Clarence Jordan was just 12 years old in 1922 when he made his profession of faith during a Baptist tent revival in Sumter County, Georgia. At the evening service, Jordan took notice of a man in the church choir who was robustly singing one of his favorite hymns, "Love Lifted Me." The following night--the night after Clarence Jordan became a Christian--he was awakened by an agonizing sound coming from a prison yard located near his boyhood home. A black man was being tortured in clear view of Clarence's bedroom window. As he watched that horrific scene, Clarence soon discovered that the tormentor, the warden of the prison, was actually the same person who had been singing "Love Lifted Me" only one night before.

Clarence Jordan would be changed forever by this experience. Committed to Jesus' radical message in the Sermon on the Mount, he became a biblical scholar who devoted his life to translating the Greek New Testament into the vernacular of rural South Georgia. His writings are known to many as The Cotton Patch versions of the Gospel. In 1942, instead of using his many gifts to become pastor of a large, well-to-do church or using his Ph.D. to secure a seminary professorship, Clarence and his wife, Florence, founded an intentional, inclusive Christian community near his home in Sumter County.

Named after the Greek word for beloved community, Koininia used clearly defined biblical principles to order their common life. Covenant members chose to live and work and worship together and shared in common all worldly possessions. They kept a common purse. Throughout its 60-years history, Koininia has been a powerful witness in New Testament living that has challenged racial and economic injustice in its myriad forms. Perhaps most notably these days, Koininia is credited for giving birth to the international home-building organization Habitat for Humanity.

Clarence Jordan never tired of saying that "God is not so much interested in our talk as in our walk." How we live is of far greater importance than the high sounding rhetoric of our religious piety. Like the prophets Amos and Micah and Isaiah who preached long before him, Jordan believed that God was disgusted by religious ritual that did not lead us into Christian action. Clarence took Jesus at his word and he spent his life trying to prove Jesus right, so much so that a few months before his death in 1969, someone asked him what he would say if the Lord came down and said, "Clarence, in five minutes tell me everything you've ever done for me." Clarence responded, "I'd tell the Lord to come back when he had more time."

In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus summoned the multitudes, cleared his throat, and made his message clear. "If any would come after me," Jesus said, "let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who try to save their life will lose it. But those who are willing to lose their life for my sake and for the sake of the Gospel will save it."

I'm afraid that a great number of us hear Jesus' words and we grimace. It's not what we want to hear because the prospect of bearing crosses has never been our idea of a good time. In fact, we'd much rather hear about the heavenly life to come, a place where every care has been lifted, a land flowing with milk and honey complete with pearly gates and golden streets. What most of us want for ourselves and for our children is not sacrifice at all, but comfort. We want to be happy. Personally speaking, I know that's what I want. I want to be happy. It's why it's so hard for parents to envision any other model of happiness for their children than the one they have envisioned for themselves, because we limit happiness by our own narrow experience of it. That's why we hear all this Jesus talk about denying ourselves and letting go of control and resisting evil and turning the other cheek and going the extra mile and giving your shirt as well as your cloak and sharing one another's burdens. We hear all this stuff about taking up the cross and following Jesus in the way, and it scares us.

But it's not realistic, we say. If only the world worked that way, we say. Because everything else in our culture warns against a life of such risk and uncertainty, we are taught to avoid controversy at all costs. We're lectured from cradle to grave to pursue the life that will lead to security, which is quite often the opposite of faithfulness, the opposite of sacrifice, the antithesis of justice.

But what if Jesus knows something that we don't? What if it's possible to bear the cross and discover joy at the same time? What if the two don't have to be mutually exclusive? What if by some stroke of providential irony those who lose their life for Jesus sake will actually know an abiding joy that surpasses any temporal happiness this world has to offer?

Maybe Jesus was right and his yoke really is easy and his burden really is light, and in bearing the cross we will find not hardship but sweet rest for our souls. I mean, I wonder, if Mother Teresa laughed more than the rest of us. Have you ever thought about that? I wonder if Nelson Mandela sleeps better than the rest of us? What if Clarence Jordan's life was actually better than your life or my life, however we prefer to define the meaning of better? I wonder about stuff like that sometimes. Because Jesus may just be correct, and those of us who are running around trying to make our easy lives even more comfortable actually may be losing out on something way more essential and much more important.

I haven't checked around lately so I don't know the weight of a standard cross these days, but I do know it weighs about one-tenth of what pretentiousness and arrogance do. And I don't know exactly how much a cross costs nowadays, but I do know it costs much, much less than oppression does. Peaceful resistance may carry a price, but it's a whole lot cheaper than the cost of war and violence and militarism. That I do know.

My friend, what the church needs most urgently today is not more people or more money or more programs or more ministries. We certainly don't need more buildings, but what the church needs more today more than anything else is courage. We simply need more courage. By and large, we are afraid to risk and, moreover, we are afraid of those who ask us to risk. Most of us have yet to move beyond the sweet and sentimental aspects of our faith to begin to discover the real hard stuff that Jesus asks of us, to wrestle with the realities of people's lives, to talk about the real stuff that matters to folk, even if it makes us squirm in the pew to have to hear it and squirm in the pulpit to have to say it. This may offend you, but I believe it is true. A great number of pastors are more afraid of their congregations than they are worried about the painful realities of injustice, and, likewise, too many of us are guilty of counting the cost before we consider the worth. As my mother says, "We would rather seem than to be."

In a culture that seeks above all to soothe and protect while people everywhere are woefully overstressed and overworked and overmedicated, I think the cross that Jesus offers may actually be lighter than the other stuff we've been trying to carry instead. Maybe the radical way of Jesus has some advantages over the other roads we've been on.

Today in Georgia, just up the road from Koinonia Farms, on your way to Americus, you can still see the pretty white frame Southern Baptist Church that is best known for "dis-fellowshipping" Clarence Jordan and his family for their commitments to racial justice and economic sharing. As I've heard the story, whenever the congregation met in 1950 to consider the motion to kick Clarence and Florence Jordan out of the church, Florence attended that spiteful meeting even though Clarence was out of town at a speaking engagement. In fact, she not only attended, but she sat on the front row, and when the motion was made to "dis-fellowship" the entire Jordan family because of their work to promote racial integration and equality, Florence Jordan raised her hand and seconded the motion. If the crime was loving her neighbor and working to protect their God-given human rights, she stood guilty as charged. Sometimes that's what carrying the cross looks like. Sometimes that's the type of courage that is required of us and the kind of peace that sweeps over us whenever we seek to follow Jesus in the way.

Let us pray.

O God, we are weak and you are strong, so please give us the measure of courage we need to face these days, to stand against injustice, to resist evil, to expose hatred, to overcome violence, to walk in peace. May we know that abiding joy that is known only by those who do your will in the world. Show us, O God, where our solidarity is needed and then give us courage to bear your cross of liberation and redemption, for your yoke is easy and your burden is light. Amen.