Psalm 139:1-18 | 1 John 3:18, 23-24 | Matthew 16:24-26
Jeremy Richards
Well, today is our final sermon in our 4 part series on love of self. We’ve been following Henri Nouwen’s lead in his book The Life of the Beloved, and exploring his idea that the life of the Beloved is a life characterized by being taken (by which he means chosen), blessed, broken, and now, given.
For some of us, maybe all this talk of self-love seems suspect. It may seem very self-centered. Didn’t Jesus tell us to deny ourselves, take up our crosses, and follow him? In fact, I just read in 2 Timothy this week that “in the last days” many people will become “lovers of themselves” in addition to all kinds of other bad things. Isn’t selfishness and self-centeredness a problem in our current culture. Isn’t self-love, in fact, antithetical to the Gospel message?
These are concerns I likely would’ve had only a few short years ago, so let me try to clarify because what we mean by self-love is a bit nuanced. When we say “self-love” in the context of this sermon series, we don’t mean selfishness. While 2 Timothy does speak ill of those who love themselves, remember that Jesus told us to love our neighbors as ourselves. So the author of 2 Timothy, presumably Paul, and Jesus must mean different things when they speak of loving ourselves. The kind of self-love we’re promoting, the kind that Jesus spoke of, has to do with everything we’ve talked about over the last few weeks. It’s about knowing ourselves, respecting ourselves, and coming to see ourselves as the Beloved children of God that we are, that we were created to be, and that we are becoming. That is our true identity. That’s not the same as selfishness. I would argue, in fact, that selfish people are precisely those people who don’t know themselves well, and probably don’t love themselves either. There is within them some deep lack, and their selfishness is a constant attempt to fill that gap with whatever they can grab. But, since the things they accumulate never turn out to be an adequate substitute for love of God and love of self (and as we’ll see today, love of neighbor), they continually come up empty, which only leads them to keep grabbing, keep hoarding. Their selfishness only increases. It’s cyclical.
Let me just give you an example. In high school and college, Brie and I loved to watch the show The Hills. If you don’t know what The Hills is, it was a “reality” show about shallow, rich, college-aged men and women and their over-the-top everyday lives, which were unbelievable in both their opulence and their drama. I’ll admit that as a college kid myself, I watched the show with a hint of envy. I couldn’t help wanting to be rich and beautiful like the people in The Hills.
Well, a couple of weeks ago, Brie and I came across a reboot of The Hills called The Hills: New Beginnings. After 10 years away, many of the characters from the original are back, as is the drama, and as is the wealth. But, I must say, the glamor is sorely missing. Only 10 years later, the lives of these rich pseudo-celebrities are anything but attractive. In fact, they’re pretty sad. Brie and I thought we’d watch like 10 minutes of the first episode, then turn it off, but I have to admit that we’ve been sucked in. But I feel kind of guilty, because I’m not watching the show with the best intentions. I’m watching the way you watch a car wreck on the side of the road. I’m watching because the lives of these rich folx are a complete disaster, and I can’t avert my gaze.
What I see in this show are the ways in which we can be self-centered without any self-knowledge, we can be selfish without any self-love. Almost everything these people do is for themselves, and yet it’s clear that they’re so lost. They don’t even know themselves. They don’t know who they are beyond their money and their fame. For all the emphasis on externals, what comes through most clearly is the lack of any internal substance beneath the surface. The outward riches reveal only an inward poverty. The more plastic surgery, fancy cars, houses, they accumulate, the more empty they seem.
Selfishness and self-centeredness are not the same as self-love and self-knowledge. In fact, they have an inverse relationship. As selfishness and self-centeredness increase, healthy self-love and self-knowledge decrease, and vice-versa.
On the flip side, those who are most giving of themselves, most selfless, are almost always those who know themselves well, who are secure in the love God has for them. Nouwen says, “As I grow older, I discover more and more that the greatest gift I have to offer is my own joy of living, my own inner peace, my own silence and solitude, my own sense of well-being.”[i] In other words, you can only give what you have. It’s very hard to tell someone else that they are God’s beloved child, if you don’t believe you are God’s beloved child. It’s hard to “pass the peace,” when you have no peace to pass. We can only give out of who we are.
To use Nouwen’s language, the more we get to know ourselves the more we come to see ourselves as the Beloved – in our chosenness, our blessedness, and even our brokenness (as we’ve talked about the last 3 weeks). And the more we come to see ourselves as the Beloved, the less we worry about ourselves, and the more we are freed to give ourselves to others.
This is just what Nouwen says in the final chapter of The Life of the Beloved. While it may sound counterintuitive, the culmination of all this self-love and self-knowledge is selflessness. Nouwen says, “…it is only as people who are given that we can fully understand our being chosen, blessed and broken. In the giving it becomes clear that we are chosen, blessed and broken not simply for our own sakes, but so that all we live finds its final significance in its being lived for others.”[ii]
I hope it’s becoming clear how our different sub-themes for this year tie together and reinforce one another. We can’t know ourselves apart from our loving Parent-God, who created and sustains us, and in whose image we were made. And we can’t love others without loving ourselves. And at the same time, by loving others, we will find that we are also loving God more deeply, and in fact, we’re coming to see ourselves in others, we are recognizing in both their brokenness and their belovedness our own brokenness and our own belovedness. It isn’t a simple, linear progression but an interweaving, like chords that wind together to make a single rope. Each of these three strands will inevitably reinforce and be reinforced by the other two. They are all interconnected and interdependent.
As with all the words that Nouwen has used up to this point, we need to explore what he means by the word “given.” Notice he doesn’t say “serve” or “help.” He says we must give ourselves. So the way we interact with others is rooted in this very idea of Belovedness – everything we’ve already explored about being chosen, blessed, and broken. If, in all these other categories, the emphasis is not on the externals but the internals – it’s not about what you have, what you do, or what people think of you, but who you’ve always been in Christ since before the creation of the world – then it must also be true that what we give must not be shallow or external, but must also be rooted in both our Belovedness and the Belovedness of the other who we are giving ourselves to. To put it plainly, it isn’t about giving things, it’s about giving our very selves.
Nouwen says that when we think of what we can give others, we often think of our talents, what we’re good at, but he says, “when focusing on talents, we tend to forget that our real gift is not so much what we can do, but who we are. The real question is not ‘What can we offer each other?’ but ‘Who can we be for each other?’” He goes on to say, “When I ask myself ‘Who helps me most?’ I must answer, ‘The one who is willing to share his or her life with me.’”[iii] In contrast to talents, Nouwen lifts up gifts as what we can and should give to one another. He says, “Our gifts are the many ways in which we express our humanity (belovedness?). They are part of who we are: friendship, kindness, patience, joy, peace, forgiveness, gentleness, love, hope, trust, and many others. These are the true gifts we have to offer each other.”[iv]
To illustrate what he means by the distinction between our talents and our gifts, Nouwen points to the L’Arche community in which he lived for the last 10 years of his life, just north of Toronto. After spending years teaching at some of the most prestigious universities in the United States – Notre Dame, Yale, and Harvard – Nouwen spent the last decade of his life living in intentional community with those with and without intellectual disabilities. All the prestigious positions at top-tier universities never did much for Nouwen. In fact he suffered from severe depression throughout his life. But, according to his biography from the Henri Nouwen Society, his L’Arche community outside Toronto was his “homecoming,” and led to “perhaps his deepest fulfillment as priest, friend, author, lecturer, and mentor.”[v] This comes through in the way Nouwen talks about L’Arche in his writings. It was clearly a transformational place for him. The Life of the Beloved is one of the books he wrote while living at L’Arche (he wrote it about 3 years before he died), and to illustrate what he means by giving our gifts instead of just our talents, he points to all the ways he has been blessed by the disabled folx he lives with. They are people who don’t have the kind of “talents” that are valued by our society, and yet, in his words, “how splendid are their gifts!” This is what he says, [read expert from pp. 91-92]
We’re supposed to be focusing on love of self for this sermon series, and yet, inevitably, we’ve found ourselves talking about the importance of giving ourselves to others. Because, again, love of self, love of God, and love of neighbor are all intertwined. They’re interdependent. They can’t be parsed up and separated out. We can’t talk about becoming our truest selves without also talking about giving ourselves away, because in giving ourselves we discover ourselves. In Jesus’ words, “Those who want to save their life 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?”
So let me tie all these themes and words together:
Your Belovedness is rooted in the love of God, whose steadfast love endures forever, who chose you from before time began. And it’s realized and recognized in the Belovedness of your neighbor. Your brokenness recognizes the brokenness in them, and these tender, raw places of brokenness become the place of deep relationship. And in deep relationship we give ourselves to one another. And in our giving we bless and we are blessed – we call forth their Belovedness, and they call forth ours. And this life – a life of being chosen and blessed and broken and given – is the life of the Beloved. This is the life God intends for you. This is the life I pray you find, the life that, by God’s grace, finds you.
God in your mercy, hear our prayer.
Amen.
[i] Henri J.M. Nouwen, The Life of the Beloved, 90.
[ii] Ibid 84.
[iii] Ibid 90.
[iv] Ibid 90-91.
[v] https://henrinouwen.org/read-nouwen/about-henri/his-life/