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.
“If anyone
is willing to come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and
follow me.” (Matthew 16:24, CPDV)
The
Jesus Peter Wanted, and the Jesus We Have
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.
The
Sacrifice Is Real
I do not want to pretend that
following the actual Jesus is comfortable, because Paul does not let us pretend
that either.
“I beg you,
by the mercy of God, that you offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and
pleasing to God.” (Romans 12:1, CPDV)
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.
What
People Are Actually Yearning For
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.
Standing
Against What Distorts the Gospel
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 | 
