March 8, 2009 Second Sunday in Lent
First Congregational Church in Thetford, Vermont, UCC
Psalm 22; Mark 8:31-9:1
Jesus had led the disciples north from Galilee. All along the way he was
calling upon people to repent, to change the focus of their lives and enter the
realm of God that was at hand here and now.
Peter was part of Jesus’ inner circle. One of his roles was as spokesperson
for the disciples, so when Jesus asked them on the road north, “Who do you say I
am?” Peter was the one who answered for them all, “You are the Messiah.”
What happened after that exchange was a turning point. It was the
beginning of a long, excruciating period of grief, but in the end, it was a grief that
made for joy, a joy beyond all hope of joy. It was a darkness that led to a light
brighter than any ever seen on earth before.
There was only grief and darkness, though, in the moments after Peter said
that Jesus was the Messiah. Jesus ordered them sternly to tell no one, and then
he began to teach them that he must undergo great suffering, be rejected by those
in power and be killed before rising again.
The disciples were horrified. The Messiah was supposed to be a great
leader who would make Israel the most powerful nation in the world, a leader
who would restore the throne of David to glory.
The disciples looked at one another in dismay and disbelief, and gestured
to Peter to speak up, to say something to change Jesus’ mind. There were crowds
around who should not hear him talking like this or they might leave, or run them
out of town, or worse. So Peter took Jesus aside.
Picture these two men set off a little from the disciples and the crowd that
was waiting for Jesus to speak to them in a field beside the road. Their two heads
were close together, and they were whispering passionately. Peter was rebuking
Jesus for talking about getting himself killed. Then Jesus turned to the disciples,
knowing that Peter was speaking for them all, and he rebuked Peter loudly
enough for them to hear, saying, “Get behind me, Satan. For you are setting your
mind not on divine things, but on human things.”
We need to feel the intensity of the emotions here. Jesus was speaking of
his own suffering and death—things he did not want to experience. As we will
see on Maundy Thursday in the Garden of Gethsemane, he was grieved and
afraid. He knew, too, how speaking of his death would hurt these disciples whom
he loved, and what a challenge it would be to their faith. For his part, it grieved
Peter to see Jesus do something that was unworthy of him and dangerous. And
like a parent who sees a child taking a life-threatening risk, he was not only
grieved, he was angry—angry out of fear and loving concern. Peter’s love, fear,
grief and rage were strong enough to make him willing to fight with Jesus to keep
him on track and above all, alive.
Then Jesus did exactly what the disciples did not want. He called the
crowd to him and said, “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 the sake of the good news I
am bringing will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and
forfeit their life?”
Jesus’ words were said out of love, but they still carried the energy of
rebuke, they were filled with paradox, they were designed to shock his followers
the way a Zen koan shocks and breaks open the mind. It was too much for many
in the crowd. There was grumbling; some turned away. Those who remained
were confused or troubled. Many did not hear Jesus go on to say that those who
followed his way would enter the realm of God and see the power of God’s light
while still living in this world.
This was a turning point. Jesus was teaching for the first time the path that
had delivered him through the wilderness of trial and temptation, and that later
would lead him all the way through his grief and fear in the Garden of
Gethsemane and his anguish on the cross to the light of Easter dawn.
It was a turning point for Jesus, for the disciples, for the history of the
world, and it can be for us, as well. Jesus offers it as a free gift of grace, a life of
joy and light ready for us to dwell in here and now even as we live in a world of
sorrow and loss—but we can receive this grace only if we open ourselves to it by
following the way. If you are struggling right now and long for peace and joy, if
you long for new life and light, following this way can bring you the grace you
need. It can also give you gifts that you can use to help transform the world
around you. So how do we get on this way?
The path begins for us as it began for Jesus and for Peter—in suffering,
loss and grief. Jesus was famished and weak in the wilderness when the devil
came tempting him to use his powers to gain the world, and it was through the
choice he made in that terrible trial that he entered the way. Jesus chose the way
again when he was on his knees sweating blood in the Garden of Gethsemane.
Peter was grieving the suffering and death that his beloved Jesus was taking on
himself, but like us, Peter would also have been grieving to hear that Christ’s way
is our way, too, that his death is a death we must choose, too. But Peter did not
turn away. He chose to stay and by staying entered the way.
Our first step on the way of Christ is to enter and stay with the truth—to
enter and stay with our grief or anger or fear about denying and losing our life
and all the suffering that brings.
The second step is to understand what Jesus means when he asks us to
lose our life. Is he saying that only those who are literally killed as he was killed
will enter new life and light? That can’t be what he means, because he says that
some will enter God’s realm while still alive in this world. So what does he
mean?
The answer is in a few key phrases in his teaching. He accuses Peter of
setting his mind not on divine things, but on human things. He says we must
deny ourselves and lose our life. He says, “What will it profit them to gain the
world but forfeit their life?” He is talking about the same step he took in the
wilderness, and the same that he would take later in the Garden. He responded to
those struggles by turning to God, by praying, “Not my will but thy will be done.”
That prayer sums up the whole path.
What Jesus is teaching us is to undergo a total shift of mind from a human
orientation to a divine orientation, turning our life and will over to God. The self
we must deny and lose is the one that is interested in gaining the world, that is
self-concerned, self-protecting. It is called the false self in the Christian spiritual
tradition. It is the self that takes as its strategy for happiness the seeking of
approval or affection or esteem, the seeking of its own security and survival, the
striving for power and control, perfection and success, pleasure and comfort.
These strategies are not good for three reasons. First, because they do not
get us what we want—they do not bring lasting happiness, they do not bring
abiding peace or joy. Second, because they lead to actions in the world that pit
us against one another, that lead in the end to estrangement from our neighbor, to
war, to immoral economic decisions, to poverty. And third, they are not good
because they get in the way of what is good—they separate us from God, our
neighbor and our best self, and from Christ-like love.
Yet if we are struggling, these strategies tend to be the first thing we turn to
for happiness. Think about it. Someone withdraws their love from you or judges
you harshly, and what do you do? Once your knee-jerk yearning for revenge has
passed, don’t you start thinking about how you can win them back or win
someone else’s affection or esteem? Or a threat rises to your well-being—you
lose your job, you get bad news from your doctor. It is only natural to start
scheming and scrambling for a way to insure your security and survival. This is
only common sense. Or your life is out of balance, things are happening that
cause you distress. It is only natural to seek a feeling of power or control over
life. No matter what the struggle, we can find ourselves on the one hand driving
harder for perfection and success, and on the other hand retreating into the
distraction of pleasurable activities and comforting security.
Jesus asks us to deny all these strategies for happiness. Instead of striving
to make ourselves feel better, he asks us to go into the pain and go more deeply
into grief by giving up the very things we have always turned to in order to get
through hard times. This is one of the reasons why G.K. Chesterton was right to
say, “Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found
difficult and left untried.”
Jesus asks us to suffer the death of our old false self, to crucify that deeply
ingrained self-will. It grieves us to think about it, it fills us with fear. If we
should go so far as to try to make that change, we will find the false self rising up
with rage to resist being deposed.
But if we have the courage to take that way, something miraculous
happens. If we watch ourselves craving to control or to seek others’ approval or
to eat a big piece of chocolate cake in response to our inner pain, if we just watch
those kinds of impulses rise and then let them go and deny ourselves those
compulsive strategies for happiness, if we consciously accept the grief of
denying ourselves escape, we will find that a way opens up that we did not know
was there, a secret passage inside us that leads through the grief and pain to
peace and joy. The Buddhist teacher Pema Chodrin wrote a book entitled The
Wisdom of No Escape. That is a good phrase for this choice Jesus is asking us to
make.
When we resist the false self’s escape plans and turn instead to God as
Jesus did in the wilderness and the Garden of Gethsemane, we discover that our
false self is not our only self, and our human will is not our only will. Divine will
rises in us. A higher, deeper, truer self appears that has been imprisoned in the
shadow of the false self. The true self is what God created us to be. It is the self
guided and empowered by the Holy Spirit.
We find that the great fear behind our grief and rage is groundless. We do
not have to worry about who we will be or what we will do if we let go of our old
way of being. We do not have to worry about how we will find our way through
our wilderness of struggle if we let go of our human will to control. Letting go,
denying ourselves, losing our life as Christ calls us to do, opens us to God’s
grace. All we have to do is die. God does the resurrecting. The Spirit shows us
the way from there one step at a time.
If you are struggling in a wilderness of any kind this Lent, congratulations,
because you will have the opportunity to practice opening to this grace many
times a day. The Catholic monk and great teacher of Centering Prayer, Thomas
Keating, wrote, “Liberation from the entire false-self system is the ultimate
purpose of Lent…. As we dismantle our emotional programs for happiness, the
obstacles to the risen life of Jesus fall away, and our hearts are prepared for the
infusion of divine life at Easter.”
The Lent that makes for Easter is a grief that makes for joy. Let us
practice setting our minds not on human things but on divine things now, letting
go of our false self’s human will so that our true self’s divine will may naturally
rise within us. Let us pray in silence, a listening prayer, a prayer watching for the
light, a prayer that says without words, “Not my will, but thy will be done.”
Sermon 03/08/2009