Trinity Metropolitan Community Church of Gainesville (Trinity MCC)

Jesus Came…to Take Up the Cross

I Peter 3:18-22 & Mark 8:31-38

Rev. Vickie Miller

I, Introduction

Welcome to this first Sunday in Lent as we spend these 40 days together following Jesus’ path. During Lent I will be preaching a sermon series, “Jesus Came” until we reach Easter day when we celebrate the “Jesus Came Alive”.   Today we will be discussing, Jesus Came to Take Up the Cross.

In Mark’s gospel we have Jesus predicting that very real possibility of his death. First Jesus asks his disciples, “Who do you say that I am? After they determine that Jesus is the Messiah, Jesus then predicts his own death. Peter rebukes him, but Jesus affirms that it must be so and then Jesus tells them that they too must take up their crosses.

Jesus’ prediction of his death reminds me of the opening scene of the movie, Milk. Sean Penn, who plays Harvey Milk, is sitting at his kitchen table and recording into a cassette player. Milk had been elected as the first openly gay person in the United States and he was out in full force with his activism to obtain rights for all people. Milk’s purpose for making this cassette, he says is to record history because he knows the real possibility of his getting assassinated. Like Jesus’ friends, Harvey’s friends would beg him that it not be so, warning him to be careful and tone down his actions, yet Harvey lived an open, passionate-filled life who would not stop for the cause in which he believed.

II. Jesus

Likewise, Jesus’ actions of his day were leading him down a path towards the cross. He had confrontations with the religious authorities, his teachings were contrary to tradition, his self proclamations were viewed as blasphemy…yet Jesus would not stop for the cause of advancing God’s dominion.

We live on this side of the cross so we have become so used to this idea of a suffering, self-denying savior that I think we don’t really get how drastic of a statement Jesus was making. This was a very strange teaching for a Messiah. For Peter and the disciples, this was unbelievable!

The literature of that time period describes the coming Messiah and what they expected:

"From heaven shall fall fiery words down to the earth. Lights shall come, bright and great, flashing into the midst of humanity; and earth shall shake in these days at the hand of the Eternal. And the fishes of the sea and the beasts of the earth and the countless tribes of flying things and all the souls of people and every sea shall shudder at the presence of the Eternal and there shall be panic. And the towering mountain peaks and the hills shall rend, and the murky abyss shall be visible to all. And the high ravines in the lofty mountains shall be full of dead bodies and rocks shall flow with blood and each torrent shall flood the plain.... And God shall judge all with war and sword, and there shall be brimstone from heaven, yea stones and rain and hail incessant and grievous." (The Sibylline Oracles 3: 363 if.)

Wow. Sounds like a hurricane, tornado, flash flood and nuclear war all wrapped up in one.

Contrary to popular belief, Jesus’ predictions about his death came true and now the cross is at the core of our Christian beliefs.

In my former religious tradition, most of our faith emphasis was placed on Jesus dying on the cross. Everything - our whole faith, our salvation, our view of ourselves as human beings all pointed to the cross. Even a dinner prayer ended with the words, “Thank you Jesus for dying on the cross for my sins,” - not “thank you for resurrecting for me,” but dying for me.

There are both positive and negative sides to placing so much emphasis on the crucifixion.

On the positive side, when we stand beneath the cross and watch this suffering one, our Savior Jesus, die as a criminal and then is buried in a borrowed tomb, we see our God who is willing to be vulnerable and weak. We see our God who is lonely who suffers along with us. This is the God who can understand our pain and our struggles. Yes, the idea of the cross did confound all of theology, turning the idea of God upside down. For that we need to know and remember that Jesus came to take up the cross.

On the other side, a cross-fixated theology may cause us to miss something. It is almost as if we go straight from Advent to Lent, from Jesus’ birth to death. At least that was my experience. Focusing so much on the cross, I missed so much of Jesus’ life and the actions that caused him to end up on the cross.

Carter Heyward reminds us that prior to the cross, Jesus lived! “Jesus lived a life of passion. Jesus did not skim through life’s surface,” she says. I translate that as, Jesus did not go from birth to the cross, but lived a full life.

Jesus chose a life path in which he took up the cross every single day of his life without regard to where his choices might lead him.

Jesus took up the cross when he stood up against oppression and indifference

Jesus took up the cross when he confronted rigid moralism and traditions that had become more important than human need.

Jesus took up the cross when he was intolerant of greed and apathy.

Jesus took up the cross when he threw out the money changers, when he ate and drank with sinners, and when he healed on the Sabbath, even as a 12-year old when his parents found him in the Temple.

Heyward continues, that it was this inward passion of Spirit-filled justice-love that sent him to the cross at Golgotha. She says that people who live passionately in the world do not and cannot avoid suffering. People who live deeply in the Spirit suffer because there are always some who cannot bear them.”

Yes, Jesus did come to take up the cross, and he did so every single day of his ministry by living out the passion that was inside of him.

The world could not bear this Messiah, this passionate Jesus, so a wooden cross did.

III. We take up our cross

Now, we come to the second part of the Mark’s gospel. Jesus, after having this discussion with the disciples, Jesus calls the crowds and says, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”

You were hoping that we wouldn’t get to that part, right?

On this first Sunday of Lent, what an appropriate passage. Deny ourselves, take up your cross: give up chocolate, eat fish on Fridays, be nicer to people we don’t like. Isn’t that what denying ourselves and Lent is all about? To take up our cross?

I must say that I have wondered about this passage for years, and I don’t know that I have ever heard a compelling explanation for it. Over the past weeks I have struggled and prayed over what it means to take up our cross.

There are some things that I believe taking up our cross is not:

It is not a sorrowful life of drudgery, despair, self-abuse and denial.

It is not a burden placed or forced upon us like an illness, a bad situation or a

loss with which we are faced.

No, taking up our cross is something that we choose to do.

It is imitating Jesus by discovering and living out the God-given passion that has been placed inside of us. That cross could be different for each one of us, but like Jesus, whatever it is, we are called to take it up with reckless regard of the consequences.

Yes, Lent is a great time to empty ourselves, to be in a period of spiritual seeking. That is why I am offering the class on Saturday, Living Lent.

When we take up our cross, I believe that three things happen for us.

1. We live a life of purpose and passion.

Like Jesus who was possessed by a purpose that literally consumed him, when we take up our cross, we become people with a destiny, fixed on a mission. We become compelled to live out the vision God has placed within us. When we take up this passion and dedicate our deepest self to it, we become, not an end, but a means in the dominion of God. When we take up the cross, we put ourselves out there for the sake of the cause of Christ.

Oh, how successful a church or any organization would be if we all lived a life of purpose and focus.

2. When we take up our cross, others are naturally more important that ourselves.

You all know the story of Huckleberry Finn. In the story Huck helped the slave, Jim, escape from his owner, Miss Watson.   Huck becomes convinced that stealing from a poor old woman’s slave was a terrible sin and that he would be doomed to hell and “everlasting fire.” So Huck decides that he needs to write to Miss Watson, confess and tell her where Jim was.   But after spending time with Jim floating down the river, through daylight, moonlight, through storms talking, singing, laughing, they become friends. Then Huck, in this dilemma makes a decision, “I took the letter up and held it in my hand. I was trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. It studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself. “All right, then I’ll go to hell” – and tore it up.

When we take up our cross others become more important than ourselves.

On the other hand, when we place our own survival above all, we fail everybody: Jesus, God, ourselves and others.

3. When we take up our cross, in essence, we are resurrected. We come alive!

We become free to be who God made us. There is a book called, “Why Am I Afraid to Tell You Who I Am?” Isn’t that often the case? Yet, the surest way to lose life is to give a great care in hiding and preserving it. But when we take up our cross and give all of ourselves to the world.

Like the young Oscar winning screen writer for Milk. He grew up as a gay Mormon kid but he decided to put him self out there and tell Milk’s story, to tell his story. His speech at the Oscar’s said to all the GLBT kids that God loves them and they are okay as they are and that some day soon they would have equal rights.

When we aren’t afraid to tell the world who we are, we are someone who is affirmed from inside, not the outside. We are resurrected in God’s love and we can live, love, rejoice, and care more deeply than we ever thought possible.

As we journey together in the season of Lent, I pray that we can all learn how to take up our crosses – not a splinter of it, not dragging it along, but taking up the whole cross:

          To live out a life of purpose and passion

          To live a life of love in which others are more important than ourselves.

          To live a life in which we are free to be, a life of resurrection power. Amen.

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