Jeremiah 15:15-21
Psalm 26:1-8
Romans 12:9-21
Matthew 16:21-28
“Let love be genuine.”
What does that mean?
Next time we say to ourselves,
“We are a loving church,”
maybe we should pause for a moment
and think about what we are actually saying.
Because chances are,
there are always more ways for us to love.
And that sounds wonderful—
until we discover how incredibly hard it is.
Because learning to love more fully
usually requires letting go of something.
And Jesus has a word for that.
Self-denial.
Now, self-denial gets a pretty bad name these days.
And maybe for good reason.
For a long time, Christians sometimes treated self-denial as though it meant rejecting yourself.
Erasing yourself.
Making yourself smaller.
Pretending that your needs don’t matter.
But I don’t think that’s what Jesus is talking about.
Self-denial is not self-rejection.
It is not self-loathing.
Actually, I think it can be quite the opposite.
Self-denial means letting go of our insistence
that God,
other people,
and even love itself
must fit within what we already know.
It means releasing the parts of ourselves
that prevent us from loving more fully.
It means creating some room in our hearts—
and allowing love to become bigger
than we thought it could be.
And that’s hard.
Because our instinct is often to protect what we already know.
We hold tightly to the things that once made us feel safe.
We hold onto the ideas that once gave us assurance.
We hold onto our understanding of God.
Our understanding of church.
Our understanding of one another.
And we say,
This is what love looks like.
This is how things are supposed to be.
Who wants to give that up?
I sure don’t!
But after years of ministry, I have become convinced of something.
Every time I thought I was “setting God free”
from one of the little boxes I had created—
I eventually discovered that God was actually
setting me free.
Free to see differently.
Free to understand differently.
And most importantly,
free to love differently.
Peter had to learn that the hard way.
Just last week, Peter got the answer exactly right.
Jesus asked the disciples,
“Who do you say that I am?”
And Peter said,
“You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”
Bingo!
Jesus praised him.
Peter got it!
Or at least—
Peter thought he got it.
He knew Jesus was the Messiah.
The one his people had been waiting for.
And Peter already had an idea of what the Messiah was supposed to be.
Powerful.
Victorious.
Unstoppable.
So when Jesus began telling the disciples
that he must go to Jerusalem,
that he would suffer,
that he would be rejected,
and that he would be killed—
Peter couldn’t take it.
“No!”
“God forbid it, Lord!”
“This must never happen to you!”
And here’s what makes Peter so interesting to me:
Peter said that because he loved Jesus.
He wasn’t trying to hurt Jesus.
He was trying to protect him.
But Peter’s love for Jesus had become tangled up
with Peter’s expectations of Jesus.
Peter loved Jesus—
but he also needed Jesus to be
the Messiah Peter thought he should be.
And Jesus said,
“Get behind me.”
Get back where a disciple belongs.
Behind me.
Follow me.
Don’t try to make me follow your expectations.
And then Jesus said:
“If any want to become my followers,
let them deny themselves
and take up their cross
and follow me.”
There it is.
Self-denial.
Peter had to let go of the Jesus
he thought Jesus ought to be
in order to follow the Jesus
who was standing right in front of him.
And maybe that’s part of what genuine love requires of us.
Because our loving instinct is often
to protect what we know—
rather than to set it free.
We even try to change the people around us
so that we don’t have to change.
And sometimes we do it with the very best intentions.
We tell ourselves,
I’m only trying to help.
I’m only trying to protect you.
I’m doing this because I love you.
Peter could have said every one of those things.
But genuine love asks something harder of us.
Genuine love makes room.
Room for another person.
Room for another possibility.
Room for God to surprise us.
Room for someone to be different
from what we expected them to be.
And sometimes—
room for us to become different, too.
I know something about that kind of love.
Twelve years ago,
this church made room for me.
You called a priest
who probably wasn’t exactly what everybody imagined.
And I came to a church
that wasn’t exactly what I imagined either!
Tee hee.
And somehow, over these twelve years,
you have made room for me,
and I have learned to make room for you.
We have changed together.
Not by giving up who we are,
but by discovering that God’s love
was bigger than the space we had originally made for it.
And now there are new faces among us.
New generations.
New experiences.
New ideas.
New possibilities.
And once again, God is asking us:
Can you make room?
Not because everything old is wrong.
Not because everything new is right.
But because genuine love never stops asking us
to open our hearts a little wider.
“Let love be genuine,” Paul says.
That kind of love is hard.
It requires self-denial.
It asks us to loosen our grip
on what we thought had to be,
so that we can receive
what God is bringing into our lives.
Peter had to make room
for a Messiah he didn’t expect.
The early Church had to make room
for people they never imagined belonging.
St. Paul’s made room for me.
And together,
we are still learning
to make room for one another.
Because maybe taking up our cross
doesn’t always begin with some enormous sacrifice.
Maybe sometimes it begins with something much smaller—
opening our hands,
opening our hearts,
and saying:
“God, show me how to love
beyond what I already know.”
Let love be genuine.
And let God keep making it bigger.
Amen.
