Lent 2b.06                                                        March 12, 2006

Jesus says if anyone wants to be his disciple
       that person must “deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me.”
But just what does it mean to “deny” ourselves?
Is it to pretend we are not who we really are?
Is it to deprive ourselves of happiness?
Is it to scrunch our energy and creativity
       into a laced up, buttoned down Puritan propriety?

Denying oneself doesn’t sound very healthy to generations
       who’ve drunk deep from the well of pop psychology.
The self is what it’s all about in our culture.
So is Jesus saying anything we can even consider?

The expression “self-denial” has accumulated meanings
        like barnacles on the hull of a ship.
To understand Jesus
        we have to scrape the barnacles off
        and look anew at the original language.
The word translated as “deny” means
        to renounce any ties of rights or obligations.
It doesn’t mean pretending we aren’t who we are.
And it is the farthest thing from an ascetic practice
        of avoiding earthly happiness in exchange
                 for a post-mortem reward.

Eduard Schweitzer, one of our greatest New Testament scholars,
        translates this verse, “he must forget himself.”//
Jesus is telling us to stop fretting over our own security,
        over making ourselves important, over advancing our interests.

St. Augustine said, “I have become a great problem to myself.”
I know what he means, and I’ll bet you do too.
I have my share of problems of course.
But even when things are going better than par
        by most anyone’s standards,
        my mind still spins out complications.
I still manage to tangle the lines of my relationships.

The harder I work at satisfying myself,
        at making myself happy,
        the more frustrated and anxious I become.
Even in the best of circumstances, I remain a “problem to myself.”

It is a dreadful thing to be self-obsessed.
In my case, I’m not even that interesting.
It’s like being addicted to a bad sit-com.

Modern culture has set us free from so many bonds

         – bondage to hierarchical authority structures, political tyranny,
         obligations of extended family and tradition.
But we are delivered from those authorities
         into the hands of the harshest task-master of all,
         the constant demands of our own insatiable self-interest.
We work so hard at making ourselves successful and secure
         that we don’t see the sunrise, taste our food,
                  or feel the air on our face.

And thus we lose our lives.
As Walker Percy put it,
         we miss our lives “as a man might miss a bus”
         while we are distracted by self-obsession.

When Jesus invites us to follow him,
         he is inviting us on a journey into life,
         but to begin that journey,
                  we have to forget about ourselves.

At our Thursday morning class last week
         someone told the story of how she had been
         weighed down by an unspeakable grief.
But someone else in this congregation was terminally ill,
         and needed to be cared for.
So instead of sinking into her grief,
         she rolled up her sleeves and helped.

Another person told the story of being trapped
         in his own sense of lostness and unworthiness,
         but his friend was dying of AIDS
                   and wanted to see him.
So he had to forget about his unworthiness
         to visit his dying friend,
         and the visit restored his own life.

The great Christian paradox is that we gain our lives
         by giving them away.
90% of religion just replaces material self-centeredness
         with spiritual self-centeredness.
All the religion driven by trying to stay out of hell
         and go to heaven is just spiritual self-centeredness.
All the spirituality driven by trying to achieve
         a placid, happy state of mind
         is just spiritual self-centeredness.
It’s just one more ego-project.

How then can we possibly forget ourselves?
If I set out to forget myself for my own sake,
         the contradiction ties me in a knot.
I remain “a great problem to myself.”

Another story from last Thursday’s class,
         perhaps the best one of all.
One woman told about a week when she was
         trapped in her depression,
                  weighed down by it, miserable in it.

Then at the grocery store check out counter,
         a stranger gave her a rose.
In that instant, she forgot herself.
The beauty of the rose
         and the beauty of the act of giving her the rose
                   filled her with delight.

That is the essence of Christian spirituality.
You want to know what grace means?
It is a stranger handing you a rose on a bad day.

We’ve all had glimpses of it.
We encounter something beautiful or good.
We sense the presence of holiness.
Confronted with another value, we forget ourselves.

We recognize the value of life other than our own.
We see its fragility.
We know someone needs us,
          and we value them enough to do what’s called for.
They need us to visit them in the hospital
          while they are dying.
They need us to bring them a meal.
They need us to drop our agenda and just listen to them.

And so we put our ego-projects on the shelf for awhile
         and give a little time, a little piece of our lives to someone else.
In that giving, we are born into another way of being,
         a way of being more fully alive.

In order to really forget ourselves,
         to put our ego-projects away for good,
         our attention must be captured by something
                    powerfully, even ultimately, engaging.
We need to something beautiful enough,
         captivating enough, fascinating and delightful enough
                    to make us want to gaze upon it endlessly.
That would be God.

“How late I came to love thee, O Beauty,
         so ancient and so fresh,”
         St. Augustine prayed in 5th Century Africa;
and in 18th Century America, Jonathan Edwards,
         declared that beauty is the chief attribute of God.
Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart quotes the Church Fathers:
         Gregory the Theologian says, . . . (God’s) radiance
                  shines upon and is reflected in his creatures.
         Dionysius insists, . . . God (is) . . . infinitely beautiful,
                  the splendor that gathers all things toward and into itself.

Scriptural references to God’s splendor, and glory abound.
Gregory of Nyssa, whom we commemorated last week,
          re-told the story of Moses as a quest
          for the beatific vision, the joyful sight
                   of the ever expanding beauty of God.

Hart says,
                   Creation’s being is God’s pleasure;

                   creation’s beauty is God’s glory; . . .
                   The delightfulness of created things expresses
                   the delightfulness of God . . . .

                   (D)elight . . . constitutes creation
                   and so only delight can comprehend it . . . .

John Dyksra Eusden and John Westerhoff maintain,

          “(I)t is through God’s beauty that God redeems.”
Two movements of the Spirit set us free
          to come fully alive.
They are compassion and delight.
In compassion and delight,
          we forget ourselves
                    and step out into a larger reality.

Compassion and delight are, of course,
          the left and right hands of love itself.
Loving the world, loving life,
          loving other people
          is how we forget ourselves
                    and follow Jesus.
There is a cross on this path.
It’s the cross of self-forgetting,
          but this cross is the way to life itself.

                                                         Amen.