"I wonder if that was part of Peter’s struggle, too. With all of those crosses bearing down on him, preaching words of oppression and death day after day, perhaps he found Jesus’ words about Jesus’ impending suffering and dying to be as horrendous as I found Sherry’s pastor’s words. “God forbid it, Lord. This shall never happen to you,” Peter protested. No one chooses to bear a cross. It is always imposed onto one by those more powerful. That was Peter’s experience. Frankly, that was Sherry’s experience as well. Furthermore, I wonder if it flashed through Peter’s mind that if something like that could happen to Jesus, to the one he just claimed as Messiah, then it could happen to any of them (Barbara Brown Taylor, God in Pain, p. 59). And none of them signed up for defeat. None of them signed up for rejection. None of them signed up for suffering. None of them signed up for death.
"So I wonder if though the disciples probably paid a lot of attention during the confrontation between Peter and Jesus, they also stopped listening as soon as Jesus said “take up your cross.” All of them had lived their lives walking down that Jerusalem road. All of them had lived their lives trying to forget the empire’s testimony that fear and death were the powers that defined them. All of them had had to respond to their children the first time those little voices asked why those people were up there and if that was going to happen to them, too. And now this One whom they had grown to trust was telling them to deny themselves and to willingly take up a cross?
"Like Sherry wondered that day in my office, like I have wondered throughout my own journey of discipleship, those first disciples probably wondered what Jesus’ invitation to take up the cross was even supposed to mean. The cross was the tool of the empire. The ultimate expression of power over another. There was no veneer of redemption, no hint of life, no connection with the divine symbolized by the cross. They had lived their lives under the shadows of those crosses, trying with all their might to not look up, constantly attempting to silence those slithering voices that kept proclaiming to them under whose fear-based power they lived, under whose death-reign they existed."
Thank you for reading! More tomorrow.
From Rev. Kershner: I am indebted to different sources for this sermon: My own theological wrestling match with the doctrine of atonement and feminist/womanist contributions to that dialogue; Walter Wink’s theology of the principalities and powers, as well as his helpful articulation of the myth of redemptive violence; Walter Brueggemann’s language of countertestimony; Ched Myers’ excellent book on the Gospel of Mark titled Binding the Strong Man. Rev. Kershner's sermon can be found at: www.fourthchurch.org/sermons/2014/083114_8am_930am.html She is now the Pastor of Central Presbyterian Church in Atlanta.