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Boy Scout Tr #240

Scripture: Mark 8:27 - 38

Prayer: Touch us, O God, with truth that burns like fire, with beauty that moves us like the wind; and set us free to see and listen and wonder at the gracious mysteries of life. Amen.

A woman walked out of her church which was the Episcopal Church, could have been any church though. It had been a particular rousing Sunday service, for an Episcopal Church, anyway. When she got outside, the woman bumped into a thin, sort of lost-looking man who was standing on the sidewalk looking up at the cross on top of the church steeple. She excused herself and started to walk away, but the man called her back. “Tell me,” he said, pointing through the front doors into the church the woman had belonged to most of her life, “What is it that you believe in there?” She started to say something, but then realized that she did not know the answer, or did not know how to put it into words, and as she stood there trying to compose something the man said, “Never mind. I’m sorry if I bothered you,” and walked away.

Well, the man did bother her. She told her priest. And the story bothered her priest. It would have bothered me, too. If someone asked you what you believe in here, what would you say? How would you put it into words? An Episcopalian might recite the Nicene Creed or the Apostles’ Creed. But us United Methodist, many of us, anyway, have not committed the creeds to memory--we are not a creedal church like the Episcopalians are. Besides, I don’t think reciting a creed would have been what a man on the sidewalk would have wanted to hear. Maybe you would have simple answered, “I believe in Jesus.” But what does that mean to a stranger on the sidewalk? Would you have said, “I believe that in spite of all appearances to the contrary, the world is in God’s good hands?” Just what is it that you believe? What

are you committed to?

Well, in today’s Scripture lesson, Jesus himself was the man on the sidewalk. He was the one who asked the question about what it all meant--about what he meant. He and his disciples had just come into the district of Caesarea Philippi trailing miracles behind them: the feeding of the five thousand, then the four thousand, walking on water, the healing of the Syro-phoenician woman’s daughter, to mention some. Jesus had been teaching as well, lessons about obedience to the law and about the difference between words and deeds and about reading the signs of the times

Every now and then he quizzed the disciples to see if they were listening and how much they were comprehending. He wanted to know if they were understanding him. And he did not hide his disappointment at their consistently low scores. For example: in the verses just before what was read today, Jesus warned the disciples to be on guard against the yeast of the Pharisees and Sadducees. Now the disciples were eager to please their teacher, like 3rd and 4th graders. They put their literal fishermen’s heads together and decided that Jesus was talking about bread. “We brought no bread,” one of them said. Jesus exclaimed, “O men of little faith, why do you discuss among yourselves the fact that you have no bread?...how is it that you fail to perceive? Do you have eyes, do you have ears, do you not remember?” (Mark 8:11-21).

So it is no wonder that they were a bit anxious when Jesus gathered them around him and asked a totally different kind of question--not about anything he had said before, but a question about who he was. “Who do people say the Son of man is?” he asked them. They are relieved at first because they have heard people talk so they just had to report to Jesus: “John the Baptist,” one said. “Elijah,” another said. “One of the prophets.” They pulled the names out of their pockets like interesting stones they had found and handed them to Jesus for his approval. There was no risk in repeating what they had heard, after all. It was what OTHERS believed. This was like a de-briefing session, a “how do you think it’s going” meeting--it was their staff meeting.

Imagine being there and watching the disciples faces. You can almost see the expectation on their faces as they gave Jesus each little tidbit they had heard. So which is it, Lord? What’s the right answer? Is is A, B, or C, or none of the above? And what did Jesus do? Did he give them an answer? No, what he wanted was THEIR answers, and again, you can almost see their faces when he turned the question back on them. “But, who do YOU say that I am?” he asked the disciples, the ones who were nearest and dearest to him, they who had received the best he had to offer, who were his own, the ones he had chosen. Who do you say that I am? What is it that you believe deep down in your soul?

Sometimes I wish that the Bible had come to us more like a musical score with all the pauses written in, or like the script of a play that tells us what is happening while nothing is being said. Because it would be really helpful to have stage directions, something like this: [Center stage: As soon as Jesus asks the question the disciples all look away, some of them studying the backs of their hands while others move little piles of dirt around with the toes of their sandals.] There must have been a long, uncomfortable pause after that question before Peter broke the silence with his answer. “You are the Messiah!”

Thank God for Peter! Talk about radical commitment! Right or wrong, he was always the first one out of the gate, the first one to leave his fish net and follow Jesus, the first one out of the boat to try walking on water, the first to volunteer his opinion on any given subject. Sometimes it is hard to tell whether he was courageous or just plain reckless; but, in any case his answer was apparently the one Jesus was looking for. Peter being right may have seemed a little out of character to the other disciples. After all, it wasn’t that long ago when Peter sank in the middle of his walk on water. While he may have been the first with his hand in the air when a question was asked, he did not always follow through on his bold pronouncements.

Because then Jesus told Peter that he (Jesus) was going to die, and it was going to be awful: bloody, painful, humiliating. He did not want them to be fooled however. When the time came, they were not to believe that his death was some horrible mistake that should have been avoided. They were to believe that God was in it, working to turn his hurt flesh into a body that would last forever.

That was what he wanted them to know, but Peter heard only the first part, the suffering and the death part, before he exploded. “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you!” It’s hard to tell what was going on inside Peter’s head. Many scholars and preachers say that he was putting his own agenda ahead of God’s agenda. They also say that Peter should never, ever have used God’s name to challenge God’s will. But, what about this very simple way of looking at Peter’s protest. Peter simply loved Jesus and did not want him to die. Death was probably one for Peter’s worst fears. So when Jesus talked about dying, it cranked Peter’s fear up so high he could not stand it.

“God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you!” Why? Because if it can happen to you it can happen to me. It can happen to anyone, and no one is safe. If Jesus was vulnerable, then so was everyone else. That was what Peter was protesting, strongly, but Jesus responded to him with matching strength. “Get behind me, Satan. You are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.” Peter went from being right to being as wrong as the devil himself.

It is the harshest rebuke Jesus gave anyone in all the Gospels; but, his use of the word “Satan” lets us know just how tempted Jesus himself was. Peter’s suggestion that he should be spared matched something inside of him Jesus would pray the same thing himself just before he was arrested. But God had also given Jesus a vision of his death that was not all dark. Light leaked into the vision. There was clearly something that lay beyond it, and Jesus knew his job was to walk toward it instead of running away. He tried to explain it to his disciples, by daring them to follow him. If they were not afraid to lose their lives, he told them, they might be surprised to find them. The image he used was a cross, which, remember, had absolutely NO religious meaning at the time. It was the Roman’s preferred method of execution. It struck fear into people hearts. It was used for intimidation--like torture and the threat of torture is used today.

Jesus called the disciples AND the crowd together, then, to make a general announcement. Jesus wanted everyone to get this. He didn’t want any confusion. He said, “If anyone wants to follow me, let them deny themselves and take up their cross.” Jesus said this to give everyone a new way of looking at death. He was saying there are worse things than death in the world, and that living in fear was close the top of the list. If they were going to let fear run their lives, then fear would become their god. The only standard for their behavior would become how much something scared them or not. If it did not scare them, they would do it. If it did scare them, they would not do it. And when their anxious days finally came to an end (death cannot be avoided forever, after all), they would discover that they had never really lived at all.

Jesus was saying, that fear was not the only choice they had. Instead of surrendering themselves to their fear, they could surrender themselves to God. Radical commitment! They could deny the panic-stricken voice inside of them--the one that kept ordering them to play it safe--and listen for that other voice instead, the one that said, “Wake up. Follow me. Do not fear.” That voice has never promised safety. However, it has always promised life. It has never offered freedom from pain. It has only offered freedom from fear!

But it doesn’t mean that we all have to go get ourselves killed either to follow Jesus. Some people have. Yes. In Luke, Jesus told his followers to take up their crosses daily (9:33) which sounds more like a way of life than a death wish. He did not tell them to go find their crosses, either, because he was pretty sure they already knew right where they were. Jesus just encouraged them to go ahead and pick the wretched things up--to stop covering them up, tripping over them and pretending they were not there. He urged them to squat down and get hold of them so they could find out for themselves that there is more to life than being afraid of death.

Today, two thousand years later, our own crosses do not have much to do with standing up to the Roman government. But fear is timeless, and my guess is that each of us has something of which we are deathly afraid. I’m not talking about poisonous spiders and snakes, things that you really do want to steer clear of. Maybe it is the fear of admitting an addiction that is eating away at your life. Or maybe it is the fear of tackling a memory that still has the power to suck the breath right out of you. Maybe it is the fear of standing up for something you believe in, or telling the truth about who you are to people who are going to condemn you for it. Maybe it is the fear of discovering you have an illness that no medicine can cure, or that your child does, or your friend.

Whatever it is that scares you to death, so that you start offering to do anything, anything at all, if it will just go away--that is your cross, and if you leave it lying there it will kill your life. If you turn away from it (God forbid it, Lord!) with the excuse that this should never have happened to you, then you deny God the chance to show you the greatest mystery of them all: that there, right there in the dark fist of your worst fear, is the door to abundant life.

I cannot say more than that. I don’t dare, but Jesus does dare. Jesus says to me and to you: Stop running from your cross. Reach down and pick it up It isn’t nearly as scary once you get your hands on it, and no one is asking you to handle it alone. All you have to do is believe in God more than you believe in your fear. Jesus says. Then pick it up, come on with me, and I will show you the way to the door. That is radical commitment!