Saving Your Life

When I was nineteen years old, half way through my sophomore year at college, I quit. I dropped out. It was only briefly as it turned out, but at that point I decided not to enroll in the spring semester and I wasn’t sure I was coming back. I’m not exactly sure why I did it — restlessness, longing for adventure, searching for something I wasn’t finding in school. I don’t know. I packed up my backpack with a sleeping bag, a change of clothes, a book or two, two hundred dollars in my pocket, and I headed out to the Florida Turnpike and stuck out my thumb. I didn’t know where I was going, just headed north, or even where I would be spending the night that night.

I spent the next five months hitch hiking around the US and Canada, sometimes by myself and sometimes with a friend. Up and down the east coast, across the Trans-Canadian highway, down to California for a month at Berkeley, then back across the US — Nevada, Utah, Nebraska, Iowa, and the mid-west before arriving back at Tallahassee, Florida State University, to enroll for the fall semester.

But I can still remember the look on my mother and father’s faces when I told them what I was going to do. Fear, panic, worry, searching for something to say that would stop me from embarking on this crazy scheme, at the same time knowing that there was probably nothing they could say that would stop me. I can’t imagine what my mother felt as she left me at the on-ramp to the expressway.

A few weeks later I showed up at my grandparent’s home in North Carolina, stayed a few days. They had the same fear and worry as I left them. They offered me anything if I would just get on a bus and go home. A while later, I called my parents, collect from a pay phone in an RV campsite in Calgary, Alberta. They offered to wire me money for a plane ticket, if I would just come home. But I continued on.

I thought I was completely safe. A lot of kids my age were doing the same thing. We had not yet heard about the murderers and rapists who preyed on unsuspecting hitchhikers. The dangers were there, we just had not heard of them yet. And surely today I would never do anything like that again. Neither would I recommend it for anyone else.

But my parents didn’t want me to stop growing, stop learning, stop exploring my self or the world. They loved me and they just wanted me to be safe.

This is the same thing Peter wanted in his confrontation with Jesus in this passage in Matthew. Peter had just declared his faith that Jesus was indeed the messiah, the holy one of God. His faith and his love for Jesus emerged with passion and commitment. He loved Jesus. Yet immediately Jesus began to talk about how he would go to Jerusalem, be betrayed, suffer and be killed. It was Peter’s love for Jesus that drove him to urge another path, another fate. He just wanted to keep Jesus safe. Why go to Jerusalem? Why take the risk?

Jesus could have avoided the conflict in Jerusalem. He could have played it safe by staying where he was. He could have stayed in Galilee, set up a school, or established a permanent community of believers like the Qumran/Essene community had done a hundred years before. Seekers would have come to him and he could have spent the rest of his days teaching, healing, working wonders. The new community, the church could have sprung from there.

This cautious scenario must have been a real temptation to Jesus, gauged by his strong reaction to it. Like Satan’s temptations in the wilderness, Peter’s redirection must have presented a real alternative. Yet Jesus knew that he had to go to Jerusalem, he had to confront the principalities and powers there. He had to bring the message of faithfulness to God’s covenant to those who had abandoned it. He had to bring the full embodiment of God’s saving love to all who so desperately needed it.

He knew well the consequences of going to Jerusalem would mean his suffering and death. But to choose Peter’s alternative, to avoid the risk and to live in caution and fear, would be to choose another kind of death — a life emptied of meaning, empty of purpose. He might physically survive, but his true life would be over.

Then Jesus turns to Peter and all the rest, and says that if any would be his disciples, they must take up our cross and follow him. And for Peter and the rest of the disciples (with the exception of Judas Iscariot) they eventually all laid aside their fears and their need for safety and security, and lived their witness, spreading the good news of God’s saving love in Jesus Christ to the whole world. It was a choice, which ultimately cost them their lives. They rejected the safe life for the life of faithfulness.

Jesus calls on us to “deny ourselves” and to follow him. I have wondered exactly what that means. Does it mean to live a life of total poverty, to have nothing at all? For some Christians through the ages, it has meant a call to abandon personal possessions, but I don’t think it is a general rule. Does it mean to want nothing for ourselves, to put everyone’s needs and wishes over our own, to have nothing, to be nothing? I don’t think this is what Jesus meant either. Christians are not doormats, to be walked on and used by everyone. It does not mean that we are to have no sense of “self.” If it did, what “self” would we be called on to save? Emptiness is just emptiness.

No, I believe that to “deny oneself” is to forsake ownership of oneself. It is to recognize that I do not belong to me. I am not the master of my fate; I am not the captain of my ship. I am not the almighty self. I may try to control every aspect of my life. I may try to make everything safe. I may try to make everything go my way. I may seek my comfort and security. But the truth is that our lives are not our own. And to live as if they were, is the ultimate formula for disaster.

We do not belong to ourselves — we belong to God. It is God who made us, God who sustains us, God who heals, and God who redeems us. In all that we are and all that we do, we belong to God. And when we deny ourselves, we deny ownership of our lives. We give it up and follow God in Christ. We very well may not be safe. We may not be comfortable. We may suffer. And we may die. When we put Christ first in our lives, the way may not be easy. We might lose a lot. We won’t get rich. We may not achieve the kind of success that we might have dreamed of. But this kind of living, living not for ourselves, but for God, this is the way to real life. Everything else is death.

When Marsha, my wife, and I were in Kenya a few years ago, we lived near and worked with Stan and Mia Topple. Both of them were highly trained and skilled doctors. If they had stayed and worked in the US, they would have no doubt developed very successful and very lucrative medical practices that would have gained them great honor and prestige in their profession, and also make them very rich. Instead, following their faith in Christ, they spent the first twenty years of practice in Korea, building a hospital there, operating on poor children born with clubfeet, genetic abnormalities and injuries. They now were in Kenya, building a new hospital there outside Nairobi, specializing in surgery for the same kinds of problems, drawing patients from all over Africa. They lived simply, they served, and they truly lived.

When I was in Zimbabwe, I lived with Bill and Nancy Warlick. They also were professionals who, if they had stayed home, would have built highly successful careers and made a lot of money. Instead, every week Bill travels to the villages and towns across southern Africa, helping to build churches, schools and hospitals. Nancy visits the streets of Harare every morning to find and feed the thousands of homeless children, sharing bread, tea and Christ’s love.

Here in Silver Spring, MD, there are those who worship among us, who instead of staying home on Thursday evenings, feed homeless men and women at Shepherd’s Table. Another one volunteers time with hospice, comforting those who are suffering and dying. Another gives time at a church agency that helps folks with rent payments and medical bills. Another knits warm hats for poor children in Appalachia. Another gathers cans and food for those who are hungry. Another visits the sick and those who can’t leave their homes. Another helps kids after school with tutoring. Another gathers pennies to buy cows and chickens for poor farmers in countries far away. Many ministries, many ways to serve.

To forsake a life of fear and self-absorption is not to seek a life of recklessness and danger. It is rather to know deep inside that we do not belong to ourselves. We belong to God. And the real meaning of life is not found in seeking to preserve our lives. It is found in giving it away. Saving our life is losing our possession of it. Saving our life is risking our life. Saving our life is serving the one who gave it to us, the one who sustains it even now, and the one who with his own life saved our life for all eternity. “Whoever loses their life for my sake,” says Jesus, “will save it.” Let us lose our lives. Amen.