Everloving God, help us to lose ourselves so that we might be found by your grace. Amen.
“Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.” St. Paul wrote that to the Philippian church and we’ve struggled with it ever since. I’ll speak for myself, but I know that I’m not alone in this, I don’t like losing things. Last week, I was looking for a particular pair of socks and couldn’t find them, it drove me crazy. I keep a planner so that I don’t lose track of appointments or tasks. My favorite sports teams are the Wake Forest Demon Deacons and the Miami Marlins, so though I’m very familiar with losing, I don’t like it. And while I know the value of humility, like all of us, I really appreciate accolades and recognition. Losing, whether it’s a pair of socks, an election, or an opportunity isn’t fun. And yet, the path of following Jesus is about exactly this – denying ourselves, losing ourselves, and taking up the Cross.
How has faith made us lose something? Put differently, what does faith cost us? Hopefully, about 10% of your annual income, maybe some self-righteousness, perhaps our sense of perfectionism, possibly some positions that do not align with the Gospel. Yes, faith is always about grace – it’s a gift from God, not the reward for our good behavior. But to receive the gift of faith costs us something. Think of it like receiving a cup of water. In order to receive it, we have to put down the other things that we might have been holding onto.
This idea of losing is so essential to our faith because it is the only way to make sense of the Cross and it is how we participate in the economy of God. God’s economy doesn’t work the way Wall Street does. No, faith isn’t about the gains, and it’s not even necessarily about the losses. Christianity is not a religion of self-negation. The Beatitudes – blessed are the meek, the poor, and those who mourn – are not a roadmap for discipleship. Our goal isn’t to become losers in everything we do. Losing, for the sake of losing, isn’t the name of the game.
Instead, the reason why losing is so vital to faith is that losing puts us in a position to be found. When we think we are self-sufficient and on top of our game, it can be a challenge to remember how dependent we are on God. We lose, not to prove how generous or lowly we are, but to be found. This is how God’s economy works – something is lost, it is transformed, and then Resurrected. God is not in the business of taking things from us, but rather transforming them. But for that transformation to take place, we have to get our hands out of it for a while.
This is how the Eucharist works – we give bread and wine to God, it is transformed at the Altar, and then given back to us as the Body and Blood of Jesus. This is what Good Friday and Easter show us – Jesus’ life is given up and he is Resurrected on the third day.
This is also the pattern that the St. Luke’s Foundation has moved towards. For most of its 50-year history, the Foundation received grant applications and awarded funds. I’m not criticizing that model; it worked for the time. But we discerned that God was interested in having the Foundation’s funds lead to deeper transformation. So the focus of the Foundation is now more about relationships than grants. Yes, to an accountant, it might look like nothing much has changed: one organization is still giving money to another. But that’s not the reality.
Out of the abundance that God has given to us to steward, we share this abundance with organizations like Meals on Wheels, Rowan Helping Ministries, Episcopal Relief & Development, and the Cathedral in Mumias and are mutually transformed as we receive so much back through the relationship. Those who serve with those organizations have experienced, firsthand, how relationships transform us. When the President of Episcopal Relief & Development was here in March, we saw how we are a part of the amazing work being done around the world. And with our recent trip to Kenya, there are so many blessings flowing from that relationship. God took what we had in terms of dollars, transformed those funds into ministry, and has enriched us with invaluable blessings through these friendships. This is how God’s economy works.
We also see this pattern in the Prayer of St. Francis that we’ve been praying over the past few months. Given the contentious nature of our political life right now, it seemed to me like a prayer that we need to be in habit of praying. Those words need to get into our hearts and minds and do their work. I’d love to hear from you how that prayer has been opening and healing you. Again, it’s teaching us how to participate in the economy of Jesus: it is in giving that we receive, it is in pardoning that we are pardoned, and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Given that this is how things work with God, I wonder what God might ask you to give up and lose so it can be remade? I wonder what things and people we might give ourselves to as a parish in order to be transformed further in the grace of God?
This economy of Jesus is not only different in that it doesn’t count gains and losses, only transformations, but it also uses different math to get there. That’s what St. Paul is getting at in the passage we heard this morning. He lists all of all of his accomplishments and qualifications, what we might call “résumé virtues.” But all of these he regards as “rubbish;” the actual word is the impolite version for excrement. He notes that his righteousness doesn’t come from the Law – meaning all of those things that he could take pride in don’t save him. I know I say it all the time, but I keep repeating myself because it takes a lot of reminders to go against the messages we get from society and the media – you are chosen, cherished, accepted, and valued because you have been wonderfully made by our loving God.
There is nothing that you need to do or stop doing in order to be worthy of dignity or God’s love. Your bloodwork might tell you that you really ought to drop 10 pounds, but not God. Your friends might say that you need to work on being a bit less judgy, but not God. Your priest might appreciate it if you came to church a bit more often or put a bit more in the offering plate, but not God. The only person you are accountable to is Jesus Christ, and he has declared that you are beloved – not because you you’ve asked for it or earned it, but because God thinks you are amazing, special, and chosen.
I’ll keep repeating this message of grace with my last breath because if we could really trust and believe it, the whole world would be transformed. If we knew that we are enough, we wouldn’t try to take the enough that our neighbor has and turn it into a deficit for them. We would see ourselves tenderly and compassionately instead of judgmentally. We would know that all of life is a gift from God. The Law though that St. Paul mentions works against this.
To be very clear, this isn’t saying that Judaism and the laws of the Old Testament are wrong, insufficient, or bad. The problem isn’t the Law, it’s our legalistic and competitive mindset. It’s our proclivity to always evaluate ourselves and others, our penchant for doing the minimum that is required, our propensity to always be in control that is the problem of legalism. The Law is something we will always fall short of, and it is also something that we will strive to serve instead of following the living God in Jesus Christ. This is why St. Paul says “Beloved, I do not consider that I have made it my own.” In other words, acceptance is a gift, not a reward.
So, one of the things that we have to lose is our sense of accomplishing all the right things. We have to give up our sense of what we think our lives are about so that we can receive the immeasurable gift of abundant life that we have in Jesus. What, then, does it mean to lose ourselves?
Well, one thing that it doesn’t mean is denying your own sense of self-worth or dignity. As I’ve said already, God made each of us and loves each of us, and God doesn’t make mistakes. Losing yourself to follow Jesus never means losing sight of that. But this idea of losing yourself has been used against our lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender siblings. They have been told that they need to pretend that their attractions are wrong, unnatural, and unholy. They have been told to deny themselves and have been forced into lives of celibacy, shame, or pretending. That is not what it means to lose yourself. If the Church has ever said that to you, I apologize and pray for healing. You don’t need to lose who you are in order to be loved.
Another thing that this does not mean is that it is okay to be abused. While abuse can happen to anyone, there have been many women who have been guilted and forced into staying in unhealthy and abusive relationships because they have been told that they need to lose themselves for the sake of the family. To borrow a word from St. Paul, that’s “rubbish.” Losing ourselves is never about having our dignity taken away.
But what does it mean to lose ourselves? In 2011, the author and columnist David Brooks wrote an article addressed to college graduates called “It’s Not About You.” In it, he told them that they’d soon be hearing commencement speeches that talk about finding their passion and purpose in life. But that’s wrong. Life isn’t about what we find, it’s about being found.
He writes, “If you sample the addresses, you’ll hear that baby-boomer theology in which the graduates are told: follow your passion, chart your own course, march to the beat of your own drummer, follow your dreams, find yourself. This is the litany of expressive individualism.” Brooks then notes that “this mantra misleads on nearly every front.” This is the same holy wisdom that St. Paul offers – it’s not about us.
Brooks concludes with, “Most successful people don’t look inside and then plan a life. They look outside and find a problem, which summons their life… The purpose in life is not to find yourself. It’s to lose yourself.” Those are good words, not just for those who are graduating, but us all. For one, it’s an impossible burden, at any age, to be told that you are responsible for figuring out the meaning of life and then implementing a plan to meet that purpose – oh, and you only get about 80 years and limited resources to do it. With the rise of this sort of thinking, it’s no wonder that so many in the younger generations are struggling with depression, anxiety, and suicide. We’ve handed them the absurd and never-ending task of figuring out who they are in a society in which they have unlimited choices, changing norms, little guidance, and every misstep is chronicled and critiqued on social media.
This is why faith formation matters so much, why we have to be a Church in which God’s abundant grace is clearly preached and practiced by every single one of us. What we need to teach isn’t how to do better or be better, nor is it giving people space to figure life out for themselves, or go on their own journey.
Instead, our task is to share the Good News: the story that even before were born, we were known, loved, and accepted; the story that when we get lost, our Good Shepherd stops at nothing to search for us; the story that we are always at home in God and there’s a party waiting for us to arrive.
We don’t need to find ourselves because our lives are hidden with Christ in God. Our identity as God’s beloved is secure and irrevocable. We don’t need to discover anything beyond that, but we do need to lose whatever gets in the way of embracing it. Jesus is in the transformation business – taking what we have and making it lovelier than we can ask for or imagine, not because we do things correctly, but because God loves to bless us.
And so we can give up on the quest for making ourselves into the maximized and optimal versions of ourselves. We can lose our sense of meeting other peoples’, or even our own, expectations. We can lose our anxiety about being popular enough, beautiful enough, rich enough, smart enough, accomplished enough. And in losing all of this, we’ll find that our identity is found in God’s love; and from that place of unconditional and infinite love, all things are being made well.
