In his encyclical letter Deus caritas est, Pope Benedict writes, “Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.”
I wanted to make these words accessible and compelling in my sermon. I offer my attempt, such as it is.
Lent brings us to some of the most challenging words of Jesus. Yet they are also lead us to the discovery that God has made “The way of the cross to be the way of life.”
The idea of a suffering Messiah was so shocking to Jesus’s own disciples that they refused to believe such a thing could happen; they expected up until the last moment that Jesus would somehow divert the course of events so as to avoid the cross and unmask his true identity as the triumphant Savior of Israel.
But it was not to be. God chose the cross as the means by which to give the world, as Pope Benedict puts it, “a new horizon and a decisive direction.” God embraced the cross as the place to reveal the love that God is.
Jesus invites us to a sacred mystery: To deny oneself, to take up our cross and to follow him. It is a lifelong journey where layer by layer we deepen our surrender to the Great Love of God.
Surrender is the foundation of the spiritual life. One of my favorite definitions of discipleship is “a lifelong process of deepening surrender to Jesus.”
Only God deserves absolute surrender because only God can offer absolutely dependable love.
With you on the Journey and the Way,
Rob+
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