Cross-bearing

On the afternoon of August 4, 1949, a lightning storm started a small fire near the top of the southeast ridge of Mann Gulch, Montana, a slope forested with Douglas fir and ponderosa pine. The fire was spotted the next day; by 2:30 p.m., a C-47 transport plane had flown out of Missoula, carrying 16 smoke jumpers. Fifteen men between 17 and 33-years-old parachuted to the head of the gulch at 4:10p.m. Their radio didn’t make it. Its chute failed to open, and it crashed. They were joined on the ground by a fireguard, who had spotted the fire. Otherwise, the smoke jumpers were isolated from the outside world.

The smoke jumpers were a new organization, barely nine years old in 1949. To them, the Mann Gulch fire, covering 60 acres at the time of the jump, appeared routine. It was what they called a “ten o’clock fire,” meaning that they would have it beaten by ten o’clock in the morning of the day after they jumped.

The rest of the story is long and complex, but only three men survived. Two of them managed to run for their lives and made it to the top of a nearby ridge. The young men at Mann Gulch had been trained to never, under any circumstances, drop their tools.

One of their tools was a Pulaski, a combination axe and pick that is very useful in fighting forest fires. It’s not useful to carry it up a 76 percent slope when a grassfire is racing toward you at 610 feet per minute. And yet, the reconstructed journeys of the victims of the fire show that several carried their Pulaskis a good way up the hill as they raced for their lives.

In short, more of the men may have lived if they had been trained to drop their tools—tools that worked in normal circumstances but became unnecessary baggage in a crisis.

Possible Preaching Angle:

In the race of life, we need to drop the sins that so easily entangles us (Heb. 12:1). Such as: the love of money (1 Tim. 6:10), resentment (Eph. 4:31), envy (1 Cor. 13:4), and pride (Prov. 29:23). We are to take hold of self-denial (Matt. 16:24), what is good (1 Thess. 5:21), our progress (Phil. 3:16), and wholesome teaching (2 Tim. 1:13).

For years Becket Cook had a highly successful career as a production designer in the fashion world. During that time, he lived fully engaged as a gay man in Hollywood. Cook said, “I had many boyfriends over the years, attended Pride Parades, and marched in innumerable rallies for gay-marriage equality. My identity as a gay man was immutable, or so I thought.” In 2009, he experienced something extraordinary: a radical encounter with Jesus Christ while attending an evangelical church in Hollywood for the first time.

Cook explained what happened:

I walked into the church a gay atheist and walked out two hours later a born-again Christian, in love with Jesus. I was stunned by this reversal. Since then, I no longer identify as gay but rather choose to be celibate because I believe God’s plan and purpose—revealed in the Bible—is authoritative, true, and good.

Surrendering my sexuality hasn’t been easy. I still struggle with vestiges of same-sex attraction, but denying myself, taking up my cross, and following Jesus is an honor. Any struggles I experience pale in comparison to the joy of a personal relationship with the one who created me and gives my life meaning. My identity is no longer in my sexuality; it’s in Jesus.

But instead of celebrating Cook for his authenticity, when he came out as a Christian to his friends he was met with skepticism and, in some cases, outright hostility. His closest friends abandoned him. His production-design agency in Hollywood dropped him under the most vague and frivolous of pretexts—even though he was one of their top artists.

Cook went on to say:

I’m not complaining or claiming to be a victim. What I gained in Christ is absolutely priceless. Like the apostle Paul, I’m learning to “count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord” (Phil. 3:8). Yes, the loss of close friendships and a lucrative career were harsh, but being in the kingdom of God more than compensates!

Recently, Cook exclaimed to a friend,

I’m the most authentic person you know! In fact, because I’m now who God created me to be; I’m finally authentic. Becoming more and more like Jesus—the truest human who ever lived—is a far more authentic transformation than becoming more and more like whatever “self” my fluid feelings suggest on any given day.

You can pay extra these days to buy jeans with ready-made holes that make them look old. You can buy spray-on mud so that your 4x4 looks as if it’s been off-road (yes, I’m serious). But there are no easy shortcuts to maturity in the Christian life.

Rory Gallagher was an Irish Blues guitarist who played a battered old Fender Guitar. The paint was stripped off most of it, and it went well with the gritty blues it was used to play. Johnny Marr, of the Smiths, admired Gallagher’s guitar so much that he took his own guitar to the woodwork room at school, trained a blowtorch on it, set the guitar on fire and nearly burned down the school. But to get its battered blues look Gallagher’s guitar travelled a long road of Irish pubs and clubs over many years.

Possible Preaching Angle:

We may think that if we would only read the right books and go to the right conferences, we might quickly become a mature Christian. Not so. We have to go through times of difficulty with the hard knocks of life, to follow the example of our Savior (Heb. 5:8). Moses spent 40 years in the wilderness before he was used by God. Joseph was 13 years in an Egyptian prison. Jesus lived 30 years in peasant obscurity before 3 years that changed the world. What is God taking you through just now? Embrace it. Trust him. Christlikeness is not cheap.

Bumps, bruises, fractures, missing teeth and facial rearrangements are an almost every-game occurrence for NHL players in their mad quest for silver glory that is the Stanley Cup. Detroit Red Wings general manager Ken Holland observes: "Two months of playoffs will age a player more than an 82-game regular season."

For instance, the Anaheim Duck's Ryan Getzlaf's cratered face took a puck to the chin during a playoff game on April 16, 2014. Doctors sewed him up. His face was "swollen and stitched, with a jagged line of sutures (doctors said there were too many to count) running from the right corner of his mouth to the left side of his jawbone." He sipped his meals through a straw the next day and played in the Duck's next game two days later wearing a face mask.

Former NHL star Wayne Gretzky said that's how you win championships. Immediately after being swept in 4 games in the finals to the New York Islanders, he visited the Islander locker room: "Guys were limping around with black eyes and bloody mouths. It looked more like a morgue in there than a champion's locker room. And here we were perfectly fine and healthy. That's why they won and we lost. They took more punishment than we did. … They sacrificed everything they had. And that's when (my teammate) Kevin Lowe said something I'll never forget. He said: 'That's how you win championships.'"

If you don't love Jesus, you will soon discover that being a pastor or a church leader is not really a very good job. You will be overworked, underpaid, over-stressed, and under-appreciated. But if you do love Jesus, you will discover as so many others have that it can be the most wonderful and exciting job in the world.

God can never make me wine if I object to the fingers he uses to crush me. If God would only crush me with his own fingers, and say, “Now, my son, I am going to make you broken bread and poured out wine in a particular way, and everyone will know what I am doing.” But when he uses someone who is not a Christian, or someone I particularly dislike, or some set of circumstances which I said I would never submit to, and begins to make these the crushers, I object.

I must never choose the scene of my own martyrdom, nor must I choose the things God will use in order to make me broken bread and poured out wine. His own Son did not choose. God chose for his Son that he should have a devil in his company for three years. We say, “I want angels; I want people better than myself; I want everything to be significantly from God; otherwise I cannot live the life, or do the thing properly; I always want to be gilt-edged.”

Let God do as he likes. If you are ever going to be wine to drink, you must be crushed. Grapes cannot be drunk; grapes are only wine when they have been crushed. I wonder what kind of coarse finger and thumb God has been using to squeeze you, and you have been like a marble and escaped? You are not ripe yet, and if God had squeezed you, the wine that came out would have been remarkably bitter. Let God go on with his crushing, because it will work his purpose in the end.

Francois de Fenelon, a 17th century priest during the Huguenot conflicts, wrote the following words of encouragement to a struggling fellow-priest:

I am sorry to hear of your troubles, but I am sure you realize that you must carry the cross with Christ in this life. Soon enough there will come a time when you will no longer suffer. You will reign with God and He will wipe away your tears with His own hand. In His presence, pain and sighing will forever flee away.

So while you have the opportunity to experience difficult trials, do not lose the slightest opportunity to embrace the cross. Learn to suffer with simplicity and a heart full of love. If you do, you will not only be happy in spite of the cross, but because of it. Love is pleased to suffer for the Well-Beloved. The cross which conforms you into his image is a consoling bond of love between you and Him.

When Jesus said, "If you are going to follow me, you have to take up a cross," it was the same as saying, "Come and bring your electric chair with you. Take up the gas chamber and follow me." He did not have a beautiful gold cross in mind--the cross on a church steeple or on the front of your Bible. Jesus had in mind a place of execution.

To deny self does not mean to deny things. It means to give yourself wholly to Christ and share in His shame and death. To take up a cross does not mean to carry burdens or have problems. I once met a lady who told me her asthma was the cross she had to bear! To take up the cross means to identify with Christ in His rejection, shame, suffering, and death.

Suffering is the heritage of the bad, of the penitent, and of the Son of God. Each one ends in the cross. The bad thief is crucified, the penitnent thief is crucified, and the Son of God is crucified. By these signs we know the widespread heritage of suffering.

Redemption is a conscious choice to serve the Lord, and that act is a denial.

The way of Christ is not a crossless way. But if Christ is with us, and we are with him, we can survive, and we can be effective.

I have often heard sermons on (Matthew 11), (Matthew 11:28) or (Matthew 11:29), but seldom has the sermon given equal weight to both verses. The reason? They seem to contradict. "Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest," Jesus calls out. But he continues, paradoxically, "Take my yoke upon you and learn from me." Taken together, the two statements jar. Why would a person who is weary and burdened volunteer to take on a yoke?

The most common suggestion for resolving the dilemma is that oxen work in teams, and Jesus shares the other side of the yoke. But I see no hint of that explanation in the Bible passage. I have, however, spent much of my life studying "weary and burdened" living tissue in a country, India, where yoke and oxen are commonplace. Because of those experiences, I think I now understand this passage.

In India, I worked as a surgeon, mainly with leprosy patients. Leprosy is a disease of the nerves, and its victims do not feel pain. As I treated infected ulcers and shortened fingers and toes, I had to work backwards to figure out what particular stress caused those tissues to break down.

Hundreds of patients had damaged their feet by wearing shoes or sandals that had a tiny rough spot protruding. Step after step, that rough spot ground against the skin, yet these patients' defective pain cells did not warn of danger.

To my surprise, I learned that most of the damage came from small, repetitive stresses like this, not more obvious stresses like bruises, cuts, or burns. Any gentle stress, when applied to a single spot repetitively can destroy living tissue. A bedsore is the clearest proof: an insensitive patient will get terrible ulcers just by lying still on the same pressure spot, whereas a person who feels pain will toss and turn throughout the night in response to messages from fatiguing nerve cells.

Conversely, too little stress also affects living tissue. Cells need exercise. Without it, they will atrophy--a condition common to anyone who has worn a plaster cast. I once treated an Indian fakir who had held his hand over his head uselessly for twenty years, as a religious act. The muscles had shrunk to nothing, and all the joints had fused together so that his hand was like a stiff paddle. Healthy tissue needs stress, but appropriate stress that is distributed among many cells.

Those principles apply directly to the stress caused by a joke on the neck of an ox. In the hospital carpentry shop in India, I helped fashion such yokes.

If I put a flat, uncarved piece of wood on an ox's neck and use it to pull a cart, very quickly pressure sores will break out on that animal's neck, and he will be useless. A good yoke must be formed to the shape of an ox's neck. It should cover a large area of skin to distribute the stresses widely. It should also be smooth, rounded, and polished with no sharp edges, so that no one point will endure unduly high stress. If I succeed in my workshop, the yoke I make will fit snugly around the ox's neck and cause him no discomfort. He can haul heavy loads every day for years, and his skin will remain perfectly healthy, with no pressure sores.

And now, I think I understand the strange juxtaposition of phrases in (Matthew 11:28-29). Jesus offers each of us a well-fitted yoke, of custom design. He does not call us to the kind of rest that means inactivity or laziness--that would lead to spiritual atrophy. Instead, he promises a burden designed to fit my frame, my individual needs, strengths, and capabilities. I come to him weary and heavy-laden. He removes those crushing burdens that would destroy any human being, and replaces them with a yoke of appropriate stress designed specifically for me. "Take my yoke upon you and learn from me," he says, "for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light."

Mieczyslaw Malinski writes: "It's easiest to see the cross on Jesus's shoulders. It's a bit harder with our neighbor's cross. Most difficult of all is seeing our own cross." And sometimes even more difficult is to see it on the shoulders of a congregation, especially our own congregation. Yet crossbearing is for the body of Christ, as well as the individual.

One day while Francis was praying fervently to God, he received an answer: "O Francis, if you want to know my will, you must hate and despise all that which hitherto your body has loved and desired to possess. Once you begin to do this, all that formerly seemed sweet and pleasant to you will become bitter and unbearable, and instead, the things that formerly made you shudder will bring you great sweetness and content." Francis was divinely comforted and greatly encouraged by these words.

Then one day, as he was riding near Assisi, he met a leper. He had always felt an overpowering horror of these sufferers, but making a great effort, he conquered his aversion, dismounted, and, in giving the leper a coin, kissed his hand. The leper then gave him the kiss of peace, after which Francis remounted his horse and rode on his way.

Some days later he took a large sum of money to the leper hospital, and gathering all the inmates together, he gave them alms, kissing each of their hands. Formerly he could neither touch or even look at lepers, but when he left them on that day, what had been so repugnant to him had really and truly been turned into something pleasant.

Indeed, his previous aversion to lepers had been so strong, that, besides being incapable of looking at them, he would not even approach the places where they lived. And if by chance he happened to pass anywhere near their dwellings or to see one of the lepers, even though he was moved to give them an alms through some intermediate person, he would nevertheless turn his face away and hold his nose. But, strengthened by God's grace, he was enabled to obey the command and to love what he had hated and to abhor what he had hitherto wrongfully loved.

Worship is pulling our affections off our idols and putting them on God.