Mark 8:31-38
“Got to Choose”
By: Rev. Kenneth Sauer, Pastor of Parkview United Methodist Church, Newport News, VA
www.parkview-umc.org
Each week my friend John LeGault from First United Methodist Church sends me his sermon and I send him mine, via the email.
We read one another’s sermons, and critique them.
It’s a neat thing to have a friend and a colleague to do this with.
We’ve been doing it, for oh, probably four…close to five years now…every week.
Usually we are preaching on the same text, since we both preach from the Revised Common Lectionary.
With his sermon for this week, John wrote me this note: “A tough assignment text this week. Pray that the Gospel truth will come through this poor sinful preacher who has sometimes shunned the weight of the cross.”
How many of us have sometimes shunned the weight of the Cross?
The words of Jesus from today’s Gospel Lesson truly are very difficult to hear and especially difficult to do.
Just a few verses before our Scripture Lesson for this morning Jesus asks His disciples: “Who do people say that I am?”, and then He asks them: “Who do you say that I am?”
Peter is the one who answers:
“You are the Christ.”
I’ll venture to guess that most of us would agree with Peter’s answer.
But what that truly means…
…what that means in the lives of you and of me…
…what that means in the choices we make in this life…
…in how we treat others…
…in the lengths we go to spread and accept the truth of the Gospel is what Jesus deals with today.
After Peter says that Jesus is the Christ, Jesus goes on to describe to Peter and the rest of the disciples the grisly truth of what that means.
For Jesus, it means that He must suffer many things.
He will be rejected by the ruling authorities, the leaders of His very own religion…
… “the elders, chief priests and teachers of the law”…
And because it is true that Jesus is the Christ, “he must be killed and after three days rise again.”
But we see that, although Peter declared that Jesus is the Christ, he didn’t like the truth of what that meant!
It meant blood, it meant guts, it meant suffering in the most awful of ways.
So Peter rebukes Jesus.
In Matthew we read that Peter said to Jesus: “Never, Lord! This shall never happen to you!”
But Jesus rebukes Peter right back: “Get behind me, Satan! You do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of men.”
Peter wanted Jesus to be the Christ, but he didn’t want Him to have to live into what that meant.
How many of us find it very easy to let the words “Jesus is the Christ,” roll off of our tongues?
It’s not a terribly difficult thing to believe and it’s an even less difficult thing to say.
It’s quite another thing to face the truth of what that means for our lives!!!
Peter had a lot to learn when he rebuked Jesus.
How often do we rebuke Jesus?
Many of us prefer to have an idea of discipleship that leaves the Cross out of it.
That way, we can get on with our worldly ways and be Christian at the same time.
We can have our cake and eat it too….just so long as we leave out the Cross!
A famous man once said: “There are four things I hate: tobacco smoke, lice, garlic, and the cross.”
Without the Cross, Christianity can degenerate into what Paul warned Timothy about: “A form of godliness” that denies God’s “power.”
I remember in college meeting up with some pretty wild looking punk rockers.
I noticed that they all wore crosses around their necks.
I wondered why.
Could they be Christians?
When I asked them what the significance of their crosses meant, their answer was: “There’s no significance. They just look pretty.”
I remember hearing about a preacher who was proclaiming: “We need to get rid of this bloody Cross!”
And in many ways we have.
Jesus spoke plainly about the cost of following Him, but so often we don’t take Him seriously.
Instead we often mumble His words and slur them over.
So often discipleship has been presented as something that doesn’t matter very much.
It’s been watered-down, overlooked, ignored…
…and as a result…
…many claim to be Christians without living into it…without finding their lives by being followers of Christ.
So Jesus said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of men.”
It has been suggested that Jesus was saying to Peter: “Peter, your place is behind me, not in front of me. It is your place to follow me in the way I choose, not to try to lead me in the way you would like me to go.”
And in saying this Jesus was beckoning Peter to “Become my follower again.”
And this is part of the Christian journey….
….learning more and more what it means to follow Christ…
…not trying to pull Him along on our every idea, our every whim, our every adventure!
How often do we rebuke Jesus by the things we do or fail to do?
How often do we deny His call for our undivided allegiance?
How often do we rebuke His refusal of violence and His choice to love all people?
How often do we rebuke Jesus’ insistence on our need to deny self?
We read in our Gospel Lesson for this morning that Jesus called the crowd and His disciples and said to them: “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.”
Here, in one of the greatest declarations of Jesus, are two of the hardest words that a person can ever face—deny and Cross!
The word “deny” isn’t some vague and foggy word.
Denying ourselves means much more than…say…giving up something for Lent.
The denial of self means that we stop making ourselves the center of our lives and actions…
…and there is nothing more liberating and life-giving than this!
The denial of self is making ourselves not an end, but a means in the kingdom of God.
And it’s not just for the sake of some moral Olympics…
…it is for Christ’s sake…
…it is for the sake of putting our self into Christ’s cause!
And as the Church of Jesus Christ we are all called together to deny our selfish pettiness for the larger good…for the sake of the whole body of Christ and for the world.
The word “Cross” is also a difficult word to face, and it has certainly been one of the most misused words in the entire vocabulary of Christianity.
We often speak of a calamity as a cross that we must bear.
But a calamity is not a Cross.
It might certainly be a horrible tragedy, but it is not a Cross.
We might speak of sorrow or loss as a Cross.
These things are horrible heavy burdens, but they are not a Cross.
Some of us might speak of our own shortcomings, our uncontrolled anger, our tendency to be overly sensitive, our impatience, as a cross we must carry.
We can even become quite pious about it.
But taking up the Cross of Christ does not mean stoically enduring what happens to us.
The Cross for Jesus was His deliberate choice to give His life as a ransom for you and for me and for the persons around us—no matter what the cost!
And taking up a Cross for a Christian means taking up Christ’s Cross…not our cross!!!
It is our deliberate choice to take up something that could be evaded.
It is our deliberate choice to take up a burden that we are under no compulsion to take up—except for the compulsion of God’s love in Christ.
It is our deliberate choice to be involved in what God is compelling us to do.
It means following Jesus.
It means suffering.
It means danger.
It could mean death.
It is the choice of taking upon ourselves the burdens of other people’s lives, of putting ourselves—without reservation—at the service of Christ.
It is our choice to follow Jesus wherever He may lead us—no matter what the cost!!!
And Luke tells us that we are to do this “daily.”
Think about where you are right now on your Christian journey.
What is Jesus asking you to do?
What truth is God convicting you of and calling you to action about…
…calling for you to give yourself for and get involved?
What is Jesus’ Cross for you to take up?
And what has been stopping you from doing it?
Does the thought of it cause you to fear?
What would be some of the consequences of following Christ to where He is calling you right now?
“For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me and the gospel will save it.”
The great servants in human history are those who have forgotten themselves into immortality.
How many millions of unknown and unsung people have found life, the largest, richest life, by losing it for Christ and the Gospel?
Do we dare to trust Christ, to deny ourselves and take up the Cross that Christ is compelling us to take up and then follow Him?
It is the hardest, but the most worthwhile thing we could ever do!
Let us pray: Holy God, so often we allow our own self-interests, and our own pettiness to get in the way of Your saving message and Your service to others. Forgive us we pray. And in these times, give us the will to resist temptation, take up the Cross of Christ, and lose ourselves for others and follow Christ. In Jesus’ name and for His sake we pray. Amen.
