We Only Have To Lose

We Only Have To Lose--March 3, 2017

"[Jesus] called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, '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, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? Indeed, what can they give in return for their life?" [Mark 8:34-37]

One day I will have been forgotten.

All my accomplishments (whatever they will have been), all my accolades, all the beautifully lettered diplomas, all the money I have ever made, all the work I have ever done, and all the objects I have had in my possession--they will one day all be tossed unceremoniously into the dustbin of history. 

The synapses in my brain, these amazing neurological connections in my cerebra cortex that store my memories and thoughts, they will one day have degraded like an old VHS tape that was kept too close to the refrigerator magnets.  Even the molecules that make up my body will one day have stopped being "me" and become soil... maybe to be reorganized into grass, or, if I am lucky, a dandelion.

One day, all the things I thought were triumphs--my best ideas, my greatest labors, my biggest wins--will have all been forgotten... lost to the great forgettery of death.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but one day, the same will be true of you and all the things on your résumé, too.

One day, your promotions will have been forgotten, and no one will remember any longer who it was that held your position once upon a time.  One day, no one will be around on God's green earth who remembers the moments we think now are etched in stone forever.

One day, America will have been forgotten, the same way the Hapsburg dynasty, the Ottoman Empire, and the Holy Roman Empire have all become answers to trivia questions rather than the immortal, eternal things they once pretended they were.

One day, the bank that houses your money will be gone... and the money you have worked so hard for in your years will be worthless.

One day, we will all have been forgotten.

Now, if all of this seems rather bleak, bear with me.  As I write, we have just come through Ash Wednesday, the day in the church's odd way of keeping time that I think could just as rightly be called, "Dethroning Day." Idols and pretender-kings get dethroned. We are reminded that even I don't belong on the throne of my own life. The God who loves and reigns from a cross does. Ash Wednesday is the necessary-but-odd practice of reminding ourselves that all the other, lesser things we (wrongly) pin our worth on will let us down... and will all be turned to ash one day.  Ash Wednesday reminds me that one day I will lose my grip on my own life--which is to say, one day I will die. 

That might seem like a downer of a message, but I think more, rather, it is a clarifying bit of honesty.  It is the bulldozer grading and leveling the ground so that something new and right can be built.  It is the starting point if we are going to have any hope of understanding the way Jesus achieves victory.

So far in this year's adventure that we are calling "Mercy Moves Us," I hope you've been able to follow along that there has been a method to the madness.  In January, we started with the idea that we disciples are moving where Jesus leads us, rather like a crew on a sailboat, and that the Christian life is not a stationary, fixed thing inside my comfort zone, but a movement directed by the Spirit.  Then, in February, we began to consider who gets to set the course in our lives by looking at the right questions to ask, and what happens when we stop pursuing our own narrow self-centered wants and instead ask about God's expansive, deeper, wider, more beautiful vision for all that we sometimes call the Reign, or Kingdom, of God. In other words, once we realize that this life is like a voyage at sea, at some point we are going to have to ask who is the captain--me, or God. 

Well, now, we are ready to take a closer look at what it looks like when the God we meet in Jesus is the one setting the course.  Once we dare to say, "Your will, not mine," as Jesus teaches us, what actually happens?  What does it look like where and when God's kind of victory happens?

That turns out to be a surprising answer, because God's kind of victory doesn't look like what the world calls "winning."  God's kind of victory, in fact, looks like loss.  A particularly shameful loss at that, too--an execution as an enemy of the state, green-lit by the respectable religious folks.  All of that is to say that God's kind of victory... is a cross.

Now, Jesus takes that upside-down victory, and he sees it not just as a fluke or some kind of cosmic exception to the rule, as if God's way of ruling is usually to get bigger armies, larger piles of money, or grander displays of pomp and power. Jesus sees that the surrender and loss we see in the cross are in fact God's calling card, and they are meant to be our way of life, if we are going to dare to follow God's Messiah, Jesus.  In order to share in God's upside-down victory, we only have to lose.

Jesus calls us to see today the difficult truth that all our stuff, our accomplishments, and all our marks left on the world will be lost one day, no matter what.  You can either let go of caring about them now... or you can clutch onto your stuff, your achievements, and your (appearance of) control to your last breath, and still have all of those things lost to the trash heap and the burn pile of history.  You can either fight and claw to try and preserve your own importance, your own nest-egg, your own control over your world, and your own achievements, only to find that the world forgets us faster than we can keep chirping in to toot our own horns... or you can let go of that whole foolish enterprise and lose yourself now.

As an old line of Jon Foreman's goes, "There's just two ways to lose yourself in this life... and neither way is safe."  He means that you can either clutch onto your self-importance and the illusion of security in this life... only to have the rug yanked out from under you at some point and to feel the loss of it then, or you can lose yourself now to Jesus and his way of self-giving love, and be a part of the adventure of all time.

But there is no way of keeping a permanent grip on the things the world and its many bully-pulpit-puppets think make you a success or a "winner."  Those puppet voices say that success in business is all that matters, that building yourself a nice comfortable (insulated and isolated) life is the measure of success, and that if you want to be remembered forever, eternally etched into history's record, you only have to win... and keep winning. 

Jesus says differently.  Jesus says, "Not to put too fine a point on it, but anybody who says you can have a lasting legacy built on your own record of achievement and wins is either a complete fool or a corrupt liar. All of those things will be forgotten one day."  Or, as Mark's Gospel puts it, "What profit do you get if you gain the whole world but have lost the whole point of life?"

So Jesus invites us today to do one thing: to lose.  To lose big.  To lose daily.  Jesus calls us to lose our old idols of power and success.  Jesus calls us to lose our old agendas that put "me-and-my-group first!" Jesus calls us to lose our old, well-worn familiar hates.  Jesus calls us to lose our out-of-whack priorities.  Jesus calls us to lose, in a word, ourselves... and in letting go of ourselves, to find the only life that really is life.  Look what happens when I quit worrying about my immediate comfort and appearance, and go where Jesus leads!  Look how I could be a part of the one thing that really will last forever--the Reign of God!  And you can, too!  Everything else in this universe will be forgotten in enough of the mists of history... but the Gospel holds out the good news of a God who remembers us... and calls us by name.

There is only more qualifier: we only have to lose.

Lord Jesus, help us to be ready to lose it all for you... and to find that we have been given it all in the very same moment.