Year B, Lent 2, March 12^th, 2006
Genesis 22:1-4; Romans 8:31-39; St. Mark 8:31-38
St. Edmund's Episcopal Church
The Reverend George F. Woodward III

 

            In 1884 a little booked called Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions was published, telling the story of the inhabitants of a two-dimensional world called, unsurprisingly, "Flatland."  These creatures are two-dimensional, and have no thickness to them.  The narrator is a Square who receives a disturbing visit from a three-dimensional Sphere.  The two dimensional Square can hardly take in the revelation of three-dimensional reality.  At first, he is in denial.  Finally, the Square attempts to tell his fellow Flatlanders about this larger world, but they are too bound up in their own limited perceptions to hear him.

            The message of the book is hard to miss.  We are all Flatlanders.  One of the messages of the Christian Faith is that we are in every generation the products of our cultures, and that God's larger reality will always seem to us strange and foreign and challenging. 

            Example #1 is Abraham.  Abraham was very much a man of his time.  He pressed for more, encountering several cultures as he wandered from Ur of the Chaldees (in contemporary Iraq) up to Haran (in contemporary Turkey) following an inner prompting, and then from Haran down to Canaan and on into Egypt and back to Palestine.  Maybe all that wandering relativized the dictums of culture a bit, and readied him for a new and deeper vision of God.

            When Abraham settled in Canaan, he settled among people who worshipped Molech.  One of the features of the cult of Molech was the practice of child sacrifice.  First born children were often sacrificed and immolated to please the god and secure prosperity and blessing. 

            Abraham loved God, and he thought he heard the voice of God speaking from within his own culture, just as we often mistake our own cultural prejudices for the voice of God.  And so he headed out with his first-born Isaac to do the thing that people did back then, when they wanted to be faithful.

            Abraham was mired in his culture.  His love for God was genuine, but his expression of that love was culturally defined.  In the moment of decision, Abraham hears the genuine voice of God speaking to his conscience.  He discerns where God and culture parted company.  The old man Abraham came to a fresh and dynamic understanding of the God he had worshipped from his youth, and thereby changed the course of religious history.

            Sometimes God shows up our Flatland world for what it is.  Sometimes the voice of God speaks into our lives, opening us to new dimensions of reality and freeing us from flat perspectives. 

            Perhaps such insight is only possible in moments of crisis, or in moments when our preconceptions are called to question.  Jesus had a knack for provoking just those kinds of crisis in His disciples, and, if we are serious about following Jesus, we should expect to find ourselves similarly challenged. 

            Example # 2, Peter.  Peter, too, was a captive of his culture, as every human being is.  He was a fisherman, and prospects for his life were predictable and limited until he was invited to join the exciting campaign of Rabbi Jesus, a healer and teacher of great power and authority.  Crowds swarmed everywhere Jesus went.  Jesus was personally mentoring Peter, and that must have been heady stuff for a former fisherman.  Jesus' star was rising in the world, and Peter's star was firmly anchored to Jesus.

            Until Jesus began to, as Mark's Gospel says, "speak plainly" about His coming crucifixion.  This was not the kind of campaign Peter had signed on for; he rebukes Jesus, and in turn Jesus rebukes Peter calling him a "satan," an adversary undermining God's call and direction.  Peter finds all of his beliefs and aspirations put to sudden test.  And so, from time to time, will we, if we are really listening to Jesus.  "If any want to be My followers, they must deny themselves, 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."

            Mark's Gospel, from which this passage is drawn, was written just after the first great persecution of Christians had taken place in Rome in 64 A.D.  Many Christians, including Peter and Paul, were martyred by crucifixion, or burning at the stake, or found themselves fed to the beasts.  All of Jesus' disciples died martyr's deaths.  It was clear to Mark and those early Christians that the Way of Jesus was not going to be an easy Way; it was going to be a Way of personal sacrifice. 

            So tell me, as you look critically at our own culture, and your own life within that culture, do we not seek in about every way possible to "save our own lives?"  Aren't we more than a little like Peter before his second conversion?  The not especially obscure message of our culture and of numerous self-help books seems to be that whatever the Sovereign Self wants the Sovereign Self should try and get.  We are anxiously attached to our possessions and driven to accumulate more.  Our perspective is materialist, adverse to aging, and scared to death of death.  We are slaves to our cultural Molechs and to the prevailing notions of what the good life is all about. 

            The Word from beyond Flatland is that there is more to life than self-interest, self-advancement, self-improvement, and self-fulfillment; more than being healthy, wealthy and wise.  We might ask how we, like Abraham, march lockstep to our culture as though its voice were the very voice of God.  Abraham nearly sacrificed his own son in such pursuit, and it is just as possible today to sacrifice children and more meaningful ways of living in our driven pursuit of affluence and security. 

            It is self-denial and self-sacrifice we are in need of.

            It could be argued that Jesus was guilty of fraud.  He knew that Peter and the rest of the disciples were operating on a messianic vision that He Himself had rejected as satanic: the hope that the messiah would lead a nationalistic triumph, with power and wealth for all who followed Him.  Yet Jesus permitted the disciples to follow Him anyway, encouraged them to sacrifice family and vocation in ignorance of where it all was leading.  It may be true, as Bonhoeffer suggested that when Jesus first called His disciples, He bade them come and die.  But they didn't know that was what He meant!

            It is self-denial and self-sacrifice we are in need of; a reorientation of our priorities.  But that isn't what we're wanting.  Most of us, if we are honest, take our stand with Peter.  We want a savior who can justify the good life here and now.  So Christ speaks harshly also to us.

            Perhaps we didn't understand, when we first signed on to be Christians and Church folk; we thought the Church would enhance our life.  Like Peter, we were hoping for a little improvement in our station and our fortune and Jesus seemed to offer the kind of stability and good morals that serve such an end, and now we hear that we have been wrong.  Much is demanded of us. 

            Peter was as close to Jesus as anyone, yet at the moment when he is most right about Jesus, at the moment when he declares Jesus to be the Christ, at that very moment he was also a "satan" who was not on the side of God, but of human beings.  At the very moment when we are most convinced that we are "on the side of God," we may be opposing Him.  At those moments when we assume our nation is doing God's bidding, we will most likely be wrong. 

            To care primarily about the enhancement of this present life and our amenities, to be determined to preserve one's own life at all costs, to confuse the voice of culture with the voice of God, these things will, in the end, lead to total loss.  Conversely, to renounce one's life for the sake of the Good News of Jesus Christ, to hold one's own life loosely in service to Christ, brings a depth of life heretofore unknown, and creates new hope for individuals and the possibility of renewal within cultures.

            I believe people need from the Church plain spoken reasons to lose their lives for Christ, not further encouragement to pamper and indulge the Sovereign Self.  I believe our nation needs from the Church a reminder that our culture does not speak with God's own voice, and a summons to spiritual humility.  In the Flatland of Abraham, it took the Spirit of God to still Abraham's arm from a grievous course.  In the Flatland of Peter, the disciple was most wrong at the very moment he was most right, and it took the Spirit of God to show him the difference.  In our Flatland, this day, we need the Spirit of God to see with new eyes, and to shoulder our Cross, and to walk after Christ as His disciples.  Amen.  GFW+

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