WEBVTT
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Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord
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Jesus Christ.
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Jesus said if anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and
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take up his cross and follow me.
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I emailed Dean Vieker the other day and asked, so how did this text
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get associated with Valentine's Day?
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And as it turns out, the commemoration days in the church calendar
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don't actually have specific text associated with them.
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And since St.
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Valentine was a third century Christian martyr, he picked a text that
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has to do with martyrdom.
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Pick up your cross.
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And so that's the text for today.
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So it's not like you're going to find a Hallmark card with a big heart
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on the front and you open it up and it says, pick up your
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Cross, although there might be some wisdom in a card like that.
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I should say, first of all, that I understand a cross here to be any
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sacrifice that you make in order to follow Christ.
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Now, certainly the sacrifices that we are called to make are not
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anything in comparison with those of the early Church who faced
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persecution and even death in some cases.
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But we do make sacrifices in order to follow Christ as part of our
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Christian life.
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So if you're single on Valentine's Day, for example, you may have to
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put up with loneliness and frustration knowing that you don't have the
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option of pursuing sexual relationship outside of marriage, even
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though the world tells you that you do.
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And so that's a sacrifice.
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It's a cross that you bear in order to follow Christ.
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Or if you're married on Valentine's Day, you have to put up with the
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person you married knowing that marriage is a divine institution.
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It's not a contractual arrangement that you can get out of at the
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first sign of trouble, even though the world tells you that it is.
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That's a cross that you bear as a Christian.
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Well, you know what
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your crosses are better than I do because you're carrying them.
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So I'm not going to talk about the nature of your crosses today.
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What I want to focus on, actually, is your attitude towards your
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crosses looking particularly at the wording of Jesus command.
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Pick up your cross.
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The imagery here is not that the cross is imposed upon you from on
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high, as you are the passive victim under the weight of it.
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The imagery is that the cross is lying on the ground and you're going
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to pick it up.
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Now, this runs contrary to certain versions of Christianity that you
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sometimes see, I think even in our own church body, that tend to
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portray Jesus primarily as gentle Jesus, and that the whole Christian
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life is about being meek and mild and gentle and unassuming.
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And you try to live a relatively sedentary life and just not do too
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much.
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And so bearing your cross looks a lot like being a doormat.
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That's not the imagery here.
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Pick up your cross.
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Bearing your cross is not something you do out of weakness or inertia.
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Or because you're too timid to do something else, you pick it up.
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It's an act of strength.
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Aggressive, even.
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Think of the way Jesus describes his own cross. In John,
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He says, no one takes my life from me.
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I lay it down of my own accord.
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Or in the Gospel of Luke, we read that Jesus set his face to go to
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Jerusalem.
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Jesus voluntarily accepted the humiliation and the suffering in
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pursuit of a higher purpose.
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And that purpose was to kill death itself.
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You can't get much more active and aggressive than that.
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And yet there's plenty of examples in the Bible of
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people who accept suffering, sort of, but they take a very passive
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attitude towards it.
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They obey God, but they do it grudgingly.
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These cases don't turn out very well.
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Let me just pick one example, and that is Jonah.
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God told Jonah to go to Nineveh and preach repentance, and Jonah
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didn't want to do it because he was kind of hoping God would destroy
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the place because Jonah was a city full of wicked and violent people.
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So God brought Jonah to Nineveh against his will, to put it mildly,
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and Jonah did it.
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Jonah preached repentance and it worked.
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The people of Nineveh repented and Jonah was furious.
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So God challenged Jonah, and he said, do you do well to be angry?
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And he showed Jonah his own hypocrisy because he gave him a plant that
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provided shade for him.
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And then he took the plant away to show Jonah that he cared more about
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that plant than he did about a city full of 120,000 people.
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Do you do well to be angry?
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And yet Jonah persisted, yes, I do well to be angry.
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Angry enough to die.
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Well
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now, how on earth did Jonah get angry enough to die?
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Outwardly, he he did exactly what God told him to do.
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But inwardly, there was a clash of wills.
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His will against God's will.
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That was so severe that in the end, Jonah thought that the only way
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that he could justify himself was to destroy himself.
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And that's how I think we have to think about Jonah's death wish here.
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It's a last ditch, desperate attempt to justify himself, to prove that
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he was right
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and God
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was wrong about Nineveh.
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And if he has to die to prove his point, then so be it.
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That's the risk of bearing a cross that you don't pick up.
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Jonah refused to pick up the suffering and the call that God had for
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him, and it led to bitterness and self justification.
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And self justification is an incredibly powerful human desire that
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leads to all kind of scary places.
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As Jonah's death wish illustrates very clearly.
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So don't be like Jonah.
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Be like St.
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Paul
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instead. Paul also had a cross imposed upon him, a messenger of Satan
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sent to harass him.
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And Paul didn't just endure it, he gloried in it.
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Here's what Paul says in In Second Corinthians I will boast all the more
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gladly of my weaknesses so that the power of Christ may rest upon me.
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For the sake of Christ, then I am content with weaknesses, insults,
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hardships, persecutions and calamities.
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For when I am weak, then I am strong.
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In this respect, Paul is like Jesus.
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He accepts the hardship in pursuit of a higher purpose.
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So how do you get to have the mind of Paul instead of the mind of
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Jonah?
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How does that come about?
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Well, I think it's actually quite simple.
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It comes down to this.
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Do you believe that God's will is more important than your own?
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Or maybe more important is not the best way to say it.
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Do you believe that God's will is more engaging, more fulfilling, more
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meaningful than anything that you have planned for your own life?
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If you want to see a picture of it, this plays out with crystal
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clarity in the moment that Jesus actually does pick up his own cross.
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That moment occurs in the Garden of Gethsemane, when Jesus prays,
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abba, Father, all things are possible for you.
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Remove
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this cup from me, yet not what I will, but what you will.
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On one level, Jesus did not want to die, but at the same time, he knew
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that the Father's will is paramount.
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The Father's will is more important than his survival instinct.
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And the Father's will is what he really wanted.
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The early church fathers often portray this scene in Gethsemane as the
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moment in which the human will of Christ is brought into perfect
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alignment with the will of the Father.
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And since he's the second Adam, the human will of us is brought into
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alignment with the Father as well.
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And this is the same Jesus who stands here today, risen from the dead
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on the other side of the suffering and the cross, who says.
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I promise you it's worth it.
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I promise you that God's will is more engaging, more fulfilling, more
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meaningful than anything that you think you have planned for your own
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life.
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Because think of what that will entails.
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God's will is that his Son defeated death on the cross and gave you an
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indestructible life.
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So that whatever sacrifices you're called to make to follow
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Christ, those crosses can't hurt you.
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They merely become the occasion for you to display the strength of the
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life that you have received.
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So pray with Jesus.
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Not my will, but yours, to be done, because that's what you really
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want.
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You really want your will to be aligned with the will of God.
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Because then you can
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not only bear your cross, you can pick it up.
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Amen.