Come and Die (Proper 17A)

 

 

Come and Die (Proper 17A)
31 August 2014

8:00 am Eucharist with Holy Baptism; 10:00 am Sung Eucharist
Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland (Oregon)

Jeremiah 15:15-21; Psalm 26:1-8; Romans 12:9-21; Matthew 16:21-28

God, give us hearts to feel and love,
take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

The only "F" I ever received in any class was in a half credit required Phys. Ed. Class I took as an undergraduate.  I had chosen it to stretch my limits, to enrich my appreciation of something completely different for me.  I did pretty well in running, in weight training, in swimming.  But despite all my hard practice and effort, not missing a class or a practice session, I flunked in beginning ballet.  The teacher had pity on me because I had tried so hard, and gave be a D minus.  But the score on the course performance evaluation handed out at the end of class to me was a F.    I simply did not have the kinesthetic sense for ballet, the sense of where my body was in space and how its parts related to each other in position. I never regretted taking the class, however, since I have loved and appreciated watching ballet ever since. 

My younger brother Mel, however, had great kinesthetic sense, though he never did ballet.   He was a diver. He also had heart. Mel would get up repeatedly to try to learn a new dive, horribly slamming his chest and legs again and again into the water.  He would be beet red, and not from sunburn! I remember one day when he was about 13: he was learning a 1½ reverse dive from the three meter board.  Again and again, face flop.  Once, he hit the board with his head and had to put butterfly closures to stop the bleeding.  His coach finally said, “Mel, if you don’t want to keep hurting yourself, you’ve got to go all out!  Put everything into it! Don’t hold back!  It’s only by diving like your trying to kill yourself that you won’t end up doing so!”    And, fearless as he was, Mel dove again, this time finally succeeding in getting the basic dive down. 

Commitment!  Going all out!  It is something we Episcopalians are not generally noted for.  I remember the first time I came to an East Coast Episcopal Church and stayed after for coffee hour: bread and butter cucumber sandwiches with the crust trimmed off, some coffee for the real addicts, but mainly strong black tea with a cloud of milk.   Not at all like the hearty church dinners of my Mormon youth!

Commitment!  Going all out!  We want to have things moderate, rational, and done in good taste.  Our besetting sin here is seen in the experience of young Anglican priests John and Charles Wesley when they first began to try to preach a gospel of going all out.  The vestry and wardens of Charles’ church in Islington thought he had gone too far, and asked the Bishop to intervene.  The Bishop of London, the Rt. Rev. Dr. Edmund Gibson, called both brothers in for a chat.  After hearing one of them explain why they thought that grace was by faith alone, and how important it was to have a sense of God at work in our lives, he famously replied, “Enthusiasm, Mr. Wesley, enthusiasm! This simply will not do!”  He removed Charles from the church in Islington. 

Commitment! Going all out!  This is the essence of holiness, of sainthood.  We see the sad stories of how we treat people who take it seriously repeatedly in our saints calendar:  last week, we heard about Bishop Charles Chapman  Grafton, founder of the monastic Society of St. John the Evangelist and ecumentist.  When he consecrated his successor as bishop of Fond du Lac Wisconsin in 1900 and included Old Catholic and Eastern Orthodox prelates and appropriate rites and vestments for such a gathering, the national church went into a feeding frenzy.  He was subjected to the worst insults and rumors, with national newspapers ridiculing the “Circus in Fond du Lac.”  But he kept pursuing the gospel.    Next week, we read about Bishop Paul Jones, who was forced by the National House of Bishops to resign his episcopacy because he was intemperate and foolish enough to opposed the First World War and say, “war is unchristian.”    

I have to admit it.  I am as guilty of this as the next Episcopalian.  I hear someone say “Lose your life to save it!  Give all to the Church!  God demands it all, and nothing less!” and my fundamentalist feelers start wiggling.  I start listening very carefully for the catch, for the moment when the person calling for total sacrifice substitutes himself or his faction for God in the equation.  I have been beaten up by hierarchs who abuse authority.  I have suffered from pastoral abuse.  So I am wary.  I want my cucumber sandwich, and my cup of tea with a cloud of milk.  When it comes to religion, I am wary of too much spice. 

But here’s the thing.  Jesus himself said “If you want to follow me, deny yourself, pick up your cross, and follow me.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in his magnificent The Cost of Discipleship, summarized the idea this way:   When Christ calls a person to follow him, he calls on them to die.” 

The word “deny” here means disown, renounce claims to ownership. “Picking up your cross” refers to the fact that prisoners who were to be executed by crucifixion had to carry the crossbeam to the place of execution. Crucifixion was the Roman execution reserved for revolutionaries, slaves, and bandits who fought against the established order. It was a brutal form of slow torture ending in death, where you were stripped naked, fixed in a posture impossible to hold without pain and slow suffocation, and left there to lose control of your bodily functions, and beg, moan, and gasp out mad gibberish until you stopped breathing.   All this was conducted in the most public of places, along a major highway, for instance, to make sure that the shameful punishment had deterrent effect on anyone else even thinking of challenging Roman power.

So what Jesus means is something like “If you want to follow me, you must give up any claims you may think you have of owning yourself. You’ll have to stick your head in the hangman’s noose to follow me. You must become the object of disgust, horror, and pity if you want to follow me.” 

We often misread what Jesus is saying here. We think he is praising suffering for suffering’s sake, and extolling the virtues of a stoic victim-hood, or worse, of a vicarious suffering for someone else’s wrongs. “This is my cross, and I’ll have to bear it” is the proverbial expression of the idea. Sometimes this wrong idea is actually used to encourage passivity and enabling behavior by the abused or the oppressed.

Or we think that this saying presupposes a knowledge of what was going to later to Jesus, his own (future) crucifixion and resurrection.  So believers think that somehow this is about suffering for others.  And some scholars think that the saying does not come from the historical Jesus, but is a creation of the later Church.   

But this saying most assuredly comes from the historical Jesus.  It is too well attested in multiple sources, too disturbing in its content, and too unlike what later Christians made of Jesus’ cross for it not to go back to him.  And it fits.  It is like Jesus’ other sayings, “If you try to save your life, you’ll lose it.”  “If you give up your life, you’ll have it!”  And the imagery is the stark, shocking imagery we have come to recognize in the sayings of this first century marginal Jew, a Galilean peasant artisan. 

Jesus here has no clear idea of what is going to happen to him, though he is all too clear of the risks he is running. Orthodox Christology is that Jesus is wholly God and wholly man, and that he suffered like us in all ways save for sin. That for me means that He shared our unknowing fear of the future.

What Jesus is calling for is this: He is calling for those who wish to follow him to actually follow him: follow God’s call, work for God’s kingdom, announce the liberation of the captive, help the sick and the downtrodden—and do this even when we know that it may very well have a high price.  He is asking us to take risks, in fact, to risk everything for God’s Reign. 

Jesus is not asking us to deliberately set out to kill ourselves or to be drama queens, constantly trying to deliberately annoy people so that they will persecute us, and then whining about the persecution we have baited.  When he says “come and die” he is telling us to lose our false selves, to turn our backs on the falsehood of the past.    For the quickest and easiest way for us to avoid the call is distract ourselves.  If we are judging others, arguing about trivial matters, or pursuing false allegiances, we are not following Jesus.   Those too concerned about trimming the crust on the cucumber sandwiches lose sight of the hungry who need to fed a square meal.  Those too concerned about a person’s clothes, or their looks, or their accent or speech impediment fail to see the person.  

This week, I invite us all to a thought experiment.  Its purpose is to help us take personally Jesus’ words here, “Come and die” “Take up your cross and actually follow me.”   During our daily prayer and meditation time, I would ask us to reflect on the expression “I’d rather DIE than …”   Fill in that blank.  What is it that we so detest, loath, or fear that we actually would prefer, at least theoretically, death than it? And then, once we have that clear fear or dread in mind, then reflect on the phrase, “To follow Jesus and work for God’s Reign, I must be willing to tolerate even …” and then add the fear you have identified. 

The great Roman Catholic defender of Christian Faith for the common person,  G.K Chesterton wrote, “The Christian ideal has not been tried and been found wanting.  It has been found difficult and never been tried” (in What’s Wrong with the World). 

May we find the heart and courage to go all out, to commit, to risk.  May we be willing to get an F to expand our horizons, and willing to get up and dive like we're trying to die so that we might not hurt ourselves.  May we take Jesus at his word, and take him seriously.

In the name of Christ, Amen.