The Star Pupil - Almost

(The following sermon was delivered as an "interview" sermon during Lent at First Lutheran Church in Kearney, NE in March of 2009)

Scripture: Mark 8:27-38

I remember as a kid being so excited whenever my teacher would ask a question that I knew the answer to. I’d raise my hand and practically bounce out of my seat going “Oh! Oh! I know! I know!” I sometimes was probably as annoying as little Hermione Granger, the little know-it-all from Harry Potter that always answers the teacher’s questions correctly. However, there was this one time, when the teacher asked us what kinds of things we found on airplanes. Now, I’d grown up flying in a small, single engine aircraft. So I felt quite confident that I had a leg up on everyone else in this particular category. I raised my hand confidently and when the teacher called upon me, I answered quite proudly: “Instruments. You can find instruments on airplanes.” The teacher nodded and smiled, affirming I was indeed correct.

Then another student raised his hand and said, “Bathrooms.” Well, this answer perplexed me. We didn’t have bathrooms on the airplanes I’d ever been on. So I stood up and rather indignantly rebuked my classmate by saying, “Airplanes do NOT have bathrooms. You have to use a can!” I was quite insistent on this matter you see, because I KNEW there was no bathroom in the airplanes I’d been on, and I felt because I had such experience in this area, surely I was correct in my assessment. You can imagine my embarrassment when I discovered there were these things called commercial airliners that indeed did have bathrooms on them.

But I learned a hard lesson that day… perhaps my preconceived notions of what something is – isn’t necessarily the only perception. Just because I think I know what something means, doesn’t mean I actually do.

I can practically see Peter doing almost the same thing when Jesus asks the disciples who they think he is. “Oh! Oh! I know the answer to this one… you’re the Messiah!”

Peter was no doubt beaming proudly when his teacher nodded and affirmed that he was correct. Jesus was indeed the Messiah.

But just because Peter came up with the right answer, doesn’t mean he fully understood the answer he gave. You see, just like I had an idea in my head about what an airplane was like, Peter had this idea in his head about what the Messiah was like. The Messiah was a great military leader. The Messiah was going to storm into Jerusalem, overturn the Roman authorities, and usher in this wondrous new kingdom. The Messiah was a great king and ruler!

What a downer it had to have been for Peter to hear that instead of storming the gates of Jerusalem and cutting down their oppressors, their Messiah, their leader, was going to go into Jerusalem, be ridiculed, suffer and die. Not exactly a great public relations move for the old Messiah!

Like my insistence that bathrooms did not exist on airplanes, Peter insisted that surely the Messiah would never undergo the things Jesus said he would go through. Because surely God’s anointed would not be demeaned and debased in this way! It was unthinkable!

To compound the problem, not only does Peter have the wrong perception about the Messiah, but what Jesus tells him he doesn’t WANT to be true. Jesus says, “This is what the Messiah means,” and Peter goes, “You know, I don’t like that meaning. I’ve got a better idea.”

And isn’t that something all of us tend to do? Don’t we all tend to be a bit like Peter? We all have our preconceived notions of how we want God to be. Unfortunately, what we want God to be isn’t necessarily who or what God actually is. Let’s face it, we want the Jesus we saw a few passages back in the Transfiguration. We want the Jesus who is glorified and standing on a mountaintop. This is the Jesus we want, and this is the Jesus we hope for most of the time, is it not?

I don’t know how many of you remember back in the 90’s the term “Buddy Jesus.”  “Buddy Jesus” was tossed around quite a bit for how to describe who and what Jesus was. Because that’s how we wanted to view Jesus – he was our buddy, our best friend, this guy who made everything in life better. And sure – it’s true, Jesus is our friend. But to stop there with our understanding of Jesus is like saying Rebecca likes pizza… and thinking that’s all there is to me.

But, that’s the view Peter and many of us have of Jesus. We like him on that transfiguration mountain top. Our white knight coming to save us in our times of trouble, of making everything in our lives “okay” and making everything seem brilliant and wonderful.

Unfortunately, as most of us know – as much as we’d like to stand, basking in the glory of the transfigured and glorious Jesus, we rarely are able to spend much time with that Jesus here on earth. The reality of the human condition, the reality of the pain and the suffering we all go through at some point and time in our lives is where we ultimately wind up. But this isn’t what we want to think about. And we don’t want to think about what Jesus has to go through first in order to get to that Jesus we all want.

And I have no doubt many of you have experienced this before… when you see a disaster coming, when you know you’re about to be in the midst of something terrible, someone comes up to you, pats you on the head, smiling, and says in this overly patronizing tone of voice: “Oh, don’t worry – it will all work out.”

Now how many of you have been so irritated you just wanted to scream at that person, “Get real! This stinks!” Now you know they mean well… you know their heart is probably in the right place… but their chipper little “positive attitude” of “chin up!” just drives you bonkers. Because sometimes…you know that it really isn’t going to be okay. Anyone who has received word that they have a terminal illness knows, it will not be “okay.” For anyone who has lost a loved one knows that it will not be okay. Life sometimes stinks. That’s a reality.

Sometimes I wonder if that isn’t the same sort of situation Jesus finds himself in with Peter in this passage. Jesus knows where he’s headed. He knows what is coming, and he knows that it, to put it bluntly, is really going to stink. Then here comes Peter… “Oh, come on Jesus… that’s not going to happen… You are the Messiah after all. And all this gloom and doom talk – it really isn’t good for morale.”

Well, Jesus, who’s never been known for pulling any punches, gets to say to Peter what we probably would all love to say to the person who tries to dismiss the reality of how difficult the path ahead really is. “Get behind me, Satan!” Don’t go trying to tell me what will and won’t happen. You’re looking for the shiny happy Jesus you just saw on the mountaintop. Well guess what – that’s not how it’s going to be for the next several weeks.

But we tend to want exactly what Peter wants. We want glory. We want Jesus to be more upbeat.

But what we get instead is suffering and vulnerability. We get a God who does something that rails against our notions of what God should be and what God should do. Instead of the “shiny happy” God we all want, we get a God who lies broken and suffering – a God who meets us not only in glory and wonder, but a God who meets us when we’re at our worst. Yet, the irony is it’s THIS God that can truly save you… because it’s a God that KNOWS you. A God who understands, because God has been there.

To make matters worse, Jesus calls those of us who are disciples of his to do the same thing. For just as who and what Jesus is rails against what we want him to be, what Jesus asks of his disciples also rails against every instinct and every sensibility that we have. Because up to this point in Mark’s gospel, being a disciple has been pretty cool. They’ve spent a lot of time in Galilee, where everyone loved them. Being a disciple of Jesus meant weekend spiritual retreats, bible studies, and participating in worship and listening to sermons. All these wonderful times where you just sit around with other people and talk about what Christ means to me.

The gospel of Mark up to this point has been the land of small groups. Like the disciples, that is where and how many of us met Jesus for the first time. In Sunday School, at a bible study…

But while the retreats and bible studies and wonderful community they’ve been building has been great—Jesus brings home the crashing reality of what it REALLY means to be a disciple of His. Because up to this point, we’ve really liked some of the sayings of Jesus that say things like: "Come to me all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." That’s such a wonderful and comforting thing Jesus says.

We don’t like so much these hard sayings of his like, "Now I am headed for Jerusalem to take up a cross, and if you would be my disciple, you will take up your cross and follow me." After two millennia of "cross" imagery, our senses are not as shocked by this reference as Jesus' listeners must have been. The pain, brutality and degradation of a death by crucifixion, including the spirit-stripping and humiliating practice of making the condemned "take up his cross" on the final death march to the execution site, was a torture reserved for only the most despised of state criminals. Yet this is the very image Jesus chooses to represent as the fate of his most devoted disciples. Not something you’d imagine would be a good recruiting poster for his cause.

As much as we may not like what Jesus has to say here, there’s a part of us that also knows how true it is. Because when we pick up our crosses, we don’t always choose to do so. No one chooses suffering. Few choose death. No one wants to purposely enter a hard time in their life. But the reality is… someday you WILL go there. It’s unavoidable. None of us dream of divorce when we enter into marriage – yet, it happens sometimes whether we want it to or not. We don’t choose to be sick, yet there it is. We don’t usually choose to lose our jobs and find ourselves struggling to put food on the table and provide for our families… yet, it happens as many are experiencing right now.

There are undoubtedly all kinds of ways you envisioned your life would go – but discovered the reality was very different from what you had hoped for.

So Jesus says we must deny ourselves, which essentially means to become humble—to recognize our own efforts are futile, to surrender ourselves to God. Because pride isn’t going to get us very far when we enter into those times. These difficult times reveal our mortality, our finitude, our sinfulness, our lack of control… and ultimately we are driven to humility rather than pride.

By entering into these difficult times, of surrendering ourselves and our will to the will of God, Christ says we must lose our old self, let our old self go. So you want to cling to the things of this world, cling to the life you have here… well, there’s a reality that no one can deny: whatever gains we may feel we have made in this life, "you can't take it with you." However the flip side is whoever lets go of the things of this world, and surrenders themselves to God is going to be given a new life. When we pick up our crosses, we know life is never going to be the same again. Life has changed – our perspective has changed.

Instead of living by our own rules our own selfish desires and reason, we live by faith – that God is leading us into a new life. But it’s not a new life we can attain by any effort of our own. It’s a life that is given once we surrender ourselves into the reality that life, at times, does indeed stink. And it’s in that stinkiness where we ultimately will find Jesus – and ultimately discover salvation.

Because the Christian calling has two parts. The first is to follow and listen and learn. The second is to pick up our crosses—to follow where we’d rather not go, but know we must.

To be a disciple, to be a follower of Christ is a dirty, messy business. It means entering into not only our own suffering, but the suffering of others. It may not be the life we want or would hope for, Jesus may not be exactly the savior we think we want him to be, he may not fit into the neat little box that we’d like him to, but the enduring promise of Christ is that through the valleys of life, Christ will pursue us and he who has denied himself and taken up his cross for our sake will never let us go.