In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.

Imagine for a moment that you are standing in the express checkout line at the grocery store. And while you are waiting you are muttering to yourself because the person ahead of you has twelve items when the limit is eight. Then there is a price check required. As you stand with your one loaf of bread your eyes are drawn to the magazines and you begin to read some of the covers.

“Makeup that takes you from the office to evening,
great abs in five minutes, thinner thighs in thirty days,
learn to say no more effectively. And you notice that all of these magazines or at least the majority of them seem to be geared towards women, Cosmopolitan, Redbook etc. There is not an issue of Sports Illustrated or Guns and Ammo to be found. But you also notice that all of these magazines while focused on women seem to be about makeovers, changing ones appearance with a focus on grooming and fitness.

Do men not want to change? If you are familiar with Red Green you will know that the answer to this question is “no”. I refer to the Red Green man’s prayer, “I’m a man, but I can change, if I have to, I guess.” And yet if we move beyond the magazines of the supermarket checkout line and the Red Green show I would argue that people, both male and female, are hungry to be changed, hungry to be transformed but we embrace a curious kind of passivity when it comes to personal change.
We want to avoid the work and the pain that comes with the efforts to change.
Why do you think there is a market for those electric muscle toners? You know the ones I mean. You strap them on while watching television and eating potato chips and you are promised gain with no pain. All you have to do is sit there and get as firm as a rock. This contraption symbolizes that curious kind of passivity which is so much a part of our culture. But true change can only be accompanied by pain, physical, emotional or spiritual because true change is about letting go of something and it is the same for Christian discipleship.

In our Gospel reading from Mark, Jesus is speaking to his disciples and to the crowd about the conditions required for discipleship if they chose to follow him.
“If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it.”
If anyone wants to leave at this point I don’t blame you.

To follow Jesus, in other words is to follow the one who turns the world upside down, even the religious world. It is a tipsy arrangement at the very least. People with a high need for approval, social status, and public recognition need not apply. Questions like who is the greatest, who is the best preacher, who has the largest church membership or who has the best salary package, are not the sort of questions that followers of Jesus Christ concern themselves with.

For Christian discipleship requires a kind of living that will eventually tumble someone from the banquet tables of prestigious boards and the processions of churchly honours. It can be a narrow and lonely road at times which always leads to the cross. And yet this denial of self seems terribly threatening to our culture. For it implies conformity and loss of what makes us unique.

Even in the church we continue to grasp and strive for power, recognition, status. And because of this grasping for too long we have offered in Bonhoeffer’s words, “cheap grace”- baptism without church discipline, forgiveness without repentance, grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without the incarnate Jesus Christ.

Clarence Jordan, founder of the interracial Koinonia farm in Americus, Georgia, was getting a red-carpet tour of another minister’s church. With pride the minister pointed to the rich, imported pews and luxurious decorations. As they stepped outside, darkness was falling, and a spotlight shone on a huge cross atop the steeple.
“That cross alone cost us then thousand dollars,” the minister said.
“You got cheated”, said Jordan. “There was a time when Christians could get them for free.”

And yet if we look to Jesus Christ in his denial of self, he didn’t disappear into conformity. He didn’t die on the cross a non-entity but rather he embodied strength and an authentic sense of self that emerged out of his relationship with God.

I think another way to put it is that to deny one’s self is to have humility. That sense of being able to think neither too much nor too little of ourselves. Humility is a gift and when practiced faithfully in the presence of grace, it allows us to be authentic human beings who accept God’s rule in our lives. A people who look for a model of leadership found in the way of the cross rather than the mansions on the hill.

But the way of the cross is never inflicted upon us by God. It is something that we choose of our own free will. Crosses are not the difficulties that befall us in the midst of life; unemployment, disease or injury. The way of the cross is not an act of penance but rather a way of living life itself. It is an attitude of mind, a quality of soul. It is a path that leads to the authentic self and to abundant life.

And yet because of our concern over greatness, because of our ambition to be first, we run the risk of not receiving what Jesus has in store for us as his disciples. Will we receive the rule of God which comes as grace to powerless people at the crossroads of life? Will we allow ourselves to become one of his disciples? THANKS BE TO GOD, AMEN