Sermon preached at City Peace Church, Cincinnati, OH on March 17, 2024
Scripture text: Mark 8:31-37, First Nations Version
I love the words of this passage in the First Nations Version of the scripture this morning. This is a well-known text, and hearing it in a different voice gives new meaning to some of these oft-repeated phrases. I particularly love the reframing of eternal life as “the good story.”
“Those who seek to save their lives will lose it. Those who lose their lives, more my sake, will inherit eternal life.” We usually think of this text as a call to sacrifice ourselves, to die a valiant death like the early Anabaptist martyrs or the Roman Christians. But, losing your life isn’t usually literal in the way of martyrs and freedom fighters. It’s often more subtle than that—restructuring your life around caring for others, around advocating for the marginalized, around the reality of a warming planet. What does it mean to lose your life for Christ, to reorient towards eternal life—the kin-dom of God—the perpetuation and thriving of life on this planet, far beyond my own life span?
First, losing your life—for Christ, for others, for the earth—is a countercultural notion. Our modern western society privileges individual choice, autonomy, and freedom. While this is noble in theory, in practice this is comes at the expense of the wellbeing of the human community and the earth itself. Being able to make your own choices about where to live, whether or who to marry, what kind of work to pursue, these are all good and important things. Don’t get me wrong. But at some point we got lost and started valuing our autonomy more than we value the wellbeing of all life. Walking in the way of Jesus, losing your life, means orienting your life towards God, towards others, towards life as a whole instead of your own individual wants and desires.
And let’s also be clear right up front about what losing your life isn’t, because there are a lot of destructive interpretations of this text, often aimed at women and those in caregiving roles. Losing your life for Christ does not mean sacrificing yourself by staying in an abusive relationship. It also doesn’t mean pursuing work that you hate out of a feeling of obligation or coercion. Walking in the way of Jesus is so much more than that. God doesn’t want you to stay in an abusive relationship or always put others first to the detriment of your own wellbeing. This isn’t the kind of life that Jesus calls us to.
So what does eternal life, the kin-dom of God, look like? What does it mean to live into the good story? Most importantly, it means embracing change. All of us are changing all of the time. We live in a rapidly changing climate, in a changing human culture. Nothing stays the same for very long. But many of us are perpetually and incredibly resistant to change. We want things to stay the same, if things are going well for us, and are resentful of any kind of disturbance to our comfortable lives. I count myself in this, by the way. And there are many things that are worth preserving, family traditions, memory, our faith commitments. But none of these are entirely immune to change.
The truth is that we all lose our lives eventually. We only get to walk this earth for a certain length of time, and Lent is a season when we remember this, that we come from and return to the soil. Lent is also a time when we remember that Jesus’s time on earth with us was brief. He certainly made the most of it, healing and teaching about the coming transformation of the world. If we learn anything from Jesus’s ministry, it’s that clinging to the status quo only leads to death, and you’re liable to have your table turned over in the temple by a prophet in righteous indignation.
We all lose what we have eventually. But willingly giving it up for another—that is really being alive. Being involved in work that builds solidarity with the poorest and most vulnerable members of our society, advocating for justice, reaching outside our comfort zone to become more deeply who we are and to take part in something communal and holy—that is what it really means to live out our faith. And it begins with letting go of our resistance to change, to losing our lives in small ways each day.
In the natural world change and adaptation are the basis for the vast diversity of life around us—animals, plants and other organisms make the most of their particular environment, learning, growing, changing as the ecosystem they are part of changes. There’s nothing inherently scary about change. It’s just that we get so used to the way things are that we resist any attempt at adaptation, even when we are suffering.
In this context losing your life to be part of the good story can be a positive thing. Learning to live as part of your watershed, part of your community (both human and beyond-human). Learning to live for others, to be part of a global movement of peaceful transformation. Love has an inherently self-sacrificial quality to it, in that your life isn’t all that matters. Like a parent who loves a child, or a spouse, and is willing to give up everything for their safety, for their happiness. This is unhealthy when it is one-sided, but mutual love is mutually self-sacrificing, and becomes part of something larger. And also, God is with us always, through every change, every upheaval, every adaptation.
I have had a front row seat in the power and peril of change. Some of you know that I have a connective tissue disorder that causes nearly constant neurological changes in my body. I have times when I am very able—walking and thinking clearly—but there are other times when my legs are weak and I use a walker or a wheelchair. I also experience times when it’s very difficult to concentrate or be productive, and all I can do is rest in my own fragile embodiment and wait.
It took me a long time to make peace with my changing body, and I still have moments of frustration, but when I was able to love myself, it also became easier to love others, to appreciate the great amount of pain that exists in the world and do something to mitigate it. I feel deeply that change is a river we are all swept up in. You can either swim vigorously against the current, wearing yourself out, or you can learn to float with the flow of the current, paddling a little here and there to avoid the boulders, but not fighting where the river is taking you.
Losing my life has been all about learning to navigate this river of change. We all want things to stay the same. We want to keep our comfortable large houses and drive in our peaceful cars and retain our habits of consumption. If we are from middle-class families, we want the same things our parents had. But those things aren’t necessarily life-giving, and they can come at the expense of the health and wellbeing of other people as well as the natural world. Pause. If you’re getting nervous, this is not leading to a call to give up all of these things and live off the grid. That’s not what I am advocating, though Jesus did command his disciples to give all they had to the poor in order to follow him.
What I am trying to say is that when we orient our lives around material comfort, it too easily slips out of our grasp and becomes something life-destroying. When we live for something greater, when we orient our lives around fostering the kin-dom of God, around being part of the good story, something deep inside of us shifts and wakes up. The job, the car, the house—those things become less important than other more life-sustaining activities.
When I think of this, what comes to mind is a scene from the movie Harriet that came out a few years ago about the life of Harriet Tubman, a former slave and conductor on the Underground Railroad. There is a moment when she is meeting with other conductors and backers after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, which made their work more dangerous. She gives an impromptu speech to those gathered saying that she would give every last drop of blood in her body to rescue as many people as possible, despite the worsening peril of doing so. She was vibrantly alive in that moment, clear in her purpose and her incredible power.
What is it you are willing to give every last drop of your blood for? I would easily give my life for my family—my partner, my nieces, my brother, my parents. But I’m not sure what else. And while this may be an interesting thought experiment, as I said before, losing your life doesn’t necessarily mean death. We all seek to save our lives or lose them on a regular basis, which each choice that we make.
What might it look life to live for something more than ourselves, our families, or our own security and comfort? This will mean different things for different people. Some do indeed follow Jesus in giving all they have to the poor and dedicating their lives to service. But we can’t all be monks or nuns or hermits living off the grid. Living for others means making decisions based on what is most beneficial for our fellow humans and for the created world. It means sharing from the bounty of our lives instead of hoarding it for an imagined apocalyptic future. Love itself has an inherently self-sacrificial quality to it. Once your love someone, your life becomes bigger. You’re no longer all that matters.
If you’re not sure where to start, look around in your own neighborhood. This is what Jadav Payeng did. Payeng is a 64-year-old indigenous man living in northeast India who has planted a forest of over 1,300 acres on a formerly barren sandbar along the Brahmaputra River. When he was 19 he was walking in the area and came across a large amount of snakes who had died in the heat from a lack of shade. He started by planting 30 bamboo seedlings so they would have a place to shelter in hot weather. He tended the plants as they grew and began to plant trees of many different species. Over the course of his life, the forest has grown into a refuge for tigers, elephants, rhinos, monkeys, birds and more. And he did all of this while working as a dairy farmer raising cattle and buffalo. This forest is now an island the size of Martha’s Vineyard with hundreds of thousands of trees, planted and cared for by one farmer who was also raising his own family and living his life.
So my question for you this morning is, what will you begin that will outlive you? What seed will you plant, that will take a hundred years to mature when your body has long returned to the earth? The world needs people who can think beyond the course of their own lives and to remember that they are part of a very old story. This story began long before we came into existence, and will continue far after we die. How will you be a part of it in this changing world?