To Die For

Mark 8:31-38

Then [Jesus] began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders, the chief priests and the scribes, and be killed and on the third day, be raised. He said all of this quite openly. And Peter pulled him aside and began to rebuke him. But Jesus, turning and looking at the disciples rebuked Peter, saying, “Get behind me Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things, but on human things.”

Then he called the crowds, together with the disciples, and said to them, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world and forfeit their life. Indeed, what would anyone give in return for their life. If anyone in this adulterous and sinful generation is ashamed of me and of my words, so will the Son of Man be ashamed of them when he comes again in the glory of his father with the holy angels.”

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I’ve been curious about and captivated by the death – and presumed murder – of Alexei Navalny, the Russian activist, lawyer, and political prisoner, who dropped dead in captivity just a week or so ago. If what so many believe to be true, is true, the bold, brazen way his death came to pass, is another terrifying example of who Vladimir Putin is and how his Russian regime operates. I don’t know enough to comment on the politics of it all with any wisdom or detail, so I won’t. But Navalny’s dedication to his cause in standing up for justice and in the face of an oppressive, power-hungry, president, is admirable.

And I’ve read some things from Navalny that indicate much of his work as an activist for justice and against corruption is rooted in his Christian faith. I’ve read that he was once quite a militant atheist, but that now he’s a believer, and that his faith has been the source of constant ridicule from many of his friends and colleagues in the Russian Anti-Corruption Foundation. His faith was also, apparently, a comfort and an encouragement for his life and work in the world. And, in light of that kind of stubborn faith, it’s meaningful to know that Navalny once said, “The world is made up not only of good and evil, but also of those who do nothing.” And he has also said, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing. So don’t be inactive.”

And it seems like Navalny’s words – and the life they inspired in him – got him killed, in the end.

Which reminds me of something Martin Luther King, Jr., said once: “There are some things so eternally true, that they are worth dying for. And if a man has not discovered something that he will die for, he isn't fit to live.”

It may be too much – or too soon – to suggest that Alexei Navalny and Martin Luther King, Jr., belong in the same hall of martyrs. But their passion for justice, their willingness to stand up to the powers around them, the fearlessness with which they seemed to live – and their shared faith in Jesus – can’t be separated from the words we hear from Jesus this morning, when he teaches the disciples that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, rejection, and murder, and that if you really want to follow him you should take up a cross and do the same.

Well, I’m no Alexei Navalny, no Martin Luther King, Jr., and I’m no Messiah, either. But I did see the Indigo Girls, in Dayton, on Friday night. (I mean that to sound like those Holiday Inn Express commercials, where they act like staying at a Holiday Inn makes you smarter. I think that may actually be true where the Indigo Girls are concerned, but I digress.)

Anyway, one of their lyrics came to mind in light of this gospel and King’s words and Navalny’s death. The lyric is, “There must be a thousand things you would die for. I can hardly think of two.” It’s a love song. And it’s about one person’s awe and admiration for another, so it’s not supposed to be about Jesus at all. But, it made me wonder about what he’s up to today.

“There must be a thousand things you would die for. I can hardly think of two.”

I think today’s Gospel means to make us wonder just what it is we might be willing to die for.

See, Jesus has just come out to his disciples as the Messiah. And he’s talking about what that means – the idea that the likely result of his faithfulness to God’s call on his life will lead to his own rejection, his own suffering and, of course, his own crucifixion and death. He’s not saying that you have to die to follow Jesus, necessarily. He’s just saying that if you’re doing it right – “if you want to become MY followers” – you better be ready for the struggle and the suffering and the death that could very well come along with it.

And Jesus knew that people – especially comfortable, privileged, powerful people – would be suddenly unsettled and afraid and threatened and angry because of all he was up to. He was about to upset the apple cart of the status quo in every way.

The cross about to be foisted upon Jesus comes to him because he’s about to come for the rich and the powerful. And because he’s about to raise his voice for the least and the last, for the outcast and the outsider.

Jesus is healing people who shouldn’t be healed. He’s loving people who shouldn’t be loved. He’s welcoming people who some would just as soon keep out. He’s forgiving sins believed to be unforgiveable. Jesus is about to pull no punches, give zero you-know-whats, lay it all on the line and let the chips fall where they may.

And the biggest chip to fall is himself – and he wants others to know what they’re in for if they really choose to follow him… if they mean it… and if they do it right.

“There must be a thousand things you would die for, [Jesus]. I can hardly think of two.”

And I wonder if that’s what was going through Peter’s mind when he tries to stop him – when he tries to quiet him down after saying the quiet part out loud. Sometimes I think Peter was just worried people would leave the fold if they knew what the risks were. Sometimes I think Peter was just trying to protect Jesus from all of that suffering. Sometimes I think Peter just can’t believe that this is the kind of Messiah God would be – one that suffers, one that gets crucified, one that gets killed. What kind of God is that?

But I also wonder if Peter doesn’t want Jesus talking this way – promising so much struggle and sacrifice and death – because Peter wasn’t up for all of that, himself.

“There must be a thousand things you would die for. I can hardly think of two.”

And I wonder if we – like Peter – fool ourselves into pretending that following Jesus means giving up chocolate or beer or Facebook for Lent; or that discipleship means praying more, or reading our Bibles, or showing up for worship. And those things are good and righteous and faithful and nothing to sneeze at, don’t get me wrong. But they are nothing more and nothing less than tools and faith practices meant to prepare and to move us toward something much greater.

All of our worshiping, learning, and serving… All of our fasting and praying and giving… are about preparing our hearts and our minds and our lives to be able to recognize and to facilitate the Kingdom of God in our midst – for our sake and for the sake of the world – even if it’s hard sometimes – and expecting it to be.

All we do in the safety of our homes and with our families and through our congregation is meant to reveal the way things are (unequal, unfair, unjust for too many, too much of the time) while knowing about how God would rather have things be (equitable, fair, merciful, just, loving) so that we will do something in the name of Jesus to bring the latter – the stuff of the Kingdom – to pass. And, again, that can be risky business if and when we do it right.

People with money – maybe that’s you and me – don’t like to be told they should give it away.

People with power – maybe that’s you and me – don’t like to be told they should share, or even relinquish, it.

People on top – maybe that’s you and me – don’t like to make room for others or to imagine their own place at the bottom.

Preaching that could get you run out of town, which happened to Jesus. Protesting in the name of that could get you hauled into court, which happened to Jesus. Teaching that could lose you some friends and get you betrayed, which happened to Jesus. Embodying that, could get you crucified, killed, and buried, all of which happened to Jesus, just like he promised it would.

“There must be a thousand things you would die for. I can hardly think of two.”

And Jesus did – he died – so that we might come close to giving more, to loving more, to sacrificing more, to suffering more for the sake of others, and for the good of the cause. Because even when we fall short – as Jesus knew we would, and as God knows we do – the cross never gets the last word.

“The Son of Man must undergo great suffering, yes … and be killed, yes ... and on the third day be raised.” YES. And “…on the third day be raised.”

And that’s where we find our hope to do what God calls us to. Not many of us are as bold, or as brave, or as faithful as the likes of Alexei Navalny, or Martin Luther King, Jr., or Jesus. We don’t all have the courage or the calling or the love within us to sacrifice and suffer and die for the sake of bringing God’s kingdom to pass on this side of heaven, no matter how badly the world needs it.

So we look to that cross, even if we’d never climb up there ourselves. And we look for the empty tomb, too, because we will find ourselves there one day. And we give thanks that even when we don’t, God does… even when we won’t, God will... even when we haven’t, God already has.

And we keep following Jesus as nearly as we’re able – testing our own boundaries, pushing our own limits, risking our own comfort, safety and security, maybe – to see, as Dr. King put it, “the eternal truth” of God’s grace for which Christ died – and lives – so that we, and the world around us, will too.

Amen

Ashes and Grief

Luke 22:39-46

[Jesus] came out and went, as was his custom, to the Mount of Olives; and the disciples followed him. When he reached the place, he said to them, “Pray that you may not come into the time of trial.” Then he withdrew from them about a stone’s throw, knelt down, and prayed, “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me; yet, not my will but yours be done.” Then an angel from heaven appeared to him and gave him strength. In his anguish he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down on the ground. When he got up from prayer, he came to the disciples and found them sleeping because of grief, and he said to them, “Why are you sleeping? Get up and pray that you may not come into the time of trial.”

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How many of you have had the good fortune of visiting Disney World or Disneyland? Whatever the case, Disney is the most magical place on earth, right? – especially if you’re a child, but even for some of you grown-ups, too. I remember being skeptical and cynical and sort of a Scrooge about Disney the first time we took the boys when they were little, because I was doing the math… I was counting the cost… I was lamenting how much more or better or different we could be doing with all of that money, besides giving it to The Mouse. (And we have friends who work there, so we weren’t even paying for all of the things!)

But, we got there and I drank the Kool-Aid real quick. I bought it all hook-line-and-sinker, because the boys were excited and in awe and enamored by the rides and the fireworks, by Buzz and Woody, by Goofy and Mickey, and all the rest, coming to life, right before their very eyes. At one point, after dropping $27 dollars (or something similarly ridiculous) on a Buzz Light Year action figure/drink cup, probably with no more than 10 ounces of lemonade inside, I declared, “Walt Disney can have all of my money.” The boys were just having that much fun.

Well, Disney works really hard at making their parks “the most magical places on earth.” Among so many ingeniously “imagineered” things, did you know that Disney has paint colors they’ve named “Go Away Green,” and “Bye Bye Blue?” They’re the colors Disney uses to neutralize and “disappear” the unappealing, unattractive – but necessary – parts of any public space, like garbage cans, mechanical boxes, fences and partitions … even the utilitarian buildings you might see from the monorails and Skyliner gondola ride are hidden in plain sight with these cleverly camouflaged paint colors. And all of that is great, for fairy tales and child’s play and a week’s vacation in Never Neverland.

But tonight – Ash Wednesday – is about precisely the opposite. It’s about doing anything and everything BUT “disappearing” the unappealing, unattractive, ugly parts of our lives as people on the planet. Tonight is about laying them bear – the shame, the death, and the sin of it all. It’s about calling it out, owning it, rubbing it into our foreheads for ourselves and others to see, and trusting that God will do God’s thing with this dust and these ashes and the brokenness they represent – that God will forgive it, redeem it, wipe it off, wash it away, transform it into something other than the mere smudge and smut that stains us all.

And I’d like to take this all a bit further – dig a bit deeper, maybe – this time around for our Lenten walk in the weeks ahead. If you read my newsletter article for February, you know I tried to get you all thinking about this plan long before tonight.

Over the course of the last several months, I’ve been particularly moved by Anderson Cooper’s All There Is podcast. He started it after the death of his mother, Gloria Vanderbilt, a couple of years ago, when he began to take on the monumental, emotionally taxing, spiritually draining task of going through her things – and reliving his life and hers and theirs together – as the last living adult in his immediate family.

For those of you who don’t know, Anderson Cooper’s father died when Anderson was just ten years old, and his older brother, Carter, died by suicide when he was 23, and Anderson was 21. Carter jumped from the 14th floor of their New York apartment while their mother watched.

So, left with all of that history, tragedy, and sadness, Anderson was left to digest and deal with the grief he soon realized he’d never been taught or trained or equipped to do well. And he began to record his reflections about it all and to share conversations with others who’d traveled the road of grief and sorrow, too, so that he could learn from their experience and wisdom – and share it with whoever else might want to listen.

I’ve been so moved by those conversations and inspired by the simple truth that grief is – or will be – the common ground we all share as human beings, that it felt like a holy calling and a faithful responsibility to do together, and for each other, however much we’re able: the good work of teaching and learning and praying about and equipping one another to grieve well, I mean – or at least to broach the topic and engage the notion that that’s possible, and a worthwhile endeavor, to grieve well – during this coming season of Lent.

And in many ways, it should be nothing new. Like I’ve already said, it’s so much a part of what brings us together on Ash Wednesday. And I think there’s something about the common ground of grief that makes this service and our Good Friday worship every year, too, so compelling for so many of us. (More of us typically come together for those two worship experiences than all the Wednesdays in between. But I’m hoping to change that this time around.)

Because it seems to me that – as hard as it can be – something about it all draws us to the ritual of and to the reflection on the grief that gathers us. So I’d like to do more of that, more deliberately in the weeks ahead. And while we don’t always know or acknowledge or have language for it, our penchant for this is a great part of the human experience – and it would and should and could be, for us, a deep, meaningful, exercise of faith as children of God.

In scripture, we read about Job, in the throes of relentless grief, repenting in dust and ashes. We know that, in Old Testament days, prophets and priests, kings and commoners, put on sackcloth and covered their heads with earth and dirt and dust and ashes, too. In the book of Judges, we read about the women of Israel who made an annual, public display of their grief over the murder of Jepthah’s daughter – one of their own – so that the nation would never forget it. In Jeremiah, we read about the wailing of Rachel being heard in Ramah for God’s children who were lost and banished into exile. And, of course we know of Jesus, weeping over Jerusalem, mourning the loss of his friend Lazarus, shedding tears as thick as blood in the Garden of Gethsemane, and crying from the cross, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”

My point is, this is God’s desire for us, believe it or not – to acknowledge, wrestle with, and experience the grief that finds us in this life. There’s no such thing as – or at least not enough – “Go Away Green,” or “Bye Bye Blue” – or “Go Away Grief” or “Bye Bye Blues” as the case may be – when it comes to the sorrows of this world. It’s hard and feels unholy and it can be unfair too much of the time. And our inclination can be to cover over it and pray it away and paint it into oblivion if we could – or sleep, and sleep-walk our way through it like the disciples in tonight’s Gospel.

But tonight … the ashes on our heads … these Lenten days that lie ahead … the cross of Christ that waits for us down the road … all of it is an invitation to see that grief and sorrow are part of life in the world, that no one escapes it, that none of us is immune from it, that not even the God we know in Jesus could shake it at every turn.

And that’s what this obnoxious wall is all about. Each week we’ll bring something forward to this shrine of grief and sorrow. We will grieve those we’ve loved and lost on this side of Heaven. We will grieve the loss of and damage to creation. We will grieve our regrets, our missed opportunities, the generational sorrows of our people, God’s children, the Church, and more. I suspect it will be hard and holy. I imagine it will beautiful and brutal, at times. And I pray it will be instructive and healing and unburdening and life-giving and hopeful, in the end, too.

There’s a poet named Denise Levertov who wrote this about grief:

To speak of sorrow
works upon it
moves it from its
crouched place barring
the way to and from the soul’s hall.

That’s what I hope we’ll do with our grief in the days ahead. Speak of it, at the very least, so that it doesn’t block our connection to God’s greatest desire for us. Not deny or hide or run from it. Not keep quiet about the challenge it can be to our faith. Not feel bad or guilty for wishing it wasn’t ours to bear.

And I hope we’ll trust what God can do with it … what God can do with us … if we will let our grief and sorrow be; if we feel it; if we learn to live with these ashes for more than just an evening, perhaps; more than just a season, even; as more than just a symbol, and as something God is always undoing, always making new, always redeeming, always raising from the dead … to new life … with love and full of hope, in Jesus’ name.

Amen