Second Sunday in Lent: February 25, 2024
The Rev. Nat Johnson
Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16
Romans 4:13-25
Mark 8:31-38
Psalm 22:22-30
Over the last few weeks, news of an Oklahoma teenager’s death and the circumstances surrounding it have flooded social media and news channels. Nex Benedict identified as gender- expansive: they didn’t fit into the binary world our western minds and so-called “Christian” roots have created. Throughout our nation, state legislatures have passed bills into law reinforcing that binary and allowing bigotry to flourish. Hate-filled speech and rhetoric spill from the mouths of elected officials, denying the existence of non-binary and trans-gender people, sparking fear, and providing permission for violence against those who do not and cannot assimilate to a far-right ideology of gender.
Violence against folks who identify as LGBTQIA+, as two-spirit and non-binary, is not new.
Though we’ve developed new words and concepts to help us articulate our identities, those of us who don’t fit the western binary have existed throughout history. And in that history, passages like the one from our Gospel reading this morning have been used to erase us, to control us, to deny us our full humanity and the divine image that we bear. We are called upon to “deny ourselves and take up our crosses” – a shorthand that asks us to bear the burden of difference and deny ourselves the possibility of true human flourishing and thriving.
The mechanism for this erasure is not limited to LGBTQIA+ folks. It has been used against other marginalized communities too. Colonialism sought to erase native identities, forcing the annihilation of indigenous language and being. It has been used against communities of color whose heritage, traditions, customs, and language are deemed unsuitable for “the American way” and enforce a project of assimilation to whiteness. This mechanism exists for one reason alone: to protect the power and privileges of the status quo. It operates under an ideology of scarcity and manifests in a culture of fear. People like Nex Benedict pose a threat to the perceived power and privileges of a binary world. They threaten the western, white image of masculinity and femininity because they expose the toxicity of such a worldview.
Jesus knew something of this conflict between the status quo and the marginalized, between the narrowmindedness of fear and the expansive nature of God and God’s purposes. In our gospel reading today, he begins to teach his disciples about the meaning and implications of his identity as the Messiah.
The disciples had their own ideas and expectations about Jesus’ identity which were rooted in the complex traditions of masculinity and power. The “Son of Man” was understood to be an agent of God in the world who would bring triumph and victory, two words laden with military might and power.
Liberation, in this worldview, was about the violent overthrow of oppressive power that would result in annihilation of the oppressors. Association with rejection, suffering, and death was inconceivable and sounded a dissonant chord in their songs of liberation. But Jesus was adamant that God’s reign and power could not be equated with the reign and power of empire. It did not and would not operate with the same purposes, did not and would not employ the same mechanisms of fear and control and military might.
I can understand Peter’s opposition to Jesus’ declaration. In the face of this world of violence and hatred, I can understand the desire to see the corrupt overthrown. I can identify with the inability to disentangle the expectations of liberation and freedom from mechanisms of erasure. With every mass shooting, with every mass killing, with every act of violence and murder against the marginalized and oppressed, I find myself willing God to take the same kind of violent action against our oppressors . I fall into the trap of doom-scrolling, looking in vain for any hint of the powerful being held to account, for any hint of justice being meted out, for the vengeance of a powerful God to be on full display. And, every time I fall into the throes of despair when my expectations of such things are not met, I hear Jesus’ sharp rebuke: “Get behind me, Satan. For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”
It is a difficult rebuke to hear let alone receive. What good does it do for those of us who bear the burden of violence and oppression? How does it quell the fear that shrouds marginalized communities who cannot assimilate and pass in dominant culture? Are we really to bear the cross of cruelty through a self-denial that gives into our own erasure? Is this the kind of loss of life that Jesus says will be rewarded?
No, that’s not at all what Jesus says. But the reversal of power that I dream about when I get caught in the cycle of doom-scrolling is also not what Jesus has in mind. In the first half of his gospel narrative, Mark opens our imagination to a liberation that is more about healing than annihilation, more about restoration than overthrowing, more about dignity than assimilation. Jesus spends his time with the disenfranchised, liberating them from isolation and social condemnation. He rebukes those in political power and exposes the scarcity of their ideologies. Jesus’ embodiment of power is a disruption to the status quo exposing the instability of their certainties about the ways of the world and the fragility of their assumptions of power.
Jesus told his disciples that they too would inevitably face the same opposition he faced. His followers would also need to walk the path to the cross – not because it was the divine will but because everything about who Jesus was and what Jesus did stood as a threat to the powerful. All who would commit themselves as his followers would inevitably stand in the same position. Our lives are testimonies of the futility of the ways of this world and will bring us into conflict with the powers and principalities of this world. The cross we are called to bear is not the self-denial of erasure but the burden of standing in opposition to injustice and corruption, in opposition to ideologies that deny the full humanity of black, brown, and indigenous bodies, that deny the full humanity of non-binary and trans-gender bodies. We stand as the very embodiment of God’s “no” to all the ways of this world that seek to destroy dignity and flourishing in human individuals and communities.
In the very next verse, left out of our lection, Jesus tells his disciples and the crowds that some standing there, in that moment, would not taste death until they saw that the reign of God had come with power. But here we are, 2,000 years later and in the face of all the evil in our world, we wonder how Jesus could have been so wrong. I wonder, though, if this doesn’t also lead us into the same trap of despair that doom-scrolling does, cutting us off from the ways that beauty and goodness and justice do manifest in our world. I wonder, too, if it doesn’t give us permission to slip into apathy and paralysis, to shrug our shoulders, bury our heads and ignore the plight of those who are unlike us.
But what if Jesus meant something different. What if Jesus meant that seeing the reign of God coming in power would be more like experiencing the transformation that comes from liberation and healing? What if Jesus meant that each of us experience the reign of God coming in power every time the hungry are filled, the naked are clothed, and the sick and imprisoned are visited? What if we experience the reign of God coming in power every time the marginalized are centered and the disenfranchised are empowered with the privileges of human being and dignity? What if picking up our cross is less about our enforced erasure and more about standing as a disruption to the very forces who seek our destruction?
In our present moment, as in our shared history, the title “Christian” has been coopted to protect and perpetuate the systems we’ve built to keep the oppressed from accessing the power of privilege. We mustn’t let the fear of the cross keep us from naming the ways that “Christian nationalism” stands in opposition to all that Christ taught, to the expansive nature of God and God’s purposes. Our gathering together each Sunday is itself a counter-cultural form of resistance to that narrative. And, our worship is meant to compel us to live eucharist-shaped lives as we’re sent out to do the work God has given us to do in this world. In our Lenten book, Proclaim!, Marcus George Halley suggests that our worship is “the exchange of one world – one that is dying – for another – one that is being made new.” He goes on to say,
It is difficult, impossible even, to authentically worship God while participating – even passively – in dehumanizing, oppressive, and violent systems. To worship God, we must be willing to stand outside of those systems, to see them for what they are, to see the ways they are doomed to destruction, and then, if we must reenter them, to do so with greater clarity about the ways the mission of God calls us to engage them… The way we worship God should not make us feel invisible and nameless, not if we believe that we worship a God who knows each of us by name and calls us ‘beloved.’ Although we are swept up into the relentless current of God’s love in worship and prayer, we do so, not to escape this world with all its joys and pains, but to better understand ourselves and our place in this world.i
Always, the love of Christ and our encounter with God in this space orients us to freedom, to liberation from oppression and erasure. Any version of “Christianity” that seeks the opposite is antithetical to what Jesus did and taught and it is a betrayal of the life-giving and liberating purposes of God for this world.
Today, we remember Nex Benedict as the latest in a long line of people whose life and death expose the relentless and oppressive systems of this world. Today, let us also remember that God is making the world new, and we are invited to participate in that creation – not as builders of God’s kingdom, but as embodiments of that new creation, bearing witness to the transformation that authentic encounter with God brings about.
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i Marcus George Halley. Proclaim! Sharing Words, Living Examples, Changing Lives. New York, 2020.