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Most Baptist churches have an Anxious Bench. It is the very front and center pew. It's called the Anxious Bench because in many Baptist churches at the end of the worship service there is a little tradition fondly known as The Invitation. This is an offer made by energetic and hopeful preachers to weary and sideways-glancing congregants just before the final hymn, that if anyone has felt the Holy Spirit moving them to accept Jesus as their Savior and join this fellowship, they are cordially invited to join said hopeful preacher down at the front to be received.
Feeling the movement of the Holy Spirit inside you is a traumatic thing. But knowing you've got to stand up in front of everyone, walk down the long center aisle under everyone's gaze and give yourself over to this preacher is a lot to consider. It's embarrassing to think of baring your emotional soul in front of a church full, to be the only one sitting on the Anxious Bench being glared at hungrily by that preacher and stared at by everybody else singing the hymn safely in their own non-front-pew seats.
Most of us, energetic preachers included, are embarrassed to display such interest in God where others can see. I remember how hard it is even to be a child and walk down front for a children's message, and yet our children get up and do just that week after week, a feat of courage those adults back in the pew do not fathom. We are much more comfortable keeping our religion to ourselves. It is tempting never to undergo that Anxious Bench trauma, never to have to get up and follow in public.
This is not intended to make those of you on the back pew feel especially guilty. Every Baptist in the room is just as guilty as you are. None of them are on the front row, either.
It is tempting to believe that God does not ask us to affirm God publicly and embarrass ourselves. But God does.
It was tempting for Peter and the other disciples to believe God did not call them to any inconvenience, discomfort, or embarrassment. But it was painfully clear -- Jesus stated it plainly in the teachings he began. Just a bit beforehand, Peter had confessed that Jesus was the Christ. Jesus had wondered if the disciples were finally beginning to understand him, and he warned them not to share his messianic identity with anybody.
Feeling more comfortable with Peter and some of the others, he relaxed and started to share himself, revealing his suspicions about what he'd have to do, the suffering he'd have to undergo. Now Jesus is the one who confesses, and Peter is the one who rebukes.
Peter and his friends, like you and me, had given in to temptation to believe that this Messiah was a glorious, victorious, majestic King. Surely God did not have in mind this ugliness and physical suffering for his perfect and beautiful anointed one. Surely Jesus was too good even for garden-variety human death, much less this horrible scenario he was describing.
Jesus saw at once that despite his clear self-disclosure, unfettered by characteristic parable, his closest friends still did not know who Messiah was and what Messiah did. So in turn he gave his hardest personal rebuke: "Get out of my sight, you Devil."
We, like Peter, play the Devil's Advocate when we give in to the temptation to think that our salvation will not require a price. We, like Peter, take Jesus aside like old ladies who have overheard children cussing, and say "Hush! Don't talk like that!" And we must hear Jesus rebuking us, too, because our rejection of his identity is as real a temptation for us as any he endured in the wilderness with Satan. To deny Jesus as a suffering servant is to continue the tempting.
We experience both sides of this same tempting offer. We have been the tempters and the "temptees." You've done it yourself many times, challenging God when suffering happens, demanding that pain cannot be part of the sacred scenario. Ever since Job, people have been questioning God's tolerance of human misery.
It is a difficult task of maturity to accept, as Jesus did, that our identity as God's children requires us to be suffering servants. It is even more difficult when our closest friends, like Peter, shrink fearfully from the prospect of some suffering we must do. The Tempter can make no more terrible attack than in the voices of those we love begging us not to do the difficult thing to which God calls. Almost every single one of us becomes a servant to this God only reluctantly.
One of the original reluctant servants of God was named Moses, baby in the bulrushes, raised by Pharaoh's daughter with his mom in attendance. He grew up to learn to hate the Pharaoh, and the hatred grew as he and his friends experienced the oppression of slavery at Pharaoh's hand, But when called by a greater authority to set the captives free, at the moment of the most important experience of his life, Moses not only didn't seek out servant-hood, strangely like unto cross-bearing. He was dead set against it, and oblivious to the sacredness and possibility of the divine within it. He was a reluctant servant.
He lived with his new wife's family in Midian. Tending his father-in-law's flock, Moses led them that day well beyond their normal grazing area, well behind the point at which pasture gave way to wilderness. It was a strange place, where he'd never been, and Moses didn't know anymore than anyone else did that the mountain he was walking toward was God's mountain.
What would you do if you were minding your business, alone in the boonies, with no one to corroborate your story, and you saw smoke, followed the smoke to where it originated, and found the fire burning up a thorn bush -- except the bush wasn't burning? What would you do?
That is an easy question for us because we already know the rest of the story. We know fire was a symbol for Old Testament writers of the presence of God. We already know it was the nature of the fire, not the nature of the bush, which prevented its being consumed. But Moses didn't know. His curiosity beckoned him toward the amazing sight, just where God wanted him, and it was that moment that God picked to call him, from the middle of the bush.
"Moses, Moses, don't come any farther. Take the shoes from your feet because the place where you stand is holy ground." Just as Moses was wondering to himself how it could be holy way up here in the boonies, God continued: "Because I am the God of your own father, and also the God of your people, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob."
Where before Moses was contented to stare at the bush in wonder, now he hid his face from this sight, because he knew this God. This was the God, his own God, whom he had never met. It is possible to claim a God you don't really know personally.
And God said, "Egypt, which you desperately escaped -- I want you to go back there and help me snatch my people from the hands of Pharaoh."
"WHAT?" Moses almost said out loud. God still knew he was thinking it.
"I have seen the oppression of my people and heard their cries, how they languish without funds for building maintenance and repair, how they long to have new members join them, how they struggle to find their identity, how they wish for a new pastor, how they worry at diminishing offering plate tallies. So I have decided to come down from my dwelling place to snatch them from the hand of this Pharaoh's power and take them from their land of oppression into a new land flowing with milk and honey."
This is only a rough translation from the Hebrew. "So, go," said God, "I will send you to Pharaoh, and you will help me bring my people out."
What Moses was going to do was not to bring freedom single-handedly to his own people. He was going to God's people, to help them be brought out by God. After all, it wasn't Moses' idea. But it was a formidable one, and it scared the fire out of him. That was powerful language God used, even translated into English, "coming down" and "snatching" people up. Moses couldn't do that. He knew he was the wrong person. "I'm one of those people" he said to himself. "What in the world am I doing thinking of leading them?"
So Moses tried to back out. From his series of protests, for the first time in the Old Testament narrative we learn who God is and what God's name is. It is in Moses' reluctance, in Moses' inability to do it by himself, that he learns the identity of God and his identity as God's agent.
"But who am I, what power do I have, that I could waltz into Pharaoh's court and get from him thousands of prisoners?"
And came God's answer, "The point is, Moses, not who you are, but who I am. I will be with you. You will be with me. The proof that what I say is true is that you and my people will come out again to this very mountain to worship me one day. I betcha."
Okay, decided Moses. "If it doesn't matter who I am, then tell me again, who are you? Who do I tell them has sent me?"
"Tell 'em Yahweh sent you. Tell them I AM THAT I AM sent you." Now some people at this point get God's name in the Hebrew confused. They call God "I AM WHAT I AM."
It was actually Popeye who said I am what I am. God says "I AM THAT I AM." "I AM THE ONE WHO ALWAYS IS. I AM BEING ITSELF."
God answers our protests of inadequacy with assurance of God's own adequacy. Moses learned that, however absent God may seem, God IS always present, always real. God is here and now.
So what Moses did, reluctantly accepting his mission, was not to bring God to God's people, for God was already with them, but to bring them to the knowledge of God's presence. That knowledge makes the difference.
And when Moses stood on the mountain overlooking Canaan, knowing he would part there with the people to whom he belonged, I bet he was glad he'd done the whole thing. I bet then he was reluctant to leave them. I bet he was grateful to them for the opportunity they'd given him. He was glad he'd walked in God's direction.
This is exactly what Jesus was trying to tell his friends: I must walk in God's direction, though it may be daunting, though I may feel reluctant, though I don't know where it will lead or if I am up to it, though it sounds impossible, though broken bones and sure death are involved, I must take this path following the voice of I AM.
And after they whine and complain and try to talk him out of it, Jesus says plainly to his friends that in denying that voice of God, in denying even a little of the suffering it calls us to do, we join the ranks of the Pharaoh and the Egyptians, we become like the Sanhedrin and the Jerusalem Council, whose rebuke of Jesus lay at the heart of his passion. "Either join them," he says to the disciples and to us, "or grab a cross."
To take up a cross is to follow the leader who did it first. It is to say NO to the insidious, provocative temptation of conventional television religion to believe that faith in God brings a magic safety that relieves one from human suffering.
But the worst temptation is to imagine that any suffering you do is the same as taking up a cross. This is not so. There is a whole lot of suffering going on that belongs in the category of regular, legitimate, everyday pain-in-the-neck stuff. Taking up a cross is not happening just because we are hurting. It isn't going to occur as something that befalls us of its own accord.
To take up a cross is to make a conscious choice to deny our own ego for the sake of a Christ-like cause. It is to affirm that Jesus is Lord out loud when people can hear you and become angry. It is to let Christ make the difference in the way you choose which paths to forge or follow, which causes to support or deny, what gets your attention and your loyalty. It is to confess Jesus in ways people will notice, which will cause them to place you into a category they will say is inferior. It is to make a decision to march head-on toward a place of death, by that burning bush, where God is already waiting.
When we take up a cross, when we walk down the aisle and sit on the Anxious Bench, when we answer God's call, what actually dies is that part of us that saves face. What dies is the false ego that is secure when we appease worldly fools to get ahead. And we know when we're doing it. That cross can't be strapped to your shoulders without your noticing something heavy and splintered weighing you down.
The choice Jesus presents his friends, the choice God presented to Moses, is either the loss of face or the loss of the real self. "For what does it get you if you lose your real self in the process of saving face?" Jesus asks. What does it get us if we sacrifice honor for profit, principle for popularity, people for things, and eternity for the moment?
These sacrifices can bring the greatest human pain we ever know. But this is what Jesus is asking. Instead of being a wealthy TV preacher in another thousand dollar hotel room, we are to be Joe Shmoe spending another night shift volunteering at the Uptown Homeless Shelter.
He asks us to live in unexpected, non-Sanhedrin ways, to be female pastors and male nursery workers, teachers and prophets who stutter a little and aren't always sure what to say, and missions field personnel who never get to own the big house in the suburbs. He asks us to see that worry over paying the church light bill and keeping scuff marks off the walls is not cross-bearing. That's just our own stuff. But letting a non-English-speaking immigrant new-church group use those lights inside those walls to worship for free -- now you're talking cross-bearing! Now you're onto something!
He asks us to pay more than lip service to his gospel, though it is not pretty, and is not necessarily fun, not comfortable, not what the Joneses are doing, does not pay well, and doesn't always end nicely at 12:00 sharp.
And Jesus asks us to say a rowdy "Yeah!" to the truth he brings. "You people won't be happy until I spell it out for you! You gotta have proof that God's kingdom really is coming! Only then will you risk denying yourselves the least little thing in affirmation of me!"
The famous Saturday Night Live Church Lady rebukes all of us for not going to any trouble to follow Jesus' call. "Some of us only respond with cross-bearing faith when it's CONVEEEENIENT," she scolds. "What could be causing that denial? What could be tempting us with a cross-free life? Could it be -- oh, I don't know -- SATAN?"
If it is, then say what Jesus said -- "get out of my sight." Don't let the Tempter lead you down any rosy garden paths! Not a single one of them leads into God's Kingdom. That path, that narrow, steep, uphill one, you can take that path if you have your cross with you. Watch for burning shrubbery.
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