Warm Green Blankets

I want to pose a situation for you. It is a situation that one of my favorite theologians, Frederick Buechner, had to confront.  He writes about it in his book, The Sacred Journey.

Ask yourself how you would have handled the same situation. 

Buechner had been looking forward to an evening with his mother.  They didn’t get to see each other as much as they wanted, so when she invited him over for dinner, he gladly accepted. 

As he and his mother sat down to eat, he received an urgent call.  A colleague needed Buechner’s help.  The colleague’s parents and pregnant sister had just suffered a serious car accident, and the doctors didn’t give them much hope. 

His colleague was waiting at the airport for a flight to take him to his family, and he desperately needed comfort at that moment. 

Would Buechner come and be with him while he waited for the plane? 

Frederick Buechner’s first response was fear.  His friend’s grief scared him. He didn’t know if he could be of any help. 

 Although he knew what he should do, he told his friend that he had things he needed to do, and asked him to call him back in ten minutes to see if he was able to clear his schedule. 

With a heavy heart, Frederick Buechner sat down to dinner.  His mother complained that she didn’t want him to go, that his friend should be able to take care of himself. 

These were the same arguments filling Buechner’s head, but as he heard them from his mother, he realized how shallow and wrong they were. 

He knew that as soon as his friend called back, he would go to him immediately.  But he never got that chance. 

When his friend finally did call back, he said that he was feeling better, and that he’d be fine by himself.  So Buechner and his mother got to spend their evening together, but an evening now shrouded in guilt. 

As he later reflected on that night, he realized that his mother’s apartment was a kind of sanctuary from the hurried, cruel, desperate, needy world outside.  His friend’s call for help was clearly a call to leave this refuge and return to the world. 

This is also what God had called Frederick Buechner to do, and he hadn’t heeded the call. 

Okay, that was the situation. Now, how would you have reacted?  Have you ever had a friend/acquaintance/co-worker  who had a deep need, but you chose to look the other way?

Later, Buechner was to write: “The shattering revelation of that moment was that true peace, the high and abiding peace that passes all understanding, is to be had not in retreat from the battle, but only in the thick of battle.” 

“…high and abiding peace that passes all understanding, is to be had not in retreat from the battle, but only in the thick of battle.”

That means that we are most truly at peace/connected with God when we are serving one another.  Isn’t that true?  Think about the times you have reached out in love to someone in need … how did you feel? 

I know that at times I feel it is an imposition – but almost always without fail, when I have extended myself, stretched myself for someone else, I have come home refreshed, at peace, with a heart overflowing with love.

As good as it feels when we are engage in doing God’s will, it’s tempting, though, to spend our life in retreat, isn’t it? You and I have so much to do in our work, at home, looking after our family.

It’s easy to retreat behind the wall of our own personal responsibilities, and ignore the needs of our friends, our community, our world. We only have so much time. Right? 

Then we come to today’s text, “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.”

“Take up his cross  . . .” The members of the early church knew exactly what Jesus was saying here. They had seen his example. He literally took up a cross and bore it to Calvary.

He had willingly chosen to subjugate his will to the will of the Father. He did what he had to do, but he did it not for his own gain, but for others. For you and me. 

No concept has been as corrupted in our common vernacular as this one: bearing a cross.

People say, “I have arthritis, but that’s just my cross to bear.” “I have a lazy husband, but that’s just my cross to bear.” But the truth is such problems have nothing--absolutely zero--to do with Jesus’ words.

When you bear Jesus’ cross, you are saying something entirely different. You are saying that you are willing to serve God, you are willing to serve others, you are willing to put aside selfish concerns and focus your attention on God’s Kingdom.

If that costs you money, if you have to give up some of your precious time, if you have to get out of your comfort zone, then that is just what you will have to do. When you bear a cross, God’s will comes first in your life. 

You see, taking up the cross isn’t about believing in Jesus. Taking up the cross is about being obedient to Jesus.  Do you get the difference?

A lot of us are like the teacher who confronted one of her students who had been misbehaving all day long. “Didn’t you promise to behave?,” she asked.

The student replied: “Yes, Ma’am.”

Then the teacher asked: “Didn’t I promise to punish you if you didn’t behave?”

The student replied: “Yes, Ma’am, but since I broke my promise, I thought maybe you’d break yours, too.”

But God doesn’t break his promises. God is faithful. And God expects us to be faithful as well. We’re faithful when we take up our cross and take the risk of stepping out in faith.

There are many people who who’ve never taken that risk. They live only for themselves and the people they love. Maybe you’re one of them. These are not evil people.  Some of them have perfect attendance in Sunday School and church. They’re not bad people, only selfish people.

Some of them are quite attractive. They live in beautiful homes. They drive nice cars. They are well educated. They’ve never knowingly broken a law.

The only problem with them is that they haven’t a clue what Jesus meant when he said, “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.” 

Following Jesus is all about living the Christ-life in the world. Heeding a friend’s call for help. Looking for ways to improve the community. Joining with others through our church to support mission ministries. Being sensitive to those with special needs. Inviting a friend to join you for our Wednesday night Bible study or Sunday morning worship.

Doing all those things that take us out of our comfort zone, our preoccupation only with ourselves and those we love, and focusing on the call of God to be in service to others. 

Every Saturday night a group of Christians serve a food line to the hungry and homeless of Washington, D.C.  They serve folks who live in sight of the White House and the Capitol Building, but are so often overlooked. After all, the poor really are almost invisible in our society. 

Before they open the doors, these Christian people gather around the food, hold hands, and are led in prayer by Mary Glover, a woman who herself stood in that food line a few years earlier.

And this is what she prays: “Lord, we know you’ll be coming through this line tonight. So help us to treat you well. Amen.”

Those good people understand what it is to bear a cross. There are other things they could be doing with their time, but they choose to be serving others in Christ’s name. Bearing a cross is about facing up to our responsibilities to others.

That is to say that the call of Christ is a call to a decision. We are members of the body of Christ. We don’t have to worry about being accepted by God. Christ has taken care of that.

But wouldn’t it be great to stand before God some day and to be able to say,

“Christ’s death wasn’t wasted on me. I did my part. I got out of my comfort zone. I gave up some of my precious time. I shared in the costs of the kingdom. I took my stand, I bore my cross, in serving my church, serving my community, serving my friends, serving my world.” 

I want to close with a story, a parable if you will.  There once was an elf who lived in the forest. He was a very respectable elf, who spent his time running around with a little wheelbarrow gathering snails and weeds that were destroying his garden, and disposing of them. 

This elf had a prized possession that he kept in his hut, a green blanket, a soft green blanket. It had fallen from a fairy’s wagon as she went through the woods one day and he had never returned it to her.

At night he wrapped himself up in this soft green blanket. It was very cold in the woods and the blanket kept him warm and helped him sleep soundly through the night.

In fact, he slept so soundly that he had never had the occasion to see the King of the World, who was said to come early each morning to make all things fresh and new.

One time a shepherd met the elf out in the woods and inquired of the elf, “Have you ever seen the King of the World?”

And the elf replied, “No, as a matter of fact, I never have. I’ve never quite been able to manage it.”

The shepherd was shocked to hear this, the elf living right there in the woods and all.  Then the shepherd came up very close to the elf, and looked into his eyes and deeply into his soul and said, “I seem to see something there that looks strangely like a blanket.”

At that moment, the elf knew the shepherd had discovered his secret – that he would rather be wrapped in the warm green blanket than to get up early enough to see the King of the World who made all things fresh and new.

There are many people, some of them in the church, who will never experience Christ in their lives, who will never meet him in a food line, never hear his words:

“Well done thou good and faithful servant,” not because they are bad people, but because they prefer their warm green blankets.

We each have a choice. There is the road of our culture that says, “Relax.  Look out for number one.  Hoard your money, hoard your time, hoard your talent.”

And then there is the road of Christ that says, “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.”

I leave you with the words of the poet Robert Frost who said it so well:

“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood…”

Then Frost concludes with these words:

“I shall be telling this with a sigh somewhere ages and ages hence; Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -- I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.”

Which road will you take?

AMEN