The Second Sunday in Lent-Year B

Lent 2B-2021 February 28, 2021 A couple of months ago, our bishop called me and asked me if I’d be willing to work with another priest who would be doing some work with a congregation in deep conflict. Just over the last couple of weeks, that work has really begun in earnest. We have a list of over 60 parishioners which we’ve divvied up, and now we are calling each one and listening to each one of them. The questions we ask are very broad and eventually, we’ll take the knowledge of all the different stories and experiences and weave them together into a tapestry of a report to help them figure out where to go from here. What has been striking as I’ve been making call after call after call this week is the deep heartbreak and suffering that each and every person I talk to has felt in this situation at their church, regardless of what side they fall on in the presenting conflict. Each person has been deeply wounded. And interestingly enough, each person has their own version of the story of what happened. At first I approached this with a sort of ideal for journalistic integrity, trying to get to the root of the story. But I quickly realized that wasn’t what was most important in the path back to healing for that congregation. This situation and several conversations I’ve had with parishioners through our two Lenten formation offerings have gotten me thinking about the stories that we tell ourselves, what purposes they serve, and how we can look at these stories we tell ourselves with a lovingly critical lens. Our gospel reading for today starts in the middle of things. Jesus is on the road traveling around the prosperous, Roman area of Caesarea Philippi, which is near the Mediterranean Sea, and on the road, Jesus asks his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” The disciples throw out names in a way that is reminiscent of school children in a classroom trying to find the answer the teacher is looking for: “John the Baptist,” “Elijah,” “one of the prophets.” So Jesus asks, “But who do you say that I am?” And then you can hear the crickets chirping in the silent background of the classroom, until Peter ventures boldly, “You are the Messiah.” Jesus sternly orders them not to tell anyone. And that’s where our reading for today begins. Mark tells us that Jesus begins to teach the disciples that “the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again,” and Peter pulls Jesus aside and begins to rebuke him. Mark then tells us that Jesus turns to look at his disciples while he rebukes Peter, saying to him, “ ‘Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.’” Not content to keep this teaching secret among his closest disciples, Jesus calls the crowd and says to them: “‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it…’” So what is happening here? This is the first of three times in Mark’s gospel when Jesus predicts his own suffering, death, and resurrection, and each time, the disciples can’t deal. Each time, they are confused, but they don’t seek clarity from Jesus. After Jesus’s second prediction of his suffering, death, and resurrection, the disciples get into a fight about who is the greatest among them, and after Jesus’s third prediction of his suffering, death, and resurrection, James and John go to him and ask if they can sit at his right and left hands when he comes into his kingdom. Over and over again in Mark’s gospel, Jesus’s disciples just don’t get it. Like Peter in today’s reading, they each have their own story of what Jesus’s ministry will be and their role in it. In each of our own stories, we are always the hero, and so the disciples cannot wrap their brains around this different story that Jesus is offering them—that he has come not to be a conquering messiah who will overthrow their oppressors and restore Israel to its proper place, and that each of them will be there, right by his side as conquering heroes. Jesus’s story is that he is called to live into the suffering of rejection by his own people, to be killed for it, and then to be resurrected on the third day. It’s hard for us modern listeners who have heard the story so many times to wrap our brains around the sense of craziness in Jesus’s story that his original hearers would encounter it. Who could even possibly believe that such an outlandish thing could happen, even if they were able to give up their own versions of the stories as conquering heroes to begin to examine what that would mean for them. The other aspect of this is the invitation of Jesus to live into suffering. Nobody wants that. Most of us will do whatever we can to avoid suffering. (I’ve started back running over the last couple of weeks, and every time I do it, at some point in the run, I think, “why on earth am I doing this?” because it’s hard and my joints are getting older every day.) And one of the ways that we avoid suffering is that we craft our stories in which we are the hero who does not suffer. Or when we can deny our suffering no longer, then in our story we become the victim upon whom suffering has been inflicted by bad people outside us. While God doesn’t cause our suffering, suffering is a part of the human condition. Jesus’s call in this passage is the call of discipleship which invites us to pick up the suffering that is already present in our lives and to carry it for as long as needed. When we face our suffering, not denying it and not blaming it on others, that is when the truth of God’s love can redeem it, allowing new life and resurrection to grow out of it. And once we’ve gone through that hard process of carrying the load of our suffering long enough for God to transform it and bring new life out of it, then we realized it’s not as hard or as scary as we first thought, and we get a little bit stronger, a little more faithful, and a little more resilient, every time we do it. But in order for this to happen, we have to examine those stories we use to protect ourselves from suffering. This past week, we got word from the diocese that they were releasing an update to the diocesan guidelines for gatherings in churches. When we got word of this new way that we were being called to adapt, my anxiety went through the roof, and I didn’t handle it well. I called a couple of friends and talked to them, which served to raise their anxiety, too. And then I talked to our bishop. And even though I heard the weariness in his voice at the end of a long day, I vomited my anxiety and my fear and my suffering all over him. And God bless him, like a good mamma or one of those best friends you have in college, he held my hair back for me while I did it. I realized the next day that I needed to go back and strip away the layers of the story I’ve been telling myself. And when I did that, I saw the layers of suffering underneath that it had been masking—my weariness with it all, my feeling that I am not equipped to be making the decisions that I am being called to make in this unprecedented season, my loneliness in this way of having to do church, my uncertainty of when things will be better, my disappointment I feel that they are not better already, and my deep longing for clarity of what it means to be faithful in this season. Your invitation this week is to join me in that work of peeling back the layers of the stories we tell ourselves that protect us from suffering. Consider starting with one area of your life where you can rationally determine that your reaction is a bit out of proportion to the situation or an area of your life where you long for clarity. And once that is done, spend some time with your suffering, maybe even make friends with it, so that we can pick it up and carry it as far as we need to until God transforms it and brings new life to us in and through our suffering.