Come to Jesus: Live Differently
Come to Jesus: Live Differently
Luke 9:23-25
One of the things that makes the Bible powerful to me is it’s willingness to speak in the most honest ways about how broken human beings can be. One of the first things that people (Adam and Eve) choose to do is the one thing—the only thing—that they’ve been told not to do. They eat the fruit and…boom…paradise is lost.
After that, there is ripple after ripple of broken humanity. Jealousy drives Cain to kill Abel. Moses can’t keep his hands off what was supposed to be God’s. David can’t keep his hands off Bathsheba. And on and on. You will not find a person in Scripture who does not have his broken edges and moments. This always seems to me to be fair warning to anyone who would get all puffed up and holier than thou. It also seems like a caveat against ever worshiping a fellow human being.
In the end, the Bible tells us pretty clearly that human beings are capable of doing amazing things and are capable of doing terrible things. In fact, not only are we capable of doing a full range of things, from good to bad to indifferent, we are actually capable of doing all of those things almost at the same time. We are not consistent or reliable or even all that predictable. If there are human beings involved, who knows what’s coming next?
In one of my favorite texts in the Hebrew Scriptures (Genesis 32), we encounter Jacob. Jacob, who would become the Patriarch of the Israelites, is deeply flawed. Early on, instead of feeding his brother, Esau, when he was hungry, Jacob makes him sign over his inheritance for a meal. (Isn’t there something recognizably human about realizing that we have something that someone else wants and taking advantage of that moment to extract the highest price possible? Some people think that’s humanity at it’s best. I am not one of those people.) Later, Jacob glues a bunch of hair to himself and tricks his blind father, Isaac, into giving him the blessing that he thought he was giving to Esau. Not surprisingly, Esau has had enough. He sets out to kill Jacob. Eventually, Jacob realizes that he has to approach Esau and seek forgiveness. Jacob sends his wives and children away and has a long night alone, waiting to meet his brother and possibly meet his death.
What happens that night is what I want you to carry with you this morning. Jacob, in that long, dark, lonely night is visited by an unknown man. Almost immediately, Jacob and the man begin wrestling. (Did they discuss this first? We don’t know. It seems like they just see each other and the match is on.) Here’s the thing, though. They wrestle all night long. No one prevails, at least until the unknown man, to be honest, kind of cheats. The man lands a blow on Jacob’s hip and dislocates it and Jacob can’t wrestle anymore. The man wants to leave but Jacob won’t let go. Instead, Jacob demands a blessing. The unknown man asks his name and says,“You shall no longer be called Jacob, but ‘Israel,’ for you have striven with God and with humans and have prevailed.” Jacob is literally renamed, “Israel.” And the name, “Israel,” literally means, “one who wrestles with God.”
In the Old Testament, I think this is the core vision of what it means to be human. It’s not that we are all good or all bad. It’s that we are “tenacious wrestlers.” We wrestle with each other. We wrestle with the hardest questions in this life. We, at times, even wrestle with God. We’ll wrestle through the night if we have to and in the end, we will not let go or give up easily. We like a good argument, a good wrestling match, a good fight.
If Jacob is the one who wrestles with God, then I think we can use a similar vision as we think, this morning, about what Jesus teaches us about who we are. I think that for Jesus, we are still the people who wrestle but I think what he is inviting us to do is wrestle with ourselves. He calls us to do battle with our own most basic instincts, to be better than our impulses, to once and for all go “nose-to-nose” with our built-in narcissism. We are born as self-centered beings. Jesus asks us, “What if we don’t have to be that self-centered our whole life long? What if we can be better?”
Almost everything that Jesus teaches us to do is at odds with what we would like to do and with what we would do naturally. If someone hurts us enough, our most basic human response it to hurt that person back. Jesus tells us to forgive that person. If someone else opposes us and stands between us and the life we feel we deserve, instinctively, we want to declare that person our enemy and hate them. Jesus tells us to love our enemies. If someone is successful, our impulse is to admire them and to assume that they have been blessed by God. Jesus teaches: “Blessed are the poor.” If someone suffers, we assume that they must have done something to deserve this. This reassures us that, since we’ve done nothing wrong, God won’t make us sick. Jesus teaches us not to judge others but to love and care for them.
All sorts of people have been put in power by appealing to people’s worst instincts: here’s who we are going to hate—together; here’s how we are going to seek revenge—together; here’s who we are going to blame for all of our problems so that we never have to take responsibility, ourselves. People love it when someone gives them permission to be their worst selves. People love it when someone says, “Don’t think! Don’t doubt! Just do what’s in your own self-interest. Just ask, “What’s in it for me?”
I think Jesus knows all of the worst things that we are capable of doing. However, instead of sanctioning those things, he demands that we wrestle with those things. In other words, Jesus takes a step beyond Jacob. Jacob wrestled with God. Jesus of Nazareth challenges us to wrestle with ourselves. He challenges us to move beyond our worst instincts. He pleads with us to choose differently.
First, we have to know that we are loved unconditionally. We are called to become forgiving people because there is a God who has already forgiven us. We are called to be a source of grace because we have experienced God’s grace, ourselves. We are called to love the people we would rather avoid and to even love the people who hate us not because we’re so great but because God is so loving. If we believe in a God who so loves the world then do we have any choice to try to love the world, ourselves?
As soon as we seek to be this kind of forgiving, gracious, loving people, the wrestling match is on. Sure, I can do those things with my dearest friends or with family members who I love instinctively. (Of course, if I’m having a bad day, I may not even do all that well at loving them.) The real wrestling match begins, though, when I know that the person I would rather avoid altogether has been put in front of me so that I can do the hard work of figuring out what in the world it would mean to love them. I’m not going to get anything back from them. There is literally nothing in it for me to love this seemingly unlovable person, other than the fact that I know that this is precisely the kind of person whom Jesus calls me to love. In this corner— “I don’t want to do this.” In that corner— “I am being called to do this.” The match is on!
When I went to New York last fall and visited the 9/11 memorial, I remembered one of the “all star wrestlers:” Father Mychal Judge, the priest who died there. I was walking along the memorial, reading the names of the dead, when I ran into his name. I knew that he had been a beloved chaplain for the New York City Fire Department. I pulled out my phone and looked him up because I wanted to learn more…
Father Mychal was 68 years old when he found himself in the North Tower of the World Trade Center on September 11th. Many people told stories of seeing him praying for and with victims, administering last rights, praying over the bodies of those who had thrown themselves from top of the towers. He was consoling and assisting and doing everything he could to save others, with no regard for his own self.
When the South Tower collapsed, it was like a tsunami of shrapnel had exploded into the lobby of the North Tower. Father Mychal was killed almost instantly. Later the image of his lifeless body being carried from the rubble by a host of firefighters became an iconic image, one that some would say resembled Michelangelo’s “Pieta.” That image is cast in Waterford crystal and is displayed permanently at the fire station on 31st street.
Here’s what I really learned about Father Mychal, though. He was a full-fledged, struggling human being. Mychal was gay and celibate, bearing not only the challenge of a vow of celibacy but the burden of hiding his sexuality from a judgmental world. He was a recovering alcoholic. He was known to wear a diamond stud in his ear, for a long time styled his hair with a “rat tail” that would hang into his Franciscan robe, and had a shamrock tattooed in his backside. What do these things make Father Mychal? I think they make him a genuine, full-fledged human being.
Father Mychal was also famous for beginning everyday on his knees in meditation. He prayed the rosary and carried dollar bills to hand out to the poor. At a time when the world was terrified of AIDS, Father Mychal was famous not only for caring for them but for washing their feet and for kissing their foreheads.
On 9/11, Father Mychal was ready to deny himself, take up his cross and follow Christ into the North Tower because he had been practicing living that way his whole life long, wrestling with himself every day to follow Christ and not his own wants and needs. On the day when he was asked to give his all, he was “in shape” because of what he had practiced, day in and day out.
We are born self-centered. We live in a world that would be perfectly happy to let us stay that way. Jesus says, “Deny yourself.” It’s so easy do what we would do anyway and say it’s our calling. Jesus says, “Take up your cross.” We want to be in charge and “drive the bus.” Jesus says, “Follow me.”
“If any wish to come after me, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me.”