the kingdom of heaven." He reverses the world's values by saying that in God's reign the last shall be first.

He has no patience with obsessive questions like who is the greatest nation, the best salary package, the most prestigious diploma on the wall, or the largest church membership.  Followers of Jesus Christ know that in God's kingdom, preference is given to outsiders, the outcasts, the poor, the helpless, the rejected, the disabled, the reviled, the hurting and those who have compassion for them.  "To such as these," Jesus says, "belongs the kingdom of God."  It belongs to those who have little to claim, no rights, and no privileges only gratitude for unconditional love that is pure gift and that leads us to live lives of compassion, integrity and high moral standards.

We join his club and become his followers by embracing this kingdom even when the world cannot possible grasp it.  It is a hard and narrow path.   But it is the path to freedom and our salvation.  Amen.

 

(c) Copyright 2003 by Mark K. Smutny.  All rights reserved.  Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution.