A Fourth Church Sermon by Carol J. Allen

March 10, 2002 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

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Carol J. Allen
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 23
Ephesians 5:8–14
Mark 8:22–34

“Who do you say that I am?”

Mark 8:29 (NRSV)

“My life has been a search for significance,” the man blurted out, with pain in his eyes and anguish in his voice. He had just recited details of a crushing childhood that has left him feeling small, sad, and isolated from others much of the time. “The god I have prayed to for help is dead,“ he said. This is what he had come to talk about. With this startling affirmation, he has begun to distance himself from the harsh and harmful god he had constructed out of an experience of early and prolonged abuse by his father. He is setting out on a search for the living, loving God, and he is accompanied on this journey by persons who don’t confuse love and violence. Their shared hope is that he will be released from the shame that has kept him captive for 50 years.

In a small town on the West Coast, across the country from where this man lives, a prominent surgeon looked out one day and saw how prisoners in the city jail were given Gideon Bibles but no help in reading and understanding their content. To the great amusement of his colleagues and friends, the doctor volunteered to lead the inmates in studying the Bible. According to Douglas Hare’s commentary on Mark, the man has been doing this now for 15 years. By his caring and concern, the doctor has added significance to his life and to the lives of some of those shut up behind bars. His practice of faith brings to mind the words of a familiar hymn: “Amazing grace. . . . I once was lost but now am found, was blind but now I see.“

“I was blind, but now I see.“ This announcement of new life is a link between the lives of these men and Mark’s Gospel story of Jesus and the healing of the blind man. Without modern technologies and services, blind people had to be led from place to place. One day, a blind man was led to Jesus. Jesus took the man to a less public place and touched his eyes. With his first touch, Jesus used a home remedy perhaps. He spit on the man’s eyes. The scene makes me think of a mother who spits on the scraped knee of her child to make it better. “Can you see anything?“ Jesus asks the man. The man’s sight is hazy. “I can see people, but they look like trees walking,“ he replies. Jesus touched his eyes again. The man strained to see. Finally he got a clear picture. Then Jesus told him to go home by going around the village that was nearby. This would have given the man time to reflect upon what had just happened to him in those intimate moments with Jesus and would have kept the occasion private for a while longer. We know nothing about this man’s background or how he came to be blind. We don’t know how his community regarded him. We just know that in this personal encounter with Jesus, he was healed, and that his healing happened in stages.

The story reminds me of the gentle touch of the ophthalmologist when I go to get my eyes examined. In the quiet and privacy of his small office, he carefully moves my head and the lenses of the eye machine while charting my responses until between us we get to the right configuration that helps me see to read. He takes down all the specifications for my new glasses and sends me on home—an intimate moment focused on my well-being, not my harm. His care adds to the quality of my life and the significance of his own because of a job well done.

As we enter today’s text in Mark, Jesus has led his disciples to a crossroads. They are standing near the modern-day Golan Heights, a few kilometers from the Lebanese border. Behind them is Galilee. Ahead of them is Jerusalem. If they think back, the disciples can recall the importance of Jesus’ public ministry, his powerful preaching and healing, his announcement of the forgiveness of sins, and his popularity with the crowds. Jesus is about to teach the disciples about the significance of what lies ahead. He will ask them the question that will challenge them to consider his mission, to clarify who they think he is, and who they believe they are in relation to him: “Who do you say that I am?” Jesus asked.

He is beginning to realize that he will have more to contend with than just a scraped knee when he gets to the city. He knows what has happened in the past to prophets in their own country. So he imagines what will happen to him and he tells his friends that he will be rejected. He explaines how he will suffer, be beaten, humiliated, spat upon, and finally murdered. “Hey, wait a minute,” Douglas Hare puts words into Peter’s mouth, the disciple who had recognized that Jesus was from God. [From a military point of view] “the Messiah is supposed to inflict suffering, not experience it. What good will a dead Messiah be?”

Jesus replies to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan.” Jesus goes on to say that if they want to save their lives, they will have to forget about them. To paraphrase, he says, “If a person wishes to come after me, he must disown himself, carry the cross, and walk in my footsteps” (Joseph Donders). It is clear now that Jesus has led his followers not just to a geographical crossroads; he has led them to a spiritual crossroads (Hare). Jesus is introducing them to a God who does not operate with the logic of an eye-for-an eye vengeance.

Jesus has just said a mouthful. Too much to digest all at once. We need to debrief. What is this business about carrying a cross? The disciples must have really been beside themselves at this point, because the cross was a punishment reserved for the worst of offenders. Jesus was saying that keeping his eye on God’s purposes was going to cost him religiously and politically. By association, his friends could be facing a similar threat.

Let’s stay with Jesus’ comment about carrying the cross. Could Mark be making the point that the disciples, at this time in their understanding, were like the blind man with hazy vision? Sociologist of religion Marsha Witten suggests that Jesus wasn’t attacking Peter so much as he was resisting Peter’s patronizing attitude. “If you’re going to call me Messiah and claim to be my follower, you’d better be sure what significance your life is taking on. If you don’t know what you’re saying, keep my name to yourself.”

Remember how Jesus marked the beginning of his public ministry by reading from the Bible in his hometown synagogue, quoting from the prophet Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. The Lord has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” (Isaiah 61:1-2a)?

Anything less than this from his followers, Witten says, is to “downsize God’s transcendence, to sand off the sharp corners of the doctrine of sin, to resort to sugary theologies and simplistic theologies of salvation.” This is why Jesus said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan.” Who does Peter think he is, that he thinks he can lead, guide, even own God on his terms?

I am beginning to believe that carrying the cross begins with a more personal, intimate, interior moment between ourselves and God before we get to the practice of Jesus’ kind of ministry. Ministry takes discipline and practice. It’s a process that takes a lifetime and is initiated and sustained by the very Spirit of God. I believe ministry begins in the sanctuary of the soul and moves outward to create sacred spaces for healing in the world. I believe that the church’s theology hasn’t always helped us figure out what carrying the cross really means. I believe that sometimes the theology of the church has actually injured people. This is at the core of what I’d like us to consider in these brief moments. A huge subject for a small time frame.

Let’s begin with this account by United Methodist pastor Rebecca Parker, in the splendid book quoted on the front cover of this morning’s bulletin. [“What words tell the truth? What balms heal? What proverbs kindle the fires of passion and joy? What spirituality stirs the hunger for justice? We seek answers to these questions—not only for ourselves but for our communities and society. What are the ways of being with one another that enable life to flourish, rich with meaning? When violence has fractured communities, isolated people, and broken hearts, how can life be repaired? We ask these questions not to arrive at final answers, but because asking them is fundamental to living.“ Proverbs of Ashes: Violence, Redemptive Suffering, and the Search for What Saves Us, Beacon Press, 2001.] It begins with Rebecca’s pastoral call on a couple in her congregation. The woman was reading a letter from her brother when Rebecca arrived. Rebecca knew

that the man was a farmer from Iowa and drove with his wife every winter to the Mexican border to share the basics: food, blankets, and repairs. They offered practical assistance and friendship to people struggling with the debilitating effects of poverty and harsh working conditions. “You know,“ the parishioner mused, “we never thought my brother would be the one to do something like this. We thought we’d lost him.“

She told how in 1945, he’d

“come home from the war, the only veteran to return alive to the small town in Iowa he’d left to go to the Western front. The day he arrived home, the whole town came out to meet him. When the train pulled into the station, the band played. Family and friends waved and cheered, and the mayor stood ready to greet him. But the man who climbed off the train was not the cheerful, high-spirited boy who had gone off to war. The man who climbed off the train was a ghost. In response to the music and the cheers, he stared back, mutely. His blank face did not register recognition of anyone—not mother, sister, or friend. They led him home to the farm. He sat in the rocker in the parlor. He wouldn’t speak, he wouldn’t sleep, and he would barely eat. No one in the town knew what was wrong. They just knew that his soul was lost somewhere.“

His sister told Rebecca how

she decided to keep him company. As often as she could, she would sit beside him in the parlor and talk. She’d tell him the news from the hardware store in town, or about the potluck at church, who was there, which dress each young woman wore. She’d tell how the clean laundry had blown off the line and into the tomatoes that morning. When she ran out of things to say, she’d just sit with him quietly, snapping beans or mending socks. He was like a stone. No expression on his face. Rocking.

It went on like this for months.

Then one night, late, after everyone else had gone to bed, she was sitting with him, quietly knitting, when the eyes in his still face filled with tears. The tears spilled over and began to run down his face. She noticed. She got up and put her arms around her brother. Held in his sister’s embrace, he began to cry full force, great gusts of sobbing, as she held him. Then he began to talk. He talked of the noise, the cold, the smoke, the death of his buddies. And then he spoke of the camps, the mass graves, the smell. He talked all night. She listened. When the morning light came across the fields, she went to the kitchen and cooked him breakfast. He ate. Then he went out and did the morning chores. She touched her Bible and quoted from memory, “Weeping may endure for the night, but joy comes in the morning.”

Rebecca Parker has returned to this story over the years. She reflects on it in her book this way:

A traumatized human being was able to return to feeling, to speaking, and to the ordinary tasks of life because another person offered him her presence and was able to remain present to the account of terror and grief without turning away. His sister was a faithful witness. She stayed with him. She heard his testimony without being overwhelmed, listening to the end. He responded by allowing the grief to unfreeze and told his experiences. He became present to himself, able to recount his own memories. However disjointed and fragmented his speech, he was able to organize the thread of experience enough to create words, to tell what he remembered. He began to come back to ordinary life. The man stayed in Iowa and took over the family farm. It occupied most of his time, but every winter he and his wife drove to southern California to help the migrant farm workers who crossed the border from Mexico searching for work.

What if the cross Jesus said to pick up is the cross of reclaiming a life that has been battered and bruised? What if the life Jesus is talking about giving up is a life judged to have little or no significance and the life he is offering in exchange is a life that is valued and loved? What if what Jesus was offering to people was a new set of lenses through which to look at life? What if Jesus’ mission was to resist the evil of violence and abuse, however subtle, and to be a saving presence with those who were disabled by violence in order that they might reclaim life for themselves? What if this is what got him killed?

The conversation that began this sermon was initiated by a man who had suffered from what attorney and author Andrew Vachss believes is the cruelest and longest lasting form of abuse, emotional abuse. He describes emotional abuse as a “long-term systematic diminishment of the value of another, whether intentional or not.” It reduces a child’s sense of self to one who is “unworthy of respect, unworthy of friendship, unworthy of the natural birthright of all children, love and protection,” Vachss says that whether from deliberate attack or passive neglect, emotional abuse leaves invisible wounds. “Like cancer, it does its most deadly work internally.” It “scars the heart and damages the soul.” Like the blind man in Mark’s Gospel who saw people like they were trees walking, abused children see through distorted vision. They are conditioned to struggle a lifetime for approval from their abusers and forgiveness for themselves for the very sin that has been perpetrated against them. Abused children are made to feel their injuries are their own fault, and as adults they continue to seek approval from those who cannot or will not ever give it to them. Some abuse has come from the perverted notion that it produces adults who are tough and able to cope with a hard world. Part of the distorted vision that children acquire is that to tell the truth about abuse will hurt others or the systems in which abuse occurs. Vachss looks out and sees a situation that, as he puts it, is threatening “to become a national illness. . . . The popularity of nasty, mean-spirited, personal-attack cruelty that passes for ‘entertainment’ is but one example.” Vachss urges those who are victims of emotional abuse “to develop their own standards for what goodness really is.“ “Salvation,” he writes, “means learning self-respect, . . . making respect the absolutely irreducible minimum requirement for all intimate relationships. Healing comes down to forgiveness—forgiveness of the broken self.” What if this was what Jesus’ death was all about?

I may be skating on thin ice here, but let’s look a moment at some of the traditional ideas about the meaning of Jesus’ suffering on the cross. I am painting these ideas with a very broad brush and without the nuances that rightfully go with each.

One idea about how Jesus saves goes this way: sin became a reality when Adam and Eve disobeyed God by violating the limits that God had set for them. God’s penalty for this violation was death. God didn’t want to punish what God had created but God’s honor was at stake. God was torn between punishing and saving. God solved [t]his problem by sending Jesus to pay the human’s debt, to take on himself God’s punishment for what humankind deserved. In this way, God’s honor was restored.

A second idea is that sin is rooted in human disregard for the needs and well-being of the neighbor. This kind of rebellion gets institutionalized in social systems that benefit some by oppressing others. Jesus’ death on the cross showed the kind of sacrifice that God desires. Jesus’ followers are called to empty themselves out for others. The sacrifice of self is the way to demonstrate God’s love.

A third view argues that Jesus’ death is the way to cause people to feel remorse and repent of their insensitivity to God’s mercy. If they see Jesus not returning violence for violence, they will be converted to him.

A fourth notion is that Jesus’ was crucified in order to show that God is present with us in our suffering. This is because God experienced through Jesus’ ordeal what we experience: humiliation, betrayal, physical and emotional torment, abandonment, isolation, and the collapse of hope. Through Christ’s pain and suffering, God enters into a union with us. [I am indebted to Rebecca Parker for the series of sermons she outlines in her book, reviewing each of these ideas in greater depth.]

There are bits of truth in each of these views that can help. There are also hindrances. Parker argues that running through each of these views is a presupposition that God uses violence to transform people and communities into greater spiritual well-being. She responds to this assumption with this question: “Is love’s ultimate expression the destruction of the self?” She answers her own question this way:

God is not the author of human violence and does not sanction cruelty and torture. To inflict pain on ourselves is not virtuous and to inflict it on others is not edifying or transforming. Sparing the rod does not spoil the child. It is not godly to beat our children or ourselves. We have to face pain more squarely. When grief or loss come to us, we cannot comfort ourselves by saying God is testing us or offering us a blessing that we don’t yet understand. . . . We have to learn to grieve full out and face forward, without covering over the realities of human cruelty and violence.

For the man at the beginning of this sermon, an abusive father had taken the place of God. The father’s violent spirit ruled the man’s life. This is to be dead, not alive!

What if God is saving us not through violence and the suffering but through resistance to it? That is to be alive, not dead! Parker is speaking of the power of a loving and sustaining Presence that breaks into the place where there is no presence, like we saw in the life of the man from Iowa, where the fire has gone out, where all is ashes. This would mean that God did not foreordain Jesus to die on the cross to appease God’s anger at us but God raised Jesus from death as an act of resistance to violence that destroys life, from the inside out, begun in intimate relationships and translated into public acts and systems. Rita Brock, Rebecca’s writing partner, adds that “Violence denies presence and suffocates spirit. . . We can resist and redress violence by acting for justice and by being present: present to one another, present to beauty, present to the fire at the heart of things, the spirit that gives breath to life.”

When we marked our foreheads with ashes at the beginning of this season of Lent, we were signifying what life is like without the fire of God’s presence. In the resurrection of Jesus, we see that violence has not put out this fire (Parker). The potential of restoring a sacred place within the self is sustained.

Brock goes on to say what we know to be true, “Love is not without pain. Love involves change and to change involves risk. We face the limits of love in the finite circumstances of our lives, the experiences which have nurtured and wounded us. Love requires courage for risk-taking and self-possession, not self-sacrifice. The more we love, the more loss carves into our souls. Pain is the risk of loving, not the basis of love.” She goes on to add, “I believed it was possible to find this truth in Christianity, in a view of Jesus that bound him in love to others, that recognized the caring that inspired his commitment to resist an unjust empire and made him part of a long legacy of resistance and hope.”

I believe that salvation begins with the courage to look and see. It means bringing violence and suffering into public view. Grieving bravely. Resisting further harm.

Because of Jesus’ willingness to face life full on, we in the church are being freed to put into the place of the harsh, punishing god that inflicts pain and suffering an image like Rita Brock leaves with her readers, an image retrieved from her memories of her reliable, caring grandmother, memories that were healing, that have begun to overtake in her the violence that she has experienced: “I like to think God might be like this: a presence whom we have never seen—perhaps do not know exists—but who has loved us from the beginning. Who puts, on a mirror, images of us at our most tender and vulnerable and wants us to be well, to thrive, and to be protected from harm. I like to imagine God with her wrinkled, freckled face peering at us, remembering us, loving us, hoping for us, embracing us with a twinkling gaze of joy and concern, without our ever needing to know.”

All praise be to God, the father of our Lord Jesus Christ, one God, our God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, now and forever. Amen.