Mark 8:31-38 "Take up Your Cross and Follow Me"
 
 

I remember this little ditty of a poem from my younger days.
It was early last December
As near as I remember
I was walking down the lane in drunken pride.
Not a word did I utter
as I lay down in the gutter,
And a pig came up and lay down by my side.
Not a soul was I disturbing
As I lay there by the kerbing,
When a high-tone lady passed and she did say,
"You can tell a man who boozes
By the company he chooses."
And the pig got up and slowly walked away.

--Author Unknown
 

All of our parents taught us from the earliest age of understanding not to associate with people who have bad reputations. And for at least one right reason and one wrong reason. The right reason is that bad habits are contagious and hanging around with folks who do all the wrong things might tempt us to try those things in order to fit in.

But the wrong reason is that our folks feared that, though our motives are pure, hanging around with folks of bad repute might give others the opportunity to gossip or assume that we are like the people we hang around with. Bad habits are certainly contagious, but bad reputations ought not be. Besides, as my son pointed out to me when he asked what my sermon was about, "Good habits are also contagious."

A friend of mine who pastors a church in Maine tells the story about "Bob"⁽¹⁾ who was a member of her church and in his mid 60s when he molested a child. He was convicted and forced to serve an 18 month prison term.

While in prison, Bob did some hard soul chafing work with his Lord. He entered Bible studies on his own in prison.

When Bob was released from prison in May of 1996 he returned to his hometown and re-entered the life of his parish church. Before his release, the pastor of the church, my friend Lorain, went to one of her Senior Deacons who also happens to be a lawyer. She and he agreed that, "while it would be important to encourage Bob to participate only in highly structured, adult centered activities in the church (...Sunday worship, adult education, cooking for church suppers), it would not be necessary to inform the church publicly of his background." The local police also did not insist on publicly announcing Bob's return to the community.

Bob increasingly found a home in the congregation. He continued to "work hard to learn who he was as a child of God who had committed a grievous sin." Pastor Lorain baptized Bob on one memorable Sunday after his return from prison. As she puts it, "[Bob] knew himself to be grafted eternally into the body of Christ."

But the information about Bob got to the parents of the cooperative nursery school that is housed at the church and, as Lorain put it, "all hell broke loose." Bob was attending Bible study on Thursday mornings and the parents did not take kindly to his being in the building at the same time as their children. You can't blame them, of course. One family removed their child, others wanted his picture prominently displayed in the hallways.

Lawsuits were threatened against Lorain and her co-pastor. They were pressured to move the Bible study to another time or place. The leadership of the church were placed in the most difficult of situations. They wanted to honor Bob's citizenship in the household of God while responding sensitively to the concerns of the parents of the day care center.

They decided to institute some safety measures to protect the children while at the same time honoring Bob as a child of God. The most ingenious of measures was the establishment of a "buddy system" whereby men of the church agreed to accompany Bob wherever he went in the church building. At first Bob didn't like that, but he didn't have any choice really. Such were the consequences of the grievous sin he had committed.

So, professional men with their own reputations to protect started hanging around with Bob. They could be seen in the hallways of the church, even in the bathrooms with Bob. Word was now out about Bob and here were these upstanding fine gentlemen with him at all times. They didn't wear signs saying that they were the Bob accompaniment patrol or anything like that. They simply were with him and had to withstand quietly the stares from others who may not have known why they could be found in the company of Bob. In so doing the congregation created a cruciform community of compassion.

They, perhaps unwittingly at first, began to bear Bob's cross with him. They entered his shame and hurt, discovered who he was as a human being and embarked on a journey that they would never have taken had they also not been part of the body of Christ.

The Church has a long history of being companions of the un-companionable not out of some liberal ethical mandate, but because the church has always understood that God participates in creation at its most broken points, and our salvation as a people of God depends on our ability to participate in God there.

That's how the cross works finally. God's participation in a broken and suffering world is the central story of the whole Bible, Old and New Testaments together. And this story reaches its zenith (or nadir, I don't know which) at the cross. And by our willingness to travel there and meet God there, we are transformed into a new being and a new community. A community formed in the shape of the cross.

To accompany the outcast, the misbegotten, woe-begotten, lost and alone is not just a commandment of our Lord that we follow begrudgingly because it's on a nagging list of things to do. We know in the innermost sanctuaries of our being that this accompaniment is a holy opportunity to make our own selves whole again. It is the opportunity to enter into the great healing mystery of God by meeting God at the broken times and places. It is no accident that the words whole, healing and holy are all cognate words formed from the same Saxon root. To be made one with ourselves and with the misshapen world in which we live and with the creator of this world who begs us to return is the central meaning of the cross. That is also the most simple meaning of the simple word atonement. At one-ment. The process of a soul torn in too many directions at once, returning to its origin by meeting a suffering God at a skull shaped hill called Golgotha.

So, Jesus says, What does it profit anyone to run off in a thousand directions at once to try to find yourself and in the process lose your whole purpose for being alive? Instead, pause for a moment. Pick up your cross or pick up Bob's cross. Not as a do-gooder, but as one willing to allow yourself to risk an encounter there with the broken heart of God.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a theologian and pastor in Germany during the time of Hitler and the Nazi government. He quite literally put his life on the line by being part of the German underground, acting as a double-agent and finally executed at a concentration camp just weeks before the war ended. He was a young man with so much to lose. He had a brilliant future as a theologian. He had a fiancé to whom he was engaged to be married. But he risked all of that and more. In his little book, the "Cost of Discipleship" (from which we get that phrase in our Statement of Faith) Bonhoeffer writes,

"The cross is laid on every Christian. It begins with the call to abandon the attachments of this world. It is that dying of the old Adam which is the result of his encounter with Christ. As we embark upon discipleship we surrender ourselves to Christ in union with his death-we give over our lives to death. Since this happens at the beginning of the Christian life, the cross can never be merely a tragic ending to an otherwise happy religious life.

"When Christ call [us], He bids [us] come and die. It may be a death like that of the first disciples who had to leave home and work to follow him, or it may be a death like Luther's, who had to leave the [security of] the monastery and go out into the world. But it is the same death every time-death in Jesus Christ, the death of the old [Adam] at [Christ's] call. That is why the rich young ruler was so loath to follow Jesus, for the cost of his following was the death of his will. In fact, every command of Jesus is a call to die, with all our affections and desires. But we do not want to die, and therefore Jesus Christ and his call are necessarily our death and our life."

I think that these men who accompanied Bob in the Church and their pastors who stuck their necks out, had to die a little in order to walk that walk, didn't they? But in so doing, they gained life in its most exquisite and profound sense. They got to meet God who places God's own broken heart at the crossroads of a broken world. And in that way, they became members of a transformed cruciform community called the body of Christ.

They moved a few steps closer to becoming at one-with Bob, with themselves, with one another, and with God in Christ. There can be no greater or more noble journey than that.