{"id":1293,"date":"2012-03-08T20:49:50","date_gmt":"2012-03-08T20:49:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=762"},"modified":"2017-08-26T15:26:28","modified_gmt":"2017-08-26T19:26:28","slug":"only-an-act-of-god-by-marilyn-zehr-march-4-2012","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tumc.ca\/?p=1293","title":{"rendered":"Only an \u201cAct of God\u201d – by Marilyn Zehr – March 4, 2012"},"content":{"rendered":"

View Archived Sermons<\/a><\/p>\n

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Mark 8 and Genesis 17<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

As you might have imagined,<\/span> preparing my sermon for this Sunday carried unique challenges as our primary focus as a community was with Erin Leis\u2019s family.\u00a0 I guess I\u2019d like to call what I\u2019ve prepared this morning, a few thoughts – a few thoughts about our texts for the 2nd<\/sup> Sunday in Lent.\u00a0 I was graced this week, by the fact that John, my husband, was learning these texts to share with the Danforth congregation this morning, so in order to ponder them, I had only to make myself available when he was going over them.<\/p>\n

\t<\/span><\/span>The thoughts that I will share with you are based on what I heard.\u00a0 In both texts, the Genesis text \u2013 Genesis 17 and the gospel text from Mark 8 – it struck me as I listened, that God is speaking.\u00a0 Almost the entire text in Genesis, God in the first person, tells Abraham, everything that God is going to do.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

God says,<\/p>\n

I\u2026\u2026 will bless you\u00a0<\/p>\n

and I\u2026.. will make you a great nation<\/p>\n

and I\u2026.. will also bless Sarah<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

God continues,<\/p>\n

I will\u2026. change your names from Abram to Abraham<\/p>\n

and from Sarai to Sarah.<\/p>\n

I will make and keep my covenant with you and your descendents after you.\u00a0 God repeats this promise several times.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

That\u2019s a lot of \u201cI\u201d language.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s a lot of effort God is going to with Abraham and Sarah to make God\u2019s desires known.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

What if we hear the Mark text in a similar way?<\/p>\n

The Mark text is a story told in the third person, but Jesus does a lot of the speaking too.\u00a0 If Jesus is speaking as God incarnate, I wondered, what is God doing in this text?<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

The difficulty with the Mark text is precisely how to hear it in a new way.\u00a0 It is such a familiar text.\u00a0 \u201cIf any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.\u00a0 For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel will save it.\u00a0 For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?\u00a0 Indeed, what can they give in return for their life?\u00a0 Those who are ashamed of me and of my works in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the gory of his Father with the holy Angels.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

As I read this text again for us, I wonder, at what point did your mind begin to wander?\u00a0 If your mind did not wander, great, maybe it\u2019s only a problem for me \u2013 but my mind wanders sometimes when I hear really familiar texts.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Another problem that I have with the text is that in my Mennonite, \u201cMartyrs Mirror related\u201d upbringing, (for those who aren\u2019t familiar with the Martyr\u2019s Mirror, it is a book of the compiled stories of those who were martyred or who suffered and died or more precisely were killed for their faith) In my \u201cMartyr\u2019s Mirror related\u201d upbringing, this text in Mark is key \u2013 because it has been expected that we will suffer for the sake of the gospel and if we don\u2019t suffer for the sake of the gospel we must be failing at our attempts to truly follow Jesus \u2013 we obviously don\u2019t have what it takes.\u00a0 I\u2019m sure you understand where I\u2019m going with this line of thinking.\u00a0 Read or heard in this way \u2013 this particular text has the potential to produce significant amounts of guilt and shame.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

But something shifted for me in a beautiful way when I heard John read it or practice the text this week from the perspective of Jesus.\u00a0 I wish I could imitate him, but because I can\u2019t, I\u2019ll just tell you what I heard.<\/p>\n

I heard a God though Jesus so full of compassion for himself and others, that when he got to the part where he says,<\/p>\n

If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.\u201d\u00a0 The word that stood out for me was \u201ctake up their cross and follow me.\u201d\u00a0 This isn\u2019t some \u201cnew\u201d cross; this isn\u2019t some \u201cgo out and find it\u201d cross; this isn\u2019t \u201cif you haven\u2019t sought out suffering and suffered really hard \u2013 you can\u2019t be my followers,\u201d kind of cross; this cross is the one that is already theirs to bear –\u00a0 and unfortunate as it may seem at times \u2013 we all have a cross that is already ours.\u00a0 It seems odd to me now that I thought it meant I needed to go out and seek more suffering. \u00a0<\/p>\n

The path of seeking suffering for suffering sake \u2013 now as I think about it\u00a0 – smacks of self-righteousness.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Recently, in a critique about the Martyr\u2019s Mirror, Julia Spicher Kasdorf, unearthed several artistic and literary responses to the wood-cut of Dirk Willems rescuing his pursuer out of a frozen lake.\u00a0 She called him the \u201cpatron Saint of the helping hand and the morally superior attitude.\u201d \u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Out of respect for this picture and what it has meant to so many \u2013 seeing it as an example of loving one\u2019s enemy \u2013 there is no picture more poignant or formative.\u00a0 And if this was Dirk\u2019s cross to bear in the act of following Jesus \u2013 so be it –\u00a0 and may we all continue to be inspired by it.\u00a0 But if we think we need to go out and find our own lake to drown in, in order to follow Jesus, we have become confused.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

The problem with hearing the text in Mark \u2013 as something more we need to do \u2013 so that we can either feel good about all that we have suffered, or feel bad when we fail is that we have the whole thing backwards \u2013 it leads us to think that it\u2019s somehow about us.<\/p>\n

Well it is about us, but not so much about what we do but about the direction that we are heading as we do the things we must do and about<\/em> what God has done, is doing and will do.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the message that is clearest to me when I hear these passages side-by-side, the one in Genesis and the one in Mark.\u00a0 When I heard the texts recited back-to-back in fact that\u2019s all I could hear. \u00a0<\/p>\n

God says, \u201cI will make a covenant between you and me and all your descendants after you.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

In Mark, Jesus says about himself, \u201cthe son of man,\u201d must suffer and be rejected by the religious establishment and be killed and on the third day be raised. \u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

God established a covenant with Sarah, Abraham and their descendents and<\/strong> gave God\u2019s self to us in Jesus who suffered and died and was raised.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

I\u2019m in awe of the lengths that God has gone to and will continue to go to reconcile and gather all of us into God\u2019s self. \u00a0<\/p>\n

In that light, what can we make of the injunction to deny ourselves and take up our crosses and follow Jesus?\u00a0 I\u2019ve lived long enough to know that we all have a cross to bear \u2013 maybe even more than one \u2013 and we\u2019re bound to drag them with us somewhere.\u00a0 If we pick them up and follow Jesus, according to God\u2019s promise, we may someday be fully redeemed. \u00a0 If we drag them in any other direction we may end up losing the very life we had hoped to save \u2013 our own.\u00a0 And we certainly don\u2019t need to go looking for more crosses to carry to ensure our moral superiority.<\/p>\n

In the end it is and always will be not our own actions but an \u201cAct of God\u201d that saves us. \u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

View Archived Sermons \u00a0 Mark 8 and Genesis 17 \u00a0 As you might have imagined, preparing my sermon for this Sunday carried unique challenges as our primary focus as a community was with Erin Leis\u2019s family.\u00a0 I guess I\u2019d like to call what I\u2019ve prepared this morning, a few thoughts – a few thoughts about our texts for the 2nd Sunday in Lent.\u00a0 I was graced this week, by the fact that John, my husband, was learning these texts to…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1293","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sermons-a-worship-audio"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tumc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1293","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tumc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tumc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tumc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tumc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1293"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.tumc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1293\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3945,"href":"https:\/\/www.tumc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1293\/revisions\/3945"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tumc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1293"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tumc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1293"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tumc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1293"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}