You Belong to Me

You Belong To Me--April 13, 2018

"We do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves. If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's. For to this end Christ died and lived again, so that he might be Lord of both the living and the dead." [Romans 14:7-9]

There's an old Patsy Cline song that has had more than its shares of covers and re-makes, but whose words come to mind when I read these verses from Romans.  The lyrics go like this:

"See the pyramids along the Nile,

Watch the sunrise on a tropic isle,

Just remember, darling, all the while--you belong to me.

"See the marketplace in old Algiers

Send me photographs and souvenirs,

Just remember till your dream appears--you belong to me.

"Fly the ocean in a silver plane,

See the jungle when it's wet with rain,

Just remember till you're home again--you belong to me."

Well, you get the gist--wherever the beloved finds themselves, no matter what happens, the singer says, "You belong to me."

And this is the beautiful thing that the apostle claims for us, too: none other than Christ himself says to you, and to me, "You belong to me."  There is no condition under which we stop belonging to him.  There is no place you can travel beyond his grip.  There is no jurisdiction which will not recognize his claim on us.  There is nothing you can do to dissolve the bond. There is no way to fall "from grace," as though you were outside of Christ's reach--not even in death.  And so, Paul can say without an asterisk or fine print or catch, "whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's."  You can almost hear Patsy Cline in the background, "Just remember till you're home again... you belong to me."

That claim means two things for us on an ordinary Friday.  First off, Christ's claim on us gives us a relentless assurance that we will never be abandoned, never be let go of, and never find ourselves outside of Christ's own grip.  If there's nothing in life that can separate us from him, and there's nothing in death that can separate us from him, then all of a sudden, nothing--literally nothing--needs to paralyze us with fear any longer.  The one thing that matters above all else is knowing that we are claimed, that we are beloved, and that we belong. 

And that is true regardless of whether anybody else thinks we are "worthy" of it--in fact, throughout his ministry Jesus seemed to make a point of especially claiming that the folks others deemed "unworthy" were the ones who most preciously belonged to him.  While everyone else is bad-mouthing Zacchaeus and scandalized that Jesus has gone to his house, Jesus says of the Chief Sell-out of Jericho, "Today salvation has come to this house, for he, too, is a son of Abraham" (see Luke 19).  Or there's the woman who is anointing Jesus' feet--and while everyone else is scandalized by her actions and wants to stop her, ostensibly in the name of decorum and prudence, Jesus goes out of his way to call attention to how good her gesture is, and insists that she, rather than anybody else there in the peanut gallery that day, will be remembered (see Mark 14).  Jesus' whole story in the Gospels is spent creating a beloved community out of people who have been marginalized, ostracized, rejected, and cast out, and saying to each of them, "You belong to me."  Paul the apostle just says that here on the other side of the resurrection, nothing changed about that.  The risen Christ says the very same to an endlessly varied gathering of hims and hers and theys and wes and us-es and thems and you and me, and regardless of what anybody else says or thinks, the living Jesus says, "Just remember... You belong to me."  Once we get that straight then all of a sudden, all the scowling faces of the Respectable Religious Crowd who want to keep out the "riff-raff" and the "sinners" just fade into the background, and all that matters is what Jesus says of us.  And he says we belong... every last one.

Now, there is a second truth that emerges from knowing that "whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's," and it is this: because we belong to Christ, we don't belong to ourselves anymore.  (Maybe honestly we never did--we have always been selling ourselves to other lesser loves and lords; Jesus is just the first one to really love us as we are and to rightly be called our Lord.)  Paul is as clear about this as he is about the assurance that nothing, not even death, can separate us from belonging to Christ.  "None of us lives to ourselves, and none of us dies to ourselves," he says.  The nonsense that folks like to quote from Henley's poem, "Invictus," about being the "master of my own soul" and "the captain of my own fate" is a load of hot fertilizer fresh from the horse.  We sometimes tell ourselves the myth (and that's all it is, a myth) that each of us should aspire to a sort of "Don't-tread-on-me"/"You-can't-tell-me-what-to-do"/"I-did-it-MY-way!" mentality, and think that's what we mean by "freedom."  Well, my apologies, dearies, but it just ain't so, on two counts.  For one, to quote the Eagles, "Freedom?  That's just some people talkin'... your prison is walkin' through this world all alone," and more to the point, the living Christ says we belong to him.  The point of life ain't for me to look out for ME--you can try it if you like, but you'll find yourself one day an empty hollow husk even if you're surrounded by piles of money and a garage full of new cars. 

When that wretched impulse inside us cries out, "Me and My Group First!" the living Christ just says, "Ah, no... you belong to me.  You don't live for yourself--that's a damnable lie. You are mine."   When the voices around us and within us say, "But we HAVE to look out for our own first!"  the living Christ says, "No, in fact, you don't.  I'm looking out for you, and that is precisely why I went through death and out the other side into resurrection--to keep hold on you no matter what, so that you don't have to waste your energy focused all on you!"  And when the presence of fear chimes in and says, "You have to protect your self and your own interests in this life, because the world is full of scary things and people who are out to get you!" the living Christ says, "No--even if they do their worst, they cannot overcome the resurrecting power of my love.  You are freed to give yourself away all the more exactly because you don't have to worry or be ruled by fear of what anybody else can do to you anymore!"

To belong to Jesus is both a gift and a calling, a blessing and a charge (a "blarge," if you like).  It calls us out from our myopic and self-centered little worlds where we were trapped, only living for "Me," and it assures us that no matter where else we go or what else happens to us, we are the Lord's.

"Just remember," says the risen Christ, "you belong to me."  And so it is.

Lord Jesus, we are yours and you are ours.  Let us live to you as you give us life today, and let us trust that we belong to you no matter what anybody else says or thinks.