Homilies for Pentecost 2 - 3

Second Sunday After Pentecost

June 5, 1994

St. George's Episcopal Church

Le Mars, Iowa Mark 3.20-35

No Loopholes

"Truly I tell you, people will be forgiven for their sins and whatever blasphemies they utter; but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit can never have forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin." Mark 3:28-29

This morning's text from Mark's gospel chapter 3 is one of those biblical passages that should not be read in the Church without commentary and explanation. At face value, Jesus seems to say that there's something a person can do that even Jesus' coming death cannot make right, that we could, after all, find ourselves beyond the reach of the saving power of his cross and resurrection because of our bad behavior. The idea that there might be something we could do or say that would put us beyond all hope of God's love and forgiveness is bad news. These verses have made a lot of people miserable, people, equipped with overactive superegos, who are prone to think, fatalistically, that if there's an unforgivable sin, they're sure to commit it sooner or later, and probably have already.

There's a famous old movie scene of W.C. Fields leafing through the Bible. Someone asks him what he's doing. He says "I'm looking for loopholes." The humor takes off from the popular idea of the Bible as expressing a list of rules -- just the sort of rules Fields had a great time breaking -- where God says: "Do this and don't do that or else...!" So that an old sinner like W.C. Fields can scrutinize the fine print, seeing if there's some way to break the rules and still escape the penalties.

Obviously, that's a totally misleading picture: God doesn't accept us because we do good things, and he doesn't reject us for doing bad things. If there's one thing we can say for sure it's that the whole point of the Bible is nothing like that. Our relation to God depends not on how good or bad we manage to be, but on his grace. Salvation is by grace, through faith. In the shadow of Jesus on the cross all our goodness and badness becomes like nothing; nothing finally matters but the goodness of Jesus, and God graciously counting that goodness as though it were ours. When God looks at you and me what matters is not what's weak, foolish, proud and fearful, dishonest, selfish and plain bad. What counts in his sight -- counts as though it was us there -- is Jesus, perfectly obedient, perfectly trusting his Father.

All the world's religions tell us what we have to do to be o.k. in God's sight, to be at peace and reconciled with the ultimate reality. What's unique about Christianity, what makes it not fit in very well with the other things people call religions is just this: it's simply not about what we have to do to make ourselves worthy of God, to get on God's good side; it's about how God accepts us as we are. Conventionally conceived, religion is basically for people who hold out some hope of being good, all things considered even good enough to satisfy God. There's a well-known scenario in which God weighs the good things we've done against the bad things and rewards or punishes us depending on which way the scale of divine justice tilts. That makes sense from the normal human religious perspective, but it's utterly alien to the Christian faith. Jesus is for those who have given up on being good enough, who have nowhere to turn but to God's grace. We see ourselves as accepted unconditionally, or not at all. Either Jesus' righteousness is enough or there's no hope for me. God's way of doing things isn't about weighing sins against good deeds, about keeping score, getting even. It's about God's steadfast love, about God the redeemer putting himself in our place, doing for us precisely the one thing we cannot do for ourselves; it's about God in Jesus Christ "stretching out his arms on the hard wood of the cross so that everyone might come within the reach of his saving embrace."

So this text from Mark's gospel is difficult: it sounds as though not W.C. Fields, but God, has found a loophole. As though the crucified Christ is almost, but not quite, good enough, as though there's a loophole, there in the small print of the New Testament. The sort of thing you discover in your insurance policy only after the disaster. Sorry, this sort of thing isn't covered!

Once we have heard and experienced the good news of God's grace it's obvious that this can't be what Jesus is saying here: there are no loopholes in the gospel. Jesus utters this warning to people Mark identifies as the scribes from Jerusalem (v. 22). He warns them in this dire way in response to their contention that he, Jesus, is not from God, not God's agent and representative among them, but that he is evil, acting on behalf of Satan. The point here is not merely that they did not believe that Jesus is God among us, nor even that they disbelieved this -- after all, what people believe isn't in their control; we can't choose to believe or disbelieve -- it is, I think, that they rejected the very idea of such a person as this being God's anointed. This scruffy Galilean is obviously lacking in religious credentials, clearly not righteous in the way these religious authorities from Jerusalem prided themselves on being righteous, as being the people God counted as good enough. He represents a God they would gladly kill, if that's what it takes to safeguard their righteousness, their religious power and moral authority.

Recall that it is Jesus' healing people and delivering them from the demonic powers that triggers the debate. Jesus argues with them about this, but his reasoning merely reveals that their position is not a matter of honest skepticism or intellectual error. They reject the very possibility of God rescuing, redeeming, healing all these people, irrespective of their merit, without preconditions and without questions, simply as they come, in need, to Jesus. For them, to accuse Jesus of being allied with evil personified, to claim that "by the ruler of demons he casts out demons" (v. 22) is to confess, in the least ambiguous way possible, that they will have nothing to do with this sort of God. God, they think, can't be like that. That God would not be holy enough for them. They want nothing to do with this idea of a God of grace. They reject and condemn any God who would act the way this disreputable man from Galilee acts, for it's painfully and dangerously clear that such a God would not judge by human standards of who's worthy and who isn't. This is a God ready to accept all who come to him, however ill-informed, unprepared, and unworthy. This is a God they could accept only at the cost of abandoning their faith in their own righteousness, and putting themselves under the care of his mercy.

The "unforgivable sin" is simply the attitude, the decision, that refuses God's grace and insists upon the adequacy of one's own goodness. No wrongdoing, however horrendous, can separate us from the love of God we encounter in Jesus Christ. Nothing can keep us from the love of God but the persistent choice to be, as we read in the third chapter of Genesis, like God, knowing good and evil, in no need of God in virtue of being good enough on one's own, the source of one's own life and goodness, to be, self-justifying, ultimately inclined to get rid of God and take his place.

Forgiving is a two-way reality, a personal relationship between the forgiver and the person being forgiven. It can't happen unless the person being forgiven acknowledges his neediness. It's impossible to forgive someone who is convinced he does not need to be forgiven; not even God can do it.

The unforgivable sin is simply, but awfully, to regard oneself as not needing God's grace, as rejecting God's grace made flesh in Jesus. The biblical witness has left us pretty much in the dark as to what, precisely, counts as rejecting Jesus. We don't really know where the line might be between rejecting Jesus and just not accepting him. Jesus says that those who are not for him are against him, and he also says that those who are not against him are for him. Nor do we really know the time frame: some passages indicate that everything is decided in this life; others tell us that in the end, every knee will bow to Jesus. It really is a good thing that we don't know these things. It's not our job to be saying who is saved and who isn't, who's in and who's out. Our job is to bear witness that everyone, without exception, stands in need of God's grace; there are no loopholes; God must in the end be trusted as the God of Grace we meet in Jesus, not a God we can satisfy by being good enough. There is a real and terrible possibility for each human being of rejecting that grace and losing God forever. And it's our job to be bearing witness that God can in the end be trusted; he will not allow us to be lost to him if it's possible for him to prevent it. He has shown he will go to any extent to redeem us and make reconciliation. There are no loopholes in his way of salvation.

Amen.

Third Sunday After Pentecost

2 July 2000

St. George's Episcopal Church

Le Mars, Iowa

Mark 5.22-24, 35-43

The Giver

The theme of generosity and giving runs through today's lessons. In Deuteronomy we heard an admonition to lend without being concerned that someone might find a loophole to avoid paying us back. In the psalm, we heard the praises of those who deal generously with the poor, and in second Corinthians, we hear St. Paul speak highly of the willingness of the Macedonian churches to share what little they had. And in the story from Mark's gospel Jesus gives the gift of life to a young girl. However, the circumstances of this act of generosity on Jesus' part are a bit strange. Jesus is a secretive and perhaps even reluctant giver.

First, we should slow down Mark's rapid-fire narrative of Jesus' ministry and dwell on the Jesus we meet there. He's very different from Jesus as he is often imagined and portrayed. He's strikingly different than the Jesus we see, e.g., in movies. There, at least before passion week, he's always in control; he's the serene holy man calmly dispensing his spiritual wisdom to the respectfully attentive crowds. I find that Jesus pretty eerie and not particularly human or lovable. The real, historical Jesus who all but jumps out at us from the pages of Mark's gospel is radically different from that sentimental paragon of pastoral religiosity. There's nothing serene about his situation: conflict, chaos and confusion follow him wherever he goes. Just in the several chapters that lead up to today's story his cousin and mentor John the Baptizer has been thrown into prison by the authorities, Jesus has been misunderstood by everyone, even his own family and closest friends, he's been accused of being both crazy and demon possessed, and he's had some harrowing encounters with those who really were possessed by demons. The religious powers have already taken note of him, decided he's a threat to them, and started to plot against him. The crowds from the towns of north Galilee and the surrounding countryside at least are wildly enthusiastic about him, or at least about his power to heal the sick. Excited mobs pursue him, but for the most part Jesus tries to avoid them. Jesus and his disciples are harassed and harried. Getting away to eat or pray or simply to get one's bearings becomes a major concern. These tumultuous crowds are scary; on occasion there's a real danger of being crushed and they have to escape for their physical safety. Maybe the image to have is of the well-meaning American tourist who walks through Calcutta handing out dollar bills to beggars; almost instantly a surging crowd gathers and he's engulfed by a swelling mass of desperate people. Or one of those horrific scenes of a rock concert or soccer match where people are trampled by the hysterical crowd.

It's not entirely clear what it was, but after Jesus is baptized by John, he had a plan: he sets out with a specific message to preach: "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent and believe in the good news." Part of his agenda seems to have been provoking certain highly symbolic confrontations with the religious authorities, and these sometimes involved healings. However, the healings, as such, seem to be incidental to his mission as he originally conceived it. Typically, he does them not because of his understanding of his task of preaching the kingdom of God, but despite it. In part, I think, this is because the people's frenzied response to them threatens to derail Jesus' prophetic mission. Also, there were, in first century Palestine, well-established categories of faith healer or miracle worker and Jesus refuses to be understood in terms of them. He has come to understand himself and his role as absolutely unique.

But there's a world of need around him. The hapless, helpless people want to get to Jesus. Yet, as we know from Mark, again and again Jesus is moved by pity and helps. Jesus gives, Jesus heals, even when it is against his better judgment to do so; even when doing so promises to exacerbate an already bad situation and put his mission in jeopardy. Right there we see who Jesus is: God being there for us in the mess of unruly human need.

Things move to a new level in today's story, but with little fanfare. It looks like one more interruption, one more frightened individual pleading for help. This time it's Jairus, identified by Mark as a leader of the synagogue; he wants Jesus to come and heal his daughter. Once again, Jesus does not seem inclined to do it; our text reports that Jairus "begged him repeatedly," and he agrees to go. Not surprisingly, even his interruptions have interruptions. On his way to Jairus' house Jesus is accosted by a hemorrhaging woman, and he heals her. Meanwhile, the little girl dies and messengers bearing the news arrive; Jesus need not bother to come. He goes anyway, contending that the child is only asleep, not really dead.

There have been various takes on this: the child was actually comatose and the people mistakenly thought she was dead. Or she really was dead but Jesus refers to death as "sleep" to teach that, for those who have faith in him, it is a temporary and not ultimately fearful matter. Neither of these interpretations are at all plausible. The only reading that makes sense to me in the context of Mark's gospel is that the child is dead, Jesus knows it, and knows he is going to bring her back, but also knows that if people find out he's done this his mission will be at even greater risk, the crowds will, he fears, go entirely berserk if they figure out that he can raise the dead.

We might have thought that Jesus had a great opportunity here and missed it. To retrieve from death itself the child of a religious leader might have significantly advanced Jesus' ministry, but even this demonstration of his authority was something for which he had no use. Thus he orders the child's parents not to tell people what he's done, but instead to promote the fiction that the child hadn't been dead. We get the idea that Jesus feels he probably shouldn't have done it, but that he can't help himself when faced with these people's need and loss.

Mark's story reminds me of a story from the Pali Canon of Tibetan Buddhism: Kisa Gotami was a woman who had lost her first-born son. Grief-stricken and carrying his dead body, she roamed the streets looking for medicine or an antidote that could restore him to life. Finally, she took the body to the Buddha. The Buddha listened to her pleas with compassion and said, "Go enter the city, make the rounds of the entire city, beginning at the beginning, and in whatever home no one has ever died, from that house fetch tiny grains of mustard seed." Kisa Gotami went from house to house to find a mustard seed from a household untouched by death. She soon realized that the task the Buddha had set was impossible, and she brought the body of her son to the cremation grounds. Gotami returned to the Buddha for instruction on the truth. The Buddha taught her that there is only one unchangeable law in the universe: All things are impermanent. His aim was to free the grieving mother from her attachment to this particular, ephemeral life and bring her into the peace, the wise detachment that accepts the inevitability of death and loss.

How starkly the compassion of Jesus differs from that of the compassionate Buddha. The Buddha is at peace; he's not plunged into the sea of human need and suffering. He calmly floats above it. He's portrayed as having found the way out of it and his compassion lies in his willingness to show that way to others. Jesus has no way out of it. He sees the suffering of those around him, the poor, the sick, the possessed, the dying, and his only response is to make it his own. He descends into it; he's undone; he dies. Whatever his initial self-understanding, whatever his timetable for revealing the will of his Father to the house of Israel, Jesus' love for us draws him deeper and deeper into the overwhelming need of sinful humanity. He is pursued and pressed upon by our need and finally broken for us. His is not a peaceful way of acceptance and escape, but one that bears the pain of relentless commitment to weak and sinful human beings.

Jesus the man of sorrows is the reality in our world of flesh and blood of what God always is: self-giving love. The God who was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself, is the God who does not stick to the plan, nor follow the rules, nor in the end permit anything to get in the way of his coming to us, being for us and with us, bringing our lives out of death and giving us himself.

Amen.

Third Sunday in Pentecost

23 June 2002

St. George's Episcopal Church

Le Mars, Iowa

Mark 5.22-43

A God With Skin On

This season of Pentecost we celebrate the descent of the Spirit, God's very presence here in our world, at once palpable and elusive. But where in the world is he? How do we discern the Spirit? How do we know when and where and how God works? The question creates a dilemma: on the one hand, trying to get precise about where God's Spirit acts and where he doesn't gets pretty weird. I grew up in a denomination whose worship services had no liturgical structure; instead, we sat in silence until the Spirit moved one of the men – he didn’t believe in moving women – to stand up to say a prayer, call for the singing of a hymn, or to read and hold forth on a biblical text. This usually went pretty well, but occasionally two men rose to speak simultaneously. To me, this phenomenon posed an intriguing question: which one of them wasn't moved by the Spirit? Which one was about to speak for God, which was just acting on his own recognizance? Where was the wind of the Spirit blowing and who was just a source of hot air? The Spirit wouldn't inspire both to talk at once, would he? When I was a boy I considered this a really interesting question, though my parents found it merely annoying and wisely told me to shut up.

Later, I lived in a southern city where an old lady owned a valuable piece of property on the edge of a famous fundamentalist university. One day the university’s president, “Dr. Bob Jr.,” came to visit her. He told her that the night before God had spoken to him in a dream and told him that he wanted her to donate her property to the university. But she was unconvinced. She replied, “Well, Dr. Bob, I spoke to the Lord last night and he didn’t say a thing about it!” I confess that it’s hard to take seriously the claims people make about God’s Spirit guiding them in the here and now.

But on the other hand, we risk making our talk about the third person of the Holy Trinity empty, piously saying we believe God is at work here in the real world but never willing to say here he is! I want to look in today's lesson from Mark's gospel for some ideas on how the Spirit moves. For the one thing we know for sure is that Jesus did what he did because that’s how the Spirit led him. He wasn’t equipped with magical powers; everything he did he did because of his faithful obedience to his Father. That means everything Jesus did he did because God’s Spirit was directing him. So it makes sense to look to him as our model of what it means to discern the Spirit.

To set the stage here in Mark, Chapter Five: Jesus has just come from across the lake where he threw the demons out of ‘Legion’ and let them go to the pigs, who promptly ran into the water and drowned. Now Jesus meets Jairus, who pleads with him to heal his daughter, who is almost dead. I think it's important to note that Jesus really doesn’t want to do this – Mark says that Jairus has to beg him repeatedly -- but Jesus finally agrees and sets out toward the sick child. This is of a piece with what’s been happening since the beginning of Mark. Jesus has a plan, and it calls for teaching about the imminent coming of the Kingdom of God, but things don’t always work out as he intends. His healings so excite people that soon he is pursued everywhere by crowds short on understanding but eager for miracles. He can hardly get away even to eat or to pray. Jesus’ agenda is to go into the towns, into the synagogues, to teach and to explain the Kingdom but because of the mobs he can’t; he has to hide out in the countryside. When he does come to town there’s that crazy scene where Simon and Andrew’s house is so overrun that some guys cut a hole in the roof to get their paralyzed friend to Jesus. He has the disciples ferry him back and forth across the lake in not very successful attempts to get away. Jesus must be frustrated, harassed and harried by the unruly hordes of frantic, desperate people. Any idea we might have of Jesus being serenely in charge, calmly moving through the steps of a prearranged scenario, with everything going according to plan, falls apart when we pay attention to Mark’s story.

Now here’s this important person, this leader of the synagogue, falling at Jesus’ feet and begging him to perform another healing. This can only further incite the crowds and further impede Jesus’ divine mission to lead Israel to embrace its long-awaited salvation. But Jesus agrees to go, even though it’s against his better judgment. Not for the first time, he lets someone in need get in the way of the plan. I suspect that precisely here is where we should be alert to the Spirit at work, precisely here where our efforts to do God’s business aren’t going too well, where things are getting out of control, where someone needs help but helping doesn’t fit into our larger schemes. There’s no reason to imagine, as so many do, that God’s Spirit can only act when we are spontaneous, and that he can’t be at work by way of our reasoning, our traditions, even our creaking Episcopal institutions. I truly believe he is. Yet God is a God who breaks into our world, his Spirit moving us toward the hurting people God loves, at cross purposes to our agendas, against the grain of our best religious understanding. I submit that when we find ourselves getting pushed in that direction, it’s a good bet that it’s God’s Spirit who is doing the pushing.

On his way to Jairus’ daughter - this is the part the lectionary leaves out -- Jesus is swarmed by a crowd hoping for signs and wonders, just as he feared. In the melee a woman who has been afflicted with a hemorrhage for a dozen years manages to touch his robe and is healed. Keep in mind that according to the Law this unfortunate, bleeding woman was in a permanent state of uncleanness, an outcast. In fact anything and anyone she touched became ritually unclean too, separated from the community of God’s people. But when she touches Jesus something wonderful happens: Jesus is not made unclean; instead, she is healed, made whole, restored to her place in God’s world. This is not of course because Jesus has supernatural powers; it’s because her faith in Jesus is faith that God is at last fulfilling his promise to create a new Israel in which all are made whole. The Spirit draws Jesus into saving contact with this outcast woman; that too, seems to me to be characteristic of how the Spirit moves.

Indeed, the Holy Spirit seems to have a definite attraction for all that’s unclean and cast aside, for whatever’s dismissed as worthless, dirty and dead. Recall that Jesus has just come from the other side of the lake where he’s been consorting with Gentiles, demons, pigs and the dead (he meets Legion coming out of a graveyard). According to the rules, Jesus is unclean eight ways to Sunday even before the Spirit moves him into that crowd and into the reach of that bleeding woman, even before the Spirit sends him to the dead child.

For she is already dead when Jesus arrives. (In Matthew’s version she’s dead when Jairus finds Jesus.) His efforts to fool the people there into thinking she was really just asleep show that doesn’t want to be raising the dead, not now, not yet, that he’s doing it because he’s moved by a reckless compassion and in that, I think, moved by God’s Spirit. I imagine Jesus resonating to Jairus’ love for the child, a love that leads him to humiliate himself. A girl child is, after all, essentially a piece of property and only an inordinate amount of affection leads him, a member of the religious establishment, to grovel at Jesus’ feet. Jesus does not want the pandemonium that will ensue if it becomes known that he can bring people back from death, but here, faced with human suffering, with death and loss, he acts not in accord with the sensible plan, but out of God’s implacable love for us, a love that can’t be contained, not by law or propriety, not even by Jesus’ own conception of his mission. This love leads Jesus to touch the dead. He takes the child by the hand. Here again by rights he is ritually defiled but instead the flow of uncleanness, of separation from God and from the human community is reversed; the child returns to life and to the love of her family.

God’s Spirit moves with freedom and audacity; unpredictably yet not at random. When we’re losing control, when the plan is going off the rails, when human mess and need gets in the way of what we think we should be doing, there we should get quiet and listen for the small voice of God’s Spirit. His work in the world contrasts with the deep grooves of caution, habit and superstition in which we so often move. There’s a legend in the Armenian Orthodox Church that many years ago there was a cat that kept interfering in a church service. One of the monks decided to tie up the cat during the prayers and then release it afterward. This became his job. Years later, after the monk died, people forgot the original reason and went out and looked for a cat to tie up during prayers. (Yossi Klein Halevi, At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden, p. 177).

Jesus has ascended but has given us his Spirit to show us the true shape of his work in this world. Probably a lot of what we think is that work amounts to tying up the cat. God was in Christ, God was in the flesh, Jesus was led by the Spirit to proclaim the good news, to heal, to make whole, to bring life out of death. Now he has made this work ours. Anne Lamott tells the story of a little girl who was crying in the night. When her mother came to comfort her the girl said she was too afraid of the dark to sleep. “But God’s with you, comforting and protecting you,” the mother said. “But I need someone with skin on, the little girl said” (Blue Shoe, p. 255). All this talk of the Holy Spirit can seem ethereal, having not much to do with this world’s insistent and all too real concerns, with its sorrows and fears, its need for a saving God. But to hear and follow God’s Spirit, the Spirit of Jesus himself, is to be for this world God with skin on, God made real enough to heal and save.

Amen.

Third Sunday in Pentecost

20 June 2004

St. George’s Episcopal Church

Le Mars, Iowa

Luke 9:18-24

You…have clothed yourselves with Christ. Galatians 3.27

Are You Putting Me On?

In the Lithuanian shetl of Eisysky, the Jewish population of four thousand was liquidated on September 25, 1941. In groups of 250 the people were taken to the old Jewish cemetery in front of open ditches. They were ordered to undress and stand at the edge of the open graves. They were shot in the back of the head by Lithuanian guards with the encouragement and help of the local people. Among the Jews that day was one of the shetl’s teachers Reb Micahlowsky, and his youngest son, Zvi, age sixteen. Father and son stood at the edge of the open pit, trying to comfort each other in their last moments. Young Zvi was counting the bullets and the intervals between one volley of fire and the next. As the executioners were aiming their guns, Zvi fell into the grave a split second before the volley of fire would have hit him. He felt the bodies piling up on top of him and covering him. He felt the streams of blood around him and the trembling pile of dying bodies moving beneath him. Time passed. It became cold and dark. Above him, the shooting died down. Zvi crawled out from under the bodies of the mass grave up into the cold, dead night. He could hear the murderers signing and drinking, celebrating their accomplishment: after 800 years, the town was Judenfrei, cleansed of Jews. At the far end of the cemetery, in the direction of the church, were a few Christian homes. Zvi knew them all. Naked, covered with blood, he knocked on the first door. The door opened. A peasant was holding a lamp he had looted earlier that day from a Jewish home. “Please let me in!” Zvi pleaded. The peasant lifted the lamp and examined the boy closely. “Jew, go back to the grave where you belong!” he shouted and slammed the door. Zvi knocked on other doors but the response was the same. Near the forest lived a widow whom Zvi knew too. He decided to knock on her door. The old woman opened her door. “Let me in,” Zvi begged. “Jew, go back to the grave at the old cemetery!” “I am your Lord, Jesus Christ. I came down from the cross. Look at me ― the blood, the pain, the suffering of the innocent. Let me in,” said Zvi Michlowsky. Crying “My God, My God” the widow crossed herself and fell at his bloodstained feet. She took him in, cleaned him, dressed him, and cared for him. After three days he left, commanding her to keep his visit to Earth a secret, and made his way to the resistance. (From Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust, Yaffa Eliach as related by Joel Marcus, Jesus and the Holocaust.)

This is the story that came to mind when I read the lesson for today from St. Paul’s letter to the Galatian Christians, with its amazing assertion that we wear Christ like a suit of clothes. The Greek word literally means simply “to put on,” but as in modern English, it’s regularly used to express the idea of putting on an article of clothing.

Desperate Zvi Michalowsky at the door of the superstitious old woman: clothed in Christ. Beyond all hope, despised and hunted, as good as dead, already having been in the grave, preposterously out of place ― how enraged those ‘good Christians’ who wanted him dead would be if they knew his imposture ― yet saved because he is absurdly mistaken for Christ. The story is deeply ironic, turning St. Paul on his head, for it’s we gentiles who are saved by passing ourselves off as the suffering Jew, the Christ of Israel, the crucified God. It’s us, disguised as Jesus, unnaturally grafted on to God’s people, made heirs of Abraham according to the promise.

We are clothed with Christ. When God looks at us he sees not what’s wrong with us but what’s right with Jesus. He doesn’t see someone contemptible, lost, hopeless, dead. When God sees us he sees not our faithlessness but the perfect faithfulness of his son. We’re taught to think about God as all seeing, all knowing. When I was a boy, this was a way to keep me in line: even when no one else saw what I was up to, God had me in his sights. He doesn’t miss a thing, and I’d get what I deserved. But Paul’s talking about what God doesn’t see: when God looks at you and me he can’t help but see the face of Jesus. Rather than seeing what’s wrong and wayward in us God our Father sees us as his well-loved children; he loves us as he loves God the Son. Wearing Jesus, we are loved by God as God loves himself, lifted up into the joy-filled life of the everlasting Trinity.

Putting on Christ, we can begin to see ourselves as God sees us. In Luke’s gospel we find the disciples, no doubt priding themselves that, unlike the crowds, who have no clue who Jesus is, but imagine he’s the latest in a long line of prophets, they know he is the Christ, the Messiah, the unique embodiment of God’s so long-awaited deliverance of his people. Yet they don’t understand. They have big ideas about being on the winning side in the coming showdown with God’s enemies. But Jesus cuts them off with his grim prediction of rejection, suffering, and death: their conception of what it means to be the Messiah is radically at odds with God’s. He says his way is the way of the cross: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it.”

What does it mean to deny yourself? I think part of it is that we’re called to forsake our confidence in those things about us that we can’t help feeling rate God’s approval, those things out of which we naturally construct our identities as worthwhile human beings. Those things might be all well and good, but the crucial thing is that they don’t even show up on the radar of God’s loving acceptance of us. Nothing counts here but putting on Christ. We’re always tempted to find something else to wear, some more plausible means of making an identity for ourselves, something more fashionable, or more flattering to our best features, but that’s to reject God’s saving grace in favor of an illusion, a fantasy. In the theological language of the Reformation we’d say Christ’s righteousness is imputed to us, his ‘alien’ goodness reckoned as ours by grace, through faith. Pushing on St. Paul’s metaphor, we might say God’s throwing the mother of all parties; it’s a costume party, and there’s just one costume that gets you in the door.

Paul in Galatians goes on to say there’s something else God doesn’t see: the difference between Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female. The differences that were once all-important, sorting people into those included in and those excluded from God’s loving gaze, recede into insignificance. No matter what we are God regards us as his own, in Christ, inseparably bound to him. We are one in Christ.

To deny yourself, to be ready to lose your life is, I think, to be willing to push anything, no matter how important, into second place, to treat what’s dear to you ―because you know it really does matter a lot― as though it doesn’t count, rather than let it divide people for whom God in Christ gave himself. God wants us to see the way he sees. He sees Christ in us and us in Christ and that’s how he asks us to see one another. Gerard Manly Hopkins’ great poem “As Kingfishers Catch Fire” concludes:

For Christ plays in ten thousand places,

Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his

To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

These concerns are perhaps especially pressing these days, when our church has become a battleground in the ‘culture wars.’ Great things seem to be at stake, matters that threaten to dissolve the unity of our common confession of Jesus Christ. We give lip service to God’s insistence on unity in Christ, but we really see the issues of the day as essential, as exceptional…as more important than the fact that God looks with absolute love upon them no less than us.

Archbishop Rowan Williams, speaking at York Minster last summer, said:

The irreducible fact about the brother or sister [is] that Christ died for them and that the Spirit wants to give something through them. To cling to unity is to cling to those convictions, especially when everything in us cries out for separation …our life with Christ is somehow bound up with our willingness to abide with those we think are sinful and those we think are stupid.

God for Jesus’ sake forgives and accepts us with no strings attached, refusing to let the zillion ways we are inadequate, disloyal, wildly wrong, plain foolish and a menace to all that’s sacred get in his way. That this is the way God deals with us might seem pretty crazy, as crazy as the story of an old Lithuanian woman believing that the Jewish teenager at her door was Jesus Christ. And it might seem almost as crazy to believe that this is the way he expects us to deal with one another. It seems like a joke, as though God is putting us on. But it’s the gospel truth.

Amen.