It is worth thinking about all the times Jesus has called us to take up our cross.
Wisdom cries out in the street; in the squares, she raises her voice.
It is worth thinking about all the times Jesus has called us to take up our cross, and we have found that Christian discipleship demands too much of us when it becomes distinctive from all the other things that claim our attention.
The Sunday After Tuesday, which collected sermons preached on college and university campuses on September 16, 2001. Looking at it, I thought back to the brief moments on that shocking Tuesday morning when I faced the thought of saying something, anything, on my own particular Sunday after Tuesday. I have often thought about that in the intervening years.
When I knew I would be writing this reflection for the 20th anniversary of 9/11, I turned to the week’s lectionary passages. I’m committed to believing that something can always be found in the assigned passages for the week that will speak to a congregation’s, or a reader’s, soul. I was hoping for comfort and solace. What I got instead were rigor and admonition.
The assigned Old Testament passage, which I’ve excerpted a verse of above, is a passage in Proverbs where Wisdom stands on the street corner and admonishes those who have not listened to her and who have not followed the Lord that they are “fools” and “scoffers”—that she will not listen to them or save them “when panic strikes you like a storm, and your calamity comes like a whirlwind, when distress and anguish come upon you” (Proverbs 1:27). (Reading Proverbs 1 in the context of 9/11 keeps hauntingly reminding me of the song about 9/11 by the great Canadian songwriter Leonard Cohen that contains the line “I’ll be standing on this corner / Where there used to be a street.”)
The Epistle passage from James is the famous description of what devastation the tongue can inflict by speaking evil (James 3:1-12). And the Gospel passage from Mark admonishes us to take up our cross.
I think there is a comfort to be found among the admonitions. But I also think, twenty years on, that it is worth sitting with the admonitions. It is worth remembering that we live in a world where we are “by death and sin surrounded,” where Wisdom speaks and we do not always listen, where the Lord calls and we do not always follow. It is worth remembering that we do not always govern our tongue; “with it, we bless the Lord and Father, and with it, we curse those who are made in the likeness of God” (James 3:9), and some of the fires our tongues have set (James 3:5) have burned all the way around the world.
It is worth thinking about all the times Jesus has called us to take up our cross, and we have found, in the words of that sermon I never preached, that Christian discipleship demands too much of us when it becomes distinctive from all the other things that claim our attention.
Would I have said all of that on the Sunday after Tuesday? I do not know. For today and tonight at least, sit with your anger and your grief and your fears and your failures and your arguments and your debates and your memories.
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