A Good Trade

A Good Trade--September 11, 2018

[Jesus said:] “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? Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.” [Mark 8:36-38]

The old cliché is right:  the one who dies with the most toys in the end… still dies. 

If we have come to that realization, then the real question is, What is really of any worth?  What has real value, if all the "stuff" we spend our time and energy is just... stuff?

And, ultimately, what is worth spending our lives on? 

See, there’s the hitch:  you can’t help but spend your life on something.  Every moment that ticks past is gone, done, spent, and can’t be gotten back.  You spend your minutes and your days on something.  The question is whether it’s worth the trade: what would you exchange sixty seconds’ worth of breath away for?  How much is a minute of life worth to you?  And what things that you spend your life on will really last or matter in the end?  What things will endure?  What things aren’t even worth the time it takes to buy them, much less the time spent working to pay for them?

There was a movie that came out a few years ago called In Time, that put the question very clearly.  The premise was a future in which people are bio-engineered to stop aging at 25, and then have only 12 more months to live, unless they buy or sell minutes of life, to be added or subtracted through counters embedded under your arm like a digital clock tattoo.  So movie tickets or coffee cost a mere few minutes of your life, and a car costs years and years.  The metaphor is obvious:  time is money.  Or at least, time is something you cannot help but spend.  The open question is what is worth the trade.

Well, the moviemakers clearly didn’t invent the idea that our lives are spent on something.  At best, they are riffing on the point Jesus makes here.  You could spend all of your energy raking in piles of possessions, or even gain the “whole world,” but if it costs you your life, what would be the point?  All of a sudden you can hear the song “Cat’s in the Cradle,” in the background, can’t you, with the well-worn message that if you spend your life at the office, you shouldn’t be surprised if your life is empty later on when the kids are spending their lives at the office, too.  What’s worth the trade of your span of years?  What is worth a life, or part of a life?

In truth, it’s more than just a length of time that Jesus is talking about.  When he talks about forfeiting your “life” or what can be given “in return for their life,” the word he is using means something like, “the self” or “whatever it is that makes you you.”  It is the word we bring into English as “psyche,” and it sometimes is also translated “soul.”  What is worth spending your self--your most essential core--on?  What is worth giving your life for?  What would you be willing to trade your deepest self, your very soul, for?  Not just years of existence, but the pieces that make you you—what are they worth?

Well, it’s a sobering question, because I suspect if we ask it honestly and with our eyes open, an awful lot of the things we do spend time on will seem awfully shallow and hardly worth the cost.  Most of the time spent in front of the television, for example—not just in the sense of the hours we have lost with our eyes glazing over to have background noise on, but also for the way we trade away a part of our selves to become shaped into a new “self” with the likes and dislikes that the advertisers and TV producers want us to have.  We lose a little of ourselves when we submit to those messages—not just minutes or breaths of our lifespan, but we lose a little of what makes us "us" when we let other messages stamp themselves on our minds and hearts. That's selling out--that's selling our "souls" in a manner of speaking. Is that worth the cost?

Of course, it’s easy to beat up on television. and our other little rectangles of technology. Well-respected people have been doing that for decades.  It’s harder to see that a great deal of the rest of our lives is equally shallow, and that maybe even the things we think are the most permanent are the things that matter the least.  Our houses and cars, and the need to have “bigger” in both of those categories, turn out not to last too long in the big scheme of things, especially if we also buy into the belief in our culture that we should never put roots down in a place for very long anyway.  It’s all about making a profit when you sell the house anyway, right?  

Sometimes we religious folk sell out by trading our integrity for access to political power.  We promise not to speak up when people are getting stepped on if someone will make us a deal to keep our own situations comfortable.  We look the other way at hypocrisy and cruelty because it is convenient to, or because naming it out loud might make some waves with the people who have influence and clout.  And let's make no mistake about it: when religious leaders and church folks give our endorsement to voices and agendas that are completely opposed to the character of the Reign of God as we have seen it in Jesus, and we use the excuse, "But look how much we get in return that benefits our interests!" as cover like it is some kind of deal, there is no other way to describe it, but that we have sold our souls for things that do not last.  And that's not artful deal-making--that is simply selling out.

Even the recurring human desire to become permanent by chiseling our legacies in stone, to get our names on towers in big gold letters, or to leave behind a record of your presence in brick and mortar, none of these last much more than a few decades—and even at that, all that gets remembered with words carved in stone are the arrangement of letters we called our names.  These things are not worth spending ourselves on.  

Jesus dares us to be honest about that, so that we can instead see that the only thing we can really do with our lives to secure them is to give them away.  That is not common business sense, and maybe the so-called experts would not consider it very artful deal-making... but that is Kingdom-of-God thinking.  Give your life away—spending it for the sake of others, dedicating it to the love of God and neighbor, offering it up warts and all to the Creator of the universe—and you will find it never really gets lost.  Try to clutch onto it for yourself, and you’ll discover that life is too slippery to stay in our grip for very long.  

What will you and I spend this day on… and when you lay your head down at day’s end, will it have been a good trade?  Ask that question, and in the attempt to answer it honestly, you'll get a decent picture of what really has value.  

Maybe the only way to avoid selling your soul or selling out in this life is to give yourself away for free in love.

O God of all our days, give us the wisdom and courage to use these lives, these selves, on what really matters and endures—the Kingdom you have given us in Christ.