Immediate Word

Can we learn to live with ambiguity in the midst of personal loss and suffering? Can we find hope in a post-9-11 world? What does it mean to "take up our cross"? What should Jesus' death mean to us? How can we understand martyrdom in our violent world? And where is God in all this?

In the lead article of this issue of The Immediate Word, George L. Murphy zeroes in on the first announcement by Jesus in the Gospel of Mark of his impending suffering and death. The Gospel reading assigned in the lectionaries for September 14, Mark 8:27-38, is a pivotal text in Mark, and George deftly draws links between the lection and several such timeless and crucial issues for believers.

The issue of suffering is further explored in the team responses, illustrations, worship resources, and children's sermon as well as in an alternative approach to the Markan lection by Carter Shelley.

Contents

The Cross At The Of The World
Team Comments
Alternate Approach
Related Illustrations
Worship Resources
Children's Sermon


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The Cross At The Heart Of The World
by George L. Murphy
Mark 8:27-38

This past week, flooding on the Kansas Turnpike swamped a family's van, leaving a stunned man bereft of his wife and four children. It was a tragic story but it's already fading from memory and by next Sunday it will be old news.

Instead of that, what probably will have been in people's minds in the week leading up to September 14 is the second anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks. Those attacks and their aftermath, which is still with us, will certainly be in the news. It is possible, however, that some deadly storm, gruesome murder, or Middle Eastern suicide bombing will have gotten some attention. There will be no lack of events to again provoke the old question, "Why?" Believers will put it more pointedly: Why does God let this happen? If God is all-good and all-powerful, why do bad things happen?

Some of your hearers may be content with the answer that all suffering is a result of sin -- although that is an idea that the book of Job already found inadequate. Philosophers have labeled the problem that of "theodicy," literally "justifying God," and have tried to give various solutions, such as the argument that what God does is entirely good, but that evil is a lack of the good. Process theology deals with the problem by denying divine omnipotence.

We should be clear at the outset that we are not going to get anything like a proof that God is "justified" in allowing terrorists to crash airliners into buildings or cancer to kill someone we love. But people do ask the "Why?" question, and aren't satisfied -- nor should they be -- to be told simply, "It's God's will."

In most congregations few people will want to listen to detailed philosophical arguments in a sermon (although they have their place in educational settings.) In any case, the Bible doesn't give them to us to preach on. What we do have for September 14 (Proper 19) is the turning point in Mark's Gospel, Mark 8:27-36. We are offered a picture of a Messiah who must be rejected, suffer and die "and after three days rise again" -- and who calls us to follow him on that path.

At first glance that doesn't seem like any answer to the problem of evil but just another statement of it. It seems like one more in a long list of stories of good people being crushed by those who hold power in the world. But there is more here, and something both more disturbing and more profound than that familiar story. The one who starts here on his way to the cross is the one Christians have come to see as the Son of God -- in fact, as God Incarnate. If that is the case, then the cross that our gospel points to is the cross of God.

But before we start exploring these implications, we need to consider what our text says in a bit more detail. It begins with what seems like a moment of triumph, Peter's statement (perhaps to be understood as one made on behalf of all the disciples) that Jesus is the Messiah of Israel. Finally the reality of who Jesus is has gotten through to his followers! But it isn't that simple. Jesus expresses no satisfaction at this confession but "sternly" tells the disciples to say nothing about it and then tells them of his upcoming rejection, death, and resurrection.

At this point we could pause to think about some much-debated questions. Is Jesus to be understood here as accepting or rejecting the title "Messiah"? Did the historical Jesus actually predict what was going to happen to him in Jerusalem? Those are important questions, but with the themes I want to emphasize we don't need to spend a great deal of time on them. The words ascribed here to Jesus do in fact describe what happened to him, and because of that he was quickly acclaimed by his disciples as the Messiah. But they also had to realize that that title meant something quite different from the popular picture of a conquering hero.

Peter refuses to accept the idea that the Messiah has to suffer and die, but he is bluntly rebuked by Jesus. The words that Jesus has spoken are to be seen not simply as a prediction about events that are going to happen but as something that must happen (v. 31). This idea is restated at other places in the New Testament. It was "necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things" (Luke 24:26). He was crucified "according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God" (Acts 2:23).

The death and resurrection of Christ have been seen traditionally as the way in which God deals with the problem of human sin, and they certainly are that. But scripture sees the central cross-resurrection event as more than just the solution to a single problem. There are other aspects of the "necessity" of the cross which are related to traditional ideas about atonement/reconciliation/salvation but which need to be considered in their own right.

I think it's important to try to convey this broader understanding of the cross to a congregation. There's no doubt that the ideas of sin and salvation are essential and need to be repeated frequently. But there are a couple of dangers in that. First is simply the fact that the words, "Jesus died for your sins," will be so familiar that some people will think "Sure, we know all this" and tune it out. That's unfortunate, because it's supposed to be proclaimed as kerygma, news, not simply information. But it doesn't always come across in that way.

But there's also the fact that this emphasis tends to make the cross sound like just a plot device that God uses because something has gone wrong in the story. Something has indeed "gone wrong," but -- as some of the texts I'll note later suggest -- there is something more fundamental here than just God's "Plan B" to deal with the sins of individuals.

To begin with, the cross can be said to have been "necessary" just on the level of social, cultural, economic, and political structures. Anybody who challenged the religious establishment as Jesus did and who -- more importantly -- represented the kind of threat to Roman power that he did was going to run afoul of a power that would not hesitate to execute him. Jesus was certainly aware of what had happened to John the Baptist, as described two chapters earlier in Mark. While Jesus wasn't openly preaching revolution against Rome, his language about the nearness of a "Kingdom of God," among other things, would have made him dangerous to Roman authorities and to Jewish leaders who wanted to maintain a modus vivendi with the occupying power. It wouldn't have taken supernatural knowledge to guess what might happen in Jerusalem if Jesus didn't intend to back down.

(The prediction of resurrection as God's ultimate vindication of Jesus' mission would have been quite possible within the context of belief in resurrection that had developed at least since the time of the Maccabean martyrs. Whether or not "after three days" goes back to the historical Jesus or is a statement of the post-Easter community is more debatable.)

This is not something separate from the problem of sin. Political oppression is one expression of that dark side of the human condition. But there is more here than just the sins of particular individuals like Pilate, Caiaphas, or the Emperor Tiberius. There are systemic evils, sins built into the structures with which humans order society, that also have to be confronted. And God's dealing with sin at that level is part of the "must" of Jesus' suffering and death.

(Note that in this first prediction of the passion, v. 31 of our text, there is no specific mention of the cross, i.e., that Jesus would die at the hands of the Romans. But the cross is part of the exhortation that follows in vv. 34-38 and of the third passion prediction, Mark 10:32-34.)

This systemic evil does not, however, exhaust the meaning of the crucifixion. Some of the later texts of the New Testament point toward a cosmic significance for the cross. In Mark 13 the predictions of the eschatological sufferings of the world are a prelude to the account of the suffering and death of Jesus in chapters 14-15. (In some old lectionaries Mark 13 was included in the passion narrative of chapters 14 and 15.) Colossians 1:20 proclaims Jesus' shed blood as the means by which "all things" are to be reconciled to God, and Revelation 13:8 speaks of "the Lamb that was slaughtered from the foundation of the world." (This translation, given in NRSV margin, is debated. For this reading see G. B. Caird, The Revelation of St. John [New York: Harper & Row, 1966].)

This expands our field of view so as to take in the whole creation. In addition to the suffering that is brought about by human sin ("moral evil"), there is also suffering involved in natural processes ("natural evil"), like the flooding with which I began. The deaths of thousands in the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 seemed to some people at the time to be also the deathblow to Christian claims about the goodness and/or power of God.

An even more serious challenge came through the acceptance of Darwin and Wallace's idea of evolution via natural selection in the nineteenth century. This meant not only that God would have to allow competition, privation, suffering, death, and extinction of species but that God would have to make use of such things in order to bring about new forms of life, and eventually humanity. Some Christians have rejected this theory (which has a considerable amount of scientific support), but those who accept it have to ask how a supposedly benevolent God could work in this way. Of course, many people have concluded that there is no such God.

Now, one can argue that if God were going to act through lawful natural processes to bring living things into being, evolution through natural selection is pretty much the only way it could be done. The cross does not "justify" this means of creation -- but it does say that evolution is not simply a matter of God forcing millions of generations of creatures through suffering and extinction without himself being touched by the process.

In the Incarnation God becomes a participant in this "bloody relentless slaughter" of evolution (as Stephen Jay Gould put it) on the side of the losers -- because in the short run it is Pilate and Tiberius and Caiaphas who survive. And the resurrection of the crucified means that there is hope even for those who don't survive.

One of my seminary professors told of a conversation he had had with a German man who had been a locomotive engineer during World War II. On one run he had to pull a train of cattle cars filled with Jews going to the east -- as we know now, to the death camps. At one stop he had gotten out of the cab and, walking alongside the train, heard a man in one of the cars calling for water. He went over to a pump and filled up a cup to give to him but was confronted by a guard who pointed a gun at him and said, "If you want to give him that water, you can get on the train yourself." Embarrassed and ashamed, the man said that he had dropped the cup and gotten back in the cab. How many of us would have done otherwise? But the real God gets on the train with us.

Does that "justify" the way God operates in the world? I don't know, and the whole idea that we can decide that question is a bit impertinent anyway (cf. Romans 9:20). In any case, it's all we're going to get. The creator who is active in the universe is the one made known to us in the cross.

And it is this full meaning of the cross that has to be kept in mind when Jesus now turns to his disciples -- i.e., to us -- and says, "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me." The messianic community is to follow the Messiah, and it is not just empty symbolism when in some baptismal rites the sign of the cross is made on the person who is initiated into that community.

The most obvious meaning of this is that Christians may have to suffer hardships and persecution for making the kind of confession that Peter made at Caesarea Philippi.

The early church's confessors and martyrs suffered and died because they were "not ashamed of me and of my words" (v. 38), and many Christians in our time in Latin America, the former Soviet Union, and other places are counted among them. ("Confessor" is the technical term for a person who has suffered persecution for the faith but has not been killed for it.) Christians who have been killed because of their opposition to systemic evil, like Dietrich Bonhoeffer or Martin Luther King, Jr., should also be named here.

When a person suffers from some illness, an abusive spouse, or something of that sort, it may be referred to as that person's "cross to bear." This can be appropriate, but it needs some thought. On the one hand, we shouldn't be too casual about equating everything that is unpleasant with the cross of Christ. There is a problem, for example, with calling the prison sentence imposed on a person for some real crime that he's committed his "cross to bear." On the other hand, I think it's too restrictive to say that only sufferings that come about specifically because a person is a Christian "count" as crosses.

One of the things I've emphasized here is that in the broadest sense Christ takes on the sufferings of the world, and that includes nonreligious sufferings like sickness. Matthew's Gospel makes that explicit in 8:17 when, after a series of healing stories, it says, "This was done to fulfill what had been spoken through the prophet Isaiah, 'He took our infirmities and bore our diseases.' " Christ heals, not by reaching down from heaven with a miraculous touch, but by bearing people's sicknesses.

If that is the case, then all sufferings are, in a way, borne by Christ. And in turn, the sufferings that we have to bear are "crosses" to the extent that we recognize that Christ bears them with us. Even more, we are called to see them as one of the ways in which the message of Christ is proclaimed to the world. This may be the best way to understand Paul's words (perhaps expressed by one of his disciples) in Colossians 1:24. There is really nothing "lacking" in the afflictions of Christ -- except that they aren't present and visible. And Christians who bear the cross make them present and visible. It is not for nothing that a Christian who dies for the faith is called martyr, "witness."

I have to add immediately that this all refers to sufferings that cannot be avoided, and not to those that are sought out. We are to try to avoid persecution if we reasonably can -- "When they persecute you in one town, flee to the next" (Matthew 10:23). The church finally had to condemn the practice of trying to be martyred. In the same vein, there is no justification for telling a woman whose husband beats her that she should stay with him and that he's just her cross to bear. His abuse is a cross -- but one that she should unload if at all possible!

Martyrs have gotten a bad name recently because of the use of the term for Islamic terrorists. We have to leave to Muslim theologians the question of whether or not Muslims who commit suicide in order to murder innocent people can be considered "martyrs" for that religion. Christians who did the same things wouldn't be. This includes Paul Hill, the former minister who was executed a few days ago in Florida for killing an abortion doctor and his bodyguard. The formal definition of a martyr has been a Christian who dies "because of hatred of the faith" -- not one who is executed for murder. And that is true regardless of what one thinks of abortion.

This suggests that this is not a text on which it's going to be especially helpful to close a sermon by telling people "Now go out and do X, Y, or Z." (That's not a homiletic device I'm wild about anyway.) One possible approach is simply to encourage people to reflect on the cross -- seen as the cross of God -- and the sufferings that they encounter in their own lives, in those of friends, and in the evening news. The old question, "If Christianity were a crime, would there be enough evidence to convict you?" might also be worth posing.

It's perhaps also worth noting that in the traditional liturgical calendar, 14 September is "Holy Cross Day" or, as it's sometimes called, "The Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross." The emphasis is on the cross as God's victory -- a note that should be sounded in order to avoid the idea that reflection on the cross is supposed to be completely morbid or a matter of pitying poor Jesus. The Collect for Holy Cross Day in the Book of Common Prayer (p. 244) might be employed:

Almighty God, whose Son our Savior Jesus Christ was lifted high upon the cross that he might draw the whole world to himself: Mercifully grant that we, who glory in the mystery of our redemption, may have the grace to take up our cross and follow him, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, in glory everlasting. Amen.

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Team Comments

Carter Shelley responds: George, your title for this week's entry in itself is a thing of simple beauty. There's so much there that has meaning for Christians because the cross of Christ really is at the heart of the world.

I appreciate the way you mention different historical critical and theological issues Mark's text presents. These issues are ones familiar to our TIW preachers from seminary classes and probably some livelier Sunday School sessions along the way. I appreciate that you keep these issues in front of us and acknowledge them without letting those same concerns deter you from this week's application of the text. Two examples are the theodicy question and the timing of the resurrection prediction.

You cover the explanations for suffering briefly but thoroughly. In your discussion of Darwin and natural selection, you also mention "Wallace." I don't know the name or his role in the theory of evolution, etc., so I'd welcome a brief identification of him. I love the Stephen Jay Gould quote.

I've pondered the notion that the cross offers "hope for those who don't survive." Thinking back to the Hebrew slaves in Egypt or the African slaves in America, it's hard to grasp God's promises fulfilled when so many believers died without ever having experienced freedom or hope. Someone like Marx would say such hope is false hope, a lie to keep the downtrodden in their place, and who wants a pie in the sky kind of hope?

Several of your strongest statements convey enough meaning to be sermons in themselves: "The real God gets on the train with us ... Creator active in the universe is the one made known to us is the cross ... Christ heals by bearing people's sicknesses ... While all of those are true, they aren't necessarily what we want to hear when the suffering we experience is our own.

Thank you for the spouse abuse example and the mention of Paul Hill and the current-day misuse of the term martyr.

With President Bush's national address last night I am struck by the contrast between Bush's conviction that the 87 billion more dollars he'll seek via Congress offers the solution to victory in Iraq and to helping its inhabitants form a safe and democratic society. The cross as God's victory contrasts sharply with the victories modern powers seek in the 21st century. In that seeking, we haven't progressed very far from the ways of the world in the day of Pilate, Caiaphas, and Tiberius Caesar.

Carlos Wilton responds: A little while ago, I read a remarkable book by a man named Thomas Lynch: a man who has two jobs. Thomas Lynch is both a poet and a funeral director. His book is called The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade (New York: Penguin, 1998).

It's a collection of essays describing what it's like to be a funeral director -- or, as some still call the profession today, an undertaker. But Lynch is also a poet, and he has a wonderful way of zeroing right in on the human condition, in all its complexity.

The hardest funerals to do, he admits, are those of children -- especially children who die suddenly. Here's what he says about one of these experiences:

"Here is a thing that happened. I just buried a young girl whose name was Stephanie, named for St. Stephen, the patron of stonemasons, the first martyr. She died when she was struck by a cemetery marker as she slept in the back seat of her parents' van as the family was driving down the interstate on their way to Georgia. It was the middle of the night. The family had left Michigan that evening to drive to a farm in Georgia where the Blessed Mother was said to appear and speak to the faithful on the thirteenth of every month. As they motored down the highway in the dark through mid-Kentucky, some local boys, half an hour south, were tipping headstones in the local cemetery for something to do. They picked one up that weighed about fourteen pounds -- a stone. What they wanted with it is anyone's guess. And as they walked across the overpass of the interstate, they grew tired of carrying their trophy. With not so much malice as mischief, they tossed it over the rail as the lights of southbound traffic blurred below them. It was at this moment that the van that Stephanie's father was driving intersected with the stolen marker from the local cemetery. The stone was falling earthward at thirty-two feet per second. The van was heading south at seventy miles per hour. The stone shattered the windshield, glanced off Stephanie's father's right shoulder, woke her mother riding in the passenger seat and, parting the space between the two front seats, struck Stephanie in the chest as she lay sleeping in the back seat. She had just traded places with her younger brother who was cuddled with his two other sisters in the rear seat of the van. It did not kill Stephanie instantly. Her sternum was broken, her heart bruised beyond repair. A trucker stopped to radio for help but at two A.M. in Nowhere, Kentucky, on a Friday morning, such things take time. The family waited by the roadside reciting the rosary as Stephanie gasped for air and moaned. They declared her dead at the hospital two hours later. Stephanie's mother found the stone in the back seat and gave it to the authorities. It said 'RESERVED FOSTER,' and was reckoned to be a corner marker from the Foster Lot in Resurrection Cemetery."

A horrible freak accident. A terrible, tragic coincidence, that Stephanie's family's minivan happened to be emerging from under the overpass at precisely that instant. The boys who tossed the gravestone off the bridge were dangerously negligent, but neither they nor the unsuspecting family had the slightest idea of what was about to happen.

It's the sort of occurrence that would lead anyone to ask where God is in all this. How can a loving Lord let this sort of thing happen? Little girls aren't supposed to be killed by falling gravestones while dozing contentedly in the back seat of the family car. For Stephanie's parents -- and, indeed, for all who hear this tragic story -- their experience is a raw and unmediated encounter with evil. What can we possibly say to people whose lives have just been torn apart by this kind of agony?

Thomas Lynch, the undertaker-poet (or maybe the poet-undertaker) has no clear answer for that in the case of little Stephanie, killed by the falling headstone named "Reserved Foster." He admits to asking, and in turn discarding, the same philosophical questions most of us would ask, were we in such a situation. "I keep shaking a fist at the Almighty," he says, "asking 'Where were you on the morning of the thirteenth?' The alibi changes every day."

Yet Lynch has also discovered, in his years in the undertaker's trade, what comfort religious faith can bring to those who truly have nowhere else to turn:

"When I first took Stephanie's parents to the cemetery, to buy a grave for their daughter, her mother stood in the road and pointed to a statue of "The Risen Christ." "I want her over there," she said, "at the right hand of Jesus." We walked across the section to an empty, unmarked space underneath the outstretched granite right arm of Christ. "Here," Stephanie's mother said, her wet eyes cast upward into the gray eyes of Christ. Stephanie's father, his eyes growing narrow, was reading the name on the neighboring grave. FOSTER is what it read. It was cut in stone." (pp. 54-57)

In all his years of work as an undertaker, Thomas Lynch has become utterly convinced of the value of faith. For it is in these experiences of darkest night that faith shines forth the brightest:

"Better than baptisms or marriages, funerals press the noses of the faithful against the windows of their faith. Vision and insight are often coincidental with demise. Death is the moment when the chips are down. That moment of truth when the truth is that we die makes relevant the claims of our prophets and apostles. Faith is not required to sing in the choir, for bake sales or building drives; to usher or deacon or elder or priest. Faith is for the time of our dying and the time of the dying of the ones we love. Those parsons and pastors who are most successful -- those who have learned to "minister" -- are those who allow their faithful flocks to grieve ....

Uncles find nickels behind our ears. Magicians pull rabbits from out of hats. Any good talker can preach pie in the sky or break out the warm fuzzies when the time is right. But only by faith do the dead arise and walk among us or speak to us in our soul's dark nights." (pp. 80-81)

We cannot understand why certain things happen, or fail to happen. We simply don't have the vision, the perspective. Yet we can trust that, when in life (or in death) it falls to us to venture out into the darkness, there is one who travels beside us. He is "the light that enlightens everyone." Even in the deepest darkness he can see -- and he knows the way.

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An Alternate Approach
Cross-bearing or Cross-carrying? A Theology of the Positive
by Carter Shelley
Mark 8:27-38

Mrs. Harriet Templeton finished drying off the dinner dishes just as her 16-year-old granddaughter entered the room, looking for the car keys. "You're going out on a school night?" she asked.

"I've got a research project due tomorrow," Jennifer replied. "I'm going on to Mary's house to work on it for a while. I'll be late getting back, so go on to bed."

Mrs. Templeton sighed as she watched her granddaughter go out the kitchen door and soon after drive away. Mrs. Templeton knew Jennifer was lying. She didn't care about school work. She wasn't going to Mary's house, though Mary would certainly cover for Jennifer if Mrs. Templeton phoned to check up on Jennifer. It had been the same with Jennifer's mother. Headstrong, willful, couldn't be told a thing: whether it was how to ride a tricycle, the dangers of getting too serious about boys too soon, or the dangers of drugs. It was these last two that had led to Harriet becoming a grandmother at the age of 35 and the guardian of her granddaughter when Jennifer was still a toddler.

"It's my cross to bear," thought Harriet, not for the first time.

Having a daughter addicted to drugs, living who knew where or how, was a cross to bear. Having a granddaughter whom she'd taken in when there was nowhere else for the child to go had also been her cross to bear. Now having a teenage granddaughter who would lie to her and no doubt repeat the mistakes her own mother had made was yet another a cross to bear.

Harriet knew that the Lord never gives you more than you can bear, but she was only 52 years old, and she felt 70. Recently, she'd been diagnosed with diabetes and was now struggling to stay on a sugar-free diet, not easy for a woman whose primary solace was found in pastries and doughnuts. Another cross to bear. Raising her granddaughter, dealing with diabetes, coping with worsening arthritis, all were crosses she bore for her Lord.

Anyone in her church circle or neighborhood could tell you the crosses Harriet bore: raising of an ungrateful cocaine-addicted daughter, the rearing of a wild and lying granddaughter, arthritis, diabetes, a leaking roof, the rise in costs for medical prescriptions, all were crosses to bear.

It is Harriet's conviction that the life she lives is indeed a witness to Jesus' call to take up one's cross and follow, but has she understood Christ's words in the way that Jesus intended them to be understood?

When Harriet says, "It's my cross to bear," is she offering a testimony of faith or is she seeking praise and attention for her endurance of these hardships? Are the crosses she bears the ones Jesus would have her carry?

What are we saying about God and Jesus when we understand our Christian call in the way Pearl Buck's missionary father (see below) and Harriet Templeton do?

In the first instance, we seem to be saying God is harsh, rigid, and mean-spirited, because God only accepts disciples who perform work they do not enjoy and are not temperamentally suited to do. Who among us would not consider it lunacy for a gifted religious writer like Madeleine L'Engle or Frederick Buechner to forsake writing permanently in order to join the Peace Corps and plow fields in Ghana? Yet people often feel that the call of Jesus Christ can only be genuine if it includes suffering and misery for the one called.

I think such examples as Rev. Buck and Harriet Templeton are the reason many of us aren't lining up to carry our crosses as Jesus calls us to do. Their call appears to be to suffering and misery, joyless and sour. It's all cost and no dividends. It's a theology of the negative. A theology of the negative can be passive and joyless.

Harriet's version is passive. It's what happens to her. What the world imposes upon her. It says, "The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away." Or she says, "It's my cross to bear," but means, "I don't have any responsibility or control over what happens to me in my life."

When cross-bearing is understood that way, it is passive and not imitative of Christ's call any more than is the cross-bearing of Rev. Buck whose joyless understanding of God and God's so-called grace makes every task seem a chore, a burden, and a punishment.

The theology of the negative's vocabulary is full of "shoulds," and "oughts," and "obligations."

When honest it views God as an ogre and a spoilsport. Its practitioners condemn laughter, a tasty meal, good times, and the pleasures of this world as having no place in the world of a faithful cross bearer.

The theology of the negative is the voice at the party saying, "No, thank you. I couldn't possibly eat that while there are starving people in the world."

For the cross-bearing, negative followers of Christ there is a belief and a sense that if something is difficult, unpleasant, or painful, it must be in keeping with what God requires.

The Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Good Earth, Pearl Buck, was raised in China by her parents, who were Presbyterian missionaries there. Buck's father was a gifted linguist who could master almost any language or dialect with ease, while her mother was a woman of independent spirit who wanted a life of adventure away from the safety of post-antebellum Virginia. They were a mismatched pair in every way. His religion was harsh, legalistic, and judgmental. She saw the love in the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Rev. Buck only saw its threat. In the multiple decades they spent in mainland China before and after the Boxer Rebellion, the Rev. Buck spent most of his time traveling from village to village preaching a message of hell and damnation to Chinese men and women he considered barbarians and whose only hope of improving their life was to become Christian. Yet, the Rev. Buck had no liking, no respect, and no love to share with the Chinese men and women he frightened into the Christian faith. His missionary zeal was not the result of a call to share the good news but an intense conviction that to truly serve Christ, he must live a life of hardship and deprivation among a people and a culture he never sought to understand or value. In contrast his wife, who remained with their young daughter Pearl in a small town most of the year round, got to know the women in the community, held health classes for them, and worked successfully to persuade some parents not to bind the feet of their young daughter. Mrs. Buck's ministry was one of friendship, compassion, and discovery. It is through her eyes that Pearl Buck's own positive and cherished view of the Chinese people was formed and recorded in Pulitzer prize novels. To the Rev. Buck, the mission field in China was a cross to bear. It gave him no pleasure and no depth of understanding or respect for the Chinese people he evangelized or into the heart of God. Rev. Buck was a brilliant linguist. He had little trouble mastering obscure dialects and rapidly learning new languages. He would have served both his Lord and himself better had he been a translator of ancient Middle Eastern dialects or as a teacher of Hebrew and Greek in an American seminary. But such a call was beyond his understanding. For him God was harsh and Christ's call a burden, a cross to bear. Had it been easy to follow, he would not have believed it to be true.

There's a difference between cross-bearing and cross-carrying.

Twelve years ago, a good-time guy finishing his senior year of college took a four-week detour from wine, women, and Winthrop College to give a kidney to his older sister who'd been on kidney dialysis for a year. There's a national waiting list for cadaveric kidneys, that is, the still-functioning kidneys that are transplanted from a person who has just died to someone whose been waiting for months, maybe years for a second chance at life through transplantation. If his sister had gone on the national list, her name might have come up in a year or two, but in the meantime her body was rapidly aging and slowly dying as bodies in renal failure will do, because dialysis keeps people alive; it doesn't keep them healthy. She had four siblings, but he was her one match, and he volunteered for the transplant.

So instead of spending his Christmas and winter break with a girlfriend in Florida or skiing the mountains of West Virginia, Joe entered the hospital. He'd been told the surgery would be harder on him than his sister, because the surgeon would have to cut through back muscles and break a rib before they could get to his kidney. For his sister it was a simple matter of attaching his kidney which would be done through the abdomen, and would not be nearly as painful. To face this trial, Joe had two requests: he wanted a private room at the hospital and he wanted sufficient pain medicine so he wouldn't suffer. Because it was December, Baptist Hospital was over-crowded with every bed filled and then some. When Joe awoke from the 11-hour surgery, he was in excruciating pain, he was sharing his room with another young man who'd fallen off his tractor and then had it run over him, and this same patient had a phalanx of relatives standing around his bed smoking cigars and watching wrestling on TV. Telling about it later, Joe said, "I knew I'd died and gone to hell!"

It was four weeks before Joe felt like his old self again, four weeks in which he experienced the helplessness and frustration most seriously sick people feel, four weeks of depression and frustration that he wasn't allowed to drive, couldn't walk from his bedroom to the kitchen without hurting, couldn't do some of the simplest things for himself and had to -- horror of horrors! -- live with his parents instead of in his own apartment.

Yet Joe's four weeks of hell meant heaven for me. Because he voluntarily chose to put himself through radical and potentially life-threatening surgery, I have had twelve years of renewed life and health -- no dialysis, no need for elevators to get up one flight of stairs, no uncontrollable muscle spasms, no late-night trips to the emergency room -- Joe volunteered for the cross he bore to help me back to a healthy life. He chose that cross, because he was my brother and he loves me -- in a way not so dissimilar to why Jesus chose his cross for us all. But there's a distinction between the cross Joe carried for me and that which Harriet and Rev. Buck bore. Joe's cross had a purpose outside of himself. He didn't seek it for purposes of martyrdom or self-congratulations. He didn't seek it out of a misguided sense that God can only be served when one is miserable. He chose it because it was the right thing to do at the time in order to help another person. But it was one act in a life that would move on beyond that act into a future in which cross-carrying was not sought as a sign of faith, but would be dealt with when it arose.

We're not expected to carry our cross every day of our lives. Remember. Jesus went to Golgotha once. You don't have to go looking for unnecessary crosses. Crosses will find you

* When you speak out on behalf of a principled and gifted teacher the school board wants to fire because he is gay
* When you decide to forgo the purchase of a new car in order to give more money to world missions or to help a child in another country receive three full meals a day

When you start to live your Christian faith, sincerely and daily, you will encounter crosses -- not because you seek them but because following Christ means choosing a path most of humanity still considers a folly and a threat. Cross-bearing or cross-carrying? It's a privilege and a pain that leads to life, life in the here and now, and life eternal.

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Related Illustrations

"The Son of God was crucified for all and for everything, having traced the sign of the Cross on all things."
-- Irenaeus, quoted by P. Evdokimov, Scottish Journal of Theology 18.1 (1965), p. 11.

* * * * *

"Seventh [among the marks of the church], the holy Christian people are externally recognized by the holy possession of the sacred cross. They must endure every misfortune and persecution, all kinds of trials and evil from the devil, the world, and the flesh (as the Lord's Prayer indicates) by inward sadness, timidity, fear, outward poverty, contempt, illness, and weakness, in order to become like their head, Christ."

-- Martin Luther, "On the Councils and the Church," Luther's Works, vol. 41 (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1966), p. 164

* * * * *

In Man's Search for Meaning Holocaust survivor Dr. Viktor E. Frankl, who resumed his psychiatric practice at the conclusion of World War II, offers one way to find meaning in suffering:

"Once an elderly general practitioner consulted me because of his severe depression. He could not overcome the loss of his wife who had died two years before and whom he had loved above all else. Now, how could I help him? What should I tell him? Well, I refrained from telling him anything but instead confronted him with the question, 'What would have happened, Doctor, if you had died first, and your wife would have had to survive you?' 'Oh,' he said, 'for her this would have been terrible; how she would have suffered!' Whereupon I replied, 'You see, Doctor, such a suffering has been spared her, and it was you who have spared her this suffering -- to be sure, at the price that now you have to survive and mourn her.' He said no word but shook my hand and calmly left my office. In some way, suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of sacrifice." (p. 135)

* * * * *

From Carlos Wilton: Some theologians believe it's improper to apply the term "cross-bearing" to sufferings caused by things such as illness and natural disaster. Here are quotations from two who take such a view:

"I don't think we Christians have understood what carrying the cross means: the path of baptism. We are not carrying the cross when we are poor or sick or suffering small, everyday things. They are all part of life. The cross comes when we try to change things. That is how it came for Jesus."
-- Miguel D'Escoto, Nicaraguan theologian

"The cross is not a sign of the church's quiet, suffering submission to the powers-that-be, but rather the church's revolutionary participation in the victory of Christ over these powers. The cross is not a symbol for general human suffering and oppression. Rather, the cross is a sign of what happens when one takes God's account of reality more seriously than Caesar's. The cross stands as God's (and our) eternal no to the power of death, as well as God's eternal yes to humanity, God's remarkable determination not toleave us to our own devices."
-- Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon, Resident Aliens, p. 47.

* * * * *

A farmer printed on his weather vane the words, "God is love." Someone asked him if he meant to imply that the love of God was as fickle as the wind. The farmer answered, "No, I mean that whichever way the wind blows, God is love. If it blows cold from the North, or biting from the East, God is still love just as much as when the warm South or gentle West winds refresh our fields and flocks. God is always love."

* * * * *

Extract from a letter by J. R. R. Tolkien to his son Christopher:

"10 April 1944

"I sometimes feel appalled at the thought of the sum total of human misery all over the world at the present moment: the millions parted, fretting, wasting in unprofitable days -- quite apart from torture, pain, death, bereavement, injustice. If anguish were visible, almost the whole of this benighted planet would be enveloped in a dense dark vapor, shrouded from the amazed vision of the heavens! And the products of it all will be mainly evil -- historically considered. But the historic version is, of course, not the only one. All things and all deeds have a value in themselves, apart from their 'causes' and 'effects.' No man can estimate what is really happening sub specie aeternitatis. All we do know, and that to a large extent by direct experience, is that evil labors with vast power and perpetual success -- in vain: preparing always the soil for unexpected good to sprout in."
-- from The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien

* * * * *

"Many have puzzled themselves about the origin of evil. I am content to observe that there is evil, and that there is a way to escape from it, and with this I begin and end."
-- John Newton

* * * * *

"To be Christian is to cease saying, 'Where the Messiah is, there is no misery,' and to begin to say, 'Where there is misery, there is the Messiah.' The former statement makes no demands; the latter is an assignment."
-- Fred Craddock

* * * * *

J. Barrie Shepherd notes in his book, Praying the Psalms, that as Psalm 23 begins, with its still waters and green pastures, it is written in the third person. Yet when the scene changes to the valley of the shadow of death, there is an abrupt shift from the third to the second person. God is no longer "the Lord," but has become "you." Just when we need God most, Shepherd points out, just when darkness is closing in, God comes not as abstract theology, but as a person who leads the way.

* * * * *

"Thank God, religion to me has always been the wound, not the bandage."
-- Playwright Dennis Potter, in a BBC interview, shortly before he died of cancer.

* * * * *

"A Scottish preacher in the last century who had lost his wife delivered an unusually personal sermon just after her death. In the message, he admitted that he did not understand this life. But still less could he understand how people facing loss could abandon the faith. 'Abandon it for what!' he cried. 'You people in the sunshine may believe the faith, but we in the shadow must believe it. We have nothing else.'

'Lord, to whom shall we go?' asked the apostle Peter...."
-- Philip Yancey, "Can Good Come Out of This Evil?" in Christianity Today, June 14, 1999.

* * * * *

"Psalm 91 gives us only part of the picture and only one of the moods of faith. With a kind of quiet amazement, the psalmist bears witness that under the wings of God good things happen to bad people. You need another psalm or two to fill in the picture, to cry out that under those same wings bad things sometimes happen to good people.

"Psalm 91 says no evil shall befall us. When we have cashed out some of the poetry and then added in the witness of the rest of Scripture, what we get, I believe, is the conclusion that no final evil shall befall us. We know that we can believe God with all our heart and yet have our heart broken by the loss of a child or the treachery of a spouse or the menace of a fatal disease. We know this is true -- everyone in the church knows it. And yet, generation after generation of bruised saints have known something else and spoken of it. In the mystery of faith, we find a hand on us in the darkness, a voice that calls our name, and the sheer certainty that nothing can ever separate us from the love of God -- not for this life and not for the life to come. We may be scarred and shaken, but, as Lewis Smedes says in one of his luminous sermons, we come to know that it's all right, even when everything is all wrong."
-- Cornelius Plantinga, Jr., "Can God Be Trusted?" in Christianity Today, June 15, 1998.

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Worship Resources
by Chuck Cammarata

CALL TO WORSHIP

Psalm 19 lends itself beautifully to liturgical use. Here are two sections of the psalm used as calls to worship.

Psalm 19:1-4

LEADER: The heavens declare the glory of God;
PEOPLE: The skies proclaim God's work.
LEADER: Day after day they never cease to speak
PEOPLE: Night after night they display truth.
LEADER: There is no language where their voice is not heard.
PEOPLE: Their voice goes into all the earth.
LEADER: Their words spread to the ends of the earth.
PEOPLE: Let us listen this morning
LEADER: That we might hear heaven's homily.
PEOPLE: Amen.

Psalm 19:7-11

(This may also be used as a responsive reading prior to the reading of the Word.)

LEADER: The law of the Lord is perfect,
PEOPLE: Reviving the soul.
LEADER: The statutes of the Lord are trustworthy,
PEOPLE: Making wise the simple.
LEADER: The precepts of the Lord are right,
PEOPLE: Giving joy to the heart.
LEADER: The commands of the Lord radiate,
PEOPLE: Giving light to the eyes.
LEADER: The fear of the Lord is pure
PEOPLE: Enduring forever.
LEADER: The ordinances of the Lord are sure
PEOPLE: And altogether righteous.
LEADER: They are more precious than gold,
PEOPLE: Than pure gold.
LEADER: They are sweeter than honey
PEOPLE: From the honeycomb.
LEADER: By them God's servant is guided;
PEOPLE: In keeping them there is great reward.
LEADER: Let us celebrate the Lord's truth.
PEOPLE: Amen.

Hymn

PRAYER OF CONFESSION

LEADER: What a privilege we have in knowing the way and the truth and the life.
PEOPLE: How blessed are those with such knowledge.
LEADER: But too often we turn this blessing into a curse for others.
PEOPLE: Becoming arrogant,
LEADER: Judgmental,
PEOPLE: Even hateful toward those who do not know
LEADER: Or understand as we do.
PEOPLE: "Abortion Doctor Gunned Down
LEADER: By Presbyterian Pastor"
PEOPLE: Said the headline.
LEADER: "God hates fags"
PEOPLE: Proclaims another pastor.

(A pause would be appropriate here to let the horror of these set in)

LEADER: God of all love,
PEOPLE: Forgive our arrogance,
LEADER: And self-righteousness.
PEOPLE: And make us more like the savior,
LEADER: Who walked the way of the cross,
PEOPLE: To bring love to his enemies,
LEADER: Rather than raising the sword to slay them.
PEOPLE: And teach us,
LEADER: That there is no power in the universe
PEOPLE: Greater than love.

(If you find the word "fags" too offensive to use, just change it to "gays" or "homosexuals.")

ASSURANCE OF PARDON

Let us always remember that we are forgiven each and every sin. But let us also remember that we are forgiven for a purpose, that we might share the amazing love of God with all those who God brings into our lives. So, rejoice in your forgiveness, and humble us that we might extend this forgiveness to others.

PRAYER FOR ILLUMINATION

Bring us now humbly before your Word of truth, O Lord. Use it to enlighten our minds, fill our hearts, and mold our wills to match yours. Amen.

HYMNS AND SONGS

Humble Thyself in the Sight of the Lord (This might be used as a response after the Assurance of Pardon instead of the Gloria Patri.)
O Love That Will Not Let Me Go
There Is a Wideness in God's Mercy
Now Thank We All Our God
Jesus Loves Even Me
Amazing Grace
Love Lifted Me
O, How He Loves You and Me

PASTORAL PRAYER

Lord of all love, remind us this morning that even the best among us -- Billy Graham, Mother Teresa, the best of the best -- even these are tainted with sin and self. "All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God." "All we like sheep have gone astray." "There is none righteous -- no not one." Sin pervades us.

Teach us the subtle but beautiful skill of hating sin -- in ourselves and others -- but loving the sinner as you love.

We are so prone to judge, to condemn, to hate, even to harm those whom we believe to be sinful or wrongheaded in their beliefs. They become the enemy, the infidel. We forget that they are also your children. We forget that your love extends to each of them. We forget that we -- the church -- we are your instruments for carrying this love to all. Friend and foe alike. Turn our self-righteous hearts of stone to hearts of flesh that we might be better messengers of the God who is love.

We pray it all in the name of Jesus the Christ, whose love led him to set aside his power and to suffer and die for the sake of revealing God's love. Amen.

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A Children's Sermon

Being Faithful Followers
By Wesley T. Runk
Mark 8:27-35

Then Jesus called the crowd and his disciples to him. "If anyone wants to come with me," he told them, "he must forget himself, carry his cross, and follow me." (v. 34)

Objects: some crosses made of whatever material that you would like and one large one that can be seen by everyone. The small crosses should be given out to each of the children

Good morning, boys and girls. Today I brought with me an object that I know all of you have seen and we have talked about many times. (hold up the cross) This is what? (let them answer) That's right, this is a cross. Why do we talk so much about a cross? (let them answer) That's right, this is where Jesus died. He died on a cross. It was an ugly sight. If you or I would have seen it happen, we would have gotten sick to our stomach. No one would ever want to die like this because it was so painful and very disgraceful. But that is the way some men decided that Jesus should die so they could have things their way without Jesus reminding them that their way was wrong. This is the reason they killed him.

That isn't the real reason Jesus was crucified. Jesus died because it was part of the plan of God. Jesus died because of everyone's sin, including your sin and mine. We made Jesus die because we sin, and we like to sin. That causes God great pain. He loves us, and he wants us to be as pure as he is, but our sin is so great that we cannot live with him the way we are. Jesus took our punishment for us and forgave us our sins. That is the reason Jesus died.

Being a follower of Jesus means that we know all of this, and we want to tell everyone else in the world how good Jesus was to all of us. We want everyone to know that sin is bad, and that Jesus died for our sins. But people do not want to be told by others how good God is, and how bad their sin is. They don't always like followers of Jesus. You may find some people who do not like you because you are a Christian who loves God. It will hurt you to know that these people do not like you and want you to stay away from them. It would be easy to live by ourselves and never go near these people, but we can't. We are followers of Jesus, and because we follow him, we must do what is right and share the love of God with everyone. That is the reason Jesus said each of us would have to carry a cross, just as he did. We may not die the way he did, nailed to a cross, but we will find people who will hate us because we are followers of Jesus. That's all right. It is going to happen. But we will keep loving even the people who hate us because that is the way Jesus taught us.

I have a small cross for each of you to take home and keep to remind us that we are followers of Jesus, and that we will follow him in times of trouble just as we do in the good times. Amen.

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The Immediate Word, September 14, 2003 issue.

Copyright 2003 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.

All rights reserved. Subscribers to The Immediate Word service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons and in worship and classroom settings only. No additional permission is required from the publisher for such use by subscribers only. Inquiries should be addressed to permissions@csspub.com or to Permissions, CSS Publishing Company, Inc., P.O. Box 4503, Lima, Ohio 45802-4503.