Already Dead, But Over It

a sermon for the second Sunday in Lent, Year B

Genesis 17:1-7 and Mark 8:31-38

On Wednesday evening as I was standing in line waiting for soup in Price Hall conversation among the people I was standing with turned to downsizing. One person was sharing that they were in the process of moving and were therefore getting ready to go through their belongings trying to decide what needed to be kept, and what needed to go. As a person who is sadly very much in the accumulating phase of my life, with three children still in the house and myself years from retirement, I started to wonder what that must be like. I often imagine a big bonfire.

This person then said, “The whole process is just overwhelming.” It takes not just a certain amount of physical fortitude but emotional fortitude to sift through years of memories and possessions and ultimately let many things go. At that point another couple had wandered up and had started to listen and join in. They shared that they, too, had gone through the grueling tasks of downsizing a few years before but that ultimately it was all so liberating. “It’s all so, so freeing when you’re done with it,” the wise woman reiterated, and we all nodded,  as if deep down we already knew exactly what she was talking about.

Over and over in scripture the life of faith is presented as a kind of downsizing—learning to lay down certain things in order to take up a new kind life and be freed. Abram does it, along with his wife Sarai. In beginning a relationship with him, God calls Abram to downsize, to leave their ancestral land behind, to let go of all the relationships and property that might have belonged to him one day, and venture forth to something of his own. It’s hard to imagine hearing that kind of invitation and believing it at the ripe old age of 99, but off he goes, laying aside that former life of his in order to live into a new reality.

And what is the new reality? God promises Abram will not just receive a new land and a new name, but be will become a whole nation. Kings and peoples will come from Sarai, who has never born even one child. That promise must have been difficult to trust, given the circumstances, but Abraham ventures forth in faith. As the apostle Paul would later say, Abraham “hopes against hope” in downsizing his own dreams, his own designs, in order to cling to God’s.

Lent this year asks us to think of the path of Jesus in this way. No matter what we tend to think faith is or is about, no matter what ideas we have about what faith is supposed to look like, the stories of God’s people in scripture and God’s covenants with them urge us to hope against hope, realizing that God raises us up from the ashes of our past to a new beginning. It is a process of moving forward, and in moving forward letting go of many of the things and ideas we think are important but which aren’t. It is a process of laying aside certain sets of beliefs or relationships or priorities and taking up the new ones that Jesus gives us. It is a journey where fear subsides and gives way to faith.

In last week’s lessons we heard about how God chooses to forget humankinds’ sinfulness and our ways of violence in order to remember God’s grace toward us. Through Noah’s delivery in the ark and then through Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness, we see that God creates new beginnings. This week the new beginning involves losing our lives to gain them, laying aside our own often selfish goals in order to take up the cross and follow Jesus.

That is precisely where we find Jesus this morning, in fact, teaching his disciples that he himself will be the model for this. Just prior to this conversation in Mark’s gospel, Peter has rightly identified Jesus as the Christ, or the Messiah. Jesus then needs to clarify immediately and openly what kind of Messiah he will be; that is, what kind of Savior and representative for God Jesus will be. He will be a Savior that doesn’t come to conquer and establish his authority through human demonstrations of power. He is a Savior that does it through rejection and death. And despite how utterly objectionable Peter finds that kind of Savior to be, Jesus is undeterred. Despite how much Peter is horrified (and embarrassed) by the thought of following someone who will be scorned at by all the people who seem to matter, Jesus knows that he comes to choose a different way. He will lay aside his own life so that God will eventually raise him us to a new and glorious reality.

Much of the world was shocked and saddened last week by the murder of Alexei Navalny, the leading voice of the opposition in Russia who for years had been one of the only people brave enough to question Vladimir Putin’s policies and hold on power. He had been imprisoned for a while in a distant prison in Siberia, his exact whereabouts and conditions unknown. I am not an expert on Navalny or all of his views but I think much of the world was captivated by how he persisted in his quest to make his country more democratic and less corrupt even when it meant danger to his own life.

After being poisoned by what was likely Putin’s forces in 2020, he was evacuated to a hospital in Germany, where he made a recovery. In an interview with “60 Minutes” in 2020, Navalny was asked whether he feared for his life. In response he said, “my job is not to be afraid and to go back to Russia.” As his obituary in the Economist states, “Navalny often talked as if he had died already, and had gotten over it.”

And so he did return to certain suffering, like Dietrich Bonhoeffer once did to Nazi Germany. In one of his last appearances before his death, Navalny was seen joking and cheerful, a sign that he refused to be broken because he was now living for the “beautiful Russia of the future.” It remains to be seen when that future will arrive, but Navalny’s witness of letting go of life for the sake of a new one should inspire us all to deeper convictions.

Jesus, the Savior who suffers and is rejected, sees and knows the beautiful kingdom of the future. He sees and knows the beautiful beginning that will come from the ashes of the cross and the new life that will come from the ashes of our past.    It is a new life of forgiveness out of the ashes of hurt. It is a new life of compassion out of the ashes of indifference. It is a new life of love for those who think they’re unlovable. It is a new life where our neighbors’ needs become important to us. It is a new life where self-denial takes the place of—and is far more rewarding than—the self-assertion and self-promotion our culture peddles in.

And, to be clear, self-denial is not self-loathing, a distinction we often blur. Jesus never calls anyone to despise who they are. Self-denial, rather, means laying our own privilege and sometimes our rights aside in order to bring about a vision of God’s future, a beautiful future where all are cared for. Self-denial is a path that reveals just how dependent we really are on God and God’s love, how dependent we really are on everyone else.

There was an endearing story that surfaced last week about the NBA star Horace Grant, who played for the Chicago Bulls in the 1990s. Many people knew him not just for his mad defensive skills, but for the large, gaudy eye-goggles he used to wear when he played. Grant wore them because he had an eye disorder, but then he ended up getting surgery to correct it and didn’t need them anymore. However, he had gotten so much fan mail from parents and grandparents of kids who wore glasses that Grant decided to continue wearing them in games without the prescription in them. Grant says people kept coming up to him explaining that his wearing goggles in the game helped the kids who had to wear glasses or goggles feel less awkward and be less bullied. In a small but significant way Grant demonstrated self-denial. He laid aside his privilege and took up the goggles to follow Christ’s example.

I wonder how often we really think of God’s kingdom in this way? I wonder how much Jesus realizes we could change this world if we did? More often than not Christ’s followers think their responsibility is to deny the rights and lives of others. Jesus doesn’t ask us to do that—not once. Jesus never expects us to call out the actions or behaviors of other people, deciding what they do or don’t need to give up. Look at what happens to Peter when he tries to call out Jesus this morning! Jesus asks those who claim to be his followers to look inside—to do our own inventories of our storage units of the soul and decide what might need to go or be changed. I think we’re afraid to do that, to be honest, afraid, like Peter, of the sacrifices involved. We then cling to the old life however we can, not wanting to give up our old life, and so we’re held back from the beautiful future. And still God calls us forth, urging us, reminding us how liberating it will be.

That exciting life of the future has been given to us already in baptism, Similar to Navalny, we can say we’ve really already died, and gotten over it. We’ve already died in the waters of the font, the old self drowned—downsized!—and now we get to live in God’s beautiful new future. It is a future where a fellowship hall full of women lay aside an entire Saturday of beautiful weather, for example, to come and learn more about prayer and strengthen faith with new friends.

It is a life where a form of self-denial is practiced in the kitchens of dozens of congregation members who purchase and then make lunches for Moments of Hope to be distributed to hungry people on the streets of Richmond.

It is a life where the cross liberates us from collecting the meaningless mental junk we’ve accumulated through things like racism and xenophobia and Christian nationalism. It is a life where God takes our minds and continually sets them on divine things—divine things of mercy and kindness, justice and humility—because God has decided we’re worth it. God looks at what we’re all about, takes stock, and plunges us in for a deep cleaning. We rise from the water, wipe our eyes once again, and learn to walk with Jesus. We learn to move forward into suffering and service only to discover, over and over, we gain everything…everything that ever really matters.

Thanks be to God!

The Reverend Phillip W. Martin, Jr.