Jesus says, “Whoever does not carry the cross and follow cannot be my disciple.” This is such a frequently repeated phrase in the Christian life, it’s almost a kind of aphorism. And I want to ask you today and as you go into the evening and the week ahead, to consider what does it mean? Because certainly you’ve heard it before, and certainly you’ll hear it again. So that’s why I’m hoping you will take away from the service today some sense of what it means when we say this phrase, “You must take up your cross and follow me.”

 

You’re likely to not only have used it yourself, but to hear others using it, and it’s used so often that sometimes it’s even used in secular culture. It’s not even used in a particular faith sense, sometimes. That doesn’t mean to say, “Whoever will take up their cross can then follow me.”

 

My niece, when she was about four years of age, with her family, attended the Seffner Presbyterian Church. They had an evening service there where they sang the old hymns of the church. I don’t mean the hymns in the blue hymnbook, and not the hymns in the red hymnbook, but the hymns in the green hymnbook. Does anybody here remember the green hymnbook? Somebody else, thank heavens, remembers the green hymnbook, the third generation back. They were the old hymns, which means the hymns back from about 1890 through about 1930. Not the hymns from the year 300. She also had a bear, it was a stuffed bear that her great-grandmother had made for her. She sewed this bear with her own hands, and she sewed it on a sewing machine that I remember she worked with her foot. She sewed everything that way. She made all of her grandchildren a stuffed bear. But this particular niece, coming as the end of the grandchildren, found the grandmother sewing it, and she was about 90. Her eyesight wasn’t very good, and as a result, the button eyes she had for this bear were pretty close to the nose of the bear, and the bear looked cross-eyed. It did. And she had hand stitched the buttons on, and there was a little more thread than maybe was necessary, and it added to the effect that way.

 

I remember visiting the niece at age four and asking her, when she showed me the bear she had been given, what she had named the bear. She said to me, “Gladly.” I said, “Gladly? That’s an interesting name.” She said, “Yes, I named it after the song we sing at night church.” I said, “What song is that?”

 

“Gladly, the cross-eyed bear.”

 

We need to approach this text with some laughter because it is such a serious and somber word that it may be the only laughter we get as we come toward it. “Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.”

 

What does that mean? What does it mean when you say, “I had to carry my cross. It’s my cross to bear.”

 

M.T. Wright, the well-known professor of Biblical studies from Oxford University, says this: “Remember that the phrase Carry the cross was not just an aphorism in Jesus’ time. It was a very relevant term. It was the means that the Romans used for execution.” Wright goes on to say, “I think of this phrase in conjunction with the leader of the great expedition. I see this leader leading a way through a high and dangerous mountain pass to bring urgent medical care to a group of villagers cut off from the rest of the world. In the last part of the journey to the village, the leader turns to the team that’s going with him and says, ‘Those who are able to follow me the rest of the way up, now, must be prepared to put down their backpacks and leave the survival supplies that have seen us through to this point. The way ahead is particularly treacherous, and we won’t be able to carry any weight. So if you’re coming with me the rest of the way, leave these things behind. You probably won’t see them again, either. And if you have any post cards or notes that you are going to send, go ahead and give it to those who are remaining now. This is the last chance to send notes to others who may care about you, your family. Some of you won’t be making it back. The way is dangerous, and it’s likely we all won’t be able to return. This is a dangerous route ahead, and only those who are prepared to face the cost should continue with me.”

 

That’s what Wright says he thinks this is like. You must be prepared to pick up your cross and carry it if you are going to follow me.

 

There will be a cost, Jesus is saying. Are you prepared to pay the cost? It is it worth it?

 

Again and again, you have to ask that question about different activities, different tasks. Throughout the week…. Is it worth it? Do I find that expending the energy or the materials or the gift of my life, my time, on this task? Is it worthwhile?

 

Fred Craddock, the professor of Biblical studies who taught for many years at Emory University, a Methodist, says, “The call to carry your cross here is coupled with these words that follow, that have for us the frightening demand to hate one’s family, even one’s own life.” Craddock says (this is his view of the scriptures here) that the hate isn’t a Semitic term, a Middle Eastern term, particularly out of that culture, which doesn’t mean precisely the same thing that we mean when we use it. “To hate,” says Craddock, “means to turn away from, to detach oneself from. It doesn’t have the same expression that we might connect with when we say to someone, ‘I hate you.’ Were that the case, then verse 26 here,” says Craddock, “would cancel all of the other calls in both the Old and the New Testament – to love, to care, to nourish one’s family. To hate one’s life, as it’s used here,” says Craddock, “is not a call for self-loathing, not a call to regard oneself as worthless. We have not been given any right to judge ourselves any more than we have been invited to judge others. What is demanded of disciples is that the network of loyalties in which all of us live in the world, that network of loyalties should be laid aside so that the gospel and the loyalty to Christ can take precedence. This can, and necessarily will, involve detaching from some things that have been precious to us.”

 

“You must be willing to give up the very stuff of your life in order to follow me.” Is it worth it? We ask that question of parents. I look at Melissa and Eric here, raising these children. I think about the journey of people I’ve stood with over the whole of parenting. I think of the costs involved. I mean financial cost. And the energy expended. And the nights without sleep. And the worrying and praying and strategizing. I look at the end of it and I wonder, Is it worth it? Do you know anybody who, at the long end of parenting, would look at parents and say, “You know, on the whole, I would say it is not worth it.”

 

That’s not what you’re hearing, is it? There is a cost of Christian discipleship.

 

When I was a junior in high school, I was going out again for the football team, and this year I thought I had a chance at playing defensive tackle. I had worked in the ninth and tenth grade to earn this position. I was the biggest person on the team going out for defensive tackle. I had worked in summer practices in preparation for it. There was another player on the team, a year behind me, named Stacy Alexander, who also was interested in that position. We came up to Labor Day, the Labor Day weekend, and the coach said, “I’m going to call three practices over Labor Day weekend: one Friday afternoon, one Saturday, and one on Labor Day itself. But because it’s a holiday, they are optional. And I thought, “Well, my family is going to the beach over Labor Day. They’ve been doing that for a long time. I’ve worked all of these August practices. And he says they’re optional. I’m off to the beach with my cousins.” Stacy stayed. When we got to Friday night, Stacy started at defensive tackle, and I didn’t. I said to the coach, “You said they were optional.” He said, “They were optional. Stacy chose to come to practice.” Stacy went on to play defensive tackle at Notre Dame, and I didn’t.

 

I used to go as a chaplain, like Nicole did this year at Cedarkirk, and as BJ Johns has done before. I’d be out there for a week at a time while the college students worked with the campers that we send to the Presbyterian Camp and Conference Center called Cedarkirk on the Alafia River. It’s hot out there in the summer. And there was one fellow who also was out there as a volunteer assistant facilities manager. He was giving up summers. It was actually his second summer after his retirement, where he was coming out there and staying in a cabin and eating with the campers, and then working throughout the day with the facilities manager, helping to mow the grass and repair the sewer lines and nail up screens around cabins, all as a volunteer spending his whole summer that way.

 

Talking with him the second summer, about halfway through, I said, “It’s hot out here! It’s hot out here for me for a week. I can’t believe you’re doing this for free, now for a second entire summer!” “It is hot,” he said. And I said, “You’re not getting anything for it?” He said, “Well, I get room and board while I’m here.” I said, “That’s all you’re getting and you’re still out here doing this?” He said, “You know, sometimes I think that over the whole of my life this is the most valuable thing I’ve done.”

 

We have a group that meets on Monday mornings here, a prayer group. Some of them have been meeting with them for a few months, some of them have been meeting together for as many as thirty years. They get together, I forget whether it’s 7 or 7:30 a.m. They call it a “prayer breakfast”, but they never have any food. It’s just coffee, and most of that black. For an hour, they meet together, they share their concerns, the pray, and they talk about a scripture. Week in and week out. Every Monday morning. Some of them for thirty years. I said to one of them who had been going the distance on that, “That’s a long, early Monday mornings. Thirty years, down at the church, for coffee only. Is it really worth it to do that, now that you’ve spent thirty years of your Monday mornings doing it?”

 

He said to me, “This has been the bread of life.”

 

William Willimon, who was for many years the chaplain, the Dean of the Chapel at Duke University, tells the story of being at the university one weeknight when there was a large gathering of students in the student union. There was a recruiter from Teach America there. You know the national Teach America program? It’s an organization, Teach America is, that is very present and active today. It seems to recruit the nation’s best college and university students to go and teach in impossible teaching situations in our country. It’s sort of an internal Peace Corps that way. The recruiter looked out that night there on the crowd of Duke University students at the student union, and she began by saying to them, “I really don’t know why I’m here tonight. You’re kind of a boisterous crowd this evening. I can tell by looking at you that many of you are not going to be interested in what I have to say. This is one of the best universities in America. You are all successful. That’s why you’re here. You’re becoming greater successes. You’re on your way to Madison Avenue or Wall Street or a law school. And here I stand trying to recruit some of you into the most difficult job you may ever have in your life. I’m out looking for people who want to go with a burned out classroom in Watts and teach biology. I’m looking for somebody who will go into a little one-room schoolhouse in West Virginia and teach kids from six years to thirteen years of age how to read. We had three teachers in our program killed last year, in their classroom. And I can tell just by looking at you that none of you want to throw your lives away on anything like that. On the other hand, if there is somebody here tonight who may be interested, I’ve got the brochures. I’m going to leave them down front, and then afterwards I’ll stay and I’ll be glad to speak to anyone who’s interested. The meeting is over.”

 

With that, Willimon said, students jumped up, rushed to the aisle, and a large group rushed down to the front, standing over the pamphlets, fighting over them really, just dying to apply for Teach America.

 

“That night,” Willimon says, “I learned people are hungry to give their lives to something more important than themselves. It is a fact of life,” Willimon said, “not only that everything costs us something, but that in our better moments, we are even eager to pay the cost.”

 

Jesus comes asking us to pay the cost. “If you will follow me, then you must be willing to pick up your cross.”

 

In our better moments, people are hungry to give their lives to something more important than themselves. It is a fact of life not only that everything costs us something, but that when we are our best selves, we want to give our lives to some great purpose.

 

Jesus comes asking us to pay the cost. We should be aware of that. And we should be prepared to pay the cost that comes with following him. But it is always worth it to follow Jesus. It is always worth it to follow the call of Christ.

 

 

©John T. DeBevoise 2007