SECOND SUNDAY IN LENT

Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16

Psalm 22:23-31

Romans 4:13-25

Mark 8:31-38

Prayer of the Day: O God, by the passion of your blessed Son you made an instrument of shameful death to be for us the means of life. Grant us so to glory in the cross of Christ that we may gladly suffer shame and loss for the sake of your Son, Jesus Christ our Savior and Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.

“…the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.” Mark 8:31.

This week it was announced that Alexey Navalny, the Russian opposition leader died in a soviet style prison colony under highly suspicious circumstances. It did not have to end that way. Navalny was well known globally. He had a strong support base in his own country and powerful friends abroad. He could have remained in western Europe. He could have continued his opposition to the bloody reign of Vladamir Putin from the safety of exile, employing social media, lobbying world leaders for support and encouraging his supporters within Russia. I have no doubt that his friends, family and supporters urged him to do just that. Putin has proved repeatedly that he has no qualms about murdering anyone he deems a threat to his regime. Two nearly successful assassination attempts had been made against Navalny by the Russian government. Nevertheless, Navalny was not content to carry on his struggle from a safe distance. He chose to return to his homeland, knowing well the danger he faced. He chose to confront the powerful systemic evil in his country head on.  

“Why,” I can hear his friends asking. “Why do you want to throw your life away? We need you alive, not dead.” I am sure Saint Peter made much the same arguments in his rebuke of Jesus following Jesus’ declaration that he was destined to undergo great suffering, rejection and death. I am sure Peter pointed out to Jesus that he was walking into a trap, that he was playing into the hands of his enemies, that no matter how much popular support he might have, his movement was no match for the raw power of Rome and the religious establishment in Jerusalem facilitating it. “Stay here in Galilee, Jesus. Be the gadfly in the wilderness. Foment opposition from afar and wait to enter Jerusalem until the time is right.”

All of this sounds entirely reasonable. And it is, in terms of human survival instinct. But human survival instinct is not an ally of God’s reign. The life God desires for us is so much more than mere survival. The shape of that life is spelled out in the Sermon on the Mount. As I have said before repeatedly, the Sermon is not a set of ideals unattainable in the real world and meant only to convince us of our sin and our need of God’s forgiveness. To the contrary, the Sermon is a blueprint for the life of Jesus as it unfolded in the gospel. Jesus lived the reign of God he preached in the real world and he graciously invites his disciples to participate in that abundant and eternal life. Jesus had no illusions about what living under God’s reign means in a world hostile to it. He understood that the life of humility, peacemaking, pursuing justice and practicing radical generosity would lead to persecution. But he also knew, and would have his disciples know, that the reign of God is well worth surrendering all the rights and privileges the world has to offer. Indeed, God’s reign is more precious than life itself.

It might sound counterintuitive that one should gain one’s life by losing it. But that is the logic of the cross. One who seeks to preserve life at all costs wastes it. The notion that life can be preserved is a delusion. We all know that life is finite and will end one way or another. The obsession with preserving life, extending it and fleeing the shadow of death at every turn only robs it of its sweetness. The fear of death prevents one from focusing on what matters, from spending life’s precious moments on those things that are important. The choice is not between living or dying. The choice is between pouring out one’s one life loving God, loving one’s neighbor and being formed into a creature capable of living under God’s gentle reign, or having one’s life pried out one’s futile grasp without ever having learned what it was for. To put it in the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., “If a man has not discovered something that he will die for, he isn’t fit to live.”

For Jesus, the reign of God was more real than the tyrannical reign of the Roman empire. Only God knows how much Jesus knew about the particulars of what awaited him in Jerusalem. Suffice to say, he knew enough to understand that his confrontation with the empire there would likely, perhaps certainly, lead to his death. Yet he went to Jerusalem anyway. He went because his dying at the hands of his enemies was the only way to prove the extent of God’s passionate love for the world. He went because he needed to demonstrate the ultimate futility of tyranny, violence and terror. He went to show the world that death, the most powerful weapon of evil, cannot kill what is true, beautiful and good.

Rome surely did not believe that Jesus had been raised from death. But it knew his disciples believed that he had. Rome understood that the church, the congregations of Jesus’ disciples, had lost their fear of death. That is because Jesus took the cross, Rome’s most powerful symbol of imperial terror, and turned it into a sign of victory, driving it like a hollywood stake into the heart of the imperial vampire. Like every other kingdom, empire and modern nation state, Rome’s control over its subjects depended upon its power to inflict death. Rome knew well how to deal with hostile armies. It knew how to punish dissidents and crush violent insurrections. But its powerful military machine was impotent before a people who feared neither death nor persecution. It was now becoming clear to all the world that the people who worshiped Jesus as Lord would never recognize Ceasar as lord-even when threatened with death. And there wasn’t a damn thing Ceasar could do about it.

I have not seen much in the way of persecution for expressing my faith.[1] I have certainly never been threatened with bodily injury, imprisonment or death. I would like to believe that is because I live in a country that respects religious freedom. But I think folks like Martin Luther King, Jr., Father Daniel Barrigan, Clarance Jordan, Rep. John Lewis-all of whom encountered violence and/or threats of violence for their faithful witness to God’s reign proclaimed in Jesus Christ, might beg to differ. They know that praying for God’s will to be done on earth as in heaven means, as Luther’s Small Catechism reminds us, praying that it be done among us. It is a prayer that God might make our lives instruments of justice, reconciliation and peace in the shadow of oppressive empires and nation states trading only in the coin of violence. If we are not experiencing the weight of Christ’s cross on our shoulders, could it be because, like Peter, we are hell bent on avoiding it?

I believe that disciples of Jesus know the joy of living only after they learn that living is more than just survival. I believe ministry becomes an exciting task rather than a burden when ministers are inspired by faith in Jesus and the promise of God’s reign rather than driven by fear arising from all the uncertainties we face personally and professionally. I believe that renewal comes to the church when it ceases to fret about the viability of its institutions and its long term sustainability and turns its attention to opportunities in the present moment for witness in word and action to Jesus and the reign of God he proclaims. I believe fear is extinguished when we become convinced that the world’s worst day is behind it, namely, the day it killed the most precious gift God had to give-and instead of retaliating, God raised up this rejected gift and offered it to us again. The truth cannot be silenced by killing its messengers, banning their books, kicking them off social media and attempting to erase their names and faces from the public square. Alexey Navalny understood this. How much more so should disciples of the one called the Way, the Truth and the Life.

Here is a poem by Nikki Giovanni about some people who lived by faith and not by fear.

Rosa Parks

This is for the Pullman Porters who organized when people said
they couldn’t. And carried the Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago
Defender to the Black Americans in the South so they would
know they were not alone. This is for the Pullman Porters who
helped Thurgood Marshall go south and come back north to fight
the fight that resulted in Brown v. Board of Education because
even though Kansas is west and even though Topeka is the birth-place of Gwendolyn Brooks, who wrote the powerful “The
Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock,” it was the
Pullman Porters who whispered to the traveling men both
the Blues Men and the “Race” Men so that they both would
know what was going on. This is for the Pullman Porters who
smiled as if they were happy and laughed like they were tickled
when some folks were around and who silently rejoiced in 1954
when the Supreme Court announced its 9—0 decision that “sepa-
rate is inherently unequal.” This is for the Pullman Porters who
smiled and welcomed a fourteen-year-old boy onto their train in
1955. They noticed his slight limp that he tried to disguise with a
doo-wop walk; they noticed his stutter and probably understood
why his mother wanted him out of Chicago during the summer
when school was out. Fourteen-year-old Black boys with limps
and stutters are apt to try to prove themselves in dangerous ways
when mothers aren’t around to look after them. So this is for the
Pullman Porters who looked over that fourteen-year-old while
the train rolled the reverse of the Blues Highway from Chicago to
St. Louis to Memphis to Mississippi. This is for the men who kept
him safe; and if Emmett Till had been able to stay on a train all
summer he would have maybe grown a bit of a paunch, certainly
lost his hair, probably have worn bifocals and bounced his grand-
children on his knee telling them about his summer riding the
rails. But he had to get off the train. And ended up in Money,
Mississippi. And was horribly, brutally, inexcusably, and unac-
ceptably murdered. This is for the Pullman Porters who, when the
sheriff was trying to get the body secretly buried, got Emmett’s
body on the northbound train, got his body home to Chicago,
where his mother said: I want the world to see what they did
to my boy. And this is for all the mothers who cried. And this is
for all the people who said Never Again. And this is about Rosa
Parks whose feet were not so tired, it had been, after all, an ordi-
nary day, until the bus driver gave her the opportunity to make
history. This is about Mrs. Rosa Parks from Tuskegee, Alabama,
who was also the field secretary of the NAACP. This is about the
moment Rosa Parks shouldered her cross, put her worldly goods
aside, was willing to sacrifice her life, so that that young man in
Money, Mississippi, who had been so well protected by the
Pullman Porters, would not have died in vain. When Mrs. Parks
said “NO” a passionate movement was begun. No longer would
there be a reliance on the law; there was a higher law. When Mrs.
Parks brought that light of hers to expose the evil of the system,
the sun came and rested on her shoulders bringing the heat and
the light of truth. Others would follow Mrs. Parks. Four young
men in Greensboro, North Carolina, would also say No. Great
voices would be raised singing the praises of God and exhorting
us “to forgive those who trespass against us.” But it was the
Pullman Porters who safely got Emmett to his granduncle and it
was Mrs. Rosa Parks who could not stand that death. And in not
being able to stand it. She sat back down.

Source: Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea (c. 2002 by Nikki  Giovanni, pub. by HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. 2002) Nikki Giovanni is one of the best-known African-American poets who reached prominence during the late 1960s and early 1970s. She was born 1943 in Knoxville, Kentucky and attended Fisk University, a prestigious, all-black college in Nashville, Tennessee from which she graduated in 1968. From there she went on to attend graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University in New York. Giovanni authored several volumes of poetry for children and adults. She is the recipient of multiple NAACP Image Awards, the Langston Hughes Award for Distinguished Contributions to Arts and Letters, the Rosa Parks Women of Courage Award and over twenty honorary degrees from colleges and universities around the country. You can read more about Nikki Giovanni and sample more of her poetry at the Poetry Foundation website.

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[1] Of course, as a pastor I have experienced opposition, some loyal, well meaning and often constructive. Some not so much. I have experienced bullying, threats by members to leave the congregation or withhold their financial support and factious groups annoyed with me because of things I said in my preaching and teaching. But I don’t equate this sort of thing with persecution. It goes with the territory of shepherding a church which is and always has been the work of urging a less than perfect community to live into the Body of Christ that it truly is.