Taking Up Our Cross
Sermon preached by Subdeacon Jeremy Swartz on Sunday, September 21, 2025
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
“The Lord said: ‘If anyone wishes to come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.’” It is a decision that we each must come to: dare we follow after the Lord or not? But before this can be answered, we must first contemplate the question asked of St Peter by Christ just a few verses earlier – “But who do you say that I am?” Attempts to answer this question have led to life, to deaths, to councils, to unity, to schisms, to sufferings, and to revelations.
And more is expected of us than was of St. Peter, for we have the fullness of the revelation of God laid out before us in creeds and contemplations, in history and examples, and with these things, we are given the same divine Body and Blood of our God which was offered to the Apostles and for the life of the world. The message of Christ has spread so far and so completely that no one cares anymore what we have to say about who He is, and people do not care because we have too often, with our actions, failed to show who He is.
We are divided, and not simply on the spectrum of left and right or liberal and conservative; there’s nothing new there, stark differences of opinion have always existed and always will. Now we find ourselves divided along the axes of community versus isolation and of humanity versus ideology. How many of us know our literal neighbors who live in the houses or apartments around us? Not me. I have dozens of neighbors – I’ve met two in the past 3 years. I maintain old friendships from the various places I’ve lived via sporadic text messages and emails. I engage with sentiments and memories rather than the flesh and blood raking leaves in the yard next to my own.
Rather than engage with the people on a stroll who walk on the sidewalk in front of my house, I scroll through my phone and see ideas shared online that I disagree with and feel the urge to respond to them; and not with love, and certainly not as a person, because in seeing the thoughts expressed I have not encountered a person but an opinion – an ideology – and my ego is liberated to respond in an inhuman way.
Who needs faith when we have the canons? Who needs mercy when we have holy correctness? Who needs to love their neighbor, when we can choose our enclaves based on our preferences for certain interests, values, and morals? And how much more convenient it is now when I can choose my compatriots without ever having to meet them, when I can simply add my comment or join their discord server? We are becoming and have become inhuman and inhumane; we replace neighbor with a disembodied gnostic exercise and style our vitriol as a defense of truth.
“Someone who has actually tasted truth is not contentious for truth,” said St. Isaac of Syria, “Someone who is considered among men to be zealous for truth has not yet learned what truth is really like: once he has truly learnt it, he will cease from zealousness on its behalf. The gift of God and of knowledge of him is not a cause for turmoil and clamour; rather this gift is entirely filled with a peace in which the Spirit, love and humility reside…God is reality. The person whose mind has become aware of God…experiences no stirring of zeal or argumentativeness, nor is he stirred by anger. He cannot even be aroused concerning the faith.”
Not aroused to righteous anger regarding the faith?! Then how, may I ask, does one defend the faith in the face of those whom we are certain can have no understanding of who God is? Those heretics, those ecumenists, those heterodox, those Catholics, those Protestants, those Greeks, those Russians, those Syrians, those Lebanese, those converts, those cradles, those liberals, those conservatives - those anyone who are not like me. Those others.
Dr. Helmut Gollwitzer was a Lutheran pastor and theologian. He lived through arrest by the Nazis, expulsion from his home in Berlin, conscription into German military service in World War 2 where he, a pacifist, served as a field medic on the eastern front, he was a prisoner of war held by the Soviets for 4 years, and after the war he earned his PhD studying under Karl Barth. In 1954, he gave a lecture in Strassburg and said,
“The world that the crucified Christ looked upon from Golgotha was, and still is, a divided world. The world to which he offers his outstretched arms and would hold so closely to his heart with its thousand sufferings and burden of indescribable sorrow is a bundle of unruly rebellious fragments, that not only reject this invitation and this Saviour, but resist the fellowship in which they are all loved by the one Saviour and held in one embrace by the same universal love. They are all dependent on the same mercy; they are all meant to live in the house of the same Father and Lord as his children…the Jew with his consecrated life together with the...fire-worshipper and the elegant…cynic in Rome; the members of the different confessions, as though their differences were of no account;…the exploiter and the exploited, without regard to their differences, which seem irreconcilable; the Jews and the Germans, transcending the gas chambers and the concentration camps, that seem to separate them forever – they are all included in the love of the same Father. From Golgotha Christ sees them all – the enmity of hostile neighbors on the same corridor of the block of flats; the discord of the parties in a broken marriage for whom having to live together is hell instead of heaven. He sees all these rejecting a heaven in which they should live together, enjoying the joys of friendship. He sees them prepared, in the hysteria of hate and fear and mistrust, to let themselves go up in flames with the others in the mushroom cloud of a nuclear bomb, rather than live amicably together. He sees them all and stretches out his wounded hands over them all, and holds them all close to his heart pierced for them all, and in one life and one death binds them together in unity with himself, making himself the one way, the one truth and the one life for them all, barring all other ways and condemning as lies all other truths that disrupt this unity, and exposing as a broken well all other sources of life, which pretend that there is any other way of life but in community.”
It is with the denial of self that we begin to see our brothers and our sisters, our neighbors and our enemies as Christ does. It is in the realization of how Christ sees those others that we begin to truly recognize how merciful the Lord is with us. St. Isaac said, “Do not speak of God as ‘just,’ for his justice is not in evidence in his actions towards you…Where then is this ‘justice’ in God, seeing that, although we were sinners, Christ died for us?” The Cross of Christ was not justice but love, and our crosses that we each take up to follow him must be carved from that love; the love which carries with it the greatest and most liberating weight.
Later in his Strassburg lecture, Dr. Gollwitzer spoke of, “those whose eyes have been opened, who have recognized the power and truth of this unshakeable and unifying love; those who see that it is senseless to resist it or to seek a basis for life elsewhere…those who…are content to be taken one with another…by this Saviour and together to rely on his sacrifice and to live together by the devotion of his life…” Brothers and sisters, this is the life to which we have been called – not a life of our own, but his life, Christ’s life, and to live so with one another.
Another well-known German pastor and theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who died in a concentration camp, summed up today’s Gospel reading very well, “When God calls a man, he bids him come and die.” Knowing this, do we follow after the Lord or not? Dare we emulate the burden of his love for one another or instead bind ourselves to disconnection and isolation? Do we die and “rely on his sacrifice and to live together by the devotion of his life,” or will we nurture our egos, and pass through time with the self-assured knowledge that without us, Christ and Christianity have no hope for a future?
We defend the faith by living it. And we live the faith by taking up our cross and following Christ. Once we join the Church, whether at birth or in adulthood, we have no home in this world anymore and yet we are bound by the Cross to both our God and our fellow persons, whether they be, as Dr. Gollwitzer wrote, “other nations, people who differ…in ideas and beliefs…the godless and the self-righteous, the communists and the fascists, the Manichaeans and the pharisees.” And we are bound by the Resurrection to present life to the world. For us the ends do not justify the means; the means must be predicated upon he who is the end for he is also the beginning – the source of all life and all love. Who do you say that he is? You will have the actual answer to that question when you realize how you show others – whomever they may be – who he is.
Amen.