What will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?

My friend Cam, Rector of Trinity Church here in Buffalo, blew my mind out the day we discussed the following question in our Bible study class:

What group in the New Testament most parallels us, here?

The discussion went like this:

What groups can you think of in the NT?

Apostles
Disciples
Military
Gov’t
Clergy of various sects
Jesus’ Family
Villagers
City Dwellers
Samaritans
(ETC)

It went on for a while. Then Cam asked us who *we* were. Us, here in Buffalo, New York, USA. Who are we? Several answers arose as to who we’d *like* to be. Other answers as to who a given preacher might want to imagine us as. But who are we, in general? What group in the stories of Jesus most parallels us, now?

The answer is the Romans. Not the gov’t or the army but the citizens of the City of Rome; whither flows all the produce, the capital of the known world and from whence flows all the political power and decision-making, the taxes, the demands of civilization. She is the magisterial center of the Orb as she knows it. Her citizens enjoy the fruits of every part of the earth, are served by workers from every race and creed and culture. They have the work done for them. They don’t do the work – even when they want to. It would be unseemly for a real Roman to work. Slaves, yes; plebs, yes. But We White People should be above all that.

What will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?

It’s hard in our society to understand this question, I think. Mindful of those who might read these notes, “our society” refers generally to the USA, to a section of culture defined by age and location and race. Most of my friends are middle class – earning far more than my Mom did when she raise three kids as a single mother – and even she tried to keep poverty away from us all. Our society here, now, is too successful to help us understand this question. We have, pretty much, “the whole world” here already.

Even my Mom, raising three kids as a single mother on the modern equivalent of about $10,000 in annual income, was quite wealthy compared to the folks who live in most of the world (and in a few parts of the USA as well). But me? Hell: I earn more than twice my Mother’s income and I have no kids. Every month, here in my house, we pay in food, rent and utilities, more than 10 times the annual Gross Domestic Product (per capita) of seven out of the ten poorest countries in the world. In fact, depending on which scale you use for the GDP, my house spends MONTHLY, at least ten times as much as the ENTIRE ANNUAL GDP of the 13 poorest countries. Yet I will manage – at some point in the next few days – to do something stupid with my money. (In fact, I did it after I started the draft to this sermon – stopping at my Boyfriend’s shop and purchasing a cable that cost more than the GDP of the bottom two countries on that same list simply for the purpose of routing my internet music from my desktop to my stereo.)

What will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?

I realised earlier this week that I have too many clothes: Not too many for a man who has my social calendar. Not too many for a man who has my budget. Not too many for a man who might need to dress up now and then or get all jiggy now and then or go to a baseball game now and then. No: I have too many clothes for a many who claims to follow someone who said “Sell all you have and give it to the poor.” I was listening to a man speak (can’t say I remember his name) on a podcast and he was talking about a man who had asked him for a shirt. And he wanted to give away his shirt – but not the good ones, you know. And he pointed out, there and then, that this was covetous behaviour He was coveting the things God gave him to share with others.

And try as I might, I still can’t bring myself to successfully give away my clothes.

What would my boss say if I came to work every day in the same things? What would my BF say? What would I wear to Pascha at St Gregory’s church? What will my housemates say?

I have such a cross to bear: I can’t get rid of my stuff!

The American fixation on stuff is traceable – follow me backwards:

1) I was taught that having stuff is better than not having stuff.
2) My parents where taught that same lesson by people who had had nothing.
3) They were taught that lesson by people who fervently believed that God showed his spiritual blessing on us by showering us with material blessing so that working hard to earn material blessing showed God’s blessing all around.
4) They got that fair and square from the Fathers of the Protestant Reformations.
5) Who got it as sort of a fun-house mirrored reflection of the things they critiqued in Roman Catholic theology combined with a distorted focus on only one or two Church fathers – specifically Augustine.

As a bonus I might suggest (perhaps wrongly) that he got it as a material reaction and distortion to his own conversion process from the Gnostics. But without reading the other Church Fathers to balance him out Augustine got the Prots off to a weak start.

It’s traceable right back to the Protestant Work Ethic and, as divorced as that was from historic Christianity so, now, our stuff fetish is divorced from any form of Christianity at all. It’s an addiction. My life is filled with stuff: books, recordings, pictures, electronics, clothes, shoes, bedding…

But I think we can trace a more Eastern route as well: for in the East they succumbed to the Roman state and began to confuse imperial power and wealth with God’s blessing. There’s the other side of our problem – no less heretical, no less opposed to Jesus who was the poorest of the poor. And from that side of the Church we begin to hear stories that maybe Mary and Joseph were quite wealthy. That maybe the wealth of the world was part of the Church from the beginning and that the secular empire – always in opposition to God – can be made to work in Symphony with God’s kingdom in the Church. That’s how Americans end up as the Romans in the Bible.

What does it prosper a man to gain the whole world (the Greek refers to an illusion) and to loose his soul (and here, the Greek actually says something closer to “life”)?

What do you do if you have it all already?

What cross is there that can take away all this crap and give me the chance to “approach the throne of grace”?

O Lord, save your people and bless your inheritance.
Give victory to those who battle evil,
and with your cross protect us all.

So we sing today. There is for us our salvation: the Cross of Christ. If we take up the Cross of Christ we have no way to carry any other stuff.

Today’s feast like the preceding two Sunday’s has nothing, really, to do with Lent. It’s a series of commemorations of political events in the Byzantine world. Today we’re celebrating the Cross’ ability to defend Byzantium (and later, Russia) from Muslims. How ironic that the way the Empire killed Jesus should be seen as leading the Army of Jesus away from his way of Peace.

What does it prosper the Church to gain the whole world and loose her soul?