By Faith

 Mark 8:31-38; Romans 4:13-25; Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16

I hesitate to admit it, but in my heart I know that I would probably be Peter.  I know I’m the kind of person who wants to take the leader aside and say: “Um, that wasn’t the plan. Are you sure you want to go there? The plan we had before was better….”

And if we’re honest with ourselves, very few of us would be enthusiastic about Jesus’ plan if we didn’t know all the sequels.

Seriously, why would anyone want to take up a cross: a symbol of Roman supremacy, spelling failure for Israel’s oppressed?  Why would anyone want to embrace the possibility – the probability, according to Jesus, of painful death?  

This past week, on the recommendation of our God’s Diversity Committee and Racial Reconciliation leaders, I watched the PBS special on The Black Church.  And in the voices of the people interviewed I started to hear an answer to that question: faith.  

That’s one thing that can make us take up Jesus’ cross.
Not simple belief in the existence of God, but what Paul describes as the faith of Abraham, who “hoped against hope”, who put faith in the expectation of God’s promises when overwhelming evidence showed it to be impossible for God to fulfill those promises.

“We’ve come this far by faith,” said the Reverend Calvin Butts III of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York, quoting a hymn by Albert Goodson. “And God has not failed us yet. When we’ve been true to God we have always been successful.”  

He’s quoted in the context of how the Civil War freed slaves to become the targets of new oppressions and separations. Quoted as a bridge to stories of another century of evidence that God’s promises of liberation, dignity, respect, and abundance just aren’t being fulfilled.  And still the expectation of justice, healing, and freedom persists, an enduring faith.

As Henry Louis Gates Jr narrated the story of the Black Church through our nation’s history – through every failure of the promised land to manifest in the United States and every cross taken up for the sake of freedom and wholeness – I kept hearing a refrain of a faith in God that both accepts all that evidence that hope is unreasonable and still finds hope in God.

“Didn’t my Lord deliver Daniel, after all?” says that faith. 

He delivered Daniel from the lion's den

Jonah from the belly of the whale

And the Hebrew children from the fiery furnace

And why not every man?

That traditional spiritual [which we’ll hear the choir sing in a few minutes] is a prayer of confidence in God. If my Lord delivered Daniel from the king’s decree of certain death, then why not me? You? 

In the terrors and dangers of slavery, segregation, lynchings, and suppression, the singer is in the hand of God’s faithfulness to us. That faithfulness is what makes it possible to be faithful to God; to walk in faith bearing the cross that has been placed on the shoulders of the oppressed.

As the Black Church story turns toward the Civil Rights movement of the twentieth century, Gates comments that “a belief that the liberating God of their fathers and mothers was on their side” enabled a new generation to deploy the prophetic gospel in the battle for freedom. 

Many at Trinity were direct witnesses or participants in that generation as church leaders, civic leaders, and ordinary folks took up a cross – one shaped by the anger of white supremacy, by the high probability of beatings and unjust murder – empowered by their faith in God’s faithful commitment to liberation. Faith that God’s commitment to the liberation of Black people in the United States is as specific and powerful as to the liberation of ancient Israel or the redemption of all people.

This week a friend shared an image of Ruby Bridges entering the all-white William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans. She’s holding her mother’s arm as they walk into the school against a background of shouting people and hateful signs. 

With that picture, Bridges is quoted as saying “I remember feeling fear once. I remember an angry white woman holding a little coffin with a Black doll and her screaming how she would hang me. I hesitated and my mother looked me in the eye and said, she won’t hurt you, I’ll see to that. I believed my mother and I kept walking.”

That’s the faith that Paul is praising Abraham for. The faith that sees the danger, sees the evidence that all is wrong, and keeps walking, fueled by trust. 

Trust that the one who has promised is faithful.  

It’s the faith of Lucille Bridges, who undoubtedly knew how real and serious the risks were, and kept walking, with her daughter, toward a promise that might often have seemed impossible. 

And if that seems out of reach for you or me, if that seems to be a faith unreasonable to ask of ourselves or others, it’s worth remembering that when Paul tells us that Abraham’s faith never weakened, Paul knew perfectly well that the line left out of the Abraham story we heard this morning is: “Then Abraham fell on his face and laughed” because the idea of him and Sarah having a child at 90 and 100 years old is ridiculous beyond belief.  

It’s not that Abraham believed without question or doubt all the time. It’s that Abraham stayed committed to God’s faithfulness, even renewed that commitment, when God’s promises were laughably extravagant, gloriously unreal.  (Abraham’s son Isaac is named for that disbelieving laughter.)

It’s not seamless for us, either. But that, Paul says, is the faith that will make our relationship with God whole. That is the faith that will unify us when we are tempted to separate ourselves. He’s talking to the Romans about Jews and Gentiles, but it’s just as true for our divisions (of race, politics, or anything else) today.
This commitment to realizing God’s impossible promises can unite God’s people with one another when the world tells us that some are better than others, that we are better off apart, that we need to hang on to our privilege, our advantages, our losses, our old identities. 

That faith will allow us – even compel us – to take up the cross with Jesus.

Sometimes, we need to actively grasp the cross: choose sacrifice and self-denial, risk pain on purpose, in order to awaken that faith within us. That is often what people in positions of privilege –white people, straight people, economically privileged people – are called to do: to choose sacrifice in order to ignite and awaken that faith that makes us whole.

Sometimes, or for others, there is no choice. The faith God has planted in us compels us to keep moving toward God’s promises when the only thing visible on that path is the suffering of the cross. That’s what calls many of both the persecuted and the privileged into the streets to march, to speak out when we could lose jobs or respect or even our lives, to sacrifice ourselves for healing even if we’d rather avoid the pain it costs. 

Others have the cross placed on their shoulders, and “take it up”, or keep moving toward God, because that’s the one thing that can keep us moving at all.  

Because the cross of Jesus, the cross Jesus invites – commands – us to share, is a cross of resurrection. 

The cross that was meant as a symbol of Roman supremacy, defeat and death is also the shape of gloriously impossible hope: the defeat of death itself, the faithfulness of God that cannot be broken by empire or gerrymandering, redlines or judicial murder or anything else. 

The cross is the weight and the buoyant lift of the promised land where the full liberation of the oppressed, the full reconciliation of the divided, pours blessings on the whole world.

The cross Jesus tells you and me to take up is the faith that grasps life and wholeness from the thorns of sin and separation, that bears up powerful expectation when hope is ridiculous, that reconciles when it costs us everything.  

Take that up, Jesus says, and come with me in faith. 

God’s never failed us yet.