The Holy Gospel According to St. Mark, the 8th Chapter
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 he 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.”
Way, way back when people first started following Jesus, they weren’t called Episcopalians… they weren’t even called Lutherans! The first thing people who followed Jesus were called, were followers of “The Way” and that’s in large part because Jesus was always on the road… WALKIN’. But in addition to describing Jesus’s mode of transportation, “The Way” was also a particular “Way” of living and being that Jesus knew had the power to transform individual people, communities and literally all of creation, from what they were into what God intended them to be… always bigger and more wonderful than any of us could imagine.
When I think of walking a path like that, I think of Glen. I met Glen on internship. Lutherans, for seminary, do two years of classroom work, then go out and serve a church under the guidance of a seasoned pastor for a year and then return for one last year of classes. Glen was a member of my internship congregation in Libby, Montana. He was a retired forest service guy and toward the end of my time in Montana he invited me to go hiking with him. He told me that he loved hiking but these days he only had “low gear.” Personally, I thought “low gear” was perfect! I also thought that for a guy who was 83, “low gear” was pretty dang impressive!
So, off we went… up, up, up a one-person-wide path, up switch backs all the way up, and as we kept walking I noticed there was only room for one of us to lead. If I had tried to pass Glen and take over the lead, I would have fallen off the edge of the mountain. Only one could lead and that’s what was happening with Peter and Jesus in today’s Gospel. Jesus was leading the Disciples on “The Way”… a narrow path, not up a mountain, but down into Jerusalem… to his death and resurrection and Peter tried to take the lead. He wanted them to go the way he had always been taught things would go with the Messiah…. they’d raise an army, throw the Romans out and crown Jesus King! But Peter’s way wasn’t God’s way… it wasn’t the Divine way… it wasn't “The Way or the Truth and it would never lead to Life”… like the Devil had done before, Peter was tempting Jesus in the wilderness and Jesus called him on it, “GET BEHIND ME SATAN!”
To make things clear to Peter and the disciples back then and to us disciples now, Jesus turned and says, “If you want to follow me then you’ll need to allow all YOUR plans to be crucified… allow YOUR agendas to be killed… your own notions murdered… your own egos sacrificed and THEN follow me down this one, difficult, frightening, narrow, painful and dangerous path, THROUGH death and on to resurrection.”
That was a hard, hard thing for Peter to hear and it’s a hard, hard thing for us to hear too. After all, following Jesus would be so much less difficult if we could just follow Jesus OUR WAY, wouldn’t it? Even better, if we could just follow Jesus MY WAY then it wouldn’t be hard at all! It would feel good, comfortable, predictable and completely under control. Unfortunately there’s just one problem… when I insist on following Jesus MY WAY then I’m no longer FOLLOWING Jesus, on THE WAY.
If you and I are going to be disciples… if we are going to be FOLLOWERS of Jesus, we’re going to have to let Jesus lead, even (and especially) when Jesus leads us to places we REALLY wish he wouldn’t! If we’re going to be followers of Jesus we’re going to have to follow him into the uncomfortable and even the downright frightening, because the thing about Jesus is that while he ALWAYS leads us to NEW LIFE… he always leads us to that NEW LIFE by way of death. The “new life” part sounds GREAT! But the reality is that new life ALWAYS and ONLY comes by way of the cross, and that reality just isn’t easy to swallow. For you and me, it means taking our own ideas of how to be a Christian… our own ideas about how to “do church” and nailing them to the cross and letting them die. It means taking what we’ve grown comfortable with over generations and generations… taking what we’ve grown familiar with over a lifetime and walking to the place where those things get speared in the side.
Jesus is leading all of us, and all of creation to become transformed into the creation God intended us to be from the beginning. But the hard part… the uncomfortable reality Peter hated to face… is that all transformation… for creation, for our churches and for ourselves, is that real transformation only happens through the process of death and resurrection… and the death part is HARD!
Jesus’s call for us to take up our cross and follow, is not a call to suffer quietly through the individual hardships that we all encounter in this life. Jesus’s call to take up our cross and follow is a call to allow God to change us completely from what we are today, into the creation God is calling us to be. It’s frightening, because what we are today is KNOWN… it’s familiar… it’s comfortable… while the thing God is calling us to become is a complete mystery, and to make it all worse, we know the path to that new creation doesn’t just LOOK like death… it IS the death of everything that was!
BUT! HERE is the promise of following Jesus… HERE is the promise of following THE WAY: Light ALWAYS shines in the darkness and darkness can NEVER overcome it! Captives are ALWAYS set free! Storms and chaos are ALWAYS calmed! Easter ALWAYS follows Good Friday and a NEW and ABUNDANT LIFE, ALWAYS, ALWAYS, ALWAYS blooms out of what, to all the world, looks like the bitter end.
I am simply in awe of what you are doing here at St. Barnabas and St. Matthews. You have decided to follow Jesus on the WAY. To walk the narrow path and let Jesus lead. You’ve decided to allow the church that has fed you, cared for you and comforted you for generations to fall even more deeply into the hands of God, to be re-shaped and molded into something new that none of us can yet even begin to fully imagine. So in the next few weeks and months, as you let go of what was… hold on to the promise of new life! Hold on to the light and life, even while walking in shadow times and in the darkness of loss and grief. Hold on to the promise... New Life is coming... Together we are becoming God's new creation! Amen.
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