The Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost - Matthew 16:21-28 - The Rev. Colette Hammesfahr

 

August 30, 2026 - Matthew 16:21-28

“If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.” There are four times in the Bible that Jesus speaks about taking up a cross and six times where he speaks about losing or saving one’s life. These verses are hard to understand. Sometimes we interpret these phrases as taking on a life of suffering or giving up everything fun and enjoyable we do in our lives. But I think Jesus and Paul, in his letter to the Romans, are teaching us much more than that.

Father Damien was a Belgian priest who went to Hawaii as a missionary. In 1873, he learned that priests were needed to minister to people with Hansen’s disease, which we know better as leprosy. When diagnosed, these people were isolated on two of Hawaii’s remote islands. There were approximately 700 people there at the time, and Damien and three other priests volunteered to go. The bishop wanted the priests to work rotating shifts through the settlement because living amongst that population was considered very dangerous – so they were to go work a while and then leave for a period of time.

Father Damien was the first to go. After a while, something unexpected happened. He didn’t simply take his rotation and leave. While there, he encountered hundreds of people who had essentially been removed from society. Many were separated permanently from spouses, parents, children, and their communities. Many were crying out for a priest because they were suffering and dying without pastoral care.

Father Damien knew that rotating shifts with the other priests would mean that his relationships with these people would be temporary. He couldn’t bear doing that – he became attached to the community and asked permission to stay. He stopped seeing a ministry and started seeing his people. And this wasn’t all because everything on these islands was beautiful and inspiring. In one of his letters, he admitted that things were difficult at first, and during one of his services, the smell had become so overwhelming that he wanted to leave the altar for fresh air. He didn’t pretend it was easy. However, over time, he became able to enter people’s homes and be physically close to them.

His story is remarkable because his love for the people wasn’t instantaneous. He practiced it. He stayed. He learned names, went into homes, and touched wounds. He buried people and welcomed newcomers to the island. He helped build churches, homes, and water systems. His language slowly changed from “those people” to “we.”

And I think this is where we begin to understand what Jesus means when he tells us to take up our cross and follow him. Father Damien didn't go looking for a cross to carry. He didn't go to Hawaii because he wanted his life to be difficult. He went because there were people who needed to be loved. And the more he loved them, the more their lives became intertwined with his.

Maybe carrying the cross isn't about looking for ways to suffer. Maybe carrying the cross is what happens when we choose to love deeply enough that we are willing to accept that love will sometimes cost us something.

Paul says something similar in his letter to the Romans: “Let love be genuine.” And then he tells us what that kind of love looks like. Love one another with mutual affection. Contribute to the needs of others. Extend hospitality to strangers. Rejoice with those who rejoice. Weep with those who weep. Don't repay evil with evil. If your enemy is hungry, feed them. If they are thirsty, give them something to drink. None of that sounds particularly dramatic. Most of it sounds like ordinary life. But every one of those things asks something of us.

Love costs us time. Forgiveness can cost us our pride. Generosity costs us something we could have kept for ourselves. Hospitality costs us convenience. Sitting with someone who is hurting can cost us time and emotional energy. Refusing to get even can cost us the satisfaction of having the last word.

Maybe that's the cross. Not suffering for suffering's sake. Not believing that God wants us to be miserable. But loving someone enough that we are willing to give something of ourselves away.

But there's something important we can't miss. Jesus doesn't ask us to go anywhere he isn't willing to go himself. Before Jesus ever tells the disciples to take up their cross, he tells them about his own. He tells them that he is going to Jerusalem, where he will suffer, die, and be raised.

So this isn't a God standing at a distance telling us to sacrifice more, love harder, and give more of ourselves away. This is the God who has already given himself to us. We don't carry the cross so that God will love us. We carry the cross because we have already been loved by the One who carried it first.

And we're not asked to do it alone. When God called Moses in our first reading today, Moses asked, “Who am I that I should go?” God didn't respond by telling Moses how talented or capable he was. God simply said, “I will be with you.”

Maybe that's where the joy comes from, too. We aren't sent out on some impossible assignment to love everyone through our own strength. God is with us in the loving, in the giving, in the forgiving, in the weeping, and even in the carrying. The love we give begins with the love we have already received.

And here's the part that seems almost contradictory: that kind of life can actually be joyful. Kate Bowler, in her book Joyful, Anyway, tells the story of a man named Charlie whose philosophy of life was remarkably simple: “Love the people in your way, every day.”[1] Bowler describes it as accepting love as an assignment. She writes, “If you love the people God puts in your way, well…you’ll always be busy. You take it day by day. So every day, I’m not just taking things as they come. I am tasked. You see the difference? This isn’t random. I’m tasked with love.”[2]

What if that's what Damien discovered? He arrived thinking he had been assigned a rotation. Instead, he discovered that he had been assigned people to love. And loving them cost him something. His life there wasn't easy. Eventually, Damien himself contracted Hansen's disease. But that doesn't mean his life became joyless.

In 1884, writer Charles Stoddard visited the settlement where Father Damien lived. He wrote this about him: “His cassock was worn and faded, his hair tumbled like a school-boy’s, his hands stained and hardened by toil; but the glow of health was in his face, the buoyancy of youth in his manner; while his ringing laugh, his ready sympathy, and his inspiring magnetism told of one who in any sphere might do a noble work, and who in that which he has chosen is doing the noblest of all works. This was Father Damien."[3]

His ringing laugh. I love that image. Because we tend to think the cross and joy belong on opposite sides of the Christian life. The cross is suffering; joy is what happens when the suffering goes away.

Jesus is telling us something different. Maybe joy isn't found by protecting our lives from everything that might cost us something. Maybe some of our deepest joy comes when we discover something—or someone—worth giving ourselves to.

Bowler quotes Immanuel Kant when she writes that a joyful life needs three things: something to do, someone to love, and something to hope for.[4] And she points to Karl Barth's description of joy as both a gift and a task. Joy gives us a job.[5]

Father Damien had a job. He had people to love. He had something to hope for. And he had a cross to carry—not because suffering was good, but because love was worth the cost.

Maybe that's why Jesus says something that initially sounds impossible: “Those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.”

We spend so much of our lives trying to protect what we have—our time, our comfort, our possessions, our plans, our pride. Jesus says there is another way to live. Give some of it away. Love the people God puts in your way. Trust that the God who calls you to love is with you as you do it. Because sometimes, in giving our lives away, we don't lose them at all. Held by the God who first gave himself for us, we finally discover what it means to really live. And maybe that's the strange joy of carrying the cross. Amen.

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[1] Kate Bowler, Joyful, Anyway (New York: Random House, 2026), 250, Kindle ed.

[2] Bowler, Joyful, Anyway, 249.

[3] National Park Service, “Father Damien,” Kalaupapa National Historical Park, last updated December 13, 2022, National Park Service webpage.

[4] Bowler, Joyful, Anyway, 250.

[5] Bowler, Joyful, Anyway, 250.