Dancing toward the cross

If you are on social media and want to follow someone, all you have to do is click a button and the app does all the work. All you have to do is decide is how often you want news about the person to pop up on your screen or phone.

Nothing could be easier, right? Someone else does the work. We just go along for the ride. The truth is that being a good follower is hard work.

Ask a dancer. They say Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, backwards and in heels! Have you ever seen those wonderful old movies? The legendary couple made partner dancing look effortless, but learning to dance, and dance well, takes effort, patience, humility, and grace.

The Rev. Kerra Becker English tells the story of a dancer, a woman who danced ballet and modern jazz who was getting married to a guy who never danced a step in his life. They decided to take ball room dance lessons so they’d be ready for their first dance at the reception. She thought her fiancé would do all the work, and that for her it would be a piece of cake.

Well, ballroom is not ballet and following is harder than it looks. Just ask Ginger!

Becker English writes: “It takes practice to maintain balance through a double turn. It takes instruction to learn all the elements of achieving correct hip action for a Cha-Cha and then be able to do it without clutching on to a partner’s arm for dear life. A good follower must be well balanced, because even the very best dance partner cannot maintain balance for two. The best dance partner in the world can’t make your steps for you.”

Following in life, in dance, and in the Christian living requires attention, commitment and a sense of one’s own self.  

Today, we are at the halfway mark in Mark’s Gospel and Jesus is talking about followship. The disciples have returned to a part of Palestine mainly peopled by Gentiles, people outside the Covenant, and they are being asked who people say Jesus is: is he a prophet, a teacher, or one of the Old Testament sages come back to life. The Jesus asks them “who do you think you are following?” Peter says that he is following the Messiah.

Jesus now talks about what following him will mean.

If the disciples thought that Jesus would just carry them into a kingdom where they would have all the spiritual rewards and with none of the work; well, they are following the wrong Messiah.

Because the Messiah will have to be rejected by his people and his religious leaders, handed over to the executioners and die and then on the third day rise from the dead. Jesus is headed to the cross, and so his followers will have to go there with him.

Peter is not having this and pulls Jesus aside to tell him that he is wrong. He begins to tell Jesus off. But Jesus cuts him off: "Get behind me, Satan," he says. “You are thinking in human terms, not thinking about the ways of God.”

Now Jesus gathers everyone and tells them what kind of Messiah they are following: "If any want to become my followers," he says, "let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.  For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake and the sake of the gospel, will save it."

Following Jesus requires a lot more than clicking a button. He can’t do the steps for you. It means going where he goes and doing what he does in the way that he does it.  Sometimes backwards. And, yes, I suppose, sometimes in heels.

It’s too bad that the phrase "take up your cross" has been so abused.  Usually, when people say something or someone is "my cross to bear," they mean suffering that is imposed on them, but which must nevertheless be accepted and endured without complaint.

Last week, Stephen Colbert intalking to VP Joe Biden on The Late Show quoted his mother: “What’s the point of being Irish if you can’t suffer for it?” But that’s not what Jesus is saying. Suffering that is imposed on us against our will is not redemptive.  Jesus’ suffering on the cross was not imposed on him; he took it up himself freely, willingly, intentionally, to redeem all of us.  

Actually, if you go and listen to it, what Colbert and Biden—two Irish-Catholic guys talking about faith and life—showed is that how we handle what we’ve been suffered is what’s really important. We take up our cross and follow Jesus when we refuse to think only about ourselves, but to suffer for the redemption of others even if it risks us losing our lives.

Following Jesus means that we act together, Christ and us in community, to discover our gifts and strengths and give them back to God and God’s people. Following Jesus requires us to be attentive to Christ who leads us, maintaining our balance and being ready to go in new directions.

Following is not passive. Followship is the concrete way we act with Jesus every day in all our relationships.

And following Jesus is costly. It expects something from us. Something more than having our toes stepped on. Following Jesus requires us to change, and to be challenged.

I heard a story about Archbishop Desmond Tutu. At the height of the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, when Christians were suffering and dying for justice and redemption, Tutu used to gather his staff around him in the mornings for prayer. And often as he was closing, he would ask, "If being Christian became a crime, would there be enough evidence to convict us?" The Archbishop was saying to this staff that they were not simply leaders, leading an important social struggle for dignity and freedom; they were followers, following Jesus Christ in insisting that God's reconciling love transcends anything that tries to resist it, which apartheid challenged in insisting that different races could not and should not live together. Without first being followers, being leaders was not enough; people had to be able to see and hear them following Christ in their lives and ministry for that leadership to really make sense in the first place.

Following Jesus is a partnership, it is Christ who leads, but to be effective followers we are called to maintain our balance, observe what’s going on around us, and be ready to go where Jesus goes, even to the cross. Even to resurrection