Simon Peter had the right answers, the right theological answer, but he didn’t understand. He said, “You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God,” but he did not understand about the way of the cross and what it meant for his life.

Simon Peter had half of the story right. Part of being a Christian is to confess that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. The other half of the story is to experience the cross. The first part is to confess that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the second part of Christianity is to experience the cross. To experience the cross is to deny yourself, take up your cross and follow Christ. It is to lose your life for Christ’s sake.

The question is: What does it mean for us to deny ourselves, to take up the cross and follow Christ?

In a book, “The Cross of Christian Experience,” the author C. M. Clowe makes the distinction between burdens, thorns and crosses.

All human beings have burdens. You cannot be born and not go through all the burdens in life. Life begins in pain. Every person here went through the pain of childbirth. To begin this life was not easy either for the mother or the child. Life began in pain. You go through all the painful experiences of childhood. All the diapers and all the diseases. You grow up and become a teenager and you go through all the trauma of the terrible teens. Time goes by and you have to pay all your taxes. Time goes by and you find yourself caring for aging parents. Times go by and your own body starts to fall apart. You have accidents that hurt your body and cripple you up. You have these illnesses that you were not expecting. Life begins and ends in pain. Pain is the very essence of life. You cannot escape it. When you are a human being, you carry the plain old burdens of life.

The second experience in life is what he calls thorns. Many people in this life have thorns. Thorns are those basic handicaps and limitations of life. For some, it is a heart disease. For others, it is a back ache or spinal deformity. For still others, it may be a problem that they had developed in childhood.

Nobody chooses their burdens and nobody chooses their thorns. You don’t chose thorns. You do not chose burdens. That is just the way it is. These things just happen to you. A person learns to live in dignity with those burdens and those thorns.

There are burdens in life. There are thorns in life. And thirdly, there are crosses. You don’t choose to have burdens because they just come. You don’t choose to have thorns because they just come. Picking up the cross is quite different than picking up burdens or living with thorns. Picking up the cross is something that you choose to do. This author says that to pick up the cross is to choose to pick up the thorns and burdens of other people’s lives. When other people are in need, due to their burdens and disasters, you chose to go and love them and help them with their lives. To pick up the cross is to choose to serve the needs of others and thereby to serve God, whatever the cost.

More of Rev. Edward Marquart’s sermon