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Look to the Cross

Sermon by Rev. June Barrow — February 10, 2008
 

Something happened this week which orients us, which points us to our future … not Super Tuesday, but Ash Wednesday. Ash Wednesday is the beginning of Lent; it’s our invitation to look again to the cross, to look to Jesus who is the heart of our faith. For us, the connecting of Jesus with the cross is an old and familiar idea, but it wasn’t that way for Jesus’ own close friends. Let’s look at the first introduction to the idea of the cross as the disciples heard it.

Once when Jesus was praying in private and his disciples were with him, he asked them, “Who do the crowds say I am?”
     They replied, “Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, that one of the prophets of long ago has come back to life.”
     “But what about you?” he asked. “Who do you say I am?”
     Peter answered, “The Christ of God.”
     Jesus strictly warned them not to tell this to anyone. And he said, “The Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, chief priests and teachers of the law, and he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life.”
     Then he said to them all: “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will save it. What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, and yet lose or forfeit his very self?”

Luke 9:18-25

Let’s look at this passage again, a verse or two at a time.

Once when Jesus was praying in private and his disciples were with him, he asked them, “Who do the crowds say I am?”
     They replied, “Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, that one of the prophets of long ago has come back to life.”

Luke 9:18-19

Also today the crowds have many opinions about who Jesus is. Some say he was a religious teacher, others say he was a good man, still others say that he is only one name for God, one path to God. Committees form to vote on who Jesus was. Today, as in Jesus’ day, the crowds are of many opinions about the meaning of the name of Jesus.

“But what about you?” he asked. “Who do you say I am?”
Peter answered, “The Christ of God.”
Luke 9:20

“Who do you say I am?” This question is different, personal and pointed. Each of us must stand before this personal question, also. Who do I say Jesus is? And who do you say he is? His friends, the disciples, had puzzled over this question. Luke tells us earlier in his gospel narrative that they have been amazed, confused, awed, and plain wrong about Jesus’ identity. Here in chapter nine, for the very first time, Peter cries out with a flash of knowing, “You are the Christ.” It’s the first statement of Jesus’ full identity. Already they knew he was a pray-er, a teacher, a healer. But now they know what we know, that Jesus is the Christ, that he and the Creator are one, that he is the cornerstone of human history.

And he said, “The Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected…,
and he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life.”
Luke 9:21-22

At the moment of revealing his identity, Jesus also reveals the purpose of his human life. He would suffer and die and be raised again to life and this was God’s own loving provision for us. As soon as Jesus’ identity is known, the living out of his identity is revealed — he will lay down his life, and trust his Father with all things.

“If anyone would come after me,
he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.”
Luke 9:23

Right on the heels of Jesus’ revealing the point of his life, he reveals the point of ours. We, too, are called to follow Jesus, to take him as our model, to do as he did – to lay down our own lives and trust ourselves to God.

Spending your life one quarter at a time
The message is clear. To follow Jesus is to lay down one’s life, to pick up one’s cross daily. When you come to Christ, and you know you belong to God, and you begin to grow in faith, you may say, “I do want my life to belong to God, to be part of the purposes of God.”

Perhaps we can think of our life as a $100,000 bill. “This is the treasure of my life. Lord, I will lay it down. I will give it to you.” And we may imagine laying down our life for God in one grand and glorious and noble act. We admire heroes and martyrs who have done that very thing.

But often what God says we should do is this: We should take the $100,000 bill that is our life to the bank, and cash it into quarters. And we should spend the treasure of our life 25 cents at a time. It’s what Jesus did. Matthew 20:28 says: Jesus said, “Your attitude must be like my own, for I, the Christ, did not come to be served, but to serve and to give my life.”

This humble attitude of Jesus had been baffling people for years. Christ had been spending his life sitting at dinner with people others rejected as unworthy of social inclusion, speaking dignity into a Samaritan woman who had been married five times, touching lepers who had gone years without human contact, stopping for beggars who cried out from the roadside, bothering with tax collectors who were swindlers, engaging a well-to-do young seeker in a discussion about eternal life, making time to welcome and bless children.

Jesus tells us to take up our crosses not once, but daily. We are to spend our lives one quarter at a time. We go through life putting out 25 cents here and 50 cents there. We listen to the neighbor kid's troubles instead of saying, “I’m busy.” We say yes to serving on a church committee. We give a cup of water to some one sick and shaky. We drive the bus. We make cookies for Vacation Bible School. We teach Sunday school. We change diapers in the nursery. We put bulletins together. We write notes to shut-ins. We help build a ramp for someone who has just come home in a wheelchair. We decide NOT to say what we think to our spouse. We decide to speak kind words to someone when those kind words are not the first ones that form on our lips. We forgive someone. We do the dishes — again. We are good parents on an evening when we are exhausted. We call a friend to encourage him. We do speak the truth to someone even though everything in us wants to avoid confrontation. We pray for someone with cancer.

Usually taking up our cross daily doesn’t carry an obvious and apparent glory. It’s done in all those little acts of love, 25 cents at a time. We take up our cross daily, because someday there may be the big moment, the hard sacrifice, the invitation to courage and sacrifice. An awful lot of the time we are not ready. We want to lay down our lives but we want to keep them, too. We avoid change, we love security and familiarity, stability and comfort. I do.

And so God arranges that life helps us along. We lose what we are used to, our health changes, our spouses age, our finances alter, we find ourselves alone, our dreams die a slow death — and, Friends, in the midst of this we can sometimes recognize God’s strange and powerful grace, setting us free, helping us let go of all that we cling to, freeing us to trust in God alone, freeing us to lay down our lives as we know them, to trust God with them. Sometimes these are invitations to lay down our lives, to offer our lives to God bit by bit, one quarter at a time.

The Story of Margaret Dryburgh
May I introduce you to Margaret Dryburgh. She was an English Presbyterian who believed God wanted her to be a missionary. In 1919, she went to China, then to Singapore, where she was a teacher and the first principal of a Presbyterian high school, which still exists. She loved music, directed choirs, and played the organ at her church.

By the time World War II came she was a middle-aged woman — she’d been a missionary teacher for 20 years. I imagine she thought, just as we do, that the next 20 years of her life would be much like the previous 20 had been.

But then the Japanese invaded Singapore and Margaret, along with all Western civilians, went to prison camp. Men went to men’s camps; women, to women’s camps. Families were divided and friends separated. Those interned left behind their homes, possessions, jobs — everything that defined them. For most, the internment lasted four long, hard years. As the war years rolled by, conditions grew worse. Food and medicine were scarce; suffering and death were abundant.

Spirits were very low. Perhaps you imagine, as I did, that suffering together like this would bond people, unite them in a common cause. But suffering of this magnitude isolates and separates people. An American journalist was also interned. Her book about her experience is called Three Came Home. She wrote this about the women prisoners: “How we hated one another.” The common hardship produced theft, greed, hoarding, suspicion, and resentment.

Margaret Dryburgh suffered like everyone did. But she reacted very differently. She wanted to raise the spirits of the women, to bring them hope and beauty and courage. She loved music and wanted to bring it into the camp. But there were no instruments of any kind in the camp. And since the women spoke a variety of languages, a choir was not a feasible idea.

Margaret had an amazing memory. She found that she could recall entire scores of complex symphonies. On salvaged bits of paper, she copied symphonic music, not for orchestral instruments, but for women’s voices. She organized a vocal orchestra. Rather than words, they sang “ooh’s” and “aah’s and “la’s.” Paper was scarce; music was jotted down on what scraps they could gather. They rehearsed hard. One of the women later said that it became the most important thing in the world to get that A flat just right.

After weeks of rehearsal, the vocal orchestra performed for the camp. The only ones who missed it were the very sick and those caring for them. The women in the camp heard the music of Beethoven, Brahms, and Dvorak. They gave several concerts, including one on Christmas Eve. Unbeknownst to the women, some men prisoners were being moved that night. They marched by on the road just outside the camp walls and heard women’s voices singing. Even the Japanese guards stopped in the road to listen.

As Japan began losing the war, supplies grew scarcer; suffering and illness increased. The women became too weak to sing, and the vocal orchestra was abandoned. Many died, including Margaret Dryburgh, just months before the end of the war. Margaret’s manuscripts survived, however, and today her music is performed. [You can hear this beautiful music for yourself on the CD Paradise Road: Song of Survival.]

How was she so brave and so self-giving? I think, Friends, that she wasn’t simply brave during the great trial, during the years in a prison camp. I think she had been taking up her cross daily, spending her life a quarter at a time just as we must. Like us, she faced a thousand small decisions and chose again and again to lay down her own life, to take up the cross of Christ, to follow Jesus.

Few of us will have a trial like Margaret Dryburgh’s. But there will be a big moment for most of us. One phone call is all it takes. Our situations will change, circumstances will swamp us and we will find that whether we want to or not, we must lay down the life we knew.

The Rhythm of Holy Week
Jesus shows us how to do this. We are in the season of Lent which points us to the cross, to Holy Week. The rhythm of Holy Week shows us how to follow Jesus. From the time on Thursday evening when Jesus prayed in Gethsemane to the glory of the Sunday morning resurrection, Jesus shows us how to lay down our lives that we might truly live.

Thursday teaches us to pray. Before Jesus met the cross, he met his Father in prayer. He left behind the crowds, he left behind the band of disciples, he left behind even his closest three friends, and scripture tells us he went on alone. He prayed and came back to his friends. He returned to pray a second time and came back. He went back a third time to pray, scripture says. He poured out his heart, his grief, his struggles to God in prayer. And only after all of that could he say: “Not my will, but yours be done.” Thursday teaches us to pray.

Friday teaches us to endure, embracing the suffering that must come. Jesus, in self-giving love, took up the cross and bore the suffering it brought. Hebrews 12:1-2 tells us that Jesus endured the cross, but that he refused and rejected the shame that comes with suffering. Jesus endured what he must, but he did not allow the shame of the event to name him. Suffering can make us feel ashamed, but it need not. Jesus suffered, but scripture is clear that he refused the shame his suffering offered him.

Saturday teaches us to wait. Imagine the disciples who had lived through the arrest of Jesus on Thursday, who had seen him on the cross on Friday, and who then had to live through that long Saturday when God seemed silent, when the heavens seemed shut, closed to their grief and doubt and questions. Like the disciples, we, too, must wait, through mystery, through unanswered prayer, through grief and loss and disappointment. We must live through the silent Saturdays of our stories. And, like the disciples, may we learn that when God seems absent, he may be near; when God looks powerless, he may be most powerful; when God seems silent, he may be speaking life into being in ways we can’t imagine. He may be bringing resurrection.

Saturday is the “between times” — between the prayer and the answer, between the need and the provision, between the crisis and the resolution, between our question and the answer, between the promise given and the promise delivered. In the Saturdays of our lives, we learn to wait, to discern, to discover the deep content of our own prayers.

Sunday teaches us to be amazed! Sunday shows us that God is sovereign, that he loves resurrection. When no one was watching, when few believed, God was there to proclaim that death and defeat do not get the last word. God gets the last word and the word he chooses is life.

Following Jesus
Jesus said: “What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, and yet lose… his very self?” To follow Jesus is to take up our cross daily, to lay down our lives, to trust in God’s own resurrection. Friends, with this Christ, there is no bargaining. There is no compromise or discussion or agreeing to some of God’s commands and insisting on some of our own. We can lose our very selves, scripture tells us, when we insist on our own way. Jesus said to his friends and he says to us: “But what about you? Who do you say I am?” It’s a question each must answer. Jesus is King of Kings, Lord of Lords, and his name is God Most High. He calls us to follow, to walk as he did, to spend our lives as he spent his, to let God be God in our lives just as in his.

Here is a prayer that cannot fail. If you are willing, why not pray it now?

Lord, I will do whatever you say. I will confess whatever you ask me to. I will obey what you command. I will receive what you give. I will believe what you say is true. Help me to trust and follow and believe and receive. Thank you, thank you, Lord. I trust in the name of Jesus. Amen.

NOTES
The analogy of the quarter was used by Fred Craddock, Leadership, Vol. 5, no. 4.
If you wish to learn more of the story of Margaret Dryburgh, you can order a video called Song of Survival which aired on PBS, or purchase the book of the same name, through www.amazon.com.