How the Liturgy Trains Us to Make Ourselves a Living Sacrifice (22nd Sunday of Ordinary Time) – Year A

How the Liturgy Trains Us to Make Ourselves a Living Sacrifice There is something we should all admire about the prophet Jeremiah. He was never afraid to be honest with God. He never held back from telling God exactly how he felt. Today's First Reading from Jeremiah 20:7-9 is not the first time Jeremiah called God a deceiver. In 15:18, the prophet laments, "Why is my pain continuous, my wound incurable, refusing to be healed? To me, you are like a deceptive brook, waters that cannot be relied on!" On that day, the Lord responded to Jeremiah's pity party. Yet, on this day, Jeremiah recovers in the resignation to the truth of his miserable condition, saying, "You duped me, O LORD, and I let myself be duped; you were too strong for me, and you triumphed. All the day, I am an object of laughter; everyone mocks me. Whenever I speak, I must cry out, violence and outrage is my message; the word of the LORD has brought me derision and reproach all the day. I say to myself, I will not mention him, I will speak in his name no more. But then it becomes like fire burning in my heart, imprisoned in my bones; I grow weary holding it in, I cannot endure it." Perhaps you have someone like this in your life, who is always ready and willing to give whoever a dissertation about their feelings in the moment, especially if they feel wronged. If you are like me, the first words out of my mouth around these types of people are, 'Calm down,' which is always the wrong thing to say because people should have the opportunity to use words to explain their immediate condition. With God, I admit I have been that person. For whatever reason, the ministry God has given me has been much closer to Jeremiah and John the Baptist ministries than to Saint Dominic de Guzman, who I aspire to be like. It has been a point of suffering for me to be a voice that cries out in the wilderness, a voice that no one hears. The conversation that Jeremiah is having in our readings today is nearly identical to the ones I used to have with God about two or three times a year, and it was the prophet who taught me how to be honest with God. It never seemed to matter, but I love that God always gives me the space to be human with Him. Then, my pity parties ended one day, and I wondered if God missed them because I felt I always gave Him a Good laugh. One day, I decided to end my suffering by just accepting that fact that I am just a miserable slave to His will, and a very unprofitable pathetic slave at that. I calmed down. Today, I am just happy to get my daily bread and another opportunity to do His will. Truly, I only feel alive when I am doing His will because doing His will is what I love, although I suffer greatly from it. Yet, even if I am a miserable slave, I still have to do that same recollection at night and confess openly whether I have carried my Cross that day and whether I followed Him as I carried it. Did I give up everything He had given me to offer that day? Did I mentally, physically, and spiritually exhaust myself? Did I deny myself by loving enough, did I deny myself by praying for others enough, and did I deny myself by fasting enough? These questions are the true measuring rod for service that we hear Christ Jesus speak to us in today's Gospel reading from Matthew 16:21-27, saying, "Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his Cross, and follow me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it." The call to take up our Cross makes no sense to our generation. The Cross was an instrument of death. The crucifix we adore is the death penalty given to our Lord. Take up your future death penalty and follow me to where I ca