Sermon for Sunday: Trained Tongues and Cross Stitches

September 15, 2024

By Kristin Berkey-Abbott


Mark 8:27-38


Today we have another strange Gospel. Peter proclaims that Jesus is the Messiah, but he doesn’t get praise from Jesus, the way he does in the exact same story in the Gospel of Matthew, where he gets to be the cornerstone of the church that Jesus is building. No, Peter is told to be quiet, and then Jesus calls him the devil, and then he has words for the rest of the followers tagging along.

This week’s Gospel truly is a hard teaching, at least at first glance. Deny yourself? Pick up your cross? Lose your life? Is Jesus trying to lose followers?

We’ve had centuries now of people trying to explain what Jesus meant. Maybe he’s saying that tithing is hard, but by doing this, we lose our money but gain our lives. Maybe it’s working for social justice, winning some measure of life for others, while we lose some free time.

Or maybe Jesus meant exactly what he said. The Gospel of Mark was written around 70 A.D., when Christians would be picking up their literal crosses, on their way to their own executions. This time period was one of extreme persecution of Christians and today’s Gospel offers a way of making sense of that persecution.

Let’s make sure to be clear: Jesus isn’t condoning suffering for the sake of suffering. This is not a text that tells us that we must welcome all varieties of suffering and suffer them in silence so that we can become stronger humans. In fact, the ministry of Jesus offers healing from that kind of suffering, a way of recovery from all the ways that the broken world breaks us too. In today’s Gospel, Jesus talks about a different kind of suffering, what we must expect when we preach his good news that God draws near, what we can expect when we try to live out our faith.

Jesus knows the powers and the principalities that are gathering against him. He understands the ways that leaders feel threatened, and he knows what happens when leaders of earthly institutions feel threatened—people get killed, people lose what they treasure: family, money, property, jobs and opportunities. Jesus promises us that there is a greater good, and that it will be worth the suffering.

All week, I’ve been thinking of these ideas of picking up our crosses and denying ourselves. I’ve thought of my friends who don’t practice a religious faith and their bafflement at those of us who do. They can’t fathom why we do what we do. It would be even harder to make the case if believers were being put to death.

I know that there are some weeks when we can’t quite understand why we do what we do. For some of us, it’s just what we’ve been raised to do; some of us are in a church where earlier generations of our family worshipped. For some of us, we come to church on Sunday morning to get grounded for the week to come. Maybe we come to church to be reminded of who we are and whose we are.

But these reasons don’t fully capture the joy that can come from being a follower of Jesus. As I’ve spent the week thinking about this week’s Gospel, I’ve also been reflecting on last Sunday. I thought about the joyful exuberance of how the service began, as we celebrated God’s Work, Our Hands Sunday by collecting detergent. I thought about all the youth collecting our detergent offerings as we sang a hymn with special lyrics. Did you notice how the collection bins quickly became too heavy to be carried? Everyone pitched in to get those containers to the front by working in teams. Where the aisle was blocked, I watched children swing the bins up and over the baptismal font—breathtaking and thrilling. And a metaphor for Christian life.

I’ve spent a lot of time this week thinking about that baptismal font. I’ve spent the week seeing the baptism pictures that were posted from last Sunday, including a picture of an earlier generation, standing in front of this same banner, holding baby Chelsea in the same baptismal clothes that baby Malachi wore on Sunday and another picture of earlier generations in front of these red windows, earlier generations with baby Kristin in the same gown that baby RustiLee wore, along with pictures of extended families then and now.

There was a joy that moved through this sanctuary last week, and I noticed that we were reluctant to leave. I wished that we had brought picnic lunches so that we could extend the joy. And the good news of our lives is that we can extend that joy. We meet here to have our joy rekindled. It seems so different from the message in this Gospel, which seems to promise suffering.

Jesus tells us we must pick up our cross and follow him. The early Christians needed to know that their suffering had meaning. Their discipleship meant that they would cross those in authority, and even if it ended in their death, Jesus tells the early community that they would find meaning along the way.

Our time period, too, has a longing for reassurance that our lives have value. In this country, most of us won’t be killed for professing our faith. But we live in a time of a different kind of death, the spiritual death that comes from loneliness, the death that comes from feeling cut off from our communities. Our quest for connection can take us to some hellish places; our current levels of addiction across our society attest to this. As a people of faith, we can offer an alternate vision, one that at first seems like we’re losing our lives, losing the freedom to do whatever we want. But in fact, it’s how we save our lives, how we learn to walk in the land of the living.

This year feels like a hinge point of history, where so many decisions will shape the future in drastically different ways. We stand at a crossroads. I wish that more people heeded the words that we find in James, that more people with bigger microphones would use that amplification to be kind, to offer a vision for flourishing for all of us. But that doesn’t seem to be the world we’re living in. At least not yet.

Like Isaiah in chapter 50 verse 4, the Lord has given each one of us a trained tongue. We have knowledge of a God that is making all things new, a God that invites us to be part of a different vision. We know that the world needs what God offers.

We may not be able to drown out the louder voices, but we can make sure that our lives declare the handiwork of God, the way that the firmament does in Psalm 19. We can be a bright star offering a shining view of a different way. And when people notice our serenity, our groundedness, the joy that we can’t contain, they’ll ask us what our secret is. They’ll expect us to tell them about some miracle food, some amazing diet, perhaps an investment plan that will triple our money overnight.

And we will use our trained tongues to testify that we don’t have to live at cross purposes. We will use our trained tongues to teach others. We will invite people to lose a life of selfish grasping for what we think will protect us. And by losing so much of what the larger world sees as important, we’ll find that we’ve woven together a richer life, a community so inviting that others, too, will pick up their crosses to stitch themselves into this joy-filled banner, to join the community of those who follow Jesus.