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The cross in mission

Mark 8: 27 -- 38

Rev. Peter R Green, Sunday morning, 06 Mar, 2005

AS WE keep thinking about mission, we have to move beyond the principles of mission and go right back to the most basic aspects of mission. Without the cross, all the rest is in vain.

  Jesus said,

“If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. ³⁵ For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it. ³⁶ What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, yet forfeit his soul? ³⁷ Or what can a man give in exchange for his soul? ³⁸ If anyone is ashamed of me and my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, the Son of Man will be ashamed of him when he comes in his Father’s glory with the holy angels.”

  Over the past few months, we have reviewed what mission is about, we have looked at the Holy Spirit in relation to mission, we have seen how we have to be adaptable in mission. We have looked at many aspects of mission.

  Today, we see how much mission is centred in the cross of Christ.

  It is particularly fitting that we should think about this truth on this particular day, because we have just welcomed Bruce into membership, and Bruce has come here with a sense of a calling to be part of our mission here.

  And what I am saying today is aimed to encourage us all to be involved in mission.

DAMAGED GIFTS

  I tried to show the movie, The Apostle, to some of you a year or a bit more ago. We had video player problems, and the picture was too dark, and we didn’t get nearly as much from what we saw as we might have.

  The story is about a preacher, Sonny, who is the pastor of a large and successful Pentecostal church in, I think, Texas.

  Sonny’s marriage falls apart when his wife leaves him for the Youth Pastor. Sonny is forced out of his pastoral position.

  There is a Church picnic. Sonny tries to see his kids, the Youth Pastor obstructs him, and Sonny, who is holding a baseball bat, brains the Youth Pastor. He drops the bat and runs.

  When he reaches Louisiana, he stops running. He realises what he has done, and, filled with remorse, he rededicates his life to Jesus. He asks for just one more chance. And he rebaptises himself as an Apostle — the Apostle, E.F.

  Sonny finds out about a church which has closed down in the town where he has stopped. He goes to visit the pastor, an older man — probably about my age — who had a heart attack and hadn't had the strength to rebuild his little church afterwards. E.F comes and offers to help get it re–started.

  The church starts growing again. E.F. is a master of promotion and planning. He gets events restarted. He puts the work back on the map. And he reaches out to the poor, the abandoned, the unwanted, and gives them hope.

  At the same time, you can see that he is still a very damaged man. He is angry. He tries to pick up one of the local women. He is pushy and bossy.

  But he is available to God, and God uses him.

  As the film draws to a close, and as the police are beginning to catch up with him, we see his final service in the church.

  He announces a series in the church on Christian marriage. “Your pastor will lead that,” he says. “I’m not so good at marriage.”

  He has matured through the adversity of his life. He realises his limitations.

  In the early part of the movie, you see Sonny preaching. He loves preaching. He gets great pleasure out of it. He enjoys the excitement, the uninhibitedness of southern preaching.

  But there is so little in it. Yes, Jesus gets mentioned. Yes, they call him Lord. But there is very little clear preaching of the cross, or of why we know Jesus is God come in the flesh.

  In the closing scene it is all changed. The old, flash, driven Sonny has, in a sense, been transformed into the true Apostle E.F.

  As armed police wait at the back of the hall, the Apostle preaches his last sermon in the church. It is powerful. It is still Southern preaching. But it is a sermon about the cross. In an inspired moment. E.F. lifts a sleeping baby from its mother's arms, and holds it up for all to see. He lifts a tiny hand.

  “Could you, as parents, bear to see a nail driven right through this innocent hand?” he asks.

  Then he explains it. He calls on them to Imagine how it hurt God himself to see nails driven through the hands of his only Son. He demands that we imagine how pained God was to see Jesus so cruelly beaten and tortured. But the Father and the Son consented together: this was the only way for us men and women to be forgiven and redeemed and saved. And Jesus took it all on himself, right to the very end.

  It is one of the most powerful and moving sermons I have seen in a secular movie. People in the theatre had tears in their eyes.

  As E.F. heads towards the waiting police, he stops one more time. He takes off his precious gold watch, the last trapping of his former life, and hands it over for the church to sell so it can expand its ministry. Then he goes out, is handcuffed and taken away.

  I won’t spoil the film by telling you about the scene which closes the film, playing behind the rolling credits.

  In a way, Bruce has shown himself to be like that Apostle for us. We were beaten around by life. We have survived, but we haven’t thrived. And we have benefited from Bruce's insights and ideas already.

  So I want to say how glad we are — and how glad I am — to have Bruce as one of us.

  And I say that, Bruce, knowing that you know your own weaknesses as well as your strengths.

  I am not holding Bruce up as an idol. We all have our own gifts, and all are important. But we recognise his gifts, which are gifts to our church. Bruce, life has hurt you, and it has also hurt us. We should all understand each other well!

  The important thing for all of us is to be available to God and to be used by him — available, regardless of how badly we have failed him in the past, available regardless of how we have suffered, available regardless of how much we have failed in those moments when we have truly wanted to serve him.

  Christ has many gifts for his Church. In Ephesians 4: 11 – 13, we read about Jesus,

It was he who gave some to be apostles, some to be prophets, some to be evangelists, and some to be pastors and teachers, ¹² to prepare God’s people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up ¹³ until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.

  There we have it. So many gifts to the church. Each one different.

  Where do you fit in?

BROKEN AT THE CROSS

  We could talk about God’s broken gifts, because that is what we all are.

  We are broken by life.

I did a rough estimate once, based on what people had told me, or on what seemed reasonably clear from other sources. At that time, over 10% of the women, and around 8% of the men attending the church had suffered sexual abuse as children or teenagers.

  I listened to many stories about life, and I heard about growing up with poverty, about growing up with violence, about growing up with mental illnesses in the family. I heard about marriage breakdowns and about bad marriages. I heard about drug and alcohol problems. I heard about illnesses. I heard about untimely deaths.

  We are a broken people.

  But there is another kind of brokenness, and this is the kind we need, if we are to be Christ’s beacons in this dark world.

  The cross speaks to us of this kind of brokenness.

“If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. ³⁵ For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it...”

  At one level, the cross is a vivid representation of the impact of evil on all that is good in the world. It shows us all the price that was paid when Jesus died to redeem you and me from bondage to sin and guilt.

  But, at another level, it is the rallying beacon of faith. The cross is a symbol, proclaiming to all that nothing can stand other than what is built on Christ himself.

  Just as the Apostle E.F was stripped one by one of family, of church, of community standing, of dignity, of his big, flash car, of his cream suits, even of his name; even of his last few worldly things — his watch and his ring. At last, even his freedom was gone.

  In almost the same breath, Jesus talks about our reaction to him:

“...If anyone is ashamed of me and my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, the Son of Man will be ashamed of him when he comes in his Father’s glory with the holy angels.”

  One major causes of our shame, of our reluctance to identify with Jesus is that sense that, “I will lose something if I am seen to belong here.”

  Our involvement in mission will grow or fade depending on how little or how much we are ashamed of Jesus. Much shame means little involvement, and little of Christ.

  Shame about Jesus means shame to declare him; lack of shame about Jesus means lack of shame about being his.

  The devil tells us how we will lose our friends, how we will lose our income, how we will be shown up as crazy or... well, the pictures he gives us are different for each of us, but they always show us ourselves losing the most important things in our life.

  But Jesus says that there is only one thing that really counts, one thing that we truly stand to lose. And that one thing is himself.

  But there is another truth, and that is that nothing of value remains with anyone who is crucified. You don’t die on a cross with dignity. You don’t die on a cross with property or hopes for the future, you don't die there with comfort in your old age, or a good company of friends around you. You lose everything when you die on a cross. It breaks you down, so that even humility looks like boasting to you.

  And that’s to our advantage, because of two facts.

  The first is, that when we lose our need for all the things of this world, then we are left with the only thing which truly endures, and that Is Jesus.

  The second is that, when you’ve lost everything you have nothing to lose. You can speak freely if you lose nothing by speaking.

  From time to time, people get rather unhappy in their work, and sometimes discuss resigning. When that happens, I ask, “Why don’t you resign?” And they tell me, “I've got bills to pay; we need the income from both of us; I have super and long service leave to consider.”

  But, every now and then, someone tells me, “I just quit my job. What I was getting out of it wasn’t enough to justify my tolerating all the garbage I was getting poured on me.”

  That’s the, “I’ve got nothing to lose.” attitude.

  When the cross truly speaks to our lives, then we can rest securely in Christ and speak out for him without any fear of what the world can still take from us.

A CROSS THAT BREAKS THE WORLD

  Finally, if the cross breaks us, it will break others like us.

  By “like us,” I don’t necessarily mean like us in skin colour, in educational background or in social standing. I mean, “like us in responsiveness to the gospel.”

  There are people who will respond when they hear of Jesus. As the song says,

...Neutral you cannot be.

  When there was a lot of conflict in a church I was in, I realised that, to be true to Jesus and to my fellow church members, I had to become involved. I couldn’t say, “I’m only a kid; I’m too young to bother myself with these things.”

  If I didn’t participate, and if evil took over, and I had said or done nothing, I would be partly to blame for what happened to the church.

  When it comes to essential matters, you can’t be neutral.

  Jesus taps into this when he says,

“If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me..”

  There comes a time when each of us has to decide whether we are truly “in with Jesus, boots and all,” or whether we are merely going to travel with Jesus and his friends whilever it suits us. Many people walked to Jerusalem, but only twelve were Jesus’ disciples.

  When the gospel message is declared by people who are learning to deny themselves and come after Jesus, then they will both hear it and see it being lived out; and many will follow, too.

  That message will break down their prejudice about Jesus; it will break their pride, and it will break their stubborn hearts, because Jesus came to plough the good soil.

CONCLUSION

  Without the cross, nothing else will be of value. We can understand all the theories of mission; we can be ready in all respects for the Holy Spirit’s touch on our lives, but, apart from the message of the cross, we remain sterile and unproductive, with the world around us insensitive to the promptings of God.

  Let’s soak ourselves in the message of the cross, until it fills our mind and heart and will, to the glory of God.

AMEN

© Peter R. Green 2005. Permission is granted for quotation in full for non-commercial purposes provided that authorship is acknowledged and this copyright notice is displayed with the text. Portions also copyright The Bible, NIV (Zondervan Ltd.)