Selfless

Propers: The Fourteenth Sunday After Pentecost (Lectionary 22), AD 2023 A

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.

Life is hard. It’s harder if you’re selfish.

I know it doesn’t seem that way. In our society, the most self-absorbed often appear to prosper. From pop musicians and cinema stars to wolves of Wall Street and social media influencers, snarky celebrities insist that greed is good.  The more you consume, the happier you’ll be, right? Stuff will stuff that hole in your soul! Whatever ails us, the remedy must always be the same: We need more.

We always need more: more money, more power, more sex, more fame. Then we will be like the beautiful people. And they’re always happy, aren’t they, trainwrecks that they are? We work jobs that we hate to buy stuff we don’t need to impress people whom we do not like. This world is a house set on fire. And good God, do we all need a way out.

Our Gospel reading this morning picks right up where we left off last week. Simon has just confessed that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of Man prophesied by Daniel, the Son of God and rightful heir of David. And Jesus says, “Yes, Simon, yes! You have got it! You are the Rock, and on this rock I’ll build my church, and you’ll batter down the gates of hell and hand over Rome to the saints!”

They’re ready now, He thinks, for His greatest teaching, His greatest secret: that the Messiah has not come to wage war against earthly kingdoms, to win glory for the godly men and exterminate everyone bad, but that in fact He’s come to die in the most selfless and humiliating way imaginable—and that this death will impossibly, miraculously, be the victory of God harrowing hell and breaking the grip of the grave!

And Peter whips around a 180 so fast you can practically hear the needle scratch. “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen!” And honestly, this is what we love about Peter. He leaps before he looks. He goes by his gut, and when he’s right he’s so right, but when he’s wrong he is all the way wrong. Jesus rebukes him as strongly as He’d just praised him. “Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind on human things and not on the divine.”

Go figure: from “on this rock I’ll build my church” to “get behind me, Satan” in 30 seconds flat.

Christ has not come to establish some earthly kingdom. The difference between the reign of God and the reign of Rome is not merely quantitative. The Kingdom of God inverts our worldly assumptions of power, of glory, of goodness itself. Christ has come to give Himself away not simply to the saintly but to all of humankind, including and especially those who will surely murder Him.

Make no mistake: Jesus didn’t have to die in order to forgive us. God is not some hungry volcano demanding human sacrifice lest He burn the world. God is on that Cross. God came to us in Jesus Christ to heal us, teach us, guide us, forgive us, and lead us all home in Him. He didn’t have to die for us to be forgiven. The Scriptures are very clear: First He came absolving sins and then we killed Him for it. The Cross was always our idea.

And Jesus accepts this. He accepts this, because He accepts us, and He knows exactly how we will react—how human beings react—when confronted with love and grace and absolution, with life beyond the grave. We get scared. We get violent. We prefer the devil we know to the God whose love we cannot conceive.

And Jesus tells His disciples—those who wish to walk His Way, those who dare to claim His Name—that if any would seek to be Christians, we must deny ourselves, take up our cross, and follow Him. Christianity will not benefit you, will not profit you, in the ways the world assumes. There is no prosperity gospel, only mammon in a mask. These days, one cannot even expect societal respectability, gauche as church attendance now is. Religion’s so passé.

There are consequences for speaking the truth in a world in love with lies, consequences for searching out beauty beneath the plastics we peddle. You don’t have to seek your cross, for one will be provided. And let me tell you what that doesn’t mean. It doesn’t mean that you stay in an abusive situation. It doesn’t mean that you look for ways to punish yourself with pain. And it doesn’t mean that you get to play the self-abasing martyr, forever calling “Look away! Look away!” when you really mean “Look at me.”

What does it mean to take up your cross? It means to live as Jesus, come hell or high water. Not just individually, mind you, for no-one alone can be Him. But together, as a community, as the Body of Christ, made one in His Spirit. St Paul lays it all out quite nicely. Let love be genuine. Hold fast to the good. Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer. Live peaceably, in harmony, as best we can, renouncing vengeance. Do not return evil for evil but overcome evil with good. That’s a cross we bear together, both our burden and our blessing.

The selfish person’s a slave to sin, and really a slave to the self. There is no tyrant so absolute as our ego, no chains so adamant as pride. Of course, one does not choose evil, in and of itself. The will always wills its own good. What we do is to mistake evil for good. We choose the lesser good, the lesser happiness, over the infinite good, over the joy of the soul. In other words, the things we think will make us happy won’t. They fail us. They crumple beneath the existential weight we place upon them. They’re false gods.

And here’s the thing: False gods aren’t necessarily bad things. Very often, they are very good things that we have misused and abused. Sex, money, food, property, power, even fame and celebrity can all be good things, for they are the gifts of God intended for our good and for our neighbor’s good. Problems arise when we take these things, meant to be means to an end, and make them instead ends in and of themselves. Any good thing, made into a god, becomes a demon.

Do not base your happiness on that which you could lose, because you will. Disaster, death, disease, and misfortune come to every man. Just take a look at Jesus! We must not be attached to the things of the world, especially not to the self, to who we think we are. Be in the world, but not of the world. Because when we aren’t attached, we aren’t afraid; which allows us to be truly present, to open ourselves up to joy; trusting that Christ is with us, trusting that God is good; and because God is good nothing good is ever lost in Him.

That’s all faith is, really. It’s just trust. Trust in the faithfulness of God. Then can we see things for what they truly are. We can see that Goodness and Beauty and Truth are eternal.  We can see that love has no limits, no bounds and no depths. We can see that all that really matters, all that’s really real, is the love we share with others, the love we show to others. And this is our salvation, the truth that sets us free! By dying to the self, we rise again immortal.

The problem in part is that we think to be selfish is to be an individual. But it’s not. Selfish people are all so terribly, dreadfully the same: reaching, grasping, clutching, gasping. Only the selfless person seems to have a personality. Only in putting others first do we become who we truly are. And that of course is Jesus. Jesus is the human whom we all were meant to be. In Him we are each unique. In Him we are each a saint. Only then are we fully human, made fully one with God.

For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life? … Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.

You have seen Him here, dear Christians, that the world may now see Him in you.

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

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