Selves
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.
In India there is tell of a man who became a great sage not through learning or study but by contemplating death. He was afraid of it, you see, and so he confronted it: a brave philosophy indeed. He laid himself down upon a simple dirt floor and closed his eyes. He imagined, “Now I cannot see. Now I cannot hear. Now I cannot move. This is what death is like. And yet—here I still am.”
He took away, mentally, everything that made himself who he was: his name, his possessions, his positions. Yet there remained something he could not take away, something irreducible. And he realized, “This then is who I truly am.” And that part of him could not die.
We find similar understandings, couched in different terms, throughout religious thought. A famous inscription at the monastery on Mt Athos reads, “If you die before you die, then you won’t die when you die.” Let that run around in your head for a bit.
This is also how St Paul speaks of Baptism: that the old Adam, the old creature, the old self, drowns in the waters of Baptism, is crucified with Christ. And we then rise from the font with the life of Christ within us. “It is no longer I who live,” Paul writes, “but Christ who lives in me.”
Even traditions that believe in reincarnation often speak of it not as a process that unfolds over many lifetimes but within a single life. We die and rise many times, do we not? Or at least we certainly should—our old identities falling away to make way for something true—until that last day when we rise never to fall again.
Think of it as having two selves, one false and one true; one the old Adam, one the new. The false self is whom we think we are, whom we’re told we are. This is the self that has a name and a birthdate and a height and a weight and a bank account and a job and all kinds of anxieties. This is the self that worries about getting ahead.
In this identity, we’re always measuring ourselves against our peers: Oh, my friend got married; oh, my neighbor got divorced; oh, my dad had six kids by the time that he was my age. What is my ranking? What is my stature? How do I measure up? Did you know that I’m 42 years old, and I still have nightmares about high school math exams? And I was good at math. But I needed to know that I could get an A. Because that was my worth, wasn’t it? That’s what would get me ahead.
This is the self of survival, the Hobbesian war of all against all. This is the self of the rat race, of social Darwinism, of keeping up with the Joneses—the stuff of winners and losers. It’s in the clothes we wear and the cars we drive and the class we join. It is our place in society, our rung on the ladder, our socially agreed upon worth.
And it is false. It is not who we truly are. This self is a construct, a façade that we build, a mask that we wear, for our protection, for our advancement. This is the self that will die, that must die, soon to be lost in the sands of time, soon to be forgotten. But the good news is: that self isn’t really you. It’s a false you, a projection of you. Or to put it another way: the thinker of your thoughts is just another thought.
There is a true you, a true self, the Image of God within. And this self is not defined against others. This self includes others, indeed finds itself in others. Your true self is the one that identifies with God and with humanity; the self that sees its own reflection, sees it own good, in your neighbor; and which understands itself as a reflection of the Goodness that is God. Atman is Brahman. Savvy?
And this is the self that cannot be taken away. Nay, this is the self that cannot truly die: because it lives in others; because it lives for others. Truly it is the Body of Christ, which looks to Jesus as our head, and sees that we are all members of each other. If I am an eye, and you are a hand, and he is a bone, and she is a lung, is not our life one? Is not your good my good, your health my health? Thus the sorrow of any is the sorrow of all, and the joy of one is the joy of everyone. Jesus teaches this.
That’s who you really are. You are the Image of God. You are the life of Christ within. And this life cannot die. It did once, and it conquered death, never to die again. The deepest, truest, strongest part of you is rooted firmly in God, and God cannot be shaken. God cannot be lost. God cannot be killed. We tried all that already.
It’s the difference, really, between mind and spirit. Both are integral parts of humanity. But the mind works by drawing up divisions and distinctions. You can see it develop in kids. When young children look at an otter, a horse, and a dog, and call them all “kitty,” that’s the mind at work. Four legs and fur is a kitty, right? They’re making sense of things by sorting them, divvying them up. The mind is a difference engine—and we need it to navigate this world, to tell right from wrong, health from harm. It lets us survive. But the mind is not us; it is our tool.
The spirit runs higher and deeper than that. The mind draws divisions; the spirit breathes connections. The spirit knows how we are one; how the divinity in me recognizes the divinity in you, and in all the world around us. And the spirit precedes the mind. I knew a young woman in Boston who was a pediatric psychologist. She studied religion in kids. And the prevailing wisdom was that kids imagine God by taking a person and adding things to it: omnipotence, omniscience, &c.
But she found that just the opposite is true. Kids start out assuming God, in that they think that everyone is all-knowing, all-present, all-powerful. Only as we grow and age and learn do we start to limit our mental picture of others, whittling away. The spirit holds everything in common; the mind breaks us down into pieces. Someday the mind as we know it will die—giving way not to less but to more—yet the spirit will live on, because our spirit was never exclusively ours.
That’s the real issue with humility and pride. Pride, in the biblical sense, is self-worship, a form of idolatry. It’s thinking that the false self is the only thing that’s true. Humility, meanwhile, doesn’t mean thinking less of yourself, but thinking of yourself less. Humility realizes that good is communal, that my true self subsists both in God and in you. Being selfless, in religious jargon, doesn’t mean annihilation. It means recognizing and understanding who you really are, what your true self is, and it is so much greater than we think.
The true self doesn’t care about getting the best seat at table. The true self doesn’t strive to claim honors for ourselves. The true self is happy to uplift the good of others, without envy, without jealousy, knowing that your good is mine. In our reading for this morning, Jesus is concerned with the impossibility of reciprocity: rejecting the notion that we do good only for personal advancement, for selfish gain; you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.
By feeding the hungry, the poor, and the destitute—what’s more, by eating at the same table with them—we are forced to confront the reality that these people cannot pay us back, in honor or coin or favors or status. The only honor we receive is the understanding that we are all one in Christ; that what I do for someone who cannot repay me, I really do for God, and God alone will see it, God and the poor. For some have entertained angels without knowing it.
Please understand the importance of this teaching. Jesus isn’t just telling us to be nice fellas. He isn’t just telling us to go out and do good. He’s showing us who we are. He is pointing to the people we ignore and we despise, and He is telling us, “There I am. They are Me. What you do to them, you do to Me, and thereby do to God. So if you would love Me, love you them—because you are them too.” He abides in them, and we abide in Him, and all of us are one in Jesus Christ our Lord.
Strip away the credit cards, the clothing, the cultural prejudices, and what do you have? You have a human being. Rich or poor, young or old, man or woman, there’s a human being. There’s the Image of God, the Christ Incarnate yet. If we cannot find Jesus in the beggar at the door, we will not find Him in this chalice. But if we realize that we are the beggar—and that the beggar too is Christ—well then, my brothers and sisters, not even the grave can contain us.
You are not your mind. You are not yourself. You are nothing of your own. You are something far simpler and infinitely greater: you are God’s own Son. Remember this when you question your worth. Because everything else is a lie.
In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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