Trinity 15

Sermon preached by the Revd Canon Richard Ames-Lewis

Mark 8.27-38 

Twenty years ago I was a parish priest in Norfolk. I remember exactly where I was on Thursday 11th September 2001 when the atrocities of 9/11 were committed. I remember George Bush and Tony Blair resolving to embark on the War on Terror. I remember the determination to drive out the Taliban.

We had an army camp in the parish, the headquarters of the Light Dragoons. Soon we heard that they were mobilising a battalion to Afghanistan. As it happened there was in the congregation a carpenter, called Fred, who could make anything out of wood. He suggested to me that he could make simple crosses for the soldiers to keep in their breast pockets. I thought this was a good idea. I discussed it with the army chaplain. He thought it was a good idea. He discussed it with the commanding officer of the camp. He thought it was a good idea too. And so Fred set to work and made 600 little wooden crosses. A special commissioning service was arranged in the camp chapel. All the soldiers, young men and women, crammed into the chapel, and the chaplain and I distributed the crosses. The soldiers queued up the aisle, each person to receive their cross. We put the rough wooden crosses into their young hands. It was like a kind of holy communion. And the next day they were flying out to Baghram.

I cannot say what the soldiers thought the crosses meant. They all without exception received them silently and reverently. I watched many of them putting them carefully into their breast pockets. It reminded me how in 1914 the Tommies going over to France were issued with little pamphlets to put into their breast pockets, printed with St John’s Gospel. But these young people were mobilising for the first time. They did not know what awaited them. So any symbol of love and support, any sign of prayer from home, any token of safety in danger, was a welcome comfort. Perhaps they were, without knowing it, obeying the words of Jesus which we just heard in the Gospel, denying themselves, taking up their cross and following.

Well we know, 20 years on, how this has all turned out.  Not all those soldiers came home, and some came home maimed. The atrocities of 9/11 seeded many more atrocities; the casualties of the twin towers have been followed by many more casualties in the carnage of Kandahar, Lashkar Gah and Heirat. With the recent chaotic withdrawal from Kabul, we know that the twenty-year war on terror has been lost, the Taliban has returned, and the West, led by America, has emphatically lost its traditional role as the upholder of freedom and policeman of human rights. Kyrie Eleison.

The freedom which the West has sought to uphold and the human rights it has sought to police all these years find their basis in Christian morality, most notably in the summary of the Law given by Jesus Christ: Love God with your heart, soul, mind and strength and love your neighbour as yourself.

But the secularisation of western society, in particular the loss of influence of traditional faith, has led to a weakened consensus in the value of Christian love, or the need to inculcate it. With this weakening comes a loss of confidence that the Christian understanding of humanity, and the significance of the Jesus’ cross, has anything to teach the world.

Angela Tilby, a former vicar of this church, wrote recently in the Church Times, “We are right to be appalled by what is happening. We have a part to play in the decline of the West, with our irreligion and moral myopia. We have lost belief in the universal human dignity which Christianity once inspired.”

I find myself thinking that Fred’s little wooden crosses seem now like the final throw of the dice for the Christian world view. Can we really claim that those soldiers thought, in any theological sense, that they were taking up their cross? What I rather suspect they thought was that it was a comforting Church blessing on the outrage of war; or perhaps a symbol of sacrifice to justify the taking of life; or perhaps just a kind of lucky charm.

When we turn to our Gospel reading today we find Jesus teaching something very different about the cross. He is telling us about the Christian necessity of suffering. The Son of Man, he says, must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. The Messiah is not going to be the long-awaited great military success to save the people of Israel from the burden of years of oppression. Rather he is destined to be a failure, to suffer and to die. And resurrection will be won only through the ultimate sacrifice. Peter, as we hear, cannot cope with such a prospect and rebukes Jesus. But Jesus rebukes Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! – you are looking at this from a human, not a divine, point of view.”

And then he goes on to address the whole crowd, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” He is challenging his hearers to walk the same path of suffering as he will walk. The cross, in other words, is not a comfort or a blessing, but an instrument of cruelty and murder. And he rams the message home with the strange upside-down reflection “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.” Followers of Jesus must sacrifice everything to walk the path. The gift of resurrection in Christ will come only through total self-giving.

Down the centuries followers of Jesus have sought to enter into what this might mean. The desert fathers and mothers in the third century cut themselves off from the world, to seek total renunciation for the sake of Christ. The monks of St Benedict followed a Rule to discipline themselves in community to be more like Christ. The Anglican divines of the Reformed Church of England sought holiness by engaging with the world through learning and prayer. And ordinary Christians at all times have sought to follow the path of holiness seeing the community of the parish church as a way to deepen our understanding of the cross as God’s redemptive way of saving the world.  All these lives given to Christ have provided salt and light to a dark and decaying world.

And this tells us something about the cost of redemption. Jesus’ suffering and dying on the cross was God’s way of redeeming the world: not easily or lightly or painlessly, but in costly difficulty and in pain. That is why we have the cross as our central symbol: to remind us of the cost to God of sending his beloved Son to redeem us. That is why we can quite properly say that when we each take up our cross, with all its difficulty and pain, with its prayer and its lament, we are sharing in Christ’s redemption.

Empires rise and fall, but Almighty God does not. As the Robert Graves hymn has it

Pride of man and earthly glory,
Sword and crown betray his trust.
What with care and toil he buildeth,
Tower and temple fall to dust.
But God’s power,
Hour by hour,
Is my temple and my tower.

Our broken world has not been abandoned. It continues to be redeemed by God.