Help us, O God, to be masters of ourselves that we may become the servants of others.
Take our minds and think through them; take our lips and speak through them.
Take our hearts and set them on fire, for Christ’s sake.
Amen.
I was a teenager in the 80s - many of you will remember that it was a pretty strange time, there was a real explosion of media and popular culture. MTV came on the scene, and we suddenly were exposed to our pop culture icons in ways that we had never been before. Madonna, Michael Jackson, Cyndi Lauper, and so many more - everyone was really striving for their own niche and their own personal “style”.
As a 15-year old girl, there were a few things that were very important to me:
hair style - how big can it get? How tall can it go? How much aqua-net does it take to keep those bangs in place?
Clothes...shoulder pads and mini-skirts and sky high heels were all the rage.
We would carry clear nail polish in our bags to school, not for our nails, but just in case our pantyhose got a run in them, we were awash in Love’s baby soft perfume and blue eyeshadow...and almost all of us...were also awash in self-loathing, and anxiety over being liked.
We were all working overtime to try to ensure that other people would like us, and at least for me, I never felt that I achieved “likeability” through all these efforts.
It really was not until I was much older that I realized that the amount of time I spent working on a “personality” and creating an “image” and a performative “self” that others could gaze on, critique and either accept or reject, was an awful lot of wasted time and also an unhealthy obsession with the most shallow and fleeting parts of my being.
As I got older, I discovered that trying to hold onto all of these mostly external aspects of my “self” were mostly impossible, and that much of my desire to cling so tightly to appearances had been inserted into my psyche by advertising corporations for the purpose of selling me stuff:
the next greatest beauty cream,
the perfect pair of jeans,
new shoes, or whatever it is that I need to have to be liked today.
The world is very artfully encouraging us every day to construct and cling to a false self, that bears little resemblance to who our most indelible and true self is.
Today we are remembering St. Simon and St. Jude the apostles. While we do not know much about these two saints, there is some speculation that they were missionary partners. We know that Jude was martyred, and possibly Simon also, although some accounts say that Simon had a peaceful death.
We personally are unlikely to find ourselves in situations where we will be asked to martyr ourselves for our Christian faith, but we are asked in small ways all day, every day to sacrifice our identities in Christ to the powers and principalities of the world. And it is a slow death by a million cuts. And while it may seem so mundane and boring and unworthy of worrying about, this death by a million cuts has some pretty terrible repercussions for our planet, and for our fellow creatures.
I watched a documentary recently about the second hand clothing trade in Ghana. I was appalled and dismayed at what really happens to all those clothes that we donate to the Goodwill. The detritus of our quest for worldly likeability ends up in small villages, piling up in their landfills, and washing into the ocean during the rainy season.
There are beaches in these places where there are 40 foot long “tentacles” of clothing that make navigating the water to do things like fish for food hazardous.
These tentacles become embedded in the sand on the beaches, they choke wildlife, and particularly the clothes made from petrochemicals - can take hundreds of years to break down. Our need to be liked and accepted by the world so quickly turns into pain for others.
Jesus said in our text today “If you belonged to the world,[a] the world would love you as its own. Because you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world—therefore the world hates you.”
When Jesus talks about the the world in this way, he is not talking about God’s creation - he is really talking about the powers and principalities of the world - the political engines and the gears of corporate capitalism.
That world is always going to hate your real self, and I would argue that it also kind of hates your false self too.
It hates your false self because there is profit to be reaped from your self-loathing and anxiety to be liked!
And it hates your self in Christ because that self can resist the temptation to indulge the world's unending hunger for our life's energy.
In our reading, Jesus does talk an awful lot about being despised, and being hated by the world...and it would be really easy for us to cling onto that part of the text because we are all so Worried About being liked or disliked!!!
But there is something more that we can glean from this - he was not trying to reinforce to his followers how unlikeable they were. Jesus rarely complained about being persecuted, and always looked on how our circumstances are occasions for transformation.
The real good-news message here, is that Jesus is inviting them to focus on the fact that they are deeply loved, and that their very essence resides eternally in a place of unconditional love.
They are loved before the world places demands on them.
They are loved when they can no longer grasp onto those things of the world that are just so ephemeral.
It's not because the things of the world are all necessarily bad, there are plenty of
short-lived, but beautiful, good and true things within creation. But we should not grasp because they do not last.
If we place our personal value in things that are fleeting, then our self-worth, and the worth we attribute to others will be fleeting. We will feel persecuted. We will feel unloved. And losing and letting go of our false self can feel an awful lot like dying, and it is in fact a sort of death.
In his letter to the Colossians 3 Paul says:
“So if you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. 2 Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, 3 for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. 4 When Christ who is your[a] life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory”.
Now, Paul isn’t necessarily talking about our final demise, he really is talking about the death of our worldly selves - and setting our minds on the parts of us that are not ephemeral, that are the “us” we were gifted by God, that part which both lives in Christ, and in which Christ lives in us.
Our true self. The True self is nothing you create because you already have it!
When I look back now, at my teenage years, I begin to realize that it was very hard for us to love ourselves, and not only that, but it was hard for us to love each other.
There was so much jealousy and cattiness over things that have now passed away for me and most of my childhood friends.
I know social media can be very problematic and can serve to make people focus on these fleeting things, but it has also helped me to stay connected with these lovely people that I went to school with. And they are truly lovely people.
These days I find I am more concerned that they know they are loved, and that they are amazing and wishing good things for them. That inner loveliness is something that they always had, it was just hard to pay attention to that part of them when we were all so consumed with how big each other's hair was.
We are all ageing, and the facades of our false selves are being slowly dismantled by life, by heartbreak, by age, by illness, by loss and grief, but also by joys and successes.
I look at them and see the way their eyes glow with pride at their children’s milestones
The love that just oozes out of them as they hold their first grandchild.
The lines that show the years that they have spent caring for their families and friends
the beautiful gifts of empathy, compassion and support that they have learned to both give and receive.
This is the transformation that Christ invites us to - it is always our personal transformation - we can’t transform others, just as we cannot “Make” them like us.
We can only point them in the direction of Christ so they can find their own transformation. The world wants you to think that your worthiness is “out there” - but it is and has always been “in here”. The only way that we can actually transform our world, is to accept Christ's invitation to transform ourselves.
If we can learn to let go of the worldly ideas about our likeability and worthiness, we can slip into who we are. And when we do, we will find ourselves residing in that place, where our lives are hidden with Christ In God, inside of us, in our very being.
And once we do see it, as people transformed by Christ, we will see not just the beauty of our true selves, but also the beauty and holiness of all our fellow kingdom dwellers.
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