so either seminary is kicking my butt, or i'm just not cut out to blog about the things i'm most interested in. i think part of my problem is that i'm not used to expressing myself in less than a few thousand words.
so on that note, i am taking my husband's advice and posting my sermons here.
this is the sermon i preached 3 weeks ago for the second sunday in lent. the scriptures are Psalm 22 and Mark 8:31-38.
Deconstructing Peter, Deconstructing Death
I have a confession to make: I don’t know how to die.
I suppose that’s not surprising, though. I don’t think many of us do. Some people never learn. They fight to the end, angry, denying, desperate. But some people do learn how to die. Jesus did.
We read the last few verses of Psalm 22 a little bit ago. It’s usually the beginning of Psalm 22 that we read, because that first verse is probably one of the most quoted verses: it became Jesus’ cry of desolation on the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” In fact, the whole psalm is read on Good Friday.
But Jesus was learning how to die before Good Friday. In Mark chapter 8, which we also read today, he is teaching his disciples and other followers how to die.
He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, "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, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?”
The impact of this statement from Jesus is often lost, because “to take up their cross” has sort of entered out everyday language. It’s not too common any more, but haven’t we all heard somewhere, “oh, that’s my cross to bear”? It usually means something frustrating or irritating, something long-term that dogs us.
But that’s not what Jesus was talking about. “To take up their cross” does not mean “to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.” (Hamlet Act III, scene I). The cross was a piece of equipment used in execution, and to carry your cross is to take an active role in your own death. This is why the Romans forced prisoners to carry their crosses. It was an act of psychological torture before the physical execution, which could probably be described as torture itself. Highways in the Roman empire would be lined with crosses hung with dead or dying men as warning to those who would rebel against imperial power, and the Jewish people rebelled often. So this image would have had quite an impact on Jesus’ first hearers. For us today, it’s like being asked to wire up the electric chair or fill the lethal injection needle ourselves.
But what’s interesting here is why Jesus launches into teaching the crowd and his disciples about how to follow him, which is to learn how to die. This passage could be called “Peter’s great reversal.” Only a few verses earlier, Peter has confessed that Jesus is the Messiah. Now, Jesus rebukes him and calls him Satan! Wow! What happened there?
After Peter’s confession that Jesus was the messiah, Jesus started teaching that he must “undergo great suffering...and be killed.” And Peter can’t handle this. So he starts to rebuke Jesus. We don’t know what he said, but it’s plain that he disagreed with Jesus’ insistence on suffering and dying.
So Jesus calls everyone together and begins to teach that not only will he suffer and die, but that in order to be his follower, everyone else has to be prepared to go through the same: suffering, rejection, torture and a shameful execution.
The middle of Psalm 22 gives a poetic picture of this in verses 14 and 15:
I am poured out like water;
all my bones are out of joint;
my heart within my breast is melting wax.
My mouth is dried out like a pot-sherd;
my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth;
and you have laid me in the dust of the grave.
That’s hard to say. I don’t know how to get there.
In 1999, the film, The Green Mile came out, and it was nominated for the Oscar for best picture. When I was in college, my friends and I used to throw an Oscar party every year, where we’d watch the Oscars and complain about who should have one and who had picked which disastrous outfit to wear. I hadn’t seen The Green Mile, but when they announce the nominees for any award, they also show a clip or series of clips from the film. I don’t remember what the whole clip from The Green Mile was, but I do remember part of it was that famous scene where the cell door clangs shut, and from somewhere a voice calls out “Dead man walkin’ on the green mile!”
At the time, I thought it was an impressively dramatic scene. But later, after I’d had time to reflect, I realized that is what Jesus is calling us to as his followers. We are to be dead men and women walking.
The gospel of Mark is widely held to have its basis in the teaching and sermons that Peter gave while in Rome. Some of the writers of the early church recorded that Mark wrote down Peter’s teaching so that it could be passed on after Peter was executed at Rome. This explains many of the accounts in Mark that include Peter, and often James and John, but not the other disciples. In this light, though, it’s remarkable that it contains this story of Peter’s private rebuke of Jesus and Jesus’ response of calling him “Satan.”
Not only could Peter not handle Jesus’ own teaching that he would have to suffer and die, he didn’t know how to die himself. Jesus realized that Peter’s own misunderstanding was probably a microcosm of what everyone who was following him was thinking. So he called together not only his disciples, but also the whole crowd who was following them and delivered this graphic teaching on what following him really meant.
This was important enough that Peter kept Jesus’ teaching alive and Mark wrote it down to be passed on to the church as a whole. Another story about Mark is that after Peter was executed in Rome, Mark went to north Africa and founded what would become the church in Alexandria. The whole gospel of Mark seems to be meant for people who are undergoing some kind of persecution, to encourage them to stay fast in their faith and in their commitment to follow Jesus. So this description of what it means to be a follower of Jesus would have probably made sense. It’s not all healings and answered prayer.
And Peter finally had learned how to die. He doesn’t protect his reputation here. He doesn’t put himself out as the insightful, spiritual disciple who was the first person to identify Jesus as the Messiah. Yes, that’s there, but he turns right around and tells of this huge mistake he made, a mistake that caused his teacher to call him Satan.
Peter learned how to die.
And when he learned how to die, he also learned what it meant to live. His teachings ended up encouraging generations of Christians who also had to suffer and die, and we still read them today to teach us what it means to be a follower of Jesus.
Because, included in following Jesus, included in the teaching that we learn how to die, is the promise of a new kind of life. Again, “For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.” Somehow, learning to die leads to gaining life.
This is the same promise contained in the portion of Psalm 22 that we read today.
My praise is of him in the great assembly;
I will perform my vows in the presence of those who worship him.
My soul shall live for him;
my descendants shall serve him;
they shall be known as the LORD'S for ever.
They shall come and make known to a people yet unborn
the saving deeds that he has done.
After the psalmist has recorded the suffering he is going through, he ends on the promise of life.
Now, as Christians in the United States, the chance that we’ll ever suffer the kind of persecution that Peter and the church in Rome did under Nero is pretty small. But we have other things crowding out the call of Jesus on our lives. Certainly, we have our egos to protect. We might never be party to our own physical execution, but we can learn from Peter how to die anyway.
Lent is often called “the great penitential season of the church.” It is a time when Christians try to learn how to die to prepare themselve for the celebration of Jesus’ own death and resurrection. I just learned this: the word “Lent” comes from the same word as “lengthen.” We call it these 40 days in English “Lent” because now the days are getting longer. Spring is coming! Included in this very season is the promise of life. Easter follows Good Friday. Resurrection and life follow death, and in fact are made possible by death.
During Lent, some people deny themselves a special food or physical comfort. Some people take up a spiritual discipline or a special Lenten devotion. Some still practice the ancient discipline of fasting, as our Jewish and Muslim neighbors also do today. Whatever you choose to do this Lent, including following Peter’s example of learning true humility so that by your mistake someone else might learn something, I would encourage you to join the ancient church in learning how to follow Jesus into death so that we might find life.
And the resurrection promises, in the words of poet and Anglican priest John Donne, “Death, thou shalt die.” (Holy Sonnet X)
Amen.
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