Sermon Mark 8:31-38 Take Up Your Cross

Rev. Jeffrey T. Howard

Sermon Mark 8:31-38 Take Up Your Cross

First Presbyterian Church of Ocean City

March 1, 2015

The image I want you to remember this Lent is the sound of a piece of cloth being ripped into two pieces. You all know what this sounds and looks like. This is the image Mark gives us at Jesus' baptism. The boundary between heaven and earth is being ripped in two. Matthew uses the same image at the death of Jesus when the curtain in the Jerusalem temple is ripped top to bottom. Both of these are symbols of the reality that in Jesus Christ heaven and earth have come together. Nothing separates them.

As we saw last week this begins a new way of thinking. We think not of ourselves and what we want but of God and what God wants. This is a paradigm shift. And this new way of thinking has enormous implications for how we think and how we live our lives. We will see today that Peter has problems shifting his way of thinking to accommodate this new reality. We will get to this, but first let's pray.

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O Lord, our rock and redeemer. Amen.

Mark 8:31 He then began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law,and that he must be killed and after three days rise again. 32 He spoke plainly about this, and Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him.

33 But when Jesus turned and looked at his disciples, he rebuked Peter. “Get behind me, Satan!” he said. “You do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.”

34 Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. 35 For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me and for the gospel will save it. 36 What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? 37 Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul? 38 If anyone is ashamed of me and my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, the Son of Man will be ashamed of them when he comes in his Father’s glory with the holy angels.”

According to Jesus there are two ways to follow him. One way is the way Peter was doing it. His got behind Jesus and followed as Satan would. The other way is to follow Jesus carrying your cross. Those are your choices. You can follow Jesus as Satan or with your cross.

What does this mean? The protestant reformer, Martin Luther, thought extensively about this question. He wondered what it meant to follow Jesus with your own cross.

In 1518 Martin Luther was summoned to Heidelberg to defend his ideas on salvation and the practice of indulgence. Luther was an Augustinian monk, and the head of the Augustinian Order in Germany, Johannes Staupitz, hoped to silence him and his protestant ideas. This meeting became known as the Heidelberg Disputation. When Luther arrived he presented his ideas which he called the theology of the cross.

According to Luther there is two ways of talking about God. He called these a theology of glory and a theology of the cross. Let's begin by asking what it's like to talk about God's glory. All of us live in an imperfect world. We see evil, suffering and death. But we can imagine in our minds a world made free of all these problems. Our minds can grasp the idea of a perfect world. Once we do this our minds begin to construct the idea of a god who comes in power to make the world the way we image it could be. So we talk about a god who will come in glory to make the world the way we think it should be.

This was Peter. He saw suffering in his world. And it all led back the Roman Occupation. He imagined a world free from Romans where people could govern themselves and would be free to worship god as they chose. So he, and just about everyone else at his time, constructed in their minds the idea of a god who in glory would come to defeat the Romans and make the world the way they wanted the world to be.

Most of us think this way too. We see a world of injustice and suffering. Just this week ISIS has kidnapped over 150 Christians living in Syria. In the 19^th century Christian were in the majority in the Jazeera area of Syria. Since then many Christian have left. Today, with constant warfare, many Christians are fleeing their farms and looking for refuge in the city of Hasaka. Civilians are being killed by shelling. Christian fighters have been joining up with Kurds.

We can all imagine a world free from war and bloodshed and suffering. And so we imagine a god who will come in glory to set all things right. We construct a god wearing a military uniform who will lead Christian armies to reclaim our land and let our people live in peace.

Jesus calls this way of thinking, the way of Satan. Satan see injustice and suffering in the world as we do. He can image a world more to his liking like us. And he can construct a god in his mind that will make the world the way he, Satan, wants it to be. This way of thinking is common but very wrong. We do not want to worship a god we construct in our own minds to do our will. We want to worship a God who is real and alive. We want a god not of our own making, but one who made us and reveals himself to us. So instead of following Christ as Satan let's follow Christ with our own crosses.

According to Luther, we should talk about the God the cross. The God of the cross is not a god of our own making. He is the creator God who has been revealed to us as a suffering God. We have a God who is so passionate for us, for sinners, for the poor, for the needy, for the widows, for the orphans, for the immigrants, that he would suffer and die for us. This is the God who is revealed to us in Jesus Christ.

When I first became a pastor I was called to a small church in Los Angeles. There were only about thirty people. Almost all were in their late 70s, 80s and 90s. They knew their church was about to close. The presbytery knew it too. But I had a different idea. I imagined a thriving, growing church with young people and families. I imagined a church with the resources to make a difference in that community. I imagined what could happen with that church and I constructed in my head a god who would make this happen.

I prayed to this god of glory every day asking for people who would come to this church. I worked hard. We started a website, put up banners and passed out fliers. We started a new worship service and gave away food. I was certain that the god I created in my mind would come in glory and turn my dreams into reality. I was dead wrong. Months went by and very little happened. I began to be discouraged. Then the true God, the God who sacrificed himself for the marginal in our society showed up. He delivered the poor and homeless in our community to our doors. Suddenly we were the church of the desperately poor. The God of the cross had acted. His will was done, not mine.

So all of us have a choice. We can see that the world around us is not as it should be. We know what it would take to fix it. We can imagine a world without all these problems. And we can construct a god of glory in our minds who would fix the world and make it what we want to be. Or can believe that the God of the cross, who suffered and died for all, has his own ideas of how the world should be. And we can follow this God. The choice is ours.

And this brings us back to following Jesus. What does it mean to follow Jesus with our crosses? The God of the Cross suffered and died for the sake of others. And he told us to love our neighbors. Therefore the primary concern in your life is not for yourself but for others. Following Jesus with your cross means to sacrifice for those in need just as he did.

There is a man in Salisbury, a good friend. He spends nearly every dollar he makes to support missionaries around the world. He organizes groups to go to the poorest areas of the world to assist missionaries to proclaim the good news of the cross of Jesus to people who desperately need to hear it. He sacrifices his time and treasure to love people the way Jesus did.

We too need to sacrificially care for the poor in our community and around the world. We need to think the way Jesus does and care for people. This is what it means to follow Jesus by carrying your cross. Let's pray.

 Father in heaven we pray to you because the boundary between us and you has been ripped apart by Jesus Christ. We ask that you help us to think as you do. Give us your concerns for the world. Lead us by your will. Give us the heart of Jesus to love and care for our neighbor. Show us what we are to do to love others as we love you. This pray in Jesus' name. Amen.