Faith and the Withered Fig Tree

Text: Mark:11:12-25

This passage from Mark’s Gospel is a difficult one to process.  What do we do with Jesus arbitrarily cursing a fig tree for not having fruit when he was hungry?  And, what do we make of Jesus telling his disciples that they have the power to command a mountain to be removed into the sea if they believe in their hearts and don’t doubt at all?  What about his telling them, “whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.”  It sounds like TV preacher stuff that we all know is spiritual abuse; i.e., “Lassie died, Timmy, because you didn’t have enough faith and so your prayer couldn’t heal her.”

What Jesus did to that fig tree seems to be such a bizarre example of the arbitrary use of his God-power that the Lectionary (WCC 3-year) avoids this passage and its equivalent in Matthew altogether.  In fact, and if I might arbitrarily use my preacher-power of exaggeration, it appears that in this age of our awakening environmental consciousness the wider church finds Jesus’ actions here embarrassing and that’s if you can find someone who really believes he actually this for certainly, our lovey-dovey Jesus meek and mild did not kill a fig tree for not having figs on it when he was hungry just like he didn’t make a whip and angrily beat the temple venders when he cleansed the temple.  “Jesus don’t do violence” we like to think.  He wouldn’t kill a fig tree and if he did anything at all about the venders it was to find an usher and politely ask him to ask them to leave.  At most, he just walked into the temple and simply said to the venders, “Hmm.  I see,” and they cowered and fled.  

Nevertheless, regardless of how strange and disturbing this passage is we still have it and we must still deal with it for in the storyline of Mark’s Gospel the cursing of the fig tree, the cleansing of the Jerusalem Temple, and Jesus’ imperative to his disciples to have faith in God and pray are the first things that Jesus did after having been publicly declared to be the Messiah by the masses.  These are Jesus’ first in state acts as God’s anointed King to save Israel and usher in the Kingdom of God.

According to Old Testament prophecy (Zech. 9:9ff), Jesus’ slow ride into Jerusalem on a donkey was the way God’s anointed end-times Messiah, the Son of Man would come into Jerusalem to establish his kingdom and restore double to Israel.  It should have been that he rode into town on the donkey and went straight to the temple and there take his place on God’s throne, the Mercy Seat, the lid of the Ark of the Covenant and then the power and wonderful reign of God would pour forth to begin making things here on earth as they are in heaven.  Yet, that’s not what happened.  Jesus rode into Jerusalem and he did go straight to the Temple, but he didn’t take the throne of the Mercy Seat.  He simply looked around and then went and spent the evening in Bethany.  It was not yet his time. 

The next morning he set out to return to Jerusalem and he was hungry.  He sees a fig tree in leaf and goes over to it only to be disappointed.  Now, fig trees are quite important with respect to religious symbolism.  Even in Jesus’ day, in nearly all religions that were known, the fig tree represented bountiful, blessed religion.  If the fig tree is producing, then whatever god it was a people served was blessing them.  This particular fig tree would have then been symbolic of the religion that was going on at the Jerusalem temple.  Jesus sees this fig tree in leaf and assumes that it must be in fruit, but it wasn’t.  Mark says that it wasn’t the season for figs, but fig trees bear fruit twice in a year’s time, in early spring and late summer.  So if it had leaves, there should have been figs.  I think that was what Jesus thought.  But that tree had no figs.  So, in what is probably the first thing Jesus said since the donkey ride, he pronounces a word of judgement literally to the fig tree and figuratively upon the corrupt religion that the Jerusalem Temple had come to embody.  “May no one ever eat fruit from you again.”  Jesus then carried through by cleansing the Temple.  That cleansing probably only lasted only for a day and maybe just hours, but in the big picture that word of judgement against the Temple bore its fruit in 70 AD when the Romans levelled it.

Jesus’ next act as king after cleansing the temple of the venders was teaching the crowds, "Is it not written, 'My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations'?  But you have made it a den of robbers."  He was working with Isaiah 56:6-7 which reads: "And the foreigners who join themselves to the LORD, to minister to him, to love the name of the LORD, and to be his servants, everyone who keeps the Sabbath and does not profane it, and holds fast my covenant – these I will bring to my holy mountain, and make them joyful in my house of prayer; their burnt offerings and their sacrifices will be accepted on my altar; for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples."  Contrary to his actions, we should be beginning to get the hint that his Kingdom of God reign will be exercised through prayer.

Carrying on, at the end of the day on their way back to Bethany Peter points out that the fig tree has withered.  In what are probably his first words to his disciples since the donkey ride, Jesus answers, “Have faith in God.” – note that throughout his Gospel Mark has consistently labelled the disciples as having no faith.  Jesus then tells them of the integral relationship between faith and prayer. “Truly, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, 'Be taken up and thrown into the sea,' and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says will come to pass, it will be done for him.  Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.” 

Jesus’ is not teaching that if they have enough faith deep in their hearts that they could even get God to uproot a mountain and cast it into the sea.  Rather, Jesus is here speaking in what could be called apocalyptic code – certain images represent certain things which one would like to say catastrophic things about without getting into political trouble of the treasonous nature such as is the Book of Revelation.   The mountain is the Temple, God’s holy mountain as per Isaiah.  The sea is peoples and nations, the chaotic state of human community out of which God will bring the order of his kingdom.  Jesus is telling his disciples to pray and believe that Yahweh’s temple, the seat of his worship and rule will be uprooted from Jerusalem and cast into the sea of humanity; thusly becoming the Holy Spirit-filled church.  By the power of faith through prayer the seat of God’s worship and reign is cast into us for we are the temple of God.  Jesus’ throne is in our midst.  God’s Holy Mountain is in our midst.

A few years ago a former parishioner of mine was hospitalized.  He had come very close to death for what appeared to be inexplicable reasons.  On one of my visits to see him at the hospital he said to me, “It’s hard for me to say this without getting emotional,” and he paused and then went on, “Prayer is the greatest power we have.”  He said that sitting on the edge of the bed that quite easily could have been his deathbed and he said it knowing that prayer was at the heart of his recovery.   We exercise faith, the reign of God, in and through prayer.  Faith is our relationship with God and prayer is our active participation in that relationship.  Faith is rooted in being in the presence of God, of being before the Father arm-and-arm united heart-to-heart with Jesus in the Holy Spirit. 

I’m going to say something very controversial and maybe even hurtful.  If so, I’m sorry.  There is no true faith outside of being in the presence of God; no presence of God, no faith.  We can say we believe in God.  We can even say we trust God to work things out.  We can say we believe Jesus died for our sins and we’re going to heaven.  But, if there has been no being in the presence of God, no knowing the steadfast love and faithfulness of the Father because of being united with the Son in the Holy Spirit, then that faith is blind intellectual assent, not faith.  I knew my former parishioner fairly well and what I believe he was saying is that his recovery came about not so much because of his own being in the presence of God praying but more so other people being in the presence of God praying on his behalf.  Faith participated in through prayer is the reign of God.

Jerusalem in Jesus’ day was filled with a corrupted religion.  Much of the Christian church today is corrupted religion.  Its an institution that exists merely for itself.  The reason was they/we got out of the presence of God and in the resultant loss of faith became something else.  Friends, do not underestimate the importance of your devotional life, of taking the time daily to sit and welcome God’s presence to yourself.  If you don’t feel anything, so what, keep doing it.  From time to time you will.  Timothy Keller in his book The Reason for God tells of a woman in his congregation and her experience of prayer.  He writes that she “complained that she had prayed over and over, ‘God, help me find you,’ but had gotten nowhere.  A Christian friend suggested to her that she might change her prayer to, ‘God, come and find me.  After all, you are the Good Shepherd who goes looking for the lost sheep.’  She concluded when she was recounting this to me, ‘the only reason I can tell you this story is—he did.’”  Amen.

Wasteful Love

Text: John 12:1-8

          It seems odd that the temple authorities and rulers over Israel did not recognize Jesus as their Messiah who would save them from their oppressors and establish the Kingdom of God.  He did all the things the prophets said this special God-anointed deliver would do.  Indeed, things that God had promised that he himself would come and do for his people.  Jesus had openly manifested the Kingdom of God, the Reign of God, in his wanderings around Judea and Galilee and even in the surrounding nations.  Everywhere he went he had openly been proclaiming, healing, exorcising, and doing miraculous feedings that revealed who he was.  Even the non-Israelites in Syria and Jordan and even the demons realized that he was the Son of God; but not the powers that be in Jerusalem.  They simply had too much power to loose.

            In contrast to these powerful rulers blinded by their power and prestige, is a young woman, probably a former prostitute, who wastes a bottle of very expensive bottle of perfume on Jesus because she kind of gets who he is and especially that he is going to die.  All the Gospels tell the story of a woman anointing Jesus for his burial in the days following his triumphal entry into Jerusalem.  In Matthew, Mark, and Luke’s version Jesus speaks highly of this woman saying that she had done a beautiful thing and that everywhere the Gospel was proclaimed what this woman had done for him in anointing his body for burial would be told also.  Apparently she got it.

            As Jesus said, this woman had done a beautiful thing.  In the Jewish faith one could say she performed an act of Chesed, an act of loving kindness that truly reveals the nature of God; pure, unconditional, wasteful, and one could even say broken-hearted love.  The perfume she poured out on Jesus in an extravagant act of wasteful love was worth upwards of three years salary for any of us here.  Yet, to Jesus it was a beautiful act that revealed the very heart of God.  You see, her anointing of Jesus with this perfume corresponds to God the Father’s wasteful act of letting God the Son’s life be given, his blood be shed for the bearing away of our sin and the cleansing of our hearts which in turn is our reconciliation to God made real by his giving us God the Holy Spirit.  Jesus wastes his life to restore value to ours in that we are reconciled to him, united to him by the Holy Spirit to become his sisters and brothers and beloved children of God the Father just as he is.  With the wasteful gift of his Spirit God has truly united us to the love which God is as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  By anointing us with the perfume of the Holy Spirit, God has made us partakers of the relationship which Jesus the Son shares with God the Father in the Holy Spirit.

            Well, enough of this theology stuff.  God has wasted the perfume of his very self on us.  He has wasted the life-giving blood (life; cf. Lev. 16-17 esp. 17:14) of Jesus the Son on us in the gift of the Holy Spirit to us.  I have said wasted.  This is not a very nice thing to say of us, especially as we know that God loves us dearly, indeed loves all people dearly even the most evil of us who have ever lived.  Yet, when we look at the whole condition of human existence – the wars, the poverty, the diseases, the way we abuse one another, our pride, our self-involvement, our self-indulgence, our self-righteousness, the way we judge one another – it would make more sense for us like Judas the thief and betrayer to turn to God and say, “Why have you wasted the gift of yourself on us.  Certainly you have a better use for yourself.  Destroy us all and start again!”

            Well, here is how Mary’s act is so significant, why it was a beautiful thing.  Of all the disciples only she understood that Jesus was going to die.  In fact, she was the only human outside of Jesus who got it.  Even though his disciples knew who he was, they wouldn’t believe him when he said he had to die.  Instead, they were blinded with their own hope and belief that he would ride into Jerusalem, cleanse the temple, kick out the Romans, and establish the Kingdom and…they would rule with him.  Hmmm, we’re back to that power thing again.  But Mary (in full reflection of the image of God), knowing no other way to express her overwhelming grief at knowing Jesus whom she loved would die, she rather spontaneously takes this bottle of very fine, very expensive, very pure perfume and wastes it on Jesus’ dirty feet.  An act that simply says, “My heart is broken, but I understand that you must die.”  All she could do with her grief was this futile, wasteful act of preparing his feet for burial.

            Mary’s beautiful act mirrors God’s understanding and deep grief over our fallenness and the inescapable fact that we, his beloved children, must die.  God is a grieving God not an angry God demanding righteousness and obedience.  His children are dying by their own demise.  Of course, he’s angry about it.  But, what else can he in his great love do for us in this life of death other than to anoint us for our death and burial with his very self that we might live through death and be healed in resurrection?  God our Father, Brother, and Constant Companion is not this sourpuss, judgmental, angry, old man of a God who demands an inordinate standard of morality from us that we cannot possibly live up to.  God is not eternally angry at us and wanting to destroy us if we don’t repent.  God is not going to destroy us and start over!  Indeed, not!  He loves us each as his own dear children.  Instead of destroying us God the Father in an act of wasteful love sent God the Son who wasted his life as one of us and died so that God the Father and God the Son might wastefully give us their very life in the gift of God the Holy Spirit that we might live through death.  Praise be to God!  Praise be to God!  He understands.  He understands that the end result of the skubala[1] of our lives is that we must die, but out of his love for us he will raise us just as he did his only begotten and beloved Son, Jesus because the same Spirit that lived in him lives also in us.

            Just a closing note, in John’s Gospel, this account of Mary is located within the Lazarus Story which foreshadows what is to become of us and in classic Johannine form describes us, the church, as we are now.  If you remember, Lazarus and his sisters Martha and Mary were dear friends of Jesus.  Lazarus became ill and died.  Four days after the fact when Lazarus corpse is obviously decomposing Jesus shows up and Mary lets him have it.  “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”  Mary here cries out for every human being who has ever cried out at God saying, “Where the hell are you God?  If you really cared and really were here this skubala would have never happened.”  Jesus wept and proceeded to the tomb where he commanded Lazarus to come forth.  Next, we find Jesus a few months latter in their house where they are throwing him a feast and all the faithful are gathered around. 

The Lazarus Story, from his death/resurrection to the feast, tells us of the Day of Resurrection and the feast we will share with Jesus in his Kingdom when all things have been made new.  But, John here doesn’t want us to let this slip by as simply being a picture of the way things will be.  Rather, he is describing very well how things are within the church, the community of believers who know the wasteful love of God because they know he has wasted it upon them by the gift of the Holy Spirit they know they now have.  The Lazarus Story describes the many communities all over the world just like us who are a living testimony to the wasteful love of God.

Gathered around Jesus at this feast, the feast which we now share, are many people just like us just like we are gathered here together today.  Among them are the people like Lazarus whose healing or conversion experience has been so vivid that it is like being raised from the dead.  There are the untold number of Martha’s who do and do and do and do.  There are the untold numbers of disciples who know Jesus yet they just silently stand by and watch what the others are doing.  There are also those like Judas, thieves and betrayers whose motives are always for their own gain.  There are the poor to whose aide we are called.  There is Jesus, our Lord, seated confidently in our midst.  Finally, there are the Mary’s who most beautifully and simply love Jesus and get what he’s all abut and love accordingly having no better way to respond in the midst of the futility of this broken world.  They waste everything they have to love as they have been loved. 

So, to wrap this up, how about you; where are you in this story?  As someone who knows Christ, who knows the wasteful gift of the Holy Spirit, who understands his death and understands that God understands that we must die, who understands that God grieves for us, who has the hope of Resurrection, where do you fit in here in the Kingdom?  I guess a better way of asking would be, “Would your neighbours say that you are a silent disciple, a busy Martha, a thieving and betraying Judas, or a wastefully loving Mary?”  Amen.

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[1] That’s New Testament Greek for s*#t.  Paul uses it at Philippians 3:8 where he recounts his achievements prior to his encounter with Jesus on the Road to Damascus.  “Yea doubtless, and I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things and count them but dung, that I may win Christ…” (KJV).

When Serpents Bite

Text: Numbers 21:4-9; John 3:14-22

I remember back in my early days of ministry in West Virginia having a conversation with a woman about church membership that certainly opened my eyes.  I asked if she and her husband had ever thought about becoming members of the church and her immediate response was “Why would I need to do that?”  The question caught me off guard a bit.  I had grown up in and around the church and I just assumed that everybody knew that once you came to faith in Christ Jesus you joined the church.  Not being prepared for that question I decided to use humour to buy myself some time so I replied, “Oh, so that you can vote and hold office.”  I was not prepared for the question, “what benefit to me would there be in joining the church?”

What it is to be a member of a church is a difficult concept to get across these days as Western culture has become so anti-institutional.  Ever since 1965 people have stopped joining things, church and civic organizations the same.  The reasons why are very complex and beyond our timeframe for this morning.  So consider yourselves spared.  Nevertheless, I would not be far off if I said that within and without the church the default understanding of church membership is simply getting one’s name on the membership roll and accepting a few more responsibilities in the area of giving, attendance, and sharing duties.  In this case, church membership simply equals club membership and the basis of the church club would be the practice of religion. 

Oddly enough, this utterly unbiblical understanding of church membership has arisen in Western culture alongside of the struggle for religious freedom.  In order to ensure a person’s basic human right to believe what they want to believe in a world where there are many ways of being Christian as well as many religions, Christian faith has been reduced to simply being a matter of private belief, the church has been reduced to just another voluntary association, and Christianity has been reduced to simply being one expression among many of the same universal truth.  It is this mindset that must be countered to understand what membership in the church is all about.

First, today one must be ready to give account of how the Christian faith is not simply one expression among many of a universal truth called god.  It is about the one and only God who is not a part of this creation really acting within history to save and transform his creation that has fallen into futility because of humanity’s rebellion.  His actions to save began a long time ago with people named Noah and Abraham, and then Moses and ancient Israel.  It culminated when God revealed himself as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ God the Son become human.  As Jesus Christ God has acted uniquely to save humanity once and for all from the futility of sin and death.  Through him we are given eternal life which is knowing God the Father and God the Son by participating in their realtionship through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit ( see John 17:3).  The Triune God of Grace is really acting in real history and matter, in time and space, to make all things new and will ultimately do so on the Day of Resurrection when Jesus returns.  We live by faith until that day with the guarantee of the Holy Spirit with us and working healing in us, in our bodies and particularly works of reconcilliation in our relationships.  In and among us us is now where God has chosen to dwell.  As our reading from Ephesians said at the beginning of this service “we are being built together spiritually as a dwelling place for God” (Eph. 2:22).  The Triune God of grace is acting concretely within history to deliver his creation in, through, and as Jesus Christ and this is the foundational truth of the Christian faith.  No other religion says this.  So, to be a member of the church one must believe this and the only way one can believe this is by God graciously giving us the faith to trust the love of the Father revealed in the Jesus Christ, a gift that comes to us by the work of the Holy Spirit upon us.  Apart from God’s revealing himself to usthere is no true faith.

Second, the church is not a voluntary society where people of like-minded beliefs have joined together for the worship of God.  The church is a fellowship that God creates by calling people to faith and in the same act calling them together for the express purpose of being a fellowship that reflects his image by the love he creates in and among them.  We are the body of Christ and each of us individually is member of it (1 Cor. 12:27).  The earliest understanding of church membership is that we are each body parts of the one body of Jesus Christ resurrected. Keep an image in your mind of resurrection where in communities all over the place God is rising up the body of Jesus Christ through which God reveals himself to the world through our life together, a life that is shaped by the cross.  We together as a church globally become like a resurrected Jesus, the New Humanity as opposed to Adam the Old Humanity walking around in our communities.  To be a member of the church is to be called together by the Father and joined together in the Holy Spirit to be the body of Jesus Christ to our community.

Finally, the Christian faith is not a matter of private faith.  It is a matter of shared faith.  Private faith simply says, “I believe this and so I do this.”  The Christian faith says, “We believe this so we do this.”  We believe that God so loved the world that he sent his only Son so that all who believe in him may not perish but have eternal life.  We know this because we have found healing by looking towards him.  Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so has Jesus Christ been lifted up.  To be a member of a congregation is to make a promise to a group of Christians to whom God has called you.  The promise is to live by Jesus sole commandment that we love one another, the love he proved and demonstrated to us by going to the cross for us.  It is the promise “I will love you as I know the Lord has loved me and, as we all know, we will fail miserably at this task so I promise to forgive, as I know I have been forgiven”.  We promise to do this undconditionally and even if we do not receive in kind from our sisters and brothers in Christ.  Just as one does not go spouse shopping after marriage, so we do not go church shopping after making the promise of membership within and to a particular congregation.  Even if it gets to the point where we say “I can’t stand that preacher’s sermons.  In fact, I can’t stand him.”  Even if it gets to the point of “I’d get more out of shopping at Wal-Mart on Sunday morning than spending time with that dying brood.”  Even if it gets to the point of detesting that miserable fellowship.  God has still called us each to this fellowship and in faith we have made the promise that we each will look to the cross together and find healing when those serpents start to bite because “we been thinking on Egypt”.  The real relationship involved in life together with the congregation to which Christ has called us each to live as his disciples is the closest thing to Jesus Christ we will know until we meet him on that day.  It is in the body of Christ that we meet Jesus Christ, him crucified and resurrected for us.  Being a member of a congregation is a serious matter.  It is a promise akin to the promise of marriage.  It is a promise to love and pray for and be together with those whom God has called us to and whom he calls to us so that we might come to know Christ and be formed in his image.

            

Its the Way of the Cross Not Religion

Text: Exodus 20:1-17; John 2:13-22; 1 Corinthians1:18-25

One of the greatest social upheavals that I have lived through has been what one could call the systematic removal of Christian symbols and practices from North American public culture.  Some call it secularization.  Others call it pluralisation.  Others call it privatization.  I’m sure there are other words for it, but no matter what you call it the fact today is that when we walk into a courtroom we’re not going to come face to face with the Ten Commandments.  All of those e-mail spam campaigns to save the Ten Commandments just didn’t work.  There was a cultural tsunami happening and if you’ve happened to see any video footage of a tsunami you know the question your faced with isn’t “how do we save what we have” but rather “how do we live now that it’s gone”.  So, in the wake of this cultural tsunami that has removed Christian “religion” (and notice I’m not saying faith) from North American public culture the question we Christians have to ask is “How do we live now that it’s gone?”

To answer that question maybe it would do us well to ask what the Ten Commandments are in the first place. If we look at them in the Hebrew language we find that they aren’t really commandments.  They are statements of reality stated negatively.  They describe the way the people who owe their lives to God are to be by saying what they are not to be.  Because the Lord delivered the Israelites from slavery in Egypt and they owe him their lives they will not worship anything other than him.  They will keep a Sabbath.  They will honour their parents.  They will not do those things that destroy trust among people, you know, murder, stealing, adultery, coveting, those sorts of things.  The Ten Commandments weren’t simply a moral code that God commanded the Israelites to obey.  They were to be the Israelite way of life, a way of life shared among a people in whose lives God had really acted to save; and here’s the important thing to note, a way of life that gave image to the very nature of God.  God told them not to make any little idols of him because the way they were to live together would be his image.

It is interesting to note how in ancient Israel the way of life brought forth from the Ten Commandments got overshadowed by a big business religion centrally focused in a very wealthy priesthood who controlled nearly everything from a great big building in Jerusalem.  It was supposed to be that if you wanted to know what the God who inhabited the Jerusalem temple looked like you just had to look at how his people lived together so genuinely and peacefully.  But what you really saw was oddly dressed hypocrites who grew rich off the spiritual needs of God’s people.  Its no wonder Jesus was so angry with them.

Well, pushing this into our “since Jesus” context, the Apostle John gives us a new spin on this idea that the way we live together shows what God is like in 1 John 4:12-21 where he writes: “No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us.  By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit.  And we have seen and do testify that the Father has sent his Son as the Savior of the world. God abides in those who confess that Jesus is the Son of God, and they abide in God. So we have known and believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them…We love because he first loved us.  Those who say, “I love God,” and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen.  The commandment we have from him is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also.”

Paul also sets us in this direction at Romans 13:8-10: “Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. The commandments, ‘You shall not commit adultery; you shall not murder; you shall not steal; you shall not covet’; and any other commandment, are summed up in this word, ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’  Love does no wrong to a neighbour; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.”  So for ancient Israel and for us in the church today, if the Lord God who delivered the Israelites from slavery in Egypt is our God too and who has saved us from sin and death, then we fulfill the Law and give image to God by being a people who love one another and our neighbours as ourselves.

So, to answer the question of how we Christians are to live now that a cultural tsunami has washed away Christian religion from our public culture, well maybe its by getting back to the foolishness of the cross, the way of self-denial and loving our neighbours as ourselves that marked the earliest Christian churches.  Christianity in North America has been little more than a religion that served the public good.  We are guilty of simply being good people who are blessed with comfort who do what good people are supposed to do and that’s go to church so God will know whose side we’re on.  That’s a start, maybe, but it resembles little of what Jesus meant when he said, “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 world and forfeit their life?” 

That’s a good question for us.  Have we forfeited the new life we have in union with Christ Jesus by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit so that we share in his fellowship with God the Father because we have resigned ourselves to believe that God has blessed our particular culture and we in turn practice our religion by being good, moral law-abiding, church-going citizens.  That’s the way of religion not the way of the cross.  We like to believe that we are not bad people but how many of us try to live on less in this materialistic and consumeristic culture so that we are able to give more towards feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, and clothing the naked.  How many of us turn off our TV’s or put aside our leisure reading so that we may know the joy of prayer and reading the Bible?  How many of us are to busy to gather with our brothers and sisters in Christ for Bible study or to serve in his church?  I could let this guilt trip go on.  Its Lent, the time of year we do this sort thing.  But I’ll end with a Jesus quote, Jesus said, “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.  Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.  For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”  The way of the cross; it may be foolishness even scandalous in the eyes of our culture, but it’s where the Triune God of grace abides and offers his rest.  Give it a try.  Amen.