Over the
course of my working life in the church I have had the privilege of knowing
some wonderful people. One of them was
my friend, the late Bishop George Barrett.
George was a great leader on justice issues in the church, and he once
told me the story of being interviewed on television. This was in TV’s early days, when guests were
asked to wear lavaliere microphones, the kind you hang around your neck. During
a commercial break the sound technician came to adjust his microphone: it was
banging up against the large, pectoral cross the bishop wore on his chest. The
technician said, “The problem is the cross. It’s causing interference.” George
Barrett looked up at him and replied, “It always does.”
The cross
always causes interference. In this morning’s Gospel, Jesus tells his
companions that the journey they are on will end in his death on the cross at
the hands of the Roman Empire. Peter cannot abide this. “God forbid it, Lord. This must never happen
to you.” [Matthew 16: 22] Those who
follow Jesus have not reckoned on the reality of the cross as part of the
transaction. Jesus knows that his critique of the empire and the religious system
that colludes with it will result in his being brought to a political
prisoner’s death on the cross. Those who accompany Jesus think that following
him will be all about sitting at his feet and copying down his pithy sayings.
But Jesus knows that following him means being called into a life at odds with
the forces of empire, a conflict that will result for many of his followers in
persecution, martyrdom, and death. “The problem is the cross. It’s causing
interference.” “It always does.”
After he rebukes Peter, Jesus says
these memorable words:
"If any want to become my
followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For
those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life
for my sake will find it. For 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?
[Matthew 16: 24b-26]
To be a
Christian, to live under the sign of the cross, is to be a perpetual voice for
interference. It means that we will always bring the Gospel’s values to bear
upon social, ethical, and cultural problems. Because the imperial presumptions
with which we are called to interfere are always centered on power, the Gospel
critique of those presumptions will always promote the voices and concerns of
the powerless. In Jesus’s day and ours, the consequences of that cultural
critique will not always be pretty. The cross always causes interference,
because in signing on to be followers of Jesus we are signing on to be fellow
travelers with him on the way of the cross. And while walking that way with
Jesus promises ultimate joy and peace, in the near term it often delivers
suffering and loss.
Jesus’s
insistence on the way of the cross as the way of life is, for us first-world
privileged Christians, profoundly counter-cultural. The message our culture sends us is a message
of grasping after something: you preserve your life by beating out the other
guy. For Jesus and his followers, you preserve your life by what the theologian
Sallie McFague calls “cruciform living.”
The
philosopher Aristotle posed life’s basic question: “How, then, shall we live?” Many
today ask Aristotle’s question. They ask
it about our wider society. They ask it about their own individual lives. One of my favorite theological reflections on
how to live is Sallie McFague’s book, Life
Abundant. Here in part is what she says:
We cannot, in good conscience “love
the world”–its snowcapped mountains and panda bears–while at the same time
destroying it and allowing our less well-off sisters and brothers to sink into
deeper poverty. Hence, I believe
Christian discipleship for twenty-first-century North American Christians means
“cruciform living,” an alternative notion of the abundant life, which will
involve a philosophy of “enoughness,” limitations on energy use, and sacrifice
for the sake of others. For us
privileged Christians a “cross-shaped life” will not be primarily what Christ
does for us, but what we can do for others.” [McFague, Life Abundant, p. 14]
A
philosophy of “enoughness”, though, is a hard bargain for the likes of you and
me. Speaking only for myself, with relation to things I am like a morbidly
obese person who no longer know when he is full. I do not have trustworthy judgment when it
comes to knowing how much is enough. And
I’m a person who reads the Bible and
goes to church every day! So if we
Christians don’t ever quite know what “enough” is, imagine how hard it is for
the others in our culture who have been led to believe that one is satisfied
only when one is stuffed.
When
Jesus tells us, this morning, to deny ourselves, take up our cross, and follow
him our first response is always to think about sacrifice and martyrdom. But,
starting from our place of relative affluence, perhaps the first image of
self-denial might lie in what Sallie McFague calls “enoughness.” Can I live trying to regain a trustworthy
sense of what is enough–enough food, enough money, enough energy use, enough houses
and cars and the like? For us first
world Christians, taking up the cross begins in a diagnosis of “enough”. Jesus
lived an abundant life in the midst of deprivation, and he called others to
share that life. “Cruciform living”
means walking in such a generosity of spirit and practice that allows the
underlying abundance of God’s creation to shine through us. Denying ourselves,
taking up our cross, and following Jesus begins when we realize we already have
enough.
But
following Jesus doesn’t end there. Speaking as a native Californian, I know how
easy it is to fall into the self-satisfied smugness of the so-called
sustainable lifestyle. “Hey, I’m driving
a hybrid, eating locally-sourced food, and I’m composting. I’m saving the
planet!” When you live in beautiful, expensive surroundings it is easy to feel
virtuous by paying a little bit more for environmentally-friendly luxuries that
poor people can’t afford in the first place.
Two
years ago, Kathy and I moved to Washington from the Detroit area, and if you
follow the news you know how many economic and social challenges that city
faces today. Another of my favorite
contemporary writers, Rebecca Solnit, has visited Detroit and written
thoughtfully about what the change there might mean for all of us in
post-industrial America. [Rebecca Solnit, “Detroit Arcadia: Exploring the
post-American landscape.” Harper’s July,
2007] In her writing, Solnit describes both the industrial deterioration of
Detroit and the surprising rebirth of local agriculture in the vacant blocks of
open land left by the razed and burnt-out buildings. Here is one of the more provocative things
she observes as she watches the painful but inspiring new life which can follow
economic devastation:
The free-range chickens and Priuses
are great, but they alone aren’t adequate tools for creating a truly different
society and ecology. The future, at least the sustainable one, the one in which
we will survive, isn’t going to be invented by people who are happily
surrendering selective bits and pieces of environmentally unsound
privilege. It’s going to be made by
those who had all that taken away from them or never had it in the first place.
[Harper’s, July 2007, p. 73]
In
other words, if we’re really talking about “cruciform living,” then as a friend
of mine observes, “something has to die” before this rebirth can begin. That something is obviously the exploitive
consumerist fantasy in which all of us seem to live and move and have our
being. Detroit
Bishop
Barrett was right. The cross will always
cause interference. It will get in the
way of our culture’s shallow vision of the abundant life. It will continue to
frustrate our fantasies of our own virtue. We will join God in making God’s
future as we walk the way of the cross with “those who had [privilege] taken
away from them or never had it in the first place.” We will save our lives by
losing them in community with those who know what real deprivation looks and
feels like.
May
the One who walked to the cross with his companions then walk with us now in
our strivings toward “cruciform living.” May that One sustain us to accept that
we really do have enough. May that One
bring us all together across the social, racial, and economic boundaries that
divide us in common purpose to the end that all God’s creatures may know the
true abundance of life lived together in the way of the cross. Amen.
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