Sep 13 | “Do you want to tell this story?” (Sermon, September 3rd 2017)

“From that time on, Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised. ²²And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, ‘God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.’ ²³But he turned and said to Peter, ‘Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling-block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.’

24 Then Jesus told his disciples, ‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. ²⁵For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. ²⁶For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life? Or what will they give in return for their life?

27 ‘For the Son of Man is to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay everyone for what has been done. ²⁸Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.’”

Matthew 16: 21-28

 

Last week, we talked about heroes. We talked about Peter, who made his proclamation to Jesus. “You are the hero we’ve been promised.”

But there’s a twist.

The hero they’ve been promised is not an avenging angel, or a warrior king come to violently liberate vassal Israel from its latest Pharaoh.

This hero will be betrayed and executed by friends and authorities. Executed in a way that normally would result not in a swift burial but in a corpse left to be eaten by dogs.

No wonder Peter rebukes Jesus.

The Gospel of Matthew softens the word “rebuke” by including Peter’s line: “This should never happen to you!” It doesn’t sound like a rebuke, does it? The Gospel of Mark includes no such line. It only says that Peter rebuked Jesus. The Greek word is “epitiman,” and implies chiding as well as warning. It is the same word used to describe what Jesus does when he tells the disciples not to reveal who he is – that is, the Messiah.

Is Peter warning Jesus not to speak of these things openly? Why?

Perhaps Peter is caught up short by this new idea of what his hero will look like, and indeed what it implies about the kind of people he and his friends are to let this happen. And he rejects it, rejects that his hero will be betrayed and brutally, shamefully murdered. He’s being invited into a major paradigm shift, and he doesn’t like it.

We usually don’t, do we?

Of course it’s not the only paradigm shift he’ll have to endure before the story is over. Jesus says that his true followers should imitate him in this hideous march to death. And eventually Peter himself goes from being the hero of his own story to being the villain, the one who leaves his friend behind. No-one likes to consider that they are capable of things like this.

But we are.

Peter says, “You’re the hero we’ve been promised.”

Jesus says, “Yes…but it’s not what you think.”

Peter hears, “No, I’m not. And neither are you. No one is.”

Bummer.

Except maybe it isn’t.

The most beloved stories of our culture are about ordinary people who discover that they aren’t so ordinary. Star Wars. The Matrix. Harry Potter. Ordinary folks suddenly inducted into a secret world of magic super abilities; ordinary folks who discovered that they were extraordinary.

We love that story because we all imagine ourselves as the hero of our own story. Of course in time we usually discover that we are, in fact, painfully ordinary, and painfully mortal.

All of us know what it’s like when we discover that we and the people we love are really just…us. Fallible animals, capable of great innovation and kindness, as well as great cruelty and selfishness, and usually existing in the rather undramatic space in-between.

What frightens many Christians is the possibility that maybe the Church is not the hero of the story of creation.

What frightens many others is the possibility that maybe humankind is not the hero of the story of creation.

The belief that humankind is the hero is called anthropocentrism, and it’s one of the idolatries of the modern Church. Human beings have a very important role to play in the cosmos, but we are only one piece of a massive and complicated system of interlocking parts, all of which live or die by each other.

Our actions as a species have huge consequences, and that should frighten us, because we’re not driving this bus.

But it can also be a comfort. The earth does not stand or fall based solely on us. Even if we had managed to avoid committing the great sin of climate change, life on earth could still end by a stellar black hole, or a gamma ray burst, or the bizarre phenomenon scientists call galactic cannibalism. All life on earth will eventually perish when the sun burns out in five billion years, no matter what happens to humankind before then. We humans are supremely adaptable and terribly fragile. The first recognizable skeletons of Homo sapiens are about 200,000 years old. Our sun, by contrast, is 4.5 billion years old.

It is no longer possible, knowing what we know, to imagine God creating the sun solely to serve us.

We have two choices: We either believe that there is no story at all, and leave this building immediately to go do something else, or we choose to take our rightful place in the story alongside creatures like the sun and seeds and dark matter – alongside other servants and children and lovers.

Because this is God’s story, and we’re all a part of it.

This should not make us feel small or insignificant. The greatest gift of God to creation is that all of us are known and loved fully by the One who made all things. Never unlovable or forgettable or disposable – here by love for love, from seed to star.

Here’s an amazing fact: Every single day, a human being replaces 40 to 50 billion of the trillions of cells in her body. Every day, cells are dying and being replaced by new ones. Every cell has a story.

Every being is a cell in the body of the cosmos.

Some are stars, some are planets, some are single-celled organisms wiggling in a drop of seawater, and some are people with stories, hopes, and dreams.

God knows and treasures every single one, because God can. But no one of those cells is in full control, even though sometimes it may appear that way.

Jesus says, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”

So, Christians, knowing who we really are: Are we not only willing to embrace our finitude, but willing to be one of the cells that dies so another may live? Are we willing to exchange a seat of power for a seat of pain? When we hear the words, “One day, when the glory comes, it’ll be ours,” do we hear that addressed to us, or to someone else? Are we able to accept, even rejoice in the possibility that when the glory comes, the poor and despised of this world will be lifted up to walk to God across our backs? Are we able to rejoice in the God who asks us to be willing to endure torture and execution for what is right when all the world proclaims it to be foolishness, or sin? Are we able to gather and worship not because we are better than the world, but because we are reminding ourselves that we are all a part of a much greater story than we can ever fully comprehend, and the truth of that story: that God’s business is the business of love, and love is worth dying for, and why would you ever not want to be a part of that story?

I’m asking these questions because I’m not always sure of the answer myself.

We are servants and yet we do all carry power. Some are white, some are not, some are queer, some are straight, some are able-bodied (always temporarily), some are disabled, some are neurotypical and some are not, some are men and some are women and some are both and some are neither, some are poor and some are rich and some are in between. All of us hold power, and all of us have known the absence of power, the sting of rejection, the pain of humiliation. This makes us mortal.

What makes us mighty, what puts us on the side of Love, is how we respond when we see others subjected to that pain. What makes us eternal is embracing our finitude before it can be inflicted upon us as though it were a punishment in a world that equates lowliness and difference with degradation and impurity.

Do you want to tell this story?

Refuse to believe that lowly means less.

Embrace the vulnerable, and proclaim your own vulnerability loud.

Exchange the crushing burden of protagonism for a cross.

The story is already happening all around you.

To paraphrase the singer Florence Welch, don’t give up – just give in.

Let us who are here by love for love be love.

Like Moses, like Mary, like Jesus, let’s proclaim, Hineni. “Here I am.”