2nd Sunday in Lent
March 1, 2015
Romans 4:13-25; Mark 8:31-38
Henri Nouwen was a Catholic priest, university professor,
and writer during the 20th century.
His books are on the spiritual life, often about his own life
experiences and reflection, because he believed that “what is most personal is
most universal.”[1] One of these books is called “Life of the
Beloved,” which Nouwen wrote in response to a secular Jewish friend who asked
him to explain his faith in simple language.
He wrote that the Christian life is the journey of becoming God’s
beloved and it occurs through four stages.
In order to become the Beloved, we
are taken, blessed, broken, and shared.
If this order sounds familiar to you, it is what we do with communion
bread. In a little bit, we will take the
bread, bless it, break it, and share it.
With Ash Wednesday a couple weeks ago, we entered the season of Lent,
which is a season that focuses on brokenness.
There are other times when we will talk more about being taken and
blessed and shared, but before we get to that shared part, we must be
broken. It’s much like breaking a horse
before you can ride her, or how a seed has to be broken open in order to become
a plant, or how we have to break bread before we can share it. Brokenness is not something we like to focus
on, and yet it’s a part of life that we cannot escape. For these remaining four Sundays of Lent, we
will be talking about it.
Last week we were going to focus on brokenness as the
wilderness. The season of Lent lasts
forty days, just as Jesus spent forty days in the wilderness after being
baptized before beginning his public ministry.
That was last week’s Gospel lesson.
Today, as you can see from the sermon title, we will focus on
self-deception. I have identified other
areas of brokenness for the remaining Sundays of Lent. However, if there is a particular area of
brokenness you want to make sure that I touch on, please let me know.
So, today, self-deception. This is a hard one, partly because it’s more
abstract, partly because we don’t like to admit when we’re wrong, and partly
because I think deceiving ourselves is the hardest kind of deception to see
through. When it’s a magician’s sleight
of hand, we know we are being tricked; we’re aware of what’s going on. When someone else is misleading us, we
usually gain some sense of it, whether it’s a twinkle in the eye like a grandpa
showing a trick to a grandchild, or a gut feeling, when it’s something a little
more serious that we should be paying attention to. But when we mislead ourselves, we often get
ourselves in trouble.
One of the biggest ways we get ourselves in trouble is when we tell ourselves that we are all we
need. We don’t need God. We don’t need anyone else’s help, either. We are perfectly capable of pulling ourselves
up by our bootstraps. We can take care
of ourselves, thank you very much.
[pause] This is the American myth of self-reliance, and I call it a myth
because it’s just not true. It’s one of
those things that fall in the second category where Jesus tells Peter he’s not
thinking God’s thoughts, but human thoughts.
We are not all we need. We do
need God and we need each other. We deceive ourselves when we try to convince
ourselves otherwise. God created us to
be in relationship with him and with one another. I think loneliness is one of the biggest
areas of brokenness in our society and it’s a brokenness that, in many cases, is
one of our doing. When we say we don’t
need each other, we distance ourselves from each other and sometimes we get
stuck in the distance and don’t know how to overcome it.
In 2001 a Harvard professor on civic engagement published
a book called “Bowling Alone.” His point
was that we have become significantly disconnected from one another and that
social structures, like a bowling league or school PTA, or even church, things that used to hold us
together as a society, have been disintegrating. He says the trend actually began in the late
1960s and had many contributing factors.
However, the net result is that we, as a society, are becoming
lonelier. Three years later the same
professor published a follow-up book, “Better Together,” which shares stories
of how people are successfully
connecting with each other and bringing their communities together. While we may deceive ourselves into thinking
that we are okay by ourselves and just as good apart as together, the truth is
that we are better together and that
that’s how God designed us to be. As the writer of the book of Ecclesiastes
says, “You are better off to have a friend than to be all
alone, because then you will get more enjoyment out of what you earn. If you
fall, your friend can help you up. But if you fall without having a friend
nearby, you are really in trouble. If you sleep alone, you
won’t have anyone to keep you warm on a cold night. Someone
might be able to beat up one of you, but not both of you. As the saying goes,
‘A rope made from three strands of cord is hard to break.’”[2] We were made to be in
relationship with each other and with God.
We deceive ourselves when we think otherwise.
Another common way we lie to ourselves is about what makes us happy and what can save
us. The TV tells us that things make us happy, and if only we
have this hair product or that alarm system or vacation in a certain place,
then we will be happy and beautiful and safe.
Beloved, there is no thing that will make you happy and beautiful and
safe and none of those things can save you.
We may be tempted to buy into materialism and consumerism and believe
that shopping and stuff can make us happy.
But, as Jesus says in our Gospel today, “What
will you gain, if you own the whole world but destroy yourself? What could you
give to get back your soul?”[3] “Those who
want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my
sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.”[4] There is nothing we can do to save our
lives. No medicine, no amount of money,
not even sheer stubbornness can actually save us, and we are delusional if we
think our salvation lies anywhere else but in the cross of Jesus. Jesus is who makes us safe and when we trust
in him completely, then we don’t need to fear for our safety or worry about our
happiness. Jesus doesn’t actually
promise our happiness. He promises that
the waters will not overcome us. He
promises that the fire will not burn us.[5] He doesn’t promise that there won’t be a
storm. He promises our safety in the
storm. [pause] As our Epistle lesson
this morning explains, this promise depends on having faith in God, so that the
promise rests on God’s grace, his unconditional love.[6] It is not earned. It is not bought. We can’t do anything to make it happen, other
than have faith and trust in God’s promises.
That is where our salvation comes from and from no other place. We deceive ourselves if we think we can save
ourselves.
Finally, we often deceive
ourselves about where our value comes from. We live in a world where everyone not just
wants attention, but actively seeks it in so many more ways than before, thanks
to social media. We have become more
egotistical and more vain. We think
everyone cares about what we ate for breakfast, the latest silly thing our pets
did, and which Disney princess we are most similar to! I'm guilty of this, too. I went on Facebook to find examples, and it was five minutes later before I remembered that I was supposed to be working on a sermon! Those of us who are on Facebook, Twitter, and
keep internet sites almost constantly check to see how many hits we’ve gotten
or how many likes or how many retweets.[7] We have this desperate desire to say or show
something important, this desperate desire to receive affirmation that we are important and that we do have value.
Beloved,
you already have value, because God made you.
You don’t have to strive after all these things. You don’t need to clamor for attention. You are not the forgotten stepchild. My favorite new TV show is “Agent Carter,” a
spin-off from the Captain America comics; she is the Cap’s love interest, if
you’re familiar with the storyline. In the
season finale last week, she is snubbed for a Congressional Medal of
Honor. And she responds with this great
quote, I knew right away I was going to use it in a sermon. She says, “I don't need a congressional honor.
I don't need Agent Thompson's approval or the president's. I know my value.
Anyone else's opinion doesn't really matter.”[8] You don’t need anyone else’s opinion and your
value does not come from another person or how much attention is paid to you; your value comes from God. He made you, and he loves you, and it is unconditional
love, no matter what. Your value does
not come from what you do or don’t do; it doesn’t come from your work or your
accomplishments or your actions or even your character traits. It comes because you are beloved by God. God made you, and he loves you. Instead of seeking attention, pay attention
to God. You will find some healing and
some rest for your soul.
It
hurts being broken. Even if fire doesn’t
burn, it still gets pretty hot. Even if
the waters won’t overwhelm us because God is with us, it can still get pretty
scary. Peter walked on water, and then
he started to sink, because he forgot to keep his eyes on Jesus. He started to deceive himself that he didn’t
need Jesus. He started to deceive
himself that he could save himself. He
wanted the attention on him. Loneliness
and self-reliance and vanity are all areas of brokenness that we tend to not
fully be aware of the problems inherent in them. We start to think we can gain the whole world
and keep our soul. But the hard truth is that those who lose
their lives for Jesus’ sake are the ones whose lives will be saved. The hard truth is that we are called to a
life of self-denial, a life where we don’t put ourselves first, a life where we
don’t seek attention and fame, a life where we take up our cross, and follow
Jesus. Taking up our cross does not earn
our salvation. We take up our crosses in response to our salvation. Thanks be to the Father, the Son, and the
Holy Spirit. Amen.
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