We all must die Proper 19B

We All Must Die Proper 19B, C. Dempesy-Sims

To live fully as Christians, we must die. We must pick up our crosses---whatever ours happen to be-- and enter the darkness, loss, and pain. We know that to get to Easter morning we must enter Holy Week, walking the hill known as Calvary, stretching our arms on the cross, crying out in fear, breathing our last, and laying ourselves in the tomb. We must descend into death and then, AND ONLY THEN, will we rise.

We must, as Jesus says, lose our lives in order to live them.

And we must do this repeatedly.

For its only in dying that we can truly live.

It’s called The Way of the Cross. 

At the Eucharist we lay our lives on the table, the same table Jesus is on. It all gets mixed up and God does what God does and makes something altogether new. And then we all take a piece of this new creation---a little bit of you…and you…and you….a little bit of me, a little bit of Jesus , we all take a piece of one another, infused by and through God and go out into the world, as something new, ready to create more newness wherever we go.

And we do it, again and again and again.

This is what Jesus was trying to get across to Peter in today’s Gospel.

There’s a lot in this Gospel and it’s easy, at least for me, to get lost.

 But the bottom line is found in two sentences: "Who do YOU say I am" and “Get behind me Satan!”

When Jesus asks, “but who do you say I am?” Peter says, decisively,

“You are the Christ.”

No doubt Jesus is surprised that any of them had figured out that He was indeed, The Christ, the promised Messiah. Jesus is God come to earth. Peter is right.

And he’s also really wrong.

He’s wrong because although Jesus is, indeed the Messiah, the Son of God and the King of Kings, he’s not above or beyond humanity. He is in humanity. He is “both and."

He’s God and He’s Human and he’ll never use his divinity to bypass any single part of the human condition. Including humiliation, suffering, execution and the deepest, darkest piece of the human condition, death itself.

Peter can’t wrap his brain around Jesus as God and Jesus as Human. He can’t fathom that Jesus would accept the fullness of the human experience. Peter will not believe that the only way to gain a God-filled life, that the only way bring God’s reign of Love, Justice and Righteousness to this world is to die.

Peter won’t accept that the Way of Jesus is, indeed, the Way of the Cross.

And so Jesus exclaims:

“Get Behind me Satan!”

Get Behind me, all you who are so afraid of the darkness that you  go to extensive lengths to keep it at bay…which just gives it control over everything that you do.

Get Behind me, Satan all of you who so fear death that you absolutely forget to fully live.

Get Behind me Satan… you who want easy answers, the quick fix.

Get Behind me Satan for the life you seek, the life you live, isn’t life at all:

It’s Good Friday without Easter

It’s the dark of night without the light of dawn.

Jesus kind of unloads on Peter, doesn’t he?

But I get it…there’s so much more joy in life when we stop fighting the pain.

There’s so much more light in life when we stop railing against the darkness.

Jesus doesn’t want Peter to miss one minute of this thing called life.

And he doesn’t want us too, either.

 Come, my friends, all you who are weary and heavy laden. Bring your brokenness to this Holy Table and let God make you and me and all of us into something new; for the Way of the Cross takes the broken and makes it Holy.

Amen.