Sermon Tone Analysis

Pentecost 17

Mark 8:27-35

October 1, 2006

*“His Cross is Ours”*

            Shortly after Jesus fed the five thousand with seven loaves of bread and a few fish, He was alone with His disciples and he began to talk to them on very personal terms about what he came to do and what it meant to be one of His followers.

He tells them what His future will hold and what that will mean for their lives.

Right after Peter’s confession that Jesus is indeed the Christ, that is the Messiah or Savior, Jesus tells them how he will accomplish the salvation of not only the Jesus people but all people.

Jesus says, “that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes and be killed, and after three days rise again.

And he said this plainly.

He announces to them that he will be killed, but on the third day, he will be raised from the dead.

His disciples were not ready in any shape, form, or fashion for such an announcement.

\\             This idea of a suffering and dying servant and Savior was more than Simon Peter could take.

"What's he saying?"

Peter asks himself.

"That he's going to lay down his life?

That he's going to be the sacrifice?

It was absurd.

What kind of God would do such a thing?"  \\             And that's the point, isn't it?

That's the truth that sets us apart from every other religion on this planet.

We serve a God who does not ask for a sacrifice, but who is the sacrifice.

\\             A few years ago, a man spoke with Mrs. Anwar Sadat, the widow of the former Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat.

She said, “In the beginning of Sadat's presidency, he had championed war against Israel.

He was part of the destructive cycle of hatred and bloodshed that has stalked the Middle East for decades.

But then one day, Sadat determined to become a peacemaker.

He wanted to break down the walls of violence and misunderstanding between the Egyptians and Israelis.

He knew that members of his own political party would try to kill him to stop the peace process.

\\             Mrs.

Sadat recalled the day that Anwar told her he was going to Jerusalem to negotiate a peace settlement.

She protested that his enemies would kill him.

He replied, "Then I would have died for peace."

He did.

His friends of war became his enemies of peace.

They assassinated him.

\\             The work of reconciliation requires sacrifice.

That is true when we are speaking of reconciliation between nations; that is true when we speak of reconciliation between humanity and God.

A sacrifice must be made, and it is God who made the sacrifice.

If we do not understand this, we do not grasp the heart of Christian faith.

Without the cross, Christianity is just another pleasant philosophy urging people to be nicer to one another.

But the Lord has given us these words, “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son . .

.”In these words we find both the law and the gospel.

We find the words of love and sacrifice.

The gospel is that God so loved the world.

The Law is that He gave, that is sacrificed His only Son for this world.

Here we find that true love embraces sacrifice.

At the cross there is the dividing line between a wishy-washy Christianity that motivates no real devotion, and a life-changing Christianity that causes people to give their lives to follow Jesus wherever he leads.

Christ laid down his life in our behalf.

\\             Peter took Jesus aside and began to rebuke him for saying this.

"But when Jesus turned and looked at his disciples, he rebuked Peter.

“Get behind me, Satan!' he said.

'You do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of men.”

These are pretty strong words, then Jesus boldly told Peter and the crowd following Him that just as the Christ, the Son of God will sacrifice His life so will those people that believe in Him and call themselves His disciples.

Hear Jesus word to His would be followers, "Then [Jesus] called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said: 'If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.

For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it.

For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his life?

For what can a man give in return for his life?”

These are hard words indeed.

Jesus is telling Peter that there is a difference between cheap grace and God’s sacrificial love for us.

For those people that believe in Jesus, His death has a radical effect and changes the very perspective of life.

Through His death on the cross we are not only forgiven ,we are called to follow.

This is because.

Christ’s cross is also our cross.

\\             These words of Jesus are not to be taken lightly.

One man, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was not always faithful in his Christian witness, wrote about the difficulty of these words of our Lord as he opposed Adolph Hitler and eventually was killed by him.

He wrote a book that is worth reading called, The Cost of Discipleship.

In it he talks about what he called, "Cheap grace."

"Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our Church," he wrote.

"We are fighting today for costly grace . . .

Cheap grace is the grace we bestow upon ourselves . . .

Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline . . .

Cheap grace is a grace without discipleship, grace without the cross…it is the call of Jesus Christ not only to talk the talk but to also walk the walk.

Cheap grace is all talk; it is lip service to God.

Costly grace is faith in action, to willing sacrifice all to follow Jesus.

Just as Luther wrote in, “A Mighty Fortress” – And take they our life, goods, fame, child and wife, let these all be gone, They yet have nothing won, the Kingdom ours remaintheth.

This is what it meant for Luther “to take up ones cross.”

What does it mean to us when we say we too must take up our crosses?

What does it mean for a person to lose his life so that he may gain it?

All too often we have watered down the meaning of our Lord’s Word to take up the cross.

We want to appear to fit into the call of Christ so that we say, more often then not, that the adverse situations that we find in our life are crosses that we must bear.

I’m sick, I am bearing the cross.

I’m in pain, this is my cross.

My children are not obedient, this is my cross.

I am frustrated by life, don’t have enough money, don’t have any friends, nobody understands me…these are my crosses.

While there may be an aspect of truth to all of these things, they, properly understood, according to Christ’s Word, are not crosses.

Rather, as Luther says they are “afflictions,” that accompany us through this life because we live in a fallen world.

Rather, the true bearing of the cross is understood as this, Martin Luther wrote, “Suffering is called a cross when Christians come by it as Simon here does (Luther is talking about Simon of Cyrene that was compelled to carry the cross of Jesus Christ when Jesus was crucified) The Christian does not carry his own cross, but the Lord Christ’s.

He must suffer for the Lord’s sake…the suffering and cross of Christians should be of such a nature, too, that, as Peter says, they suffer not as thieves and murderers but as Christians.

That is, for the sake of the Lord Christ, for the sake of His word and confession.

And, “Whoever professes that he is baptized and is glad to be called by the name of Christ should be convinced that he is no better than Christ, his Lord.

For such a person must be conformed to the image of the Son of God.

If Christ wore a crown of thorns, we should not expect people to place wreathes and roses on our head(s).

Bearing ones cross means to suffer for the sake of the gospel, for the sake of Jesus.

It means following Him, pointing to Him and saying He is the one in whom I believe.

It is His word that I follow.

In this, we Christians cannot not help but to be ridiculed, belittled and scorned.

What does it mean, in a practical way, for us to bear this cross of being a Christian?

It means to identify with Jesus Christ.

It means different things to each of us because we bear the cross of Jesus in many and various ways.

One thing we know, by Christ’s example, is that it means sacrifice, denial of ones self and service and love towards all people.

It means giving up our hope of the best life possible here on earth and focusing our hope in the better life of eternity, not just for ourselves but for other people.

One thing is for sure.