Sermon

TAKE UP YOUR CROSS

The Second Sunday in Lent – March 3, 1985
Stephen Elkins-Williams

Does your Christianity make demands on you? Does it make you uncomfortable with conventional, worldly wisdom, with your life as you often live it? Does your faith force you to struggle with difficult issues, to work at finding God’s will, to persist at overcoming your own selfishness? If your Christian faith does not stretch you, it if makes no demands on you, if it does not tug you beyond where you are to an ever-deeper level of living, then you are not living it to the full.

Our faith is not given to us merely to make us feel good, nor to give us a sense of order and respectability in our lives, not to bring us consolation in the midst of life’s troubles. Our faith is intended by God to be a transforming gift, one that shapes and molds us and stretches us and leads us where we would rather not go.

One of the most important means that God has to accomplish that is our worship together on the Lord’s day. Our worship is not to be only a time of socializing, nor one of merely enjoying music and ritual, nor primarily a precious hour of tranquility in the midst of a hectic week. Rather, our worship is to transform us, to feed us, yes, but also to send us forth “to love and serve the Lord.” In Eucharistic Prayer C of Rite II, we ask God to “Deliver us from the presumption of coming to this Table for solace only, and not for strength; for pardon only, and not for renewal.” Our liturgy must do much more than soothe and comfort us; it must change us and form us, both as individuals and as a community.

As human beings we resist change, especially changes in ourselves. Growth, particularly that which is not controlled by us, is often painful; and so we develop our defenses to protect ourselves. We adopt rationales such as, “Religion is all right in its place, but let’s not get carried away;” or “My life is complicated enough without stirring things up more;” or “Now is not a good time to think about that; I’ll do that later when things are calmer.”

But we only deceive ourselves if we so studiously avoid what is our most important life’s work, i.e. letting God transform us into the people he would have us to be. We may avoid some short-term pain, but our lives will surely be less rich, less full, less productive if we so smugly and so tenaciously cling to ourselves as we are, constantly refusing God the opportunity to transform us. That transformation and nothing less is what our Christian faith asks of us; and so, we make a great mistake if we do not, to return to our original question, let our Christianity make demands on us.

Jesus says this in plain words in Today’s Gospel: “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.” “If any man would come after me…” Presumably that is what we are all trying to do as Christians. As part of our baptismal covenant we promised “to follow and obey [Jesus] as our Lord.” How do we do that? Jesus tells us that we are to deny ourselves and take up our cross.

Deny ourselves? Take up our cross? If there ever were demanding words, these are they. In the midst of a culture that encourages us at every turn to indulge ourselves, to count ourselves as number one, to lead enlightened lives of self-interest, these are hard words indeed. We have heard them so often that we have gotten very good at not hearing them. We deflect their meaning by treating them as words of history spoken to another people, not as a stark and urgent invitation extended to us today. We try to get around these words in whatever way we can; but despite our efforts, there they remain at the heart of Jesus’ invitation to us: “Deny yourself and take up your cross and follow me.”

It is important to realize what this invitation does not say. Jesus does not invite us to be masochists, to love pain for its own sake. He invites us not to embrace whatever is painful, but rather to follow him wherever that leads, even to the cross. Nor does he invite us to a life of gloominess and sadness. He does not mention our emotional state here, and presumably God still loves a cheerful giver.

What Jesus does invite us to is a life of faithfulness, a life that is focused on God and not on ourselves, a life that does not run from, but rather embraces, the cross.

For all its visibility in churches and around people’s necks, for all its social acceptability as a Christian symbol, the cross is still not a very popular subject. One preacher of some insight has said, “Show me a church that is overflowing, and I will show you a church that does not preach the cross. People do not want to hear about it.” That included the apostles, of course. In today’s Gospel, when Jesus predicted his own rejection and death, Peter began to rebuke him. Jesus responded by calling Peter, “Satan,” i.e. the Tempter, because he was trying to be, not on the side of God, but of men.

Given the importance of taking up our cross, then, if we are truly to lead Christ-centered lives, what does that actually mean for us? How do we do that concretely?

Taking up our cross means fulfilling our responsibilities, even when it would be far easier not to be faithful. It means putting others before ourselves, no matter how hard that may be. It means going against our human instincts to look out only for ourselves, to control others, to take the easy way out.

For a parent, it might mean to struggle to discipline the child without indulging one’s anger, or to let go of an older child, to let the child live his or her own life rather than simply to satisfy the parent’s need. For a spouse, it might mean being ready to move for the good of the family. Or for the one whose marriage is in difficulty, taking up the cross may mean being ready and willing to sit down and hear the pain of the other spouse without defensiveness. For divorced spouses, it could involve loving their children enough not to use them to score points against one another.

For a student, embracing the cross might mean accepting the discipline of study as part of one’s life. For elders, it may mean learning how to cope with losing control of one’s life and one’s body without becoming bitter.

For everyone, denying ourselves and taking up the cross includes forgiving another from our hearts, even when there is not much hope that we will be treated any better the next time. It may mean allowing one who is dying to face squarely the fact of death without imposing our own need for denial. It will undoubtedly mean struggling to be more generous with our money and our time and our caring than we might otherwise be inclined to be.

For us as a parish this year, taking up the cross has meant giving up our rector and friend, Peter James Lee, and to deal patiently with all the ambiguities and insecurities of an interim period. When a new rector is called, with all the joy and excitement that it will bring, there will certainly also be some element of the cross as we respond to any new directions in which the new rector may lead us.

With that very partial list for starters, I leave it to you and to your Lenten reflection to fill in for yourselves more specifically what it may mean for you to deny yourself and to take up your cross and follow Jesus. It is a fitting and vital subject for all of us to spend some time on.

As you do so, however, let me add one word of caution. It is very easy when looking at our walk with the cross to think that we carry it alone; and so we become either proud when we succeed or discouraged when we fail. It is essential to remember that in all this, we are not dependent only on ourselves, but on the God who loves us and strengthens us, who in the words of today’s Epistle, “did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all. Will he not also give us all things with him? …Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? …Neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, not things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Romans 8:31-39; Mark 8:31-38