I.N.I.

A sermon to be preached on the 19 Sunday after Pentecost (aka 17 September 2006) and based on verses from the RCL Gospel for the day, St. Mark 8:34, 35, to be preached at Christ Lutheran Church, Elizabethtown, PA [and based somewhat on a sermon I preached at Concordia, Granite City, IL on 26 September 1982]

Grace, mercy, and peace be yours in Christ Jesus our Lord,

Dear Friends in Christ,

By this time, I guess pretty much everyone who is going to school this fall has started classes. It’s going to be a while before the next long holiday weekend. It’s too early for a snow day. We start off with a pretty long stretch of books, and homework, and teachers. And did you notice how this morning’s three lessons all touch on teachers?

The Old Testament lesson (Isaiah 50:4-9a) really grabbed me in the first translation I picked up earlier this week when I read: “The Lord God has given me the tongue of a teacher, that I may know how to sustain the weary with a word. Morning by morning he wakens — wakens my ear to listen as those who are taught.” Our New International Version translation renders that opening “The Sovereign Lord has given me an instructed tongue…” but I see a connection in that one must be instructed before one can teach.

Our Epistle for today James 3:1-12) is that marvelous, marvelous passage about the control of the tongue, and it starts out with the warning that “Not many of you should presume to be teachers….” And apparently one of the reasons James had in mind is that a teacher’s tongue can lead him or her into all sorts of trouble. As, of course, the rest of us can be brought down by our own tongue, or the tongues of others.

And our Gospel brings us stories of Jesus who (in verse 31 of Mark 8) “began to teach them saying that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, chief priests and teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and after three days rise again. He spoke to them plainly about this….” Here Jesus — as teacher — spoke plainly to his disciples about the way his own body would be fulfilling the role of the teacher that Isaiah had spoken about (50:6) “I offer my back to those who beat me, and my cheeks to those who pulled out my beard; I did not hide my face from mocking and spitting.” And note, would you, the immediate reaction he got to this teaching: Peter took him aside to rebuke him!

These precious bits of teaching were not immediately scooped up and treasured by the disciples. The disciples, either led by Peter or bowled over by Peter’s pushing himself forward, immediately rejected this teaching. They wanted to proclaim, that is they allowed Peter to begin to proclaim, ‘Lord, say it isn’t so! You can’t mean that! Don’t even think that’s what will happen!’ These people so near and dear to Jesus didn’t recognize the value of the teaching Jesus had just given them.

Did you ever notice how the true value of something is often not reflected on the price tag attached to it? Most of us have heard or read stories about a very valuable antique having been bought at a yard sale for just a dollar or two. And here in the Gospel, Jesus’s words cost the disciples nothing, but were so very important and valuable. Jesus’s words here ultimately cost Jesus his life. How much did Jesus’s cross cost? Its price tag would certainly have been deceptive. The cost of a beam of wood couldn’t have been all that much. It may even have been recycled, taken from a construction project in Jerusalem or having already been used at some other execution. In any event, Jesus did not have to open up his wallet to buy the thing (although, I’m rather sure that if he had been carrying any cash in the Garden of Gethsemane, it probably would have quickly disappeared among those coming to arrest him). So it didn’t really cost Jesus anything.

OR it cost him a great deal. And it was costly to Jesus, to his heavenly Father, and is even costly to us who intend to be followers of Jesus.

The first cost to the Father was the loss of his perfectly created world. Had sin not come into the world, then the cross would never have been necessary. But Satan got into the game early on. He tempted Eve and Adam. They ate the fruit and fell into sin. God lost his perfect world.

The greater cost to God the Father, though, was losing his Son. God in Heaven had to let his sinless Son suffer and die; for what? In order to save a rebellious world from eternal death. When Jesus became sin so that he could die in our places, his perfect Father in Heaven had to turn his head, had to forsake Jesus, had to give him up. What a terrible price to pay for a rabble of rebellious humans, some of whom were hammering nails through Jesus’s hands at that very minute. A terrible price, but God paid it.

Jesus paid, too. For a time he had to give up his unlimited power and glory in order to cramp himself into a human body. I picture that for myself like being in an accident and then having to live in a full body cast for months. Except worse. That would only be a hint of what Jesus went through when he moved from ruling the universe at the right hand of the Father, to living in a restricted and restricting human body, being at one place at one time instead of everywhere at all times. It cost Jesus just to come live among us.

And it cost him dearly to die the way he did. The costliest payment for the cross came that Friday afternoon as he hung on the accursed tree and was drained of his life blood, robbed of his breath. The horrible suffering that went with being crucified is simply unimaginable to us. There were no laws against cruel and unusual punishments, except that this cruel punishment was reserved by the Roman empire for low life criminals. It was a horrible way to die. And dying was the horrible price Jesus had to pay for the cross. It was not neat and quick and easy. It was not humane. It was not peaceful. Jesus’s death on the cross — because of what each of us had done (and continue to do) to slap God in the face — his death was very costly.

This cross — this expensive cross is the one Jesus teaches us here that we need to “take up for His sake and the Gospel’s.” There are at least two levels of meaning in this key phrase. One is that we will all have to be prepared to die for our Lord. The other is that we will have to live lives of self-denial.

Being prepared to die for the Lord is not something that seems too much of a reality to us in America these days. We pride ourselves on our right to exercise our religion as we see fit. But there are Christians throughout the world who are daily in danger of losing their freedom and lives because of their faith.

And the pages of our Church’s history are written red with the blood of martyrs. We could begin with the prophets of the Old Testament. Or with the murder of the Bethlehem babies. Or with the beheading of St John the Baptizer. Or St Stephen, at whose execution Saul of Tarsus assisted. Or other early followers of Jesus who suffered death for his name’s sake at the hands of the Romans. Or the martyrs of the Middle Ages. Or of the Reformation era. Or of World War II. Or of Communist regimes. Being prepared to die rather than give up the faith has been a characteristic of Christians throughout history. When Christ calls us to “take up our crosses for His sake and the sake of the Gospel” He calls us to be ready to die.

Another facet of the call to the cross is that it calls us to self-denial while yet alive. We need to disown our sins and to disown our sinful selves. Neither of these is easy for us to do. Our sins are part of our very nature. When we confessed our sins at the beginning of the service, we told God that we were in bondage to sin; we admitted that we have sinned in our thoughts, in our words, and in our deeds; we confessed that we have sinned by the bad that we have done, and by the good that we have left undone. That doesn’t leave a lot about us either untouched or uninfected. When we have to disown our sins in confession to God, we have to somehow rip out our very being and throw it away because together they are an abomination before God.

To take up our crosses and disown ourselves means that we have to go against our natural sinful selfish inclinations and to share our money, our food, and our goods with those who have none. We have to deny our prideful insistence that we and our kind are somehow superior to others who are different from us. We have to acknowledge that God is God not only of ourselves, but also of the whole world. Then we have to bend our every effort to get the message of Christ’s redeeming death on the cross, of his overpowering love, out into the waiting ears and hearts of the world.

Without this expression of faith shown by our good works or by our good words, there is no visible evidence that we do indeed believe. James wrote about that earlier in his epistle. In the section that’s today’s lesson, where he writes about the untamed tongue, he mostly focuses on the trouble that little muscle can cause. But the corollary should be clear, too, in that the tongue also praises God, also teaches others about God’s love and forgiveness, also offers words of comfort and peace to hurting, troubled, lonely people. The tongue, though a small part of the body, can be directed and guided to share the good news of God’s love that was so clearly shown to us when Jesus died that costly death on the cross. The tongue can be directed to teach others about God.

By God’s grace, empowered with the Spirit, washed clean at Baptism, and fed at the altar, you and I can indeed take up our crosses and follow Jesus. We can deny sinful ourselves. We can follow Him, our best and truest Teacher, to death if need be but certainly and always we can follow him in loving other people as He loved us and in telling them the Good News of salvation.

In Jesus’s name. Amen.

And may the peace of God that passes all human understanding keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus, our Lord.

S.D.G.