Defied Expectations

Mark 8:31-39

Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, ‘Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.’

He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, ‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. 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. 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? Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.’

A little over 10 years ago, when I was doing AmeriCorps out in Northwestern PA,  I had a friend, Emily. Emily and I bonded over our shared love of baseball—she was a native Ohioan and was diehard Cleveland fan; I was, still am, of course, a diehard Red Sox fan. Emily is maybe the biggest baseball fan I’ve ever met—incredibly loyal to her home team, knowledgeable of all the stats, all the players, the history. We traveled around to several different games in the area that baseball season, including an afternoon game in Pittsburgh to see the Pirates. We were enjoying the game, low stakes for both of us, as neither of our home teams were playing. Just enjoying a lovely Spring day in a beautiful ball park. Then, the guy sitting next to us, next to Emily decided to strike up a conversation. He was harmless enough, had clearly taken an innocent liking to Emily. Emily was being polite, humoring him, but I can assure you, was not interested. Her disinterest was cemented when the guy noted that the next player coming up to bat had a good batting average. He paused, looked at Emily, and, as if Emily was a child said, “Do you know what a batting average is?”

Church, I will never forget the look Emily gave me. It was a look full of rage that screamed “ARE YOU KIDDING ME” without saying a word. Emily had to make an excuse to get up to go to the bathroom or get a pretzel so she wouldn’t explode at this dude, making the assumption that, presumably because she was a young woman she didn’t know the most rudimentary facts of baseball.

I thought of that look Emily gave me when I read this passage. Jesus might seem a little harsh in his response to Peter; after all, Peter meant well—Jesus had just told all his disciples that he was going to suffer and die. Peter freaked out, “That can’t be right, that’s not supposed to happen to a messiah! Jesus, you must be mistaken.” But think about it, Church—Peter just tried to tell Jesus Christ, the Messiah, that Jesus’ description of what will happen to the Messiah is wrong. Church, that’d be like me trying to tell Arnie Powell the best way to handle frozen pipes, or telling Jo Knowles how to write young adult fiction.  

As I see it, there are a couple reasons Peter freaked out. The first is Peter’s own preconceived notions, his own biases and beliefs about what the messiah would be like. Traditional ancient Jewish beliefs about the messiah were that of someone kingly, a leader wearing a crown, sitting on a throne. It wasn’t some itinerant preacher talking about bringing the powerful down, talking about the meek inheriting the earth. But this is what Jesus did church—Jesus took preconceived notions, assumptions taken for granted, and turned those notions and assumptions upside down. Jesus defied all expectations. Here was Jesus—not calling himself the messiah, not calling himself Christ, not son of God, but referring to himself as the Son of Man. Church, he was one of us. No one ever thought the long-awaited messiah would stoop so low to be one of us—the Son of Man—the Son of Man who would not wear a crown of gold, but a crown of thorns; the Son of Man who would understand the pain and grief and fear that we will all experience at some point in our lives; the Son of Man who came to this earth to make sure none of us would ever be alone in our suffering.

Today, we take comfort and give so much gratitude in the fact that Jesus, both human and divine knows our pain, knows our grief, knows our worries, anxieties, our deepest fears. But in Peter’s time? In Peter’s time, the idea that the messiah would be someone who would deign to stoop to our level was unthinkable. In Peter’s time, the messiah certainly wasn’t someone who would suffer and die a very human death. I can imagine that the disciples were, after dropping everything to follow Jesus, hoping for a relatively comfortable life as compensation for their sacrifices. But here was Jesus not only saying he would suffer and die, but that followers of Jesus should be prepared to do the same. I think, church, that when we hear information and facts that aren’t to our liking, we try to deny those facts, or twist them in a way that better suits us, that’s more comfortable for us. But Jesus isn’t all about comforting all the time. Jesus is about making some people uncomfortable to get to the point that no people are uncomfortable. And these disciples, of course they loved Jesus, but they didn’t want their lives to get any more difficult. So Jesus’ explanation as to what would need to happen to the messiah, and what the disciples should be prepared for, should be prepared to sacrifice was not something that wanted to hear.

Our views and acceptance Jesus’ purpose as the messiah have changed from the disciples’ time to our time, sure, but human nature hasn’t. We still try our hardest to ignore things we don’t want to hear. I remember when rumblings of the pandemic were beginning, about a year ago—I remember I was actually at a little young adult potluck with folks from the church I was attending in Philly. I remember despite the fact that we were all capable of reading about the horrors that were happening in Wuhan province of China, we asked a med student, Ian, who was present at the potluck, “I mean, it’s pretty much just a flu, right?” Ian didn’t know yet, they hadn’t had any cases where we was doing his residency, but he shrugged and said, “yeah, it seems like a respiratory sort-of flu.” That was comfortable for us. We could handle that. Stories of Wuhan, and what was beginning to happen in New York, no thanks; a different version of the flu, sure, fine. And then as the news got worse, as it became a reality, as restaurants closed, as sirens were constant around Philly, I spent my days doom-scrolling, looking for optimistic information that would fit what I wanted, what I needed to hear, looking for something, anything positive, and finding nothing. I, like so many, didn’t want to face the reality that things were changing. I, like so many, didn’t want to face the fact that my life would get much more difficult, that I would have to make sacrifices. Of course, I eventually did begrudgingly accept this fact, I continue to begrudgingly accept it today. But we’ve seen that’s not the case for everyone in this country. We’ve seen that people just won’t accept information they don’t want to hear.

When Jesus explained to his disciples that he would suffer and die and be raised from the dead, Peter went into a panic. Though immediately before this passage we just heard, Peter says, confidently, that he believes Jesus to be the messiah, here he is, trying to explain to the messiah what it means to be a messiah. You know, it feels sadly similar to when doctors and nurses urged people to wear masks, to stay in, to avoid large gatherings of people, we had a lot of people with absolutely zero medical experience attempting to explain to doctors why they should be able to go to bars, or why they shouldn’t have to wear masks.

Now, I wonder about those folks who refuse to wear masks, who refuse to do the bare minimum; I especially wonder about the folks who do that who consider themselves Christian. I wonder how long they would last a follower of Jesus in his day. If one can’t make the tiniest sacrifice of wearing a mask, the bare minimum to protect other people, I can’t imagine that person would be willing sacrifice their own lives in order to do the work that they were called to by Jesus. And church, this warning was so harsh, of being prepared to take up your cross, because this was the reality. As we’ve talked about before, Mark was the earliest gospel, so these were the earliest Christians—these were the most misunderstood and persecuted Christians. This was a real warning, church; a real warning that what we’re fighting for is right, but what we’re fighting for feels very threatening for those in power, so it is dangerous, and it could get you killed, and you have to be prepared for that.

Last weekend, Chris and I watched the excellent new movie Judas and the Black Messiah about the 1969 state-sanctioned plot against and assassination of the activist and Black Panther leader Fred Hampton. In the middle of the movie, Hampton is giving a speech to a diverse group of supporters right after he was released from prison after being arrested on a bogus charge. In this stirring speech, he warns his supporters. He says, (and keep in mind, when I read this quote, that Fred Hampton was 21-years-old when he was assassinated), “If you’re asked to make a commitment at age 20, and you say ‘I’m too young to die,’ then you’re dead already.”

This was a warning. It was a call to action, but it was warning—if you’re going to fight for radical equality in times of extreme division and oppression, you have to be prepared to die. And this, church, this was not an exaggeration. Because it wasn’t long after Hampton said this that he was murdered in his bed by the state. But the reason this quote from the movie, from a Hampton speech, really jumped out to me—was thinking of it in relation to the words of Jesus in this scripture passage: “For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life, and forfeit their soul?” If you think you’re too young to die for radical equality, if you think your life is more important than equality for all, then you’re already dead. If think the end-all-be-all is your profit and your status and your power, you’ve already lost your soul.

But okay, okay, let me pause a little here, because this is getting really heavy. I’m not asking anyone here to make any kind of death oath. I am, however, asking us all to make a commitment. Making a commitment is a sacrifice in itself—it’s a sacrifice of time, and in our case, it’s a sacrifice of some of our ego—of recognition that some of the ways we’ve looked at the world throughout our lives may be dead wrong. Because you see, in this passage, when Jesus talks about forfeiting one’s life—the word life is from the Greek psyche, and this is interchangeable with the words soul and self. So in my view, in my interpretation, while in Jesus’ time, it was very much a warning that you may have to literally lose your life, I also see this as very much as giving up our egos, and recognizing that we don’t have all the answers. So we have to sacrifice our preconceived notions of things, we have to realize that many of our assumptions we’ve held are quite possibly very wrong. This is a difficult and humbling task. Because in recognizing that we don’t have all the answers, we have to look to help from others. We have to work together, to listen to the experts, and listen to each other. We all have something to contribute to this world, to the good works Jesus calls us to do. But we have to let go of some of our time, some of our ego, and some of our comforts in order to give what we can, in order to be the disciples that Jesus asks us to be.

Giving up some of our ego may involve giving up long-held biases, and preconceived ideas— some as seemingly innocent as assuming girls and women don’t know or care about sports. They may be more malicious than that, vile assumptions about race, class, or gender and intellect, for example. Giving up our ego will surely involve recognizing that not only do we not have all the answers, but that, in fact, we have few of them. It means looking to those who know things we do not, and listening. It means listening without panicking or knee-jerk reactions, or denying reality. We hope and pray it will not be necessary to sacrifice our literal lives, but it will mean, at the very least, sacrificing some time. Church, you are all sacrificing your Sunday morning by being here today. Anyone who watches this sermon later, is sacrificing that length of time to listen, and to learn. This is a wonderful start, but I don’t want to let us off the hook! Because the work we are all called to do takes so much more than just showing up! Jesus alone upended oppressive political and religious systems and gave his life doing so.

We can’t do it alone, and God-willing we won’t have to sacrifice our lives to do it, but it’s Lent church—what better time to think about what kind of sacrifices we can make in the near future, as we enter into a post-COVID era, as we exit this pandemic wilderness and see all the damage that has been done, to see all of God’s children who have been left behind. As I’ve noted for some time now, this has been a Lenten year, so I don’t think we need to put much emphasis on giving up small pleasures for these next few weeks. But we can meditate on some of our own irrelevant or incorrect assumptions or preconceived notions and we can work on giving them up. We can meditate on when and why we deny the harsh realities of the world. And we can work extra hard on listening to one another. And when we come back together, church, we will, God-willing, be able to truly commit to the work of bringing the Kingdom of Heaven to the here and now. Amen.