SunMar82009
Scripture: Mark 8:31-38
When I was just out of college, I was working a rather menial job, and I thought I needed to do something more worthwhile with some of my time. So I went to the Boston chapter of Amnesty International and asked them what I might do to be helpful. They pointed me to a large pile of papers and said, “These need to be filed.” And so, in my desire to make a difference, I went to work filing those papers. After a couple of sessions of that, I was so bored that I quit and never went back.
The trouble was, though, that my failure to stick it out gnawed at me. “Amnesty International does great work,” I thought, “and someone needs to file those papers, so why shouldn’t it be I?” Here’s a chance to be useful. Here’s a chance to make a difference. “Take up [your] cross” said Jesus (Mark 8:34). What better cross than that—contributing to an organization that works tirelessly to free people around the world who have been wrongly imprisoned? I wouldn’t do it, though. Instead, I put my cross down.
And maybe that was the right thing to do, to quit work that only seemed to sap me. Some time later, when I told a supervisor of mine about this, wringing my hands over my failure, she said to me, “Not every work is right for everyone.” And I have grown, over the years, to see the wisdom of her words. What God worthy of the name, after all, would insist that people engage in dreadful, soul-crushing work? Doesn’t God want us to be filled with joy (Jn. 15:11)? Doesn’t God seek our deepest peace (Jn. 14:27)? Isn’t it God’s desire for our weariness to be given rest (Is. 40:28-31)? Healing, comfort (Is. 40:1) and fulfillment are God’s fondest hopes for us. Shouldn’t I be doing work that somehow fills me?
We rightfully lift up this way of thinking in Federated’s lay ministry initiatives all the time, this notion of finding work and volunteer ministry that is just right for us. Frederick Buechner’s wonderful formulation has become a kind of mantra for many of us. When thinking about our vocation, he says, “the place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet” (Wishful Thinking, p. 95). That’s perfect. The world is hungry, and we have each been given our own gifts for feeding that hunger. Our vocation is to live out God’s call each in our own way. So some are cooks, some tend the family checkbook, some build houses, some tend to sick people or animals. And some do need to file papers. But not everyone.
All of that makes me feel better about my limits. And I don’t think it’s being untrue to God, this reminder that we all have our own particular ways of serving. When I read today’s passage from Mark’s gospel, though, I can’t help but wonder if maybe there’s more to the story than that. It’s pretty easy for me, surrounded as I am by my upper-middle class comforts, to justify my privileges by concluding that “this is simply what God has called me to.” These words of Jesus make me wonder, though: does God sometimes call me to places and situations that are harder and more challenging, while still honoring that I have my own particular way to serve?
Some time ago, I heard an exchange between two ministers. One asked the other how he had come to his present position. Jim reported that he’d left a teaching job he loved, in a city that had been his home for many years, and had come to a more administrative job in what seems a dying setting. Jim’s friend asked him quizzically why he had done it. And Jim said, “Because I was called. I don’t think,” he continued, “that we’re always supposed to go and do just what makes us happiest. Sometimes I think God invites us to places that we might never have chosen if left to ourselves.” “Take up your cross,” he might have added. “Deny yourself.” And the part of me that still wonders if I should have stayed with the Amnesty International job winces. Maybe I took the easy way out. Maybe that cross was mine to bear. Maybe that was a call from God.
Now I really don’t think we were meant to do work that sucks the marrow from our bones. And we need to be extremely wary of making some people think they should do all the serving while others just sit back and receive it. Countless people—and I’ve heard this lots from women over the years—have had it drummed into them that they were supposed to sacrifice themselves even when no one else around them did. I will always remember a friend of mine, a woman, saying, “When I come downstairs in the morning, and there’s one glass of orange juice left, I leave it for the next person. If my husband and sons found that same glass, they’d drink it.” If you’re the only one sacrificing, and you resent it, are you just supposed to keep at it? If you feel that all the giving is one-sided, is it still the right thing to do? Women who are victims of domestic abuse regularly report that their church conveyed to them that they were just supposed to take it. ‘Deny yourself. Take up your cross. Don’t try to save your life—lose it.’ There’s something incredibly wrong with a picture like that, in which some are supposed to do all the sacrificing and everybody else just gets to enjoy the fruits.
All that said, is there nevertheless something good and right about Jesus’ words this morning? Or is this just rubbish, remnants of some bygone spiritual age in which guilt and obligation were the bywords, an age we’re just as glad to be rid of? Is this something we want to teach Mia, who is baptized today, or should we do our best to shield her from such apparently misguided wisdom?
The short answer is: yes, there is something good and right in Jesus’ words about taking up the cross and denying ourselves. But they only work, these words, if they’re freely chosen, and if they reflect the Spirit and love of God. They only work if we are not coerced but choose the path ourselves, and if that path is guided and given by God. If I make you feel you ought to do thus-and-so, then it’s become sheer obligation. If God is not in the commitment, then it’s a form of atheism, divorced of any holy wisdom.
What gets us side-tracked so often is that we try to make these words of Jesus into a moral code, into a big list of “oughts.” Let me say this as clearly as I can say it: this is not about what you and I need to do to be on the right side of God. It’s not about some difficult standard that we have to meet. It is, instead, about a deep and true way of life that is rooted in the very nature of God. Against all those natural impulses that push us to protect ourselves and stay out of trouble and make our lives as easy as possible, Jesus points to another way. He simply gives himself—over and over again. His very being is about self-offering. And that self-offering connects him to God.
So as we take that in, then we wonder: is that maybe the way for us, too? Is there something about life lived for the sake of someone or something beyond ourselves that makes it really worth living? Has God instilled in us a deep sense of what placing ourselves at someone else’s disposal means?
Sometimes it’s easier to come at this from the other side. Think for a moment about what it’s been like to be on the receiving end of someone’s care for you—the time your spouse came and got you when you locked your keys in the car; the way your parents used to drive you all over kingdom-come for hockey or swim or lacrosse leagues; the teacher who stayed after school to help you figure out quadratic equations; the nurse neighbor who came over after hours to show you how to give yourself that shot; the unpleasant job your parent held onto just so you could go to college, the fact that your spouse stayed with you even though you’re not Hugh Jackman (which is the case in our house!). It would be a miracle if we had gotten to this point in our lives without many people having given of themselves to help us flourish. In countless arenas, people have gone out of their way—sacrificed themselves, picked up a cross—so that our lives would be richer. To which the only appropriate response is: thanks be to God!
If it’s right for them, though, isn’t it right also for us? We, too, are invited into the kind of denial of self that enriches others. And when we ask, “in what ways?”, the only answer that makes any sense is: God will let you know. But it takes a relationship with God to discern the unique road that is ours to follow. It takes prayer and attentiveness and openness.
You can do things for others because you think you ought to. Many people do—maybe most of us much of the time. When we’re honest, though, we know it usually stinks. Obligatory work, divorced from God, is almost always doomed to some kind of failure—either a commitment that fades quickly, or a gnawing resentment that poisons the very work that was supposed to be so giving. When we do things because we ought to, we miss out on the most crucial dimension of the work: that it is freely chosen, and that it is done as a joyful response to God.
There’s no easy formula for how to find the giving paths that are right for each of us. How nice it would be to say, “Just follow these three easy steps and you’ll get it.” But no. It’s simply up to all of us to keep listening, to keep attending, to keep searching for ways to bring that self-offering love into play.
It happens in all sorts of ways, of course, this radiant sort of self-offering. Let me give you two examples.
Just this week, I received a letter from my eye doctor to all her patients. “I am writing,” she says, “to let you know that I will be leaving [my practice]. I am embarking on a two year training and patient care mission in Islamabad, Pakistan, where I hope to establish a retina unit at a hospital that will provide free care to anyone who cannot afford to pay for their medical treatment. My goal is to provide the same level of outstanding care to these patients as we strive to provide our patients [here]. While sad at leaving my patients and colleagues . . ., I am nevertheless very excited about this prospect of making a difference where it is needed greatly” (letter from Nadia Waheed, M.D.). Why would she do that? Why would she leave the comfort and security of one of the great medical centers in the world to pitch her tent in the medical wilderness? ‘Deny yourself. Take up your cross.’
Or this: in a small town outside Roanoke, Virginia, Don Charles noticed that behind his church there was a quarter-acre plot of land that was unused. As a volunteer at the Roanoke Rescue Mission, “he also saw how difficult it was for the mission to find fresh, healthy food. [So] Charles decided to use the church plot to feed poor people in Roanoke.”
He had recently been to an aquaponics workshop. Aquaponics is the science of cultivating plants without soil. “Basically,” [he says,] “you grow fish in a tank and you circulate the nutrient-rich water [that fish excrete] through a trough and float Styrofoam trays on top of these troughs. You can plant vegetables or whatever in there, and they suck the nutrients out of the water.” Last year, its first harvest was substantial: 1550 pounds of squash, zucchini, tomatoes, corn, sweet potatoes, green beans, onions, peppers and potatoes—all to provide daily free hot meals to single mothers, drug addicts, disabled people and others who really need it. Again: why do this? When asked that very question, Charles says simply, “It’s not about me. . . . Being a Christian means thinking about other people. [It means] working together and helping each other” (The Christian Century, March 10, 2009, pp. 12-13). ‘Deny yourself. Take up your cross.’
When we hear these words of Jesus, we tend to think he’s demanding our whole lives, which, in a sense, he is. And that scares us. But Fred Craddock, the remarkable preacher and theologian, puts it this way: “We think giving our all to the Lord is like taking a $1,000 bill and laying it on the table—‘Here’s my life, Lord. I’m giving it all.’ “But the reality for most of us is that [Christ] sends us to the bank and has us cash in the $1,000 for quarters. We go through life putting out $.25 here and $.50 there . . . “Usually giving our life to Christ isn’t glorious. It’s done in all those little acts of love, $.25 at a time” (Fred Craddock, quoted in The New Interpreter’s Bible, Vol. VIII, p. 629).
The man who looks after his wife as her body and mind vanish, the woman who visits her fading, repetitive, sometimes ornery parents much more often than she might otherwise choose to, the teacher who stays at the Podunk school because the children there are just more needy, the family that makes a substantial gift to the One Great Hour of Sharing offering in two weeks, knowing that it will go directly to alleviating poverty, hunger, and disease among people who have almost nothing—all of these are the life of cross-bearing and self-denial lived out, $.25, $.50 at a time. No one—least of all Jesus—would claim this is easy. Yet, somehow, deep in the heart of our beings, we know that just such a way of living is “the way and the truth and the life” (Jn. 14:6). And so, we pray, God, lead us on. Lead us to bear the cross, to give ourselves to you, body and soul, knowing that such is the dominion of heaven.