The sermon I heard warned against viewing Christianity as the religious counterpart to our secular culture of instant gratification, but rather affirmed it as calling for self-sacrifice. It also linked cross carrying with the paradox of saving your life by losing it. IIRC it did not lay out any specific guidelines on how to identify your own cross.

The sermon I heard yesterday preached on James and focused on the verse about teachers being held to a high standard.

There's something to be said (in light of your comments) about preaching from James. However, since I am a visiting preacher next week and want to include the gospel from Mark 9:30-27, I am thinking of the metaphor of self-sacrifice and what that might look like. Here, James offers hints: 3:13, " Who is wise and understanding among you? Show by your good life that your works are done with gentleness born of wisdom." 3:17, "But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy. "

OTOH, who can look at the cross without thinking of the lynching tree as Prof James Cone discusses; http://www.hds.harvard.edu/multimedia/video/strange-fruit-the-cross-and-the-lynching-tree
?

I actually took my cue from Friday's Holy Cross Day. I'm not very familiar with Cone's work, but I had just heard an NPR story about the author of Strange Fruit so I did look at the similarities of lynching and crucifixion. My main focus was on how remembering that the cross is an instrument of torture and death points us towards seeing the world as it really is and not as we would wish it to be while still allowing us to see the work of God amidst the brokenness.

Jon White

I preached that to take up our cross means to be willing to choose to endure the consequences of standing with and serving those Jesus would stand with--the poor, the oppressed, the sick, the voiceless, the powerless--in an attempt to help them, even when it is against our own self-interest to do so.

Gillian Barr
Norfolk, VA

"And not only is it easy to misapply, we are frequently urged to misapply it, to 'bear with', to 'offer up', to endure suffering that we should not endure by people who claim to speak for God."

There are times when we simply *can't* fight back against bullies or whatever causes us to suffer. Institutions, armies, diseases, people, or what have you can, in some cases, simply be stronger than we are. It is in situations like this that we have no choice but to endure. Here is where the theology of the cross applies: It's not an invitation to calling oneself a victim. It's a (counterintuitive) faith in the redemptive value of suffering in and of itself, when we in practice cannot alleviate it in ourselves or others.

I'm also with Bill and Gillian on the symbolism of self-sacrifice.

Erik Campano

Jim--Thank you for this. So good. I agree with Bill, Gillian and with Erik I agree in part and disagree in part. I think the redemptive part has to do with our absolute steadfast faith in God.

I always see that phrase "take up your cross" as a call to discipleship. And THEN Jesus goes on to tell us what THAT is. Nicely expressed by Gillian.

Marcus Borg says that to take up one's cross is to look at the world from the view on the cross - with the compassion of Christ. I think it is putting on Christ lenses. Too often it used about putting up with oppression or abuse or some other burden imposed by others who are more powerful - then justified with this "take up your cross" idea. One way to look at it might also be to take the place of the beloved disciple with your head on Jesus' chest listening to the heartbeat of God - looking out at the world from that perspective.

My sermon took the form of "not this, not this, but this" where the primary contrast was with the ideology in Christian garb that precipitated the tragedy in Libya and the firestorm throughout the Mideast. Taking up the cross is not merely suffering (that is so often psychologized), but more concretely the giving of space in your life so that another might live. I threaded James 3.1-17 into the discussion as part of the critique of the competing ideology.

This bad theology of the cross can turn deadly for women when mixed with bad theology of marriage. Women living with domestic violence too often get told that the abuse is their "cross to bear" and that they are bad Christians if they fight back or leave the marriage. Mujeres Latinas in Accion specifically mentions this theology as a barrier to abused Latinas seeking help: http://www.mujereslatinasenaccion.org/Latinas%20&%20DV.html.

Something like 25% of women in this country have experienced domestic violence. The church needs to get smart about how the misapplied theology of the cross has been used to keep them quiet about it.

The preacher examined the word 'deny' and found that the Greek original has the meaning of forgetting, in this case, forgetting one's self. She made the text read that one is to forget oneself in the service of Christ, something possible when we love so much that which may require our own life that we freely give it to save that which we love. A newsstory recently spoke of a father who pulled his young son out of the way of a speeding auto and used his own body to protect his son. It cost him his life, but he saved his son's life in the process.

I think it's very interesting that taking up one's cross is associated with oppression and violence; I'd never heard that before. If the phrase (or the idea of "offering it up") suggested any one thing to me, it was illness.

I am not convinced that our particular part of the Church Universal needs to stop discussing the personal realities of the cross created by "generations of preaching aimed at our selfishness and self-absorption". Unlike some of our more pietistic Catholic and Protestant sisters and brothers, I do not hear the language of the cross in the lexicon of most Episcopalians.
While your remedy is a welcome salve in churches where personal salvation is the primary impulse of religious engagement, I think our church needs to pay greater attention to the cross in both its personal and communal aspects. A place to start might be Bonhoeffer's theology of the cross and it's antithesis, cheap grace.

Our sermon did indeed touch on a similar theme, and in conversation with the preacher afterwards, I extended it to one of my least favorite phrases in the church: "God won't give me anything I can't handle" or, perhaps more dangerously, "God won't give you anything you can't handle." The idea of God having a ledger of challenges and pain to give out in a seeming arbitrary manner, e.g. "Oh, Jamie can handle his grandmother getting Alzheimer's, let's give that one to him." is extremely disturbing to me. And yet I hear it frequently, even in the Episcopal Church where I would have thought our reasoned theology would have done some work to counteract it.