How long the Cross?

2nd Sunday of Lent, 2009
“Deny yourself. Take up your cross and follow me.”

I’ve got a question for you – how long did Jesus carry the cross? All his life?
I’ve been to the place where most likely Jesus was condemned, and most likely to the place Jesus was crucified. It’s maybe a mile – at the very most – two.

Another question - How long did Jesus hang on the cross?
About 3 hours – according to the Gospels.

One more question – how long have you carried your cross? How long have you hung on your cross?

It’s a trick question of course – and not really very fair –

For many of us – we describe chronic pain of one kind or another as the cross that we carry. It could be recurring physical illness. It could be a troubled relationship with a partner or maybe our son or daughter. It could be lack of success - not having enough money to give to God, to save, to pay bills, and then be able to go to a movie every once in awhile. It could be a persistent interior voice that is convinced we are less than….beautiful, or loveable, or wise. It could be judgment that we carry – maybe you haven’t kept those 10 commandments that we read earlier, and believe that you are not good human beings. Maybe none of these describe you and you wonder how anyone could even think these things and you’re glad that you’ve escaped troubles.

But maybe you have picked up the heavy cross beams and nailed yourself – and others – and the inevitable troubles of life to the cross bars - and hung there for how long? Maybe years. Maybe a life time.

Certainly, many of us have been trained to do this, to submit to difficulties, to soldier on – especially we women have been trained to do this – even now – after all these years of feminism.

But what I’ve learned over many years as a Christian woman – a follower of Jesus - is that when we define life’s difficulties as crosses to bear we significantly narrow down our ability to respond to tragedy in creative and life giving ways. My guess is that if you pay attention to what happens in your body – when you think of “bearing your cross” - your stomach gets tight, your heart rate increases, your breath shortens - and anxiety or depression are not far behind. What happens when you try to be good and shoulder your burdens is that a whole range of creative possibilities for healing and for reconciliation and for change are lost because they cannot even be imagined. There’s no physical room for imagination to blossom.

This is Not what Jesus had in mind. He hated the cross. He abhorred this instrument of torture and death for the thousands who were crucified along Roman roadways. For Jesus, the cross was not a good to be grasped as proof of saintliness or Godliness or goodness. The cross was splintery hard wood with rusty iron spikes – and it was designed to asphyxiate – to choke out breath. It was designed as a public teaching tool to keep people knuckled under and fearfully assenting to their own poverty and powerlessness. We might glorify the cross – but Jesus did not. He would have done anything to avoid it – think about him in the Garden – pleading to the point of sweating blood. He would have done anything to avoid the cross - except deny who he was and who God is and who creation is meant to be. Who you and I are meant to be. Not bent over nailed down struggling to make a buck beating our chest about our unworthiness men and women – but straight up beloved glorious energetic beings – stewards of creation – and fully, wholly dependent upon the Lord the giver of Life. We are meant to be friends of God. Jesus would have done anything to avoid the cross except not tell the truth. And not live wholly and fully and directly in the truth.

What truth? The truth that underlies the entire creation – Love that is not wrapped up in itself but pours outward through creation continuously. Love that is always available - that breathes in and through us and sustains us whether we are aware of it or not. Jesus was not about trying to act good. He wasn’t about mentally understanding certain principles. He was about Recognizing this Sustaining Love.

He was about healing and life. Everywhere he went people crowded around him hungry to touch him, to bring into their own bodies and spirits the magnificent power of healing and life and clear vision that flowed through him. They hung on his words. They didn’t understand them, for the most part – but they knew that he taught them so truly that they could trust him in a way that they had never ever trusted before.

So the cross that Jesus had in mind was not the cross of chronic suffering. He came to heal those things that ravage and destroy our lives. Professionals, prayer, community discernment – all of these are ways that the Spirit can pour healing into your life. And the truth is – sometimes suffering is not lifted – sometimes it continues – and the community of Christ is called upon to help spread the weight of it around. That’s why we have lay Eucharistic visitors and pastoral care teams and prayer chains.

The cross that Jesus talked about what was the very particular suffering that arises when you re-align your allegiance to a new way of life in which God is at the center – and not country, not family, not church, not liturgical styles, not organists or priests, not ego. This new life is not about abandoning your country, your family, your church, your ego – it’s about those things taking their proper place.

Follow me. Jesus said. It will cost you everything. It will liberate you completely.

What does that look like?

It looks like Ma Khin Khin Lee – whose picture is on the front of the bulletin and whose name might sound familiar to you, because we have written many letters through Amnesty International on her behalf. She was arrested, along with her three year old daughter, in 1999, for helping to plan a pro-democracy march in her native Myanmar. A young teacher, with a bright future – Ma Khin Khin Lee and her husband shouldered the cross – paying a heavy price as they worked for basic freedoms for their fellow countrymen. The wonderful news is that she, along with 23 other prisoners of conscience, were just freed this past February 24th – after 10 years in prison.

It looks like Jenni Williams and the other women of Zimbabwe, who put their lives on the line for social justice and fair and free elections. She leads a women’s movement for justice that has been nurtured in church sanctuaries – Catholic, Anglican, Baptist, Methodist, and Apostolic. These women confess to raw fear – Jenni has been jailed over 33 times and severely beaten – but she says that she calms her fear and the jack hammering of her heart by breathing deeply and remembering that she is following Jesus on behalf of her children and all the children of her county. And so, Jenni and the Christian women of Zimbabwe take up their crosses and follow Jesus, with their own bodies on the line.

It looks like Jonathon Daniels, one of the martyrs of the Episcopal church. A priest in training, Jonathan Daniels answered the call of The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King and went to Alabama, along with other clergy and laity, to help with the fledgling civil rights movement. After being released from jail, he was with a group of other Christians who’d also been jailed. The day was hot and they bought a soft drink from a small town grocery store. An unpaid deputy met them on the porch and aimed his gun at a black teen age girl named Ruby Sales. Jonathan pushed her to the ground and took the full blast of the gun. His death shocked the Episcopal Church into putting civil rights onto the top of it’s agenda. Jonathan and the thousands upon thousands of unnamed people took up their cross and followed Jesus must be dancing in heaven to see this day when the President of the United States is African American.

Deny yourself. Pick up your cross and follow me. Most of the time this is not dramatic – as in the stories I’ve just told you. Most of the time it’s much more quiet. It’s prayer – “wasting time – not “doing” anything of substance – but spending time with God. It’s letter writing – as we’ve done with Amnesty International and Bread for the World, and as many of you do day in and day out, whether you see the results of your efforts or not. It’s going the extra mile for your student – or for some stranger who needs help. It’s releasing your grip on having things your own way – and asking above all else – for the desire to walk with Jesus, whether it’s to the mountain top or to the cross.

Living the Rule

The Rev. Linda Campbell
"Welcome!"
Matthew 10: 40 - 42

Proper 8A

The last couple of weeks, you have been treated to some great preaching. A couple weeks ago, Nancy Olson told us stories about what the hospitality and companionship of this parish and of other Christians meant to her as she raised her mildly autistic son and followed a call into ordained service. Bishop Marc told us stories of welcome and hospitality experienced by his father, when he was a young man in Saudi Arabia.

I have long thought that hospitality is the core Christian virtue, and have preached this in every parish I have served – every youth group I have led, every Sunday School class I have taught. I am firmly convinced of the accuracy of the Benedictine rule: “All guests who present themselves are to be welcomed as Christ, for he himself will say: “I was a stranger and you welcomed me”… Once a guest has been announced, the superior and the community are to meet the guest with all the courtesy of love. First of all, they are to pray together and thus be united in peace…. Great care and concern are to be shown in receiving poor people and pilgrims, because in them more particularly Christ is received; our very awe of the rich guarantees them special respect.” Follow the Benedictine rule and you will find that it helps you slow down and pay attention. It will help you see God - in the young and the old. In the rich and the poor. In the people you know - and the people you don't know.

I've been in a funk recently and so I know it's time to renew my commitment to deliberately practice hospitality - to go out of my way, every day, to open my mind and my heart and my life to others. I invite you to reflect with me on what welcoming life looks like.

First of all, it means having an open mind. To get an open mind, it helps a lot to read Scripture and walk awhile with Jesus. Joan Chittester reminded me recently that "Jesus was an assault on every closed mind in Israel. To those who thought that illness was a punishment for sin, Jesus called for openness. To those who considered tax collectors incapable of salvation, Jesus called for openness. To those who believed that the Messiah had to be a military figure, Jesus was a call to openness." It is impossible to immerse yourself in deep and reflective reading of the Scriptures, and not be called to the hospitality of the mind that makes room for women in bright pink and shaved heads, or the love that blossoms and grows between people, regardless of gender, or the real need for the basic political will to safeguard our planet. When we make room in our minds for the ideas of the gospel - the barriers of fear and prejudice come tumbling down.

I was a bit chagrined last week when Bishop Marc reported that he had had an extra five minutes on his way here – and so when he saw the Code Pink house on Solano Ave., had pulled in to say hello. I pass by that house almost every day on my way to the church – and had yet to stop in. Even more to the point, I wasn’t sure that I wanted to stop in! With those faded pink banners hanging out front, and the large truck with signs all over it and the unkempt front yard, AND those women who do wacky street theater on behalf of peace – it was just a bit over the top for my basically conservative nature.

So, what I couldn’t do for myself – was done for me. The word from Bishop Marc to Code Pink was that they have allies right down the way – in us – and so, given this friendly push - I have crossed the threshold of their home and am ready to open my mind and meet these wonderfully wild women who give themselves so wholeheartedly to the cause of peace in the world.

Beyond an open mind, being welcoming means having an open heart. How does your heart open? It helps to practice being warm and gentle with others and yourself – when you answer the phone, when you are at the breakfast table, when you are walking the dog. It means treating others with respect. This past week, Bishop Marc gave us the story of his father, who worked in the Saudi Arabian oil fields when he was a young man – and made friends with the Bedouin workers - unlike the other oil men who ignored or made fun them. Bishop Marc’s father learned bits of the Bedouin language and treated them with respect. In return, they took him far out into the desert, into their homes that far removed from the modern world – a world in which hospitality was the central virtue. Heart connections were made and life time friendships resulted. Stories of those friendships were passed on to Marc and his brothers and sisters, as well as to the children born into the Bedouin camps – and those stories became stories that have since been on passed on in many places – including now, at St. Alban’s.

As many of you do, I have the habit of buying food for those who ask. I have walked into Gordo’s many times, to buy burritos for Quint and others who are often on the sidewalk out front. I don’t know about you – but I don’t regularly sit down and give them the food of friendship. Why? Because buying burritos and saying hello feels good and it’s easier. Sitting down and eating with them and having long rambling conversations means letting them into my life and that means change – and the truth is, when you let people into your lives – you cannot know in advance what kind of change that will bring.

The truth is that a heart that welcomes the prophet and the teacher and the little ones – is “a place where the truth of the oneness of all things shatters all barriers, a point where all the differences of the world meet and melt, where Jew and Gentile, slave and free, woman and man all come together as equals.” And that, my friends, is the beginning of revolution. When we let new people and new ideas into our hearts, we begin to shape a new world. The good thing is that it is a new world that is filled with a lot of potential friends rather than probable enemies!

But welcoming others doesn’t just mean thinking new things or feeling new feelings about people we were harsh with – or more likely, simply didn’t think about – it means opening our lives. And that can be overwhelming can’t it? The world – through the internet, the 24/7 news, magazine – is ever in front of us. We KNOW that the poor are poor, that the lonely are lonely, that wars are waged and that young people are dying, that honeybees and salmon and hundreds of other ubiquitous species are disappearing. We know – but we often don’t know why. But truly welcoming the little ones – the ones for whom food is becoming scarce and are extremely expensive, means finding out why – finding out the connections between how we live – as well as the larger question of government and corporate policies – and caring. Real hospitality to the prophets and teachers of our time – people who are telling us loud and clear that the planet is in trouble – and that the “little ones”, the poor ones – are the ones who are bearing the initial brunt – real hospitality means that we consider how to take these concerns into our lives.

Being truly welcoming means bending some efforts to change things, to make a haven for the helpless, to be a voice for the voiceless – it means stretching our ideas of home and family and church to others. What I don’t want for my family and friends and fellow church goers – I do not want for others. What I want for my children, I want for the children of Ecuador and Iran and Nigeria. So – when Ruth has out her table for Amnesty International, I will participate. When I get an email from Episcopal Public Policy Network that my senator needs a letter about the farm bill that affects American small farmers as well as millions of hungry people around the world, I will write that letter. I will pledge money to the church and to some ecology group that is working on climate change and global poverty. I will pay attention to recycling and take the extra time to figure out which can to put trash into. I will take public transportation as often as possible. I will, in other words, do something.

Nodding to your neighbor and shaking hands with newcomers when you pass the peace – that is all good and important but it’s not the kind of hospitality and welcome that Jesus called his disciples to practice. The kind of welcoming that he talked about, is not just about being nice. When you stop to give a cup of cool water to the little ones of the world – you have stopped long enough to notice a need and do something about it. That means being willing to be interrupted and inconvenienced – and it is THE way to come out of yourself – out of any funk you might be in - out of your limited world and into the much larger world of God’s hospitality. Indeed, into God’s welcome to you!


Resource: Wisdom Distilled from the Daily, Living the Rule of St. Benedict Today, Joan Chittester, OSB