2nd Sunday in Lent (Year B)
– Sunday, March 4, 2012
Christ Evangelical Lutheran Church,
Lancaster, PA
Text: Mark
8:[27]-31-38
On
the first Thursday night of the month, the community meal is usually
fairly tranquil, but not last Thursday. After several fights and
having to manage the entire room because the group that served was
short on people, I noticed out of the corner of my eye a man that I'd
spoken with before. He was just sitting there sideways in his chair,
not eating anything. He was turning his head to stare at me. I made
eye contact with him and he got up. From the look in his eyes, I
knew immediately this would be no ordinary conversation. A few weeks
before he'd told me of his struggle to make ends meet since he got
out of the service and of his run-ins with the law. But it was
losing two wives, one to death and one to divorce, that had broken
his heart. And just that week another whom he hoped to marry had
walked away. He had come to the brink of taking his own life. The
tears welling up in his eyes told me of his dashed dreams and his
expected future which now was cut to pieces.
As the
meal drew to a close, this man remained in the hallway of the Parish
Ed. Building, crouched on the floor, his hands clenched into fists,
his body balled up in despair. After I could free myself, I went
over and crouched down next to him. I
asked him if he wanted to sit down, he said no, he wanted to be on
the floor. Over the next hour, he told me about losing
his father, and his brother also. Speaking of God, he said, “he's
a good man, I love him.” But his God whom he loved had broken his
heart even deeper than his wife had. He sobbed, “why does he hate
me? why does he have it out for me?” He would rebuke God, and
then say he was sorry, and then literally shake with anger, his
clenched fists turning a deep red, and he'd ask me if it was ok to be
angry. I told him yes. And so he screamed at his God, saying what
he needed to say. He had hopes for his life, but God didn't deliver.
This
confrontation we hear today between Peter and Jesus is the turning
point in Mark's gospel. I mentioned it two weeks ago at
Transfiguration because it's so important – because it's the
confrontation between our expectations and God's way of doing things.
It's the clash between human things and divine things, to put it in
Jesus' words. After all the great deeds of Jesus, the healings, the
miracles, the epiphanies, Peter finally realizes that Jesus is the
Messiah, the long-awaited one. His hopes for Israel, for himself,
seem as though they could come true. Peter's eyes get bigger. He
sees big things coming.
It's
almost impossible for us to realize just how disappointing Jesus'
words must have been. Just when Peter's hopes were at their highest,
Jesus dashed them with talk of suffering, rejection, and death. The
Messiah wasn't supposed to die a humiliating death, least of all at
the hands of the elders, chief priests and scribes who should be
bowing down before him.
Disappointment
is one of the most common, and human, emotions toward God. The
psalms are filled with human sadness, rage and agony directed toward
the God who allowed the wicked to flourish and the righteous to
suffer. Jesus was a great disappointment for Peter. Everything
scripture and his faith told him about God told him the Messiah
wasn't supposed to end up on a Roman cross. Peter was profoundly
disappointed.
We all
know those whose dreams have been dashed apart. We know parents who
have outlived their children, the nicest person with terminal cancer,
the poor among us doing all the right things for their families only
to be pushed aside by an uncaring society. But it's closer than that
for all of us. We've all been disappointed with God at some point.
We've expected something from God only to see the light at the end of
the tunnel fade to darkness. This is part of what it means to have
faith, to actually believe in God and expect good things from God.
Sometimes we will be disappointed. Sometimes we are concerned with
human things to the exclusion of divine things. So go ahead, right
now, and take out your bulletin, flip over the announcements page and
use some of that free space to write out one way how you've been
disappointed by God. Go ahead, it's ok. There are little pencils if
you need them in the pew rack.
Maybe
you have argued with and shouted at God over your disappointment,
maybe you haven't. I have. Our faith is messy, and Peter is the
patron saint of messy faith. Christ walked with Peter from their
confrontation through three denials, desertion, and to the empty
tomb, but on to Christ's resurrection, to a future in which Peter got
to be the rock on which the church was built. To the cross and
through to the resurrection, Christ led Peter to the death of his
expectation for God, for the Messiah, for himself and for the world,
and on to a new appreciation of who God can be and what God can do,
to a new vision for the world, to a new identity for himself as an
apostle. Peter could never have seen this coming, but looking back,
I imagine he realized how it couldn't have happened any other way.
It's
when Israel's hopes for the Messiah were pierced by nails and the
spear, when Peter and the disciples were completely disappointed,
that God created new life out of death and victory out of defeat.
This is, in fact, the only way our God works. If we're looking for
the God of Israel, the Father who raised Jesus the Son from the dead,
then we must look to the cross to find him. This is the way of our
surprising and creative God, who confounds our expectations at the
cross, only to see us through to the empty tomb and a resurrected
faith. Look to the disappointment, the crosses, in your own life.
We all have a cross to bear, but it seems that in the mystery of God
some bear much greater burdens than others. Let me be clear –
Africans have not so offended God so as to bring on the famine and
AIDS pandemics they face. Parents who have lost children have not
somehow missed the mark by a greater margin than those who have the
privilege of holding their grandchildren. I am no more righteous and
no less a sinner than my friend who has lost a brother, a father and
three wives. How some end up with a harder road is bound up in the
mystery of the God who allows this world to be broken and sinful, but
only so that he can redeem it and us, just as we are redeemed in
Christ. Our disappointment is not a punishment. It's part of this
broken world. We can simply be sure that wherever we are
disappointed, wherever crosses come, Christ is crucified alongside
us, and he is using our experience to create in us a resurrected
faith. Christ is creating in us a faith that can see a future that
was unimaginable before. This is the new life, the new world that
springs from the death of our limited and selfish vision. And so
when our Lord asks us to take up our cross, perhaps he is inviting us
to lay down our insistence upon our own way, and promising that we
can trust our Lord when he leads us along by his hand which was
wounded for us.
I
don't know what the future will hold for my friend from the meal. I
cannot write the next chapter in your story. Our lives are not that
simple, and sometimes lives are burdened with tragedy. This world is
not neat and tidy. But if the crucified and risen God, Jesus Christ,
is anywhere at all, if he's in that water and in this bread and wine,
then he is wrapping his arms around this man, and he has joined
himself to his child and to you, his beloved children, forever and
ever. However your story unfolds, the enduring character will be our
Lord Jesus Christ, who is with you as he shall always be. His love
will hold you beyond death. I am praying for my friend, just as I am
praying for each of you as you face the crosses, and the joyous
resurrections, ahead. I ask for your prayers as well. Amen.
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