The Me I See in You

Lections: The Twelfth Sunday After Pentecost (Lectionary 22), AD 2025 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.

Humility and pride are the archetypes of spiritual warfare within the Christian faith. Satan, after all, is the spirit of pride, the great and primordial serpent who ruined the world. And his archfoe Michael, Archangel Prince of the Heavenly Host, takes as his name the battle-cry מִיכָאֵל, “Who is like God?” Michael prevails not due to his strength but due to his humility, his faith that God is good.

Pride is the primal sin from which all evils flow, the self-love that separates souls from love of God and neighbor. Yet surely there are things of which we justly should be proud, yes? Are we not proud of our children, of the people they become? Are we not proud of our spouses, and the wonderful things they accomplish? Are we not proud of our friends, who make our lives worthwhile? And are we not proud of the good that we do, when we see how others may benefit?

St Paul writes that anyone who boasts ought to boast in the Lord, in the graces which Christ pours out, in us and through us, for us and for others. Elsewhere he writes that if we must compete, then let us outdo one another in showing honor to one another. Humility here is not self-abasement, not autoflagellation. Humility here is simply love. And Christ calls us to love our neighbor, not more than ourselves, not less than ourselves, but as ourselves. For who can love another if he does not love himself?

Such love is not pride in the sinful sense. Rather, it is the spiritual virtue to look upon ourselves, to look in the mirror, without flinching; to recognize our image, warts and all; and yet to see the Image of God—the Christ within us, in Spirit and in Sacrament—just as we see Him in everybody else. God loves us infinitely. God loves us as He loves Himself. God is love, and so love is the root of all reality, the Alpha and Omega from which we are born and to whom we return.

Or put more pithily: Humility isn’t thinking less of yourself. It’s thinking of yourself less.

Now that’s good advice, insofar as it goes. But we aren’t to be humble just because it is polite. We aren’t called to love one another simply to be nice. Love is not a sentiment. Love is the core of who we are. It’s both what makes us human, and what makes us divine. We cannot know ourselves, let alone our God, if we in pride neglect to love each other. And to better elucidate this, I’m going to turn now to the words of perhaps the greatest theologian of the 20th century, Fr Sergius Bulgakov.

Here’s just a chunk from the introduction of one of his books:

God-Love created human beings for love. The human heart wants to love and thirsts to be loved. It suffers when it does not love and thirsts to be loved. It wants to expand, to make room in itself, in its own life, for other lives; going out of itself it seeks to melt, to lose itself in the other, to become the other for its own self, to drown in the ocean of universal love.

To lose its own soul in order to save it—such is the law of love as it is shown by the Word [Jesus Christ] who established this law.

To discover abundant wealth in spiritual poverty, to live not for oneself but with all and for all, to become in all of one’s life the other for one’s own self, to become in one’s self the not-self, in one’s own, the not-own, in emptying oneself to become filled,  in humbling oneself to be exalted, to live in love, to become love according to the image of the Holy [...] Trinity—such is the frontier for human nature.

Being-closed-in-on-oneself, limitedness, self-love, self-desire, and self-worship are unnatural for a human being. That is the lot of sinful, fallen, perverted human nature, and not that of nature’s law in its power and glory […] A human being lives only to the degree and by how much it loves, and it dies to the extent and by how much it does not love. The one who loves is rich, for one becomes rich in God-Love.

Created after the image of God, who created everything by love and who embraced everything by love, the human being is called to make room in its own love for everyone and everything. It only begins the first lessons of love; before it lies the life of the future age, all of eternity, which can be filled only by love, for there is no life and there is no eternity in non-love [...]

The power of love, its resilience, is concentrated in a personal center from which it proceeds and to which it returns. The blessedness of love is in this ceaseless dying and resurrection of the personal I.

Did you get all that? It probably sounds better in Russian.

Fr Bulgakov insists that we, like Christ, are not known, are not fully revealed as ourselves, until we pour out our lives, for love of one another, into one another. To know who we are as children of God, each of us must send her soul into someone else, to recognize herself in the other, that it then may be returned to her in glory, in resurrection. That’s how love works, how love gives us life: I pour out myself into you, and you pour myself back into me. There is, in fact, no me without you.

And the flow of that life, the movement of that self or soul, is love. Just as God the Father forever pours out His Being into God the Son, and God the Son forever pours out His Knowledge back into the Father, such that the eternal exchange between them is their Life and Breath and Spirit, making the Three together One God; so we who are made in the Image of God are only truly human when we pour out our lives into one another, for one another, such that the exchange of love and life and being makes us one humanity in Jesus Christ.

Love, then, isn’t just what we’re meant to do; it’s who we’re made to be.

I think this is particularly difficult for Americans. We have been raised in the cult of the individual, the cult of consumerism. We think that in order to truly be ourselves, we must be freed from any and all obligations unto others. We think our souls consist of the choices that we make, the purchases we take, just me and my credit card on the Holy River Amazon. Spouses hold us down, children hold us back, and neighbors need to close their doors and mind their own damn business, right?

We cut ourselves off from everyone, imagining that this will set us free. But all we’re really doing is curving in upon ourselves, like flowers cut off from the sun. You are not solely your own subjective experience. You are also who you are in the eyes and hearts of others. And I don’t mean this in a social anxiety kind of way. I mean that we only know ourselves in our love of neighbor. The part of me I give to you, you then give back to me. And so I know that I am real, because I am loved.

This is why the humble are exalted; not because they’re earning brownie points with God, but because they rejoice in others, such that others’ joy is their own. Anyone who’s ever loved knows that this is true. Who wouldn’t trade his happiness for the happiness of his child? Who wouldn’t take the hardship of a friend upon herself? Christ crucified was happy, for His death has saved us all! He poured out Himself for the world and so has conquered death and hell.

Dear Christians, let us love one another. Let us humble ourselves for the good of our neighbors. Not because the Lord is keeping score; we’re far beyond that now. But simply because to live as Christ—He in us and we in Him—this is our salvation, and resurrection, and everlasting life.

Love only yourself, and you’ll have no self, just a serpent wound ‘round your heart. Yet love one another as Christ loves you, and you will rise immortal.

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

Pertinent Links

RDG Stout

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St Peter’s Lutheran

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Nidaros Lutheran

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