So, a few weeks ago, I was up around Otselic, and I saw a rusted out old car covered with religious bumper stickers. One of them caught my eye out of them all: JESUS IS THE ANSWER TO ALL MY QUESTIONS.
Now first off that's an illogical statement. I mean, the answer to “Where did I leave my keys? What will I make for dinner tonight? How are you feeling today?” The answer to all of those questions is NOT “Jesus.”
But I sorta understood. It is a bumper sticker after all, and good bumper stickers assume you know the backstory. So I started to think. Because this seems to be the predominate version of Christianity these days: Looking for meaning in life? Jesus has got it for you. Do you need a sense of serenity in a difficult and demanding world? Jesus has got you covered.
When I was in Kingsport, TN, my congregation was filled with engineers and management types from the local chemical plant. So, when my vestry had major questions, they loved data. So they hired a church consultant to tell us how to grow the congregation. The consultants eventually told us, "First find where people itch; then find a way for the church to scratch that itch." They added, "The church is here to meet people's felt needs.” Hmmmm.
But we've been spending quite a lot of time lately with Mark as we go through this earliest of the Gospels. And unlike those church consultants, Mark has little to say about our felt needs, our struggles and our difficulties. Mark mainly just talks about Jesus. And when he talks about Jesus, it's not Jesus as the answer to our problems. Instead he gives us a Jesus that is a strange and demanding Lord.
Take today's reading. As the disciples walk along with Jesus, a couple of the disciples, James and John, say, "Lord, grant us to sit at your right and your left when you come into your kingdom." It's a fair request, I think. After all, they've left everything to follow Jesus. It had not been easy traipsing around behind Jesus through Judea, up and down the dusty roads. So, a little reward seems in order.
And Jesus replies to this request by saying: "You don't know what you're asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink? Are you able to be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?"
Now we know what the disciples don't know. The road that Jesus is walking is a road that leads to torture and death on a cross. The "cup" that Jesus is to drink is the cup of his horrible death. The "baptism" that will drown him is the baptism of his death as he suffocates to death on a cross.
And we tend to chuckle a little the disciples respond, "Sure! No problem!"
Now I suspect that Jesus looked at them and thought, "You morons! Here we are, all the way in Chapter 10, and you still have no idea!” But what Jesus said out loud was, "You will drink the cup that I drink, you will be baptized with my baptism."
And Jesus does not promise his disciples that they shall be in glory with him, rewarded and happy. He promises that if they will follow him they shall share with him in his sufferings and challenges. James and John ask to sit next to Jesus in his glory, but when Jesus came into his "glory," it was not on their imagined throne. It was on a cross, with two thieves, one on his right and one on his left.
And this what so many churches have been reluctant to proclaim to the world, perhaps because we're reluctant to hear this message ourselves! Jesus is not a magic trick for getting what we want out of God; Jesus is God's way of getting what God wants out of us. God wants a world restored. And the way God gets that is with ordinary people like us who are willing to walk like Jesus, talk like Jesus, yes, and even if need be, to suffer like Jesus.
I've always thought it would have been enough of a challenge if Jesus had only said, "Even though I am the Messiah, the Son of God, Savior of the world, I am going to be nailed to a cross."
But he doesn't stop there. He adds, "Come, take up your cross and follow."
And I wonder if that car in Otselic would've had enough room for a bumper sticker that said, “God Has a Cross that Fits Your Back, Too.”
When I was in Knoxville, I had to do a baptism for the campus minister at the University of Tennessee. The person being baptized was a grad student from China, and I was just so proud. When it was over, I made the grad student stand with me and take a few pictures. I mean, who wouldn't want to have their picture taken with me, right?
And when I said, "You can email these pictures to your family back in China," I noticed everyone cringe. Later I asked the campus minister what I had done. He said, "Well, now that he's baptized, his life has been ruined. His parents will disinherit him. The government will take away his scholarship. His life as he knew it is over because he's a Christian now." That man truly was baptized into the baptism of Jesus.
But that man did it willingly, knowing what James and John didn't know. And so many people around the world still do. Not following some magic God that will fulfill all our needs, but a demanding Jesus who needs us to suffer along with him, to struggle along with him, to bring peace and justice to such a turbulent, unjust world.
One final story:
Once, when I was visiting Little Rock, I met up with the guy who runs Mercy Church, a nondenominational worship gathering that is run out of the undercroft of Christ Episcopal Church. This guy had gone to Duke and was headed for big things in the Baptist Church. But then he got sidetracked into this ministry. He lives in a dangerous, tough part of town and has been the victim of violent crimes on several occasions. But he still lives there, sharing his love of Christ with the homeless, the addicts, the rejected, the abused.
I asked him why. He smiled and said, “Well, it's sort of what you sometimes get when you get Jesus. I thought 'I found Christ' when, in reality Christ found me. I thought he wanted to give me something to reward me for my faithfulness. And he did, I suppose. But mainly, he gave me this job, this really, really hard work. He gave me this cup to drink. He gave me this baptism.” And then he turned back to his people, a smile, a friendly word, and a big heart filled with love.
When I see how so many in so many churches are misled by promises of success and riches, and when I hear Christian leaders on tv lean into hatred of others or, at the very least, bamboozling of others, I sometimes despair. But so often, a follower of Jesus will cross my path. In my past...but also so many, many times here in my present, in this place, in these churches. And I will see the ones about whom Jesus spoke, the ones who drink the cup and take up the cross.
And there is hope. There is Jesus.
And that's the Good News.