My Facebook feed
over the past couple of weeks has been littered with kids of every age standing
on front porches or in entry hallways posing in new, fresh clothes. Their shoulders are squared and they're holding sign with their new grade level on it. On Tuesday this
week, most children in Henrico, Chesterfield, and Hanover Counties will join
the fun. It’s the beginning of another school year. Behind each of those
perfect, first-day photos will be the stories and experiences we don’t see: figuring
out a new morning routine…the nervousness of stepping onto the first school
bus…the crushing reality of that first homework assignment the tiredness as the
kids come home the first day, hungry and exhausted, with rumpled clothes.
In order to make
that first day go a little easier for our 17-month-old son, we brought our him
to the nursery school this past week for a dry-run. To my surprise, he was a bit apprehensive at first, but he quickly
caught sight of a ball on the floor unlatched himself from my leg and began to
play.
All of this
reminded me of a time I was serving back in Pittsburgh when I had to do a first
day of school dry-run for a group of Burmese refugees our congregation had
helped resettle to an area near downtown. I had received a panicked call from
one of the parents two nights before school was supposed to start. No one had
given the seven refugee high school students their list of bus transfers. In
the Pittsburgh city school system, students often rode public transportation to
get to school. These students barely knew any English, and they certainly didn’t
know which bus lines to take to get to their assigned high school, which was on
the other side of the city. So I was recruited to help chart that course for
them. I got online and figured out which route they needed to take and reported
the next morning—the day before school started—to practice it with them.
I was
embarrassed to admit it at the time, but I had actually never ridden public
transportation in the city. I had my own car and could go wherever I wanted. That
morning I was foolish enough to think I could lead a group of non-English
speakers through what turned out to be a very convoluted route. We walked 4
city blocks to the nearest bus stop in their neighborhood, which we rode to the
main station downtown. There we got off the bus, walked another 2-3 blocks to
the subway station. I accidentally herded them onto the wrong subway at first, but
we figured it out and rode that 3 or 4 stops to another terminal where we got
out, climbed the stairs, and waited for a shuttle bus to take us the quarter
mile to the school. Of course, that morning was not a school morning, so there
was no shuttle bus. We had to walk all the way to the school and have faith that
the shuttle would actually be there for them the next morning.
That morning I
was taught again a lesson about the bravery and resilience and resourcefulness
of refugee families. Prior to going, I had a lot of reservations about the
trip: how much would it cost? How would we get back? What happens if I mislead
them? As the twists and turns of the trek unfolded, I kept thinking that I myself
would never stand to take such a long and complicated route to school every
morning. Those immigrant teenagers, on the other hand, signed on for the
journey without hesitation and, more astoundingly, without complaining.
Wouldn’t it be
nice if the path of following Jesus were to come with a nice list of bus
transfers? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the life of discipleship was accompanied
with its own detailed and escorted route telling us exactly what to do in each
situation, lining up all the steps in advance, as if to say, “If you claim to
be Christian, you’d make a left here, or a right on that stance over there?”
There is little
doubt in my mind that is what Peter and the other disciples are thinking this
morning on their first day of discipleship school. Granted, they’ve been with
Jesus for a while now, venturing through the towns and villages of Galilee and
the Gentile territory around it, but we get the sense that the lessons and the
homework have really begun ever since they left Caesarea Philippi and Peter
declared Jesus was the Messiah. It’s like for a moment there we saw Peter
standing there on the front porch, in fresh, new clothes, grinning and
clutching a sign with his new grade level on it: “Discipleship: Day 1.” Now he
is lost, his clothes are all rumpled, and he’s failing his first homework
assignment on the first step. That is because what Jesus shows them about how
he is Messiah is difficult to follow mentally.
Jesus is Messiah, the one God himself has
anointed to set the world to rights, but he is going to accomplish that by
undergoing suffering himself. Jesus is
the Son of the Living God, the one to whom all honor and glory is due, but he
is going to display that honor and glory by being handed over to his enemies. Jesus
is going to demonstrate what it means to be divine and offer that divine life
to all, but he is going to do it in the utmost of human ways: he’s going to
die. This is not a path we might expect from the Messiah, the Son of the very God
who brought life into existence and has almighty power at his disposal, who
could do divine things in a very divine way. Our human brokenness prevents us
from grasping this.
In Jesus, God is
saying the world doesn’t have to attain my love—the world doesn’t have to come up
to God’s high level or make the all the right decisions in life or have all the
right beliefs. In Jesus, God is saying my love is coming to you, where you are,
and suffering in the world as you often do. This is what we come to know in
Jesus, and that act of love and grace is going to meet a rough road to get the
job done. It’s going to have to suffer and eventually die.
Those who follow
Jesus should therefore expect a similar road from time to time. And if there is
a particular list of directions to take as one of his disciples, if there is a
set of instructions about how to go about this, it simply involves this: die to
yourself. Jesus dies to himself, and therefore we must, also, if we’re joined
to him in baptism.
And this ends up
being a particularly challenging thing to do in a culture that is all about self-assertion.
If it was difficult for Peter and the others to deny themselves, to lose their
life, it is certainly going to be hard in our day and age when we’re told at
every twist and turn to claim your own identity, to make a name for ourselves,
to get our fair share. We live in times that glorify the individual, that
seduce us with the false claim that we can be our own god and set all our own
rules. We live in times where it is so easy to place ourselves in positions of
supposed moral authority relative to other, criticizing them for their
mistakes, confessing other people’s sins (doing it publicly is even better), pointing
out how we would have done very differently.
The life of
baptism into Christ, by contrast, is a repeated shedding of the self. It is a
life of self-denial, of pointing that finger inward—a life, for example, that
teaches us to weep when others weep and rejoice when others rejoice. It is a
way of associating with the lowly, as the apostle Paul says to the Romans, and
not claiming to be wiser than we are. It is a road that always surprises us with
the opportunities to forgive those who’ve wronged us, to think first of others’
needs and to respond to evil with good.
There are a lot
of tough but important conversations happening these days in our culture along
the lines of race and class and it seems to me that the most productive and
healing conversations occur when people essentially present themselves in these
conversations in a posture of self-denial. That is, when they approach the
discussions in a willingness to really hear what the other side is saying and
imagine themselves there rather than simply waiting for their turn to speak and
get their point across. This is especially true for those who find themselves
in positions of power or majority.
This road is
hard, I won’t lie. It is grueling at times, but Jesus is always there to help
us through it, to lift us up and to remind us that we gain our true life as we
do it because he is risen. He lives—and has lived—through it all already for
us.
The other images
that have floated through our news media and social media feeds this week have
been of the devastation from Hurricane Harvey in Texas. I’ve found it hard to
wrap my brain around the level of flooding that has occurred. But I’ve also
found it hard to wrap my brain around the level of heroism and community spirit
that has occurred. There was the story of the woman whose 29-year-old son went
off to a coastal community in the Houston area 3 months ago to help his dad,
who had cancer. When the Hurricane hit, she became worried because, with
cellphone towers down and whatnot, she wasn’t able to contact him. As a
last-ditch effort she googled his name and found out he had become a hero, stepping
up to steer efforts in an impromptu storm shelter that had no power and no
water and that was filled with medically fragile adults. There was the tragic
but heroic story of the 3-year-old who was pulled from the water still clinging
to the body of his drowned mother who did literally everything she could to
keep him safe as they got swept away by the current.
It seems that
every case where there’s a hero, in Texas as in life, it involves someone who
has denied him or herself. And by contrast, every case where there’s a villain it
involves someone who has asserted him or herself in inappropriate and harmful
ways.
There are no
list of specific bus transfers in the life as one of Jesus’ followers, the life
of self-denial and taking up the cross to suffer. The way forward is more a
mindset that Jesus gives us, one where we learn to let go of ourselves and
listen to the world. At some point we do have move forward, however. We have to
step off that front porch and get on the bus. Jesus calls us to, and our
baptism compels us to it. 20th century Lutheran theologian and martyr
Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote once, “Faith is only real when there is obedience,
never without it, and faith only becomes faith in the act of obedience.”[1] That is to say, Jesus loves all and has died
for all, regardless of who and where we are.
But it is in the
act of following, in the act of losing our life over and over again for the
sake of Jesus’ vision of a world restored…it is in the act of unlatching
ourselves from the leg of what we think is safety and instead taking up the
cross in the world where we will find the strength to walk the journey, and to
get up and walk it again, and walk it again, and walk it some more, wherever it
leads.
Thanks be to God!
The Reverend Phillip W. Martin, Jr.
The Reverend Phillip W. Martin, Jr.
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