A Sermon preached for RCL readings Proper 17, Sunday, August 31, 2008'

The Rev. Mark Ainsworth

‘If any want to be my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.’

Sometimes I listen in to my prayers – by which I mean I try to examine critically what I am saying because it is all too easy to turn prayer into advising God as to how God ought to do things, and to pray for things we are implicitly and sometimes explicitly told we should not pray about.

In the gospel reading Peter does a similar thing, he advices Jesus that he, Peter, knows better than his Master. You will remember last week’s gospel reading where Peter reached the high point of his career so far in the narrative. He was absolutely correct in his understanding that Jesus was the Messiah, the meaning of Israel’s hope and the meaning of the life of the world. Now in today’s reading he gets completely wrong the implications of this belief. He understands and misunderstands Jesus magnificently, and all in the space of one conversation.

I am sure we have done much the same thing, and not just about Jesus but also about anything in life. How easy is it to be totally right and then immediately wrong in the space of one conversation.

Peter tries to correct the Lord by telling him that death isn’t an option. The Messiah is meant to kill the enemies of God not be killed. Have we ever tried to correct God? Isn’t there a tendency to sometimes think that if we were God we would do things differently – better in fact!! We think we know what the situation demands and God appears not to know because things are not going the way we want, and in our prayer we inform God about what he ought to do about it. We would solve our own and the world’s problems according to…. According to what? According to the measure of what we think is the nature of the ‘problem’. Peter’s mistake is understandable, but not excusable. What is it that Peter doesn’t get? It is the heart of the gospel, ‘If any want to be my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.’

Let me try and come at this from another angle. What is Christianity about? Some would say it is about judgment, love, mercy, forgiveness, and helping others. It is all these things, but through what must these things flow, so to speak, so that they may be truly what they are? They must flow through the cross and the resurrection. Some of you may have water filters near the where the supply comes into your house, to better purify the water you drink. Well everything, when it comes to Christian faith and life has to pass through Jesus in his death and resurrection. Christian spirituality, if there is such a thing, is about Jesus’ death and resurrection in each of our lives. The gospel, the good news is death and resurrection.

Now I realize that death does not sound like good news, but it is, but it requires a complete re-understanding of what makes sense.

Let us look at Peter again. As a result of his declaration about Jesus the word is out among the disciples that Jesus is the Messiah. Now Jesus has to correct their view about what that means. Certain views have to die, and since there is no such thing a view from nowhere, certain presuppositions also have to die. And presuppositions are the hardest of things to die because they are the hardest of things to see. They have to be replaced by God’s revelation – a revelation that is very often other than what we might want, expect, and therefore be prepared to receive.

We see an anticipation of this in the first reading. Moses has to deal with God being other than he might expect. Moses was raised in a totally polytheistic environment, so his whole process of thinking has to be changed by God. ‘God’ did not arise from Moses’ thoughts - he intruded into them. Monotheism, just to take that example because here it is in the first reading, didn’t arise from rational processes – it was declared by the voice from a burning bush. The other god’s of Moses’ experience were nothing, not because people did not need the (and all of us are tempted by other gods), but because the one true God would not tolerate other gods. ‘It was not as though the mind of man already knew there was a single God and Moses was simply trying to clarify a point or two on the question’ (Patrick Henry Reardon). So Moses, like Peter, has to be told the truth, truth other than what would have made sense. So do we. Which is why we spend the first part of the liturgy hearing Holy Scripture so that we can start to see differently.

Peter it seems was combining genuine love of Christ, sentimentality, over protectiveness of his closet friend, and his forgetfulness of the scriptures concerning the fate of God’s servants. Jesus rebukes Peter for his being too caught up in the religion of assimilation to cultural values. In this case the expectation - very prevalent at this time - that the Messiah would certainly usher in an age of peace, national unity, and international respect. Peter wanted his country to succeed. And it is no bad thing to love one’s country - to desire its respect among the nations. In Peter’s worldview of the Messianic age death had no place; the elders, chief priests and scribes surely would eventually come around to what his Lord was trying to say.

Peter is not merely partially mistaken, he is completely mistaken. And Jesus, recognizing the temptation, the great temptation to cave into popular demands and expectations, rebukes him and tells him to get behind and to pick up the cross. He uses the most strong language used so far of anyone in the gospel. Jesus identifies Peter with that shadowy figure called by various names in Scripture – ‘Satan’, ‘the devil’, ‘the accuser’, ‘the enemy’. And that should tell us just how serious the situation is – how critical it is that we get critical faculties so that we can recognize when we are being tempted.

When have we had to avoid that kind of temptation? When have we had to stay faithful when good-natured, over-protective people like Peter were trying to dissuade us in strong words to follow a course that ultimately would lead not just to a mistake but to evil? It is no exaggeration to say it – we can do evil simply by being good-natured, protective, loving people – like Peter. He is not a bad person, but he becomes, for a moment, so badly distorted that the enemy has occupied the territory of his soul and causes Jesus to vehemently accuse him and deliver him from the error.

Now what had happened to Peter? He was suffering from amnesia. He had forgotten the whole sweep of scripture. Yes, if one chooses to emphasize the image of King David then you might come up with a victorious Messiah. But Peter had forgotten the Prophets and the Exile of Israel. He had forgotten the suffering servant of Isaiah, and the fate of Jeremiah. He had forgotten what was happening virtually on his own doorstep in the Temple every day – sacrifice.

Now there is some measure of excuse here since this whole sweep of Israel’s life only became clear through the resurrection. But Peter had allowed the cultural consensus to take over his mind. The lens through which he saw the scriptures was not one determined by the scriptures and the worshipping life of Israel, but by various voices in the immediate situation. Doesn’t this happen to us also? How many times have we heard the readings we have just heard? Every three years we hear them, and yet we forget, we don’t pay attention, something is missing, and we are missing the nourishment we need.

The great test for Jesus is this, and it is our test also. Are we going to stay faithful to what God has revealed or are we going to do what makes sense to us and our passing age and the demands of popular appeal?

Peter has to get his mind transformed. He thinks that surely Jesus won’t get killed; Jesus says yes I will, and then he reveals the heart of the gospel.

Some people think that Jesus went to the cross so that we don’t have to. I am not sure where they get that idea given that the whole New Testament, of which this mornings’ gospel is an example, is about death and resurrection. Jesus’ death and resurrection – yes - but therefore our death and resurrection. If you read the gospels over one quarter of the material is devoted to the final week of Jesus’ life as he goes to the cross. We pick up the cross only because Jesus has done it for us so that now his death can be applied to our life.

Paul writes, for example, ‘I have been crucified with Christ, it is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me.’ Or, in another place ‘we were united to him in a death like his so that we shall be united to him in his resurrection.’ We, as Christ tells us, have to deny ourselves and take up our cross and follow him. We have to lose our life to save it. We have to die and rise with Christ as Paul expresses it.

Have you ever seen a baptism? You will remember that baptism is about death and resurrection, the whole language of the liturgy points to that. ‘In it we are buried with Christ in his death. By it we share in his resurrection…’ St Paul writes, ‘We were buried with Christ in baptism, so that we might walk in newness of life,’

Have you ever received Holy Communion? We eat the body of Christ and drink his blood so that we may be filled with his life and die to our own. We take more of Christ’s life into ourselves, saying yes to him and no to our flesh and blood, no to things that seem at times very natural to us but are actually distorting and destroying the beauty and joy and life of God’s image in which we are made. Listen to the Eucharistic Prayer that we use this morning (Prayer B, page 369). We pray these words; ‘Unite us to your Son in his sacrifice, that we may be acceptable through him, being sanctified by the Holy Spirit.’ ‘Unite us to your Son in his Sacrifice…..’ Is there something here we don’t understand?

What does this mean, this death and resurrection, this picking up of the cross? It obviously does not mean a literal cross, and it does not mean some kind of wallowing in suffering. It means death to our way in this world and rising to life according to the way of the kingdom of God. It means that if we have died to sin, how can we possibly wish to live in it?

It means that real life is to be found not in ourselves, as we understand ourselves, but by giving up the kind of hold we have on our own life. We die daily so that when the real end comes - in the form of our final illness and our deathbed - it isn’t so difficult. Life in this world cannot be fixed, patched up, improved by human agency, there is no utopian progressive scheme. No, we have to die in every thought, word and deed so that God can recreate us. And because God does not want us to die eternally, to wither away in a life turned away from him, he has sent his Son to live our life and die our death so that attached to him we can die and then receive his resurrected life and live in that life, now, and beyond the grave.

Let me give two examples of this taking up the cross and dying to self and then rising into Christ’ life, his way.

Suppose someone has wronged us and we are hurt - and you know how that feels don’t you? You can feel some level of superiority, some pride. After all you have been hurt, you have been wronged, and you are in the right. And let us suppose you don’t want to forgive because, after all, the person who has wronged you hasn’t asked for forgiveness, and there is a perverse sense of smugness in being aggrieved. I have known people who harbor un-forgiveness for years. And guess what, who really gets hurt by doing this? You do. It is like drinking poison and expecting someone else to drop dead. We die a death that is not life-giving. But if we are to live the Lord’s Prayer, if we are to die to self and get out of this poisoned life, then we have to die to any and every thought, word and deed that is unforgiving, and, by God’s grace, grow in the resurrected way of forgiveness. And every moment in our life is a moment for death and resurrection; everything must be given over to the Lord, killed, and then received from his hand resurrected. And it is painful, it is a cross, but there is also the peace and joy of the kingdom which this world does not understand.

Or let us suppose we are envious of another person. They have things we don’t have, they have love we have not received, they have gifts we have not been given, and they seem to move effortlessly through life. Now envy is a sin that can never give us a moment of even ‘evil’ happiness, but which I mean the kind of happiness that can come when we get back at another person, get even with them, that brief moment of heady excitement and sense of justice. But envy does not make anyone happy, so it too has to be crucified. Instead a spirit of thankfulness for what we have, and for what they have, has to arise. And only Christ, who is our Thanksgiving, (Greek – Eucharist) can cause that to arise in us. And so we must give over to him the envy and rise into the joy and light of his resurrection.

This denial of the self, this death, is for life, because the more we say no to ourselves and yes to Jesus the more we find the life and joy and peace of God.

Jesus knew that life in this world can’t be fixed, can’t be patched up, it is too broken, so he took into himself all the brokenness and broke that brokenness with his purity, faith and love when he died faithful, pure and loving to the end.

That is not the world’s way. It thinks it has life in itself. ‘This is who I am’, someone says. Christ says, ‘deny it, find me, follow me, die to self and then you will find your true self.’ He is the image of God in whose image we are made, this is the way we find our way back to the house of the Father (parable of prodigal son) and are clothed with the life that really is life. The way of the cross is not misery, it is painful and difficult, but it is simultaneously joyful and satisfying, it is the way of life and peace.

So what area in our life recoils from this way, where are we resisting the way of the cross?