April 18, 2024 - Living, Not Dying, For Others - LTS Chapel

 Acts 4:5-12; Psalm 23; 1 John 3:16-24; John 10:11-18

"We know love by this, that the [Son of God] laid down his life for us––and we ought to lay down our lives for one another." (1 John 3:16)
"The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep." (John 10:11b)

What a pairing of verses we have for us today––a call to a life of ministry and service to the people of God in which we deny ourselves and take up our cross and follow Christ, as the Gospel of Matthew says. On these verses, together with the framing from Matthew, rests an entire history of what it means to be like Christ––self-sacrificial, putting others needs before our own, turning away from our selves, suffering so that others may live. The meaning of being a Christian, right?

The thing is, as much as we love this idea that to be a Christian is to live a life of self-sacrifice, there is something insidious about it actually manifests in our world. We know that historically, this idea has been used to keep certain groups of people in servitude and slavery to others––literal slaves have been told that as Christians they must sacrifice themselves for their masters, wives have been told they must sacrifice their physical safety and lay down their lives for their husbands, victims of clergy abuse have been told that they must sacrifice their well-being for the good of the whole church community. And so we feel caught between this millennia-long belief that we are called to sacrifice our lives for others and the millennia-long experience that sacrificing our lives for others has caused unnecessary pain and suffering.

Episcopalian theologian, Jay Johnson, in his book Peculiar Faith: Queer Theology for Christian Witness, helps us to think differently, by unmasking this "theological commitment to sacrifice" as a "zero-sum game." (Johnson, 122.) As he reveals, "that game only perpetuates the mistaken portrait of life's blessings as scarce commodities." In other words, proclaiming that I must lay down my life for you, or that you must lay down your life for me, implies that life is a limited commodity. That there is not enough to go around, and so I must give up some of mine for you, or you must give up some of yours for me. 

But this is a lie. There is more than enough life for each of us, and what's more, there is an abundance of life for the entire community. An overabundance, actually. There is more than enough. None of us need go empty-handed when it comes to the life that Christ has brought to us. "I came that they may have life and have it abundantly," Jesus says a few verses before our Gospel pericope begins for today. Jesus does not say, I came that some of them may have life. Jesus did not lay down his life for us to share and distribute evenly amongst ourselves, with some giving up bits of their lives so others can have a bit more. The Gospel of John says that Christ came for all––all the sheep, even the ones not of this flock. The life Jesus gives us is not in short supply. It is not a restricted commodity that we must hoard or trade. We are not called to lay down our lives so that our siblings might have some instead.

So what, then, is meant in this idea that we sacrifice ourselves for others? Because we are also not called to live lives of self-indulgence at the expense of others. Luther rightly says that at times, when we are curved in on ourselves, that we sin against one another. 

In looking at the text from 1 John, New Testament scholar Janette Ok point out that that the phrase "lay down our lives," followed by the reference to having "the world's goods" in verse 17, resonates with the words in Philippians 2:4, "let each of you look not to your own interests but to the interests of other." (Ok, Working Preacher, April 18 2024.) Ok proposes that this is not about laying down our actual lives, or sacrificing our mental or emotional well-being, but that it is about not requiring that others sacrifice themselves--or their mental or emotional well-being--for us. It is about sharing what we have with one another rather than hoarding it for ourselves. It is about thinking of ourselves as existing and following Christ within a community, rather than as individuals. 

Jay Johnson also emphasizes the importance of framing all of this within the life of a community rather than the individual life. Johnson points to Paul's words in Romans 12:1 that we be a "living sacrifice," where the call is not to stifle our own lives for the sake of others, so that we die inside, but to live in such a way that the whole community benefits. Johnson puts it this way, "Christians sacrifice whatever thwarts the thriving of the whole body, from which all the members draw life." (Johnson, 122.)

Johnson is saying something really important here that we need to expand. Your self-sacrifice does not benefit the community. Because you are part of the community. If you are struggling, if you are overwhelmed, if you are denying yourself to the point of exhaustion, you are not giving life to the community because you are a part of the community. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 12:26, "If one members suffers, all suffer together with it." If you are suffering, I suffer with you. Giving up your life for this community does not give me more life. This is not a zero-sum game. Life is not a limited commodity that we trade. If you are exhausted, the community is affected, because if you suffer, all suffer together, because we are one in Christ.

So what does this living sacrifice for the good of the community of which we are a part look like? Mary Streufert, a Lutheran theologian, talks about this using the analogy of pregnancy. In her work, Maternal Sacrifice as a Hermeneutics of the Cross, she suggests that the kind of sacrifice Christians are called to is the kind of sacrifice a pregnant person makes for their fetus. Being pregnant, and I say this having been pregnant twice, is a sacrifice. There are certain things I had to give up when I was pregnant because they would harm my fetus. I had to give up sushi. I had to give up alcohol. I had to give up coffee. I had to give up staying out late and spending time with my friends, because my fetus needed me to sleep. I had to give up indulging in ice-cream so that I wouldn't get gestational diabetes and preeclampsia. I had to give up unhealthy and sometimes harmful ways of living so that when my babies were born, they would have life, and have it abundantly. Because if they did not have life abundantly, neither would I.

But, I could not literally sacrifice my life. Because then my babies would die. They required me to live so that they, in turn, could have life.
This is a model of laying down our lives for others that Christ is calling us to. To lay down those harmful and unhealthy ways of living that inhibit the life of the communities to which we belong.  Not to destroy ourselves, which damages the community. But to live in ways that help us to thrive and share our abundant lives with the community, so that it also might live abundantly. Not to give up and give away our abundant lives to others, but to share it. Because there is no limit to the abundance of the Christ-life. The life of Christ is not a restricted commodity––it is supra-abundant, limitless.

Now I'm going to speak some truth here. This community, this STU community of professors and students and staff is exhausted. We are coming to the end of the school year, and we are working exceptionally hard at bringing life to this new STU "thing." But we are in danger of [killing] ourselves as we birth this new life. And if one of us runs ourselves into the ground, the whole community suffers. And this is not what our Scriptures verses today are calling us to do. Dear students, dear colleagues, dear co-workers, Christ came that you may have life, and have it abundantly. You are one of the sheep of this flock whom Jesus has come for. You are part of that whole body. You are part of that community to whom Jesus has given life. You do not stand outside of the body, or outside of the community. You are not excluded from the gift of life and thriving and abundance. And more to the point, you are not called to exclude yourself from that. You. Are. Not. Called. To. Kill. Yourself. For. The. Community. 

The summer after my first year in seminary, I did an intensive CPE unit. I was in Philadelphia, and my site was a downtown hospital. I was assigned to the Neonatal ICU, the Cardiac/Respiratory ICU, and regular shifts in the Emergency Department which, being in downtown Philly, saw a lot of gunshot wounds. In twelve weeks, I encountered seven deaths, including a woman who died in childbirth. And I opened myself to that suffering, I laid down my emotional well-being for those to whom I was ministering, and I descended into a dark cave that in hindsight, was my first episode of clinical depression. 

What helped me in that time, was going to one of my professors, Dr. Gordon Lathrop, and sharing with him what was happening and the suffering I was experiencing. And Dr. Lathrop looked at me and he said, "Only Christ was called to die on the cross for others. And you are not Christ."

Lay down your lives for others means laying down any self-sacrificial behaviour that will, as it causes you to suffer, cause the whole community to suffer. Instead, take up the life that Christ has given you, so that we all might live. Take up the abundance of grace and love that God gives to you so that we all might together experience that grace and love. Embrace the abundant resurrection life that we celebrate in this Easter season and share it with those around you, so that together, we might all live abundantly the life Christ has given us. Thanks be to God. Amen.

January 18, 2024 - Giving Up Hope - LTS Chapel

1 Cor 7:29-31; Mark 1:14-20

"The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near..." "The appointed time has grown short... The present form of this world is passing away."

Well, if I were Paul, I suppose I would tell you to take all those New Year's Resolutions you may have made just a few weeks ago and throw them in the trash. Also, whatever classes you're registered for this semester, really, don't bother with scheduling the final projects and exams. "The appointed time has grown short," and "the present form of this world is passing away."

Jesus, too, would probably have given you the same advice. Drop what you're doing and follow Jesus, leave your books at your desk, and follow.

Neither Paul nor Jesus seem to have been long-term thinkers. And it's easy to chuckle, with two thousand years between us and their words. We can't possibly take them seriously, and so we read them somewhat metaphorically - with Paul we spiritualize and contextualize his words, finding ways so that they don't literally apply to our circumstances, and say that they really mean we just shouldn't become spiritually attached to the physical things and situations of this world. With Jesus's words, we turn to liberation theology, which has taught us to see the "now" of the coming of God's reign, where we can act to resist and even overthrow the economic and capitalist powers of oppression, but continue to live in this physical world.

The challenge with these interpretations is that it seems highly likely that Paul and Jesus as he is written in Mark both literally mean that the world is ending. According to Lester Grabbe, a Hebrew Bible and Early Judaism scholar, Jesus and Paul both believed in a Jewish eschatology that understood that "the age of the world is finite and [that] history was being played out according to a pre-determined divine plan." (Grabbe, Vol 4, 282) This physical world was only meant to exist for a certain period of time, and then God would literally intervene and literally destroy Rome. The sufferings that they experienced under Roman Imperial rule were part of the divine plan and a sign that God was about to end the world.

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Did you know that the present form of this world is passing away? Literally. Last year's fires in Canada, last year's global temperature extremes that twice crossed the two-degree higher than historical averages marker that we weren't supposed to cross for another fifty, the shocking warming of the top two metres of the oceans, the loss of biodiversity - these are just waypoints on what now appears to be an irreversible trend of environmental change that will have catastrophic changes for humans. Scientists, agriculturalists, sociologists, even economists are tracing the path from environmental collapse to global food collapse to global economic collapse to global security collapse. The radical changes that need to be made now will only minimize the harm that is coming, they won't eliminate it. According to the two most recent Intergovernmental Panels on Climate Change, as well as the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, there is "great certainty" that our future - our future, not just our children's future - will see global civilizational collapse. The collapse of food networks, the collapse of governments, of infrastructures, of production and manufacturing systems, of banking systems, of the internet, of institutions like ours, whether you're talking about churches or seminaries. All of it. In our lifetime.

Now the difference between our situation and Paul's is not that he turned out to be wrong, but that he believed God was in control of all things and had planned the suffering under the Roman Empire in order to display the glory of God when it was overthrown. Our situation is that when it comes to this already-begun climate collapse, the suffering that we are and will experience, along with the suffering of the entire world, is not caused by God, but by our own curved-in-on-ourself-ness. It's caused by our own self-centeredness, which has led us to exploit and consume the resources of this world without hesitation and indeed with divine justification. We are the cause of our own destruction, and it cannot be stopped.

Which is what causes me to lose sleep at night, to feel like I want to throw up even as I say all this, to feel as if my heart stops beating when I face the very real possibility of the actual extinction of the human species before the end of this century - because that is one of the outcomes that is predicted if we continue on this path -  and what makes me wish I was not actually preaching this sermon right now. Because the question that keeps arising is one that Paul didn't ask, and that is "why didn't God stop us?" followed immediately by, "what if God can't?"

It's not a new question actually - this was the question asked by Jews as the Holocaust unfolded. Elie Wiesel, in his book Night, tells about the tortuous hanging of a boy in a concentration camp: "the [...] rope was still moving: the child, too light, was still breathing... And so he remained for more than half an hour, lingering between life and death, writhing before our eyes. And we were forced to look at him at close range. He was still alive when I passed him. His tongue was still red, his eyes not yet extinguished. Behind me, I heard [a] man asking: "For God's sake, where is God?" And from within me, I heard a voice answer: "Where is He? This is where--hanging here from this gallows..."" For Wiesel and other Jews, this was the ultimate blow - the death of God. They had been taught to believe that God was both good and that God was omnipotent. Rather than give up their belief that God was good and God loved them, they gave up on their belief that God had the power to change things - they gave up on God's omnipotence. It wasn't that God would not stop what was happening, it was that God could not.

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So, when Lutherans are ordained as pastors, we are cautioned to "[give] no occasion for false security or illusory hope." At this moment in time, hoping that God's omnipotence will save us from the coming collapse of the climate and civilization is an illusory hope, just as was the Jews' hope that God could save their children from the fires of Auschwitz.

And so we are driven to our knees in fear, not just for the future but for our faith. Giving up on God's omnipotence is terrifying in and of itself, because this is the space of hopelessness and it greatly troubles us because we have come to believe that hope is the result of faith. That to be faithful is to be hopeful. That's how we demonstrate our faith, right? By hoping, by trusting, that the God who promises to deliver can indeed deliver. So, as faithful people, hopelessness shakes us to our core.

But hope is not faith, and it can betray us when we hope in something, instead of in someone. I'm going to say that again - we run into trouble when we hope in something, instead of in someone. Another way to say this might be that we run into trouble when we place all of our hope in an outcome, instead of in the One who is with us.

Paul dos not proclaim that God is going to save this world, or this species, or any species from extinction. Paul is very clear that resurrection is not a kind of spiritual new life while maintaining our old life. Paul is explicit that the new life that God will bring is something completely different from what we know: "Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable." (1 Cor 15:50) This is not some kind of double speak that we are meant to understand metaphorically. Paul is literal - the present form of this world is passing away and God is not going to save it. Paul told the early Christians to give up both mourning and rejoicing, and he might as well also have told them to give up hope.

But here's the thing - giving up hope is not the same thing as giving up faith. To be hopeless is not to be faithless. Miguel De La Torre, a professor at Iliff School of Theology, says in his book, Embracing Hopelessness, "hopelessness engenders desperation and doubt, two needed emotions that serve as the basis for faith." "Hopelessness does not mean faithlessness." Hopelessness is to give up hope in a particular action, in a specific outcome. Faithlessness is to give up believing that there is One who is and remains in relationship with us. Indeed, hopelessness can drive us to faithfulness, where we give up hoping in an outcome and turn instead to God who is with us even unto the cross. To be hopeless is to be freed from illusory hope or false security, to be hopeless is a step to being faithful. Hopelessness is what happens when our belief that God can change the outcome is stripped away, and yet we still reach out our arms in the moment of death and cry out in despair and doubt, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Jesus felt hopelessness. But he was not faithless. A faithless person does not believe there is anyone there to hear him, and so does not even cry out. Faith is what compels us to cry out because we know that there is someone listening. Jesus cried out in hopelessness because he knew God was with him.

As we take seriously the reality of climate collapse and the very real possibility of civilizational collapse, these feelings of hopelessness will increase. As fishers of people, we are not called to proclaim that God will or even can make everything okay again. This world that we live in is dying. But we are called to proclaim to them, and to ourselves, the good news that God is with them, that Emmanuel is with us, and will remain with us as this world that we have crucified ends. Together we will cry out, and God will be with us. Thanks be to God. Amen.