Jeremiah 20:7-9 | Romans 12:1-2 | Matthew 16:21-27

God of might, giver of every good gift, pour into our hearts the love of your name so that by deepening our sense of reverence and thy watchful care keep safe what you have nurtured.  Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

There’s a beautiful image in the opening prayer of our liturgy today, and it’s this image that there’s a God who has a work to be done for us.  He ministers to us, and in return, we minister to him by ministering to each other.  But one of the things that we prayed for is, “God, continue to do what you’ve been doing all along, nurturing us, nurturing us.”  An image of nurturing us is also then – we find it in that wonderful reading from St. Paul when he’s saying, “Be careful.”  Paul says, “Do not conform yourselves to this age,” but there’s so much that the Jews had learned that they have such a hard time letting go of, a misconception of who God is, too much emphasis on the law, too much emphasis on perfection and sacrifice and for sins.  So he has this longing to free people from that kind of system that keeps us from receiving the most beautiful, the most powerful thing that God can share with his people, and that is wisdom.  “Let me renew your mind,” he says.  “I want to give you – I want God to give you, I want to give you the hope and the trust in a God who will give you discernment so that you will know what God wants.  You will know what is good, what is pleasing, what is perfect.” 

Now, if you’re like me – I grew up in a religion.  Mine was Roman Catholicism.  It was a – it is a marvelous tradition.  It’s the mother lode, they call it, the oldest of the Christian traditions, but what it really is that I want to say is that I have learned most everything about God through my religion, through pastors who mostly preached to me and through teachers in Catholic schools and through witnessing of people that are Catholic.  And so all those things tend to give me a sense of what it is that I’m supposed to do and who God is and what I need to believe about him, and we need that kind of information, especially as long – most especially if it’s grounded in the essence of the message of Jesus, the pure message of Jesus.  We know that every religion is also not only guided by divinity and guided by the Spirit, but it’s also human, so we don’t expect perfection.  We shouldn’t expect perfection.  What we should expect is that we would get the thing that God wants us most especially to know and to feel, and that is his relationship with us as a source, a direct source of wisdom and understanding of who we are, why we’re here and what is good, what is right for us.  You, we all came into the world, in a way, filled with certain understandings of who we are.  Because of our ancestors, we have certain traits we have that we pick up from our ancestors also, but basically what we come into the world with is this openness to, “Who am I?  What is this place?”  And we start taking it in, and we learn from the people around us.  We’re memetic people.  We imitate.  If we have parents that are loving and kind and gentle to us, we tend to be that way.  If we had parents that are constantly at war with each other, we have that kind of understanding.  That’s what relationships are, I guess, but all that comes into us, and it seems to me that, once it’s set, then there’s a tension between the person we are and the person we’ve learned to be.  And there it is.  There’s the real challenge of living a spiritual life.  How do I find my authentic self?

So what I’d like to look at and see from these readings, we get something really interesting about the experience of Jeremiah and the experience of Jesus.  That’s what I want to talk about.  Now, Jeremiah is such an interesting prophet.  He was supposedly called to this work when he was very young, but the one thing about anybody that does any kind of work – if God gives me something to do, like I’m a pastor, and I do it, and I see people responding positively, and there’s respect for me and love, and I love them, and they love me back, and it’s wonderful.  But Jeremiah was-- he never found that kind of satisfaction in his work, because every time he went to people – and they were always doing something that was destructive to them, and so he had to tell them, “You are destroying yourselves.  You’re destroying each other.  You’re going to self-implode if you don’t change, if you don’t change.”  He was always crying out vengeance, outrage.  “Stop what you’re doing.”  And he would just be crucified for it.  He would just be thrown into cisterns, sinking in mud, all these things, and so he said, “You know what?  I don’t want to do this anymore.  I’m not getting anything out of this.  I keep trying to work with people, and they do not respond.  But then there’s this thing in me, this life in me that is not me maybe, or it is.  It is me.  It doesn’t feel sometimes like me, but I cannot not do this work.  There’s an energy, a life force,” calls it a, “fire burning in my heart.  It’s imprisoned my bones, and I can’t hold it in.  It’s like there’s a me that wants desperately to be, even though it’s not working, even though it doesn’t feel like it’s satisfying.”  Now, the most interesting thing about the frustration of Jeremiah, who’s often called the weeping, complaining prophet, is there’s something about him that’s so unique to me, and that is he gave a prophecy that seemed so powerful, because this is what he said.  He said, “This system of people trying to follow a law – they’re told, ‘You stop this, or do this.’”  He sees such resistance.  He calls their hearts hard-hearted evil hearts.  They aren’t receptive, and so he said, “There must come a day when there’s going to be a kind of miracle that’s called redemption.”  He didn’t call it that, but he said, “Somehow God is going to enter into people’s hearts, the core of their being and write his law – his law for them on their hearts.  So no one will have to worry about being taught anything.  They will have the teacher inside of them, awakening them to what is their destiny, what is their authentic self.”  Or another way to say it, which Jesus talks about, is it’s their life – their life. 

So there’s much more we find in Jesus teaching in this when he’s describing to his disciples the way his life is going to go.  It’s planned that way.  It’s God’s will for him, and let’s face it, Jesus was not greeting this way his ministry was going to go with open arms, saying, “Oh, this is great.  This is what I always knew it would be.  This is perfect,” because we don’t always have, as human beings, a full understanding of what our destiny is.  It’s something that’s revealed to us slowly, slowly over time, and we have to pay attention and reflect on everything going on so we can figure out, “Who is this person I am called to be by God?  It’s not the person that other people have told me what I should be.”  That’s always dangerous, or even what you in your – if you have a misconception that what God really wants more than authenticity is perfection, if you get caught in that, you’re going to put yourself under all kinds of pressure and condemnation and shame over the fact that we’re not perfect.  None of us are.  We’re not intended to be perfect, sinless, but aware of who we are, aware of our sin, aware of our shadow and embracing that and then waiting and listening and watching, looking to God who then is working to speak to us personally through our hearts, through kind of these mysterious ways, through dreams and things that seem – or that you can’t really figure out that easily, and then also just through the events of our life.  He’s teaching us all the time. 

So when he’s describing what life is for him, and he’s having a hard time with it, as we know, then Peter comes up and does what we all tend to do.  “Well, wait a minute.  That doesn’t sound like a God that would – no God would do that to his Son or to you who are so close to God.  He wouldn’t put you through something as painful and confusing and makes you look like a failure.  Why would he do that?  God forbid anything like that should ever happen to you, Jesus,” is Peter’s words.  And then Jesus just says, “No, you’re blocking the work of me finding, accepting and living my life, not the life I wanted, not the life everyone else expects me to have, no, the life that I’ve been given from God, that’s what I’m here to do, to live the life.”  It’s so interesting.  There’s a wonderful quote by St. Catherine of Siena where she said, “If anyone would become what God wants them to be, intends them to be, it would set the world on fire.”  Nothing is more important than living the life that we’ve been giving, and living on this planet has that work built into it of discovering that which is my life.  So that’s when Jesus explains something to his disciples, and this is always one of those statements that, for most of us, at least for me, it never made any sense, but it does now.  “If you want to come after me, if you want to follow me, take up your cross and follow.” 

You have to take up your cross.  What is the cross?  Well, in Jesus’ case, it was this moment of crucifixion, but the cross, crucifixion is a part of everyone’s life on a regular basis when we come against something that we think we know is true, and we have to let go of it, and to let go of something that we’ve based our life on is a painful, excruciating situation.  And we feel like we’re losing something.  “This is the way I’ve always been.  This is me.  I can’t let go of that.  I’m so comfortable with that person that I think I am.”  No, if you want to save your life, if you want to be not just living but fully alive, then you’ve got to let go of your life.  So it’s like, “Wait a minute.  To be alive, to be in life, I have to let go of life?”  Well, it’s obviously there’s two lives in this.  There’s the life that the world tells you to live.  There’s a life where control – your ego tells you, “That’s a great way to be in this world, to be successful.  How about to be better than everybody else?  That would be wonderful.”  All those are images that come both from our culture and from our ego, and they can create this being called me or you, and we can be caught up in these things that just do not produce what they promise.  And so what Jesus is saying is, “I will show you your true self, and your work is to look at that that is not you and let it go, let it die.”  Because what is more important?  What is your life worth?  Having an easy life, having a rich life, having a powerful life, is that better than the life God is giving you?  It’s the thing that makes you most satisfied.  It’s the thing that is most authentically you.  It’s the thing that will make the biggest on the impact on the circle of people God has given you in your life, and if you have any expectations of exactly what it is before you start asking the question, you will not get an answer.  He wants you to be open to his revelation of you, the life he’s asked you to live, and it seems like – it’s so funny to me in a way.  I’m just saying this because it sounds like, “Of course I would do that,” and then I looked at myself, and I see there’s so many things I refuse to let go of.  I like to be comfortable.  I like to be well-thought of.  I like to be in the center of things.  I’m a three on the Enneagram.  I love performing, all those things.  Well, those are good things, but performing how?  So I get all kinds of accolades in return?  Does that work?  If I pattern what I say so that people like me, is that going to be feeling good for me?  No, the only thing that really feels like me is when I’m up there doing what I believe I’m being asked to do, and somehow when you spend a lot of time reflecting on this, you can begin to feel what’s your fake self and what’s your real self.  I know when I’m sitting in a room feeling like, “Why isn’t everybody talking to me?”  What is that?  You need to be the center of attention all the time?  Well, there’s something in me that thought that was a really great way to live my life, to be the center of attention, and now whenever I get that, I say, “Are you kidding?  That’s not what I want to do.”  You ever been at a party where one person runs the whole dinner party and talks unceasingly?  What’s your reaction to that?  It’s not a pleasant thing to be engaged in, somebody demanding attention from everyone, and yet if I be honest, I used to do it all the time. 

So that’s what I’m talking about, God entering into you and into me and giving us those insights into who we really are meant to be.  And when you’re in that state, the things that tend to disappear, the three things I talk about all the time that get in the way of being who we are called to be, living the life we’re called to live, and that’s fear, anger, and then the big one, shame.  Whenever I am not who I unconsciously, perhaps, know that I should be, there’s going to be a mild feeling of uneasiness, that something’s wrong.  And the wonderful thing about shame, when it’s in its right place, it reminds us, tells us, makes us aware that something’s off, and if we say, “Well, life is just lousy.  There’s no joy in life anymore,” no.  Look at what it is that seems to be robbing you of your joy and ask God to reveal it to you.  And if you say, “Okay, I’ll change it,” you’ve made the biggest mistake.  All you have to do is see it, admit it, name it, own it, and then say to God, “Please, open my eyes, the eyes of my heart and let me see who I am.”  I just know how little in my prayer life, especially in my early life, I ever even thought to pray that way.  I had all kinds of clear ideas as to what would make me happy.  I remember once even thinking, “If everybody loved me, I’d be really happy.”  I have to laugh at that, because who wants everybody in love with them?  It’s crazy.  I want a relationship with 500 people or something?  No.  “Give me a friend.  Give me somebody that loves me.  Let me love somebody.  Let me learn how to gain a sense of my own value, and then let me be out there in the world, used by you in every way you want that I can bring life to people, and I’ll feel it.  I’ll know that this feels right.”  That inner, wonderful place of calm called peace, that’s our inheritance, and when you’re living your life and not someone else’s, that’s when you feel it.  That’s when you know.  It’s that feeling all is well and all will be well, and that’s our inheritance. 

Father, your gifts are beyond our imagining.  The longing in your heart for us to find fullness and light in this world is crucial for us to know and to experience in order to know who you are and why you’re in our life and what you want from us, not something that takes life away from us but that enables us to find it.  So bless us with open hearts, open minds.  Let us be good disciples, good learners, good listeners, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.