Pick it up

Proper 7 A 2014
http://www.lectionarypage.net/YearA_RCL/Pentecost/AProp7_RCL.html


Like many new clergy, I too had a honeymoon period with the parish, now almost 20 years ago. That is a sweet if somewhat unrealistic time that a pastor and a congregation will share, similar to a honeymoon in a committed relationship. After a search process and much anticipation, the new clergy arrives, and we’re all rather enchanted with one another. Everything is new, everything is wondrous, everything seems possible, there is new energy and new hope.

During this period, a wonderful faithful member of the congregation approached me with a sense of delight. He slapped me on the back and said, “Everything is going so well! Everyone likes you so much! And there are no complaints.”

I stood there and suddenly, for me, the busy room fell silent. Something went cold inside of me. As this very kind man walked away, I thought to myself that if those words were carved on my tombstone, “Everyone liked him and had no complaints”, that I would not care to appear before God to have my ministry judged.

“Whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it."

The cost of the Gospel is shot through all our readings today.

“Take up your cross” has, through the years, been tamed and made a private sort of piety. My long-suffering Irish Catholic mother modeled this kind of spirituality and taught it to me. Whenever something came along to test my personal patience as a kid—a splinter in my knee, the ice cream man coming late to the neighborhood—mom would say “offer it up.” The message was clear—life’s little troubles gave me material that would make God happy as long as I had the right attitude.

We miss the Gospel, and for that matter the prophets and the message of Paul, if the cost of discipleship, the cost of following Jesus, becomes for us a private way of making sense of the suffering that life brings.

To listen to God and act on what we hear, to be a person baptized into the death of Jesus, to follow Jesus on his way—is a different path indeed.

It is a way that breaks the heart, says Jeremiah. Jeremiah hears the living God but almost seems to regret listening. Betrayal and violence followed him as he struggled to be faithful to the living word he heard. Jeremiah was simply obedient to the word that the God of Israel was speaking to him, the same God who was worshipped by all those around him. But Jeremiah heard the whole word, not just the word that made life comfortable and predictable. For that he was attacked, betrayed by friends, and abused. But we do not have the bland words of comfort of his friends to inspire us. We have Jeremiah the broken-hearted man who accepted no cheap comfort, who although complaining before God opened his heart and mind to the challenging Word he heard.

It is a way of death and resurrection, says Paul. To those who simply added belief in Jesus as Messiah to their array of beliefs, Paul makes clear that to follow Jesus is to enter willingly into Jesus’ death in order to be raised with him to new life. This way would lead to rejection by faithful followers of Moses as well as by Roman Gentiles. Not a popular road, but one that leads us into the heart of God.

And “take up your cross”? We now know that the cross was an execution reserved by the Romans for capital crimes, for revolution and for subversion. The Romans did not really care what you believed just so long as you paid your taxes and obeyed Roman law. If Jesus was harmless, just a gentle man teaching a gentle personal faith, he would not have been crucified. The Romans were quite practical and consistent this way. Private faith is not threatening. Faith that challenges the empire, the status quo, the way that business as usual is done—that is threatening. The Way of Jesus threatened to overturn both the business of the Jerusalem Temple as well as the rule and priorities of the Romans. In a real sense the Romans were quite correct in crucifying Jesus. He was an enemy of the state, whose Gospel meant the end of the rule of tyrants and the powerful.

When Jesus says “take up your cross”, he means embrace my radical and life-changing, world-changing way. Walk with me on a dangerous road, a road that leads from death to life.

Yesterday at the ordination I heard from the rector of St Stephen’s downtown how they transformed their church into a congregation of radical hospitality to the people of the streets. A deacon came to church dressed as a homeless man and preached, speaking from the standpoint of the poor and their experience walking into a comfortable church. The people of St. Stephen’s heard that word and began, from that day, to take up the cross that for years they had simply adored.

And we have taken up our own cross in our bi-lingual and bi-cultural journey. Yesterday we heard moving testimony from one of our leaders who had experienced several segregated congregations in Portland before coming here and plunging into life and leadership at SPP. Life is different here, he and his spouse assert. Nowhere have they experienced a church where two language-groups and cultures are simply together as one.

This is part of our Way of the cross, as we pay the price of walking a Way that is often not comfortable, that does not “feel like the old church” or does not feel like many other churches at all. But here we try in our way to break down barriers, to address and dismantle assumptions of power, to make the concerns of all members our concerns, the struggles of all members our struggles, to welcome fully.

There are many ways to find comfort in this world. Portland is full of such comfort—a lovely privileged life so long as you have enough money for coffee shops and food carts and a couple of trips up the Gorge or out to the coast. But there is another way, the way of the cross, the way of walking with and embracing those different and learning more and more about ourselves, about others, about the Gospel, about Jesus, about the Way of God. About the Cross.