What does it mean to carry your cross?

Text: https://www.lectionarypage.net/YearC_RCL/Pentecost/CProp18_RCL.html

Years ago, my preschool aged son got really mad at me. I don’t remember what the fight was about, but as I sent him into his room to cool off, he turned and shouted, “I hate you!” Then I heard him pacing around in his room, engaged in conversation with himself. He was saying something like, “I am so mad.  I want to [whatever it was] and she won’t let me. I hate her.” 

Then I he said, “But she’s my mom.  You can’t hate your mom.”  

He argued with himself for several minutes: “I hate her.” “But she’s my mom. You can’t hate your mom.” 

At last, he appeared in the doorway of my room and announced, “I don’t hate you.” And he got on with his day. 

It’s not just because I am a mom that I want to assure you that Jesus does not want you to hate your mom. It’s also as a student of the Bible, that I assure you that  Jesus does not want you to hate your mom. 

The word “hate” gets thrown around pretty loosely these days. We say, “I hate it when that happens” over something entirely trivial, like when the shampoo bottle leaks into the suitcase.  

My children sometimes used to tell me not to be a hater, not to be hatin’ on their music or clothes, and as we see daily, people are out there constantly proclaiming who it is that hates us or freedom or America or who we should hate because of the color of our skin or our politics or our gender or who we are married to or want to be married to.

Jesus uses the word “hate” here in opposition to the way Jesus uses the word “love,"and in the Bible those words DO NOT describe emotions. Loving one’s neighbor has nothing to do with feelings, and hating one’s family does not, either. Rather, these are words about decisions. Jesus is always about decisions. Decisions about how to act toward God and neighbor and yes family, too; decisions about how to follow Jesus.  

This is not a new idea. We just heard God say to Abraham, look, life is complicated. So pay attention - and choose life!

And Jesus is too. Jesus is talking about discipleship here, what it means to follow him. And what he wants you to hear is this: don’t be so absorbed by or entangled with your family that you neglect your spiritual calling. 

This is also why he says we must give up all our possessions. Note that he says give up, not give away, give up having our possession be what we need to serve -because the more stuff we have, the more we will need to serve that it. And then we are not free to serve God and neighbor. As it goes in a favorite hymn of mine: Jesus calls us o’er the tumult, Christian love me more than these. 

Still, these are hard words and if you just read today’s reading by itself, it’s not difficult to see how at times people wanted to throw Jesus off a cliff.

But this is a continuing narrative, and what we read today is commentary on the parable that was narrated just before this reading, which, unfortunately, we didn’t hear, in which a certain man gave a great feast and invited many people to come, but the people he invited all had excuses for why they couldn’t.  

One said he’d just bought a field and had to go look it over.  Another said he just bought some oxen and needed to test drive them. A third said he just got married so he had other obligations. All of these people refused the invitation to a wonderful banquet because they were focused more on other things - work, possessions, family.

Sometimes we don’t even know that we are being held captive by our attachments. We’re just moving through life, with a vague feeling that our energies are misplaced……

Please note: Jesus is not saying, I won’t let you be my disciple if you don’t do these things. He is saying that we will not be able to be disciples if we are too busy doing other things. We will not be able to serve God and neighbor if we are focused on serving stuff, serving money, serving even family, as hard as that sounds.

And how do we serve? By carrying the cross. 

This is another troublesome phrase we have managed to mangle so that we think of it as something we have to drag around - something that’s “our cross to bear” like a nagging relative or a painful physical condition.  

But what Jesus means is that we must be his standard bearers out into the world. We must carry the cross of Jesus as our standard, as our flag, as we live out our lives in the world. Carrying our own cross means showing how we ourselves are living out our Christian faith, even if it means letting go of things that others say we need to hold on to.

We are to bear the cross of Jesus in the world as we go about our normal, everyday work and play, as we go to our offices or schools, as we volunteer not only at church but also at the library or the shelter, and shop at the grocery store. We are Christian disciples not because of what we do here on Sunday, but because of what we do out there to live out the Gospel Monday through Saturday.

So we have to think about what it’s going to cost us to be a discipleamid strong pulls from many directions. We have to know that our jobs, property, children, parents, society at large, Lord knows what else are all going to make claims on our attention, our time, our very souls. We have to know going in that we will be mightily pressured to attend to the needs of the powerful rather than the powerless. 

We have to know going in that we will risk loss and ridicule and even anger if we are going to truly follow Jesus.  

But sometimes we can’t go along with the crowd or even our families, not if we mean to carry the cross.  Distractions always have the potential to pull us away from God. 

So let us heed these hard words of Jesus and decide how we will live out our calling daily, knowing that when we are carrying the banner of our savior before us, then even the everyday things we do will be holy and sacred.