Carrying the cross means committing to follow the way of Christ, recognizing that doing so will transform our lives and relationships.

Vicar Bristol Reading
The Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Lectionary 23 C
Texts: Philemon; Luke 14:25-33

Siblings in Christ, grace to you, and peace, in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Have you ever been told that a physical or mental illness was “your cross to bear”? Or maybe it was a particular pain you were struggling with; an obligation that overwhelmed you; an injustice you’d experienced… Maybe you’ve been told that one of these things was “your cross to bear.”

Sometimes Christians talk this way about Jesus’ command to “carry the cross,” this idea that faithful people will accept trials and burdens passively and piously because “we all have our own crosses to bear.” Sometimes it even goes as far as to present suffering as necessary and spiritually redemptive.

But the God we know through Jesus’ words and actions in scripture focused on healing and alleviating people’s suffering,
not demanding it. Jesus provided for people’s needs, and protected the most vulnerable, even when it was scandalous or dangerous for him to do so. Even from the cross, Jesus speaks mercy and forgiveness. If we trust that Jesus, the incarnate word, reveals God’s heart, we can trust that God doesn’t desire for us to suffer. But God is with us when we suffer.

So what does it mean to carry the cross? Jesus gives this command a number of times across the Gospels,[1] and every time he connects it to discipleship, saying “Take up your cross and follow me.”

If we want to know what it looks like to carry the cross, it looks like Jesus. Not just Jesus’ suffering and death, but Jesus’ life. Jesus gives these teachings about taking up the cross long before he himself is executed on a cross. So the example he is calling disciples to follow also includes his life and ministry. To carry the cross, we need to practice the same hospitality, generosity, and compassion that we see in the life Jesus. We, too, need to provide for others’ needs, protect the vulnerable, speak forgiveness. To carry the cross, we need to live like Jesus… even when it’s challenging.

And it does get challenging. The Gospel is good news, but it isn’t easy news.

If we commit to following the way of Jesus, things will have to change. Not just on the inside, in our hearts, but on the outside, in our lifestyles and our relationships.

In the Gospel passage we heard this morning, Jesus adds some drastic language to the call to carry the cross. Worried that the crowds drawn by his popularity won’t take seriously the difficulties of discipleship, he says, “If you want to follow me, you have to hate your own family, your own life!” Whew! That’s a tough bar to clear! We know, of course, that Jesus doesn’t advocate hating complete strangers, let alone close family. But he wants to be sure that people get the message that living in the way of Christ will change their lives. It will shift even their most intimate relationships in unanticipated ways.

This is a lesson Philemon learned the hard way. His situation, which we encounter through one of Paul’s letters, is an example of how living according to the Gospel can challenge the status quo. Philemon is a Christian in the early church, and Paul is writing to him on behalf of Onesimus, who has also become a Christian. Onesimus is in serious debt to Philemon, but Paul urges Philemon to let it go. He should accept Onesimus back into his household – not as a debtor enslaved to a master, but as an equal, a sibling in Christ. Within the social structures of their day, Philemon had a right to demand reparation from Onesimus! But their shared commitment to Christ has changed their relationship to one another. Paul reminds Philemon: This is what you signed up for when you became a Christ-follower! Your life has to change! The world may think retaliation and punishment are fair, but the Gospel demands a different standard. For those who carry the cross, relationships are defined by love, not revenge; forgiveness, not resentment; and mutual respect, not coercion.

As Philemon learned, the Gospel life can involve letting go of things we might prefer to keep: things like status, power, comfort, wealth.

Discipleship can be costly. But it’s not about losing just for the sake of loss. It’s about losing for the sake of love, as Jesus did.

Jesus went all the way to losing his life for the sake of love. And, in doing so, modeled sacrificial love for us. When we choose to follow the way of Jesus, we choose to follow that way. Our “cross to bear” is the burden of love – for ourselves and for one another. That burden is not light. We have to let go of some things in order that we might carry it. We may think we know what we’ll have to lose. But, like Philemon, we will find that the Gospel continually changes our lives in ways that will surprise us and challenge us. That’s the hard work of discipleship that Jesus warned about. When we agree to follow Christ, we will be continually transformed, like clay in the Potter’s hands.

But we can trust that the Potter is making us into something new, something good.

The change might feel painful, but it’s the kind of pain that leads to growth, not the kind of pain that wears us down or destroys us. Bearing the cross of Christ-like love is a way of life.

Every time you make the sign of the cross on your body, remind yourself that you are marked with the cross from your baptism, and your baptismal calling is to carry the cross. Which means your baptismal calling is to live your life with the radical love we see in Jesus. And when that burden feels heavy, remember that it is also life-giving. And the life it brings is stronger than anything: stronger than suffering, stronger even than death. We share in the cross of Christ, yes, but we also share in the resurrection of Christ.[2] And thanks be to God for that! Amen.

[1] Mark 8:34; Matthew 10:38, 16:24; Luke 9:23, 14:27.
[2] Philippians 3:10-11.

The path of Christ is having God give you the humility of Christ – not a false humility, not self-abuse, but true joy in seeing all, and yourself, as the image of God.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost, Lectionary 22 C
Texts: Luke 14:1, 7-14; Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16; Jeremiah 2:4-13

Beloved in Christ, grace to you, and peace in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen

Be careful, very careful, with this Gospel reading.

Once again, Jesus is speaking of life in the reign of God, something we’ve heard all summer. But today’s Gospel is as tricky as any we’ve had. There are side paths that are easy to stumble into, paths which lead away from the path of Christ, if you’re not paying attention.

Jesus doesn’t intentionally set a trap here. In fact, he’s very consistent with the flow we’ve heard from him for months.

The problem is human nature. The particular thing he’s talking about, humility, cuts really close to a nerve in how we live, and makes it hard to hear and follow. Judging by the common way people usually talk about these verses and live them out, most of us have gotten lost on these side paths.

So listen carefully. Keep an eye on Jesus’ lead as closely as you ever have.

Now, our problems with social order and class are a little different from this story.

We don’t have a strict social and class order that’s reflected in how people are seated at the table, but we do have deep problems with social order and class. We’re very familiar with judging and with jockeying for position.

But when Jesus says take the lowest seat, and let others go before you, or, those who humble themselves shall be exalted and those who exalt themselves shall be humbled, we seem to consistently miss the point and take the side paths.

The first is the path of false humility and expectation of reward, one of the main Christian responses to this. Let others go first and pretend you’re humble. But inwardly, we hope someone notices, hope to be invited forward, to be commended. We can even be ridiculously proud of how humble we are. This isn’t a path of humility, it’s a path of pride and deceit. Please hear this clearly: do not leave worship today believing humility means Jesus wants you to pretend to be lower than others, hoping to be commended, resenting when you’re not. Nothing is further from the truth.

The other side path of Christian response is the path of self-devaluing. To hear Jesus saying you have no value, your gifts are of no account, you’re worthless. Everyone is better than you, you deserve no attention. This response has been drilled into the faithful for centuries, particularly by the powerful onto the marginalized and the powerless. This isn’t a path of humility, it’s a path of self-hate, of self-abuse. Please hear this clearly: do not leave worship today believing Jesus says being humble means you have no value, you aren’t worthy of a seat at the table. Nothing is further from the truth.

To find truth, we need to overturn our understanding of the word “deserve.”

So, some believers think they deserve more praise, more attention, are more important, but act as if they’re not because they think it’s how the game is played. The truth is, it may look nice to let someone go ahead of you, but if inwardly you think you deserve more attention, you’ve missed the whole point.

Some believers feel they deserve no praise, they’re worth nothing, deserve being sent to the bottom. This also may look humble, but if inwardly you think you have no value, you’ve also missed the point.

Instead, Jesus is describing an entirely new upside-down world order. Everyone deserves love, everyone deserves praise. From chapter one of Genesis to now God has tried to tell you that all are created in God’s own image. Are worthy of the love of the Triune God who made all things.

Jockeying for position isn’t the problem. Believing there is such a thing as position, that there are people who rank higher, are more important, that’s the problem. Jesus calls for a complete transformation of the heart’s values. Seeing everyone as precious in God’s eyes, including yourself, including the ones who are outside your empathy, those you look down on. Having the mutual love for all Hebrews talks about today, and welcoming strangers not because they might be angels, but because they are the image of God.

Jesus told a parable to show this reversal. But they already had the only parable they needed.

The eternal Word of the Triune God, one with the Father and the Spirit from before creation itself, was at this dinner. The One whom all creation should honor and adore and kneel before watched other people scramble for the important seats.

Jesus is the parable. The One who created billions of galaxies, worthy of all honor and praise, did not, as Paul reminds you in Philippians 2, cling to divinity, but this Son, the Word, humbled himself and took on human flesh, and by this said, “You are beloved, and precious, and worthy.”

That’s Jesus’ vision of God’s reign. It removes any distinction between people. If the God of all time deigns to become a human being, then simply being a human being made in God’s image is glory and honor enough for anyone. For each and every one.

Why have social order and class when we can look at each other in equal joy, recognizing God’s face in each other’s faces?

But going from where we are to living this vision can’t be done in an instant.

That’s where we get lost. There’s no switch to flip that we suddenly know in our hearts we’re all equal, or instantly care for the people whom we don’t care for, or think better of the people we disdain. We can’t suddenly see as Jesus sees, love as Jesus loves, live as Jesus lived. It takes God time to shape us.

So today Jesus names just the first steps toward this reality. Think of what he’s saying this way:

When you were a child and you hurt someone, your parents likely told you to say you were sorry. But if you’re like most children, you might not have truly felt it. There might have been a touch of sullenness and reluctance to your “sorry.”

But one day, the goal is you’d become a person who genuinely felt sorry when you hurt someone, who said, “Can you please forgive me?” Not sullenly, not because you were told to, but because that’s how you viewed the world and all people. Because you loved this person.

Likewise, Jesus says humility’s first steps are: “take the lower seat. Be humble. Don’t put yourself above others.”

But this isn’t the end of the path, the goal of Christian life. These instructions aren’t full life in God’s reign. They’re just the first baby steps of following Christ’s path of humility, a path that leads to the cross.

Sadly, the Church is and has been full of adults of all ages who live frozen at these baby steps. Who never let the Spirit transform their heart and eyes to feel and see as Jesus does. Who are forever children when it comes to this truth of God’s reign. So they – we – toddle off on the side paths of immature humility that only lead to death and pain and sadness. Remaining at the basic level of Christ’s humility for one’s whole life is unhealthy, even deadly, because is shows a dry, empty heart. It’s rejecting God’s fountain of living water, Jeremiah says today, and building yourself a cracked cistern that holds no water.

It’s time to start growing up. To move to solid food, real nourishment, and a deeper understanding of the life in Christ.

Once you leave today’s baby steps and take full, grown strides down Christ’s path, you’ll find the true glory of God’s reign.

It’s a chaotic joy of a table that has enough seats for everyone, and everyone’s getting up and switching seats, sharing food and laughter, telling stories, embracing tears, rejoicing in good news. A reign of God with no hierarchies, no privilege, no rankings, where all look at each other with glad and shining faces, recognizing the image of God in the other because all see it in themselves, too.

That’s what Jesus was hoping to get started at that dinner party, a path that opens up to such chaos and delight and wonder.

To see this in your life, you’re going to want to pray today’s prayer of the day often: Give me, O God, the humility of your Son. Make this joyful reality, this new heart, these new eyes, mine always. Because God delights to give that to you.

And if this is what God models in Christ, and what God wants to make happen in you, and in all God’s children, why on earth or in heaven would you want anything less?

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

 

All of us are bound tightly by whatever we call them – spirits, passions, vices – and God in Christ has come to set us free.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost, Lectionary 21 C
Text: Luke 13:10-17

Beloved in Christ, grace to you, and peace in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen

This poor woman suffered for 18 years, bent over double.

But she didn’t come to the synagogue for healing. That was Jesus’ idea, unlike many of his healings. He called her over and said she was set free from her ailment.

After 18 years, this woman probably didn’t ever expect or hope to be better. She just thought, “this is how I will always be, hurting, struggling to breathe, to move.” Today would be just like every other day.

But this day, she was set free. For the first time in two decades, her Sabbath was restful, peaceful, joy.

This physical healing was her great gift. But not for us.

In Jesus’ wonderful healings we don’t really know where we fit in the story. When we, or others we love, are ill, suffering, we pray for healing. We hope for healing. We even demand it at times.

But we also know it’s not as simple as that. Sometimes God has healed loved ones of physical and mental disease. Sometimes the healing given isn’t what we asked for. So centering our worship with these stories, as the Gospel of the Day, is a practical problem. How do they apply to us?

But this story is different. Because Jesus uses language in this episode that opens a door for us to enter this healing. Oddly enough, it’s language we sometimes are too sophisticated and modern to take seriously.

Ancient people often attributed illness to evil spirits, and Jesus’ day did, too.

This woman has painful scoliosis, caused by who knows what. But Luke says she had a “spirit of disease” for 18 years, that’s why she was bent over double. And Jesus goes with this. He doesn’t say, “Be healed.” He says, “you are set free.” The same word describing freeing a prisoner from a cell, or freeing someone from crushing debt.

When the synagogue leader protests this Sabbath healing, Jesus keeps the image. He defeats his fellow rabbi in a classic Jewish debate, declaring that if the lesser thing – untying an ox on the Sabbath for water (one who had only been tied up over night) – is permitted in Torah, then clearly the greater thing – setting free a woman kept in bondage by Satan (one who had been tied up for 18 years) – is also permitted. The rabbi lost, and he and his friends know it. They’re “put to shame,” Luke says. The crowd of common folk hoot and holler at Jesus’ Jewish wisdom and skill.

But here’s your open door: Jesus, God’s Son, has the compassion and power to set free God’s children who are bound. What Jesus did, even if it uses the language of evil spirits, that’s the hope. Because if you can be set free of something you’ve come to believe will always bind you, wouldn’t that be life?

What ties you up, holds your life, and has done for so long you really believe this is the way you will always be?

The ancient Christian desert fathers and mothers shared the same belief in the presence of evil spirits. But they also had a wisdom that could be a great blessing to us.

They developed an understanding of nine spirits of temptation that afflicted people. They believed these spirits could bind us, hold us in their grasp. A few centuries later, Pope Gregory I codified a list of seven of them, unfortunately mislabelling them deadly sins. But the wisdom isn’t about sin that needs punishing. The wisdom is recognizing forces that trap us and shape us.

The list varied, but mostly it was anger, pride, deceit, envy, avarice, fear, gluttony, lust, and disengagement (sometimes called sloth.) Any of us at any time can be bound up by these evils, our forebears taught. They can hold our hearts and minds, affect our behavior, cripple our spirits, break our will.

Now, some of us in this room, in our community, have physical and mental ailments they’d like to be freed from, but not all of us. But everyone in this room, in our community, has at least one of these spirits.

And today Jesus, the Christ, the Son of God, can set you free.

If “evil spirits” sounds a bit superstitious, think of them as controlling passions.

Is anger always lurking behind your heart, resentment at hand, ready to burst out and make a mess of your life, or to hurt others?

Are you trapped by needing to think pridefully of yourself, ready to manipulate things so you come out on top?

Does your vanity bind you, so you lie not only to others but even to yourself, to make yourself look better?

Does the melancholy you feel about your life lead you to envy what others have and who they are?

Is your need for security such that you cling tightly to things, unable to share, greedy for more?

Are you so afraid of life, so anxious, that you live a life of doubt, sometimes unable to move?

Or is something of a good thing never enough, you never feel fulfilled, needing more and more and more?

Do you see others as objects, trying to control them and the world, finding yourself using others?

Or is the world so fractured, so complex, you see no point in acting, no point in engaging, but fall into the boredom of being and doing nothing?

These are the passions that can bind us all, and everyone finds themselves trapped somewhere in these. That’s the wisdom of our forebears.

But God has come in Christ to set you free. Whether you ever thought it possible or not. Whether you came here looking for it or not. Just because God loves you.

That’s your hope: you don’t have to be bound by these.

Naming what binds you, watching for it, so that you know how and what to pray, that’s a good beginning. Once you know your captor’s name, you can learn new ways of thinking and being that lead to wholeness and life, not the bondage of these afflictive passions.

But beginning, middle, and end of it all is asking your God to free you in Christ. Recognizing you have no more power over the passion that binds you than over physical disease, ask God to set you free. To lead you to serenity instead of anger, humility instead of pride, truthfulness instead of deceit, emotional health instead of envy, non-attachment instead of greed, courage instead of fear, sobriety instead of gluttony, vulnerability instead of dominance, and action instead of disengagement.

The Triune God has sent you the Holy Spirit to live in you and give you life, to break any chains that bind you, trap you, block you from the abundant life God intends you to know. Nothing can separate you from God’s love in Christ, not even that thing that has held you so long.

That’s the joy the leader missed seeing.

Keeping Sabbath pales in comparison to God freeing someone from what binds and holds them. Rather than being indignant, he could have rejoiced with this woman, with the crowds, that God had done such a glorious thing.

And so can you. You can not only ask God to set you free, every day. You can also be one who sets others free, rather than binding them. Give an ox a drink, or a cup of water to someone thirsty. Call an old woman over to love her in Christ. Look out for the ones who are bound and find a way to give them hope, or, if you can, untie them. You can bear God’s freeing grace in your actions, your words, your love, and your witness to what it’s like to be freed.

Unlike this woman, being set free from these things takes a lot of time. A lifetime. We’re all in the state of being freed, and all in the business of helping others find the freeing touch of God in Christ. Until all, oxen and humans, are set free: to live, and drink water, and stand up straight, and praise God’s goodness together.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen