The Cross We Take Up

Mark 8:27-38

Why on earth would anyone want to follow Jesus?

Who would want to sign on with a leader who announces that – rather than make the change we want to see in the world, rather than liberate us from the oppressive government or systems we live under – instead, he’s going to become a victim of that oppression, suffering and dying and rising?

A leader who rejects the friend who tries to talk him out of this defeatist and depressing sounding attitude?

And who goes around publicly inviting people to get killed with him?

Who wants to sign up for that?

I don’t.

Just like Peter, I signed up to follow the Messiah who is here to heal and save: heal you, me; save the world from ourselves, and most of all defeat the evil around and oppressing us.

Two thousand years after Jesus lived and taught and died and lived again, it can be easy enough to feel comfortable with Jesus telling his disciples that he’s going to suffer and die and rise.

I hear this, and I recognize the story I know, a story we tell several times a week in the Creed and the Eucharistic prayers. I know the story, so it doesn’t shock me the way it shocked Peter and James and John and probably a couple of Marys, and the rest of the disciples, when Jesus first told them.
It doesn’t bother me, unless I remember that this means that Jesus may not be planning to overthrow the evils I’ve been expecting him to tackle and defeat in our lifetime, any more than he overthrew the Romans oppressing Israel in the first century. Or at least, not in the way I want God to do this.

And it doesn’t bother me that Jesus invites us to take up our cross (I’ve been singing happily about that for nearly forty years now), unless I really think about what it might mean to voluntarily embrace crucifixion – even if it’s only metaphorical.
I’m not especially interested in dying right now, nor in losing my self – losing the identity I’ve gotten comfortable with and becoming someone I don’t even know.  New life sounds more uncertain than attractive, from that perspective.

We’ve learned, over the centuries, how to soften the shock for ourselves, but I think Jesus still wants us to feel it. Wants us to know how radical an invitation he’s offering.

It’s not an invitation to suffering for suffering’s sake, nor because suffering or dying are holy on their own merits, but Jesus’ invitation is to suffering – or whatever work or strain or risk or loss – for the sake of something you love so very much more than yourself.
Just the same way Jesus embraced all that risk for the sake of God’s extraordinary, all-encompassing love for human beings. For us.

Jesus wants us to feel the shock, I believe, and to embrace the risk in his call to us to love as we never dreamed we could love. Wants us to understand that loving something so very much more than I love myself is, indeed, a way of dying to myself. Jesus wants us to know how much that love costs, as well as the incredible reward of abundant life that kind of love can bring.

Sometimes when you love that way you can see and feel that cross in your hands and the weight on your shoulders, as you empty your budget or your schedule or your tear ducts or even your blood into the pain of a beloved friend, a child or parent. Or when you empty your self-image, your identity, your wallet, your emotional and physical strength, into the dream of God or into the pain and need of the world: for justice, peace, good news, healing or daily bread.

Other times, when you love that powerfully, you don’t always know it consciously, or feel the weight of the cross as you take it up.

I don’t always believe, or know, that I love God’s work in the world, or God’s call that way. Often I don’t want to love Jesus quite that much – it’s overwhelming. But I can tell you that the self I used to know was never going to live in New Jersey. And here I am in the midst of life extraordinarily abundant with you.

Sometimes the cross looks like the call of Mother Teresa, Dr. King, or Oscar Romero.

Sometimes it looks like a cross-country move you hadn’t planned on, and which transforms you anyway, lost and saved all at once, by loving something or someone so very much more than yourself.

That’s the cross Jesus invites us to take up; how he invites each of us to follow him, and all of us together.

It’s an invitation we took up, consciously or not, in baptism, vowing to love and follow Jesus, and to live in imitation of him, including dying and rising.

That’s what we do in baptism, if you hadn’t noticed before. What two more of us do today, as Kathy and Reese are baptized. Through the power of the water – water we can’t breathe in, when it washes over us – we die with Jesus, and in the same water, rise to share in his resurrection: to have, in our own lives, eternal life.

A few splashes of water, in a tidy church ceremony, aren’t very dangerous. But we’ve been watching the deadly power of water all weekend long, as Florence pours through the Carolinas. We’ve been seeing all that power that can wash away who and what and where we were and leave us in a whole new landscape, a new life we aren’t even going to recognize at first.

In the promises we make in baptism, and renew any time we participate in someone else’s baptism – promises of proclaiming good news, seeking justice and peace and human dignity, loving our neighbor and seeking Christ – we commit ourselves to taking up our cross: loving God’s mission, God’s people, God’s life, in our daily actions and choices, loving more than we ever dreamed we could love.

And in taking up that cross of love, risking suffering or loss or strain or unintended transformation, we accept Jesus’ invitation to share his divine experience. Loving as God loves, infinitely more than we can ask or imagine, risking resurrection, new, unknown, abundant eternal life here and now and always.

It’s probably not what you wanted to sign up for; maybe not what you thought you signed up for when you first met Jesus, or when you were baptized. But it is what Jesus has been telling us all along. That love, cross-shaped and awkward as it may be, is already pulling us through every risk and strain and loss, to resurrection life.