Jesus told his disciples, “If any want to become my followers,
let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.[1]
My mother had a little collection of things she used to say from time to time when I was growing up: Life isn’t fair, for example. I don’t care who started it. If you’re bored, go read a book.
And she would say, I suppose we all have our crosses to bear.
Sometimes she meant that one sarcastically, as in, You kids are being really annoying today. More often she was taking about those burdens in life that we didn’t ask for and we can’t change, so we just have to put up with them, no matter how difficult they are.
It might sound similar, but I don’t think that’s exactly what Jesus meant when he told his disciples to take up their cross and follow him.
Sermon prep: Pondering what it means to take up your cross and follow, I stumble across this quote, which was included in a letter I sent to Sunday School teachers a few years ago:
When we traveled down to the Eastern Shore of Maryland, we were amazed by the flowering trees we saw everywhere. They were extravagantly gorgeous, and we were sure we’d never seen that kind of tree anywhere before. We took pictures just so we’d be able to reassure ourselves later that they really were as strikingly beautiful as we remembered. And then we came home. This is a picture of the third house down the street from me. Same kind of tree. I had never noticed.
Every so often I go to look something up in the Old Testament textbook I used in college, which happens to be an earlier version of the book we used in seminary some years later. It’s a delightful time capsule containing the syllabus and review questions for the course, minutes of the Educational Policy Committee, and this letter from my dad, which I always open and read. He was a contributing editor at Time magazine. The enclosure from the government was a tax refund – the checks have been cashed but the IRS envelope is still there. Much as I love the convenience of email, it will be sad when there are no more letters like this to cherish so many years later.
Every Wednesday morning, we gather at Good Shepherd for Holy Eucharist and healing prayer, including prayers for the healing of the world and of our own souls. A few of us come early to sit in silence for 20 minutes, and I open that silence with a short prayer. This morning I’ll be reading the collect from last Sunday, a prayer that stays with us through the week as part of the Daily Office:
Waiting in silence for breakfast. Spending some time “away from the world,” I haven’t consumed as much news or social media as per usual, and that has made the few photos I did see of torches in the night and hand-to-hand combat in the streets all the more shocking. I’m holding two things in prayer this morning. First, while we can say that this ugliness hurts us all, and that’s true, my heart is breaking for those directly targeted, for whom this comes on top of the racist acts and thoughts, subtle or not, they encounter every day. O, my sisters and brothers! Also, I’m looking into my own heart and asking myself what things I do (or fail to do) that contribute to the racism that still pervades our world. I want to be better than that.