[Sermon prepared for the Fourth Sunday after Pentecost, June 25, 2023, at St. Mary the Virgin Episcopal Church, Phoenix, Arizona]
✠ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, the Trinity, one in Essence and Undivided. Amen.
“Take up your cross and follow me.”[1]
This command of Our Lord often is applied in jokes and rationalizations, such as, “Oh, him. We’ll he’s definitely someone’s cross to bear, not mine,” or, “Ugh, the doctor put me on a low-cholesterol diet. Well, we all have our cross to bear,” or if one is into mixing metaphors, “I’ll bear that cross when I come to it.”
This command, however, is much more serious than the evasions which we employ to lessen its sting. Both our Gospel and our Epistle today[2] clearly state the unavoidable implications of this command. In the Gospel, Jesus states that to be His disciples, we must be wholly committed, no matter whether our families disagree, whether our coworkers disagree, whether our friends and associates disagree, whether those in authority over us disagree. Our Lord was very clear; the path allows no half measures and carries high risk.
St. Paul, in his typical style, also impresses upon us the price of discipleship, not as a warning of what we are getting into but a pointed reminder of the covenant we made in our baptism. This means altering our old ways of thinking, of acting, of reacting. In other words, as Jesus died on the Cross, we too must die to our old habits, practices, and allegiances so that we might rise anew, even as Jesus had risen from the dead.
By now, you probably can close your eyes and repeat verbatim some of the themes to which I return in homilies time and again. The Word became flesh so that He could proclaim the Good News of the Kingdom of God, so that He might suffer and die and then rise again to free our corrupted Nature from Sin and Death and remake it anew. You may remember from past homilies how baptism is not a simple representation of a metaphoric bath but a real and effective washing away the stain of our old Nature and bringing us to share in the new Nature won for us by Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. I have taught time and again that the real presence of Our Lord in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass feeds us continually with this new Nature given us in our baptism. Indeed, each Sacrament is an action of the Holy Spirit that strengthens us in our new Nature, either to lead His Church, to bind two into one in His presence, to affirm one’s commitment given in baptism later in life, to seek healing for the body, and to seek healing for the soul when we miss the mark and spiritually injure ourselves. Each Sacrament is designed and intended for the creation or maintenance of our new Nature against the perils presented to us in this age.
Speaking of the perils presented to us in this age, this age is a freak-show of peril. We are surrounded daily by provocations that enrage our ire, tempt our gluttony, excite our lusts, enflame our greed, incite us to envy, lull us into sloth, or plunge us into despair. We are surrounded by expectations and obligations by families, friends, colleagues, and leaders; even though they are cloaked by duty, some of these expectations are at their heart manifestations of one sin or another. Perhaps it is a family expectation to maintain a tradition that enforces the impoverishment or oppression of others or keeps alive a feud that has raged far beyond living memory. It is possible that our careers require us to fleece a customer or deny someone in need of a service to which they are entitled. Perhaps our leadership expects us to assist in the systemic oppression of a minority or at least look the other way. Events around us themselves can lead to the near occasion of sin, as it were.
It seems as if it were a conspiracy to drag the individual back into the old nature, to undo the good done at our baptism. Not to fuel anyone’s fires of paranoia, but to a degree this is true. I am not going start quoting The Screwtape Letters for you, but the system as it stands now is designed to drag as many hapless souls into Hell, however one defines Hell, as it can. Many ages ago something threw a spanner in the works and ruined the Creation which God called good from the beginning. Whether individual beings in rebellion against God had decided to help things along is not for our discussion here. Suffice it to say the system has been sabotaged completely enough to function but function badly, and its end result has become not Life as God intended but life spinning toward suffering and destruction.
It is this ruined system that God decided to save by inserting Himself into it and playing by its rules. Rules that stated that since the system tends toward ruin that all who come to be within it spiral to ultimate decay and corruption, ruin and nothingness. In this gambit God offers a Human Nature, bound to the system, perfectly unified with Divine nature not bound to the system but instead owning the system. In that perfect union Corruption met Incorruption, Death met Life, and Nothing met Being, and so these non-essences were filled and lost their power. In His Resurrection, Jesus won for us a new Nature, incorruptible, immortal, and suffused with being,[3] which we put on in our baptism.[4]
The problem is we still carry around that old Nature with us. It is part of our embodiment, part of our essence. It will not pass away until we make it pass away, until we starve it, control it, crucify it,[5] and at the end when our bodies die, it too dies, but unlike our bodies will never rise again. Instead, St. Paul exhorts us to care for our new Nature, to feed it, to nurture it with all we can, manifesting and exercising the fruits of the Holy Spirit who nourishes us in the Holy Sacraments. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, goodness, faithfulness, and self-control become manifest in those who strive to put down those things, those negative behaviours, those sins that contribute toward a downward spiral, those sins which suck the life from others, those sins which suck the life from ourselves. We must shun, avoid, and purge everything that bloats our old Nature, a Nature that is dying despite our best efforts, and will die. If that old Nature is all we have when we die, if we have starved that new Nature, then should we expect to be anything at the Resurrection but an empty shell, devoid of any joy in the joy all around us?
Make no mistake, we still must love our families and our neighbours, offer respect, render evil to no one in malice or retaliation, but prioritize the Way of Life and Peace as Our Saviour has taught us ahead of them. We may win no accolades, respect, or even bland indifference from those around us, but this will win us are brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, and even children among the faithful.[6] What we will gain is a relationship with God, who renews all things and gives life to those who only just come to Him and ask.
Easier said than done, right?
My brothers and sisters, that is why the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews encourages us not to stay away from the assembly of believers,[7] that is, from the Church. That is why St. Paul encourages the Galatian Church to hold each other up in all gentleness, exhorting each other to practice virtue and to leave vice behind.[8] This is why St. Paul multiple times tells the Corinthian Church to mend their fences and remember to love each other, for the greatest thing ever is love.[9] St. John the Apostle stresses that since God is Love, it is our duty to love each other and to hold each other up.[10] Christ died for us, not just one or two, but for us. We cannot do it alone. If we are to practice solitude for some spiritual exercise, it can only be with the prayerful support of brothers and sisters in the Lord upholding us as we engage in cloistered prayer.
No, the assembly is not perfect. So many atrocities have been committed by groups of people, people who were supposed to be Our Lord’s disciples, but it has arisen because they “lost their first love,”[11] that love for God that spills out into love for each other. It is only together that we can succeed, it is only in encouragement to virtue that we feed the new Nature, and it is only in the Sacraments, which require at the bare minimum two mortal participants united in prayer that our new Nature is preserved. Our relationships outside the Church may and likely will rupture. Our relationships within the Church should not.
Only by sharing the load can we take up our cross and follow Him, fearing no one else, for what, truly and eternally, can they do to us?[12]
✠ Through the prayers of the Most Holy Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary, Holy Dominic, and all the saints, Saviour save us. Amen.
[1] Mt. 16.24, Mk. 8.34: “‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” [2] Rom. 6.1b-11, Mt. 10.24-39 [3] Cf. Rom. 6.9-10 [4] Rom. 6.4 [5] Rom. 6.6, cf. Gal. 2.19, 5.24 [6] Mk. 10.30 [7] Heb. 10.25 [8] Gal. 6.1 [9] 1 Cor. 13 passim [10] 1 Jn. 3.14, 4.8 [11] Rev. 2.4 [12] Ps. 118.6
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