Mark 8: 31-38

Sisters & brothers, grace to you and peace from God the Serving One, from Christ the Calling One, and from the Spirit the Strengthening One. Amen.

Today we hear the disrupting and disturbing call of Jesus to deny ourselves, to take up our crosses, and to follow him. This call is far more disruptive and disturbing than what I’m going to ask you to do right now, in the spirit of total disruption and disturbance. But what I’m going to ask you to do right now, I would ask everyone to do — including choir and organist and assisting ministers and acolytes and every worshipper who is able to stand and walk without difficulty — and that is to relocate to the opposite side of the sanctuary from where you are presently seated. If you are in the back on the right, move to the front on the left. If you are on a side aisle up front on the left, move to a center aisle in back on the right. Mix it up! Change it up! Go now! Get up! Move your Lutheran be-hinds to another location.  This is not the sharing of the peace (that comes later) so don’t bother greeting your neighbor as you go, just move! And by the way, I would suggest you wait until the sharing of the peace to go back to your regular-scheduled place, if you must.

If you’ve never sat in the choir stalls, now’s your chance. Some may want to head up to the balcony for the first time ever but don’t think just because you’re far away you’re off the hook. Better yet, the front pews which are rarely-to-never warm on Sunday mornings are just begging to be occupied for once! There are two sets of pews in the upper chancel. Someone could keep the organ bench warm for Barbara, just keep your feet off the pedals and your fingers off the keys!

This applies to the preacher, too. I’m leaving this big wooden box behind this morning. And don’t worry about needing to look at me to listen to the homily this morning. If you want to crank around and pivot in your pew, that’s fine but it’s just as well if you want to sit there and focus forward on the cross — since it’s the cross which Jesus invites us this day to “take up”.

So, there. How’s that for a major disruption? A disturbance of liturgical and homiletical proportions! Could you feel yourself fighting it? Was there some inner resistance to relocation? Having an identity crisis away from your regularly-scheduled pew? Well, that’s just the beginning.

For in our Gospel text today, as the opening verse indicates, Jesus was just beginning to teach the disciples for the very first time about what was in store for him: his rejection and suffering, his death by killing, and his rising after three days. It was just the beginning of his teaching about all this, and without hesitation he was met with instant resistance from none other than one of his closest disciples, Peter.

With great love and regard yet firm resistance to what Jesus was teaching them, it was as if Peter took Jesus aside to tell him, “Lord, don’t even go there!” Peter didn’t want to hear any such talk from Jesus’ mouth. This wasn’t the kind of leader Peter or the other eleven had in mind to follow. But before he could resist any further, Jesus puts Peter in particular in his place (but the others as well) with a public rebuke: “Get behind me, Satan!” — clearly equating that mindset as both adversarial and antithetical to him. Knowing his God-ordained path, Jesus isn’t about to let Peter or anyone else with another human idea tell him otherwise. “Get behind me” is Jesus’ own brilliant way of reminding both Peter and us just who is to do the leading and who is to do the following.

And then Jesus issues the most disruptive and disturbing news of all. Calling the crowd to gather along with the disciples, he proceeds with a teaching which still stops all of us within earshot of it dead in our tracks as well: “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 safe, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.”

It’s a perfectly horrifying call if, like Peter, we have our minds set on human things which — if we are honest with ourselves — as humans, we generally do. We are interested (if not preoccupied) in self-preservation, in self-advancement, and most certainly in self-esteem. But Jesus asks for the impossible from us and, in return, gives us the impossible.

Like Abram and Sarai in today’s First Reading, God appeared before Abram at the age of 99 and commanded him to walk before him and to “be blameless.” An impossible task for any human to accomplish. And yet God makes a covenant — a promise — with Abram to be the ancestor of a multitude of nations and gives him a son through his wife Sarai who herself was well beyond child-bearing years. What seems to be an impossible demand on Abraham and Sarah is made possible by the God who always gives what is commanded.

Sisters and brothers, this core teaching of Jesus is clear: the cost of discipleship demands nothing less than the death of us. But in return, Jesus gives us the promise of new life, exchanges our death with the hope of resurrection, and infuses us with his empowering holy Spirit to stir our hearts, creating the willingness to “get behind him” and follow.

These weeks of Lent have often been referred to as a time of self-denial. Some of us use these 40 days to deny ourselves certain things to remind us of Christ’s sacrifice for us, and truth be told it can get pretty silly. Whether it’s chocolate or coffee or dessert or “cuss words” or carbs or whatever it is we “give up for Lent,” it can end up being a rather self-serving self-imposed discipline.

What Jesus is calling us to is perhaps more accurately a time of self-defining rather than self-denying. You are not defined by your wealth or lack of it, nor are you defined by your employment or lack of it. Your race doesn’t define you, your illness or your good health doesn’t define you, nor does your marital status define you regardless of whether or not the state supreme court says your relationship is worthy of the institution. Your age doesn’t define you, nor does your physical ability or disability. Your political views, your personal power and prestige, your car, your house, your children, your education, your 501k — ultimately none of these things define who “you” are.

This day, Jesus issues the disruptive call to define ourselves plainly and simply in him — to let his life so shaped by the cross be lived out in us and through us. Rather than “who” we are, the call of discipleship reminds us “whose” we are — servants of the servant, followers of the crucified, disciples of the one who died and rose again.

In a startling indictment, author and Benedictine lay woman Madeleine L’Engle calls the modern church “a safe place to escape the awful demands of God.” In other words, she warns us of the danger of being busy church people rather than disciples whose lives have been disrupted and disturbed by the cross.

Dearly beloved of Christ, you are in Christ, and above all other competing identities for your self-definition, by virtue of your baptism into Christ’s life, death, and resurrection, that is your primary identity. Try as we might to let our other identities be out front, Jesus calls us this day to “get behind him” and let his cross define us to the core.

Today, may Christ’s awful and horrifying call disturb and disrupt us into discipleship, re-arranging our lives for the sake of the gospel and in service to the world. Amen.