Sermon: “In the Way of the Cross”

I guess it’s fitting for this dreary season of Lent to have heavy boulders of scriptures like these to read.  I think it would have been a whole lot more fun to just get up and sing “Wipe Out!” or “Love is All You Need” again – as we did last night at the church talent show!  But Lent is the time that the Spirit drives us to the wilderness, with the hope of finding God in the darkness.  We’re tempted to resist the Spirit’s call, though.  I know I was distracted from this sermon yesterday by a beautiful color magazine ad that I could see across the room:  “Grand Cayman Islands,” it said.  Yes, I thought.  Oh yes – barefoot in the rosy sunset on a soft Caribbean beach!  But Jesus calls us on a different way, along a more rocky shore, in the way of the cross.  Who in their right mind would want to go there?

Jesus cries out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” from the cross, we know.  But you might not know that these words were the “title” of Psalm 22 before it was numbered as it is today.  Scholars have guessed that Jesus might have actually sung the entire Psalm from the cross, both to reach out to God and to give himself and his friends comfort in those final hours, much as the last people on the Titanic were said to have been heard singing “Nearer My God to Thee” as the great ship went down.  Jesus pointed the way toward God even when God appeared the most conspicuously absent.

But we can understand why the disciples of Jesus might have wished for a less painful outcome.  I’m sure we could easily identify with Peter in Mark’s Gospel lesson, in his good intentions to argue Jesus out of his prediction that his ministry was going to end in a bloody death on the cross.  We have the benefit of 20-20 hindsight on Easter, so we can afford to be optimistic – to hear Jesus proclaiming what would be the life-bringing spiritual success of the resurrection and not the resounding worldly failure of execution by the Romans.  We can see why Peter would want to talk his friend out of such negative thinking, especially since he believed his great friend and mentor was God’s Messiah.  But Jesus returns rebuke for rebuke, Mark says.  Jesus points toward the cross – not just for himself, but for his disciples.  He calls the way of the cross the way of salvation.  Jesus says, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.  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.”[1] 

What does this mean?  Does Jesus want us to seek out suffering just for the sake of pain?  No wonder so many people reject Christianity as too negative!  This stuff sounds masochistic – suicidal even.  But let’s think about it for a minute.  Maybe it seems to us an unpleasant truth, but I believe it is truth.  The way of life is the way of the cross.

My family has a running joke about movies – whenever we overhear someone talking about a film we haven’t seen yet, we like to interrupt the one possibly blabbing the ending of the story by saying, “And they all die in the end!”  If we’re hoping to see it, we want to cut the talker off before we hear too much.  But it’s also a profound truth about every human creature ever born – we do all die in the end.  There’s a kind of bittersweet sadness to the baptism of an infant – especially if your family has a baptism gown (as my family does) that’s been handed down for generations.  My son Jacob was baptized in 1993 in the same embroidered white gown my Uncle Jake wore back in 1909, for his baptism.  The earth spins around the sun a few times, and before you know it, a human life is nearing its end.  It’s hard for a child or a teenager to get that, but Uncle Jake knows how fast his life flew by.  With failing eyes and hearing, he is grateful to be alive – but like any one at 99, he knows what it means to be on the way of the cross.

What these scriptures remind us is that life is full of suffering, and finally death – but God hears us, and even draws nearer to us, when we cry out – and living in denial or avoidance of pain or injustice is simply a lie.  It is a lie that does NOT lead to what Jesus called “fullness of life.”  Jesus teaches us to set our faces toward the cross, and move toward it with courage.  Jesus teaches us to pour our hearts to God, not just in praise, but also in grief and anger – because through that way of the cross, God can reach out to us, and heal and restore our faith.  This is one of the lessons that Lent can teach us if we are willing to follow Jesus through these days in the wilderness that stretch between here and Easter.  So what does walking his way of the cross look like?

Our American Protestant culture is so relentlessly cheerful and death-denying that it’s almost easier to start out by talking about what it does NOT look like.  Think about it: how do we usually handle our pain and suffering in the Congregational church?  “Don’t ask; don’t tell,” if you hear what Jen and I hear as we talk with many of you.  In other words, we reveal our suffering only very reluctantly, even to our pastors.  It’s a large part of our British and Northern European cultural heritage to have a stiff upper lip and put a cheerful face on our suffering.  We may be struggling along privately in the way of the cross, but most of us seem to prefer to make it look like an easy walk in the park. 

I can’t tell you how often someone will tell me a story of almost unbearable sadness, and then apologize for telling it.  If tears are involved in the telling, the apology is even stronger.  Now I’m not saying this to criticize anyone – I’m exactly the same way.  A couple of weeks ago in my sermon, when I got a little choked up remembering my mother’s death, many of you thanked me at the door for allowing that vulnerability – and I immediately apologized.  It’s just a gut instinct, isn’t it?  But when we deny the way of the cross, we wall ourselves off from the love of Christ.  When we are in pain, like wounded animals, many of us slink off to nurse our wounds alone in the bushes, and we are likely to lash out in anger at anyone who tries to help.  And that’s such a shame, because what we need is love, right?  “Da da da-da-da – love is all you need.”

I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve called people who haven’t been seen in church for a while and heard them say not that they have been sick, but that they have been sad.  They have been going through a hard time.  One woman who had suffered a third miscarriage couldn’t bring herself to come to church and see all the families with little children.  A man going through a divorce couldn’t stand to come and see all the happy couples.  Someone who had lost a job didn’t want to come to church, because there was too much shame in letting people know.  They were all walking the way of the cross, though not by choice, and they thought friends at church wouldn’t want any part of it.  They figured we would resist joining them there, on the way of the cross.

And in their defense, sometimes they were right.  I think of our wonderful talent show last night.  We are a church that really knows how to laugh and have fun together – whether on Saturday night or on Sunday morning.  Sometimes we are not in the mood for hearing something depressing.  You know, some nights you just feel like the Marx Brothers and not the documentary on Darfur.  If we don’t feel well equipped to receive bad news, when it comes our way it can feel like we’re taking on water, so we try to buoy people up.  We so HOPE they’re fine, it’s hard to give them room to NOT be fine.  So we say something perky and cheerful and try to get them to look on the bright side.  Pastors do it too – and if I’ve done that to you, I do apologize.  We resist the way of the cross.

But some of you have heard me quote a pastor friend of mine who once said that most people can recognize a Christian who’s called to offer the kind of sympathetic care that our Deacons and Stephen Ministers offer all the time – what sets them apart is their ability to stand with you on that shaky swinging bridge between life and death and help you get across safely.  Many of you have that gift – you can walk the way of the cross with steadiness and perseverance, and encourage others with God’s help.  Keep doing that, people of faith.  Thank you for making it possible to bring our full selves here to church – and to pour out our hearts in prayer and praise, and in anger and grief.

We can’t allow ourselves to forget that the same Psalm 22 that begins “My God my God why have you forsaken me?” ends with words of amazing hope and promise:  “You have rescued me” and “I will praise you.”  With the Psalmist, Jesus cries out, “for he did not despise me, or hide his face from me, but heard when I cried to him…before him shall bow all who go down to the dust, and I shall live for him.”  We live because he lives, and still today, our Savior walks the way of the cross with us, every step of the way.

Thanks be to God for this Good News.  Amen.