September 17, 2006
(Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost; Proper 19)

Overstuffed Baggage

by The Rev. Canon Susan Sommer

Isaiah 50:4-9  •  Psalm 116 or 116:1-8  •  James 2:1-5,8-10,14-18  •  Mark 8:27-38 or 9:14-29
(From The Lectionary Page)

Desperate situations call for desperate remedies, and there comes a time in the life of every parent when one must gird up one’s loins, and take a deep breath, and clean out the back seat of the car. If you have a school-age child, you too will likely find an amazing assortment of belongings: stuffed animal friends, Barbie accessories, crayons, folded scraps of construction paper, hair clips, flip-flops, Happy Meal toys, napkins bearing the residue last week’s run to Sheridan’s, you get the idea. There was a time in my life when I traveled light. Now? Not so much.

By contrast, Jesus was a big proponent of traveling light. Earlier in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus sent his disciples on a mission of preaching and healing, with specific instructions to take nothing with them -- no money, no extra clothes, no food for the trip. By the time we get to today's gospel passage in Mark, the disciples have been on the road for quite a while with their teacher. You'd think they'd be with the program by now. And yet, they had way too much stuff with them. Not physical stuff, for sure, but a whole lot of baggage nonetheless.

Peter was the spokesman for the overpacked disciples. When Jesus told his disciples that he must undergo great suffering, be rejected, and killed, Peter was appalled. This is a great example of how “correct thinking” – orthodoxy, if you will – is, in itself, not always enough. Peter, after all, answered the question correctly. Jesus IS the Messiah. But what that stunningly correct identification meant in the minds of Peter and the disciples had everything to do with the baggage Peter and the disciples carried with them. They believed the Messiah would be a political figure, the next King David. They expected to be part of the royal entourage. Undergo suffering, be rejected, and put to death? Where was THAT in the contract? No wonder Peter took Jesus aside to straighten him out.

We probably can recognize some of the baggage Peter carried with him in his backseat, so to speak. It's the stuff of humanity, after all. One prominent item of Peter's baggage was a big load of wishful thinking, of mistaking faith in Jesus for something like a business transaction. Peter agrees to follow Jesus as his Lord and savior, and in return, Jesus would ensure for Peter a life of blessing and prosperity, ease and comfort. But that’s not all. Hidden under the seat was a whole supply of denial. Crammed into a corner near the seatbelt was Peter's own longing for status and prestige.

Peter and the disciples may not have carried a lot of physical belongings with them as they traveled with Jesus, but they still had way too much baggage. Stuff that they believed got them through the day, stuff that was so woven into their very beings that they could not conceive of life without it. The baggage we carry around may not be identical, but I'll wager it's substantial. What are you hauling around? A big ol' hunk of busy-ness, maybe? A demanding job where you're expected to produce more with fewer resources? How about damaged relationships? Unhealed, unexamined pain that we throw into the back and try to forget about, only to have it leak out all over the upholstery, stinkin' the place up?

And that’s just the baggage of us individuals. Think of the baggage that institutions like the Church carry around in their backseat. If you receive Episcopal News Service stories daily as I do by e-mail, you’d probably identify a backseat filled with bushels of arrogance and control issues, cardboard cartons filled with cultural biases masquerading as revealed truth. We’re talkin’ serious baggage here!

And Jesus calls us on it. Tells Peter (and us) that we are setting our minds not on divine things but on human things. He tells Peter (and us) that he cannot be a Messiah defined by the kind of baggage that Peter and we carry around with us. Instead, he has to be the kind of Messiah God intends him to be. Nothing can dissuade Jesus from his mission of sacrificial, self-emptying love. That's why his message to his followers was, "Let it go. Let it go. Hanging on to all that stuff in your life that you hope will keep vulnerability at bay doesn't work. It's why I'm here."

And thank God for that. Thank God that God's agenda is bigger than my baggage, bigger than yours, bigger than Peter's. Thank God ours is a God who can hear us and love us and stay in relationship with us no matter what. A God who can say, "Beloved child, you're doing it again. You're setting your mind on human things, not on divine things. Why don't you just clear some of that stuff out and help me carry this cross.”