The Jesus We Actually Follow

There is a moment in this Sunday's Gospel that I think gets rushed past too often, and I want to slow down on it before Sunday arrives.

Jesus tells his disciples plainly what is coming: suffering, rejection, death. And Peter, the same Peter who just confessed him as the Christ, the same Peter who was just handed the keys of the kingdom, pulls him aside and says: Lord, may it be far from you. This shall not happen to you. Peter is not being unfaithful in that moment. He is doing what almost anyone who loves someone would do. He wants an easier version of the story.

And Jesus turns on him with words sharper than anything he says to his actual enemies in this Gospel: Get behind me, Satan. You are an obstacle to me. For you are not behaving according to what is of God, but according to what is of men.

I want to sit with that rebuke, because I think it names something the American Church badly needs to hear right now.

Peter wanted a Messiah without a cross. A kingdom without cost. A savior who wins without suffering, who triumphs without sacrifice, who never asks his followers to give up anything that actually matters to them.

That is not a first-century problem. It is the exact Jesus a great deal of American Christianity has manufactured for itself right now, in 2026. A Jesus repackaged as a mascot for national power. A Jesus stripped of the Sermon on the Mount and dressed instead in the language of dominance, grievance, and conquest. A Jesus who blesses wealth instead of warning against it, who sanctifies cruelty toward the immigrant and the outcast instead of commanding welcome, who gets invoked to justify exactly the kind of earthly power the real Jesus refused three times in the wilderness.

That is not Christianity. It is Christian Nationalism wearing Christianity's clothes, and it has done more damage to the actual Gospel in this country than almost any external enemy of the faith ever managed.

The real Jesus, the one this Gospel actually gives us, said the opposite of what that movement preaches. Whoever would save his life will lose it. Whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. That is not a formula for national greatness. It is a formula for the kind of costly, self-emptying love that a power-seeking version of Christianity has no room for.

I do not want to pretend that following the actual Jesus is comfortable, because Paul does not let us pretend that either.

A living sacrifice. Not a one-time offering you make and then move past. An ongoing posture, a daily choosing, a body given over again and again to something other than self-protection and comfort. Paul follows that immediately with the instruction not to be conformed to this age but reformed by the renewal of the mind, and I think that pairing matters. The sacrifice is not primarily about giving something up in a single dramatic gesture. It is about refusing, every day, to let the values of the current age reshape what you believe the Gospel actually asks of you.

Following the real Jesus costs something. It has always cost something. Jeremiah, in this Sunday's first reading, describes the word of the Lord as a fire enclosed in his bones, something he could not hold in even when speaking it made him a derision, a laughingstock, mocked all day long. That is what it costs to speak an unpopular truth faithfully. It has never been the safe or comfortable path. It was not safe for Jeremiah. It was not safe for Jesus. It is not safe now.

Here is what I believe, and I believe it with everything I have: people are exhausted by the counterfeit. They are exhausted by a Christianity that shouts louder than it loves, that legislates more than it listens, that has confused political dominance with spiritual authority.

And underneath that exhaustion is a real hunger for the actual thing. For a faith that looks like Jesus actually looked: eating with outcasts, touching the untouchable, telling the powerful the truth and the powerless that they are beloved, dying rather than dominating. People are not rejecting Jesus. In enormous numbers, they are rejecting a distortion of Jesus that was never really him in the first place, and they are still quietly hoping someone will show them the real one.

That is the work in front of this parish, and it is not primarily a work of better arguments or louder preaching. It is a work of living. Paul does not say demonstrate the will of God by explaining it correctly. He says demonstrate it, full stop, by being transformed. The most persuasive thing this community will ever do is not a sermon. It is a Blessing Bag handed to someone sleeping outside. It is a table where a queer teenager finds out, without having to ask, that they are safe here. It is showing up at Pride with something real to offer instead of condemnation. People do not need to be told what real Christianity looks like nearly as much as they need to see it.

I want to say this plainly, because I think plainness is required right now: standing against Christian Nationalism, against bigotry preached from pulpits, against hatred dressed up as holiness, is not optional for this community. It is not a political position layered on top of our faith. It is our faith, applied honestly to the moment we are actually living in.

Get behind me, Satan, Jesus said, to the disciple who wanted an easier gospel. I think he would say the same thing to a great deal of what currently claims his name in this country. Our task is not to win that argument with more shouting. Our task is to take up the cross ourselves, to live the harder, truer, more costly version of the Gospel so visibly and so consistently that it becomes its own argument.

That is the sacrifice this Sunday's readings ask of us. Not a single dramatic gesture, but a living sacrifice, offered daily, in a world that badly needs to see what the real Jesus actually looks like.

Come Sunday. Let us take up that cross together.

Pax et Bonum,

Bishop Greer