Sermon: The Self You Lose, the Self You Find

Matthew 10:34–39 

This passage and I have history. Who else has history with this passage?  I was talking to Sarah Augustine about this passage, which she recently preached on, and she told me how much she loved this passage and always has.  I told her my journey with this passage has been much more torturous.

This book, the Martyrs Mirror, was on the bookshelf of everyone I knew growing up. The Amish around where I live give it as a wedding gift. It depicts detailed and gruesome stories and images of my spiritual ancestors — and yours, too, if you are a part of this church — being tortured and killed for following Jesus. Literally losing their lives. 

This passage we just heard, the Martyr’s Mirror — they are both intended to communicate a true thing: that following Jesus will be hard at times; something will be demanded of you. You will need to take up your cross, that heavy, awful thing. And sometimes following Jesus will bring about division and discord with families, within communities because Jesus’ message, his Gospel, his Good News — is going to upset the normal order of things if that normal is not in alignment with the Kindom of God — its justice, its peace, its mercy, its upside reordering of our world. This is good stuff. It’s a true teaching.

But this teaching as it was handed down to me also got distorted in ways that it took me years to untwist. For my larger community, the idea that Jesus came to bring not peace but a sword got translated into a license to cut off the erring neighbor, the doubting cousin, the church down the road that did things differently, all in the name of faithfulness to Jesus. In my little home community, there are dozens of different kinds of Amish and Mennonites because of the constant splitting apart that we believed faithfulness demanded. Some Amish still follow the ban, a shunning of family members who “choose sin” over following Jesus as the community understands that.

But the way I internalized the Scripture actually did more damage than this outward divisiveness. I got the message that I needed to sacrifice my self. I needed to sacrifice my wants and my needs and my dreams.  I needed to take up my cross and die on it — maybe at some point literally, but before then I was just supposed to sublimate my self to whatever faithfulness demanded. The message, as I received it, was that selfhood was the obstacle to faithfulness.

For a young person who had barely begun to find out who she was, who barely knew her self, who barely knew what she wanted or needed or dreamt — that was a confusing and sometimes painful message. You can’t give up a self you haven’t yet found. You can’t surrender what you don’t yet possess.

And the damage done didn’t stop with my little community or psyche. ”Lose yourself” has been preached, across centuries and continents, to people who were already being asked to disappear. It has been preached to women who were told their desires didn’t matter. To children who were taught that their inner life was inherently suspect. To enslaved or colonized peoples who were told that their cultures, their languages, their spiritual traditions were the very “self” they needed to renounce — and that adopting European Christianity along with enslavement was what it meant to “take up the cross.” It has been preached to LGBTQ+ people, who were told that their very identity was the sacrifice this text demanded of them. That is not the gospel. That was fear, and power, and sometimes cruelty, wearing Jesus’ words.

So I want to talk today about what I  believe Jesus might actually mean by “Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.” It probably doesn’t surprise you to hear that I think that it is not an invitation to self-erasure but an invitation to something more radical, and more life-giving, than that. 

When I was 28 and in seminary, I discovered the mystics — Meister Eckhart, Teresa of Ávila, Thomas Merton  — who wrote about self-surrender in a way I found very powerful.  They are all writing for people who have built a solid self and are now being invited to loosen their grip on it. The spiritual journey they describe presupposes a formed ego, not an absent one. 

But building that formed ego, while necessary, comes with a side effect. Because that construction isn’t built out of nothing — it’s built out of other people’s expectations, of what our society deems success, or what our subculture deems success. (Raise your hand if you’re the humblest!) This leads to the formation of what the mystics call the false self — the ego-self, the constructed self, the defended self. This is the self that is always performing, always comparing, always anxious about whether it is enough. It is the self built from what others think of us, what we’ve accomplished, what roles we play. It is not evil — it is necessary, especially in the first part of life. But it is not our deepest truth.

Instead, the deepest truth is what the mystics call our true self — what Rohr calls “who you are in God.” This is the self that was never in danger. The self that is already beloved. The self that needs nothing added to it (or subtracted from it) to justify its existence. Paul points to it in Colossians when he says, “Your life (i.e. your true self) is hidden with Christ in God.”

When Jesus says “lose your life to find it,” he is not asking us to erase ourselves. I believe he is asking us to stop clinging to the false self — the performing, defending, comparing self — so that we can discover the true self that was always there. Not disappearance — homecoming.

But we can’t stop there, because this passage is not only about individual spiritual transformation. It was spoken to disciples being sent out into an occupied territory. The cross Jesus mentions was not a metaphor in first-century Palestine. It was a Roman instrument of political terror, used to execute those who threatened imperial power. To take up your cross in that world meant to align yourself with the ones Rome was already crucifying: the poor, the resistant, the colonized. It was a political teaching as much as a spiritual one. Perhaps moreso.

The sword Jesus brings to this struggle is not a military weapon. In the Bible, the sword is the instrument of discernment, the sharp edge that cuts through what is false to reveal what is true. In Hebrews 4:12, we hear that the word of God is”sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and spirit, of joints and marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.” This is the sword that cuts through illusion. 

And the family divisions Jesus names — daughter against mother, son against father — these are not Jesus celebrating broken families. He is acknowledging, with clear eyes, that when a person begins to live from the Gospel truth, it will create friction with any system — family, social, religious, economic — that has organized itself around domination, control, or a false peace. The path of authentic selfhood disturbs the peace of false peace. The path of genuine discipleship disrupts the comfort of conventional, this-is-just-how-things-are religion. That has always been true. It was true in first-century Galilee under Roman occupation, and it is true now.

And this is where the personal and the prophetic become inseparable. Because the false self that Jesus invites us to lose is not only our individual ego. It is also the collective false self — the imperial self, the settler self, the dominating self, the patriarchal self, the identity built on the assumption that some lives matter more than others, that some peoples’ flourishing is worth more than others, that the land we occupy was always ours to occupy.

The Doctrine of Discovery — that theological and legal framework that justified the taking of Indigenous lands across the Americas and also justified slavery — was built on exactly this collective false self. It was Christianity in service of empire, the cross repurposed as a tool of conquest rather than a sign of solidarity with the crucified. Patriarchy grew from that same false self, and it, too, took a false peace as its price. It has told men their worth depends on domination and control. It has told the men who couldn’t perform that — who were tender, or afraid, or soft-spoken, or simply themselves especially if they were gay or nonbinary— that they’d failed at being men. It has told women and gender-fluid people their worth depends on submission. A distortion that has diminished everyone it has touched, in different ways.

What does it mean for us to “lose” this inherited identity? Not in guilt and self-flagellation — which is just the ego punishing itself, which is still all about the ego — but in genuine relinquishment? To loosen our grip on the comfort and security and control that that history may have afford us, and to align ourselves instead with those it has harmed — including those parts of ourself it has harmed?

That can be a cross. That could be a real cost. And Jesus is clear-eyed about that. He doesn’t pretend it will be easy or without conflict. But he also says: This is the way to life. What gets found here is life. Abundant life. The life that was always there, underneath all the performing and defending and accumulating. The mystics called it union. The prophets called it justice. Jesus called it the K indom of God.

I believe this is what is on offer here. Not self-erasure. Not self-abnegation. But the wide, generous, deeply rooted life of the true self — the self that knows it is beloved, and therefore has nothing to prove, and therefore can be freed to love. The true self that knows all life is beloved and worthy and valuable — and something we must nourish, protect, and defend with our lives. Amen.