Sermon
by Rev. Caela Simmons Wood
First
Congregational UCC, Manhattan, KS
March
6, 2016
Sermon Text – Mark 8: 31-38
When God came to Sarah and Abraham
and promised to make of them a multitude of nations, God was inviting them to
live into the larger story. Now, anyone who comes from a big family can tell
you it’s not necessarily always smiles and roses. Life in community – living
into that bigger story beyond ourselves – can be hard work.
Even in smaller families, it can be
hard. There are benefits to a life lived in relationship
with others…but there are very real costs, too.
I want to tell you about a friend of mine. She gave
me permission to share her story with you and I’m going to call her Jill, which
isn’t her real name. My friend Jill has four children. Her oldest child is
about to enter kindergarten. When he was 3 or 4, Jill and her husband decided
to open their home to another child. They are foster parents to a daughter who
is now about 3, I think. About nine months ago, Jill gave birth to their second
biological child. And two months ago, in the middle of a cold winter’s night,
the folks from CPS showed up on their doorstep with a newborn– the biological sister
of their foster daughter. So Jill has four young children – two infants and two
preschoolers. I’m telling you – foster parents may be the closest thing to
superheroes we have walking among us. If you’ve ever wanted to support foster
children or their families, I would encourage you to consider becoming a CASA
volunteer. My friend Jill says their CASA has been a real life-saver in their
journey.
I look at Jill’s life and don’t really pretend to
understand how she makes it through each day. Caring for four children that
young – the feeding, the bathing, the diapering and pottying, to say nothing of
the intense emotional needs…..it seems astonishing to me that anyone could
survive the relentlessness of those tasks. But then, as if I weren’t already in
awe enough, you throw this into the mix: Jill and her husband spend a lot of
time in court or preparing for court dates. The biological mother of the foster
children wants very much to have them back – of course she does. And Jill loves
them as if they were her own children – of course she does.
And so all of these days filled with laundry, and
bottles, and diapers, and reading books, and kissing boo-boos, and answering
questions…all of these days might eventually lead to a time when my friend only
has two children living in her home. The foster children may go back to their
biological parents. The uncertainty for everyone must be excruciating.
Loving isn’t easy. Sometimes it looks like this:
sitting up in the middle of the night even though everyone else in your house
is asleep and staring at a tiny baby. You’ve loved this baby for every one of her
sixty-some days on earth. And tomorrow there is yet another court appearance
that may determine whether or not she will go to live with her biological
mother. And if that happens, you may not see her again. This tiny creature that
you have loved with your whole heart. And there’s not much you can do about it
all. Most of it is out of your hands. And it hurts. And it’s really, really
hard – this loving business.
I think Jesus knew a bit about just how hard it can
be to love. As he was approaching his death, he tried to prepare his friends.
He knew it was going to be really hard on him. He told them what was going to
take place – about the arrest and the trial and the execution. But they didn’t
want to hear it. They didn’t believe their love could be taken away from them.
And so Jesus got testy. He said to them, “Look. I
know this is hard for you. But if you really think you are one of my followers,
you have to get this one thing straight: you have to realize that a time will
come when you have to take up your own cross if you want to keep following me.
If you keep trying to make things easier on yourselves…well, it won’t work.
You’re going to end up empty-handed. But if you are willing to lose your own
life for my sake and for the sake of the Gospel, you will discover your life
has been saved.”
Oh, Jesus. Why must you come speaking in riddles and
gibberish? How can this be? How can someone lose their own life just to have it
saved? And while I’m complaining about how difficult this passage is, can I
also just take a moment and note something very important? This passage has
sometimes been misused in very harmful ways. Sometimes, people have used this
passage to try and comfort or control people who are being abused, enslaved, or
otherwise mistreated. People have said, “Oh, this is just your cross to bear.
Grin and bear it. God will redeem you through your suffering.”
I don’t believe for one second that’s what Jesus was trying
to say here. Jesus knew that he had a very particular cross to bear and he was
willing to follow the road he was on until death because he believed he was
doing it for the sake of the gospel. That is not at all the same thing as
asking someone to stay in an abusive relationship or situation just for the
sake of…what? I don’t even know. The point here is that Jesus was telling his
followers that a time might come where they might need to suffer for the sake
of the greater good – for the sake of bringing others to a better understanding
of God’s extravagant love. That’s a completely different thing.
I’ve never much believed that suffering is, in and of itself,
redemptive in some way. Or that suffering should be a goal. No, it seems to me
that Christ came that we might have life and have it abundantly.
It seems, though, that Jesus had seen just enough of this
wide world to understand that suffering often comes. Whether we want it or not.
And there are ways – both big and small – that we are sometimes called upon to
offer our lives for something bigger than ourselves. And I don’t just mean
something like being a solider or rushing into oncoming traffic to save someone
who is about to be hit by a car.
My friend Jill is also giving up her own life in order to
live into something bigger than herself. She has intentionally chosen a path
steeped in suffering, in hopes of sewing tiny, lasting seeds of love that might
one day grow into giant, beautiful, shade trees of hope.
Here’s something else about Jill’s story I didn’t share
earlier. Her mother-in-law is unwilling to hold or even look at the youngest
baby. She has told Jill that she is unwilling to open her heart to this baby –
unwilling to risk any attachment – because she doesn’t want to be hurt when he
someday leaves their family.
Oh, but to love is to risk! Because our days together are
never certain. Let me tell you a story about something stupid I once said. I
had a friend who was preparing to marry a man who is about 25 years older than
her. In my youthful ignorance, I said something like this: “Don’t you worry
about him dying? I mean, he’s going to get old and die long before you do. And
won’t that be awful?” She said to me, “Caela, you have no idea how long David’s
going to live. He could die tomorrow. You’d still love him for every day that
you have him, wouldn’t you?”
My friend understood what Jesus understood – and what he was
trying to tell his friends: our days are numbered. We don’t know how numbered,
but we do know that we have a limited amount of time with the people and places
we love. Lent is a season of the Christian year where we remind ourselves of
this important fact: from the dust we have come and to the dust we will return.
In the midst of the certainty that all of our days are
finite, it seems to me that the only chance we have of leaning into infinity in
some kind of meaningful way is by living for something larger than ourselves. I
think maybe that’s what Jesus was trying to help his disciples see – that the
only real way to live is to release our own lives for the sake of the larger
story.
In closing, I want to share with you this poem, written by
the Rev. Michael Coffey as he reflected on Jesus’s mandate to lose our lives
for the sake of the gospel:
this road you pave with your words
and your broken body and blood poured
it is not on the lustrous map I bought on Amazon
the Travel Channel has not done a feature on the
highlights and hot spots
there is no restaurant tour with stops for every
palate
and no kitschy giant dinosaurs to stop and take
snapshots with the kids
this way that you speak of with mouth wide open
is every dark dream we ever feared might be true
and all that we wish we could fix about our lot
and the sum of all we reject and hide in the mind’s
black box
hoping we will never lose control and crash into the
jungle
and have its contents played for all to hear
but you say this path, this bumpy road, this crooked
cross highway
is the way of life itself, the gift hidden inside
the ugly truth
that we will indeed know suffering no matter our
resistance
but oh, letting it befriend us we finally have
something to live for
something bigger than ourselves, so trembling we
submit
and sink into your eddy of mercy and welcome the
news
we live only when we have something we are willing
to die for
when we know that our lives in their short span were
spent for love
