Quality of Life--May 6, 2020

Quality of Life--May 6, 2020

"Finally, all of you, have unity of spirit, sympathy, love for one another, a tender heart, and a humble mind. Do not repay evil for evil or abuse for abuse; but, on the contrary, repay with a blessing. It is for this that you were called--that you might inherit a blessing." [1 Peter 3:8-9]

There's an old joke I love, framed as a complaint about a restaurant: "The food is terrible there--and the portions are so small!"

I know, I know--insert your own rimshot on the drums here.  And I know that it ruins the humor of a joke to dissect the way it works, but in this case, that's OK; it wasn't very funny as a one-liner in the first place.  The thing I value about this joke is how it reminds me that quantity isn't enough.  Quality is essential.  After all, having a huge portion of terrible food isn't appetizing.  What you want is a satisfying amount of genuinely good food.

Now, the reason I mention this is that sometimes religious folks talk about the kind of life we are given in Christ only in terms of quantity, rather than being a different quantity of life, too.  Too often, we hear talk about "eternal" life only in terms of a length of time, rather than understanding "eternal" as a different kind of life, too.  Jesus also talks about bringing "abundant" life in similar terms--and we can make the mistake of hearing that only as an amount of time, rather than hearing it as a differnt way of living our lives even now as well.

Now, as anyone who has lived through watching a loved one suffer through an extended illness will tearfully attest, sometimes it seems like modern medicine is only able to prolong death, rather than to restore the quality of someone's life.  And if you have been in that place before, enduring the suffering of someone you love, you know that just keeping a person's heart beating or lungs breathing isn't much of a quality of life.  The Gospel doesn't just offer us an infinite number of years of existence--the promise we are given is of, as another New Testament writer would put it, "the life that really is life."

And that's what I want to spend a moment exploring here.  I think somewhere along the way we allowed those "religious" voices to turn the Gospel message simply into, "Follow Jesus and you will get to live for an infinite number of years even after you die," while saying next to nothing about how Jesus' WAY of life was better, even now.  But that came at the cost of hearing how many times and ways in the New Testament we were given descriptions of how our quality of life changes because of Christ.  We turned Christianity into, "Believe these facts about Jesus so that you can still be a selfish, vindictive jerk forever in the afterlife," rather than, "Follow Jesus so that you are freed from the cycle of hatred and rottenness that runs rampant in the world around us, both in this life and beyond death, too."  And here in what we call First Peter, there is a reminder about how our lives in Christ are different, not just in quantity, but in quality.

At the heart of what First Peter says here is the core teaching of Jesus that we not respond to evil with evil, hatred with hatred, or reviling with reviling.  And we are taught not to do those things, not as a way of earning some other prize called "eternal life," but rather because it is an essential part of the new way of living life that has a Jesus-quality to it.  See, refusing to answer evil with evil isn't a means toward some other end--it is the way itself that Jesus gives us.  The life freed of the cycle-of-rottenness is itself a gift of grace.  It is the thing we are freed for.  It is the better kind of life--the life of blessing and blessedness--"to which we were called," as First Peter puts it.  Like Catherine of Siena wrote, "All the way to heaven is heaven, because Jesus said, 'I am the way'." 

So much of what passed for Christianity in the world around me over the last four decades of life has said something like, "Christianity is about how you get to life-after-death."  And everything was framed in terms of what necessary steps had to be taken in order to unlock the reward of some post-mortem prize called "eternal life."  Within that framework, all the different branches of Christianity were just seen as differing answers to "how you get to heaven after you die."  Some said, "You need to recite the correct answers from the creed," and others said, "You need to have had a moment where you invite Jesus into your heart and accept him as your savior," and still others, I was told, said, "You have to do a certain number of good deeds, or follow a sufficient percentage of the rules for a sufficient amount of the time," and some said, as if to cover their bases, "You need to do all of the above--doctrinal orthodoxy, righteous deeds, and a born-again-experience moment in your life when you specifically invited Jesus into your life."  And against that backdrop, First Peter's talk (and Jesus' talk, mind you) of not answering evil with evil was usually relegated to one of the good deeds you could do, like an optional merit badge project for Boy Scouts, or as something you could skip as long as you could recite the Apostles' Creed without flinching.

But that's just not how the writers of the New Testament themselves actually saw things.  They recognized that the life Jesus gives us is not just something that starts after your heart stops.  It is a kind of life we live now.  And it is not simply a matter of doing enough good deeds now, in utter misery and suffering, in order to reserve our spot in glory.  It is about a different kind of life that, by its very nature, is freed from the weariness of unending cycles of tit-for-tat getting-back-at-one-another.  It is a life freed from that hamster wheel of always attacking back... and then always looking over your shoulder to see if someone is going to get revenge for your act of revenge.  It is a life that feels more like an adventure and less like a treadmill, because we don't have to keep walking on the same old track of answering evil for evil and hatred for hatred.

I wonder, how might my day, my week, my year, my life, be changed if I could simply step out of that rut of always needing to "get back," always lashing back out when someone has been rotten, always seeing every interaction with others as a contest to be won?  What might I be freed from if I didn't let other people's rottenness determine my course of action in the day?  What could happen if I let love, compassion, humility, and kindness be the hallmarks of my life, rather than a constant drive to win arguments, demean people, or shut others down?

I have a hunch I would feel more alive, even right now.  I have a hunch I would call that kind of life, even now on this side of the grave, "eternal" and "abundant."  And compared with the petty smallness of needing to answer every insult with an insult back, I would say that kind of expansive, grace-filled, loving life sure feels like a little resurrection.

Lord Jesus, don't let us settle for the old way of living with bitterness and hatred, but pull us into your new kind of life even now, and let us dare to believe we can live your way of life beyond death, too.