Lent — Andy James

The Path to Follow

March 1, 2015 By Andy James

a sermon on Mark 8:27-38
preached on March 1, 2015, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

He had talked about the importance of following him from the very beginning. The first time Jesus saw his first disciples Peter and Andrew fishing by the sea, he invited them to follow him and start fishing for people. Over time, he accumulated a notable little band of followers—tax collectors and sinners, among others—soon joined those first fishermen, and others came and went from the large crowds who gathered to witness his healing and hear his teaching in his ministry across Galilee. By the time of our story from Mark this morning, they were quite experienced at following him. They had become accustomed to his strange detours across the lake and his sudden departures from the beaten path so that he could find a quiet place away from it all, though they never quite could figure out what all he was up to.

So it wasn’t a total surprise when one day Jesus addressed the disciples and the crowd who had gathered with them and began to tell them what it meant to follow him. He had just talked with the disciples about his identity, and for the first time one of them—Peter—had identified him as the Messiah, leading him to describe what this would mean for him along the way. Jesus had planted the seeds then with the disciples that this would not be an easy path: he would undergo great suffering, be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, all before he would rise again three days later. But the disciples didn’t seem to understand this, and Peter even confronted him to vow that this should never happen. However, Peter’s insistence that Jesus should never suffer like this only seems to have made him want to help others understand what he meant even more.

Jesus’ instruction to the crowd was a bold response to Peter’s attempts to sanitize his message:

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

He took the core idea of following him that he had been talking about since the very beginning and used it to shape his teaching to a new place. No longer could they think that wandering around the Galilean countryside was enough—even though many of them had already left behind their homes and families to follow him, they needed to deny themselves completely. No longer was it enough to just carry a knapsack worth of belongings along the way—they had to carry a cross, the ultimate sign of disrepute assigned to the greatest criminals who had threatened the Roman empire itself. And no longer could they come and go, following Jesus when they wanted—they were to follow everywhere he went, even to death.

If that wasn’t enough to sort out the imposters from the real followers, Jesus continued to explain things a bit more. Next he explained that their attempts to save themselves would be futile:

For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.

If they were following him just to be saved, then they weren’t denying themselves after all—they were seeking their own well-being rather than truly following to join in Jesus’ mission and ministry.

So Jesus insisted that the real profit came from giving everything up, from the biggest loss imaginable, as the great hymn writer Isaac Watts declared so well:

My richest gain I count but loss
and pour contempt on all my pride.

And finally Jesus made it clear that acceptance of this seemingly-disgraceful path was not optional—those who were ashamed of it would find even more shame directed at themselves “when [the Son of Man] comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.”

As much as Jesus talked about following with his disciples, you’d think that we would take it just as seriously. The Christians of the early church probably thought about it quite a bit, for they faced many challenges from the culture around them and struggled even more with a government that didn’t welcome any group claiming any other way than the Roman way. But over the centuries, the idea of following Jesus put forth so clearly by Jesus in the gospel of Mark has largely been replaced in the church with a focus on belief that builds largely on the word of Jesus as told in the gospel of John. The sort of radical, self-giving action proposed and lived out by Jesus has become a much less demanding challenge, for it is far easier to affirm a creed and accept belief than to take action that has the potential for consequences as it did for those who first journeyed with Jesus. In our day and age, following Jesus has become about as difficult as following someone on Twitter, where all it takes is to click a button to start getting status updates and keep up with what is going on.

So what does it look like for us to follow Jesus in our world today? What is required of us if we are to truly deny ourselves and find a new way? How can we take up the cross of Christ in our own lives today? Following Jesus today is not about wearing a cross around our neck every day, about showing up to church on Sunday, about writing a check to show our financial support of the work of this congregation or some other good group, or even about getting others to join us on the journey. Instead, following Jesus today means taking his words seriously in our lives and standing up in our world as he did for the poor, the oppressed, and the marginalized.

When he tells the crowd to deny themselves, he is speaking to us too. He is not telling us to deny who we are or set aside the gifts that we have been given to share. Instead, he is encouraging us to place our hope and trust in God, not in ourselves. He is calling us to set aside any personal benefit that might come from the work that we do or the things that we believe, for we cannot do these things out of hope for a better life for ourselves or our children or even the promise of eternal life but rather for the sake of God’s reign to be realized in our world.

When he tells the crowd to take up their cross, he is speaking to us too. He is not telling us that we must carry a cross everywhere that we go or display it in a way that shows off our faithfulness, for the goal here is not so much to make those around us aware of our faith but to commit ourselves to a path that we do not fully understand. And so in calling us to take up our cross, Jesus is encouraging us to go where he goes, to sacrifice the things of this world so that the world might be different, to walk and talk and live each day in a way that points not to ourselves, our human government, or our particular culture, to place the transformation of this world at the forefront of all things, not our hopes to be around in the next.

And when he tells the crowd to follow him, he is speaking to us too. He is not telling us that we must live exactly as he did or spend our days worrying about the number of people who will join us along the way. Instead, he is calling us to get on the move, to step out of the ways that we have lived for so long and seek people along the road, to make our way into the world where the great need stands ready and waiting for God’s presence to be realized in people like us.

In these Lenten days, it seems incredibly important to recommit ourselves to following Jesus in our changing world, but we can’t approach this following in the same way that we have approached it before. We can’t just do what we’ve always done and say that that is enough. We can’t simply acknowledge Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior and go on about our lives as if nothing has changed. And we can’t leave ourselves or our world the same as before we set out on this journey.

The specifics of this path are not mine to set before you. The specific path for each of our individual lives to follow Jesus will emerge as we spend these days in prayer, penitence, and exploration. The path before us as a congregation as we seek to follow Jesus will only become clear when we commit to this individual exploration and begin to share what we learn along the way. Even so, what is clear to me is that we are called to follow Jesus in the same way as those who first heard him, denying ourselves and the things of this world that get in the way of our relationship with God and taking up the challenge of whatever cross we must bear in our lives and in our world.

So as we journey this Lent together, may God open the path to follow all the more so that we might join Jesus in both the challenges and the glory that lie ahead. Thanks be to God! Amen.

A Strange Celebration

February 22, 2015 By Andy James

a sermon on Mark 1:9-15
preached on February 22, 2015, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

What do you do after a marquee moment in life? How do you celebrate a major accomplishment before moving on to what is next? Athletes and others used to proclaim that they would be going to Disney World, but what do you do?

Our reading from Mark today tells us about one of Jesus’ most incredible moments, after all, so I wonder a bit about what we think he might best do next to celebrate. When he went out to the Jordan to be baptized by John, he knew that he would submit to John’s baptism for the repentance of sins, but he didn’t necessarily know that he would hear the voice of God speaking to him so loudly and boldly, declaring from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

So after this marquee moment, what did Jesus do? As Mark tells it, “the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness… for forty days.” That was quite a strange celebration! Mark doesn’t tell us all that much more about these forty days for Jesus. Matthew and Luke, the two gospels who built their own accounts of Jesus’ life, ministry, and death on Mark’s telling of the story, both go into great detail about these forty days, explaining very carefully the particular temptations that Jesus faced and sharing his responses to them with us. But Mark simply tells us that after his baptism and the words of affirmation from heaven, Jesus was “tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him” before he emerged from the wilderness to begin his ministry and proclaim his message in Galilee.

For Mark, this time in the wilderness matters less for the specific temptations that Jesus faced and more for the ways in which these forty days enabled him to explore and understand his call to ministry. This is the beginning of everything we know about Jesus from Mark, after all—there’s no virgin birth, angel visitations, or boyhood antics described here—and everything that follows from this for Jesus in Mark builds on this time of temptation and exploration in the wilderness.

When he emerges from the wilderness, Jesus is definitely not the same as he was when he went in. Mark tells us that after his forty days in the wilderness, Jesus set out to Galilee to proclaim the good news of God:

The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.

Jesus is a changed man after his sojourn in the wilderness with Satan, the wild beasts, and the angels. This man who approached John without reservation to receive a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins now has a message of repentance of his own to share that cleanses the heart, not just the body. This man who entered the waters of the Jordan as something of a blank slate emerges from his time in the wilderness insisting that there is something more to his life than what there was before. This beloved son came to understand his status and his calling in a new way after these forty days and so set out to proclaim and live a new message that called all people to trust that God’s kingdom was coming into being in the world and that all things would be made new once and for all.

For centuries, Christians have used this story of Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness as the basis for a time of penitence and preparation for Easter. The emphasis for this season of Lent has traditionally been on giving something up—on building up spiritual strength to overcome the temptations of everyday life, on fasting from food or other earthly things as a way of embodying in our physical bodies the sort of spiritual change that we desire in these days, on setting aside things that we can control that impede our spiritual growth. But when I look carefully at Mark’s version of this story, the tradition of giving something up for Lent doesn’t seem all that connected to Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness. We hear so little here about the temptations that he faces that we can’t build a season of practice around them. And the wilderness mentioned in Mark doesn’t look very much like our world.

This wilderness is a strange place. It can bring the danger of encounters with Satan and wild beasts or the safe comfort of angels ready to serve and care. In the first thirteen verses of Mark’s gospel, we hear about the wilderness four different times. It is the place where John the Baptist comes from and the place where Jesus is driven by the Spirit after his encounter with John. On the whole, it is a place of hostility and conflict that emerge not from the pains of giving up coffee, chocolate, or alcohol for six weeks but from the ongoing conflict between the forces of good and evil that stand at the center of Mark’s understanding of the world.

So when Jesus was driven out into this wilderness, amidst all the real challenges that he faced, I think he took up far more than he gave up. In his time in the wilderness, Jesus came to truly understand what the voice had said to him in his baptism. In the midst of his temptation by Satan, he sorted out what true repentance meant. As he journeyed through the wilderness of conflict between good and evil, Jesus discovered what it meant to live faithfully in the day and age when the time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God has come near so that he could share that message with others. And as he emerged from the wilderness, the time was right and ripe for his proclamation of the new thing that God was doing in the world in him, through him, and because of him.

In these forty days of Lent, we too are faced with the challenges of discovering a way through the wilderness of life in our increasingly complex and challenging world. We hear how God has claimed us and promises to make us and all things new, and we have to sort out what that might look like. We encounter the challenges of temptation and uncertainty in the wilderness of these days and must decide how we will respond. And as we seek a way through this wilderness, we must still be ready to share what we have encountered and learned along the way with others when we emerge into the new life on the other side.

This year, in our life together as the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone, we’ll be taking this approach of taking up something new during these Lenten days as we explore a few of the possibilities for mission and ministry in our midst. We have discovered quite well that we are active and engaged with our community and our world in ways that speak to our varied interests and passions, and the session is hopeful that we can continue to deepen and broaden our commitments to mission in our life together. Beginning today and continuing for the next four weeks, each Sunday you will hear about some of the mission work that we are already doing—and some possibilities for you to get more involved. As we make our way through this Lenten season, it is my hope and prayer that you will find some new place to participate in our work of reaching out beyond these walls and being a part of the kingdom of God coming near in our world.

Even if you’ve already given up something for this Lent, I hope that you will take up something new for this season that will continue well beyond it, for the journey of penitence and renewal that we share in these days is not so much about the things that we give up for forty days but about the ways that we continue to grow in faith, hope, and love each and every day so that we too might proclaim that message that Jesus offered to those who would hear:

The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.

So as we journey these forty days together, wandering the wilderness of our world, may we discover the pathway to live in the time that is fulfilled and the kingdom of God that has come near so that our Easter celebration may be filled with faith, hope, and love enough to enjoy and share. Thanks be to God! Amen.

Empty

March 5, 2014 By Andy James

a meditation on 2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10 for Ash Wednesday
offered on March 5, 2014, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

There are many joys of my life in ministry—the gift of celebrating together when there is good news in life or in church, the strange pleasure of preparing meaningful worship for each Sunday, the possibility of being a part of God’s new thing that is always emerging in every community of faith and the world.

But all that joy doesn’t mean that there aren’t some challenges, too. Sometimes my humanity is on full and complete display and I’m just empty. Sometimes there are challenges that leave us with no words to say or no action to take. Sometimes there simply isn’t an easy way to keep going forward. Sometimes there is nothing more to do than to turn to God and pray for a new way to open up.

Ultimately, that’s what Ash Wednesday is about: about recognizing our emptiness, about acknowledging our brokenness, about reaching out to God to seek and find a new way. On this holy day, we “remember that we are dust, and to dust we shall return.” We remember that our life is finite, with a beginning and an end. We remember that our capabilities in this life are even more limited. We remember that our brokenness exceeds our wholeness. And we remember that our lives are so often—too often—filled with emptiness.

Even amidst any desolation in our lives, this sacred day reminds us that the story does not end like this. In our reading from Second Corinthians tonight, Paul makes it clear that God fills our emptiness, that God brings us from the place of death into new life. This is an amazing gift, as Paul says:

We are treated as impostors, and yet are true;
as unknown, and yet are well known;
as dying, and see—we are alive;
as punished, and yet not killed;
as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing;
as poor, yet making many rich;
as having nothing, and yet possessing everything.

All that seems to us to be nothingness—all the sin that separates us from God and one another, all the darkness that tears us away from the light, all the brokenness that keeps us from being whole, all the emptiness that longs to be filled—God steps into all our nothingness and makes it something-ness. God fills our emptiness with the abiding presence of God’s love. God takes all our broken pieces and puts them back together more beautifully than they were before. God sends the light of Christ to shine on us and shake the darkness from around us. And God takes our sin in Christ and brings us back together with God and with one another. Paul says it so beautifully and so simply: “For our sake [God] made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” In Christ we find all that we need to be made whole, and in Christ we are reconciled with one another and with God.

So as we remember that we are dust tonight and go forth into the wilderness of these forty days of Lent, may God’s love fill all our emptiness, may God’s grace enter all our brokenness, and may God’s example in Christ show us the way forward through death and resurrection, this Lent and always. Amen.

Temptation for Today

February 17, 2013 By Andy James

a sermon on Luke 4:1-13 for the First Sunday in Lent
preached on February 17, 2013, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

It’s time again for Lent—that forty-day period when we are supposed to eat fish on Fridays, give up chocolate, alcohol, or Facebook, and generally reflect on how we are sinful and miserable human beings. As with so many things, we can blame it all on Jesus—he was the first, after all, to take a forty-day journey in the wilderness, and his story of temptation is clearly what Lent is all about, right? Since he suffered for forty days, we should too!

But I think our text from Luke this morning suggests that our Lenten journey should look a little different from Jesus’ sojourn in the wilderness. Jesus had just been baptized in the Jordan River, and he went to the wilderness led by the Spirit and yet to be tempted by the devil. His vision of temptation along the way was not of beef or chicken on Fridays, rich candy bars, wine and beer, or social networking sites—no, these temptations rattled at the core of his humanity.

First, after forty days without food, the devil suggested to the famished Jesus, “If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread.” Jesus had spent his entire time in the wilderness fasting completely, eating nothing—far more than just giving up chocolate or limiting ourselves to fish on Fridays during Lent! Giving up things that aren’t all that good for us to begin with for the 40 days of Lent isn’t really what this is all about! Although the devil tried to take advantage of Jesus’ hunger, Jesus didn’t take the bait. “It is written, ‘One does not live by bread alone.’”

But for Jesus, this was about more than food, and so it should be for us. We are not what we eat—no, we can be better measured by what we consume from the world around us, by the people who influence us, by the natural resources we use and abuse, by the relationships that enrich our lives, and by the faith that sustains us as we go along the journey together. Jesus knew this, and so he somehow battled through his hunger to avoid this real temptation upon him to fill himself with something that would not truly satisfy him.

But the devil was not done with Jesus. He next took Jesus on a quick but complete tour of the kingdoms of the world and offered them to him: “I will give their glory and all this authority to you, for it has been given over to me, and I give it to anyone I please. If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours.” Now Jesus had to be outraged right away—he surely knew that all the world belongs to God, and the devil had no authority whatsoever to give these kingdoms to anyone, especially Jesus, who already had such authority! But this temptation was about more than the power itself—this was about how to use and abuse that power, about shifting allegiance to a different way of thinking and working in the world and misusing the gifts of power in our lives. Jesus didn’t fall for the devil’s tricks, though. Again, he responded with words from scripture: “It is written, ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.’” Jesus would not give in so easily to the powers of evil in the world in order to gain some temporary power and glory, for his call was to challenge this evil and make it clear that the greatest power comes in weakness and the greatest glory from giving it all away.

While this temptation may not seem to be something of our world—surely the devil doesn’t dangle power and honor and glory before us all the time!—all too often we do look to take the easy way to power and glory. We look for the quickest path to achieve our goals, even if it means cutting some corners or hurting some people along the way. We are constantly tempted to bow to powers other than God to get what we want. And we even seek to build up honor and glory for ourselves, focusing on establishing ourselves and our ways and ideas with power and privilege rather than seeking to join in what God is doing around us.

But Jesus’ third temptation takes all this testing to a new level for Jesus and for us. The devil suggested that Jesus should throw himself down off the pinnacle of the temple and see what would happen. He even quoted a bit of the psalm that preceded our gospel reading this morning:

He will command his angels concerning you, to protect you…
On their hands they will bear you up,
so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.

As the devil saw it, if these promises are so real and good and important, if God really is present, Jesus should have checked out it just to be sure, and all would be well. But Jesus knew otherwise. He too could quote the words of Psalm 91, but he didn’t need to test them at that moment in order to trust them. As Bruce Benson puts it in a brief reflection on this temptation (from the February 21, 2010, edition of Sing for Joy), Jesus was tempted more than anything “to forget that trusting God with one’s life is not the same thing as being reckless with one’s life, that throwing himself off a high wall would be an act of foolishness and not of faith.” And so Jesus responded to this temptation to misuse scripture with another quote from scripture: “It is said, ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’”

Now we surely don’t put God to the test! We surely don’t make little deals with God that if only such-and-so will happen, we will be more faithful or stop doing something we shouldn’t be doing anyway. We surely don’t ask God to prove God’s goodness before trusting God in our lives. We surely don’t get frustrated and angry when God doesn’t answer our prayers as we wish and so fails our test. But you know it is true—so often we do exactly this. We expect God to respond to our prayers on our timetable. We suggest that the bad things that happen in our world or in our lives are simply part of “God’s plan” and so will just be okay if we can only suffer through the immediate pain and move on in life. And we even try to “prove” what we believe by twisting around events around us instead of trusting that God is really at work beyond our knowledge and comprehension.

The level of faith and confidence in God’s presence that Jesus demonstrated in response to this temptation—and all these temptations—is something that will constantly evade us. Unlike Jesus, we will always fall short in responding to the real temptations around us. We will never be sustained completely by the right things, and we will always be hungry for something more. We will never be able to completely give up our thirst for power and trust that God’s power is enough for us. And we will always be looking for better proof that God is at work in our lives and our world.

Yet Jesus struggled with these same things. These temptations during those forty days in the wilderness and countless other times during Jesus’ life remind us that God knows the depth of the trials and temptations that we face. And just as he overcame those temptations, we can find a new and different way through them, slowly but surely, day by day, not because we become better people but because God’s new life in Jesus Christ takes deeper and fuller root in us and in our world each and every day. Lent is the gift of time to do just that—to clean out our closets of the dusty old things that get in the way of all that can be new, to cultivate new practices that help us to set aside faith in our own ways and instead trust God’s grace, to make our way through the temptations of our world trusting the presence of God all along the way.

So may we find God amidst all that we give up and all that we take up in these Lenten days so that we can walk the road of uncertainty and temptation with confidence as we seek the way to new life along the road of the cross and look for the hope of the resurrection in our midst through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Taking Up the Cross

March 4, 2012 By Andy James

a sermon on Mark 8:31-38 for the Second Sunday of Lent
preached on March 4, 2012, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

The cross is an incredible mark of the faith of the church. In our worship, we see it all around us – on the wall here at the front of the sanctuary, on the table here in the chancel, on the pulpit and lectern, on the bulletin cover, and even normally on top of our steeple! Today’s children’s bulletin even has an activity for counting crosses – in its four pages, there are forty crosses, one for each day of the season of Lent!

When we see a cross in our world today, I suspect that most of us immediately think of Jesus and the Christian faith. But this simple symbol is not quite as universal as we might think. In some parts of the world, the cross is exclusively a Roman Catholic symbol. When I visited the Czech Republic and Hungary several years ago while in seminary, we learned that most Protestant churches there do not use the cross at all because they do not want to be confused with Catholics. This was quite strange for many of us Americans – one member of our group had cross jewelry of every sort and wore it often, and I can only wonder what the locals thought of this Presbyterian seminary student from America who was so Catholic in her attire!

Even so, in our context at least, the cross has become a clear symbol of Christians and Christianity. However, I suspect that most people of Jesus’ time would be quite surprised by the prevalence of this symbol in these days. In Jesus’ own time, the cross was much more a sign of death than new life. Crucifixion was the most severe and cruel form of capital punishment imaginable. To anyone under Roman rule, then, the cross was a symbol of torture and death, something to be avoided as much as possible, and certainly not something you’d wear around your neck every day!

And yet in the eight verses of our reading from the gospel of Mark this morning, Jesus suggests not only that he will face a cross, but that we should, too. These eight verses mark a major shift in Jesus’ emphasis with the disciples over the course of the whole gospel of Mark. This moment comes immediately after Jesus asked the disciples what other people were saying about him and who they said that he was. While Peter responded that Jesus was the Messiah, Jesus ordered them all to keep quiet about it.

But right after this, Jesus began to teach them a little more about what is required of the Messiah. Jesus said that he would need to “undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.” The disciples were not happy with what Jesus said. Just as Peter had enthusiastically affirmed the emerging picture of Jesus as Messiah, he enthusiastically denied that he could face such things, so he pulled Jesus aside and gave him a stern talking-to.

While Peter thought that Jesus, with the stature and presence of a respected teacher and prophet and the one he believed to be the Messiah, could never suffer and die, Jesus insisted that this was the path ahead for him. He made sure that all the disciples could hear his own rebuke of Peter: “Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”

But this was not enough for Jesus. He wanted everyone who was listening to him to be aware of what he was facing. So he went to the crowd and spoke again to them, insisting that those who wanted to follow him had to deny themselves and take up a cross instead. He made it clear that no one should follow him for personal gain or with expectations of an immediate transformation of this world or a speedy coming of the next. Instead, everyone who follows him should be ready to give up everything they have and get nothing tangible in return. While this may seem to be a difficult, strange, and paradoxical word coming from one named as the Messiah, Jesus insisted that this was nothing to be ashamed of – those who were not happy with these things would find themselves struggling all the more in the days to come.

Taking up the cross is a difficult challenge. We can’t just put on a piece of jewelry or place a beautiful adornment in our sanctuary to receive its benefits, and we want to avoid the suffering and pain that we know, deep down, that it brings. We don’t want to give up the things of this world, and we want to stay in control at all costs. But taking up the cross requires letting go of all those things. We also have some good theological justifications developed over the centuries that give us pause, too, as we consider taking up the cross for ourselves. We say that Christ’s suffering was enough for all of us and that no one should have to endure that kind of suffering anymore. We Protestants intentionally have an empty cross rather than a crucifix to remind us that Jesus’ suffering there was not the end of the story. And we say that there is no reason to keep crucifying Christ over and over again in our actions or practices of faith.

So I think we’re incredibly good at avoiding this command to “take up our cross” for practical, personal, and theological reasons, yet Jesus’ words still ring in our ears: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” Jesus challenges us to somehow balance our conviction that he suffered enough for all of us with his command to take up our cross and follow him, to walk the way of uncertainty, pain, and death, to give up the things of this world for the sake of something beyond ourselves, and to trust that God will not only make something greater of our pain but has already walked that way before us and walks that way alongside us too.

This suffering is quite likely something more than giving up chocolate or cigarettes or Facebook for forty days. It is quite different from the awful things we have seen in the aftermath of tornadoes in our nation in recent days, for these things are not suffering sent by God to test us or punishment doled out for some sin we have committed. And the suffering Jesus calls us to face as we take up our cross is far less than putting ourselves out there to be killed as he did.

Instead, I think this suffering is much more like reorienting our lives toward the way God wants things to be, shifting everything we say and do into a mode of self-giving love, adjusting our hearts to give up everything we have to make room for all that we can still receive, walking our own road to the cross not for the benefits we will find there but because we and all the world will be better for taking that journey.

All this is the challenge of Lent – to somehow find our way through this difficult path, to remember and respond to Jesus’ challenge to deny ourselves and take up the cross and follow him, to sort out what we must give up so that we can take up this new way, and to always keep in mind that the sufferings of these days are not the end of the journey, for there is even greater glory ahead.

May God give us the strength we need to walk this journey together and with Jesus, so that the suffering we share along the way of the cross with one another and with Jesus will bear joyous fruit with the dawn of Easter Day.

Thanks be to God.
Amen.