Almighty God, guide us to seek your Truth: come whence it may, cost what it will, lead where it might. Amen.
Mark Twain once said, “It ain’t the parts of the Bible that I can’t understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand.” Certainly, those words apply to today’s text from Mark. Jesus said, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” It doesn’t take a seminary degree to understand what that means. It’s direct, clear, unambiguous, inescapable, and also really difficult. It has been said that “Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.”
Jesus, don’t you know that in the book “How to Win Friends and Influence People” there isn’t a chapter called “Deny Yourself”? Lord, I know you lived a long time ago in a different culture, but we’re trying to pursue the American Dream here, “Take up your cross” isn’t a part of that Dream. Look, we’re all busy people here, we try to make time for exercise, and we do meditation, and we volunteer in the community, but Jesus, this talk of “losing our lives,” that’s just too much; we’re looking for an integrated life, can’t we have a version of Christianity that supplements all of the good things that we’re already doing?
It really comes down to an issue of ownership versus stewardship of our lives. We’ve been trained to think that self-actualization or self-determination is the greatest goal that we have, that the goal of life is to find our identity and live into that. So we speak of needing to “find ourselves” and charting the course of our lives. You might say that ever since Descartes famously postulated that “I think, therefore, I am,” that we’ve developed a selfish and harmful approach to the rights and autonomy of the individual.
In our context, since 1980, narcissistic personality disorder has been clinically recognized. When the term was introduced, about 1% of the population had such a diagnosis. Today, that number is as high as 6%. One study found that, since 1960, there has been a 10% decrease in words like “us” and “we,” while over the same period there has been a 42% increase of the words “I” and “me.” And this isn’t a problem that we can just say affects Millennials, as previous generations taught, encouraged, and marketed this worldview, which has been described as a “narcissism epidemic.” Given this context, all the more, Jesus’ words about denying yourself is that much more unsettling.
But as Peter says to Jesus elsewhere in the Gospel, “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life.” You might not like what Jesus has to say about taking up your cross, but that doesn’t change the fact that he said it. John Calvin remarked that “We are not our own, we are God’s.” And so it’s a question of ownership versus stewardship. Is your life yours or is it God’s? You can probably guess where I come down on that, but my opinion really doesn’t matter much on this. Can God tell you how to live your life, or is that up to you to determine?
Of course, answering that question with words is very different than answering that question with your life. Absolutely, I affirm that my life is a gift from God and that I am only the steward of this precious gift, not the owner. I am not my own maker or savior. But I’m also a horrendous sinner. Every single day, I fall short of my intentions. And so it is by the grace of God that I am allowed to participate in the divine and abundant life intended for me.
This is the story of Abraham. He was living in Ur in a very comfortable situation. But God tells him to leave that land, leave his inheritance, leave his family and go to an unknown land. He could have easily said “Who are you to tell me what to do?” He could have said “That’s not how I want to write the story of my life.” But he doesn’t, he goes. And God makes a covenant with him, that his descendants shall be “exceedingly numerous,” more numerous than the stars in the sky. But this promise is beginning to look like an empty promise. Abram and Sarai, the names they used to go by, remained childless. God reiterates, “I will make you exceedingly numerous.”
And God makes it clear that this promise isn’t just for Abram, but also for Sarai, as God makes it clear that she will also be blessed by this covenant. And in this process, both are given new names – Abraham and Sarah. They lost their identity, the names they had gone by for years are changed as they will be the instruments through which God will bless the entire world. As I mentioned last Sunday, throughout this season of Lent, I want to point to examples of grace so that we will be ready to recognize the transformative and surprising grace of God more fully on Easter morning. And there is so much grace in this story of Abraham and Sarah.
For one, there is grace in knowing that you are never too old for God to work through you. And it is made clear that grace is abundant – God does not promise Abraham a child, but that he will be the ancestor of a multitude of nations. Grace is abundant. When we forget this though, then our rugged individualism really wreaks havoc. When we think there is a competition over love, or dignity, or salvation, or respect, well, then find the worst of humanity.
I know that we only got a snippet of the Abraham story this morning, but if you read chapters 12 through 22 of Genesis you’d see that when Abraham looks to his self-interest and self-preservation, he gets into a heap of trouble. And when he is obedient to God, he finds the abundant grace of God. It’s not that God rewards us for self-denial and punishes us for being selfish, but rather when our hands are full of our own interests, we can’t receive God’s grace which is given to us. Isn’t it ironic that all the things that we want, God has given to us, but we can only encounter the grace of God by self-denial?
Just as God did for Sarah and Abraham, by God’s grace, we are taken from barrenness to abundant life. But the road that we use to get from here to here is the Via Dolorosa, the way of the Cross. “Take up your Cross, the Savior said… it guides you to abundant life… for only those who bear the cross may hope to wear the glorious crown.” What makes such an admonition so difficult is that this isn’t just some lifestyle choice, but rather a never-ending struggle over your identity and vocation. It’s not nearly as simple as saying that “Jesus is Lord” and being baptized; no, it is daily dying to self so that we might rise with Christ.
You’ll often hear people speak of having a “cross to bear.” Please, unless you’re about to be put to death, don’t ever use that phrase. Having to work two jobs to make ends meet is not a cross to bear, having a difficult boss is not a cross to bear, sitting in traffic is not a cross to bear. The cross is a public means of shaming someone while causing maximum pain as a means of execution. The cross is not an inconvenience or setback, it is, quite literally, the worst thing that could ever happen to us.
The grace of God is that the cross is exactly what God endures for us. The Cross is what makes the Messiah, as difficult as that might be for us to grasp and accept. It was certainly difficult for Peter – “how does a dead Messiah help us?”, he wondered. How does trying to save our life end up making us lose it? It doesn’t make sense. But the grace of God was never about making sense.
We are all dependent on God’s grace, but we resist this because we have pride in our own accomplishments, because we don’t think we’re so sinful as to need someone dying on our behalf, because we think that our lives belong to us. It’s only when we strip that all away that we encounter the depths of God’s grace. It’s why wealth isn’t correlated to happiness, why awards don’t give you peace of mind, why even though you have several friends you still feel alone. When people suffer great losses and hit rock bottom, they’re often more in touch with the grace of God. Again, not because God actually gives them more grace in their pain, but it’s only when all of those other distractions and lies are removed that we actually can see God’s grace all around us.
As we are in Lent and are thinking about topics like self-denial and fasting, I wonder, what needs to die in you so that you can more fully receive the grace of God and follow Jesus? Power, prestige, wealth, reputation? The thing is, we all give up our lives for something. We all pay a price for the life we live. For some of us, we climb the ladder of success. For some, we put our self-worth into relationships and only care about how other people view us. For others of us, we give our lives to a corporation in exchange for money, sacrificing our family and sanity along the way.
Now, I’m not suggesting that we all go out and abandon responsibilities and quit our jobs, not by any means am I suggesting that. But I am suggesting that because our lives belong to God, when something else demands our life, we ought to be ready to say “Sorry, I can’t give you that because it belongs to God.” And that might take some radical reordering of priorities in your life. That might mean making some major changes to the way you spend your time, your money, your energy. As Jesus tells us, paradoxically, it is only by dying to self can we fully live to God. In doing so, it’s not that we’ll earn God’s grace, but rather will see more clearly just how abundantly God loves us. As Mark Twain said, “It ain’t hard to understand,” but it is certainly hard to do. So we ask for God’s grace as we seek to heed the words of our savior and take up our cross. Amen.
