Take Up Your Cross, Take Up Your Life
A sermon preached by the Reverend Holly Huff at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on February 25, 2024, the Second Sunday in Lent.
This year I’m thinking of Lent as a particular call to fast from self-reliance. As a call to spend this time preparing to enter into Easter joy by following Jesus’s example in the wilderness of resisting the temptation to prove ourselves. Each of the devil’s provocations involve the delicious lure of having done it by himself, having shown he is the powerful son of God. Yet Jesus doesn’t play. His trust in God is absolute, he doesn’t need to prove himself. And he lets God feed him in the desert.
Hard for us to do the same, to simply be cared for. But it’s in that spirit of resisting the temptation to prove ourselves and letting God take tender care of us that I want to hear the Gospel call to take up our cross and follow after our crucified Lord. “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, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?” This saying of Jesus is one I found most vexing for the longest time. I remember painfully puzzling over this one as a child. I mistakenly heard it as a call to heroic martyrdom, a call to justify myself by annihilating myself. I was hearing it from the cramped self-enclosed place where I needed to prove myself to a false God who, I feared, had set out a lot of conditions I needed to meet before I might be loved. “Must be this tall to ride.” Smarter, prettier, kinder, more “selfless,” straighter, of course, more successful, less stubborn, above all happier. Lose yourself to save yourself, right—and I had a pretty clear picture of the self I thought I needed to lose, all the pieces of myself I thought needed to go before God could really love me. That’s a terrifying way to live. It’s slavery and death, not the gospel freedom Jesus is beckoning us into. We can only hear this saying as undergirded by the faith of Abraham laid out by Paul in the letter to the Romans: we believe in a God who gives life to the dead and calls into being the things that do not exist. God who created us, who wants us to exist, is recreating us by the gift of his Son and his cross.
The cross is God’s pledge to us that there is nothing, nothing, that can separate us from the love of God. Christ Jesus our Lord goes to the end of all things for us. God enters into creation, takes up our human nature, and will not leave us comfortless. Jesus promises to stick with us. He’s willing to die for us. Take up your cross means take up your life, all of it. The good, the bad, and the ugly. Take up your life as it’s been given to you, with its joys, sorrows and profound desolations.
In a few short weeks we will observe Good Friday together. You might remember we carry in the wooden cross from the narthex and during the singing of the reproaches, Jesus’s laments over his people, everyone in the congregation has the chance to come forward and venerate the cross. Kneeling before it or kissing it, offering prayers, making the sign of the cross, taking that sign onto our own bodies. This veneration of the cross is incredibly exposing, I find, so raw, yet there is profound safety in lying at the foot of the cross, his cross, where nothing can ultimately harm us. “Lose your life for my sake, and you will find it.”
In our Episcopal ordination liturgy, a person being ordained for ministry often lies prostrate as the gathered people pray for them, lying prostrate being a posture of dying to self. There are some orders of monks who when they take their vows lie prostrate and then are covered with a funeral pall, enacting a kind of death. The question is what kind? I had some trepidation about this when I was ordained… I still carried some fear that holiness might require my annihilation. That everything that makes me me might need to be sifted off before God could work in me. Does God want me to die? was the question. I hoped not, I trusted not, I knew better, yet that fear was still somewhere in me and it was a great grace to lie down on the floor, my face to the ground before the altar, be prayed for, and know that I was simply to rest there. Rest in Jesus’s strength. Let him do it. Resting in child’s pose at the foot of the cross. Safe, protected, cared for, accompanied. Dead to self-reliance, and enlivened by the God who gives life to the dead. That’s the only trustworthy place for ministry, lay and ordained. Every baptized Christian has a ministry, not just the folks up front wearing funny clothes, right, and ministry has to flow out of the knowledge that we are loved and held and saved and cared for. Jesus has us. And our thankful response to this gift overflows in love of neighbor and service to the world and holiness of life as God lives through us.
“If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” In the Gospel according to Luke, it’s “let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily.” Jesus calls us not to the heroic but to faithfulness to our lives as they are, here, now, guaranteed with the promise of his cross that God is with us in everything, to the end of the age. So you already have a cross. You don’t to go find a new cross or more glamorous cross. That’s what gets Peter in trouble, for suggesting to the Messiah who must suffer and die that he should find a more glamorous cross that more closely fits his idea of how it would be appropriate for God to show up.
“Those who want to save their life will lose it.” There is something in us that needs to die. Usually not the part we think. Self-reliance and all our attempts to prove ourselves need to fall to the ground at the foot of the cross. A seed must die and fall into the earth so that something new can be born. Our old and hardened ways crack open and slough off slowly as God gives the growth. It’s not ours to decide which things need to go. This is Jesus’s descriptive heads-up, fair-enough warning that when we follow him, for his sake and for the sake of the gospel, old things we were thought were essential will wither away. To make room for something new.
“Those who lose their life for my sake will save it.” Jesus came and still comes to bring us life abundant. It is God’s joy to create from nothing: God delights in our coming to fullness of life. God’s dream for each person and for all of us communally is that we flourish as the beloved children of God we were made to be, in loving relationship with God and our neighbor, including all creation. “The glory of the Lord will be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.”
When Abram and Sarai hear the promise, they laugh. God promises, and they laugh, because it’s so on-its-face ridiculously impossible. Their lives are over, they’re as good as dead as Paul says. But they place their faith in God’s promises, rather than anything they can do themselves. They know their weakness and fragility and barrenness only too well. And yet the god in whom the new-named Abraham and Sarah believe is the God whose delight it is to call into existence the things that do not exist. The God who delights in creation, in the growth and flourishing of creatures, who creates and calls us good, very good.
God believes in us. We usually think it’s supposed to go the other way, right? Do we or don’t we believe in God, are we or aren’t we faithful. But the decisive thing is God’s faithfulness to us. God believes in our full flourishing to become the children of God. God wants us to exist, called us into being and is calling us still, cajoling us tenderly, loving us so faithfully and steadfastly that we can’t help but start to unfurl in love in return.
Abraham and Sarah see fulfillment and fruitfulness where before was only an impossibly bitter dream. Their first child, born when Abraham is ninety-nine, they name Isaac, meaning laughter. The scoffing laughter of hope deferred when they heard the promise has now been reborn as the laughter of God who delights in creation.
The call to take up your cross is a call to engage your life as God is giving it to you, in the trust that this mess here is where God is preparing a path for your flourishing. God’s word will not return empty: God keeps promises. “The one who began a good work in you will be faithful to complete it in you.” It’s just fine to still be afraid. One hymn we sang last week is one of my very favorites, in particular verse 2. Hymn 675. “Take up your cross, let not its weight fill your weak spirit with alarm; [Christ’s] strength shall bear your spirit up, and brace your heart, and nerve your arm.” Jesus’s call to take up your cross is not a martyr’s task, though there is a part of our insistent self-reliance that must fall to the ground and die. Walking the way of the cross with Jesus is the easy way. He does it. His strength shall bear your spirit up and brace your heart and nerve your arm. Love that, Jesus’s strength will fire the nerves that move the arm that reaches out to sooth an upset child or holds a hand across a hospital bed. In your labor, earning a living, in creative pursuits, too, Christ’s strength nerving the arm that moves the pen or pulls the paintbrush or strikes piano keys. Work for justice happens in his strength, too, as our hearts are braced to love this hurting world and our arms are nerved to hold picket signs and pass boxes of food across the counter at the food pantry. All this flows out from Christ who has made peace by his cross and then—only then!—gives to us the ministry of reconciliation.
Hoping against hope, we take up the cross, engaging our life as it actually is in the faith that God is caring for us in it, Jesus has pledged to be with us through everything, and that the God who brings life to the dead is able to do what he has promised.
Amen.