To Save Your Life
Preached at Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford on Sunday 27th of February 2022
You can watch a filmed version here
READING
Mark 8:27-38
Jesus went on with his disciples to the villages of Caesarea Philippi; and on the way he asked his disciples, ‘Who do people say that I am?’ And they answered him, ‘John the Baptist; and others, Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets.’ He asked them, ‘But who do you say that I am?’ Peter answered him, ‘You are the Messiah.’ And he sternly ordered them not to tell anyone about him.
Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, ‘Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.’
He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, ‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? Indeed, what can they give in return for their life? Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.’
SERMON
Let the words of my mouth, and the meditation of all our hearts, be acceptable in thy sight, O Lord our Rock and our Redeemer.
Within 24 hours of realising I believed in God, I stole a Bible from a theological college.
Within a month, I had read the entire thing, cover to cover.
I’d never read the Bible before. I grew up so far from Christianity that I genuinely thought David and Goliath was a piece of Greek mythology, and so everything was new to me. And everything spoke to me. And I so read it again. And again. I love the Bible. And I love the Lectionary - being thrown a random piece of scripture and having it just breathe out meaning over your day - it’s a joy.
But for this service I was told: “we’ve used all the lectionary readings for today - pick whatever you want!”
So I picked one of my favourite bits of the Bible - as far as anyone can have a favourite bit, anyway.
When I read this for the first time, I sat there, stunned. I underlined it in pen and I thought to myself, “That is Big Trans Energy.” Big Queer Energy. See, it’s all about revealing, and truth, and risking oneself for that truth. And that is where queer people live.
So, let’s look at the reading, shall we?
Jesus is wandering down the street, as Jesus often did two thousand years ago, and on the way he turns to his disciples and he says “Who do people say that I am?” and the Disciples repeat all kinds of rumours. Possibilities whispered by people who have created their own ideas of who Jesus is. Who Jesus needs to be for their world to make sense. He’s Elijah. John the Baptist. A prophet. A holy man. A walking resurrection.
The world is claiming to know who Jesus is. And their ideas are wildly flattering. But also wrong. Not bad. Just wrong.
Jesus then asks his disciples, those who are close to him, who they think he is.
“You are the Messiah.” Says Peter.
The Messiah. The Christ. The Anointed One. The translations vary, but the meaning remains the same. Jesus is known. Jesus is seen. Jesus is named. And then he tells them to keep quiet. This is his truth. And it is his to reveal. At a moment he chooses.
And here is the core of what this passage is all about. Truth, and revealing - and the consequences of that.
At the beginning of this passage, people make assumptions as to who and what Jesus is - Just as people make assumptions as to who and what we are, who and what we all are, straight or gay, cis or trans, bi or pan or ace. People look at us, hear about us, and they assume. And their assumptions might not be insulting - it’s not inherently bad to be any of those things - but it might be bad for you.
Being anything other than fully the person God created you tends to be bad for you - internally, at least.
And in the case of Jesus, and the assumptions made about him - who wouldn’t want to be seen as John the Baptist? Or Elijah? Those are flattering assumptions if ever I’ve heard them! But they’re just that - they’re assumptions. And they’re wrong.
And the truth? That Jesus is the Messiah? That is dangerous. Just as, even today, the truth of who we are can be dangerous.
The transcendent truth of who God has made us can be dangerous in this world, and so it makes sense that, immediately after the Disciples speak and know his truth for the first time, Jesus makes his first clear prediction of the passion. The unfair and unjust consequence of his truth in God - and of others fear of it - or of what it may be. The possibility alone is world-shaking enough to be feared, after all.
He tells his disciples, simply, that: “the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief Priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.” He will be rejected. And he will suffer. And he will be killed. But he will rise again.
Here, Jesus explicitly predicts the instruments of social and religious power denying and destroying something of God that they simply cannot comprehend. And he predicts God prevailing. As always.
But, as I am trying to make clear, this isn’t just about Jesus’ life, Jesus’ self, Jesus’ truth, Jesus’ revealing. This is about us, too - as followers. This is about our lives in God. Our selves in God. Our truths in God.
This is made clear in that, moments after predicting his own death at the hands of those who cannot accept his wondrous truth, Jesus says: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?”
It’s not exactly a cuddly platitude. Jesus is seemingly asking us to die. To "lose our lives".
But what does it mean - to Lose Your Life? I think that's the important question here. The thing upon which our understanding of this entire passage relies.
What is a life? And what does it mean to lose it?
On some level that is a fairly simple question. Alive is alive and dead is dead and there's a clear line between the two things. Right? Wrong.
Though it is important to recognise that for Jesus’ followers, in this most dangerous moment, the literal meaning of “losing a life” - of dying - would have been foremost in their minds - indeed many of them, including Peter, would follow him to horrible early graves - martyrs to a truth the powerful were unready, unwilling, or unable, to accept - life isn’t simply the state of being alive, and dying is not the only way to lose your life.
And I know that sounds wild, but you already know that. On some level at least. Because who hasn’t been told to “get a life”, or told someone else to? And the only way that saying “get a life” to a living, breathing, person can make any sense is if “life” means more than breath and heartbeat and brainwaves. And we all know that - even if we’ve never really thought about it until now.
So what is life?
It’s this. It’s all of this. And it’s everything else too. Life is all that we know. And all that we think. And all that we think that we know.
And so in this passage, Jesus is not, in fact, asking us to die - what he is asking of us is much harder. He is asking us to lose our lives. To lose our lives for his sake. And for the sake of the Gospel.
We are being called to strip away all that is familiar and comfortable, all that makes existence easy, all that makes sense. We are being called to give up this vast nebulous concept that is ‘life’, in pursuit of this radical Gospel.
We are being asked to dismantle ourselves, and the world, and rebuild in a truer image - for when we lose our life, only then, only in that raw, honest, vulnerable state, will we truly find it.
In losing our lives for Jesus’ sake, and for the sake of the Gospel, we will save them.
But what does that look like?
The process can take many forms, but it must, at its heart, be a process of clearing away the stuff of life that separates us from God, and from the full truth of who we were created by God.
And this is why this is one of my favourite passages in the Bible. This is why I chose this reading for this explicitly LGBT inclusive service, at the end of LGBT history month. Here is the Big Trans Energy. The Big Queer Energy.
You see, as trans person, in many ways, I have already lost my life, and found it.
When I transitioned I moved away from where I grew up. I lost touch with all the acquaintances I had. My name changed, my face changed. Scrap of paperwork by scrap of paperwork, who I was, who the world thought I had been, disappeared. As far as the world knew, I died.
One day, years later, I went back - not just to the city, but to the same streets where I grew up. I went into a shop, and I was served by a woman named Grace. She wasn’t wearing a nametag, but Grace and I had gone to school together for eleven years. So I knew her. Knew her name. Her age. Her favourite colour. Even that embarrassing horse phase she went through in year three.
To her, I was a stranger.
I bought my stuff, left the shop, walked down the street, past my old primary school. A woman was walking in the other direction and she looked me right in the eyes. She was my childminder. She’d worked at the nursery I’d attended, and then founded her own childminding business. All in all, this woman had spent more time with me, between the ages of two and eleven, than my parents had. And she smiled, and squeezed by, without a flicker of recognition
To her, I was a stranger.
And what do you say? In a country filled with transphobic rhetoric, in front of half a dozen small children, on a random street corner: “Hi! Remember that little girl you raised? Surprise!”
Of course not. So you let it go. You have to. You lose your life. And it all slips away.
It was on that day, a few years before I found God, that I realised that I had died, somehow, in a way I had not anticipated. I had died and I was walking those streets as a ghost in my own past. And yet, in the midst of all of that strangeness and loss and pain - I also knew that I had found life. The only life that matters. The life that springs from one’s true self.
I knew that if I hadn’t transitioned, not only would my life have been lesser, been no life at all - it would have been shorter, and I wouldn’t be there - wouldn’t be here, now.
In that moment, on that street, I knew that every day for the past few years I had experienced life more fully, and more joyfully, than I ever had in the nearly two decades that I’d spent, walking up and down that one long street which, coincidentally, held my nursery, my primary school, my high school, my sixth form college, and my childminders house - all in one long line.
I knew that as hard as this day was, I’d been given a choice between this strange metaphorical death, and a far more literal one. And I also knew that I had chosen correctly - no matter what difficulties lay behind and ahead. Because that was the only choice I had. Not a choice to be queer - but what to do about the inescapable fact that I am.
Because that’s the choice, isn’t it? The horrendously difficult choice all queer people have to make at some point. A choice that is not about what we are, because being queer is not a choice, but about what we do about it.
One the one hand we could try to pretend we are not who and what we are. We could take whatever moment of clarity we may have had - whatever truths we may have discovered lurking in the most secret parts of our souls, and we could deny them.
We could become our own Peter, hearing the cockerel crow and weeping as we realise that, out of fear of worldly retribution, we have denied the wonder and clarity gifted to us by God.
We could continue as if we had never seen that terrifying beauty and endless possibility that, for a moment, danced before our eyes.
We could try to keep safe, to keep control, to exist in the status quo and avoid the suffering and rejection so often offered by the world and by those in power - Try to avoid suffering and rejection at the hands of our own modern versions of those elders, chief priests, and scribes, who, two thousand years ago, were so challenged by the wondrous expansive truth of God’s love for creation that they insisted upon the death of the person who most embodied it.
We could save our lives, as we know them, whilst simultaneously knowing that to do so means losing the truest life of all. The life that God, in Their infinite love and wisdom created and called each and every one of us to live.
We could live a half life. A life of surface, and nothing more, too scared to disturb that hidden, unwanted, truth, to ever truly be alive.
We could die, in all but breathing.
Or we could risk it all.
We could choose to give up our lives - our lives - in pursuit of the incredible dazzling truth of who we were made to be.
We could step out into the unknown, and a world that is so often utterly unable to accept the truth that we have found in the core of our beings - the truth of who God formed us to be - Knowing, as I did, as I stood on that street in my childhood home, that what we stand to lose is nothing short of everything, and that everything is as nothing in comparison to what it is we shall gain.
And yes - upon doing this, upon finding our lives, we may die then, too - hate crimes are rising, and all too many of us do - but before that possible end, we know we will have truly lived, if only for a short while.
In short, in this world, at this time, queer people are given a choice: we can try to save our lives, only to lose them, one way or another - or we can willingly lose our lives, in search of a truth that so often sees us rejected and reviled by society. In doing such a thing, in giving up our life in that way, we will find it.
Jesus asks us, “what will it profit [us] to gain the whole world and forfeit [our] life?” and though he was not explicitly speaking of queer people in the twenty-first century when he spoke those words, it does not mean that this meaning does not hold.
To go further - Jesus says: “those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.” And so we are called to give up our lives for the sake of Jesus - for God, made flesh - and for the sake of the Gospel, for the Good News of God.
And what is more of God than a full and unashamed embracing of the people God made us to be, lovingly crafted in God’s own image.
What is more of the gospel - what is better news - than the truth of who we are? Living, breathing examples of the expansiveness of God’s creation, and the love which God has for each and every one of us?
Jesus died for us on the cross so that we may live - so that we may call on God’s Kingdom to collide with the here and now - to manifest on Earth. To bring a purity and depth of love and justice that is beyond human comprehension, but, in Christ, is within human reach. And that Kingdom starts with us.
We are called to love our neighbours as ourselves - and so we must love ourselves.
We are called to share the good news of God - and that includes the truth of who we are - living embodiments of the wonder of God’s creation.
We are called to Lose our Lives, for in doing so we shall find them, in God.
People often think that it is in denying our queerness that we please God - and that in embracing it we indulge only ourselves, wrapped up in human affairs and not the divine. And to that I echo Jesus’ words to Peter in this passage - ‘Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.’
What is more human than the social and cultural norms that we use to shame and exclude?
What reeks of human corruption more than the use of scripture, and of God’s name, to excuse bigotry against God’s beloved creation?
And what can come closer to the divine than to see the world as God created it, and to praise God for the wonder of that creation - without denying or defying any part of it?
Jesus calls on us to give up that which is easy, comfortable, and safe, in pursuit of a far more wonderful, far more dangerous, truth. He does this repeatedly, throughout the Gospels, not just here, in this reading. We are called to give up the whole world, and in return, we are gifted ourselves. We are gifted whole lives. Who are we to ignore or deny that call? And what is the world that it seeks for us to do so?
Jesus asks us to take up our crosses and follow him - and no cross is formed by God.
Our metaphorical crosses - like the literal one Jesus carried - are formed by human hands, as a reaction to human fears, and in response to our perceived breaking of human rules in pursuit of God’s truth and justice.
Our cross is not our God-given queerness, but the world’s response to it.
So let us not be afraid, but do as our saviour asks of us - for in Matthew 10 he says: “nothing is covered up that will not be uncovered, and nothing secret that will not become known. What I say to you in the dark, tell in the light; and what you hear whispered, proclaim from the housetops. Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; What I say to you in the dark, tell in the light; and what you hear whispered, proclaim from the housetops.”
So, be it today, or tomorrow, or some far off day, when you are ready, we must take up this great challenge, and follow, faithfully, this great command from our God, who knows us more intimately than we know ourselves.
We must proclaim our truths from the housetops.
We must tell of God’s love for us in the light.
We must shoulder those crosses the world has carved for us, crosses that those who hate us wish to nail us upon, and we must walk beside Christ in the light of our own truths.
For, as queer people, we have nothing to fear from the divine - nothing to fear from God - by whom we are, all of us, fearfully and wonderfully made - all we have to fear are human things.
Human hatred.
Human intolerance.
And when we know that we are forever held in the arms of a God of love and justice, who created and formed us in an abundance of love, a fear of human things, a fear of mortal things, a fear of death - a fear of the loss of our lives - is no real fear at all.
AMEN