Look, Look, and Live! - A Homily for the Fourth Sunday in Lent

A sermon preached by the Very Reverend Tyler Doherty at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on March 10, 2024, the Fourth Sunday in Lent.

We apologize for the inconvenience, but due to recording issues, an audio recording of this sermon is not available.

I’ve always experienced that little throw-away line from Ephesians–“We were by nature children of wrath, like everyone else”--as a surprisingly refreshing source of profound comfort. It might seem a little strange that this rather gloomy diagnosis from the Apostle Paul could open for us a place of springs, but it does. How?

One of the curious things about the Christian life is that it proceeds from an entirely different direction than most other “spiritual paths.” These days, there’s a lot of talk about being your “best self,” your “authentic self,” your “true self.” It makes me wonder how many selves I actually have. Apparently, this true self is located mysteriously within–like an inner light (usually white or blue in shade). Who we are, the scheme goes, is essentially God. We just forget that we are God. 

Our true self, new age mysticisms tell us, shines forth when it’s stripped of its material constraints (like our inconvenient bodies), its inheritance from family of origin, its social-cultural history, its network of relationships, its genetic predispositions, its embeddedness in structures of race, class, gender identity, and sexual orientation. Pure, unblemished, timeless, this self is untouched, unchanged by the vicissitudes, the chances and changes, of life. And when you happen to encounter those chances and changes–an illness, intractable wars in Ukraine and Israel-Palestine, a neighbor who needs a blanket and a cup of coffee--the idea is to remind yourself these nuisances are not really real and go back to being God. Sure, the world’s a mess, but it’s all an illusion.  So don’t worry, be happy! Better yet, be God. Be your true self. Same thing.

Christianity starts from an entirely different diagnosis. God is God and we are not. God is the creator and we are God’s creatures, loved and cherished as God’s children and raised in Him through our election in Jesus Christ. It’s not that we aren’t just our true selves, our authentic selves, enough of the time, but that apart from God’s one-way love we are, “children of wrath like everyone else.” Where secular mysticisms encourage a kind of inward-turning cultivation of feelings of piety, inner knowings and the like, Christianity starts with the premise that there is no one who understands, no one who seeks the Lord, no one who is wise: “I am a worm and no man.” So we call on the name of the Lord. Left to my own devices, absent God’s saving help and grace, I’m most certainly capable of every evil. No use pretending otherwise. Holy Scripture reminds us that we are “dead through our trespasses,” in dire need of the in-breaking otherness of God to save us, raise us, so that God’s life–not just our “best self”--can live through these hands, feet, ear, eyes, and lips for the furtherance of God’s yet to come Kingdom always arriving from a future infinitely more than we can ask or imagine.

While on the face of it this picture might seem an affront to our trimphalist humanist narratives of endless progress and “making the world a better place” through interior cultivation, better information, and heroic service (captured, and tagged, of course, on Instagram), the Christian path is uniquely humble and refreshingly honest in its assessment of the human capacity to improve its way under its own power to a better world. It just can’t.

Holy Scripture takes our capacity for self-centeredness and self-enclosure and the deadly mischief that ensues utterly seriously. More than that, “like everyone else,” establishes solidarity not just with those who do it like we do it, and think like us, who hold the same political positions we do, but with all of fallen humanity and the creation groaning in labor pains, waiting to be born. We’re finally able to come down to earth just a little bit, and acknowledge that we’re “like everyone else”: faulted, foibled, limited, conditioned, and in need of God’s saving help. We’re not perfect and were never meant to be. Our ducks will never be in a row apart from God’s saving help in Jesus Christ who is perfect for us in the gift of Himself to us. As Jason Micheli puts it–”The Good News of the Gospel is that it’s not about you. The Bad News of the Gospel is that it’s not about you.”

Once we realize that we don’t have to save ourselves, and that there is something idolatrous about trying to do so in the first place, a whole new freedom, received as sheer gift and not by our works, is ushered in. As Paul writes in Ephesians, 

But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ-- by grace you have been saved-- and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.

Again and again—in the parable of the Prodgial Son (“While he was yet far off…), or Paul’s assertion in Romans that “While we were yet sinners,” or Jesus the Divine Physician coming to save sinners and raise the dead—we hear that salvation is something given, gifted, wrought for us who are unable to save ourselves: dead in our tracks. That it doesn’t depend on me, that salvation comes from outside and that we have been elected in Jesus Christ since before the foundation of the world, is the best news you’ll ever hear. And yet…

And yet, like the Israelites who are brought out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery only mutter and grumble that the water from the rock, the manna from heaven, the quail that cover the camp in droves aren’t what they prefer, and close in on Moses as their scapegoat, it’s worth pondering our aversion, our intolerance of, and impatience with, free grace. If we can’t recognize our allergy to the gift, we risk missing its astounding, wondrous, prodigal nature altogether. So the Bad News of the Good News is that it’s not about me and my resume, my spiritual credentials, my pious acts, my rhetorical skills, my heroic service. I’m not special–I’m like everyone else while simultaneously remaining unique and unrepeatable. The Bad News of the Good News is that I’m not the protagonist in the Story of Me. So who is? Well, God in Christ through the Holy Spirit who is fashioning for Godself a people to be a light to the nations, where justice, mercy, service to one’s neighbor, and radical welcoming of the widow, orphan,  alien, and stranger in the land around the full to overflowing table are the order of the day.

Inner Geniuses cultivating exalted mystical states and Heroic Actors saving the world for their friends on Facebook (poverty porn) are both mortally offended by this state of affairs, because their carefully curated and performed identity takes a back seat to the creator of the universe who speaks and acts, who justifies and sanctifies. It might just be that we are too cozy with the notion–so often heard these days–that we are, “The heroes of our own story,” where the spiritual life gets figured as a kind of Choose Your Own Adventure where we get to take credit for our wise choices (our unwise choices are usually somebody else’s fault). Look what I have done, rather stunned gratitude at what God has done through me, despite all my very obvious limitations. Obvious, that is, to everyone but myself.

We have a deeply ingrained (original) resistance to simply being “like everyone else.” And because we can’t acknowledge that God is the author, the actor, the giver, the gift, and the giving, how we perform our Christian life is always set against others in competitive struggle for who’s actually doing it right and winning the race. It’s an entirely graceless and self-centered project that blinds us to the goodness, mercy, and loving kindness of God revealed to us the person and work of Jesus Christ. It’s a little bit like being in the wilderness and suddenly being surrounded by poisonous snakes come to think of it!

When we miss the gift, when we poo poo the abundance in which we dwell (“Yeah manna, quail, water from the rock, a cloud by day, a pillar of fire by night and no Pharoah telling me how many bricks to make every day, but what have you done for me lately?), when we forget that we are even now seated in the heavenly places alive in Christ, we become blind to the light that has come into the world and inhabit our own personal version of that cinematic masterpiece Snakes on a Plane. Fear, scarcity, and lack take pride of place and become the slithering, hissing, poisonous story we live from. Worse still, our neighbor becomes our adversary–someone against whom we are pitted in competitive struggle over limited resources. 

What gets lifted on the pole on the way to the Red Sea is ultimately the hellish myth of ourselves apart from God–our self-reliance, our misperception that we are the heroes of our own story, our mumurous fear that inevitably grinds into the mechanical hunt for some sacrificial victim upon whom to place the blame and inflict violence. That whole way of seeing and being in the world is what’s lifted up. We see our captivity and in that seeing begins God’s freeing work in us. 

Of course, it’s really no different from Jesus’ call to, “repent and believe the good news.” Turn, be turned, and return! There’s another way to do this thing we call being human and becoming beloved community with the Beautiful One as its pulsing center. We need help. And help has arrived in the person of Jesus. Look upon Him, receive Him, and live! Or see and acknowledge what being to the doer, the actor, the genius, the hero of your own furiously maintained story is doing to you and those around you: the anxiety, the burnout, the exhaustion, the perilous fragility and inherent violence of trying to work, or purify, or discipline our way to God’s love. See how alienation from the Truth of the freely bestowed riches of God’s mercy, and blindness to how God has already acted in Jesus Christ, is poisoning you! And see how acknowledging the simple fact of our shared human snake-bittenness immediately brings a huge sigh of relief and establishes bonds of solidarity and love. No more pretense. No keeping it all together. No boasting in the face of what’s not ours to begin with. But nesting in that promise-watered place of need with everyone else exactly like us and finding Jesus, each one, strong to save.

What a relief to be “like everyone else,” and to know ourselves loved, accepted, as we are and not how we could be or should be. What a relief  that it’s “by grace [we] have been saved through faith, and this is not [our] own doing; it is the gift of God-- not the result of works, so that no one may boast.” What a relief to receive that the good portion of God’s love for us in the person of Jesus and to find ourselves lead and drawn onwards in the power of the Holy Spirit, with Abraham and Sarah, with the murmuring Israelites to a land of promise that we do not yet know, to a land that God will show us (we children of wrath like everyone else): “Jesus said, ‘Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.’”  Look, look, look, and live!

Amen.