Second Sunday of Lent-
Two Questions and a Calling
When Mark (as well as the other writers) put his Gospel together, I am sure there was a rhyme and reason to it all. One thing follows the next, building and adding and giving depth. Here is an interesting series:

• Question One:

"Who do people say I am?" Mark 8:27

Not a tough question. People were talking. Just listen to the gossip and figure it out. People say all kinds of things about him. People place him in all kinds of boxes. Do we? Which takes us to....

• Question Two:

"Who do you say I am?" Mark 8:29

A little more difficult. This one means digging into our own souls and figuring out what we believe. But believing isn't the ending- it is but the beginning. Just because we "say" the "right" answer to the question, doesn't necessarily mean that we "get it" or even that we are willing to follow that insight to its proper conclusion.

Which happens to Peter. He steps back from his statement that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, to rebuke him as if he would know God's will better than Jesus does. He has a "power-based" understanding of who Jesus is. After all, if Jesus IS the Son of God, that is a pretty powerful position to be in. Naturally that power is to be used. Isn't it? So that leads Jesus to give...

• A Calling:

"If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me." Mark 8:34

Now we're into discipleship! And this gets scary. As Sarah Dylan Breuer says in an article this week at The Witness Magazine:

As Christians, it still is the case that realizing the Cross' meaning has to involve us looking hard and talking honestly about power.

The cross, as Sarah said in her article- and my pastor said in church this morning, is not an incovenience as we often think of it. Nor is it a pretty piece of jewelry- not to Jesus. WE have made it that over the centuries. Rather it is an instrument of state-sponsored torture and death. It is an ugly, demeaning, death-dealing exertion of power.

So to take UP the cross is to lay DOWN our power. It is to become truly powerless and know that in that step of laying DOWN power, we will be GIVEN a new power. Notice that the power is GIVEN, we don't TAKE it. When we stand powerless before the exertion of power we are standing in God's power. When we stand with those who are also powerless before the exertion of power, we are standing in God's community.

That I have a hunch is what discipleship is all about.