The Way of the Disciple Is the Way of the Cross

There is a particular temptation that most of us never recognize as dangerous precisely because it feels so natural. It is the temptation to get ahead of God. We move forward with our own plans, our own agendas, our own relentless pursuit of comfort, and we do it all while telling ourselves we are still following Jesus. But a disciple who has gotten ahead of the one they follow is no longer a disciple. They are something else entirely.

The word Satan is not actually a proper name. It is a description. It means accuser, opponent, adversary. And when we get ahead of God, when we offer unsolicited advice rooted in our own pride rather than in discernment, we risk becoming exactly that — an opponent. We become a stumbling block rather than a signpost pointing others toward the good news of the gospel. The place of the disciple is always behind the Lord, or beside him. Never ahead.

So what does it actually look like to walk in that place? Scripture gives us a clear framework. To be a disciple of Jesus, he asks three things of us: deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow him. These are not suggestions. They are the shape of the life we are called to live.

Denying Yourself

Self-denial looks different for every person because what each person clings to is different. For some, it means releasing control. For others, it means setting aside a dream or a desire in order to serve someone else's need. For all of us, it means confronting our pride.

James 4:10 calls us to humble ourselves before the Lord, with the promise that he will lift us up. What is striking about that command is its context. It is given in the middle of a passage about resisting the devil. Humility is not just a virtue. It is a weapon. When the powers of darkness press in, one of the most powerful things a person can do is go low.

Romans 12:3 echoes this, urging us not to think of ourselves more highly than we ought, but to think with sober judgment. Self-denial is not self-destruction. It is the honest, grounded recognition that we are not the center of the story.

Consider what self-denial looks like in ordinary life. It looks like a woman giving up two years of her own plans to drive across the state and care for her daughter's children while a four-year-old named Pearl fought stage four liver cancer. It looks like a husband quietly setting aside his own preferences, year after year, to defer to his wife. It looks like a friend who shows up on the side of the road in the middle of the night to make sure you get home safely. It looks like someone who sets aside their own desires to care for another person's daily needs, doing for them what they cannot do for themselves.

We deny ourselves because Jesus denied himself for us. He left the splendor of eternity with the Father to be born into poverty, into shame, into circumstances the world would have judged harshly. He who knew no sin became sin for us, as 2 Corinthians 5:21 tells us, so that we might become the righteousness of God. Self-denial, at its root, is a response to that love.

Taking Up Your Cross

To take up your cross is to embrace suffering. Not to seek it out masochistically, but to stop running from it. To stop believing that you are entitled to a life without pain and to instead allow suffering to do its shaping work in you.

Romans 12:12 calls us to be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, and faithful in prayer. It calls us to share with those in need, to practice hospitality, to bless those who persecute us rather than curse them, to rejoice with those who rejoice and mourn with those who mourn. This is not a passive, resigned life. It is an active, engaged, cruciform life. It is a life that has looked at the cross and decided to stop flinching.

Suffering, when we stop fighting it and instead bring it to Jesus, becomes the very instrument by which we are shaped into his image. The cross is not the end of the story. It is the path through it.

Following Jesus

To follow Jesus means to abide in him, and abiding happens in two directions simultaneously.

The first is the prayer closet. Jesus himself speaks about this in Matthew's gospel. There is a kind of intimacy with God that only happens in solitude, in silence, away from the noise of screens and social media and the constant hum of modern life. If you have never tried setting aside a period of silence just to be with God, to listen rather than scroll, it may be one of the most transformative things you could do. The presence of the Lord becomes tangible when we stop filling every moment with noise.

The second direction of abiding is the community. Every baptized person carries the Holy Spirit. When we gather together, we gather as people who are each bearing something of God within them. The Eucharist makes this explicit. As 1 Corinthians 10 describes, the cup and the bread are a koinonia, a Greek word that English renders as fellowship, but which means something far richer. It means a shared life. Mine is yours. Yours is mine. One loaf, one body.

This shared life is risky. Loving people will bring pain. But we cannot heal in isolation. The love of Christ comes to us through each other. The early church in Acts was so powerful precisely because they lived this way. They needed each other, and they knew it.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in his book Life Together, offers a useful challenge. If you are someone who is comfortable alone with God, push yourself toward community. If you are someone who draws everything from community, push yourself into the prayer closet. Both are necessary. Both are how we abide.

None of this is possible on our own strength. We bring nothing to God that he has not first given us. We are, without Christ, empty. But that is exactly the point. The way of the disciple is the way of the cross, and the way of the cross leads, always, to resurrection.

https://youtu.be/KAnkHNW89Vo?si=3Dd9ucBTlD4N-hbR

What Actually Makes the Church Different?

There is a question worth sitting with before you read another word: What truly unifies the people of God? What gives the church its strength, its identity, its reason for existing at all?

Most of us have a ready answer. We talk about community — the way a congregation feels like family. We talk about service — the way the church rolls up its sleeves and meets needs in the neighborhood. We talk about worship — the liturgy, the music, the sacred rhythms that lift us out of the ordinary and connect us to something larger than ourselves. These are beautiful things. They are real things. And they are not enough.

Here is the uncomfortable truth: none of those descriptions are unique to the church.

A Rotary Club builds community. A nonprofit serves the vulnerable. A yoga studio offers transcendence and ritual. Even organizations with deeply troubling ideologies — groups no one would want to be compared to — describe themselves in exactly the same terms: a tight-knit family, a mission to serve, a cause bigger than the individual. If community, service, and a sense of the transcendent are what define the church, then the church is simply one option among many. And we should not be surprised when people treat it that way.

But the church is not just another organization. And the moment we begin operating as though it were, we have already lost something essential.

The Question That Changes Everything

In Matthew 16, Jesus and his disciples are in the region of Caesarea Philippi when he asks them a pointed question: who do people say the Son of Man is? The disciples report back the popular opinions — John the Baptist, Elijah, Jeremiah, one of the prophets. There was no shortage of takes. There never is.

Then Jesus narrows the question. He does not ask what the crowds think. He does not ask what the religious authorities have concluded. He asks his disciples directly: but who do you say that I am?

This is not a survey. Jesus is not gathering data or testing the waters of public opinion. He has already done everything necessary to reveal who he is. The miracles, the teaching, the encounters with the marginalized and the powerful alike — all of it pointed to one conclusion. The question is not informational. It is confrontational. It demands a personal response.

Peter gives one. "You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God." (Matthew 16:16 — a declaration that Jesus is both the long-awaited deliverer and the very Son of God.) It is a confession that comes not from clever reasoning but from revelation. Jesus tells him plainly that flesh and blood did not produce this answer — the Father in heaven did.

And then Jesus says something remarkable. On this rock — this confession — he will build his church. And the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. (Matthew 16:18)

The Rock Beneath Everything Else

The confession that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of the living God, is the foundation of the church. Not a foundation among many. The foundation. Everything else — the community, the service, the liturgy — flows from this or it flows from nothing of lasting consequence.

This matters because it means the church is not held together by shared preferences or compatible personalities or a common commitment to doing good. It is held together by a shared submission to the Lordship of Jesus Christ. That is a different kind of unity entirely. It is not the unity of people who happen to like each other. It is the unity of people who have knelt before the same King.

And it raises a question that is worth asking honestly: have you actually made that confession? Not recited it. Not inherited it from your parents or absorbed it from the culture around you. Have you made it your own?

There is a difference between attending church and following Jesus. There is a difference between paying dues and tithing as an act of worship. There is a difference between tolerating the church's teaching and submitting to it. The Nicene Creed, recited in churches around the world every Sunday, is not merely a historical document or a theological checklist. It is a declaration of allegiance. The question is whether we mean it when we say it.

What This Confession Actually Does

When Peter makes his confession, Jesus responds with an extraordinary promise. The keys of the kingdom of heaven are entrusted to the church. Whatever is bound on earth will be bound in heaven; whatever is loosed on earth will be loosed in heaven. (Matthew 16:19) This is the church's authority — not authority that originates in the church itself, but authority delegated by the one who holds all authority.

This is why the church cannot be reduced to a social club with stained glass windows. The Church, when it is truly the Church, participates in something with eternal weight. It is the community through which the power of God is made manifest in the world. It binds and looses because it has itself been loosed — freed from sin and its consequences by the one whose Lordship it confesses.

This is also why the gates of hell cannot prevail against it. Not because the church is impressive or well-organized or culturally relevant. But because the church is built on a confession that is simply, irreducibly true. Jesus is who he says he is. That truth does not bend to popular opinion or the spirit of any age.

The Invitation

The question Jesus asked his disciples in Caesarea Philippi is the same question being asked today. Not of the crowd. Of you.

Who do you say that he is?

Your answer — your real answer, the one that shows up in how you live and what you submit to and where you place your ultimate loyalty — that answer is what determines whether you are simply attending an organization or whether you are part of the church that Jesus is building.

The confession is available to anyone. The grace to make it is given freely. And the promise attached to it is unlike anything any other organization on earth can offer.

https://youtu.be/aw20zgQSFNc?si=_rPuHBZDm7vzjpmp

Coming Home to Our Kingdom Colony

Fr. Anthony

On this journey we have been traveling together as God’s people at Emmanuel we have recently taken an excursion upon a path I’m gonna call the Capital Campaign, a campaign in which we have been raising funds to work with the Dioceses to purchase the campus at 1300 Shaw Avenue, a campus we believe God has called us to for the unique mission he has given us to be a church for the community, the city, and the whole Diocese of San Joaquin. A part of our journey on this excursion has been a five-part sermon series titled Building and Abiding, which was inspired by God’s word to his exile people in the book of Jeremiah:

Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Marry and have sons and daughters; find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage, so that they too may have sons and daughters. Increase in number there; do not decrease. Also, seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper.

As we moved through this series that has unpacked this verse in our context, Father Noah launched by proclaiming God’s desire for us to flourish even as he calls us to live as resident aliens who proclaim to the world what true flourishing is in a relationship with Jesus. Developing this proclamation, Deacon Ted called us to embrace and be thankful for the work that God is doing in our lives amidst the promises and pitfalls of the places he has placed each of us, and particularly in this place where God has placed all of us together as Emmanuel. Again, Father Noah warned us about the refugee mentality, a mentality by which we hold ourselves back from engaging and investing in the place that God has placed us, and he renewed our call to live as resident aliens who engage the larger culture without capitulating to its values and without undermining love. I followed Father Noah’s call with my own call to manage the pain of exile and our inconsolable longing by cultivating the virtue of hope through which we are sustained by a foretaste of future glory in a myriad of ways, a virtue in which we learn meet God in our pain and longing and thereby cultivate an intimacy that enables us to realize that He is our true consolation. Finally, Father Noah wrapped up by impressing upon us the reality that our flourishing is connected to the flourishing of the larger culture, and within that connection he called us to live as good ambassadors of the Kingdom. He further pointed out that good ambassadors love the cultures they are sent to, and they learn to deeply appreciate its unique qualities and virtues, even as they remain loyal to the values and vision of their home country. And putting a bow on the series, Father Noah reminded us that raising money to acquire the property at 1300 Shaw is not an end in itself but rather a means to an end. He reminded us that God has placed us at “1300” to establish a Kingdom colony that goes out and invites in, that goes out into the larger community and invites people into our colony by bringing the hope and healing of the Gospel to those ravaged by Babylon.

The sermon series is over, and our excursion through the Capital Campaign is coming to an end, and in the short time that remains I would like to offer another lens by which we can look at the property God has called us to at 1300 Shaw. On the one hand we are existentially a people in exile, a people for whom this fallen world is not and never will be our home. Likewise, in our recent history we have been a people in exile because we lost our earthly home at Cedar and Dakota when we decided to stand for the Gospel against the ravages of Babylon. In this narrative, God calling us to 1300 Shaw is a kind of homecoming akin to the Israelites returning to the Promised Land. Yes, it is not the home we came from, but it is the home that God is calling us to, and it will become a place we can truly call home because of the gracious work God has done in our lives through our time of wilderness wandering, and likewise through the work he is currently doing through this Capital Campaign in which God is training us to exchange the treasures of the world for the treasures of the Kingdom. Many of you have already made pledges for this great exchange, but to those of you who haven’t, I ask you to ask the Lord to place upon your heart what he would have you do to invest in our homecoming, to invest in establishing this Kingdom colony. And for those of you who have made pledges, I ask that you keep your eyes open for further opportunities that God might have for you to further invest your time, your talent, and perhaps even more of your treasure in this Kingdom colony that we will call our home.