15 PENTECOST, PROPER 19

SERMON PREACHED AT CHRIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH, NORWAY, MAINE

THE REV. ANNE G. STANLEY

13 SEPTEMBER 2009

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Proverbs 1:20-33; Psalm 19; James 3:1-12; Mark 8:27-38

How do we respond to God, you and I? How do we show God that we are aware of God in our lives? What does God see and hear from us to show that we are paying attention to our relationship with God? Put bluntly, does God even know that we GIVE a rip?

The Bible is one long account of people’s unfolding relationship with God, how people from the very beginning have responded to God—or not. The Bible gives hints along the way to help God’s children make appropriate responses, how to live our lives in relationship with God. Actually, the Bible doesn’t merely give hints but instructions, even commandments from God’s own self.

For example, today, in the first reading today, from Proverbs, we can hear Wisdom, speaking for God. Wisdom is crying out in the streets, scolding the people. Some of them aren’t following God’s will; others don’t even know what God’s will IS. And Lady Wisdom goes on to imply that those who do have the right knowledge and who do the right thing will have a good life and those who don’t risk disaster. This is a bit over-simplified, to my way of thinking---we all know that bad things happen to the righteous as well as the unrighteous. For Wisdom, it’s all pretty black and white. Nevertheless, she is making the point that people’s way of life is a response to God. The way we live indicates where our heart is. And that’s true enough.

How do we respond to God?

The Lord’s statutes are clear, sings the psalmist. Let our words and the meditations of our hearts reflect God’s law; let them be acceptable gift from us to God.

Then there’s the Letter to James, written some decades after Jesus’ death. This author has a lot to say about the words we use in our daily lives. And how our words, once released from our mouths, reveal what’s in our hearts. Signals to God, clues, about the state of our relationship with God.  Our words to others are a way of responding, not just to them but to God as well.

 “Sticks and stones will break your bones, but words will never hurt you.” Did you learn that when you were growing up? I did. Did parents or teachers use that little saying to make you feel better when some kid teased you?  As in, don’t worry about what she said, at least you don’t have bruises. What a terrible message! “The tongue is small,” says the letter-writer, “yet it can do enormous things….no one can tame the restless tongue….with (our tongues) we can bless God, and with (them)  we curse those who are made in the likeness of God….From the same mouth come blessing and cursing.”

How do we use our tongues in response to the presence and gift of God in our lives?  How do we show with our speaking that we give a rip?

I remember to my everlasting shame a time when I forgot all about my tongue and how I lived my life. True, I was in second grade. But I knew better. A rumor went around my school that a little first grader named Barbara didn’t wear underwear. You can imagine how that report spread. The fact that Barbara lived in a tarpaper shack added credence to this information as far as we were concerned. So one day, a little gang of second and third graders got Barbara to reach down to pick up a marble and with jeers and taunts we all ran around behind her to check out what we suspected. We didn’t manage to verify the rumor but I can still remember the excited babble. “Sticks and stones will break your bones….but words will never hurt you.” Tell that to Barbara.  What did she take away from that day at recess? What stuck with her, even in her subconscious?

How do our lives reflect our relationship with God?

How did Jesus himself respond to God in his life?  In Mark’s gospel today, Jesus is having a discussion with the disciples about who he is, about his identity. “Who do people say that I am?….Who do YOU say that I am?” Jesus says some things that make the disciples squirm, that make Peter, anyway, uncomfortable.  Jesus lets them know that he will have to suffer, be rejected by the religious leaders, and that he must be willing to die. That’s how I will be responding to God in my life, Jesus is saying.  More than that, of course, Jesus will end up responding to God WITH his life.

Peter objects strenuously to all of that. This is no way for a messiah to behave. Why does it have to be like that?

Jesus goes further. This way is for you as well as for me, Peter. And not only you, but all of you as well. Jesus speaks to the rest of the disciples and to the crowds standing around. “If you intend to follow me, then be prepared to take up your cross, deny yourself and lose your life.”  

That’s discipleship in a nutshell. The cost of discipleship.

We respond to God by how we live. Jesus is talking about his whole focus, and ours. His commitment, and ours. His response to God, and ours. His way of life, and ours. He showed us how far he was willing to go. How far are we willing to go?

More than one commentator has pointed out that for Jesus’ contemporaries, the cross was no metaphor. They knew the cross meant suffering, shame, and death. They knew that picking up one’s cross had nothing to do with putting up with difficult in-laws or with the bad economy or poverty or with illness. They knew that carrying one’s cross is not about bad luck. Carrying the cross and denying ourselves is a voluntary act, something we do by choice.  How far are we willing to go to spread the gospel and defend our faith, to do the work Jesus has laid out for us to do even when doing so may mean hardship, inconvenience, expense and even ridicule? How well do the choices we make reflect our response and relationship to God?

I keep thinking about the little girl, Barbara. “Those who want to save their life will lose it.”  What if I had made the choice NOT to go along with the other bullies but to walk over to stand next to Barbara? What if I’d had the courage, the guts, to have done that, risking taunts against me as well as her? Is that too much to expect of a second grader? Apparently it was too much for that one! What pattern was I setting for the future course of my life? What would I have lost by making a different choice? What would I have gained?

In the Body and the Blood of the Eucharist, Jesus makes sure we know that his life, freely offered for us by his own choice as a response to God’s love, was not offered in vain. When we come each week to the Table, we offer ourselves to God, our souls and bodies, a living sacrifice. We receive the sacred food and through it we are restored and filled with the risen Christ himself. And on we go then, our lives restored and renewed, with endless opportunities for us to choose to keep on responding with our lives to God’s own self, given endlessly for us.