Sermon on Mark 8:31-38

Pastor Jennifer Garcia

During Lent this year, our readings from the Hebrew Bible will remind us of some of God’s promises.

Last week, we read about God promising Noah that God would never again flood the whole world. Indeed, that God’s weapon, God’s bow, was hung in the heavens, never to be wielded again. God made acovenant with humanity—a promise and agreement founded in relationship. It was a covenant of peace for all time.

This week, we read about God’s covenant with Abraham and Sarah: that their numerous descendants would be God’s people forever.

These two promises, as well as the ones coming up in the next few weeks, all connect to baptism.

When we see a rainbow, we remember that God saved Noah and his family from the flood. In baptism, we remember that God saved us by becoming human, living and dying and rising again,to restore our relationship with God. Baptism is a reminder that God has already saved us.

And when God made those promises to Abraham and Sarah, God gave them new names, new identities in God. Baptism reminds us of our identities as children of God.

All of this—salvation and identity as children of God—comes through God’s grace. We don’t do anything to deserve it. God loved us before God made us. There is nothing we can do to make God love us any more or any less.

Still, we are sinners—we mess up and hurt each other and ourselves. By God’s grace, we are also saints—people who love God and let God’s love show through the way we live our lives. Martin Luther said that we are simultaneously saints and sinners. We can’t escape either side of that paradox, but God loves us exactly as we are.

On this side of death, we will never stop messing up and hurting each other, but God chose us, knowing that full well and loves us no matter what. We mark that in baptism, because God knows we need physical things like water to remind us of the truth: that we are part of God’s family forever and God’s love will never leave us.

In baptism, we are reminded of God’s covenants with humanity: that God saved us and that God’s family is vast and includes us.

When we remember these truths, we are freed and strengthened for the work ahead: the co-creation with God of the Beloved Community.

We’ll need that strength, because when we get to our Gospel reading, Jesus has some harsher words for us. He tells his disciples of the sufferings he must undergo and warns them that following him means being willing to suffer and even die for the cause.

Jesus isn’t glorifying suffering or saying that his followers should seek out suffering or meekly put up with abuse. Christianity isn’t about trying to suffer. Jesus here is just being realistic about the path he was on. He was saying and doing things that the occupying Roman Empire wouldn’t like. He was defying the emperor and upending society. He didn’t need to seek suffering—it was coming to him, and he knew it.

And if his followers were really learning from him, there was impending suffering for them, too.

But again, the point wasn’t the suffering. The point was that living out the Beloved Community means living in a way that upsets the people in power, the people who benefit from keeping things the way they are.

There’s no freedom for captives, food for the hungry, or good news for the poor without changing the way the world works. And that’s what Jesus was here for. And he was preparing his followers for what that meant.

That kind of world-changing justice comes out of freedom. Freedom like we receive in baptism. The freedom to see what Jesus is up to and decide we want that love and freedom for others too. And so, we take on the task of helping the Beloved Community become a reality, which upsets people who benefit from the status quo and puts us in danger. We live in a society that doesn’t actively persecute Christianity, so we are likely not going to lose our jobs or be threatened or be subjected to violence, like Jesus was warning his disciples.(Though, there have been people like Martin Luther King Jr. who were 20th-century American martyrs.) In general, we’re more likely to suffer awkward family holidays or raised eyebrows from neighbors or getting asked to step down from leadership positions.

But even our Sabbath theme might earn us the names “lazy” or “irresponsible.” We’re going to disappoint people who want us to do things. It might earn us the resentment of our colleagues and friends. It’s very easy for people who aren’t taking care of themselves to resent the people around them who are. Rest is countercultural and so needed.

And when we are restored by resting, we might feel moved to advocate for rest for others. And the people who benefit from cheap or unpaid labor will feel threatened by the prospect of people being paid better or having more paid leave or having more support to care for their families. That’s the slippery slope of following Jesus.

It starts with God’s grace rooting us in our identity as beloved children of God, which frees us to live without fear or shame, which stirs in us a longing for others to live that way too, which leads us to take costly action for others’ freedom and wellbeing, which contributes to the Beloved Community. And if that costs us everything, it’s entirely worth it.

All of that starts with God’s covenants with us. God’s promises of peace and grace and love allow us to follow Jesus and make the world a little more as it is in heaven.

A commentary by the organization The Salt Project reframed God’s covenants that we’re reading during Lent not as “a series of separate covenants here and there, but rather that God’s covenantal relationship with creation unfolds in salvation history, like a single flower blooming over time…helping to reveal the inner depth and beauty of what was there all along.”[1]

So instead of reading this series of covenants over the course of these weeks as individual episodes, we can see them as a collective unfurling of God’s grace, each helping us to understand God’s love for us better.

Beloved, we don’t earn God’s love through works. We are free to rest in God’s grace. God has already saved us, and there is nothing we can do to change God’s love for us.

And still, a hunger may creep into your life for others to experience that freedom and love too. That’s when following Jesus becomes both costly and powerful. That’s when the Beloved Community becomes more real for us. That’s the road that leads to the cross and the resurrection.

Remember always that you are a beloved child of God, saved by God’s grace and included in the flower of God’s covenants.

And when that hunger for following Jesus stirs you to action, take up your cross and follow him. The Beloved Community is always wort

[1]https://www.saltproject.org/progressive-christian-blog/2018/2/20/cross-purposes-salts-lectionary-commentary-for-lent-2