Previously in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus and his disciples had been pretty busy – they’d fed over 5,000 with just two fish and five loaves of barley bread – they’d witnessed Jesus walk out on the water to their wave-tossed boat , heal a demon-possessed Gentile girl and a deaf mute and a blind man – and they’d helped him feed another 4,000 plus crowd with only seven loaves of bread and some small fish.  The first 8 chapters in Mark talk of Jesus’ ministry in Galilee.

But today’s passage marks a turning point in Jesus’ ministry.  The remaining 8 chapters of Mark tell of Jesus’ journey to the cross.  Today’s passage generates a new acknowledgement of the identity of Jesus and then the author of Mark starts to do some serious theological reflection as to what that means.  Today’s passage raises three pretty big questions.  Who is Jesus?  What must he do?  And what does that mean for us?  Many hours have been spent studying, researching and examining these questions over the years, but if we’re honest with ourselves, a good reading of this passage, shows us that the author of Mark claims that Jesus made the answers quite clear.

First, let us get back to the basics.  Who is Jesus?  Most Sunday School children have this answer down pat.  Many Americans who rarely, if ever attend a Christian church could make a pretty accurate statement regarding a traditional Christian understanding of Jesus’ identity.  Even Peter gets this one right.  Jesus is the Messiah, the Christ, the Son of Man.  Jesus’ ministry had already shown those closest to him that he was someone special.

But the second question was a little harder for those whom called Jesus friend or teacher.  There are many people, Peter included, who have trouble with this answer.  But the question of what Jesus was to do, was addressed by Jesus himself.  Jesus understood that he would have to suffer, be rejected and eventually die.  Peter, and I imagine the others who cared about Jesus, did not want to hear this.  They had an understanding of the Messiah as one who was powerful – one who was anointed – one who would restore God’s reign on earth.  They had experienced Jesus as one who could perform miracles.  I can only imagine that the disciples’ experiences with Jesus up to this point and what he was saying would have created quite a tension in their minds.  Peter didn’t want to hear or even think about his teacher as one who would suffer, be rejected and die.  The people standing around at this point may have had different understandings of Messiah but I imagine none of them liked to think that they were following someone who by all rational humanly standards would lose.

Today, since we already know the outcome, it’s perhaps a little easier for us to come to grips with.  We say the words in our creeds, in our baptismal vows, we celebrate communion all with the understanding and knowledge that Jesus, our Messiah died for us.  Despite all of its criticism, and my personal dislike of the movie, Mel Gibson paints the picture of the suffering, rejection and death of Jesus in the movie, The Passion of the Christ.  People flocked to see this movie recognizing that we do follow a Christ who turned our understanding of Messiah upside down.

But we sure don’t like to focus there, do we?  We don’t like to spend too much time focusing on the blood, the pain and the rejection that our teacher, our Messiah endured.  Sure, we acknowledge it as part of our history, but you just have to compare our attendance Easter Sunday or Christmas Eve with our attendance on Maundy Thursday and Good Friday to know where we like to emphasize.  We like to think of the image of Christ’s suffering in light of the hope that the resurrection brings.  We like to believe that Christ suffered so that we don’t have to.  We like the understanding that we are saved by Christ.  We like to think of church as a place where we are immune to the suffering of the world and worship as a time to be fed and energized.

All of those understandings of Jesus and church are sound and helpful at times in our life.  In fact, I would venture to guess that most of us have joined or attended a church in our lives primarily because of the very real benefits we receive from it.  As one of your pastors, it is my hope that you experience relief from your suffering when you worship, that you feel at home when you walk through the doors, that you find life in the community here and support each other on life’s journey.  Through classes, fellowship groups, worships and the numerous other ministry opportunities that this church currently offers or has offered over the years, I hope that you have received the benefits of the people of Christ serving you.

I know many of you want for your children what I want for my son – to understand church as a safe place.  A place that he can call home no matter what is going on in his life.  I want my son to KNOW Christ’s love in his life because of how he experiences Christ’s love at church and in the world.  I want him to know Christ’s teachings – I want him to understand what it was like for the disciples to follow Jesus around Galilee.

But, today’s passage reminds us that we can’t stop there.  It reminds us that the point is not to meet our human needs.  It reminds us that Christ’s suffering does not take the place of our suffering… in order to have the life in Christ we too must suffer.  We must give up our humanly desires and turn our lives to that which is divine.  Again, many of us KNOW this, but it is much harder to live it.  When we suffer, when we are in pain, when life doesn’t go the way we want it to, it is more natural for us to complain, blame or shut down than it is to give it to God and move on.

In a few months I will be attending my 10 year college reunion.  Reunions are a perfect chance for us to reflect on how our life matches up to where we thought it would be.  When I think about where I thought I would be in 10 years the day I graduated, I don’t even recognize my life.  Good and bad, life has taken many twists and turns that has brought me to this place at this time in my life and it would not have even crossed my mind that I would be a divorced, single mother and a preacher.  Looking back I can think of more than one instance when I just wanted to say, wait a minute, this is not what I wanted out of my life.  There were moments of seemingly minimal significance that turned out to have a tremendous impact on where I am today and there were moments when I thought my dreams were shattered only to pick up and find new hope, new dreams and life anew.

It is like a woman I heard about.  Her name is Georgene Johnson.  She lived in Cleveland, Ohio and had just turned forty-two years old.  She struggled with the idea of being 42 and was trying to have a good attitude about it, so she started running and exercising to keep in shape.  She said, "I'm not going to look like I am forty-two, or at least I am going to look like a good forty-two." She did well in her training.  She was running farther every day.  So after awhile she thought she would try a little competition and entered a 10K race.  That's about six miles.  Nervous about her first race, she got up early, arrived at the meeting place.  To her surprise there were a lot of people milling around, stretching, getting ready.  All of a sudden a voice on the microphone, said, "Move to the starting line." This is it.  A gun sounded and they were off, like a huge wave, hundreds of runners, sweeping her up.  She was in the race.

After about four miles it occurred to her that they ought to be turning around and heading back to the finish line.  She wondered why they didn't turn around.  She stopped and asked an official, "How come the course isn't turning around?"  He said, "Ma'am, you are running the Cleveland Marathon."  Twenty-six miles.  Her event, the 10K, was to start a half hour after the start of the marathon.

Some of us would have stopped right there and said, that's it, I'm going home.  But to her credit, she kept right on going.  She said to herself:  "Well, this is not the race I trained for.  This is not the race I entered.  But for better or worse, this is the race that I am in."  Eventually, Georgene finished the race.

That's the way it happens.  Life just has a way of doing that to us, picking us up and putting us into situations that we didn't train for, we didn't volunteer for, we didn't want.  But for better or for worse, this is the situation we find ourselves in.  Nobody dreams of divorce when they get married.  NO one can prepare themselves for disease.  Old age sneaks up on us more quickly than we want.  We watch the tragedies on the news with an assumption that it doesn’t happen to people like me.  We don’t gamble, drink, smoke or anything else with the thought that we will become addicted.  We don’t search out people that we KNOW will hurt or disappoint us.  When you stop and think about it, there are many points in our lives where we can say this didn't turn out to be the way I thought it was going to be.  I thought my life was going to be different.  This isn’t the race I entered.

When we find ourselves in those situations we can either quit, shut down or avoid… or we can follow Georgene’s example and keep going.

I don’t believe in a God who throws us tragedy in order to “teach” us some kind of lesson.  But my experience has taught me that to be human, we must suffer.  I want to be careful here.  This passage is not meant to support torture, abuse, assault or mistreatment of one human being by another.  What we are to do is to let go of our concern with ourselves and focus on that which is divine.  Jesus isn’t asking us to do anything he wasn’t willing to do.  Jesus didn’t sit back and just wait for his suffering, rejection and death to happen nor did he run away in fear.  He knew what the end result would be but he stayed busy working for justice, teaching and sharing love with those he met along the way and then, when the time was right he challenged and faced the powers that be.

To renounce self was not meant to glorify suffering but to push us to the understanding that it’s not all about me.  To renounce self is to put away whatever it is that gets in the way of us loving God.  In other words we need to stop thinking first of ourselves and those that we love the most and think about God first, and ALL of humanity next.  When we decide to follow Christ, we are saying that we are renouncing our kinship family and joining the family of God.

Dorothy Day once said, “I only love God as much as I love the person I love the least.”  And I think that might be what Jesus was trying to teach Peter and others.  Peter was concerned with his friend, his teacher.  He was focusing on their relationship and the sadness he would feel losing that relationship.  Who among us wouldn’t respond as Peter did?  Who here has not told a friend that they need to do what’s best for themselves?  Who has never made a decision for their own family that might negatively impact someone else?  I know I’m guilty.  Simply by being born into the United States of America puts us in a state of privilege that many around the world will never see.  Being in a position where we can worry about losing our job or our home means that we have more than many within our own nation.

So that brings us back to the third question, what does this all mean for us?  Sure Jesus’ response is straight forward:  “If any want to become my 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.

But what does that really mean?  How do we know the difference between that which is human and that which is divine?  There’s no list.  There’s no step by step recipe.  But in every tough decision we make we can either allow the Cross to shape our lives and our way of thinking or rationalize that God would want what is best for me.

Jesus called his disciples to follow him through Galilee.  To learn about God’s love, to talk about faith and hope and healing.  But at this point in the Gospel, the disciples are confronted with a second call – the call to follow Jesus to Jerusalem bearing the cross.

We, too, are called first to Galilee, then to Jerusalem.  We need to build the foundation.  We need to understand and embrace the love that God shares with us.  We need to be engaged in a faith community and find support from a church family.

But then we’re called to continue the journey.  We’re called to bear the cross.  And this cross doesn’t represent all suffering – it represents the persecution that is felt by the powers that be.  It reminds us that part of our understanding of discipleship is to stand up for those who cannot stand up for themselves.  To challenge the ideas of survival of the fittest and every person for themselves.

And even though it’s hard and even though there are a lot of times when we choose to stay in Galilee rather than carrying the cross.  There are a lot of examples of this all around us.  We see this happen when a young family whose parents are out of work give clothes and toys to a family who lost everything in a fire.  We witnessed this in our own faith community when those who have experienced loss over the past few months have been embraced and lifted up by so many friends and strangers who care.  We see this when instead of moving their children to a better school system, they move to a struggling school system and help build up the families who don’t know other options.  We see this in the witness of youth from Dublin, Ohio who raised over $6000 in a troubled economy to bring hope to a sick child through the Make a Wish Foundation.  We see this in the witness of many who care about and advocate for persons who are homeless, mentally or physically ill or outcast for any reason.

And in just a few minutes we will commission a team of 19 persons and counting who have embraced this vision of cross bearing as they have made a commitment to form a Justice Ministries Network.  And I know that those 19 people are just a portion of the people committed to put others first.  Will they be perfect in everything they do once their commissioned?  Doubtful.  Do we as part of the church always pick the “right” side of justice issues.  Unfortunately, not.  But we can support each other through the process and we must challenge each other in love each step of the way.

When our lives are focused on the divine and we can lose ourselves to the Gospel, we need each other and we need God.  And the good news is, that God will be with us every step of the way- through both our Galilean struggles and our struggles to the cross.  No matter what part of the journey you are on, God loves you and promises to be with you – not to make all the pain go away, but to make your load a little lighter as you travel through these times so that you have the strength to make not the hard choices in life.