Pick up your cross and come and follow me.
Many people preach the gospel of prosperity.
They tell us that if we do what the Lord tells us,
the Lord will take care of us.
We will be special in the Lord's eye;
that we will have smooth sailing;
we will have good health, and even we will receive much wealth.
That is the message that they say.
And we hear it often if we ever watch any of those televangelists.
Then they suggest you give them some of your money
so they can continue this wonderful message of prosperity.
The challenge is that it is just not true.
It is just not the gospel.
It is a lie, plain and simple.
If it were true, our church would be full, wouldn't it?
If people believed it was real, that if you come to church,
you would have no health problems
and you would have all the money you wanted,
everything would be good and the churches would be full.
It would be a pretty easy insurance policy:
just come to church once an hour, once a week and all is good.
The challenge is again, it just is not true.
It is certainly not my experience,
and I don’t know about you
but I know plenty of really good people who bad things happen to,
and they are faithful people.
I know a whole ton of people
and I scratch my head sometimes wonder and say to the Lord,
“Why do you allow so many bad things happen to so many good people?”
But bad things happen to bad people too.
It is just we do not often hear about that.
Or we write it off and say, “Well, they deserve it.
You see the challenge has been around a long time.
It is not just in the gospel times.
It was even happening in ancient Old Testament times too.
That if they did good things, then they were rewarded.
If they did bad things, they were punished in this life here and now;
that was the whole story of Job, right?
Because bad things were happening to him, he must have been evil
The challenge is that it just does not make sense.
It just does not jive because we have so much evidence,
so much data to tell us that, bad things do happen to good people.
And sometimes that is us;
bad things happen to us, or we suffer endlessly.
If that be the case, then where are we to go with this?
Jesus makes it very clear.
He goes to the other extreme in the gospel.
He does not just say, “Good things will happen to you if you follow me.”
He says, “Bad things are going to happen to you.
It is going to be a rough life.
If you come and follow me, it is going to be real life.
You are going to have sacrifices.”
Things are going to be difficult; people are going to come after you.
He said, “It is going to be a rough thing.
You are going to have to pick up your cross and come and follow me.”
Wow. That is not only the not prosperity gospel, but just the opposite.
Now we know why the churches are so empty.
Because that is a tough message to sell.
Come and follow me and have all sorts of stuff happen to you.
Wow, that is hard. That is really hard.
What are we to do?
It is in the midst of this is that we have to just look again
and figure out what it is that the Lord is saying to us.
He is promising to be there for us all the times.
And maybe at most, especially in the darkest of times.
That is why if God has any preference of all,
it is not towards those who are wealthy and rich,
it will be for the poor and the most vulnerable.
We hear that message over and over again in the gospel.
Jesus testifies to it by his actions.
The way he goes to the people in the periphery;
goes to the poor and the vulnerable.
We might call this gospel of prosperity “daylight or sun spirituality.”
But life is more like “lunar spirituality”
where there is a cycle of light, then phases and then darkness.
Barbara Brown Taylor coined this phrase, and it is particularly powerful.
It is really a more honest spirituality.
We need to adopt for ourselves
because there are times in our life where the moon is shining brightly
and we believe in the Lord.
It is all clear because it is just so beautiful in our lives.
And then there are other times when
there is a half crescent presence of God in our life.
We still feel God is presence, but it is not a fullness.
Then there are times when there is just no moon at all.
There is a darkness in our life and we wonder where God is at all.
Then the small crescent returns
and we start to see a glimmer of God's light in our life,
and soon enough it becomes fuller.
And then we have a full moon again.
We see God ever so brightly in our lives but only at times.
The cycles come and they go.
It seems when we are in the no-moon phase of our life
that it seems to last longer, but in reality, it isn't.
It is just a cycle that comes and goes.
We wish the full moon was there all the time,
but that is just not a reality in our lives either.
We get sick.
Our loved ones make mistakes and hurt us.
We hurt them and cause them pain.
There are just times when things just do not go right
and there seems to be less presence of God in our life.
But remember that the moon is a reflection of the sun.
The sun is shining all the time,
and God's love is always present, all the time.
It is just that we are not experiencing it at that moment in time.
Lunar spirituality is a little bit more honest.
In those dark times, we can say and do things
that we know are not right.
We might upset ourselves, betray ourselves and betray the Lord.
Jeremiah, in today's first reading, is struggling.
He is being put down.
He is being condemned, and he is rightly frustrated.
He says that he was duped and he let himself be duped.
The better translation is “I was seduced, and let myself be seduced.”
It is more active.
Jeremiah knows the cycle of life.
The word of God is like a burning coal in his belly.
He ca not help himself.
He cannot but speak of the Lord because he knows the light is real.
We have to stand back and look at our lives and get a better sense of it.
There is a great theologian, Ken Wilber,
who was known as “the integralist.”
He was trying to integrate different religions.
And he says that good religion does two things primarily:
translation and transformation.
Translation helps us make meaning of our lives,
the seasons of our lives.
especially the darkness, those times when we can't understand,
and we don't see God.
It gives meaning to the suffering and the pain of life.
Good religion does good translation.
But he says also, good religion calls us to transformation;
to go beyond the cycles or phases of life
and allow the Lord to completely transform us from the inside out.
That requires of us our cooperation with the Lord.
This is what the Lord is speaking about in the gospel.
Pick up your cross and follow me.
This is where we, we learn to, to accept the seasons of our lives,
and then align our hearts, our wills with the Lord's will.
There are times when we know that we are not in sync with the Lord
and yet we do not know quite know what to do when that happens.
It is like when our car is out of alignment, there is a little wobble.
That is called a wheel alignment problem.
We recognize it by a little jimmy in the steering on a straight road,
it is pulling to one side or it is got a little rock in it,
which means it is off balance or a pull to another side.
In those moments, we recognize that we are out of alignment
and we have to bring in our car and get it back into alignment.
Afterwards we can just put our finger on the steering wheel
and we will hold a straight line.
Sometimes our souls are out of alignment with the Lord
and it is pulling into one way or another way.
And there is a bit of a little shake in the heart,
in the way things are happening.
We need to know what that looks like.
That is the translation.
And then we need to move to the transformation component.
And to allow our will to be transformed into God's will,
to realignment, to what God wants us to do in any one moment.
But we have to pay attention.
We have to take note of the seasons of our life
and know when it is happening and
know when we are out of alignment.
That that is what the Lord says by picking up our cross.
Suffering is not just regular suffering,
suffering because we are doing the right thing.
Like when parents say to their children, this is what we are going to do.
Even though it is an unpopular thing and other parents aren't doing it,
but you are doing it. Why?
Because you know it is the right thing to do.
Like coming to church;
kids might not want to come, may not actually want to be here,
but you know, it is the right thing.
It is going to pay longer term dividends.
You choose that action, and your kids are not going to like you for that.
The other kids' parents are liking their parents
for not bringing them to church.
They are not liking you for bringing you to church.
But you say to yourselves, “I'm doing the right thing.
I have aligned my will to the Lords,
and that is what we are going to do.”
In the long term, we will be going the right direction.
That is the transformation we are called to.
And every one of us are called to that transformation in different ways.
Parents in one way,
single people in another way,
and seniors in a different way.
Each of us are called to transformation.
But we first must translate then transform.
We first need to understand the lunar spirituality of our lives,
the seasons, and then allow our hearts to be transformed.
Today, we come to the table to be nourished by the Lord,
to be refreshed by the Lord,
whether in dark or in bright times of our life,
we accept and understand, translate where we are at,
and allow ourselves to be aligned to the Lord's will,
and to follow more clearly.
Pick up your cross and come and follow me.
