2/25/18 “Lost in Translation” by Nancy Petty

Text: Mark 8:31-38

My first instinct in reading Mark 8 is to regress to my Southern Baptist upbringing. “Deny themselves” sounds a lot like hate yourself for being a sinner. It activates old guilt and shame. But it is also easily recognized. Yes, I am worthless, and I should be denied. Shame and guilt and sinfulness are familiar and comfortable—messages I heard at a very early age from the church and from those Billy Graham crusades I attended when in middle school.

So I hear Mark with those ears. But after about sixty seconds, my adult faith/progressive faith/studied faith steps in to debate that interpretation. You are beloved! Creation is good! God accepts me as a creation of God’s own! And in that cycle, I essentially neutralize the teaching here—rendering it almost meaningless—because I can’t stomach the old lesson, and the new lesson is a total reaction to that.

There may not be another New Testament text that is more lost in translation than this text from Mark’s gospel. The church has taught and continues to teach the “old lesson”—deny self because self is selfish, sinful, and scandalous. But it not just the old lesson about denying self in order to faithfully follow Jesus. It is also an old lesson about the enemy: anyone who would dare to challenge or rebuke Jesus. Yes, it is easy to point the finger at proud Peter as the enemy. How dare he challenge or rebuke, of all people, Jesus? Any yet, Peter didn’t say anything we haven’t thought or even wanted to say. “If we are really honest haven’t we, at some point, disagreed with Jesus, asking why he doesn’t do what we want? Why won’t he see the world our way? It all seems so clear to us. If he can cast out demons and silence the crazy guy in the synagogue surely he could silence the voices that drive us crazy. If he can heal Peter’s mother-in-law why not those we love?…If he can make the paralytic walk why are so many crippled by fear, dementia, or addiction? If he can calm the sea surely he could calm the storms of our world. Yet they rage on; violence, war, poverty…” (Fr. Mike Marsh, Interrupting the Silence)

So how do we shift from these old lessons of understanding denying self as self-hating shame and guilt and sinfulness, and being seen as the enemy when challenging our faith and move more deeply and boldly into new lessons—lessons that have been lost in translation? I propose to you today that if we can stay with it, our current-day reading of this text can have a very different feel, a more profound purpose—or, as one wisdom teacher (Gurdjieff) would say, a different “taste.”

To explore a new understanding we will need to adjust our thinking and consider that the kind of denying that Jesus spoke of was not/is not about “I am ‘bad’ and need to deny myself in order to be ‘good’ and loved by God.” It is more similar, in my thinking, to being asleep and waking up.

Regular life, as we live it, is mechanical – it’s almost like we go through it on autopilot. Things happen, we react. We walk around thinking we have lots of control in our lives, but we are really like wind up toys that are walking the big hamster wheel just like everyone else. Most of our time is spent doing things that society tells us we should, or that we think we have to do. Our houses, our clothes, our cars, our food – much of what we labor to procure or consume is little more than social capital that we are manipulated into pursuing by peer pressure, social norms, or guilt.

This, by the way, is a corporate sin. We aren’t bad for living into this reality. It’s all around us. It is the world. As humans we are born with the potential to live differently, but we aren’t taught that explicitly. And so we live inside this massive Disney set where we are all actors performing an elaborate script that we didn’t get to read in advance, and that feels, most days, like we’re watching a re-run.

This may sound ridiculous. But I think we all get whiffs of it. Those moments of soul-crushing dread on Sunday night when we think of another week of the same daily routines. The deva-ja vu we experience walking down a street, not because we have, but because it is so familiar to so many other streets we have walked. The resignation that was so beautifully and poignantly portrayed in the movie, “As Good as It Gets” where a man’s life is essentially an amalgam of routines that smother him in monotony.

Jesus was all about waking up – about raising our consciousness to living and to abundant life. He taught about a way of being that doesn’t “get us into heaven” but connects us to a beloved community right here and now. And it has nothing to do with our sins. It doesn’t really have much to do with what we think of as “happiness” either. It has to do with our willingness to be nakedly present in this moment—to set aside whatever preoccupations have us caught in our own future needs that keep us from choosing to live in the present moment. And this, I propose, is what Jesus is asking us to deny—anything that keeps us from living in the present moment.

Consider this quote from the Gospel of Thomas. Jesus is asked what his students are like. He replies,
“They are like small children
living in a field not their own.
When the landlords return and demand,
‘Give us back our field!’
the children return it by simply stripping themselves
and standing naked before them.”

What an image! And I know what you’re thinking. That isn’t real life. We can’t go around naked in a field for heaven’s sake. And we can’t just give everything away and trust that our rent will be paid and our basic needs taken care of.

I hear you. I get stuck there too. But I think it isn’t about being literal children. It’s about not getting attached to those clothes or that house or our ownership. It’s about viewing the transactions of life as just that – transactions that don’t really touch who we are underneath the costume of personality that we wear. It’s about seeing those as transient, transactional, expendable.

And that takes us to a whole other level. I can consider releasing the external stuff – the clothes, the car, etc. I mean, I’m not there yet, but I could imagine getting there. Wearing all black like Malkhaz. Driving an old clunker car like my wife. Purging the house over and over until it looks like a monk’s hermitage. But Jesus’ call to deny ourselves, based on this teaching of asleep and awake, goes much deeper. It actually goes to who we think we are – our personality, our likes, our thoughts. If I asked who you really are, you might say something about who God created you to be, but right after that would come the adjectives and adverbs that are part of your “identity” – almost all of us believe ourselves to be the sum total of our thoughts, wants, and needs.

Think about our language. I AM cold. I AM hungry. I AM angry. We identify with this constant narrative of chatter in our minds as who we actually are. Jesus says that’s not so. That there really is a part of us, the essence of who we are, that is formed in blessing from the very beginning creation, that is inseparable from the divine, that is already resonant with the great I AM.

I don’t claim to understand where the line is. Where essence ends and personality or created self begins. And I don’t actually think that’s my job. Because right along with this teaching of denying self, Jesus teaches that God’s reign—the kingdom—is already here. How can both be true? Don’t I have to do something? Get it right? Divest myself of the selfie baggage before I can “enter” that realm called the beloved community of God?

I would argue that is a very Western, type A reading of the text. You do this, earn that, and then you get the reward. It is one more example of the video game version of life.

What if, instead, it is all true, all at the same time. What if the momentary act of denying ourselves is all it takes, so that it is the choice itself to let go of what is NOT us in order to make room for who we might be. I know. It still sounds like merit theology that you can do right. But the doing is the getting right. Every time I can let go of a trapping, or a mask, or a false identification, I am entering the beloved community that God envisioned for all of us. It may only be for a second, and the work of stabilizing in that place may never happen. But what if Jesus is teaching that waking up, or being saved, happens every second of every day that we are alive. And that our work is to be ruthless in asking ourselves if who we are is rooted in love and in justice? And to be willing to deny and let go of those parts that are not?

If you are like me, this sounds pretty terrifying. Who will I be if I let go of being my thoughts? Who am I if not that dizzying collection of neuroses? Well, that’s where losing your life comes in. And that, by another word, is death. In order to dwell deeply in my own true essence, in the realm of God, I have to be willing to die to the person I think I am today. I’m not talking about killing her, I’m talking about letting her go. I have to know that I am not the “courageous one.” Yes, I am willing to take risks, but that’s not who I am. I have to get past being the pastor. My role is not my essence. My wild white hair that identifies me to strangers in the grocery store is not my essence. My three academic degrees does not make me any more important than the youngest child among us.

But it isn’t all loss! The point is that just on the other side of denying is finding life—authentic life, meaningful life, hopeful life! When I can catch myself identifying with all these “things” and can manage to let them go, I am more likely to land in a place of peace! It isn’t necessarily “happiness” and it is not without problems, in most cases. But it is unmistakable. It is real and true and it too is familiar and comfortable.

But what about all the pain in the world? What about that suffering that Peter wanted to protect Jesus from? What about injustice? How can I be satisfied in my own personal spiritual peaceful homeland when there is suffering all around me? How can my own “salvation” be the focus of my work in the world? There is some compelling brain research that says that when we can take in the world FROM a place of safety and peace and calm, it actually causes not only our actions to change, but it can alter the outcome of the actions of those around us. There is a Hindu teaching that he or she who is perfected in ahimsa, or non-violence, is not only non-violent himself or herself, but violence is not possible in his or her presence.

If we stop thinking of the heaven or the beloved community of God as a geography that we can “get to” and where we then have to haul or drag others across the border, we can begin to see how our own waking up contributes to the welfare of others. Instead of a map, what if God’s realm is a big IT network. There are servers all over the planet, all over Raleigh, all over this sanctuary. But most of them are offline – they’re asleep. So signals are being sent, but they aren’t being received, and re-transmitted. What would it be like if these servers could come online, could begin to transmit the love of God that Jesus embodied and that Jesus is asking us to embody? Wouldn’t that change the face of the planet?

Furthermore, what if we stopped thinking about denying self as that old lesson we learned in our Southern Baptist churches that taught us we are bad to our core and at the religious crusades that were designed to save us from our sins and thus our souls from eternal damnation. And what if we stopped trying to neutralize the old lesson with a polar opposite reaction—in essence throwing out the baby with the bath water and never talking about what we might need to let go of—to lose—in order to follow Jesus and find abundant life. What if denying self is not about being bad OR being good OR figuring out what we must do to “get it right?” What if, instead, the new lesson about denying self is about letting go of all the things we think we are and have to have and who we have to be and what the world expects of us; and opt instead for being our most authentic self—warts and all, sins and struggles, gifts and goodness. Because, it is then, when we are our most authentic selves that we have the greatest potential of following Jesus’ way and therefore finding life.