to give only love in return

And Jesus said, if any would become my disciples, let them deny themselves, and take up their cross, and follow me.

Sooner or later, when we tell the stories of our lives, and we’re going to tell the truth, we get to the embarrassing parts. The story of Jesus is no exception. People ask: “why are you a Christian?” and we say, well, to be a Christian is to believe in God. And to believe in Jesus. That Jesus, is some way we can affirm but not completely describe with our limited minds and clumsy language, is God incarnate. That Jesus was God, come to earth, looking like one of us, teaching us and showing us how to live.

And then, if you’re talking to someone from my generation especially, a strange thing happens. See, in this day and age people have heard the name of Jesus before, it’s kinda hard to grow up in America and not hear the name of Jesus, but we don’t know what it means. We know it’s associated with churches, and with God, and that whatever picture we have of Christians, we know that this Jesus fella is involved, but we don’t really know who he is. And, to this person, asking “why are you a Christian?” we begin to tell the story of Jesus.

How he grew up a peasant, how he was a carpenter for a living, but then when he came of the right age to be a rabbi, a traveling preacher, in his culture, he left his carpenter’s tools on the bench and went walking around from town to town. And then we begin to tell the stories of the great signs and wonders that the gospel writers tell us:
how Jesus touched a woman who had a fever and the fever left her
how Jesus made the blind man see
how Jesus made the lame man walk
how Jesus healed man who was deaf and mute
how Jesus turned the water into wine
how Jesus fed a huge crowd on a mountainside out of a kid’s lunch box
how Jesus walked on the water
how Jesus spoke to the wind and the waves and they listened, and quieted down
how Jesus raised the dead man Lazarus to life.

And then, when we’re done telling the wonderful stories, we tell them what we first teach our children: that Jesus loves everybody. That Jesus was a teacher, a healer, a reconciler. That Jesus shows us who God is, and what God is like.
God is not angry,
God is not vengeful,
God is not cruel.
No, God cares.
God heals.
God comforts.
God caresses.
God gives hope.
God loves.

And then…. And then… sooner or later, someone will ask what happened to him.

Well… um… he… he want to the capital city for a festival. And the government, the ones in power, they arrested him, and beat him, and stripped his clothes off so he was naked and ashamed, and they hung him on a big stick next to the street, and they stuck nails through his hands and feet so he couldn’t get away, and left him there until he died.


It’s at this point that some people just plain get bewildered, and get up and walk away.



I grew up a southern upper-middle-class white boy, in the suburbs. And here’s the gospel, the good news, I was taught as a child: it wasn't, "deny yourself, and take up your cross, and follow."

It was this: you can do anything you want to.

You are an American.
You have rights.
You can be anything you want to be.
You can go anywhere you want to go.
You can wear anything you want to wear, you can eat anything you want to eat, you can do for a living anything you want to.

You can achieve anything, if you just set your mind to it, and work hard enough.

Well, why can’t we just leave it there? That Jesus was a teacher, and what he taught, at heart, was the golden rule we teach our children: “do unto others as you would have them do unto you?”

Why can’t it be about truth, justice and the American way?
Why can’t we just leave it at “Be nice to each other?”

Because of the cross.

Because the cross is a reminder
—and I’m sorry we need it—
of all the evil and ugliness in the world that will not be denied.
Of all the power in this world that wants to become powerful by stepping on other people.
Of all the power in this world that is built on exploitation.
Of all the power in this world that wants to hold on to power, as long as it can, by any means at its disposal.

It is a reminder that even in high places, proper places, places that should know better, there is a lot of ugly, evil, cruel power in this world that crushes and hurts.

You know this to be true.



What our culture is interested in is success, not sacrifice. And the cross is a symbol of the acceptance of the pain and suffering of the world. That God came to earth, that he gave himself away, that he fed us and taught us and healed us and told us to give ourselves away and knew….knew… that there is selfish power in this world that doesn’t want to let go, and that he would, by preaching something different than what the powerful wanted, would come into direct opposition with that power, and that the results would not be pretty.

And he did it anyway.


To take up the cross and follow Jesus is to realize that we live in a world where the powerful want more, where success means control. But that’s not what Jesus did. He walked right into the buzz-saw of power, right up to the cross.

Bearing the cross, for me, means realizing that I participate in systems of oppression, whether I want to or not.

See this stole? You like it? Pretty, isn’t it? Handmade, one of kind. Let me tell you where I got it. Two years ago, my classmates and I took a trip just south of the border, to Juarez. We saw a number of church ministries there, saw some good work that was being done, participated as much as we could in a few days. One of the things we saw was a ministry aimed at an indigenous group of people to Mexico. They’re called the Tarahumara Indians, and they live in the Copper Canyon region. They are deliberately primitive people, deliberately living by themselves. But there was a famine a few years ago, and the people were starving, because they lived so close to subsistence level. The tribes sent some of their strongest and most able workers into the cities to earn money and buy food to send back to buy food.

There was a church mission to these native peoples set up in Juarez. A church group had come in, if I remember right, and built shelters on a hillside lot. Little things, 8 feet by 8 feet, maybe, cinderblock and plywood and tar paper. The whole lot was about the size of a typical suburban plot of land for a single-family home, and there were between thirty and forty people living on it. Ten little shelters. They had one toilet. One, between them. And one hose.

And I remember asking, why did they build the shelters on the side of this steep hill? Wasn’t there an easier place? And our guide said, “Oh, no, it’s not a hill, it’s a landfill. If you dig down six inches you’ll hit trash.”

I met one of the men, a quiet, reserved fellow. We had to talk through an interpreter. He came in to the city, and he worked in the factories in Juarez, the maquiladores. The factories, the maquiladores, exist because American companies can take raw materials, send them south, have them assembled in Mexico, and then ship them back north, more cheaply than could be done here in the states. The factories provide jobs for Mexican workers, and that’s good. But they provide jobs that pay, on average, about $7.50. A day. There are benefits, and food, and other intangibles, and the wages are rising. I’m told it’s ten times better there now than it was a decade ago.

But this guy still lives on a trash heap. And when they offered to sell us some of their native garments, we bought them. What would you do? This is a belt, in their native garb.

And I’m wearing it as a stole today, not to say, look at me, aren’t I pious, or to say, aren’t we great, to give charity to those in need. No, for me this is a reminder. A mark of shame, almost. Shame that there are places in this world where people live under crushing poverty. Shame that I contribute in any way, whether intentional or not. Shame that the man who made this with his own two hands lives in a house that’s smaller than my bathroom.

that’s just not right.


This is part of what taking up my cross and following Jesus means to me: that I recognize that, on a global scale, I live a life of unbelievable wealth and privilege. That my life, whether I like it or not, is embedded in a society in which such injustices happen. When I can, when I know and when I have a choice, I try to do the right thing. To buy fair trade. To give an honest wage for honest work. Because, so the gospels tell me, God made all of us, every one, in God’s own image. But I don’t always know. And I get up every morning, and say, Lord, have mercy on me. I can’t help some of the things I do.


Follow me, says Jesus, to the cross.

Jesus, the Christ, who saw, as Peter in today’s gospel did not, that true power is made perfect in self-giving love. Jesus also knows that the way of abundant life, the way of self-sacrifice, leads to the cross. And what God does is take that cross, that symbol of all the human cruelty in the world, all that power corrupted and turned to domination, and transforms it.

The cross tells us who God is.

God identifies with human suffering,
God identifies with the powerless,
God identifies with the lowest of the low,
God absorbs the worst humanity has to dish out, and gives love in return.

And that, I think, is the essence of our calling:
To give only love in return.