Setting your mind

Mark 8: 31-38, NT page 44 Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man 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. He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. 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.” He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, “If any want to become followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. 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. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? Indeed, what can they give in return for their life? Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.” Sermon The man who makes sure that our church is clean and ready for worship, who picks up the bulletins that some of you leave behind in the pews, restocks the paper towels in the bathroom, and changes the light bulbs way up there in the sanctuary ceiling – his name is James Marshall, and he probably greeted you as you walked in the door if you come into the church using the side entrance on High Street. He is usually here on Sunday mornings, but he has a church of his own in the Sandy Hook Community, and after joining that church some years ago, his brother Earl, who plays the drums, encouraged James to learn to play the guitar so that with a couple other church members, they might start a praise band who would lead the singing. James had always wanted to learn a musical instrument, so he bought a guitar and practiced at home, and he thought he was sounding pretty good, even though every time he took out the guitar his wife Tina would say that she needed to go to the grocery store. After grocery shopping for a while she’d call home and ask, “Are you finished practicing James?” “Not just yet,” James would answer. “Then I think I’ll go visit my mother for a little while,” Tina would respond. After weeks of practicing this way, always with Tina at the grocery store or her mother’s house, for some reason James was still pretty sure he was mastering the guitar, so he went to his church in Sandy Hook to play with his brother Earl and the rest of the band. The rehearsal started and James started playing, though he noticed that the bass player kept looking at him kind of funny. The Deacon in charge of the music, Deacon Armstrong, asked the band to stop and he called James aside: “Now James, what made you want to start playing the guitar?” James told him, “The Lord put it on my heart Deacon Armstrong.” “No he didn’t,” Deacon Armstrong responded. Now you need to remember this story. After James told it at our staff meeting last Monday I asked him if I could tell it to you because it illustrates an important point - no one, not even James Marshall, is allowed to be good at everything. But when you reach that limitation and you fall short, you can’t let the one thing that you can’t seem to do keep you from seeing all the things that you can. Deacon Armstrong took James aside to talk about his calling as a guitar player, and Deacon Armstrong knows the rest of the story. I’m sure you do as well. He probably knows how many people James helps to their car on a Sunday morning, not because anyone asked him to, just because it seemed like the right thing to do. He probably knows how many Saturdays James spends up here at the church, and I bet he even knows the story of the car accident on West 7th Street, when a van flipped over with a mother and her child inside. James Marshall was the one who ran across the street to pull them both from the vehicle before the police or anyone else arrived, not hesitating, not even thinking, just reacting out of pure kindness and love for his fellow man. Deacon Armstrong probably does know all that, or if not all, at least most of it, which is important because the point here is, not being able to play the guitar is nothing, though sometimes it’s the one thing that we can’t do that prevents us from seeing all the things that we can – the failed expectations of ourselves and our neighbors too often preventing us from appreciating the people who we are - just as the teaching that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed; this aspect of who Christ is prevents Peter from understanding and appreciating the truth about his friend Jesus. When Peter realizes that Jesus is not the savior that he wanted or expected, he’s too disappointed to appreciate the kind of savior that he is. Our 2nd Scripture Lesson begins: “Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man 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. He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him.” And he rebuked him because he was disappointed. Do you know what it’s like when someone is disappointed in you? Not disappointed by what you’ve done, but disappointed in who you have turned out to be? A few years ago I was asked to lead a parenting class – the fact that I didn’t have any children and didn’t know anything about being a parent hardly mattered to the committee who asked me to lead the class. I was ill-equipped, and having no idea what to do, I researched curriculum and came up with an exercise featuring a sheet of paper with a simple figure of a child drawn on it. The exercise was for parents to write the qualities that their child had on the drawing, the qualities that they had hoped their child would have or might have some day outside the drawing. The point of the lesson was illustrated in the difference between the two lists – does your child embody any of the qualities that you value, and do you value the qualities that the child actually embodies? One father who ended up with two very different lists – his son didn’t embody any of the qualities that he valued – and upon realizing this he interrupted the lesson to make sure that I knew how ridiculous he thought it was that someone without any children would be leading a parenting class, which was a valid argument, but doesn’t take away the hard truth of what can happen when the people we love fail to meet our expectations. Peter is disappointed that Jesus is not the savior he had hoped for, and we get a taste of the problem that this kind of disappointment can cause whenever we fail to meet our expectations of ourselves or others. You know how hard it is to reconcile the difference between the people that we are and the people that others think we are supposed to be, but how much harder it is to reconcile the Jesus you thought you knew, the Jesus you’ve been imagining, with the reality of him. “He began to teach them that the Son of Man 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. He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him.” Now this kind of thing happens all the time of course. Teachers compare themselves to each other, and in recognizing the kind of teacher that they aren’t, they fail to appreciate the kind of teacher who they are. Choirs sing without recognizing the beauty of their voices – mindful only of the kind of choir that they used to be, straining towards being the kind of choir they think they are expected to be – failing to appreciate who they are naturally, without even trying. And there are many who are like Peter – who hear this news of Jesus and the suffering that he faces willingly – and cannot accept the savior as he is. We learn about a Jesus, who like a guardian angel shields us from disease or hardship, healing all infirmity, protecting from all inconvenience, and providing for every need. We expect him in the hospital when cancer knocks on the door and death creeps ever near, we expect him to cast the cancer out. They also say that Jesus is like a friend, a best friend even – but do his words not hurt at times, is his truth not a little too honest? We see him smile in the paintings, embrace the children, save the lost sheep – so who is this Lord who is unwilling to save himself? Walking to his death willingly. Submitting to a trial that could be avoided? Who is this – Peter asks – and if you are anything like me you want an answer to the same question. Remember this then – Jesus is not who you want him to be, but he is who you need him to be. You may want a savior who will save you from today’s hardship. Know instead that you have a Christ who faces such hardship beside you, only to triumph over it. Indeed he is a Savior far greater than any savior I had hoped he would be. But our minds are too often set only on what is human, so Father Abraham, 99 years old, stood before the Lord and the Lord promised him an everlasting covenant, promised his wife Sarah that her barrenness would give rise to nations; “kings of peoples shall come from her.” But Abraham fell on his face and laughed, “Can a child be born to a man who is a hundred years old? Can Sarah who is ninety years old, bear a child?” I cannot imagine it. Be warned today as the faithful of every generation have been warned – do not set your mind on the God of your own imagination, but on the God who raised a nation out of the barrenness of Abraham and Sarah, a God who rises from the dead. Amen.