In the name of the crucified God who bids us take up our cross in this crucifying world, Amen.

by He Qi

In the scriptures the Wisdom of God is presented as a capital-P-person. She is a companion and co-creator and, in some texts enables God’s creation of the world. It seems to me that the sorting out the relationship between God and Wisdom is much like what Christians do trying to explain the Trinity. We love us some fuzzy math. It could be said that she, Wisdom, precedes from God in the same way Jesus and the Holy Spirit are said to precede from God while at the same time being God. So is the Trinity a Quaternity? This is what I mean by fuzzy math. But, no, God and Wisdom are no more separable than you are from your shadow. Eventually some Greek-speaking Christians would identify Wisdom with Jesus linking wisdom and the word. But Jesus did not identify her with himself. Rather he identifies himself as her son. In the Eucharistic gospel for this Wednesday, Jesus responds to his critics by saying, “Wisdom is vindicated by all her children,” meaning himself. That gospel fits much better with our lesson and canticle. But I’m not going to count today’s gospel out. It too offers the wisdom of God, and as we shall see, it is a hard lesson.

“Who do people say that I am? Who do you say that I am?” Peter gets to go to the head of the class by saying, “You are the Anointed One, the Messiah, the Christ, the son of the Living God.” Most folk hear those words, “Anointed One, Messiah, and Christ,” and think of Jesus and only Jesus. But in the scriptures of the Jewish Jesus and his Jewish first disciples the term anointed, or meshiachin Hebrew from which we get the word messiah, is used first for priests, and then for kings, and not just Israelite kings. When the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek because after the rise of Alexander the Great everybody spoke Greek, the word that was used for God’s anointed whether priest or king waschristos, christ, long before Jesus was born.

Peter’s confession then, was that he understood Jesus to have been anointed by God like King Cyrus of Persia who ended the Babylonian exile, the last person called christ or messiah in the Greek and Hebrew versions of the scriptures at that time. Peter also understood that Jesus was more than someone anointed by God to perform a specific task, even one as great as delivering the Jews from the Romans which what the disciples seemed to think and want and for good reason. Peter knew that Jesus was more: “You are…the son of the Living God.”

            This is the core confession of our faith. Jesus is more than a good man or even a great man. He is more than a good or great teacher. He is more than a worthy role model in faith, piety, and righteous rabble-rousing. Jesus is more than a gospel preacher and social justice activist. He is all of those things, and more. He is more. Jesus is the son of the God who lives without beginning or end. Jesus is God’s son in a way that differs from the way we are all God’s children. And Peter got that.

            Peter correctly identified Jesus as the one God in her wisdom anointed with her spirit as the incarnate gospel, the love of God poured into human flesh through woman-flesh to birth the commonwealth of God and its commonweal into our broken, crucified and crucifying world. Then Jesus teaches his disciples a lesson they were not expecting on what that really means. The first thing Jesus taught them after Peter’s confession was that the mortal yet immortal son of the Living God would have his mortality tested and proved.

I imagine Jesus asking, “Do you know what all of that really means? It means I’m going to be hurt, I’m going to be broken. The same authorities and powers that chew you up and spit you out are going to grind me into the dust. They are going to leave me battered and bruised and bloody. They are going to kill me. And the next day when you wake up I will still be gone, dead and gone. And the next. And the next. Who will you say I am then? What will your wisdom say then?”

            And Peter confident in his wisdom said, “Stop talking like that.” Peter rebuked Jesus the way Jesus often rebuked his own disciples and the occasional demon including just previously. Jesus’s language was pretty strong, “Get behind me, Satan!” But he wasn’t calling Peter the devil. The original meaning for satan is an adversary, human or divine. It didn’t always mean the devil or even an evil figure. When the angel only his donkey could see blocked Balaam’s path it was described as a satan. Here Jesus isn’t calling Peter the devil, there’s an entirely different word in Greek for that. He is telling him that he is positioning himself in the way of, in opposition to, God’s work through Jesus by trying to shush any talk of Jesus getting hurt or killed. Peter is so consumed by the thought of Jesus dead at the hands of violent men that he seems to have missed “and after three days rise again.”

            In Mark’s gospel, “Who do you say that I am?” functions like an invitation to say a slightly different creed. The key points are in the gospel. Jesus is the woman-born, child of earth and God’s child–in more than one way. The translation “Son of Man” is inadequate and misleading. Jesus is the son of the Living God. Jesus like every preacher or prophet worth her salt is going to be rejected some point by those at the top of the hierarchy. Woe to the people whose prophets are always praised by those in power and in positions of privilege. Jesus will not just die. He will be killed, violently. And he will rise from death–not be raised by somebody else like he and other prophets did for other people, but he will rise; he will raise himself. That is what he was anointed to do. That is what it means for Jesus to be Christ. And that was part one of the answer to, “Who do you say that I am.”

            Jesus made clear that the full answer wasn’t in just knowing his identity, titles, or the history of those titles. It was in taking up the cross and following him. That is what Jesus calls us to as disciples. There are real costs to following Jesus, living and loving as he did, welcoming as he did, speaking out as he did. So what is your cross? It’s not just some hardship like a cranky boss. The cross is the price you pay for living the gospel you confess. It’s rooted in the place God calls you to to live out your confession. It’s the place where your faith meets the harsh realities of this world. Jesus’s cross was a Roman one; it was the empire’s death sentence for revolutionaries. Is your faith revolutionary enough for anyone to notice? Is your faith visible outside of the walls of this sanctuary? Jesus call us to take up our cross and follow him, follow him into the world’s broken places and make a difference.

            What does it look like to bear a cross on which you might be tortured and killed today? It means standing against policies that consign people, and primarily people of color, to death, incarceration, exile, and poverty absent access to healthcare. Our government is cutting funds to refugee service organizations in the Palestinian Territories. That means they are cutting funds that provide food, healthcare, and education through the Anglican Province there and through the Lutheran Church. They are cutting funds to the only hospital in the Palestinian Territories that can treat cancer with radiation and chemotherapy. Taking up the cross on which Palestinians are being crucified will see you crucified along side of them as anti-Israel by some folk.

Jesus walked among the poor, hungry, and downtrodden. He didn’t stay in the safety of the sanctuary, or use scholarship and scholarly debates as a surrogate for doing the work. He spent time in the temple and he studied in the synagogue and then he took it to the streets. He also took some time to himself and then did it all over again. Jesus fed the people, food for their bodies and food for their souls. There are hungry people in this land of abundance, not because there isn’t enough, not because they’re just poor, not because they can’t manage what they have. We have poverty because of inequities that are built into all of our systems. Some of those same systems existed in Jesus’ day so he didn’t just hand out food. He publically came against the systems that kept some people poor and other folk rich, naming names of those at the top of the system. That’s what gets you a cross to bear, although opening a food pantry and feeding the homeless in some neighborhoods and business districts will get you the same treatment.

            Jesus called us to provide water for the thirsty. Flint Michigan still does not have clean water. An entire generation of children have been poisoned with lead and other pollutants and had their IQ lowered. Those children may have health and behavioral problems, and later difficulty getting into college and finding jobs. Their income potential and quality of life has already been drastically changed for the worse. Calling for affirmative action to even the playing ground for them will sho nuff get you a cross to bear. Wading into the race-based politics that saw the state strip a black city of its mayor, city council, and ability to self-govern, then put them and only them on a poisoned water supply and give the army permission to blow up abandoned buildings in town without out notifying residents who thought they were under a terrorist attack–calling out the institutional and individual racism at play in Flint Michigan and here at home will get you a cross to bear.

            It’s not just Flint. Desperate people seeking refuge from violence and crippling poverty also seek legal access to petition if they meet the qualifications for refugee status. Asking the question isn’t a crime. Putting in the application isn’t a crime. We’ve got a legal process. But this government has set it up so that there are no legal routes to that legal process so if you make it in they will detain you and your children in cages like animals for the illegal entry that they forced you into. And that’s if you don’t die of thirst in the crossing. And woe to you if you help somebody survive in that desert by leaving water along the way. You will find yourself in the crosshairs of your cross.

            A final example, Jesus called out the police brutality of his day. He stood with the people and spoke up for the people as one of the people. He didn’t just stand with good men like Botham Shem Jean, but he stood with and died with the criminally corrupt bearing his cross along with them, receiving a final beating at the hands of the police before his execution.

            Taking up your cross is political. It is as political as the Gospel. It is as political as Christianity has always been. As political as our Church has always been, sometimes on the right side, and sometimes on the wrong. Jesus calls us to take up our cross and follow him though it mean our death. He meant that as literally as he meant his own death in the preceding verses. “Who do you say that I am? If you say that I am the Messiah, the Christ, the Son of the Living God, then take up your cross though you may die on it and follow me.”

            We can no longer pretend that we can follow Christ without following him into the broken places of the world. We can no longer pretend that we can follow Christ without paying an exorbitant price at some point. We can no longer claim we follow Christ if we never leave our places of safety and never raise the ire of those who construct and benefit from the systems that impoverish and imprison. Take up your cross because Christ bids you to, and you will find him in that place of need and service with the power to raise you when you fall, even from the grasp of death. Amen.

Lessons

 Mark 8:27 Jesus went on with his disciples to the villages of Caesarea Philippi; and on the way he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” 28 And they answered him, “John the Baptist; and others, Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets.” 29 He asked them, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter answered him, “You are the Anointed One, the Messiah, the Christ.” 30 Then Jesus rebuked them, ordering them not to tell anyone about him.

31 And then Jesus began to teach them that the Son of Mary must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. 32 He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. 33 But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”

34 Jesus called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. 35 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. 36 For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? 37 Indeed, what can they give in return for their life? 38 Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Mary will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.”