Setting Our Minds on Divine Things

Mark 8:27-35; Proverbs 1:20-33

Proverbs 1:20-33

{20} Wisdom cries out in the street; in the squares she raises her voice. {21} At the busiest corner she cries out; at the entrance of the city gates she speaks: {22} “How long, O simple ones, will you love being simple? How long will scoffers delight in their scoffing and fools hate knowledge? {23} Give heed to my reproof; I will pour out my thoughts to you; I will make my words known to you.

{24} Because I have called and you refused, have stretched out my hand and no one heeded, {25} and because you have ignored all my counsel and would have none of my reproof, {26} I also will laugh at your calamity; I will mock when panic strikes you, {27} when panic strikes you like a storm, and your calamity comes like a whirlwind, when distress and anguish come upon you. {28} Then they will call upon me, but I will not answer; they will seek me diligently, but will not find me.

{29} Because they hated knowledge and did not choose the fear of the LORD, {30} would have none of my counsel, and despised all my reproof, {31} therefore they shall eat the fruit of their way and be sated with their own devices. {32} For waywardness kills the simple, and the complacency of fools destroys them; {33} but those who listen to me will be secure and will live at ease, without dread of disaster."

Mark 8:27-35

{27} Jesus went on with his disciples to the villages of Caesarea Philippi; and on the way he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” {28} And they answered him, “John the Baptist; and others, Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets.” {29} He asked them, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter answered him, “You are the Messiah.” {30} And he sternly ordered them not to tell anyone about him.

{31} Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. {32} He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. {33} But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”

{34} He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. {35} For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.”

The Sermon

Does your typical day look anything like this?

• Up early to get ready and maybe take care of children or parents or others;
• then sit down in front of the computer, or rush out the door to school or main job or other responsibilities;
• lunch “break” is no less stressful than the rest of the day, and it’s not really any kind of break at all;
• late in the day, rushing to take care of other responsibilities, doctors’ appointments, homework or hurried errands or extracurricular activities or second job or getting dinner ready and served and cleaned up;
• evening: meetings, or more homework, or third job, or other commitments—even social commitments take up your precious time and drain your energy;
• late night: maybe catch the news, or catch up on e-mail, or pay some bills, or just keep plugging away at the homework;
• then getting ready for work or school tomorrow, maybe helping kids or others get ready for bed;
• You get tucked in, try to read, distracted by two or more major things on your mind, and it seems like as soon as you get to sleep you are getting up and starting the whole thing again.

Does your typical day look anything like that?

One of the omissions from the blue Presbyterian Hymnal that had been in the red one from the 1950’s was a piece written in the late 1800’s called “Take Time to Be Holy” by Will­iam Long­staff.

Each of its four verses began with the same five words, including verse 2:

“Take time to be holy, the world rushes on;
Spend much time in secret, with Jesus alone.
By looking to Jesus, like Him thou shalt be;
Thy friends in thy conduct His likeness shall see.”

T’s a beautiful hymn. But when your days, and your weeks, and your life are going by that fast, that full, that anxiously, do the words “Take time to be holy” strike you as maybe just a little bit over-optimistic? Maybe kind of irrelevant, maybe, kind of, impossible?

Of all the things for which I am grateful that have to do with the eight-week sabbatical from which I returned on Tuesday, one of the most important to me was that you gave me the opportunity to take time to be holy.

I read the old masters—Calvin and Schleiermacher, Barth and Tillich, Nietzsche and Tolstoy —and was sustained in my studies by holy communion and worship in chapels, churches, and cathedrals. I sat or stood respectfully with the Orthodox, Catholics, and Protestant; I prayed for peace at the Temple of Israel in Wilmington and the oldest mosque in Belgrade, Serbia. I walked miles and miles through towns and countryside on sunny days, and I made my way across a moonlit field to worship with the Trappist monks at 3:00 in the morning.

One thing I can tell you: it’s easier to take time to be holy when you are being paid to do so.

But when it isn’t your immediate task, it’s not easy to see how you can do it with any hope at all of getting it right.

And when you hear Jesus rebuking Peter, and saying, “You are setting your mind not on divine things, but on human things,” you think, “Yeah, but…?”

Meanwhile, Wisdom cries out in the street; in the squares she raises her voice. At the busiest corner she cries out: “How long, O simple ones, will you love being simple?

“I have called and you refused, and you have ignored all my counsel.”

I don’t have to tell you, but we all need to recognize, that eventually, we run out of those days.

And at all those busy intersections of our lives, where the Spirit of Wisdom speaks—all that traffic zooming by, all the endless conversations that go on in our heads, our own voices running through schedules and arguments and things that have to be dealt with—in the midst of all that is the knowledge that we don’t get an unlimited supply of these days.

And it’s not about God’s wrath, it’s not about God’s judgment. We’ll already have plenty of judgment for ourselves.

From time to time I hear people who haven’t made it to church for a while say, “Well, I guess I’ve been a little lazy,” and I tell them, “Look at your schedule. That doesn’t sound to me like lazy.”

But somewhere along the line, we have to attend to this critique from the mouth of the One who put us here: “You are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”

It seems not only possible to imagine but altogether probable that many believers get through their whole lives having essentially the same experience as a moral atheist.

“Well, OK, I missed out on the spirituality, because, frankly, I didn’t really actually know what that means exactly. But I wondered in awe at the vastness of the universe, and I tried to do right by my fellow human beings.”

But for the followers of Christ to be able to say no more than that means they may have missed out on the depth of a very important relationship.

On one of the Sundays I was out, I had the enormous privilege of hearing Tom Long preach at Lake Junaluska.

The day I saw him, he was making the point that if for Matthew the kingdom of heaven is a future that’s on the way, for John, the kingdom of heaven already exists, but it is suspended above us and our world like a canopy, and in John’s gospel, we see it piercing the world we know like a needle on a sewing machine.

Well Mark is less of a professional theologian than his buddies Matthew and John and Luke. When Mark tells his stories, they’re short and powerful and immediate. Mark shows us that Jesus is God’s son by means of showing us Jesus’ acts of power that left people amazed.

You might say that, for Mark, the kingdom of heaven has now come into the world, and its name is Jesus.

So when Peter accurately says that Jesus is the Messiah, and Jesus says—as he’s done all along in Mark—“Don’t tell anybody about me,” it may have been because the point was not for Jesus to say, “Hey, everybody, stop what you’re doing! It’s all over now; I’m here. So put away all your work and wrap up your lives, and from now on, just fall down and worship me.”

Maybe the point was the opposite: that we need to keep living our lives—keep going to school and working and looking after your families and taking care of each other and taking care of the business of being a human in this world. But now, know this: that God is at work in the world—for Jesus, that meant doing what he came here to do in this life, culminating in going to the cross.

And, know this: that you are holy—you can set your mind on divine things, even as you are in the world, just as Jesus is in the world. “Your friends, in your conduct, His likeness shall see.”

You will always have your responsibilities. But now you may know that in those responsibilities, and in all your relationships, in your school day and your work day and your busy retirement and your Sunday worship,

it is no longer enough to say, “Take time to be holy.” You don’t have the time left to take out of your schedule.

So instead, we’ll just have to make all our time holy. And if the kingdom of God came to us in a man named Jesus, now we can be the kingdom of God as a sign to all those around us.

That’s a pretty tall order. It’s going to demand more of us—more truth, more justice, more commitment to caring for each other and the world than a lot of us are used to or even ready for. There’s only one way to make it happen.

In this busy world of human things, don’t forget to set your mind on divine things.