Sermon, by Pastor Joel
Seventeenth Sunday After Pentecost
September 15, 2024
Isaiah 50:4-9a
Psalm 116:1-9
James 3:1-12
Mark 8:27-38
The context of this sermon is
100% written by a human
A couple weeks ago, my Facebook feed offered up a particularly poignant thought exercise. Perhaps you have also seen it. The video showed a shaky black and white film of people, dressed in old-fashioned clothes, walking on the street, standing in front of their houses, doing regular things. The words reminded me of this reality. I’ll paraphrase: In one hundred years, strangers will be living in your house. In one hundred years, that car you coveted will be metal scrap. In one hundred years, no one will really remember you. Do you remember your great-grandfather? How much do you even know about him? The fact is that a lot of this will happen much sooner than one hundred years. More likely there will be no house at all, let alone a strange family. But the point landed home: the things we chase today, the stuff we so value, will mean nothing, to anybody we know, sooner than we can image. Storing up treasure on earth is a fool’s errand.
And yet, don’t we love our treasure? The average house size in Canada was about 1,200 square feet in 1971. Today, the average house size is 2,200 square feet – even though families have gotten smaller not larger. According to an article in PIRG, Americans buy an average of 53 pieces of clothing each year – four times more than in 2000. (I doubt Canadians are far behind.) More than 100-billion items of clothing are produced in the world every year, according to the BBC – and as much as 65 per cent of that ends up in a landfill in 12 months. Meanwhile, gallons upon gallons of water are wasted, and farmland is lost, to create shirts we don’t need. The examples could fill this sermon. But to paraphrase the words of the gospel: what does it profit us to gather this treasure, but forfeit the world? Certainly, if we have in mind our legacy to our children, we risk leaving an impoverished one.
It’s a thought-provoking line in the gospel, spoken by Jesus. He says: Those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for the sake of the gospel, will gain it. For what will profit them to gain the whole world, and forfeit their life?
Jesus says this line after a devastating exchange with Peter, who is arguably his closest friend. Peter is struggling with hearing Jesus talk of his terrible death. We can imagine that he must have heard Jesus explain the prophecy many times, to each new crowd. Who wouldn’t be conflicted about hearing how your dearest friend and ally was predicting for himself great suffering, betrayal and the most brutal of deaths on a cross. (The rising again would sound like a footnote, under those circumstances.) Peter, we are told, takes Jesus aside, and rebukes him. We can assume he said something like: Stop this downer talk, this isn’t going to happen on my watch. This cannot be the way our story ends.
Now Jesus has had plenty of people challenge his words – Pharisees, tax collectors, the woman with the sick child in last week’s gospel. He typically responded calmly. In this case, with Peter, his reaction is so vicious, so out of character, we might ask ourselves why.
We forget sometimes that Jesus was also human. And humans, by our nature, want to live. So I imagine having your close friend throw up doubts also highlighted your own doubts about the difficult path ahead. What was Satan to Jesus, but temptation? Temptation to make a different choice, a more self –serving choice. And so Peter, while expressing his concern out of love, was also tempting Jesus away from what he saw as his duty: to continue to spread the gospel, even at great risk to himself, even until he made the authorities so angry they would plot his death. And so Jesus says: there is no point in gaining the world, if you lose yourself in the end.
Of course, we all, in the end, lose our lives. But this passage in the gospel speaks to what we do in the time we have, and the choices we make. That message on Facebook reminded us that most of what we do for material gain serves us in the moment. It’s not even fair to say it won’t matter in 100 years. In 100 years, the choices we make about the environment and for the social good will likely matter very much. In fact, doing right for 100 years from now, will require gaining less today. We can’t continue to consume whatever we want, and live in houses too large for our families and trample over forests and farmland, without creating loss for our children and grandchildren.
Whoever loses their life for the sake of the gospel will gain it. Jesus is describing a selfless choice. His own – to face the cross. And ours – to live for sake of people we don’t know and future generations we can only imagine. Can we resist temptation, live meaningfully, exist in moderation, and deny our own wants for what the natural world needs? One hundred years from now, our names may be a mysterious line in a family tree. Our houses may be gone, our cars will be scrap, our clothes living long in a garbage heap. Our great-grandchildren may not know us when they see our faces in an old picture. But they will know the future created by our choices. Amen.
Comments