Just Add Water
Lent 2, Yr B, 11am Cathedral
Genesis 17.1-7,15-16,
Romans 4.13-25,
Mark 8.31-38
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
There is comedian called Yakov Smirnoff – like the drink – who was brought up in Russia but settled in the USA in the late 1970s and became a stand-up comedian. He tells a story about when he first went arrived in the United States from his native Russia, that he was not prepared for the incredible variety of instant products available in the grocery stores. He said, "On my first shopping trip, I saw powdered milk – you just add water, and you get milk. Then I saw powdered orange juice – you just add water, and you get orange juice. And then I saw baby powder, and I thought to myself, What a country!"
Smirnoff is joking, of course, but we clearly live in a society in which instant gratification and instant solutions have become the expectation and that is problem. And Christians can be just as guilty. People come to faith in many different ways, some slowly over years, and others fast at a particular moment of conversion. There can be an expectation that people change instantly once they become believers, that there is an is an accompanying immediate, substantive, in-depth, miraculous change in habits, attitudes, and character. We go to church as if we are going to the grocery store: Powdered milk, powdered orange juice and powdered Christian. Just add water and disciples are made. Unfortunately, there is no such powder, and disciples of Christ are not instantly made. They are slowly raised and learn through many trials, sufferings, and temptations.
Our first reading from Genesis talked about Yahweh telling Abram, that he would become the father of many nations and that his wife, Sarah, presumably not that much younger than him would bear a child in her old age. We have a new granddaughter, who is just a few months old. I am only 60 and quite glad I am not up half the night with a baby! But Abraham was 99 at the time he was told and 100 when Isaac was born. Imagine how that must have felt – quite a shock to the system but he remained faithful. He trusted God. His faith had endured for 99 years before this, so it was a long slow period of learning, and growing that didn’t stop simply because of his age but carried on.
In Paul’s letter to the Romans, Paul was keen to emphasise the importance and priority of faith and even used Abraham as an example. We should also be mindful here of John the Baptist’s words at the beginning of Matthew’s gospel, though, where he challenged the Pharisees and Sadducees saying, after calling them a brood of vipers, that despite their ancestry and relationship to Abraham, ‘God was able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham’. And there we begin to glimpse an understanding what being a child of God means, which has less to do with direct parentage and, according to the New Testament understanding, is more about us being adopted into God’s family.
The gospel passage from Mark 8 occurred just after the great confession where Peter acknowledged that Jesus was the Messiah. The passage was also just before the Transfiguration which we heard two Sundays ago. Here, Jesus talked about the necessity that he should suffer but if we accept that Mark wrote things in order, it would have been the first time such a notion had been mentioned. This was the first time then that the disciples had heard anything like this, and it must have come as something of a shock. And we can see that it did because of Peter’s response to it. One moment he was saying that Jesus was the Messiah and the very next moment, Jesus said to him: ‘Get behind me, Satan’. This is clearly not something that would have been invented by the early church about St Peter, so it is authentic, but it also allowed Jesus to emphasise his point and make clear how crucial it was.
But just before Jesus responded in this way, we were told that, he turned and looked at his disciples. It is a fascinating but unexpected human detail and quite revealing. It is as if Jesus was putting two and two together and perhaps realizing that the disciples were all thinking like this, and they may even have put Peter up to say what he did. They were expecting a Messiah would be someone who would lead them militarily against the occupying force of the Romans and take back their country to themselves, but Jesus was bringing something rather different and rather more challenging, as they were about to find out.
So this was a perilous and defining moment for Jesus that would lead some to stop following him. He had to dispel the idea that he was there to lead a military rebellion and teach them the actual meaning and purpose of his mission. So, he rejected Peter’s understanding in the most outright fashion he possibly could, by calling him a tool of Satan and saying, he did not have in mind the things of God, but human things. He could not have been more direct in his condemnation of that way of thinking. Peter was not wrong to think he was the Messiah; it was just a different sort of Messiah to the one he had expected.
He then gathered his disciples along with the crowd and said to them together that for anyone who wanted to follow him, far from receiving rank, privilege, or power, they would instead need to deny themselves, take up their cross, and follow him, and that it would involve suffering for their faith and that this was crucial to discipleship. If any of them had expected a rebellion based on force, then they would have realised that this was not Jesus’ way.
For some, then, this was a crucial turning point, but it is also important for us to understand as well. Belief in Christ is not going to give us rank, privilege, or power, and nor will it insulate us from pain or suffering but it might help us understand Christ’s solidarity with us because he himself has been through suffering.
We would all prefer an easy life, without suffering, but that is not always ours to choose. But we do have control over some elements of our lives, like how we live in a world where so few have so much, and so many have so little. We can choose to deny some of our desires in order that others may have something. We can choose to limit our own ambitions for ever greater possessions, if we are not so to pollute our planet that everyone suffers. But we also need to develop our willpower to deny ourselves in order to train ourselves. The athlete does not improve their performance, and will not win the race, if they never train but sit in an armchair. Lent is a good time to practice this of course but the whole point is to develop spiritually. There is nothing more deceitful than using what should be a spiritual discipline if it is only for selfish advantage such as losing weight.
We can sometimes be far too pious about these things and one year, as some of you may recall, rather than giving anything up, I decided I should take something up, and I took up smoking for Lent. I am not recommending it. I did it purely as a comment and a criticism against false piety but I have to admit I enjoyed probably more than is healthy its shock value! The whole point of fasting or taking something up is to become more spiritually athletic. We might consider reading the Bible, the NT or the gospels more in Lent, setting aside a time to pray more, or reading a book that challenges us or opens our thinking or giving more away in Lent. We might also use it as a reminder that there are others who suffer, who have no choice about what they give up, whether in Ukraine, in bombings in Gaza, whether Palestinian or Israeli hostages, and in giving up something we are expressing not only concern for them, but our solidarity with those who suffer. So, we might also use this time to be more informed about their plight and consider what else we might do to give them help and support and to pray for peace in this increasingly turbulent world.
Finally, we were told to follow Christ to be his disciples. The word disciple has the same root as the word discipline. To follow Christ means to be obedient to Christ; to do as he commanded; it also means being a learner. And being a learner necessarily involves changing from ignorance and misunderstanding to knowledge and greater understanding. And the implications of that are that we cannot and should not limit our learning only to Lent. There is nothing instant about this - it is for the whole Christian year, every year and for all Christians. The goal is to be lifelong learners about Christ, with Christ, and for Christ that we might understand better what being the Messiah, and the Prince of Peace actually meant for him, and what then it means for us now, and for the world. Amen.