Sermon for the Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Year A (8-30-26)

About a dozen years ago, sorting out whether to be a priest, I sold my car and packed my life into a suitcase and two boxes a friend stored under his bed, then spent a few months owning almost nothing in a monastery — and learned more about living abundantly there than I ever have since. 

Then I came home and developed strong opinions about things like throw pillows within about six weeks.

I've been thinking about that season again this week, reading Matthew. Picture the scene. Jesus has just told the disciples, plainly, that he's headed toward Jerusalem, toward suffering, toward death — and, in the very same sentence, that on the third day he will be raised.

Peter — who two verses earlier had correctly named him the Messiah — pulls Jesus aside. You can guess the shape of the argument even without hearing the words: Come on Jesus, my man! This isn't how it goes, we didn't leave our nets for this kind of attitude! Whatever's coming, we can find another way - it’s working. Grab hold of what's yours and don't let go!

Most days, that's not bad advice. But instead of resolved and appreciative, Jesus turns to Peter and says, "Get behind me, Satan."  Then, to everyone: "For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life?"

The word behind "life" there is psyche — soul, self, the whole animating center of a person. Gain the world, and there's nothing waiting on the other side of that trade. Just the loss. The third day belongs to the verse right before it instead — whoever loses their life for his sake will find it. Losing, not gaining, is the side of the ledger with a resurrection attached.

Some years ago I read, and just recently reread, a strange little book called Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn. I'm aware of how it sounds to say that a novel featuring a telepathic gorilla changed how I read Genesis, but here we are. Ishmael — the very wise gorilla — teaches his human student that our whole civilization runs on a story so old we've stopped noticing we're telling it: the myth that the world was made for us, and we were made to conquer it, subdue it, extract whatever's useful from it, and call the rest waste.

Quinn wrote that in the nineties. 

This past February, the EPA repealed the legal finding that carbon pollution endangers human health — the scientific basis used since 2009 to regulate greenhouse gases — and the EPA called it, in its own press release, the largest deregulatory action in American history. Meanwhile the fossil fuel industry it just freed up is on pace to clear roughly three thousand dollars per second this year, according to Oxfam. Not per day. $3000 per second.

That's an economy responding to need, alright — just not any need a human being actually has. The need is the system's own: grow or die, because the quarterly numbers said so.  Quinn has a name for a civilization built on that need — Taker Culture — and it turns out you don't need a psychic gorilla to recognize one. We're already living in it.

And I don't think Quinn gets all of Genesis right — God’s charge of our dominion didn’t have to become large-scale conquest. But he's right that you can't spend centuries telling yourself the world exists to be taken without becoming the thing it needs saving from.

Which brings us to a bush that's on fire and won't burn up. The story of Moses and the burning bush is a notable one, but as amazing as the flaming detail is, it isn't what God leads with.  The Angel of the Lord's first words to Moses aren't about the fire at all. They're about the dirt under his feet: take off your shoes, this ground is holy.

Ordinary desert ground. The same patch Moses had been walking sheep across for years without a second thought, and God calls it holy before Moses has extracted a single useful thing from it beyond grass for his flock — no minerals, no acreage, nothing to show for it.  That's the move Taker Culture can't make: it looks at ground and sees inventory, mineral rights, whatever's underneath worth pulling out. 

God looks at the same ground and says,  this is already holy.  Not because of what it will yield. Because it's ground — God-given, created, gifted ground. The fire still matters, but the ground was holy before the fire showed up, and it'll be holy long after the fire's gone out.

That should trouble anyone who's ever looked at a majestic mountain and only thought: I wonder how much coal we could rip out of there?

Losing our life, in the sense Jesus means it, starts there and goes further: neither our lives nor the ground under our feet is ours to use up for our own gain. Both belong to God. And Jesus isn't asking us to believe that from a safe distance. A few chapters later he's the one carrying the wood himself. And this wasn't the first time he'd turned down the world — there was a wilderness, once, and a very reasonable offer of every kingdom in it, if only he'd bow down.

Every empire since has taken that deal. Jesus is the one figure in this story who looked at the whole world, free for the taking, and said “no”. That refusal is the foil to Taker culture's whole creed that more is always the answer, enough is a myth for the weak.

What makes that refusal good news, rather than just admirable, is that the story doesn't stop at the cross. It goes on to an empty tomb. That's the answer to Peter's fear back in verse twenty-two: the one that whispers in his ear, "hold on tight, because whatever you lose is gone for good." The resurrection says that isn't true. You can lose something and it isn't gone for good.

Ishmael can tell us exactly what's wrong with our Taker culture. But in the story he could never tell his student how to actually let go of a scarcity mentality. Only an empty tomb has ever accomplished that. Which is what makes Paul's list two chapters over so pointed: let love be genuine. Contribute to the needs of the saints, extend hospitality to strangers. Do not repay anyone evil for evil. Overcome evil with good.

Read that against an economy built to grow forever on a planet that quite obviously isn't, and it stops sounding like Sunday-school nicety and starts sounding like insurgency.  Generosity, restraint, contentment — those aren't Christian virtues in the abstract. Right now, on this dying and beloved planet, they're refusals. They're what it looks like to say no to the deal in the wilderness.

So here's where I land — the world was never a thing to be gained. It is ground to stand on, and it turned out to be holy, and might help us be more holy too, on our better days.

You can't buy back a life spent trying to gain the world. But you can lose it on purpose, the way Jesus did, trusting what he trusted — that there's a more valuable life waiting beyond the tomb.

Take off your shoes. Enjoy this holy gift. It was never for sale to begin with.

Amen.