Sermon 3/12/06
Give or Give Up - Mark 8:31-38
(view lectionary notes for this text)
I’ve never been good at giving things up for Lent. Usually Lent surprises me, even as a pastor, and the season has begun before I’ve even thought about ‘giving something up.’ Other times, I pick something that proves to be too difficult for me. I’d never dream of giving up chocolate for Lent – I wouldn’t even make it through Ash Wednesday on that one. So I’m pretty hit and miss with this tradition we have – giving up a favorite treat or something for forty days during the season. I know other people who faithfully take part in this practice each year. I remember in Junior High Youth Group that one of my friends gave up chocolate for Lent – the brave soul – and she even tried scraping the chocolate off a chocolate-peanut-butter Girl Scout cookie she really wanted. She was not going to cheat! I think this practice has a valid and important place in our faith lives. After all, there are very few times when we are willing to change our habits for any reason. Giving up a food or luxury item may not change the world, but I am sure it requires more dedication than doing nothing at all to observe Lent.
Lately, I’ve also seen Lenten programs that encourage “taking something up” during Lent instead. This language is torn straight from today’s gospel lesson, where Jesus talks about our ‘taking up’ the cross. The idea is that during the season of Lent, you might take up an additional practice of faith and giving – spending hours visiting nursing homes or hospital patients, volunteering time at a soup kitchen or after-school program. The idea of ‘taking up’ is that the Lenten practice of self-denial can be come too self-focused. A practice of taking up something for Lent encourages us to turn our focus to those around us. Again, I think the intentions of such efforts are good, but I wonder again about a long term impact. Do we take up something for Lent, only to drop the new practice at the end of 40 days? And what is the motive of what we do? Do we take up a new practice for our own fulfillment, or to respond to God’s calls and commands?
With these questions, we turn to one of the ‘classic’ texts of Lent, from Mark’s gospel. Our scene opens with Jesus describing for the disciples the events that will happen in their coming time together – the Son of Man will undergo great suffering and eventual death, and then rise again. Mark notes that Jesus “said all this quite openly.” Peter wasn’t please, apparently, with such openness. He takes Jesus aside and rebukes him. But Jesus turns the tables back on Peter. “Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things, but on human things.” Then Jesus calls the crowds and disciples together. “If any want to become my followers,” he says, “let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lost 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?”
Denial. Crosses. Saving and losing lives. Gain and forfeit. Jesus’ words are tongue twisting and circular and confusing. To save our life we must lose it, and if we lose it, we save it. What does it mean? For answers, perhaps we can look to the first part of this passage again, where Jesus has a rebuking showdown with Peter. What triggers Jesus’ reaction, I wonder? If someone you loved told you that all sorts of terrible things would happen to them, even if they thought those things were necessary, wouldn’t you want to stop these things from happening? Wouldn’t you insist that it wasn’t true, that they were just pessimists, with bad outlooks on the future? Isn’t Peter just trying to get Jesus out of this negative state of mind?
But then, on the other hand, I wonder: Are Peter’s motives really so selfless? Does he rebuke Jesus just because he does not want to hear about what his master will have to endure? Is he really just unable to bear hearing what Jesus will endure? If that’s the case, why does Jesus respond to him so harshly? Wouldn’t Jesus know Peter was speaking and reacting out of love? I wonder, then, if perhaps Peter was speaking out of fear – not for Jesus, but for himself. He has been following Jesus day to day, step to step. Now Jesus is talking about a path of suffering, rejection, and death. Won’t Peter have to follow Jesus on this path, too, to continue his discipleship? Perhaps Peter is not ready to give, or give up, what it takes to follow Jesus.
Are we ready? Last week I talked about my hope that our Lenten experiences would mean more to us than we could say in two sentences – that our experiences these forty days would impact us beyond what we could sum up so succinctly. But I worry that in fact we are not ready for such an experience, that we, like Peter, are only willing to travel so far with Jesus. Do we want to experience God in a way that will change us beyond these 40 days? Change of even the most superficial nature is hard for us – hard to sit in a different pew than usual, hard to learn new hymns, hard to try new styles of preaching. How much harder is it to change in deeper ways – change our way of life? Jesus is asking us to take a path with him that will change us beyond 40 days. He’s talking permanent change. Life-shaking change. He’s saying give me your life, and I’ll give you back a life so changed you won’t recognize it.
This is the kind of giving – or giving up – that we don’t want to do. If we think about the ways that we give – of ourselves, our money, our time, our possessions, our talents – we usually are willing to give so long as it doesn’t make us change our usual patterns and behaviors. I’ll give as long as I don’t have to give up something else. We, like Peter, fear being asked to give more than we’re able – to give not just our things but ourselves. Painful giving. Giving until it hurts.
Jesus doesn’t see it this way. He turns our usual understandings upside down and inside out. To live you must give. To save you must lose. Indeed, he asks us, what can you give that equals the gift of your life? At General Conference in 2004, Bishop Bruce Blake took up this theme, sharing about the loss of a friend and church member, Tom Roughface, a Native American in the Ponca tribe in Oklahoma. He said, “Prior to Tom’s funeral, we went to the Ponca Tribal Center for a time of sharing by the Roughface family. The sharing was not in the form of words, but in the form of giving. Thousands of dollars of gifts were given to members of the tribe and friends. If persons needed food, the Roughface family gave them a basket of food. Others needed household supplies. The family gave them a basket of supplies. Some had resources to meet their basic needs, so the family gave them hundreds of blankets and shawls. [My wife] and I sat in awe at this expression of giving by a family experiencing grief . . . We were accustomed to friends giving to a bereaved family. We experienced the family giving to us . . . I asked one of Tom’s granddaughters . . . to explain this tradition to me. She smiled and said, “We believe you can accept death better by giving than by getting.” A theme resounded like an echo in my mind, “Give until it heals!” . . . This is so different than the message which has been preached from our pulpits and paraded through finance campaigns throughout our denomination, “Give until it hurts.” But the Ponca tradition is just the opposite: “Give until it heals.” (1) Jesus might further adapt the Bishop’s words. Give until it gives you life.
Unless we give up what we’re holding onto so tightly, we won’t be free to take up the cross that Jesus is offering to us. And we want to take that cross, though it seems hard to bear. Because if we don’t take up that cross, there is only so far we will be able to follow Jesus, only so far he can travel with us, before our paths must part. His path leads to the cross and beyond. His path may seem painful, but it is the path to the fullest kind of life we could desire. It is the path that will meet our deepest hopes. It is the path of life. What can we give to walk such a path? Everything! “If any want to become my followers,” he says, “let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lost it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.”
Amen.
(1) http://archives.umc.org/interior.asp?ptid=17&mid=4306