Well, it happened again. I had a lovely thought for my sermon that I just cannot justify putting in my sermon. It really has nothing to do with anything else I’m talking about. Plus, I’m already pushing 20 minutes which, for me, is a long sermon.

So, because I cannot bear to delete it, here is a random thought on Mark 8:33: “Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things, but on human things.”

Isn’t it interesting, that Jesus would say that? Peter, who wants Jesus to be super-human, to embrace the full power of God and not have to suffer consequences like a mere mortal–it is Peter who is setting his mind on human things.

That the divine thing is the jagged rocky ground on which they are standing; the path they can see before them stretching out across Galilee toward Jerusalem. The divine thing is the suffering and rejection and death.

The divine thing is not avoiding suffering and rejection–or laughter and friendship or anything distinctly, painfully, achingly human. The divine thing is the life of God that swells within and around and among us down here on this piece of earth, with these friends and enemies, on this path God has given us to walk.