Transformative Joy

Sermon preached Sunday, March 10, 2024, the Fourth Sunday in Lent, at Lutheran Church of Our Saviour in North Chesterfield, VA.  

Let’s talk about Transformative Joy. This morning’s readings are such great examples of the ways God can take something and turn it on its head, transform it into something else completely. In the story from Numbers and in the Gospel reading, we see death transformed into life.

The stories about the Israelites wandering in the desert for forty years are relatively well known to many of us. You may remember the story of God providing manna for the people to eat when they didn’t have food, or God providing water from a rock when they didn’t have anything to drink. The ten commandments? That happened during this time. The worship of a golden calf? That happened here, too!

Chances are, though, if you start naming stories about what happened, today’s reading from Numbers isn’t in the top five. Despite the fact that this story is always the first reading on the Fourth Sunday of Lent during year two of our three year reading cycle, it’s one that we’re prone to forget about.

I think part of the reason for this is that it comes across as supernatural in a superstitious and almost magical way. The serpent on the staff becomes a totem, something that will provide a cure for the poisonous snakes just by looking at it. What we forget, though, is that the healing does not come through the action of gazing on the snake itself. Looking is the act of repentance—healing only comes through God.

The Gospel reading refers directly to this Old Testament narrative and Jesus compares himself to this serpent…but there’s a difference. Whereas the snake is the object of fear and danger, Jesus is the representation of salvation and healing. Instead, the cross itself is the thing we wish to be saved from.

In both cases, we are asked to look at things that are killing us: the poisonous snake and the cross, which represents all of the ways we harm one another and seek to destroy the things we don’t understand, namely a God who defies our expectations. The cross embodies our unwillingness to accept and embrace justice and love over power and violence. It contains all the ways in which we refuse to listen to God’s Word, all the ways we actively work against it.

Why is this the case? Why are we called to look here? Why were the Israelites asked to look at the snake? Why do we make the cross the focal point in our worship space? It’s not magic. It’s not superstition. It is a recognition that only by identifying the things that hurt us, the things that are slowly killing us, can we move forward. The Israelites faced the source of their death and God healed them. We face the cross, the symbol of our own death, the symbol of our sin, of all the things that keep us from new and abundant life with God, and God reminds us that even this horrific tool of death can play a role in our salvation.

It’s like going to the doctor. You can go and have blood drawn and your heart and lungs listened to, and tests taken, but what would happen if you just left? What would happen if you never got the results back? What would happen if you never faced that you had high blood pressure, or diabetes, or cancer? Would refusing to look at your illness make it go away? Of course not. We have to face the diagnosis in order to know how to address it.

It’s like having a conflict with a spouse or a friend or a coworker. You can pretend like it never happened, paste a pleasant, if fake, smile on your face every time you see them. But what would happen? Would things actually get better? Or would resentment seethe underneath the surface until it came out sidewise and your relationship was ruined beyond repair? It takes courage to confront conflict, to decide to work through it and address it—we have to face it in order to transform it into something else entirely.

It’s like thinking that, as a society, problems like racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, economic disparity, and education gaps will all sort themselves out if we’d just stop talking about them, as if the only reason these things happen is because we keep bringing them up.

But think about that for a minute. Would slavery ever have ended in this country if abolitionists just decided to stop talking about it and waited patiently until slave holders came around to their way of thinking? It never would have happened. Would women have been given the vote if they never marched and demanded that their voice be heard? Would we have weekends, safer working conditions, and a minimum wage if workers assumed that their employers would choose fairness and employee welfare over profit?

We don’t like to have the boat rocked. We like the status quo because we know what to expect. We are tempted to keep things the way things are if “the way things are” is working for us.

We know from history that talking about our societal and systemic problems don’t actually make them worse, rather they highlight and bring into the open all the things that live in the shadows. We have to face the ways in which sin manifests itself if we want to participate in dismantling it. We have to face the ugliness of ourselves and our capacity for destruction to be transformed into participants of God’s new creation.

This work is hard. This work is sometimes painful. This work can also be incredibly rewarding. And this is work we do not undertake alone. We face the things that hurt us—hurt our bodies, hurt our spirits, hurt our society, hurt our world—always with God by our side, and only through God’s grace and strength.

The central verse in the Gospel reading today is perhaps the most well-known and well-loved verses in the Bible: John 3:16. “⁶For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” It’s a verse you’ve likely heard a lot. Maybe you have it memorized. But when you really think about it, what does it mean for you? How does it influence your life? Does it provide comfort? Or hope? Or inspiration? Or courage?

For me, when I hear these words or read them, I am reminded that God’s love is ever-expanding and abundant. It sticks with me. It will never leave me. This love is so incredible that God chose to inhabit our world, inhabit our bodies, and endure the shame and pain of the cross. Through this incredible act of irrevocable love, we are given healing, wholeness, salvation…and freedom. Freedom from everything that hurts us, everything that kills us slowly from within and without, everything represented by that instrument of torture, the cross. We face the cross, we look to the cross, and we are transformed, because we know that Christ has triumphed over it and, through Christ, so have we.

This is God’s doing, not ours. It is God’s power, not ours.

God tells Moses to put a bronze serpent on a pole to be lifted up, so that everyone who looks on it may life. Jesus tells all who will listen that he will be lifted up, so that everyone who believes will have eternal life. Elsewhere in the Gospel of John, Jesus goes further and says that when he is lifted up, he will draw all peoples to himself. This is God’s act of reconciliation and new life and transformation.

We know that God’s transformative joy finds us every time we courageously face those things that threaten us, both from within and without, and embraces us with love.

Amen.

What It Means to Take Up a Cross

Sermon preached Saturday, September 11, and Sunday, September 12, 2021, the Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost, at Grace Lutheran Church in Westminster, Maryland. 

Jesus asks Peter, “Who do you say that I am?”

If Jesus asked this question of you, what would you say? There are a lot of titles to choose from. Jesus is teacher. Jesus is healer. Jesus is advocate. Jesus is partner. Jesus is savior. Jesus is leader. Jesus is a justice-seeker.

Jesus asks Peter, and Peter says, “You are the Messiah.” Jesus is the Messiah, but Peter didn’t understand what that truly meant. When Peter calls Jesus the Messiah, the word is loaded with expectations Jesus has no intention to fulfill. Prior to Jesus, ideas of the Messiah had to do with judgement or military might or kingship or something different altogether. There was no consensus. Many of the first century Jews longing for their savior were looking for a commander of armies to drive the Romans out of Israel.

Jesus, on the other hand, does not speak of fighting wars and winning battles. Instead, he teaches his disciples that he must undergo suffering and die. Jesus is the Messiah, but he is unlike any Messiah the disciples have anticipated. Peter can’t handle it. Peter may know that Jesus is the Messiah, but he doesn’t want to hear a thing about the cross.

There are all sorts of ways we can refer to Jesus: Messiah, teacher, friend, activist, healer…but all of them are meaningless if we do not keep the cross at the center. The cross is what grounds every piece of our faith. It’s been said that, “Just as Jesus is our lens for seeing who God is, the cross is our lens for truly seeing Jesus.” (Erica Gibson-Even)

We cannot separate Jesus from the cross. It’s all around us. Martin Luther suggested one way of reminding ourselves of that fact. He recommended that every morning and every evening, we make the sign of the cross. Luther believed that our days should begin and end with the cross.

The cross all around us—in jewelry, architecture, knickknacks from the Hallmark Store. This weekend, as we commemorate twenty years since 9/11, I am reminded of the cross at ground zero, the remnants of broken steel beams that kept vigil over ground zero.

Crosses are all around—but it hasn’t always been that way. The earliest Christians and Jesus-followers avoided using the cross. After all, it was an instrument of torture, terror and execution. It would be like using an electric chair or gallows. It was offensive. It was scandalous. And it was a symbol of the oppressive government that had sentenced their Messiah to death. It took time for it to be representative of our faith, instead of just a weapon of choice for the Roman Empire.

And now, we are removed from the history of the cross and the legacy of scandal. Crucifixion is no longer the most popular means of death for people to be kept in their place. We are left, two thousand years later, trying to figure out what it means to take up our own metaphorical cross…and in our attempts to deal with this reality of the cross, we can fall into two traps: we can cry “persecution!” at every tiny slight, or at the opposite end, minimize all kinds injustice and suffering as par for the course.

One the one hand, it can be tempting to call every hardship we might face a cross. We could say that a long commute is a cross. We could point to the weeds that sprout up in our yard despite our best efforts a cross. We could call the never ending piles of laundry that reappear week after week, or the sign that tells us “no shirt, no shoes, no service,” a cross…but they are not. We are not oppressed by these things. These are minor inconveniences that we want to call “cross” so that we can play the martyr. It’s tempting, but none of these things have anything to do with us living as Christ has called us.

On the other hand, there are a lot of Christian clichés that seek to either glorify or minimize suffering. When someone loses a job or gets a bad diagnosis or faces any kind of difficult period in their life, we say things like, “This is your cross to bear,” or “God has given you this test.” I’m sure you’ve heard some of the platitudes people offer, often with good intentions, that do not take seriously the difficulties or systemic injustice people face.

So that leaves us trying to find a middle way…trying to discern where the cross is in our own lives. We all have a cross, or two, or three. The trick is parsing them out—and then taking them up.

As one preacher put it, “Taking up our cross and following [Jesus] means, most basically, acknowledging that we are powerless to save our own lives—powerless in the face of our own sin, in the face of the brokenness of the world, in the face of death. We don’t have to seek out a cross to bear—for most of us, this reality is always chipping at the foundations of our illusions and best efforts.” (Erica Gibson-Even)

What are you powerless against? What crosses are you carrying? Really think—because they’re there. I’m not saying that there are not resources in our world that might help us…but these crosses require more than a quick fix or an easy solution. They affect our entire beings.

We are powerless against…what, exactly? We are powerless against a life-altering diagnosis. A relationship we have no clue how to repair. A lost job. A dead loved one. A mental illness. A natural disaster, like the ones that don’t seem to stop coming lately. This global pandemic we’re still not out of. We can take steps, we can seek help, we can attempt to do our part, but too much is out of our control.

No, if there’s one thing the world has plenty of, it’s crosses. But the good news is that we need not fear death from any of them. Through his own death and resurrection, Christ conquered death. Through baptism, we have been joined to Christ in death and been raised to new life. These crosses we carry should be instruments of our own execution, but instead, they become a reminder of our unity with Jesus and his resurrection. Our crosses are transformed and taken up by God so that we are equipped to carry them forward.

The traditional Good Friday liturgy involves a procession with a cross. The cross is carried in and pauses three times on its way up to the altar. At each stopping point, the crucifer proclaims, “Behold, the life-giving cross, on which was hung the salvation of the whole world.” The assembly responds, “O come, let us worship him.” Even on Good Friday when the cross should be seen through the most sinister and terrifying lens, we announce that it is in fact life-giving.

We are joined to Christ and that life-giving cross—joined through the waters of baptism. In that baptism, God claims us and names us as beloved children and starts us on a journey to where God is calling us and where God already is. As Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, commented, “If being baptized is being led to where Jesus is, then being baptized is being led towards the chaos and the neediness of a humanity that has forgotten its own destiny.” (Being Christian, 5) I’ll read that again. [Repeat]

We are being called to the crosses of humanity. We are being called to carry our crosses into the world so that we might help other people shoulder theirs as well. Doing God’s work, with our hands. Our crosses are not eliminated, but we are given the strength to do what God is calling us to, despite the weight. We engage with others and they engage with us and all of our burdens are lighter.

Week after week, we come and gather in this space, our shoulders a little slumped, our backs aching from the heavy load…but here we are washed in the font. Here we are fed at the table. Here we are supported by our siblings. Here we are reminded who shares our burden: our teacher, leader, prophet, priest, advocate, healer…and messiah, Jesus Christ.

Amen.

What It Means To Suffer

Sermon preached Sunday, February 28, 2021, the Second Sunday in Lent, at St. John’s Evangelical Lutheran Church in Littlestown, PA. 

“Then Jesus 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…”

Jesus warns his disciples that suffering is coming, and there’s nothing they can do to stop it. Jesus warns us that suffering is part of a package deal.

But our culture has a funny relationship with suffering—or, rather, we have a funny relationship with what we call suffering.

There is some suffering we say is “deserved.” Because Joe made poor decisions, he is now homeless and hungry—he is getting what he deserves. Jane brings it on herself because is too trusting and lets people take advantage of her. And if that group over there would only do things our way, they wouldn’t be in the terrible position they are now. We can’t always explain why bad things happen, and so we assign blame to the victims.

And then there’s the other end of the spectrum: holy, or righteous, suffering. This happens when someone’s faith is just “being tested” by the cancer slowly taking their life or the demoralizing process of losing their job—if they can make it through stoically, they’ll have proved the strength of their faith! This way of thinking doesn’t allow for people in the midst of hardship to share their frustrations, fears and prayers for comfort. Instead, it tells them to keep quiet, unless they are rejoicing for what they do have.

And then, finally, we have the most ridiculous: the Olympics of Suffering. If you’ve never witnessed this in action, this is what it sounds like:

Person One says: “Oh my goodness, I am SOOO busy! I just don’t know how I’m going to get everything done with work and the kids, and then my car broke down last week and the baby has a cough and gas prices keep going up and that restaurant down the street that I love is closing.”

And Person Two says: “You think that’s bad? My knee has been acting up because of all of this terrible rain that’s flooding my front yard and when I went to pick up my new prescription at the Pharmacy I had to wait forty-five minutes because they screwed up the refill and by the time I finally got home last night I was too exhausted to do anything but microwave some leftovers for dinner.

And Person One returns with: “Oh I know! I had to order pizza for the family because I didn’t have time to cook and the dishwasher wouldn’t start for some reason so I had to do all the dishes by hand.”

And again, Person Two: “At least you have a dishwasher to start with! I always have to do dishes by hand and inevitably the dog will jump up on me while I’m in the middle of it and make me splash water all over myself.”

…okay. So I’m exaggerating—but not by much! I have heard so many conversations similar to this and, I’m sorry to say, I’ve participated in my fair share. The Olympics of Suffering triggers something in us, something about trying to be the one who works hardest or the one who does alright despite having the most difficult life. I don’t know. But this one-upping the bad things that happen to us can’t be all that healthy.

It’s not healthy, but it also distorts our perception of reality. It’s important to note that “…not all suffering is the cross, and not all suffering is simply to be accepted.”

This means that when Jesus says he must undergo suffering, he’s not talking about our Olympics of Suffering. That suffering is not the cross. He’s not talking about “righteous” or “holy” suffering the way that we do. He’s not talking about “deserved” suffering. That suffering is not to be simply accepted. He’s talking about real suffering of body and spirit as he is arrested, beaten, tortured, mocked and executed.

When Jesus says that any who want to become his followers are to take up their cross, we need to discern what is the cross and what is not—what is suffering and what are exaggerated first-world problems, as well as what suffering is done as a witness to the Gospel and what suffering is not acceptable.

Having to wait in line or eat pizza for dinner because you are too tired to cook is not suffering for the sake of God’s work. And living on the street or being diagnosed with an incurable illness or being born into unimaginable poverty—while it is suffering—should not be accepted because “Jesus said we had to take up our cross.”

Jesus suffers because of who he associates with, what he says, and what he does. Jesus is constantly surrounded by people on the fringes of society, if not outside of it completely. He builds relationship with women, Samaritans, children, tax collectors, the unclean, the poor. He identifies with the last and the least and cries out for justice on their behalf.

Jesus preaches Good News that is not reserved for the religious elite. His words of hope and healing are not meant just for those who are already assured of God’s love, but for those who had been told time and time again that they were not good enough, or healthy enough, or faithful enough.

Jesus embodies a new way of being with others that involves humbling himself and becoming a servant to all, not merely those who had the social or political status to warrant it. Jesus served in actions: feeding crowds, healing the sick, forgiving sins, washing feet and, importantly, Jesus cried out for justice. Jesus cried out that God’s will would be done on earth.

The powers at the time attempted to silence him because he stood up for all whose voices were unheard—and Power thrives on keeping the powerless silent. Jesus speaks up, calls out hypocrites, proclaims the undeserved love of God, and ushers in a kingdom of reconciliation. That’s the work of God. And that’s the work that Jesus suffered for.

No, not all suffering is the cross and not all suffering is to be accepted—but don’t be surprised if taking up your own cross results in some suffering.

When you join your voice with someone who’s voice has been ignored—they are not voiceless! Just not heard—you may upset those who have chosen not to listen. When you feed the hungry or clothe the naked, you may be told that they deserve their lot in life and that you shouldn’t waste your resources on them. When you choose to forgive the person who wrongs you or show love to your enemies instead of hate, you may confuse the hard-hearted people who believe compassion is the same as weakness.

But in all of these things, you are doing God’s work, the work God has called you to in baptism, the work you are able to do because of the body and blood of Christ which sustain you week after week.

There may be some suffering. There’s no point in denying that. But suffering for the sake of the Christ, taking up our own cross, speaking out for the last and least among us—these will never be in vain. This is God at work, bringing in the kingdom. Amen.

Take Up Your Cross

Sermon preached Sunday, August 30, the Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost at Saint John’s Evangelical Lutheran Church in Littlestown, PA.

The other day I was scrolling through Facebook and noticed that one of my friends was getting ready to embark on a 30-day no sugar challenge.

I see those kinds of things a lot—do you?

A special diet challenge. A fitness challenge, like do a set of pushups everyday for 60 days. A reading challenge: read this many books over the course of the year. A financial challenge: put this much money aside each week.

No matter what aspect of our lives we’re seeking to improve, we seem to be more willing to try if we see it as a “challenge,” not just a change to our lives.

And I think that’s because the word “challenge” makes it seems temporary. It’s got a time limit—you only need to not eat french fries for this very specific amount of time. You only need to find time in your schedule to work out for 30 days, then you can relax. Once those sixty days are up, you can go back to spending five bucks on a coffee every day.

Because actually changing the way we life, taking on something that could upset the balance of our lives—even for a good reason!—that’s uncomfortable. And I want to avoid being uncomfortable, don’t you?

I bring all of this up because Jesus offers quite the challenge in this morning’s Gospel, although, of course, it doesn’t come with any kind of end date. He tells the disciples what’s going to happen to him—it’s the first prediction of his death. He tells them he will suffer, be killed and, finally, raised. The disciples, however, only seem to hear the parts about suffering and death, and don’t want any of it. They don’t seem to hear Jesus predicting his resurrection.

Peter, speaking on behalf of all the disciples, takes him aside and rebukes him (can you imagine rebuking Jesus?). And just like that, Peter goes from being blessed in the text last week to being called “Satan” this week.

Peter is showing the reaction we’d all likely have. We don’t want to hear that the people we love will suffer or die. It’s human nature to avoid pain and death.

But then Jesus gives the real challenge. Hear it again:

“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 will find it.”

This challenge, uttered so closely after Jesus’ first prediction of his suffering and death, comes as a surprise to the disciples. Up until now, their life hasn’t been all that difficult. They’ve heard lots of wonderful sermons, some great parables, they’ve seen miracles performed and been empowered by Jesus to perform miracles. They’ve had a few run-ins with the Pharisees or Scribes, but those have largely been battles of words and Jesus always comes out on top.

This isn’t the first warning that Jesus has given them that their path won’t be easy—earlier Jesus warns them that they may not be accepted when they go out and what to do if they aren’t—but these are pretty stark and bleak terms.

Take up your cross and follow me.

Any who want to save their life will lose it.

Remember here what the cross meant to these people. It wasn’t a symbol of salvation, hung up or worn to remind us of our faith—it was a representation of death, torture and an empire that crushed any resistance under its foot. It was a very real and visceral threat. Crucifixion was the chosen means of death when the Roman Empire wanted to keep people in their place.

The disciples don’t want the cross. The disciples don’t want to lose their life. They want the miracles! They want the blessings! They want the crowds of admirers and the occasional victory after verbal sparring with the religious elites. They don’t want the hard, the painful, the uncomfortable or, especially, the fatal.

Neither do we, for that matter. We don’t want the hard either. We want the blessings, the sermons, the teaching. We want the miracles!

But life isn’t all miracles.

Life is good times and bad. Easy and hard. We welcome new life and mourn death. We celebrate successes and grieve failures.

Jesus tells us that if we want to become his follower we must take up our cross.

Taking up our cross means taking up the difficult, uncomfortable and painful things—perhaps even fatal things. It’s not something any of us are eager to do. And it’s not something they can give up in thirty or sixty or ninety days.

The truth of the matter, though, is that the cross is there whether we take it up or not. It dogs our steps, casts a shadow on our days. I said before that life isn’t all miracles—because it’s not. We can ignore parts of our lives, parts of our world, but that doesn’t mean they go away.

We can try to ignore it when sickness invades our homes and our communities. We can try to pretend that people aren’t fighting disease or that we ourselves will never be unhealthy. We can come up with excuses or platitudes without ever naming death for what it is.

We can try to ignore the needs in our community: the hunger, the poverty, the injustice that rears its head whenever it is given an opportunity. We can pretend that what happens to our neighbor doesn’t have any effect on us. It’s safer and less risky for us stay silent and stay home.

When we recognize the harmful things in the world and try to do something about them, we are putting ourselves at risk. We may offend our friends or neighbors who would prefer to keep ignoring. We may find ourselves in the position of being “that friend” who always goes on about social justice issues or brings up uncomfortable topics. We may cause people to face their own crosses, which, like us, they are reluctant to do.

But if we do risk it, if we put ourselves on the line, if we engage the hurt, engage the pain, engage the cross of our lives, instead of running away from it, something remarkable happens. Just as Jesus was resurrected after his crucifixion, if we take up our cross, God will bring new life out of it.

Only by recognizing that we are sick can we be healed. Only be realizing our privileges can we fight the disenfranchisement of others. Only by hearing the needs of our world can we attempt to meet them. It’s tough work. I don’t want to minimize it or say that it’s easy. Discipleship is hard but it’s what we’re called to.

Because new life can only come out of death. Jesus can only be resurrected after he died. We can only live after we lose our lives for the sake of the Gospel.

Find the cross in your life, the crosses in your life and take them up. Accept the challenge.

God’s got new life waiting.

Amen.

Who Do We Say Jesus Is?

Sermon preached Sunday, September 16, 2018, the Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost, at St. John’s Evangelical Lutheran Church in Littlestown, PA.

Jesus asks Peter, “Who do you say that I am?”

If Jesus asked this question of you, what would you say? There are a lot of titles to choose from. Jesus is teacher. Jesus is healer. Jesus is advocate. Jesus is partner. Jesus is savior. Jesus is leader. Jesus is a justice-seeker.

Jesus asks Peter, and Peter says, “You are the Messiah.” Jesus is the Messiah, but Peter didn’t understand what that truly meant. When Peter calls Jesus the Messiah, the word is loaded with expectations Jesus has no intention to fulfill. Prior to Jesus, ideas of the Messiah had to do with judgement or military might or something different altogether. There was no consensus. Many of the first century Jews longing for their savior were looking for a commander of armies to drive the Romans out of Israel.

Jesus, on the other hand, does not speak of fighting wars and winning battles. Instead, he teaches his disciples that he must undergo suffering and die. Jesus is the Messiah, but is unlike any Messiah the disciples had anticipated. Peter can’t handle it. Peter knows that Jesus is the Messiah, but doesn’t want to hear a thing about the cross.

There are all sorts of ways we can refer to Jesus: Messiah, teacher, friend, activist, healer…but all of them are meaningless if we do not keep the cross at the center. The cross is what grounds every piece of our faith. It’s been said that, “Just as Jesus is our lens for seeing who God is, the cross is our lens for truly seeing Jesus.” (Erica Gibson-Even)

We cannot separate Jesus from the cross. It’s all around us. Martin Luther suggested one way of reminding ourselves of that fact. He recommended that every morning and every evening, we make the sign of the cross. Luther believed that our days should begin and end with the cross.

The cross all around us—in jewelry, architecture, knickknacks from the Hallmark Store— but it hasn’t always been that way. The earliest Christians and Jesus-followers avoided using the cross. After all, it was an instrument of torture, terror and execution. It was offensive. It was scandalous. And it was a symbol of the oppressive government that had sentenced their Messiah to death. It took time for it to be representative of our faith, instead of just a weapon of choice for the Roman Empire.

And now, we are removed from the history of the cross and the legacy of scandal. We are left, two thousand years later, trying to figure out what it means to take up our own cross…and in our attempts to deal with this reality of the cross, we can fall into two traps: we can cry “persecution!” at every tiny slight, or at the opposite end, minimize all kinds injustice and suffering as par for the course.

One the one hand, it can be tempting to call every hardship we might face a cross. We could say that a long commute is a cross. We could point to the weeds that sprout up in our yard despite our best efforts a cross. We could call the never ending piles of laundry that reappear week after week a cross…but they are not. We are not oppressed by these things. These are minor inconveniences that we want to call “cross” so that we can play the martyr. It’s tempting, but none of these things have anything to do with us living as Christ has called us.

On the other hand, there are a lot of Christian clichés that seek to either glorify or minimize suffering. When someone loses a job or gets a bad diagnosis or faces any kind of difficult period in their life, we say things like, “This is your cross to bear,” or “God has given you this test.” I’m sure you’ve heard some of the platitudes people offer, often with good intentions, that do not take seriously the difficulties or systemic injustice people face.

So that leaves us trying to find a middle way…trying to discern where the cross is in our own lives. We all have a cross, or two, or three. The trick is parsing them out—and then taking them up.

As one preacher put it, “Taking up our cross and following [Jesus] means, most basically, acknowledging that we are powerless to save our own lives—powerless in the face of our own sin, in the face of the brokenness of the world, in the face of death. We don’t have to seek out a cross to bear—for most of us, this reality is always chipping at the foundations of our illusions and best efforts.” (Erica Gibson-Even)

What are you powerless against? What crosses are you carrying? Really think—because they’re there. I’m not saying that there are not resources in our world that might help us…but these crosses require more than a quick fix. They affect our entire beings.

We are powerless against…what, exactly? We are powerless against a life-altering diagnosis. A relationship we have no clue how to repair. A lost job. A dead loved one. A mental illness. A natural disaster, like Hurricane Florence, bearing down on the coast.

No, if there’s one thing the world has plenty of, it’s crosses. But the good news is that we need not fear death from any of them. Through his own death and resurrection, Christ conquered death. Through baptism, we have been joined to Christ in death and been raised to new life. The crosses we carry should be instruments of our own execution, but instead, they become a reminder of our unity with Jesus and his resurrection. Our crosses are transformed and taken up by God so that we are equipped to carry them forward.

The traditional Good Friday liturgy involves a procession with a cross. We do it here each year. The cross is carried in and pauses three times on its way up to the altar. At each stopping point, the crucifer proclaims, “Behold, the life-giving cross, on which was hung the salvation of the whole world.” The assembly responds, “O come, let us worship him.” Even on Good Friday when the cross should be seen through the most sinister and terrifying lens, we announce that it is in fact life-giving.

We are joined to Christ and that life-giving cross—joined through the waters of baptism. In that baptism, God claims us and names us as beloved children and starts us on a journey to where God is calling us and where God already is. As Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, commented, “If being baptized is being led to where Jesus is, then being baptized is being led towards the chaos and the neediness of a humanity that has forgotten its own destiny.” (Being Christian, 5) I’ll read that again. [Repeat]

We are being called to the crosses of humanity. We are being called to carry our crosses into the world so that we might help other people shoulder theirs as well. Our crosses are not eliminated, but we are given the strength to do what God is calling us to, despite the weight. Week after week, we come and gather in this space, our shoulders a little slumped, our backs aching from the heavy load…but here we are washed in the font. Here we are fed at the table. Here we are supported by our siblings. Here we are reminded who shares our burden: our teacher, leader, prophet, priest, advocate, healer…and messiah, Jesus Christ.

Amen.