A Fourth Church Sermon by Joanna M. Adams

September 14, 2003 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

The Choice of a Lifetime

Joanna M. Adams
Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Proverbs 1:20–23, 32–33
Mark 8:31–38

“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.’”

Mark 8:34 (NRSV)

O God, in whose service is prefect freedom, we bow before you with the certain knowledge that without your guidance we would surely lose our way. Tell us now what we need to hear, and show us what we ought to do to reflect the light of Jesus Christ our Lord, in whose gracious name we pray. Amen.

Here is a true story for you this morning. It takes place in the town of Maryville, Tennessee, where there is a nice Presbyterian Church called New Providence. Close by is a fine Episcopal Church. What happened is that one day someone walked into the sanctuary of the New Providence Presbyterian Church in broad daylight and stole the cross right off the communion table. The congregation was distressed. The Presbyterian pastor called the Episcopal priest at the neighboring church to see if the congregation could borrow their chapel cross until they could get a new one. The Episcopal priest was glad to share, the only caveat being that the cross had to be returned to the Episcopal chapel every Thursday by 11:45 a.m. for the noon communion service. My friend in this drama is the Episcopal priest, Martha Sterne.

Hear how she describes what happens next:

Presbyterians—they’re organized, prompt, often guilt ridden—so we figured we were safe. But a couple of weeks into the deal, 11:45 a.m. on a Thursday rolls around—no cross. We call the Presbyterians and whoever answers the phone never even heard of our cross. I hear Judy, our parish administrator, saying, well, “It’s pretty big, gold, what can I say it’s a cross.” About that time the other line rings so I pick it up and it’s Emily Anderson, the pastor of New Providence who’s cruising around in her car and nonchalantly asks if I want some lunch. I hiss back, "I don’t want lunch. I want our cross back." Dead silence. Then she audibly gulps. It just kills Presbyterians to goof up. I hear a strangled voice, “Okay, I’m U-turning on Broadway.” It got here. And they’ve been on their toes ever since.(1)

Why all the fuss about the cross? Because it is important, that’s why.(2) No, important isn’t the word. Indispensable is the word. You cannot have the church without the cross. You cannot live the Christian life without the cross. One day long ago, Jesus said to his disciples and to anyone else who would hear, “If you want to become my followers, deny yourself, take up your cross and follow me.” Visitors to Fourth Presbyterian Church sometimes ask why there is no cross on our communion table. I love the answer that Bob Rasmussen and others give—that the church itself is built in the shape of a cross. This entire nave, the aisle down the center, the transepts, the whole place is cruciform, representing the central spiritual reality that undergirds everything we do as a community of faith.

I have been struck in the past few days by the crowds pressing in around me out on Michigan Avenue on the sidewalk. You can see them today as you leave church; people are lining up around Chestnut Street waiting their turn to visit the hot new apparel store that has just opened in the old FAO Schwartz space.

Some of you might be better historians than I, but to my knowledge, we have never had an overflow crowd here at church on Good Friday. Some people cannot stand the idea of the suffering and death of Jesus. As Reinhold Niebuhr observed years ago, “They insist on a God without wrath bringing men and women without sin into a world without judgment through a Christ without a cross.”(3) Cleaned-up Christianity is not a true story. Here is the true Christian story: whatever else he did, Jesus went the way of the cross. He allowed himself to be stretched out, to be poured out for others. Even the disciples who knew him best and loved him most deeply found it incomprehensible that he would have to do what he had come to do in such a radical way. Why in the world would the Messiah have to suffer and be rejected? They were horrified at the idea.

A lot of people in this congregation read a novel over the summer written by a man named Dan Brown. It is a thriller entitled The Da Vinci Code, a deliciously convoluted story involving a murder in the Louvre, the search for the secret of the Holy Grail, and a one thousand year-old society that Leonardo Da Vinci allegedly was a member of. Among the conjectures brought forward in the course of the novel is that Jesus and Mary Magdalene had a relationship that went far beyond that of Savior and disciple. A number of you have asked me in recent weeks what I think about The Da Vinci Code and the idea of an alternative life for Jesus, a happier, more positive life than is depicted in the Gospels.

The latter question has been around for a long time. Perhaps you remember the controversial movie The Last Temptation of Christ. It was based on a book by author Nikos Kazantzakis. In that book, Jesus, in a haunting scene, is wrestling with what he ought to do, now that it seems inevitable he will be arrested. He asks himself, “Why don’t I just go back to Nazareth, get married, have a family, take up carpentry again, and get away from all of this that is before me?”(4) He could have done that, but if he had, he would not have been able to fulfill his own destiny. He would have missed the whole reason for his being, which was to show us the face and nature of God, who pours himself out for the sake of others. Christ came to show us how to live and how to die and how to be free from the excessive self-anxiety that robs human life of meaning. No one ever said that Jesus’ way was the easy way.

In our time, it seems that it is even more scandalous to talk about the cross. Can’t we just be positive? There is so much negativity in the world. What’s wrong with having as one’s goal in life to be healthy and well-liked and successful? Preacher/theologian Fred Craddock puts it even more starkly: “Why would we want at the center of our faith a symbol that is of a man slumped dead on a cross?”(5)

This morning, I want to suggest a reason or two why we ought to want the cross. First, because it tells us the truth. Neither life in general nor the life of faith is cakewalk. Cruelty, fecklessness, violence, hatred, suffering and loss—they are all out there on the loose. A Savior who is above all that isn’t worth having. As we baptized these precious little ones this morning, I remembered reading about a custom in the Greek Orthodox Church, the church which began in the Middle East, and how it is that in their baptismal tradition the priest wears a large cross around his neck. After the infant has been baptized and is still literally damp from the baptism, the priest takes off the cross that hangs around his neck and “forcefully strikes the child in the chest, so hard that it hurts the baby and the baby screams. Why would he do such a thing? The symbolism is clear: all of us who are baptized into Christ must bear the cross, a sign not of ease or victory,” but of sacrifice and of deep identification with the sufferings of the world.(6)

“If any want to be my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me,” Jesus said. Some who heard him say that originally would have had reason to receive the teaching literally. For them, Roman persecution in the form of crucifixion was a real possibility. But what about us here on the Magnificent Mile? We are hardly under the threat of death. I wonder, though, are we really out of death’s shadow? I am not speaking of literal death, but the death of the human spirit caused by excessive self-absorption and its attendant miasmas: indifference and complacency.

We don’t often read the book of Proverbs anymore, but the lesson that was our Old Testament reading today gives us a picture of wisdom personified as a prophetess. She speaks to the people at the busiest thoroughfares and intersections of the city. Did you note what she warned the people against? She warned them against complacency. “It is complacency that will destroy you.” I had never thought of that before, that complacency, which seems so passive, has the active power of destruction; yet, wisdom says it is so.

What is the mantra of so many in our society today? “I don’t know and I don’t care” might sum it up nicely. I don’t know my neighbors, and I don’t have time to know them, and I don’t have any energy left over to care about them. I don’t know about Americans who have lost their jobs or have fallen into poverty in the last twelve months. There’s too much to wrap my mind around. The answer to the question, by the way, is that 101.3 million people fell below the poverty level in the last twelve months. One half of them, six hundred thousand of them are children.(7)

I don’t know and I don’t care. I don’t know what is happening to the ozone layer or to wildlife habitats or to the ice floes in Antarctica. Indifference, wisdom says, has the power of destruction—destruction of the human spirit, destruction of the human society, and now we realize, destruction of “the planet God has entrusted to our care.”(8) Wasn’t Edmund Burke right when he said, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men and women to do nothing?” We fight evil by remaining engaged, by caring, and by acting and by standing for something that we believe in, by being brave and by not settling for the lesser of two evils, by not tuning out to the cries we hear from our neighbors, in our city, and around the world.

Just this past week, I read about a new biography Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder profiling Dr. Paul Farmer, an award-winning physician who had everything going for him, and yet decided he was going to spend his life setting up clinics for poor people in Haiti and elsewhere. He started a foundation, and he and his partners care for literally thousands of sick people. They build schools and sanitation systems. When Tracy Kidder asked him why he lived that kind of life, he said, “I don’t know. The problem is that if I don’t work this hard, someone will die who doesn’t have to.”(9)

Jesus said if you want to have a really meaningful life, let me show you the way. Take up something great. Yes, it might be heavy, but with my strength you can carry it. Follow me, and I will lead you into the richest and most rewarding life you can imagine.

Think about how the cross is not closed like a square or a circle all turned in on itself. It is open—vertically up to heaven, reminding us to reach up to God and to be the best that we can be, even as God has reached down to us in Christ Jesus, drawing our very lives, our triumphs, our energies. All is drawn up into the mercy and grace of God. Then there is the horizontal part of the cross, which reaches out across the horizons of space and of relationships and stretches us the other way, not only upward but outward.(10)

I love the verb in that strong, challenging teaching from the New Testament today, “Take up your cross.” This is what I would call the mother of all volunteer activities—taking up your cross. What could that possibly look like here and now? For starters, it looks like not worrying about yourself all the time. Get over yourself, and get out there, and do something for someone else. Pick up a concern that does not necessarily affect you personally and identify with your neighbor, no matter how much it costs you in time away from the gym, or the after-work cocktail hour, or the desk at the office. Listen—Jesus loves people, and because he loves us, he wants us to find our way in life. Because he loves us, he is willing to reveal the secret in life of how it can be lived at its fullest. If you haven’t memorized a Bible verse in a while, here is one to take to the bank: “Those who want to save their lives will lose them, but those who lose their lives for my sake and for the sake of the Gospel will save it.”

This past week, our nation remembered the police officers, fire fighters, and all the ordinary people who literally laid down their lives for friends and strangers two years ago. We remembered the priest in Tower II who lost his life because he stopped to offer last rites to a dying man in the stairwell. We remembered the airplane passenger on the flight that crashed into the farmlands near Pittsburgh, who called home on his cell phone and told his family goodbye and that he loved them, and that he and the others were doing what they could to thwart the terrorist plans that were surely to crash the airplane into an intended target in Washington, D.C.

I reflected again last week on the words of the poet Emily Dickinson:

If I can keep one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain;
If I can ease one heart its aching,
Or cool one pain;
Or place one fallen robin
Back in its nest again…
I shall not live in vain.

This is the secret; this is the secret of which Jesus spoke long ago. I think of it all in terms of the cross. The cross calls us to live in both directions, vertically and horizontally, so that this congregation can be reminded of the glory and grandeur and great purposes of God, and then go out to serve in such a way that God’s love for the whole world becomes real in flesh and blood.

There are so many things about us that are predetermined—the color of our eyes, our time and place in history, who our parents are, what our innate abilities are—so much is already set. But there are choices too. One day, sooner or later, you will hear a voice calling you to stretch and to grow and to move to higher ground. You and only you will decide how you answer.

Albert Schweitzer once said, “I don’t know what your destiny will be, but this much I know, the richest and most successful among you will be the ones who find a way to serve.”(11)

May we go the way of Christ as his disciples, here and now to the glory of God.

Notes
1. Martha P. Sterne, St. Andrew Episcopal Church, Maryville, TN, 9/17/00.
2. Ibid.
3. As quoted by Fred B. Craddock in “Why the Cross,” The Cherry Log Sermons, Westminster/John Knox Press, 2001, p. 79.
4. Ibid, p. 82.
5. Ibid, p. 80.
6. Peter J. Gomes, “Storm Center,” The Christian Century, 5/31/03.
7. The New York Times editorial, 9/8/03.
8. Brief Statement of Faith, P.C. (USA).
9. The New York Times, 9/10/03.
10. Ibid, Sterne.
11. As quoted by Dan Wakefield in Returning.