Trip of a Lifetime

Mark 8:27-38

Jesus went on with his disciples to the villages of Caesarea Philippi; and on the way he asked his disciples, ‘Who do people say that I am?’ And they answered him, ‘John the Baptist; and others, Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets.’ He asked them, ‘But who do you say that I am?’ Peter answered him, ‘You are the Messiah.’* And he sternly ordered them not to tell anyone about him.

Then Jesus began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. He said all this quite openly.

And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, ‘Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.’

He called the crowd with his 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 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. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? Indeed, what can they give in return for their life?

Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.’

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Recently, I read an article about the potential joys and troubles of traveling with others. One of the stories was about a man named Stephen Garrido, who took a trip with his girlfriend of a year, a trip of a lifetime to Disneyland. He had high hopes for the journey. But apparently, even Disney isn’t always the happiest place on earth. Instead, it was a living nightmare Stephen said.

He learned his girlfriend was much too messy for a small hotel room and worse, extremely rude to staff at the hotel and restaurants. She found out that Stephen snored like a blender full of marbles. The trip ended with her cursing at him profusely and the two split two weeks later.

Getting an invitation or extending an invitation to travel with someone is a big deal. Mainly because I think traveling with someone is the best way to get to know them. The new experiences, stressors, and challenges reveal a new or different side of you and you see a new side revealed of someone else. So you are likely cautious when extending and accepting an invitation to travel.

Jesus and his disciples traveled together a lot, especially in this part of the gospel of Mark. Just in the last two chapters, Jesus had been in the desert, then to Bethsaida, Over to gennesaret, On to Tyre, then Decapolis, Down to Dalmanutha, and finally back to Bethsaida. I’d say from all of that, the disciples and Jesus likely learned a thing or two about another from all this travel. You’d think they knew each other pretty well at this point, but maybe not…

In today’s story, Jesus and the disciples are again traveling, this time from Bethsaida to Caesarea Philippi. And as they were walking, Jesus threw out a question, “who do people say that I am”. It doesn’t seem to have much context, but if we look back a few verses, Jesus was just berating the disciples for not knowing who he was: “do you still not understand? He said.

Are your hearts hardened, do you have eyes and ears and yet you don’t get it? Do you not remember all that I have done? Maybe he was concerned others were just as confused as his disciples.

They responded to the question with logical answers, but none were the answer Jesus had hoped for. “Who do you all say that I am” asking the disciples, thinking maybe after all the traveling and that stern talking to, they had figured it out. And Peter, acting as the spokesperson for all the disciples, says “you are the Messiah.”!

Ah there it is! The right answer. The disciples or at least Peters has it figured out, he knows who Jesus is. The Messiah, the Christ, the anointed one. This is the first time in the entire gospel, more than two thirds of the way through, that someone calls Jesus the Messiah, that someone seemingly understands who he is. And it’s that the best feeling, to be understood, for others to truly know who you are…

But immediately there was a problem. The messiah Peter had envisioned was not the same Messiah that Jesus would be. Peter had created this image, this idea, or ideal, of what the messiah would be and do, act and look like. And that wasn’t something only Peter had done… Many Jews expected and longed for a Messiah to return and restore Israel to all its glory. How that would happen or the kind of messiah the people hoped for, varied.

So when Jesus started revealing the kind of Messiah he would be and what would happen to him, well Peter just couldn’t take it. That’s not what he expected the messiah to be. To be fair, we don’t know exactly what Peter hoped for, but we do know it wasn’t a Messiah who would suffer, get rejected by the religious leaders, and then be killed. That much we know because Peter pulled Jesus to the side and let him know just how wrong he was.

But Peter’s expectations, whatever they were, were wrong or misguided or incomplete. And apparently not in a small way, since Jesus felt the need to call Peter satan, the tempter, and ordered him to turn around and get behind Jesus, because clearly Peter didn’t know what he was talking about.We do the same thing, no? We, too, create an ideal image of our Messiah, an idea of who Jesus should be and how he should act.

We want Jesus to be a judge who condemns all those we think are wrong and who models only what we think is right. We want Jesus to be our grant maker, who will give us the health and wealth we’ve wished for if we just lift up the right prayers.

We want Jesus to be a republican or a democrat, that way we can say “my preferred politician is more Christ like” when really we mean they are more like the Christ we have created for ourselves.

Yet, Jesus is rarely what we want him to be. And like Peter, we get disappointed, upset, and ultimately let down by this. The truth is our partner, our friends, siblings, parents, kids and coworkers, even our Messiah will never live up to or fulfill the image of who we want them to be.

If we hold them to some version we’ve made up for them, they will inevitably leave us angry, wishing they were more like this or that, and the relationship will suffer if not cease.

A deeper, more fruitful relationship can only occur when one sees the other person for who they really are and not who they wished them to be, Jesus included. Because Jesus isn’t always the messiah we want, but he is always the messiah we need. We need a messiah who meets us in our suffering. A messiah who knows what it’s like to face rejection and heartache and despair and share in that with us. A messiah who comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable. A messiah who willingly lays down his life in order to give you a new one, full of grace and forgiveness and love.

I find great comfort in knowing that Peter didn’t fully understand Jesus. This man who had traveled all over Judea, who had seen the miracles, who used the right words, but in many ways still got it wrong. What I find even more comforting is that he still got the invitation to follow Jesus.

We don’t have to have it all right, we don’t have to understand everything about God or Jesus or the faith we claim. We can have doubts and questions and even wrong ideas about all of it.

The good news is that the invitation still stands! Jesus extends the invitation to follow him, to travel with him regardless of what we have wrong, or if we feel our faith isn’t deep enough or strong enough or sincere enough. He doesn’t say you need to have this understanding, or you have to know this, or even believe these things about him.

In fact, it is because Peter, the disciples, and the crowd don’t have it all figured out that Jesus invites them in the first place. Unlike you and me, Jesus isn’t cautious about who he invites because Jesus knows that if you really want to get to know him, you have to travel with him.

I hope we model this well here at Cross of Grace, especially on days like today, when we welcome new Partners in Mission. Hopefully, we have been clear, you don’t have to have it all figured out, or believe in every single thing we do, or know all the answers. We don’t! Because becoming a Partner in Mission isn’t about any of that.

Being a Partner in Mission is about accepting the invitation to travel with us. Today you are saying I am willing to take this journey of faith alongside you. And in return we get to say, Thanks be to God. We’re so glad you’re here because we are in for the trip of a lifetime.

We will undoubtedly learn new things about one another, we won’t get it all figured out, but we’ll ask questions and support each other along the way. And we’ll help each other aside the idea of the messiah we want and together we’ll follow the messiah we need.

Amen

Gratitude over Outrage

Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

Now when the Pharisees and some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem gathered around him, they noticed that some of his disciples were eating with defiled hands, that is, without washing them.

(For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, do not eat unless they thoroughly wash their hands, thus observing the tradition of the elders; and they do not eat anything from the market unless they wash it; and there are also many other traditions that they observe, the washing of cups, pots, and bronze kettles.)

So the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, “Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?” He said to them, “Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites, as it is written,

‘This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines.’ You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.”

Then he called the crowd again and said to them, “Listen to me, all of you, and understand: there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile. For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.”

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On Tuesday, I got really angry. I love my son dearly, but Clive will not stop climbing on anything, everything. The chairs, tables, the kitchen counters; he’s sneaking and oddly daring for being my son. Tuesday he climbed on a chair, then on the kitchen table for the 52nd time in the last hour. I was angry and grabbed him off the table and, getting as close to his little ear as I could, told him to stop climbing on the table.

As soon as I let go, he pouted his lip, cried big tears, and I felt terrible. After putting him to bed, I turned on the local news. The first story was about how three children in Indianapolis, five years old and younger, had lost their lives from finding a gun and accidentally firing it. And I thought if I should be outraged about anything, it shouldn’t be my son acting like the toddler he is, but rather that toddlers are losing their lives from completely avoidable situations.

What makes you angry, outraged even? Is it the high cost of living that only seems to be getting higher? Is it that suicide among young people continues to grip our community? Is it that it's easier to get a gun in Indiana than to adopt a pet, in most cases. Whatever the source, what do you do with your anger? For many of us, anger is a motivator, a catalyst in our lives. We hear something, see something, that hurts us or someone we love or experience something that we know isn’t right and we feel compelled to act.

Action, what we do with our lives, is the main concern for both Jesus and James today. And it's tempting to think that this righteous anger, this outrage over something that isn’t right in the world, is a good thing.

It was for Cecilia Munoz; her outrage did a lot of good and got her pretty far in life. The source of her anger came from a dinner she had at 17 with her parents and a close friend. The year was 1980 and the conversation at the table focused on the wars going on in Central America and the involvement of the US.

After dinner, Cecilia’s good friend looked her in the eyes and said that if the US were to ever go to war somewhere in Latin America, he believed that her parents belonged in an internment camp just like the japanese-americans during WWII, because they were immigrants from Bolivia (a central american country).

She couldn’t believe someone who knew her, knew her parents, who sat at their table for meals, could say and believe such awful things about her parents. She was outraged and, as she wrote in an essay, that outrage became the propellant of her life, driving her right into the immigrant rights movement, fighting for people whose story was a lot like her parents. And according to Cecilia, “a little outrage can take you a long way”. It took her to Washington, then to the white house, and even becoming a MacArthur Fellow for her work with helping immigrants.

Isn’t this what James is talking about when he says be doers of the Word, not just hearers?

We hear God’s call to welcome the immigrant and the stranger, to care for the weak and the vulnerable, the orphan and the widow as James puts it, and then we do those things.

That's what God wants from us according to James. Does it matter if anger is the fuel that gets us to do the right thing?

Well Cecilia has a warning, “anger has a way of hollowing out your insides”. For every fifty families she would help, she could only think of the five who didn’t get the documentation they’d hoped for. The defeats were more than the victories, which is often the case with any injustice or problem out in the world. And anger could only take Cecilia so far before it started carving out her soul.

Or as theologian Fredreick Buechner puts it, “Of the 7 deadly sins, anger is possibly the most fun… in many ways anger is a feast fit for a king. The main drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you”.

Our outrage at the problems, struggles, and pains of this world are not misplaced. We should get mad when we see our neighbors being harmed, when we witness the misuse and abuse of creation, when we hear the cries of the poor and brokenhearted. Those same things anger God!

Yet, when anger is the source of our action, the fuel for what we do out in the world, it will eat us up. The problems are too great, the struggle too strong, the hurt too deep for anger to be the motivator.

It won’t sustain us for the work that God calls us to nor does it accomplish what God desires, at least that’s what James thinks. Which is why he says we must be slow to anger, because it will feed us for a little while, but then it starts to carve a hollow place in your soul.

Yet what of Jesus, he seems pretty angry with the Pharisees, calling them hypocrites! And what about that other time he flips tables over in the synagogue? What is that if not outrage? Yes this is true, Jesus certainly gets angry. But it’s good to remember or be reminded that we aren’t Jesus and his ways are always higher, better than our ways, Isaiah reminds us. Jesus' concern though is with actions too and what motivates them, just as James is, but from a different perspective.

While James tells us that anger shouldn’t be the catalyst for our actions, Jesus is worried that our actions are simply going through the motions; that we do what’s considered the right thing, but one’s heart isn’t really in it, saying the right words but it’s all lip service. The Pharisees weren’t wrong for following the tradition of washing hands. But, Jesus is angry because they cared more about the tradition than they did their neighbors and God’s instruction to care for them.

Is that not still the same today? We hold to all sorts of traditions, all sorts of ways of doing things, over caring for our neighbors, with one glaring example being gun violence. We hold so tightly to human tradition, this right to arm oneself that we either forget or outright abandon God’s commandments, like don’t kill, love your neighbor, and protect the vulnerable.

It’s not enough to extend thoughts and prayers after the next act of gun violence or mass shooting if we are unwilling to forget human tradition, advocate for gun reform, and hold tight to God’s commandments. If not, it’s all lip service.

So if it’s neither anger nor tradition that motivates our action, what should?

Cecilia Munoz says anger didn’t eat her away completely because that hollow place carved by outrage got filled with other, more powerful things, things like: compassion, faith, family, music and the goodness of people around her. These things filled her up and tempered her outrage with a deep sense of gratitude.

Anger, righteous or not, rarely produces what we want. Clive still climbs on tables after all.

So, what fills you up with a sense of gratitude? What are those things more powerful than anger that sustain your action?

Thanks be to God for every generous act of giving, every perfect gift that comes from God, filling the hollow place hewed by outrage and anger. May we all be so overwhelmed with gratitude for the good, more powerful things of this life: faith, hope, love, family, music, joy, that we can’t help but be doers of God’s word.

Perhaps then we will accomplish not only what we want, but what God wants too.

Amen