Lent 2B – 2006, Genesis 22:1-14, Psalm 16:5-11 Romans 8:31-39, Mark 8:31-38 The Rev. J. Brian Ponder Church of the Resurrection, Starkville, Mississippi March 12, 2006 In the Name of God: Father, Son and Holy Ghost. Amen. I came across the following reflection in as I was preparing for this week’s sermon. It’s by the Rev. Claudia Dickson, director of spiritual formation at the Center for Biblical and Spiritual Formation in Raleigh, NC and author of the book Entering the Household of God. I think this reflection speaks great truth in the context of the season and the several lessons we’ve heard from Scripture this morning. She writes: [The Reflection was read here.] Today’s lessons echo a theme, a call, to surrender our all to God—our all short of choice, but to indeed choose partnership with God. Whether it’s in the story of the binding of Isaac or Jesus’ call for us to take up our cross, the stories are replete with a call to denial of self. They make a distinction to Dickson’s question posed early in the reflection: “Are we to observe Lent by proving that we can deny ourselves something?” … Indeed not! Our Lenten pilgrimage—and as Dickson states, our lifelong pilgrimage—is in search of true life … not just a notion of surviving this wilderness experience by denying ourselves something, but finding life, true life, “life” in its fullest of terms, by denial of self—not giving up something, but giving up self. Our lessons are full of images and language about handing over our lives and that which we might otherwise control—turning it all over to God, … trusting … resting … assured … hopeful. This doesn’t mean that the story of the binding of Isaac isn’t problematic, or maddening, because it is. It’s a picture of God that I’m not sure I want. It’s gruesome. It seems mean. It’s God going too far! … Or is it? … And then there’s Peter. Last week we heard that Jesus was driven into the wilderness and tempted by Satan, and now Satan stands right before him … the Adversary in the midst of the everyday, clothed, if you will, as Jesus’ entrusted disciple, trying to hold onto a notion of Messiah that Jesus did not come to fulfill. … Just as God often asks not the expected but the awesomely unexpected , Jesus, too, surprises them … us, revealing more and more the whole while about his true life, his true nature. Both stories are about temptation … God’s tempting … testing of Abraham to show his faithfulness, Abraham’s temptation to furnish proof of his faithfulness, and Jesus’ temptation by Peter to settle on a compromised Messiah-ship. These lessons are about obedience and faithfulness, but there’s more, so much more. … Don’t we oftentimes prefer a conception of discipleship which leaves the Cross out of it … a discipleship that wraps up all the loose ends, that’s tidy and compact and neat? … We’re called to messiness … a divine messiness, a dangerous discipleship in the name of Christ … to follow where God would lead us—whatever the Cross and whatever the cost. And it’s scary … or it should be! In giving all over to the working of God, our very lives not only bear witness to the kingdom of God still being revealed in this world, but what’s more, that our lives become a very part of that coming kingdom. … You’ve heard me say it to the point of it being cliché, but this is truly about confessing just who and whose we are—trusting in that divine relationship wherever it might lead—even to the cross. As one writer puts it: The word “cross” … is a difficult word to face. It has certainly been one of the most misused words in the whole vocabulary of Christianity. We have given the name of “cross” to so many things that are not a cross at all in the truly Christian sense of the word. … The Cross for Jesus was his deliberate choice of giving his life a ransom for many, his deliberate choice of ministering to [humankind’s] need of the truth about God, to their need of love, cost what it might. [For disciples] Taking up a cross … means the deliberate choice of something that could be evaded, to take up a burden which we are under no compulsion to take up, except the compulsion of God’s love in Christ. It means the choice of taking upon ourselves the burdens of other lives, of putting ourselves without reservation at the service of Christ in preparing a way for the kingdom of God, of putting ourselves in the struggle … whatever the cost. … If we love God there is danger, the danger of a cross, the danger that life will be upset, that it will be loaded with the burdens of others, that it [might] be thrown into deadly combat … But it is the bright danger that illuminates life with a divine light. … Friends, this is the light that has illumined the paths of so many before us. This is the light that has illumined the paths of such people as: ∑Martin Luther King, Jr.—who waged peace to bring about justice and equality for people of color—for all people—in this country; and the light of ∑Archbishop Desmond Tutu—who along with many others has helped establish not only a process towards, but a road through to forgiveness and reconciliation in post-Apartheid South Africa; and the light of ∑Mother Theresa of Calcutta—who not so much solved the sickness and dis-ease of the those who were suffering and dying around her, as she helped them to die in dignity and full humanity; and what we’re hearing now of the light of ∑Tom Fox—the Quaker—a pacifist—found dead and having been tortured in Iraq on Friday who worked before his death in opposition to all oppression and affirming the presence of God in everyone—even those who would become his captors and murderers; and … the light of ∑You and me—if we so choose it and allow it to illumine our pathways and guard us in the footsteps of the One we profess to follow … none of us great people … all of us just ordinary people, allowing room for God, if it’s God’s will, to do extraordinary things in and through us. In it all, we find out more clearly, more truthfully, more authentically just who and whose we are, that no matter what the obstacle, no matter what the burden, no matter what … nothing will be able to separate us from the love of God. … May we so choose it. May we so desire it. Amen.   Dickson, Claudia. An Empty Space, a reflection found in The Living Church, v. 232, no. 11. March 12, 2006. Pages 10-11. Plaut, W. Gunther. The Torah: A modern commentary. New York: Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 1981. Page 150. Buttrick, George Arthur, commentary ed. The Interpreter’s Bible, v.7. New York: Abingdon, 1951. Pages 770-771. Ibid.