Text: Mark 8:31-9:8
I have been thinking this week about my grandfather.
A little less than a year ago he died and in the weeks to follow, my little brother discovered online a memoir my Grandpa Earl had written for a booklet called “Facing Bereavement” from Alpha Ministries.
He tells of how he and my Grandma Doni were faithful churchgoers for years… until the spring of 1987.
My aunt, Candy, died at the age of 32 from an incurable brain tumor and they stopped going to church. It wasn’t necessarily a conscious decision, but my grandpa was angry. He found ways to just not be available.
Jennifer Stern writes that “grief, like drowning, an be deceptively quiet… those who live with grief often appear “okay”… they look like they are floating (if not swimming) yet on the inside they feel they are drowning…. It takes herculean effort to stay afloat during the rough waters of grief.” [1]
Grandpa Earl tried to stay afloat and numb his pain by traveling extensively for work and numbing it through heavy drinking. My grandma kept asking him to stop, but he wouldn’t listen. He writes, “Throughout this time, I was drinking Scotch every night and I didn’t think I could stop – I didn’t really want to. I didn’t have the willpower. I was still mad.”
My grandma didn’t drink, but one day she had enough of my grandpa’s behavior. She got drunk, floated out into the lake and might have drowned had my grandpa not found her. He thought she was trying to commit suicide, but after she yelled at him for hours, he came to understand just how unhappy she had been. A truth he hadn’t been able to hear until he dove into the water to drag her back to the dock.
My grandpa had been so caught up in his own pain, he couldn’t see or hear hers. He made a home in his anger and drinking and distance. He couldn’t see how his actions were causing further harm because he lived in a different reality. A false reality.
Until my grandmother was finally able to get through to him with a hard truth.
The next day, he made a commitment to never drink again.
And he kept that promise.
Together, they found ways to confront the reality of their loss. Together, they found ways to heal. Together, they found faith again.
The truth is, we all get stuck in our own pain.
We all get caught up false realities we think are good for us, whether they are narratives of success, or the rose-colored glasses of our privilege, or illusions that everything is okay when it is not.
Again and again, we mess up and refuse to see hard truths.
Rev. T. Denise Anderson rightly notes that “we don’t exactly incentivize the telling of hard truths.” After all, “hard truths trouble the waters of our understanding and challenge notions of what is real.”
Patterns of “shame, guilt, ignorance, or inaction” can trap us in situations that feel familiar and comfortable, when reality is far more difficult to accept.
We drive past the person looking for a handout on the street corner and ignore the problems of homelessness in our city.
We rush to make a neighbor feel better rather than actually listening to their story.
We lift up our few relationships with people of color instead of confessing the systemic racial injustices that plague our church and nation.
We drown our sorrows rather than holding them in the light and seeking healing.
In our scripture for today, Peter, likewise, found himself confronted with some hard truths.
Truths that shook the core of his being.
He seems like he has it all together, just like my grandpa did.
After all, Peter has been walking in the footsteps of Jesus for months.
He had a front-row seat to the inbreaking Kingdom of God!
And so when Jesus asked, “Who do you say that I am?” Peter knew the answer.
“You are the Messiah.”
It sounds like the right answer, but… perhaps Peter wasn’t actually pay attention.
In this time, the Messiah, the Christ, “the anointed one,” came with numerous interpretations.
Some talked of a king who would rule with divine authority.
Others believed the Messiah would return at the end of days to bring judgment.
Still others hoped for a spiritual leader who would reform the people.
When Jesus starts to say things HIS messiah would never say: words like suffering, rejection, and death, the text says Peter takes hold of Jesus and rebukes him.
“No, no, no, Jesus… you have it all wrong…”
Like Peter, we want it to be easy.
We want to pretend that everything will magically be better.
We’d like to think that we can show up for church once and a while and nothing more will be expected of us until we arrive at the pearly gates.
We have had enough death and suffering… especially in Covid times.
We’re tired of living in Lent.
We’d rather plead ignorance, or avert our eyes, or numb reality away with our favorite vice.
“No, no, no, Jesus… you have it all wrong…”
But Jesus challenges those false narratives with a dose of hard truth.
As Debie Thomas reminds us, we cannot replace the cross with a shortcut. [2]
If we want to be a disciple, we must take up the cross.
If we want to save our lives, we must let them go.
And truth be told… a lot of us really are not ready to embrace that reality.
A few days later, Peter and some other disciples find themselves on a mountain top where Jesus is transfigured before their very eyes.
God’s power and presence is revealed in their midst.
The sight of Moses and Elijah confirms the role of Jesus in the world.
Surely, Peter gets it now… right?
Only, again.. and again… he wants it to be easy.
Or rather, the possibility of having to actually accept this reality is terrifying.
He thinks maybe there is an “out” from all this talk about crosses and suffering and death:
“It’s good to be here… let’s build a shelter. Let’s start a church. Let’s stay right here in this place and not leave.”
But the clouds roll in and a voice rumbles from the heavens… “This is my Son! Listen to him!”
Rev. T. Denise Anderson asks: Are we willing to listen to hard truths?
“Or are we committed to the status quo because, though it may be imperfect, it’s at least familiar?”
We tend to protect ourselves with numbness or apathy, or by plowing ahead focusing only on our own needs and desires without concern for anyone else.
Maybe this call to listen, to pay attention, to be aware, is actually what allows us to take up our cross.
Maybe it is what finally allows us to step outside of what Debie Thomas names as those vicious cycles we embrace again and again… cycles of denial and acquisition, success and violence, false realities that try to “cheat death, but in fact rob us of… abundant life.”
What if taking up our cross is not about denying the world, but opening ourselves to the suffering of the world?
We “experience the abundant life Jesus offers,” Thomas writes, “by accepting – against all the lies of my culture – that I will die, and trusting in Jesus’s assurance that I will rise again.”
And once we truly listen and understand that reality, we cannot help but work to make it a reality for others as well.
For a long time, Peter watched as the Kingdom of God was breaking forth.
The hungry were fed.
Demons were cast out.
His own mother-in-law was healed.
“This guy is making everything better!” He must have thought.
But what Jesus offers is not an invitation to sit back and watch…
Jesus doesn’t say that once we get ours the work is done…
Jesus calls us to listen, to notice, to roll up our sleeves, to take up our cross, to labor for the Kingdom.
To stand in the midst of the world’s pain and see the hungry…
notice the demons and powers that would destroy….
Weep with the broken and grieving…
and then do something about it.
We experience God’s abundant life when we enter into the reality of the suffering of this world and give everything we can to bring about God’s reality.
That was the kind of legacy that my grandfather left.
When he lost my aunt, Candy, he tried to hide from the reality of that loss. He numbed away the pain and closed himself off from others.
When my grandmother died from the same kind of tumor in 2001, he embraced the cross of Jesus Christ.
He learned to listen not only to God, but to his own pain and to the pain of the world.
He decided to let go of trying to do it all his own way and decided to allow others to help. To allow God to help.
My grandpa wrote: “I know that until he calls me home I have a mission of reaching out, touching people, helping carry his word in any way that’s his will.”
Grandpa Earl got involved in the church’s after school program and hung out with the kiddos every afternoon… building with blocks, reading stories, singing songs.
He started visiting people who were in trouble and needed someone to talk to, whether they were home or in the hospital.
He became involved in recovery ministry and A/A and made his famous five-pound-fudge to take to meetings.
When he listened to his own pain, and saw how God was moving through it, he was able to listen to the pain of others, and help them find a way through as well.
As Anderson reminds us, “Again and again, we are implored to listen, especially when what we hear is unsettling.” Again and again, God shows us a path through the difficulties of this world… through even death itself… to abundant life.
May we hear…
and may we act.
[1] https://transformativegrief.com/2018/04/30/drowning-doesnt-always-look-like-drowning-neither-does-grief/
[2] https://www.journeywithjesus.net/essays/2930-gains-and-losses
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