Elma United Methodist Church

That’s Crazy!

Elma United Methodist Church

That’s Crazy!

Dan Shelly

Elma United Methodist Church

March 12, 2006

(Mark 8:31-38)

 

This gospel reading in the Book of Mark is a critical turning point in the life and the teachings of Jesus.  Leading up to this point, it has been all smooth sailing for Jesus and his followers.  The sick have been healed, the blind made to see, and everyone wants to be near Jesus and hear his message.  He’s even dismissed those stuffy old Jewish Pharisees as irrelevant.  Instead Jesus is bringing a new message, a message of God’s love and brotherhood. They’ve miraculously fed crowds of 4000 and 5000 people with food left over.  God’s abundance seems to be everywhere and new life is breaking out.  For the disciples it seems clear that the Reign of God is at hand, and just before this reading, Peter has declared Jesus to be the Messiah.  It doesn’t get much better than this!

 

So what does Jesus do? He takes the disciples aside and begins to explain to them that Jesus, the Son of Man, needs to undergo great suffering and rejection.  That everyone is going to turn against him, the elders, the chief priests, the scribes, even these adoring crowds that are following him.  And his message will be so controversial that they’re going to put him to death.  But after three days, he’ll rise again.  You can almost imagine what the faces of the disciples must have looked like.  They had to be stunned.  Here they had left everything, their homes, their families, their jobs, and they’d taken off following Jesus – listening to his teachings and watching the powers of heaven being opened up before them.  Everything was going great!  And now Jesus tells them the cost. 

 

Jesus tells them that he’s going to go to Jerusalem, to confront the authorities there, and eventually be put to death.  Instead of becoming conquering heroes, people helping to liberate and unite the nation of Israel, Jesus wants to turn this band of disciples into co-conspirators of a condemned movement.  These members of the Messiah’s inner circle will become wanted criminals, hunted by and hiding from the religious authorities and persecuted for what they believe.

This is more than Peter can stand to hear.  He takes Jesus aside and tells him that this is crazy talk!  They’re winning and Jesus is a success, the crowds, the people they love Jesus and they love what he’s preaching – a message of love and kindness, forgiveness, gentleness.  There’s no reason to throw it all away by confronting and challenging the authorities in Jerusalem.  There is plenty of ministry to be done right here in Galilee!

 

Jesus looks Peter right in the eye and says to him, “Get behind me Satan!  You want the rewards, the comfort, the recognition of worldly success but I’m talking about what God wants for our lives.”

 

Then Jesus called out to the crowds, gathered them together with the disciples, and shouted out for all to hear, “If you want to be my followers, here’s the cost, you need to let go of the comfortable life you’re now living, pick up your cross and follow me.  For if you try to save this comfortable life, in the end you’ll lose it.  But here’s the crazy part, anyone who loses their life, the comfort and recognition of this world, for my sake and for the sake of the gospel, in the end will save their life.  If you don’t want me to be ashamed of you, then for heaven’s sake, don’t be ashamed of me, my words and ALL my teachings.

 

Jesus laid it on the line.  You see the disciples loved it when he called the Pharisees to accountability for their actions, but suddenly their teacher was calling them to accountability as well and that wasn’t very comfortable.  Suddenly this relationship with God that Jesus was telling them about required something from them as well.  That wasn’t part of the deal was it?

 

You see, what the disciples and the crowd wanted was “Cheap Grace.”  Cheap because it didn’t cost them anything – nothing changed in how they lived their lives.  They were all about receiving God’s blessings, accepting God’s abundant love, but that’s as far as they wanted it to go.  The image that comes to my mind when I think about this kind of faith is veal calves. 

 

Do you know how veal calves are raised?  In order to make their meat soft and tender, for their entire lives, veal calves are fed on nothing but milk.  Now there’s nothing wrong with milk and it’s what every calf needs when it’s first born, but as they grow, healthy calves begin to eat grasses, and often eat oats and grain to help them grow strong.  And healthy calves begin to wander off from their mothers, they run, they jump, and they explore the boundaries of their world in order to strengthen their muscles and grow into mature cattle capable of withstanding the rigors of winter and of life.  But veal calves never do that.  Instead, they live their entire lives within tiny enclosed stalls so that their muscles never grow strong and resilient.  They’re raised from birth to death fed on nothing but milk and constantly sheltered within the walls of their stalls.  Does this sound familiar?

 

Today, that’s what we Christians get when we only hear and present to others the message of Cheap Grace, when we forget the man Jesus who shouted out to the crowds if you want to be my followers, put down your comfortable lives, pick up your cross, and follow me.  What we get is the watered down milky message of “Jesus and me” and personal salvation that produces VEAL CALF CHRISTIANS. Veal Calf Christians - Christians who spend their whole lives hearing the easy message of Cheap Grace, Christians who never venture outside the walls of their stalls to encounter a world of poverty, of pain and injustice in desperate need of the Good News of God’s love in their lives. 

 

We all need to start our Christian lives with the milk of God’s redemption and salvation brought to us through the person of Jesus, but when we stick with that diet alone, when we forget the rest of the gospel message of Jesus, then we end up living as weak and anemic Christians, never growing, never exercising our muscles of faith, and never able to withstand the tests and rigors of the real world outside the walls of the church.  The real world that’s desperately hungry to encounter the Good News of God’s redemption in their lives.  We too end up as Veal Calf Christians.

 

But the Good News of the Gospel comes to us through the actions of God’s Holy Spirit.  For even when we WANT to remain isolated within our comfortable lives, the Holy Spirit comes to us and invites us to take a step outside the stall.  It comes in different ways, for me it was an invitation to go to Kenya on a mission trip.  And my first reaction to that was just like Peter – That’s Crazy!  I was retired and had an incredibly comfortable life.  Why in the world would I ever want to go half way round the globe to an impoverished third-world country on a mission trip?  It made no sense at all!  But the urgings of the Holy Spirit worked on my life until in response I eventually found myself way out of my comfort zone and stretching my faith to its limits.  And I came home from those trips changed, strengthened in my faith, and broadened in my view of God’s family and God’s love.  I was able to see brothers and sisters in Christ living from day-to-day with absolutely nothing, absolutely nothing but the Joy of the Lord to sustain them and it opened my eyes up to the limited view I had held of what it meant to live as a disciple of Christ.  Instead of Cheap Grace, Jesus invites us to experience Responsible Grace.  An understanding of God’s Grace that compels us to respond in thanksgiving to God’s gift of redemption and opens our eyes and our hearts to respond to those in need within our community and throughout the world.  This is what the writer of the Book of James was talking about when he said, “Faith without Works is Dead!”

 

Faith without works creates veal calf Christians, incapable of being about the work of the Father in the World.  True discipleship calls us to follow where we’d rather not go, and grows and strengthens us into World Class Christians.  From this point forward, the path to Jerusalem was clear to Jesus and Jesus invites us to do the crazy thing, the thing that makes no sense to the world. 

 

Jesus invites us to put down our comfortable lives, pick up our cross, and follow him.