Self-Made

Propers: The Fifth Sunday of Easter (Confirmation Sunday), A.D. 2019 C

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Everyone has a god.

Everyone has something in his or her life that is their greatest good; the thing they value above all else, fear and love and trust above all else; the thing that gets them out of bed in the morning. That thing is their god. And the way that we live in relationship to it—the way that we shape our lives around the most important thing at the center—that is our religion.

Everybody has a god. Most of us have more than one. And so everybody is, in some way, religious. Especially those who protest that they aren’t religious at all.

These gods of ours take many forms. And I’m not just talking about Zeus or Thor. I’m talking about money. I’m talking about sex. I’m talking about ego and pride and nation and race; your sense of superiority or of victimhood; your pocket book, your politics, your property and possessions. The human heart is a factory of false idols. We manufacture gods every day, churn ‘em out. And we are willing to live for them, to die for them, to follow and to fight for them. But the problem, of course, is that every one of these gods fails.

There is a powerful new religion in America today. It goes by many names. But its principle tenants are consumption, customization, and cognitive dissonance. We are raised to believe that everything is for sale. Everything has a price. And our principle duty, as good little consumers, is forever to choose options from a menu of infinite choice. And the choices we make—the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the causes we support on Facebook—we think this somehow makes us who we really are. And we will be judged on the final product, won’t we?

We will be judged by society, by our peers, by the great borderless digital democracy. We shall be weighed and measured and found wanting. Not skinny enough. Not pretty enough. Not woke enough. Not strong enough. And so we must continue to consume, continue to choose, in hopes of perpetual self-improvement, blown about by fickle fashion, homeless and rootless, in a world where everything is negotiable, everything is optional, everything is for sale. Including, first and foremost, human dignity and worth.

This system—this religion—fancies itself the frontline of freedom, liberated from history, from biology, from local or family ties of any kind. You can be whatever you want to be! So it better darn well be good. Or you’ll have to scrap yourself and start all over. There is no future, there is no past, there is no moment or world or dream beyond this: buy what you want to make who you are.

And so we think that war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength. All the while racking up debts and desperation. All the while fearing to be who we are, lest we be judged unworthy. All the while making the rich richer, and the poor poorer, and the devils oh-so-delighted. No wonder we’re awash in an opioid epidemic and deaths of American despair.

But we have hope, my brothers and sisters. More than that, we have the assurance of victory already won. For we have seen the One who has overcome this world. He has raised us up with His own two hands, and promised us that we are not judged, we are not alone, and we are not self-made. Rather, we are born and sustained and redeemed in Love—a Love that outdoes and outlasts this world. And nothing we can ever do, or fail to do, can ever steal that Love from us. Nothing can ever snatch us from the crucified hands of God in Jesus Christ our Lord.

My dear confirmands: today we celebrate the fruition of your faith. Long ago your parents brought you to the Font of your Baptism, in which Jesus chose you as His own, chose you forever to be children of God and coheirs with Christ. On that day your parents made promises on your behalf, promises that you would come to know your inheritance in the faith, to know your home in the Church, to know the God who creates you in every moment of existence and calls you ever home in Him.

In Baptism, you were bound to the death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, drowning to sin, rising to life eternal, with the fire of the Holy Spirit burning in your heart. At your first Communion, you received the very Body and Blood of God made Man, a foretaste of the feast to come, of Heaven touching down on earth, of eternity here breaking into time.

Your bodies, minds, and souls were nourished in worship, in Sunday school, in the great holidays of the Church year and its blessed cycle of seasons in this community. Through three years of Confirmation class you have studied, with your parents and your pastor, with your classmates and your congregation, the Old and New Testaments of the Holy Scriptures, the Lord’s Prayer and the 10 Commandments, the Apostles’ Creed, the Sacraments, and the duties incumbent upon a Christian.

Now we welcome you as full and mature members of the Body of Christ, calling God to stir up the Holy Spirit within you, that you may join us in shouldering the heavy weight of the Cross, and the still greater weight of our Resurrection in glory. But of course this is not the end. It is but the beginning. We have tried our best to give you a starting point in faith, in the love of God, Father, +Son, and Holy Spirit, in whom we all live and move and have our being.

Now it is up to you to continue this walk in faith, even to lead the way. Christ is still at work here and throughout the world, wherever we find Him in our neighbor’s need, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, healing the sick, rebuking the sinner in love and forgiving our foe as God has first forgiven us. We go now to be Christ for a world still very much in need of Him.

So what happens next? The statistics are not encouraging. So many Christian youth in the wealthy Western world seem to vanish after Confirmation, only to return should they have children of their own, and often not even then. We are told that our society has outgrown religion, outgrown the strictures of moralism and metaphysical chicanery that distract us from what really matters in life—which is, again, what to buy, what to watch, what to eat, what to post.

But that’s a dead end. And everyone knows it, even if we don’t admit it yet. Eventually all the foods will be eaten, all the toys will be bought, all the pleasures experienced, all the taboos violated, and all the political programs pushed. And our entire society—our entire world—will one day sit up in bed and ask, “Is this it? Is this all?

“Isn’t there more to life than what I can see and touch and buy and use? Isn’t there more to being human than pretending to be forever young, each of us trying so desperately to remain our own little universe revolving around ourselves? What if purpose and value and meaning and love can’t be bought and will not be ignored? What if the deep questions we were told to laugh off are in fact the only questions that really matter—and I can’t seem to order that from Amazon?”

That is when the world will need you, my dear confirmands, my fellow-soldiers in Christ. Not to tell them that we are right and they are wrong. Not simply to parrot verses from the Bible or sections out of the Catechism. But to walk with them along the Way of humility and mystery; the Way of selfless self-emptying that is the Way of Christ; the Way of Beauty and Truth and Goodness and Love; of God made Man so that women and men may be one with God.

It is not the task of Christianity to provide easy answers to every question, but to make us progressively aware of the great and holy mystery at the heart of all that is. The Gospel is the Good News of liberation for a world enslaved by sin and death and mountains of stuff.

And so we anoint you, our confirmands, as a sign of the Holy Spirit within. We lay hands on you to demonstrate the love and support of the Church, the authority to declare new life and the forgiveness of all sin. And we slap you—gently, liturgically—to remind us all that your Confirmation is a deadly serious thing; because the world needs you, and Christ calls you, now more than ever. We’ve left a mess for your generation. But Christ will set it right.

So congratulations. And let’s get started.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.