"Please de-baptize me," she said.
The priest's face crumpled.
"My parents tell me you did it," she said.
"But I was not consulted. So
Now, undo it."
The priest's eyes asked why.
"If it were just about belonging to
This religion and being forgiven,
Then I would stay. If it were just
About believing
This list of doctrines and upholding
This list of rituals,
I'd be OK. But
Your sermon Sunday made
It clear it's
About more. More
Than I bargained for. So, please,
De-baptize me."
The priest looked down, said
Nothing. She continued:
"You said baptism sends
Me into the
World to
Love enemies. I don't. Nor
Do I plan to. You said it means
Being willing to stand
Against the flow. I like the flow.
You described it like rethinking
Everything, like joining a
Movement. But
I'm not rethinking or moving anywhere.
So un-baptize me. Please."
The priest began to weep. Soon
Great sobs rose from his deepest heart.
He took off his glasses, blew his nose, took
Three tissues to dry his eyes.
"These are tears of joy," he said.
"I think you
Are the first person who ever
Truly listened or understood."
"So," she said,
"Will you? Please?" – Brian McLaren

Strange how a last minute glance at Facebook this morning says so much! Brian McLaren's words this morning ring especially true – there are times I wish I could be “de-baptized” too. This morning’s Gospel about the real cost of discipleship, taking up your cross, denying yourself, losing your life and all is just one of those moments when de-baptizing might just seem like an option.Last week we heard the reading of Peter declaring Jesus as the Christ of God and being commended for getting that right. Immediately following getting it right, he gets it all wrong in projecting onto Jesus his vision of what the Messiah would be. Jesus rebukes Peter with some pretty harsh words and continues on to speak about denying yourself, taking up your cross and following him. He speaks of losing your life for his sake, in essence laying down your life for Christ, in order to gain real life.

This whole idea of taking up our cross is admittedly a bit alien in 21st century America. We do not execute criminals by crucifixion like the Romans did. The cross has become a fashion statement – many of us wear crosses around our necks and we see them in our homes and churches. It’s almost as if the cross has lost its offensive meaning.

What also troubles me is how the cross is used to legitimize our own suffering. I think this comes, in part, from atonement theories that case suffering as redemptive by using Jesus as the example. This is rooted in the idea that Christ “suffered for our sake” and died for our sins. Yes, this is in scripture, but I often find the meaning can get quite twisted as people equate their own suffering as somehow necessary because Christ suffered for them. This often gets couched in language of “it’s my cross to bear.”

That may well be. There are times when we suffer in life because of something we absolutely cannot control. However, people often take on crosses that are not their own. In essence, they act as Simon of Cyrene – the one who carried Jesus’ cross for him. When an abused spouse/partner thinks their suffering at the hands of their loved one is their cross to bear, that is not true – they are taking on the cross of violence another puts on them. When the spouse/partner of an addict suffers because of the active addiction of their loved one, they are taking on the cross of their addicted loved one and acting as Simon of Cyrene. Remember, there was a point where Simon put down Jesus’ cross because it was not his to bear to the end in death. I don’t believe that taking on a cross of suffering that someone else forces on you is what Jesus is talking about in this passage. I do not believe in a God who requires your suffering abuse at the hands and actions of another. Jesus died for that, you don't have to!

So what does this mean then, to lose your life for Christ’s sake and take up your cross and not someone else’s? I suggest it begins in identifying what in your life is standing in the way of your living fully and freely for God and others. There are plenty of attachments we have which can get in the way of our relationships with God and others. Some of these are truly addictions – and I’m not just talking about drugs or alcohol. Addiction to money and possessions is probably one of the most insidious and powerful addictions in our culture. Remember, addiction requires habituation and an increased desire of more of whatever we are addicted to. Think about that with respect to money. No matter how much money we have, don’t we all think we need more? No matter how many possessions we have, wouldn't that new iPhone or tablet computer or big screen TV be really nice? Another addiction we have is to being busy because it makes us feel important because we know the busier you are, the more important you must be. Or how about the obsession many of us who are parents have over making sure our kids are enrolled in all the right classes, playing all the right sports, involved in all the right activities so they can get into all the right colleges? If you have been playing Simon of Cyrene to another person and on the receiving end of abuse, maybe the relationship has become an obsession all its own.

These are the individual attachments and obsessions we have … but there are also the communal ones which lead to deep systemic sin and oppression of others. What about our obsession to get the absolute lowest price on everything? How many jobs have been shipped overseas to third world countries with oppressive working conditions and child labor so that we can get our clothing at rock bottom prices? How many people in our own country earn much less than a living wage because we demand things like cheap fast food? How many immigrant workers get exploited because employers know they can pay them substandard wages, if they get paid at all? Our addiction to cheap goods causes us to turn a blind eye to the suffering of others precisely because it is out of our immediate sight.

What if we were to take a close and honest look at our obsessions, attachments and addictions and be willing to deny ourselves those things we think we cannot live without so that we might lose our life for the sake of Christ and the Kingdom of God? If you've been carrying a cross that doesn't belong to you, it may be time to put it down and leave that relationship so you can free yourself to live for the Kingdom of God. If you see yourself in those attachments and addictions I've mentioned … and there are many more than what I've stated … perhaps this would be a starting point to lose that life.

When we let go of obsessions, attachments and addictions, it is a way we take up our cross to follow Christ. It demands we die to our way of living so that we can find a fuller life in God. When we do, it will feel like death – make no mistake. Giving up obsessions and addictions always feels like dying because it is. But we are a people not just of losing life, but of transformed resurrected life too. When we hand over our life to God by denying our obsessions and addictions, we open a way for the Spirit to resurrect us and transform us into a totally new creation – both individually and collectively. Christ invites you today, in this community, to lose your life for his sake, take up your cross and follow him into a resurrected life. He awaits your reply ... the response is up to you.

This morning’s collect from Prayers for an Inclusive Church speaks of an “Unclean God” … a God that gets into our mess. This past Friday was the Feast of St. Mary the Virgin and this morning we are singing lots of Marian hymns in her honor – remembering a God who crossed boundaries of propriety to be born of an unwed teenage mother from some hick town up yonder. And now this same Jesus, son of Mary and Son of God, whose parentage is questionable at best, dares call a Canaanite woman a dog! Wow … unclean God indeed! There’s much disturbing about this story. Jesus begins by entering unclean Gentile territory and this woman, desperate to help her ailing daughter, crosses the cultural and gender boundaries to get his attention. And Jesus’ first reaction is to ignore her. But she won’t take “no” for an answer – she shouts all the more. The disciples ask Jesus if he wants them to shut her up. Jesus responds by essentially telling her he didn’t come for “her kind.” He attempts to put her in her place. But she is undeterred! She kneels before him and begs his help. And that’s when Jesus says, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and give it to the dogs.” It’s nothing new that women get called a “dog” when they refuse to be put in their place! She pops off with a snappy comeback: “… even the dogs eat the crumbs under the master’s table.” Jesus commends her great faith (in contrast to Peter’s little faith from last week’s reading) and says, “let it be done for you as you wish.”

There is much which troubles me in this story; however, the ending is what is sticking with me this week, perhaps due to the events which have unfolded. One could come away from this reading with the impression that if we just nag Jesus enough, whatever we want will be done for us as we wish. And there are plenty of people who will tell you if “you just have enough faith” and “just pray harder” God will hear you and answer your prayers. There are even hints of this in scripture itself. It’s as if God is some kind of indifferent parental figure that needs to be harangued until he gives in to our desires or some kind of benevolent sugar daddy doling out favors capriciously. My life experience tells me this isn’t true and I suspect deep down you know it too.

This story brings up the issue of what it means to be healed. It is a difficult question in our time and place because we often confuse healing with cure. The strides in medical technology have led us to believe that we can cure anything. We often read into the biblical narrative that those who are healed are cured when that isn’t necessarily so. Cure is the reversal of illness or disease and restoration to a non-diseased state. If you get strep throat, it is caused by bacteria. If you take an antibiotic, it will kill the bacteria causing the infection and support your immune system to clear your body of the disease. For the record, antibiotics don’t cure the infection – they provide support to your immune system by killing enough of the bacteria that your body can finish the job of clearing out the infection. There are some illnesses for which a cure is possible.

But more often than not, we suffer from diseases and infirmities which cannot be cured: infirmities are of body, mind and spirit. Many of these are just conditions – they are what they are. These conditions and infirmities can be managed, perhaps, but not cured. We have been painfully reminded of this in the death of Robin Williams this week. Mental illnesses such as depression, bipolar, or schizophrenia, addictions to alcohol or drugs, chronic diseases such as Parkinson’s, dementia, COPD, diabetes, congestive heart failure, many forms of cancer are not things for which there are cures. Treatments exist to help manage these chronic conditions. These treatments can bring us with a quality of life. But to expect a reversal, a cure, of this kind of disease is as unrealistic today as it was in Jesus’ time.

Diseases of body, mind and spirit can and do claim the lives of people we love and sometimes this happens in what seems to be tragic and untimely ways. We seem to be able to accept when people die from physical illnesses. If someone dies of cancer, we don’t blame their deaths on not “trying hard enough,” do we? But we often struggle to understand when the cause is addiction, mental illness, or even the deep spiritual diseases of our human condition. I think deaths from spiritual disease are the hardest to talk about because these infirmities are so deep and often hidden from us. This week, we have watched violence explode in Ferguson, Missouri over the death of Mike Brown – a young black man who was unarmed and gunned down by a fearful police office. The spiritual disease of racism and fear runs so deep that we find it easier to couch this as police abuse or criminal behavior. But it is a disease of a spiritual nature. When young black men have to get “the talk” from their elders about how not to provoke the police, that is the spiritual disease of racism! When a trans or gay person dies at the hands of an angry mob, that’s the spiritual disease of heterosexism. Yes, it is criminal behavior in the taking of a life, but that is a symptom of deeper spiritual illnesses which only God knows whether or not they can be cured – but I do think they can be healed.

Chronic emotional illnesses are also places where we can hope for healing, but cure is impossible. Those who do not suffer from drug or alcohol addiction can quite wrongly stand in judgment of addicts and alcoholics and blame them for “taking that first drink” or “choosing to use.” These beliefs stem from a complete lack of understanding of how addiction binds our will and destroys our freedom – it impairs the ability to choose freedom. People who stand in that judgment seat are in denial of the fact they have their own addictions – even if only the addiction to self-righteousness. There is healing for addiction, but there is no cure.

For those who do not suffer from mental illness, we can fall into the mistaken idea that if those suffering would just “snap out of it,” “get on meds,” or “get some help,” they could be cured. This isn’t true either – there is no cure for mental illness. There is treatment and management, there is healing, but there is no cure. If there were a cure, our brother Robin Williams and our sister Sophia Schmidt would not have succumbed to death by suicide from end-stage mental illness.

If we look closely at this story, we hear in the end the woman’s daughter was healed … not cured. What that healing looked like is unknown to us. Perhaps she was cured … and maybe not. Maybe she received some relief from her torment or perhaps she received just enough grace to go on for one more day.

Healing is something we all need and we all seek. Every single one of us has something which cannot be cured – a dis-ease of body, mind or spirit. Healing is gift from God which brings a sense of serenity and wholeness in the face of what cannot be cured. I am persuaded that healing is something which happens in community – it does not happen in isolation. At our best, the Church is a conduit for the healing grace of God. It comes through our worship, the sacraments, how we are sacraments to each other by the giving of our very lives, and from the medical resources with whom we partner to address the physical and emotional components of infirmities. Faith plays a role in healing, to be sure, but God also wants us to avail ourselves of therapeutic treatments too. It’s not either/or … it is both/and.

This community of Grace has been a means God has used to bring healing to others. It doesn’t mean that those who come here are necessarily cured, but it does mean we are called to show the love and care of Christ to all who come through the door. It also means we run the risk of our hearts being broken. In my life, I have found this is a risk worth taking because only when my heart breaks can God’s grace flow in to heal me too.

Have you ever come close to drowning? I mean really close … like you really thought you were going to die. It only happened to me once when I was 16 years old. I was body surfing at the Wedge in Newport Beach – thus named because of how the beach came up against the Newport Harbor jetty. The formation there made the waves pretty big and with a great shape for body surfing. While other beaches had 4 – 6 foot surf, the Wedge would have 10 foot waves or more. I was out there one day and trying to get into shore after riding a wave. Walking up the beach and out of the surf, I suddenly felt all the water pull out from around my legs … and looked over my shoulder to see about a 10 foot wave about to crash on my head! It was a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I took a deep breath and before I could tuck down the wave crashed and pinned me face down and prone in the sand. I could not move! In that moment, I thought to myself, “Well, this is it. I’m going to die.” But then I heard another voice, “Hang on. The ocean always lets you go.” It was my father who taught me this and it’s true – eventually the pressure releases and the ocean will let you go. While it seemed like forever, it finally did release and I was able to get my feet underneath me and propel myself to the surface. I was shaken and sputtering, but I lived to tell about it. I am convinced that the reason I made it was because I remembered my father’s words and followed his instructions.

Today’s gospel talks a lot about water; but not just water … darkness and wind are part of the story too. It is a story which, if you want to take it seriously, absolutely cannot be taken as a factual, literal event – it’s just too weird! This idea that the Bible is 100% factual is really a belief which has only been around for about 150 years – it’s not how we’ve viewed scripture for most of Christian history. I think there are some things we need to take literally – that whole “love your enemies” thing … there just isn’t any real way to see that as a metaphor! But the problem is when we take everything as literal – like the Bible is some kind of newspaper account. That’s a problem because the weird stories leave us with only two options. The first is we must completely turn off our knowledge of physics and science. Somehow Jesus, and Peter (at least for a few minutes), become magically able to suspend the laws of gravity and not plunge into the water. Somehow the laws of nature and physics don’t apply to Jesus. If that’s true, it would stand to reason he could have suspended natural law in any number of other situations – like when he was on the cross, he could have just not died. This also contradicts what Paul said about Christ in his letter to the Philippians – “though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.” Jesus was Son of God – but he was a flesh and blood human being … the laws of physics still apply!

The second problem in taking this as a factual account is that we cannot ignore science and so we discount this story as some kind of Christian fairy tale. This could lead to the thinking that if this story isn’t “true” (meaning factual), then nothing in the Bible is “true” and we can discount the whole of the Christian faith. Both of these conclusions are the result of having a literal/factual interpretation of the Bible.

I take the Bible too seriously to take it literally all the time. So today, instead of shutting off our brains and ignoring science or discounting the Gospel text as a fairy tale, let’s look at a third way – that of image and metaphor where water, darkness, and wind tell us more about a much deeper truth.

The story follows on the heels of the feeding of the 5,000 (which we heard last week) and it’s a story where the original language of Greek is more colorful than our translations can render. Jesus compels his disciples to get into a boat and go to the “other side” of the lake – or as the Greek says he tells them to go “into the beyond.” “Go into the beyond!” – sounds like the Gospel according to Buzz Lightyear, doesn’t it? The “beyond” he is referring to is Gentile territory – where the known comfort of a world bound by Jewish rules and customs gives way to the unknown world of … bacon eaters. The “beyond” already sets the stage for a rising anxiety of facing the unknown.

The disciples set out, Jesus dismisses the crowd and goes off to pray, he comes back down to find the boat a long way off shore and the disciples being battered by waves and opposed by the wind. The Greek gets kind of colorful here: the disciples were “tormented by the waves” and “opposed by the wind” which carries a note of hostility in it – they are opposed by a hostile wind! Notice that fear isn’t in the equation at this point in the story – but water, darkness, and a hostile wind are.

In the Biblical imagery, water, darkness and wind have deep symbolic meaning. Water and darkness are the twin powers of chaos and calamity – the two deep things we fear. In both Hebrew and Greek, the word for “wind” is also the word for “spirit” or “breath” (we have three words, they have one!). These three words take us back to the beginning … as in the first creation story in the Book of Genesis (and yes, there are two stories that don’t match … so much for factual accounts!). Genesis 1:1-2 reads:

“At the beginning of God’s creating of the heavens and the earth, when the earth was wild and waste, darkness over the face of Ocean, rushing-spirit of God hovering over the face of the waters …” (Everett Fox, The Five Books of Moses). Notice the language from this Jewish translation: darkness, waters and “rushing-spirit of God” – or “wind” or “breath” of God. When these elements are coming together in a Biblical story, it is a sign of God’s power and presence – we call that a “theophany” or a revealing encounter with God. In this Gospel text, God is moving over the face of the water in the darkness again in the person of Jesus. The imagery is that of the chaos being under the feet of Jesus – God in Christ claims dominion over the chaotic waters in the middle of darkness and in spite of a hostile wind/spirit. A powerful image to Matthew’s community being persecuted in Antioch!

The disciples now become frightened when mistake Jesus for an apparition. His response was to tell them: “Have courage! I am. Fear not!” The words recorded in Greek are highly symbolic too. Whenever “I am” shows up in the Bible, it is reaching back to the voice which came out of the burning bush to Moses on Mt. Sinai when God said, “I am who I am.” Jesus, who claims dominion over the chaos and calamity, essentially says, “have courage, God is here, don’t be afraid.”

Now Peter, being who he was, shouts back a challenge: “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.” Jesus responds “Come” – and Peter steps out onto the chaos of the dark water himself. And notice that just for one brief shining moment, the chaos and calamity are beneath his feet too! Not because of his own strength and might, but because he had his focus on Christ. But then he saw the hostile wind/spirit and was distracted from his focus on God’s dominion over the forces of chaos and he begins to sink. He cries out, “Lord save me!” knowing full well his salvation didn’t come from his own ability. Jesus picks him up and doesn’t really rebuke him – he chides him a little “O you of little faith! Why did you doubt?” – doubt also means “hesitate” here. Why did you hesitate?

Peter hesitated for the same reason we do when we venture “into the beyond.” Sometimes we get thrown into the chaos of the beyond against our will – illness, job loss, death … there is a lot beyond our control. But even when we embark on something that we know is good and feels very right, we are still facing the chaos of the unknown which can make us hesitate. Ask any married couple if they had the pre-marital “cold feet” … “I know I want to spend the rest of my life with him/her … but what if I’m making a mistake?” And what about getting that great job offer … isn’t there hesitation when you want to say yes but you still have nagging doubts? Anytime we personally head “into the beyond” we can get distracted by the anxiety of the unknown. I confess I had that moment with our Food Forest project – on Rogation Sunday. When I stepped outside the kitchen with my coffee I thought, “How cool!” and then “Oh my God! What have we done??!! What if nobody shows up to help? Art’s gonna kill me. Where will we get plants? What if I’ve snapped my cap?” We all hesitate and have moments where the chaos gets more of our attention than it should get.

In those moments, I go back to Jesus’ words: “Take courage! I am. Fear not.” The Holy One who claims dominion over all the chaos of our lives and this world invites us to venture into the beyond in spite of our hesitation and fear and tells us we are covered by God’s grace. When re remember those instructions, there really is nothing for us to fear.