The Gospel Scripture that is suggested for us to consider today comes from the Eighth Chapter of Mark. It is a turning point in Mark’s story, because it is the first time that Jesus foretells his death and speaks of his resurrection.

 

 

 

 

 

One of my friends is an office manager in a small business here in Columbia. Her days and her work consist of complicated financial record keeping, and intricate computer programming, and web-site maintenance. When we get together she talks of her work, and I listen. Occasionally I ask a question. But I really don’t know enough to ask many questions about her work, so mostly I listen, and she speaks in what amounts to a foreign language for me. 

 

If she asks about my work, the same is fairly true for her. She did not grow up going to church. She doesn’t attend church now. Church is not a part of her history or her experience. So church language is pretty much a foreign language for her as well.

 

So mostly we talk about kids, and family, and weather. That is our common language. I’ve invited her to visit us here at Broadway Christian Church. I think she would like us. She hasn’t made it yet. Truly this is foreign territory for her.

 

I’m always a bit surprised about how intimidating church can be for some folks. Some Sundays I try to imagine, “Now, what would it be like for her if she were here on this Sunday?” Listening to our language and reading our worship bulletin, trying to decipher words like “Lent,” and “intercessions,” and “offertory,” and “Doxology,” and “transformation,” and “narthex.”

 

Well, for me the language of the Church is very familiar. It is comfortable. It is like my pink robe. It wraps around me. It comforts me. It is warm. It is the bearer of many memories. I thought about wearing my pink robe this morning as a visual aid. I mentioned that to my family. Stunned silence! And then Bill very bravely said, “You really don’t know how bad that robe looks. Keep it at home. Just tell them about the pink robe.” If you can imagine that full-length pink robe, and if that robe could talk, my, wouldn’t it tell you about the movies it has seen, the Christmas mornings it has enjoyed, the pajama days it has retreated into. 

 

But the language of the Church is as comfortable to me as that robe. It wraps around me, comforting, warms, bearer of many memories. And it is so comfortable for some of us, this language of the Church, that sometimes we forget its strangeness, the real oddness of how we talk, and who we are, and who we are called and hope to be. Then something happens to remind us. A visitor bravely whispers, “And what is Lent?” And we stop, and we listen, and we pay attention. 

 

“Oh, Lent. Yes, Lent.” We take notice. “Oh, yes, Lent. It’s 40 days before Easter. It comes from the Anglo-Saxon word meaning ‘to lengthen’ as in days leading up to springtime. It’s a time of reflection. It’s a time of penitence. It’s a time of preparation for Easter. You know, Lent.”

 

It gets our attention. Or, it’s like last Sunday when the pieces of this floor were lifted out and the waters of baptism were right here in front of us. Emily Rackers stepped into that water, and it took her breath away. She couldn’t stifle her gasp, and she couldn’t stifle her surprise of how cold that water was. She didn’t back out. Rick and Jacob wouldn’t let her. But you could see the look on her face: “What am I getting into?” When I saw that look, I knew she meant the cold water, but I also knew that for years on down the road Emily is going to be asking that question, “What am I getting into being a follower of Jesus Christ?”

 

Or I’m struck by the odd power of this Christian faith of ours. Sitting across from a man a few weeks ago who from all appearances has lost everything – his source of income, his prestige and his community, his reputation, his material possessions, his freedom – and yet his face shines with nothing less than the love of Christ. His heart now beats in time to a passion and a purpose to love God and to serve God, and to love and serve others. If you ask his family, they will tell you he is a new man. He has been transformed in the deepest sense of that Church word. 

 

I left that encounter with him – it was just an hour – but I left it stunned just right out of my comfortable pink robe of faith. You see… I was almost undone by the power of the words he gave voice to in his life. Words like “repentance,” and “forgiveness,” and “intercession,” and “new life.” Right before my eyes, there was a man truly born again in the least likely of circumstances.

 

I was almost undone by the power of the truth of Jesus Christ, face to face with a man who is choosing for the first time in his life to be a follower. Some would say his life has been lost. He would say his life has been saved as never before.

 

The Scripture from Mark 8, the verses I just read, came alive for me in a whole new way after that encounter, after that hour with this man. “If you try to save your life, you’ll lose it. If you take up the cross, if you lose your life for my sake, you will save it.”

 

Truthfully, those have not been my favorite verses, and I did not invite my friend to come to church this Sunday. That is hard language. I didn’t want to scare her away. 

 

Even for those of us who fluently speak this language of “Church,” this Scripture is a hard one. It is hard to get our heads around, and our hearts around, and our lives around. And I just glimpsed it in a whole new and deeper way sitting across from a man with nothing.

 

I found the suggestions of Marcus Borg very helpful in reflecting on this text. He also has broken open this Scripture for me, almost as powerfully as this encounter of a few weeks ago. For three of our small groups this year, Marcus Borg has been our teacher. Along with his book The Heart of Christianity – Rediscovering the Life of Faith, Marcus Borg is a good teacher. He is a man of Christian faith and practice. He’s a devoted student of the Scriptures. He’s a follower of Jesus. His book has not been easy. For many of us, it has not felt much like a pink robe. We’ve had intense discussions. We’ve had differences of opinion, but his understanding of these Mark 8 verses is one of the most helpful and enlightening I have ever considered.

 

Taking up the cross is not whatever suffering or inconvenience comes ones way. Taking up the cross means following Jesus on that path of death, a path of endings that will lead to beginnings. A path that takes one to the tomb. That tomb becomes a womb. And the denying of self of which the Scripture speaks in denying the false self – the self created by culture and values of our culture. The self shaped and wounded by simply growing up. This self in response to life that becomes self-absorbed, and self-focused, and self-protected. And dying to this self, denying this self means the possibility of being born again into one’s true self, one’s real self.

 

Or another way to look at it comes in his helpful description as a closed heart in comparison to an open heart: 

“Blindness and limited vision go with a closed heart. ‘We have eyes; we do not see. We have ears; we do not listen.’ We are so enclosed in our own world that we do not see or hear very well. A closed heart is a master of rationalizations of our self, interest of our self, justification of our self, perfection. It’s always easier to see that in somebody else.” (Isn’t that the truth?)

 

“A closed heart is in bondage to its own desires, not a marriage of head and heart. A closed heart lacks gratitude. It’s insensitive to wonder and awe. It forgets God, loses track of the mystery that’s all around us. It lacks compassion. Although one can be charitable with a closed heart, one does not feel the suffering of others, won’t feel the suffering of others, remains insensitive to the injustices upon the poor and the oppressed and the weak among us.” 

 

“Closed hearts occur for all kinds of reasons: difficult childhoods, disappointments, greed, bitterness, victim-hood, martyr-hood, and the true self becomes buried beneath a hard shell of the exterior. The true self will die in a closed heart. And a closed heart has the power to drain the life from others around it.”

 

“But with open hearts we see more clearly: the person next to us, the landscape, our selves. With open hearts we are alive to wonder. An open heart knows radical amazement. An open heart and gratitude go together. An open heart is one with compassion and a passion for justice.”

 

So, here is the question: How does one go from a closed heart to an open heart? How does one die to that pretense self, the mask of the self on the exterior and allow the true self to immerge? How does one be born again even in the least likely of circumstances?

 

Well, Marcus Borg says and the Bible says in the Scriptures of Mark 8: “Picking up the cross of Jesus and following that strange path into death and into resurrection can do it. Losing one’s self – the false self.   Booting out one’s false self for the true self does it.

 

The season of Lent suggests paying attention. Choose one’s footsteps. Noticing the direction they are headed. Are they heading toward God? Are they heading deeper to God? Are they heading away from God? Are they on the edge of God? 

 

Sometimes to help pay attention, we give up something for Lent, like alcohol, or caffeine, or sugar, or meat, or chocolate. That will never happen in my life, that chocolate part. We give those things up reminding ourselves how dependent we can be on externals, and each hunger, each thirst, each craving is a reminder: “Oh, yes. Turn to God. Turn to God in prayer and with the direction of my life.”

 

Sometimes people take up something, like daily reading of the Scriptures. They take up prayer. They take up walking. They create a new thing in their routine to remind them again of their connection with God.

 

This year I’ve taken up some words that were offered by Frederick Buechner, an intriguing Christian writer. The words are “Stop, Look, and Listen.” I was reading his daily devotions. I’ve been reading them since July, and his February 21 suggestion, which came just about a week before Lent, was about “Stop, Look, and Listen. He suggested that drama, and story, and art, and music invite us to “stop, and look, and listen at the basic reality of life.” He went on to say that the Judeo-Christian teaching, at its heart, is a teaching about stopping, and looking, and listening, that the prophet’s message was an invitation to stop, and look, and listen, and that Jesus’ message to love God and to love your neighbor is nothing less than an invitation to pay attention. “Stop, Look, and Listen.” 

 

So I thought I would try that for the season of Lent. It’s not easy. I don’t do “stop” well. It’s hard to “look” beyond myself and the busyness of my day. It’s hard to “listen” beneath the noise of so many languages around and about. But I’ve been trying to do that. To “stop, and look, and listen.”

 

That’s what happened last Sunday when I watched Emily Rackers in the waters of baptism. That’s what happened when I sat across from that born-again man. I stopped, and I looked in his eyes, and I listened. It has been startling these last few weeks of Lent. It has been unexpected. It has been uncomfortable. It has been amazing. And those words all sound something like “resurrection,” I believe.

 

We need a season like Lent to invite us into letting go of the false, the pretend, the dead stuff, and to anticipate resurrection right now. We need a Scripture like Mark 8 to push us beyond our external self toward our God, to push us into our created internal real self whom Jesus can reveal. We need a friend who doesn’t understand our language, so that we take notice and consider slowly and carefully, “So, what does all of this really mean? What is it about?”

 

One last word. I was so relieved last Sunday. I’ve seen it for years, but I was “stopping and looking and listening” last Sunday. I was so relieved last Sunday when Emily Rackers came out of those waters of baptism, as did every baptismal candidate, and Belinda Davis was standing there. Did you see her? With a towel. And she wrapped Emily in that towel, and she put her arms around her. That’s not a pink robe, but it’s close. 

 

In that moment I hoped that they got it. Not just the baptism. I hoped that they got that on this strange and wonderful walk with Jesus, they are not alone. I hope they got it in the deepest place of their true self. They are not alone.

 

You are not alone. I am not alone. And that may be the most powerful language of the Church we can speak in this amazing, frightening, what-have- we-gotten-ourselves-into walk with Jesus Christ. We are not alone.

 

Amen.

 

 

Saving One, thank you for offering your life as a ministry for us to behold. Help us to shake free of the things of this life that distance us from you: hurried steps, clouded vision, and distorted hearing. Help us to shoulder our crosses, to live and die confessing your love. Amen.