"True Religion - Abnegation and the Cross" - Sermon for 14th after Pentecost, 8-30-26

† “True religion” which we ask for in today’s collect, is also a California-based, trademarked brand name of a clothing company that began only in this century. I hope the Church doesn’t get sued for infringement!

True religion – which the Church named twenty centuries ago and didn’t think to trademark – is defined thus in the Epistle of Saint James, Chapter 1, Verse 27: “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, [in other words, true religion] is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.”

True religion – the faith practice, not the blue jeans – is by definition counter-cultural. What is cultural, after all, but to strive to be stained by the world and to look out for number-one?

Saint Paul gives us a list of how to be counter-cultural. Jesus does, too. Paul’s advice is more clear-cut. If you want to live a truly religious life, I suggest you start by meditating on today’s epistle passage. Take today’s missal leaflet home with you and, in the words of another collect, “read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest” this passage that he wrote to the early Church in Rome.

Jesus’s advice is more up to individual interpretation. “If any want to become my followers,” Jesus said – if any want to practice true religion – “let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life” – by cultural standards – “will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life? Or what will they give in return for their life?”

A central question asked by true religion, if not the central question, is this: “What does your cross mean to you?”

Jesus may have been speaking in metaphor, but his first hearers could not but have heard him literally. The cross was the Roman Empire’s instrument of terrorism and execution, reserved for enemies of the empire as the empire defined them. Counter our culture, the Romans said, and you will die a slow, public, and excruciating death. And you will serve as a warning to any who might make the mistake of following you. And for Jesus’s first hearers, this was true. Tradition holds and history shows that many of his immediate and subsequent followers were killed by the empire; if not crucified, then tortured to death in other cruel ways.

Has the cross lost its meaning? Has popular culture appropriated it? Diluted and dulled it by careless and callous overexposure? I expect it has. How can the Church reclaim the cross? Should the Church reclaim the cross?

I think that to reclaim the cross, to make the cross counter-cultural again, we must remember to pair Jesus’s injunction to take up the cross with what he said just before that, which is decidedly counter-cultural: to deny ourselves. Somehow, we have allowed self-denial and the cross to become separated, one from the other.

We talk about self-denial in the season of Lent, when faithful followers of Jesus might give up – might deny themselves – beer or chocolate or social media or swearing. And then Easter comes, and likely we’re back to our old selves until Ash Wednesday next year.

Self-denial isn’t popular in popular culture. We are supposed to want it all, have it all, and then want even more – and get it all by the end of the day. We Americans have become Amazonians, a race not of legend and myth, but in rapacious reality.

If you prefer unfettered hedonism to consumerism – or, perhaps, fettered hedonism – the San Francisco Chronicle reported last week that someone named “Baby Jesus”, an organizer for Burning Man, wrote that the festival’s “Orgy Dome” has been remade to “withstand the desert’s famously unpredictable weather,” and, for the convenience of the participants, will now be under one roof, rather than “a series of interconnected carports” (August 27, 2026).

And, if you will permit me to couple hedonism with consumerism: available for purchase, according to a fetish vendor’s ad, favorably shared by a Facebook friend, is a leather thong whose connecting hardware, located in the small of the back, is a crucifix. Not merely a cross, but a cross with the familiar figure of grown-up Jesus affixed to it.

And every bit as blasphemous as this are the politicians and public figures who wear crosses around their necks or pinned to their lapels, all the while legislating, administering, and adjudicating policies that starve the poor, bomb the innocent, and cook the planet.

Has the cross lost its meaning? Has popular culture appropriated it? Diluted and dulled it by careless and callous overexposure? I expect it has.

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The theological term for self-denial is abnegation. In his 2024 book Take Up Your Cross: A Theology of Liturgical Abnegation, David Fagerberg quotes a seventeenth-century French cleric named Jean-Jaques Olier, who, commenting on today’s gospel verses, wrote that the reason “why our Lord put abnegation in his gospel as the first step we must take in Christian life … [is] because self-centeredness, being filled with the self, blocks Jesus Christ and the fullness of his divine life from entering us. It is the inexhaustible source of every evil and every sin” (27).

And, Fagerberg continues, we attempt abnegation, “to renounce our own will, because Jesus has renounced his, and we want to be like Jesus” (29).

In multiple places in the gospels, Jesus is clear that he has come not to do his own will, but the will of his Father. Jesus, the only begotten Son of the Father, practiced abnegation – and modeled it for us – from his Incarnation through his Ascension. Why? Because of the Holy Trinity’s love for us and for all creation.

Abnegation doesn’t mean to make us lifeless lumps of bland passivity. Rather, paradoxically, it takes a strong self-will and self-love to renounce our own will. To stand apart from popular culture even as we are surrounded by it. To carry our cross, even if we cannot yet embrace it through a more perfect abnegation.

So, what, then, is our cross? Fagerberg quotes an eighteenth-century French Jesuit, Jean Grou, who writes, “As a rule, when we speak of a cross, we mean certain dispensations of Providence, either natural or supernatural, which thwart us, humiliate us, give us pain or sorrow, and try us in a variety of ways. Such crosses may be caused by nature, like bodily afflictions, infirmities, and illnesses; or by our condition in life, like poverty, toil, and dependence; or by some state that we have adopted, such as marriage; or by man’s injustice, or by fortuitous accidents, or the malice of evil spirits. Or they may come to us directly from the hand of God. They attack our health, our possessions, our peace of mind, our reputation, our person or the persons of those we love; they mortify our feelings, our pride, our self-love; they exact a variety of sacrifices from us, some outward, some inward. Crosses in this acceptation of the word, which is the commonest, are the usual lot of humanity and there is no one who can completely avoid them. Everyone has his own; for some they are larger and more numerous; for others they are smaller and fewer. But no man is altogether exempt from them” (384).

What is your cross? What does your cross mean to you? What do you continue to surrender in self-denial to carry it? What is tempting you to put it down and follow not Jesus, but another? Those are questions for you to answer on your own, although certainly you can discuss it with me and clarify it if you need help.

What other help do you need to keep carrying your cross to the end? – which, by the way, doesn’t end with death, but rather in resurrection and life-eternal.

It should come as no surprise that I agree with Fagerberg, and the theologians he quotes, that frequent reception of Holy Communion is indispensable. This is how, he writes, “Christ takes up residence in us” which leads to “begetting love of crosses, being transformed, perfect and consummate union, conferring of the highest love, and strength and perseverance in serving God” (433).

And here is where Jesus’s sharp rebuke of Peter comes in. Therese Lisieux, a nineteenth-century French nun writes “that the devil thinks that when he ‘has succeeded in driving a soul away from Holy Communion he has gained his ends, and Jesus weeps’” (433).

Popular-culture Peter tries to drive Jesus away from his cross, and Jesus says, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”

Jesus knew better. And now, thanks be to him – by his word and through his Sacrament – so do we.

Instead of rebuke, Fagerberg invites us to counter the devil with another strategy: that is, with ridicule. “We should,” he writes, “laugh the devil to scorn. Contempt is a sort of scorn; scorn is mockery or derision; derision is ridicule and laughter; and when the devil tells us that the world (soon ending) is the final abode for a soul (which will not end), tells us that the things of the earth have the same ineffable sweetness as the things of heaven, tells us that the taste of a corruptible good is as gratifying as a taste of the Supreme Good, then it is all we can do to stifle our laughter” (433).

Truly true religion is not a clothing label worn on our sleeve or slung across our backside. True religion is abnegation and cross-carrying. It is following Jesus, as faithfully as we can, despite our falls and failures, to Calvary’s hill, to the garden’s tomb, and to an eternity with him. †

Father Daniel S.J. Scheid, SCP

14^th after Pentecost, Proper 17 – August 30, 2026

All Saints’ Episcopal Church, San Francisco

“True Religion – Abnegation and the Cross”