Sermon For September 17, 2000
Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost
HEBREW TESTAMENT: Wisdom Spurned ~ Proverbs 1:20-23
CHRISTIAN GOSPEL: Who Is This Man? ~ Mark 8:27-38
SERMON: Dancing In The Footsteps
It sounds like Jesus might be one more of those Presidential candidates. Polling the crowd, holding up a finger to check the wind, trying to find out what people think so that he can tweak public policy just a little bit to bring in a few more votes. “Who do people say that I am?” The disciples said, “Well, word around town is that maybe you are John the Baptist come back form the dead. Maybe you are Elijah or one on the other prophets. Jesus, people are saying all sorts of things.” Even though we are highly critical of all of this polling and change in public policy, we would admit that it is important for leaders to have an idea what people think. It is difficult to lead somebody from here to there, when you don’t where here is to begin with. Jesus shows that he was trying to find out, not so much what everybody else thought, but what the disciples thought. He was preparing them for the lesson of the day. He said, “I’ve heard what word is around town. I’m going to ask you another question now. What do you think? Who am I?” Mark doesn’t record any discussion or describe what we can imagine and that is the disciples looking at each other and trying not to be the one called on. Then Peter speaks up. Peter has been at the middle of things for a long time. He says, “You are the Christ. The Messiah.” If you have seen the Cottonpatch Gospels, you can imagine Peter beaming with pride that he got the right answer to the question. “I’ve got it Jesus! I know who you are! You are the Christ! You’re the Man! You’re the Messiah.” The response that Mark records is a very strange one. He says that Jesus responded, “Sshh, don’t say anything more about that.”
Throughout the gospel of Mark there seems to be an underlying layer of mystery. One of the commentators that I read suggested that Jesus might have been commenting on the depth of people’s understanding. Even though Peter said the right words, the common understanding of the Christ or the Messiah that many people had, as we can see demonstrated on Palm Sunday, is that when the Messiah arrived, the Messiah would be a new King, a military leader, someone who would drive the Romans out of the land, so that the Jews could once again take charge of their future. This commentator said that Jesus understood the assumptions that Peter had when he tagged Jesus with the words “the Christ.” And he knew that was not enough, so he didn’t want Peter spreading an easy answer to the crowd. It was, as we commonly refer to today, “a teaching moment.” Jesus had to explain what it really meant to be the Messiah. He said, “You have visions of glory, of victory. But let me tell you what is ahead. What is ahead is suffering. What is ahead is pain. What is ahead is probably death.” How would you like to be part of an organization, you signed on to the mission statement, putting all your energy into it, you have achieved some good things, you are really proud, then the leader says, “You know where this is going to take us, don’t you? The road is going to be difficult. We are going to be arrested, thrown into jail, interrogated. Some of us may lose our lives for this.” You might have some second thoughts about having signed up. Peter again speaks out and says, “What are you talking about? Hey, we are talking about God here! God is going to be victorious over everything! What is all this talk about suffering and death?” Jesus says, “I don’t like it either, but I know it to be true and I don’t want to hear any more from you.” Scriptures say his words were, “Get behind me Satan. Don’t tempt me to do something else. It would be easy for me to believe that all I have to do is walk into town and the Romans will throw away their swords and the crowd will lift me up to the heights. But that is not why I am here, and that is not why you are here. If you want to be my follower,” he said, “you want to be my disciple? Then you have to pick up your cross and follow me. I came to serve, not to be glorified. I came to give myself, not to gain. If you think you can guarantee the future, you will find that you have nothing at all. But if you listen to me, if you follow in my footsteps, if you give yourself to God’s love, then you will find life beyond your imagining. You have to turn away from human concerns and worries.”
Again we can find ourselves in the Gospel. All of us know a deep spiritual yearning. We know that whatever happens in life, that there will be moments. Moments when we realize that everything that we have, everything that we have achieved is not enough. You might be in the middle of a crowd at Seattle Center, and find that everything is background. You are sitting there with your own thoughts, and you say, “Why am I here? What am I doing? This isn’t providing anything for my life.” It might be in the middle of the night and you wake up and you find yourself unable to sleep. You think about what your life has been and you feel a sense of panic come over you. A fear that your life will be over and you’ll never find out what it all means. There might be other days when you have been smoking cigarettes or taking prescription medication or having a drink, just to relax, to help you from the stresses of life, and you realize that none of those things, none of those things can touch the hunger that you have deep inside of you. Maybe it is less obvious; maybe you have some passion in life. You are an avid follower of a football team or baseball team. You are a collector, spending your free moments going to flea markets or antique shops or collecting on-line, to get one more piece, one more something from your collection that is missing. A goal that makes you feel alive and interested in life. Then you reach the point where one more figurine or one more baseball card or one more of anything doesn’t bring that rush any more, it doesn’t bring that joy to you. You realize that you have been looking in the wrong places.
Frederick Buechner, a Presbyterian Minister, who writes some delightful definitions, talks about the word “lust.” He says that lust is like trying to slake a thirst with salt. You are trying to use the wrong thing to provide a solution for a need. It is because of our inability to find that solution in human things that many of us turn to faith. Even in faith we want to make it something that we can hold onto, something that we can grasp, something that we can own. So we want it well defined. We say that is we want to find true meaning in life, that we have to have faith in God, that we have to accept Jesus Christ, that we have to turn over everything to our Lord. When we have difficult times we say, “Well, we all have our cross to bear.” There is a difference between “bearing a cross” and “taking up your cross.” To talk about something that has happened in our life, something that another person has done, something that circumstances have imposed on us, an illness, a loss of a job, a breakup in a relationship. To call all of those things “a cross” and to feel that it is part of your faith journey to bear that cross, really misses the intention and meaning of Jesus’ words.
Jesus doesn’t say that if you want to be a good person you have to suffer in life, and that suffering will make you good, Jesus says, “If you want to be my follower you have to take up your cross and follow me. You have to make choices in your life. You have to choose to do things that might not be comfortable for you. You have to do the right things. You have to set aside you human needs in order to be able to respond to the call of God in your lives. “If you find your life you will lose it, if you lose your life for my sake, then you will find it.”
All of this paints a pretty sober picture. If you really want to be a faithful person, a good person, don’t do anything to have fun because you’re only being selfish. Don’t do anything for enjoyment. Be responsible. Follow God’s ways. Work for justice and mercy. Toe the straight line. Don’t worry about all that silliness of humanity. Now if you have had that feeling in your life, you are only standing firm in our theological tradition. The Puritans gave that to us, a full dose. To be a faithful person is to wear black, gray and white; to be serious and follow all the ways; put fun and joy off to the side. Obviously I don’t think that is the answer to everything. There is a scripture where Jesus says, “I have come that my joy may be in you, that your joy may be full. I have come so that you might live life abundantly.”
Sometimes the wisdom of God can come to us through all of those e-mail stories that people forward to us. It is very easy to disperse information on the Internet and sometimes we are overcome with the jokes, but I know that many of you are familiar with the anonymous piece of inspiration called “Footsteps in the Sand” where someone has a dream that they are walking with the Lord. It really doesn’t say if “the Lord” is Jesus or God, because that term is used in reference to the creator and to Jesus himself. Someone is walking along the beach with the Lord and notices that sometimes there are two sets of footprints; sometimes there is only one set of footprints. Now these visions of feet in the sand come when the lightening flashes and there is a sequence of remembered events from this persons life. Disturbed, finally this person says, “Lord, you promise that when I accept your love, when I turn my life over to you, that you will always walk with me. I can see that many times in my life that there were two sets of footsteps and I knew that you were there with me. But there were times that there was only one set of footsteps and Lord, I can’t understand why you would desert me in my most needful times, the most dark and troubling times of my life.” The response of faith says, “I didn’t desert you, it was then that I was carrying you.”
That is a pretty powerful piece, but it only says that the purpose of faith is that God is going to rescue us from our most difficult times, that somehow God will help us make it through. I think there is something missing in that approach. I received a twist on this piece of poetry that I think points to it better. In retelling the story, there are again, two sets of footsteps in the sand. One set of footsteps evenly space, going in a straight line down the sand. Another set of footsteps that wander back and forth, sometimes circling back around themselves. Sometimes walking in parallel, but often off to the side, one way or another. Then a point is reached where the footsteps begin to be parallel more and more. And then later on there are still two sets of footprints, but there is a larger set, with a smaller set of footsteps inside. Then farther down those smaller footsteps have become larger and larger until they become the same size as the first footsteps, so only one set appears in the sand. Then farther down, again, there are two sets of footsteps, all over the sand. So the dreamer says, “God, I understand the first part. You are showing me the way and I was wandering around distracted by many things.” God said, “Yes, that is right.” “Then our steps were parallel as I learned to walk with you.” God said, “Yes, you understand that very well.” “Then, when there is a large footstep and a small footstep, I was learning to walk in your footsteps.” Again the response, “Yes, that is correct.” “Then as my small footsteps grew larger, it was as if you and I became one and we walked together.” “Yes, that’s right.” “But, did I regress or something? What happened when all of a sudden my footsteps were all over again?” The response was, “That is when we were dancing.” When we were dancing! And we think that our faith should be serious and somber, that if we are really true Christians that we shouldn’t be having a whole lot of fun. But if Jesus calls on us to live a life so that our joy may be full, so that we may live life in abundance, the purpose is for us to care about others, give of ourselves, to be a part of the world around us, that we might have a joyful existence. We don’t give up everything fun in order to be a Christian. We become a Christian and live in the way that Jesus taught us, so that we might know a far greater joy than we would know in any of the other things that we did in our life. This is an important distinction. And it is a wonderful call for us. It doesn’t say that there won’t be any hard times or any difficult times. It calls on us to find our meaning and our joy in all the good and all the bad that life has to offer. This is what it means for us to be faithful people. God’s Spirit will be with us, to give us guidance in the dance. Thanks be to God. Amen.