Sermon for Passion Sunday Year B

Hi all,

This is my sermon for tomorrow.

Pr. J

4-5-2009, Palm/Passion Sunday
Salem - Luther Memorial Parish, Parrottsville, Tennessee
Mark 15:1-47
they said I had to carry this cross…

Once upon a time I had to carry a cross. It was on Good Friday. I was an intern at a big church in Chicago. They took worship and the liturgy very, very seriously in that church. I found out how seriously one day early in my internship when I made the honest simple mistake of walking across the chancel from one side to the other. Immediately the Assistant Pastor pointed out to me that I did a bad thing. I didn’t understand. What’s so bad about it? “You didn’t reverence the altar,” she said. “Was I supposed to?” I asked. “Are you Lutheran, or Baptist?” came the response. If you were ever to go to that church today and see how they do worship, then you might come away thinking, “Boy, those people must be more Catholic than Lutheran.” They, one the other hand, definitely would think that you are more Baptist than Lutheran.

In fact everything they did in that church concerning worship was well within the bounds of the Lutheran worship tradition. You just don’t see that kind of thing all the time in every Lutheran church because our local practices differ so much. Take, for example, Good Friday. The day I had to carry a cross. Holy Week had arrived. I had just finished running what seemed like a marathon Lenten season, with Evening Prayer conducted every week night, mid-week Lenten Compline every week, a few saints’ days celebrated during the week when we had mid-day worship Monday-Friday at noon, not to mention the never ending funerals, and the usual grind of three big services every Sunday morning, one of those in German. Then Holy Week hit. They told me that on Good Friday the intern always has a very important job. During the Good Friday liturgy the intern carries a cross during something called “the veneration of the cross.”

Right away I thought, “Wait a minute! Lutherans don’t venerate the cross! That’s Catholic!”

“But, oh contraire,” they told me. Veneration of the cross has always been a Lutheran practice, since the time of Martin Luther. The Lutheran theology of the cross practically begs for it, and veneration is not the same thing as worship in any case. Lutherans worship God as Father, Son – who died on a cross – and Holy Spirit, but they may venerate the cross, which I came to understand in my own unique way as a sort of show of respect for the cross, the best I could do having been once upon a time what Pr. Stacy McGill calls a “stinky Baptist” myself.

So, ok, … I have to carry a cross. What cross?

“Oh, the Assistant Pastor will show you,” said the senior pastor. And he snapped his fingers and the Assistant Pastor obediently took me back into the maze of passages behind the office to show me the cross I should carry. There it was, propped up in something like a big flower pot with flowers entangled around it. It was perhaps 4 feet tall, and looked heavier than it was.

“That’s the one the intern carried last year,” the Assistant Pastor said. She had me lift it to see if I could carry it. It turned out to be hollow and made of light weight plastic. No problem. I can carry this in one hand. That was Wednesday in Holy Week. Then Friday came.
There was a rehearsal on Friday afternoon. I came into the sanctuary, looked around for the cross I had to carry, and didn’t see it. “Where’s the cross?” I asked. The Assistant Pastor, who always did the senior pastor’s talking for him, said, “He has changed his mind. He wants you to carry that cross over there.”

I looked where she pointed, up over two sets of stone steps, way back in the shadowy recesses of the chancel, and there it was. Propped up against the big stone altar was the mother of all crucifixes: a very big cross with a large figure of Jesus nailed to it. With real nails. And it was as tall as I was. And it didn’t look user friendly. They had me pick it up, just to see if I could. Unlike the other cross, this one was solid wood. Oak. Heavy. I hefted it. I could pick it up. I was holding it where the crossbeam met the stock, about so high. Not good enough, they told me. You have to hold it with one hand underneath, and keep it steady with the other. So I tried that. It was barely manageable. But not high enough to please the senior pastor.

“Higher!” he demanded.

I began to have some really strange thoughts about the suitability of that crucifix as a hammer at that point; I could use it to flatten the senior pastor once and for all; many people would have applauded me if I had, but there would probably be negative consequences for me, so I never acted on that thought. I lifted the crucifix as high as he wanted it and was able to keep it there, barely. But then he wanted more.

“You have to walk down the aisle with it!”

“What?!”

“Walk down the aisle while the choir is singing!”

“You’re kidding!”

“No! You have to walk down the aisle all the way and then bring it back while the choir is singing!
Every intern does this! You have to do it!”

I could tell this was not going to be a Good Friday after all. It was going to be a Very Bad Friday for this intern.

So that night at the appointed time in the liturgy I managed to heave that holy blessed monster crucifix up in the air and began walking down the aisle with it while the choir sang away. And I barely made it. And I am amazed that I didn’t drop it. As it was I couldn’t balance the thing while walking, and it kept swaying from one side to the other because it was so top heavy, and as I went down the aisle people reached out to touch the thing and I gritted my teeth and kept saying to myself, “Don’t push it! Don’t push it! It’ll go over! It’ll flatten the person in the pew across the aisle!”

Somehow I managed to make it all the way down the length of that aisle and back, which I took to be proof that there really is a God, and much to the amazement of the senior pastor. Later I was told the senior pastor didn‘t believe I could do it, and he wanted to set me up for a fall, because that‘s just the way he is. But the joke was on him. Fortunately, I’ll never have to do that kind of thing again, nor would I wish it on anyone. You might say I was walking the “way of the cross,” and that is my story of carrying a cross. What’s your’s?

The Bible gives us Jesus’ story of carrying a cross.

Jesus had to carry a cross of his own when they sent him to Golgotha. What we know of the Roman practice of crucifixion tells us that Jesus would have had to carry just the cross beam, but that was bad enough. Much bigger and heavier than the crucifix I had to carry, they would have laid it across his already battered and bloody shoulders and forced him to carry it. He couldn’t get relief just by dropping it, because they would have tied his arms to it. If it went down he would have gone down with it, and he probably did. In the end they got him a little help, because he just couldn’t do it. Then they crucified him on a hill near the city of Jerusalem.

Remembering this is what Holy Week is about. It is a reminder that after Jesus entered Jerusalem in triumph, he walked the way of the cross on the road to Golgotha where he died on the cross for the sins of all people in order to win the victory of God over sin, death, and evil.

The road to Golgotha is lined by human tragedy, and our Passion Sunday service today is a way for us to open ourselves to this story in our lives.

Where is this story in your life? Where have you carried a cross? What do you know of betrayal and fear, of confusion, of your world turned upside down while no one seems to care? How do you think about and pray about the burdens you find yourself carrying?

However you answer the questions, know that Jesus has already been there ahead of you. He has already walked the path that you are walking, he has already carried that cross; know that he did this for you and for all humanity in all times and all places, did this because God is a God of compassion who gave the only Son, that the entire world might have life.

Let us therefore give thanks to God, let us be bold as disciples of Christ, let us take heart and have courage in our lives because of the saving sacrifice of Christ on the cross for us.

Thanks be to God