The following sermon was shared at St. John’s Episcopal Church on Matthew 16:21-28.
This is one of those Gospel passages where I could literally only read page after page of what others have written about it.
It also feels like I could read everything that has been said, and no one would be completely satisfied.
And who am I to add to what’s been said about “dying” to myself? Have I applied it to my life? I’ve at least spent a lot of time thinking about cheap grace and the cost of discipleship. Cheap grace is when we want God to give us everything while we offer God as little as possible.
In the pursuit of self-sacrifice and costly discipleship, we can go to another extreme of toxic self-denial. One author writes about the tension this passage introduces as denying yourself without destroying yourself.
I wonder if some of us have struggled to receive anything helpful from this passage because it can be twisted into an attack on having an identity. In addition, a scholar I know shared that liberation and womanist theologians have noted how this passage has been misused to weigh down women and minority groups by calling their loss of agency a spiritual benefit.
The tension in this passage about dying to ourselves doesn’t stop there.
Just last Sunday we read in Romans 12 about the unique gifts God gives us. Clearly our individual abilities and attributes matter as we join together in the body of Christ. There is a place for our “selves” as part of God’s greater whole. We aren’t supposed to disappear when we are joined with Christ.
In fact, a sense of your personality, strengths, weaknesses, gifts, preferences, and tendencies can be valuable and enlightening. It can be liberating to understand yourself if you grew up in a more repressive religious culture that suppresses individualism for the sake of conformity to nitpicking, overreaching legalistic rules.
The older I get, the more comfortable I become with myself and the more accepting of who I am as a quieter introvert. The other day I saw an ad for a t-shirt that said, “I like woodworking and maybe 3 people.” That was close to my reality, but not quite, since there are four other members of my family. That sort of self-realization isn’t unique these days.
Oscar Wilde quipped, “Be yourself; everyone else is taken.”
Dr. Seuss wrote, “Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter, and those who matter don’t mind.”
There is a lot of peace and contentment to be found when we come to God and others as ourselves and offer ourselves to God’s service as we are, not as we wish we were.
Now, we have the daunting task of colliding the common wisdom of today about being yourself with the message of Jesus in this Gospel passage. It sounds like Jesus is almost contradicting the wisdom of “being yourself” in your unique, gifted way.
Are we supposed to be ourselves OR let our “selves” die?
I imagine Jesus looking at me with a straight face and saying, “Yes.”
How do we reconcile the perceived need to figure out who we are with the words of Jesus about the cost of following him?
I wonder if we see a tension here between how we think our lives have to be compared to how God sees the reality of our world. There is room for our identities and gifts as we live in step with God, but it’s easy to go off course as our desires and vision become entangled with other priorities and values.
Peter displayed a very understandable, very human desire to maintain control that caused him to suggest a different path than Jesus’. Perhaps our understandable desires for control and predictability often oppose where Jesus is going. This wasn’t the last time that Peter had to rethink his assumptions and beliefs in order to follow Jesus.
Asserting control over what we can’t influence causes much anxiety in our lives. I would also guess that Jesus’ over-the-top response says more about his inner struggle than it does about Peter, a work in progress as a disciple.
Taking up your cross is a difficult image and concept for us to translate into our time, even if we can explain it academically. Jesus had a mission, and it was a fate that no one would willingly choose. It was the cruelest form of death devised by an Empire known for its innovative cruelty and violence.
How do we translate that to today? What does it mean to carry your cross at a time when every form of the death penalty is hotly debated as inhumane?
We can start with the concept of being different, of choosing to question the status quo and to even live in such a way that others can’t imagine why you’re making a choice that runs contrary to conventional wisdom. It may even seem foolish, a kind of death to the values and priorities of our time.
It could look like:
Generosity that appears wasteful
Kindness to those who offend us
Mercy to those who are undeserving
Simplicity when the norm is to accumulate.
Those seem rather tame in comparison to Jesus’ message about a cross and death, but I think it’s OK to gradually find our way along the path of Jesus, shifting to his way of living.
Living with the values of God’s Kingdom that Jesus put into practice puts us at odds with the priorities of our wider culture. There is a clash between an Empire and the Kingdom values of Jesus. There is a real tension between a suffering servant who saves through self-sacrifice and an Empire that claimed to “save” others through conquest.
In addition to the conflict between Jesus and the wider culture and politics, there is a personal tension to consider.
We make decisions every day about what to buy, who to serve, where to go, and when to rest. What is the driving force behind those decisions? What are we trying to build?
I’ll bet that most of us are trying to build a measure of stability. From my imperfect perspective, I can’t see anything wrong with that. But the things we accumulate, value, and pursue can disconnect us from the reality of God.
Thomas Merton taught about the struggle between the false self as opposed to the true self found in God. He explained the idea of losing your life to find it as holding onto a false self that we surrender to God. Then we become free to receive the true self as beloved children of God.
This was how Merton made sense of this passage without turning it into an attack on the good parts of who we are as individuals. We live our lives with this ongoing tension between our false selves fabricated from our surrounding culture or personal preferences and our true selves that are defined by God.
Merton wrote in The New Seeds of Contemplation:
My false and private self is the one who wants to exist outside the reach of God’s will and God’s love—outside of reality and outside of life. And such a self cannot help but be an illusion…
[He continues:]
We are not very good at recognizing illusions, least of all the ones we cherish about ourselves. . . . For most of the people in the world, there is no greater subjective reality than this false self of theirs, which does not even exist.
So much of what Jesus taught could be boiled down to love God and love your neighbors as yourselves. This Gospel passage hits a little different. We are told to deny ourselves, to save our lives by giving our lives up. Yes, we should love God so much that we put God above all else, but where does that leave ourselves?
If Merton is right, perhaps Jesus is getting at the great risk and reward of following him. We give up what we think is valuable and important in order to receive our true identity as beloved children of God with unique gifts and talents. We have to let go of what we’ve picked up along the way that obscures the truly worthwhile gifts of God.
There have been fork in the road moments in my life where I’ve had to make choices or felt a shift within that made one path the more obvious choice. When we speak of spiritual formation, we could say that God can form us into people with values and passions oriented closer to the way of Jesus.
I don’t think I’ve made any great sacrifices in my life to follow Jesus, but I spent a great deal of my life building a career as a Christian author before waving the white flag. That was a bad career on many fronts, but I ultimately had to draw the line when I felt God calling me in directions that the industry wasn’t going, and likely will never go.
There were several red flags along the way, but the deciding moment came when so many Christians in those circles fused their faith with right-wing political power and “media”.
The Kingdom of God does not serve any earthly political party. Resisting that shift into politics was an easy decision for me, but the implications for my career were hard to accept. Yet, stepping back helped me get a better handle on my identity before God and others apart from that career.
Can Jesus give us something better, helping us discover what we may have struggled to find on our own while clinging to illusions and misplaced priorities? In my limited experience, I believe he can and will.
That is the risk of following Jesus. It can feel like we are giving up everything that is valued in our culture, but on the other side of the sacrifices and surrendering, we can receive a truer identity we may have never discovered on our own.
Photo by Levi Meir Clancy on Unsplash
Ed Cyzewski: Author // Contemplative 