Practice dying for Eternal Life

A homily based on the following lectionary readings for the second Sunday of Lent, year B:

Mark 8:31-38

[Jesus] began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”
He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. 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.”

Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16

When Abram was ninety-nine years old, the Lord appeared to Abram, and said to him, “I am God Almighty; walk before me, and be blameless. And I will make my covenant between me and you, and will make you exceedingly numerous.” Then Abram fell on his face; and God said to him, “As for me, this is my covenant with you: You shall be the ancestor of a multitude of nations. No longer shall your name be Abram, but your name shall be Abraham; for I have made you the ancestor of a multitude of nations. I will make you exceedingly fruitful; and I will make nations of you, and kings shall come from you. I will establish my covenant between me and you, and your offspring after you throughout their generations, for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your offspring after you.”
God said to Abraham, “As for Sarai your wife, you shall not call her Sarai, but Sarah shall be her name. I will bless her, and moreover I will give you a son by her. I will bless her, and she shall give rise to nations; kings of peoples shall come from her.”

Romans 4:13-25

The promise that he would inherit the world did not come to Abraham or to his descendants through the law but through the righteousness of faith. If it is the adherents of the law who are to be the heirs, faith is null and the promise is void. For the law brings wrath; but where there is no law, neither is there violation.
  For this reason it depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all his descendants, not only to the adherents of the law but also to those who share the faith of Abraham (for he is the father of all of us, as it is written, “I have made you the father of many nations”)—in the presence of the God in whom he believed, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist. Hoping against hope, he believed that he would become “the father of many nations,” according to what was said, “So numerous shall your descendants be.” He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was already as good as dead (for he was about a hundred years old), or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah’s womb. No distrust made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, being fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised. Therefore his faith “was reckoned to him as righteousness.” Now the words, “it was reckoned to him,” were written not for his sake alone, but for ours also. It will be reckoned to us who believe in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead, who was handed over to death for our trespasses and was raised for our justification.

Do you ever wonder why that seems to be a uniquely human experience? You notice other animals don’t seem to fret or express the same or any anxiety about death, because they don’t express a self-concept. There is no resistance to death because they don’t develop an “I” as it distinguishes “I” from the rest of the pack for the world or the universe. They play their part, without resistance. They live and die, and continue in peace in what the late, great King Mufasa called “the circle of life.”

But we humans—we’re different. We make ourselves different. We seek meaning. We want to know who we are and what are we doing and are we doing it right??? And it is the awareness of our death that seems to be the engine behind those questions. Whether we are aware of it or not, we are all seekers, telling ourselves stories about how things work and who we are, and in rehearsing those stories, we find our role. We establish an identity. We find a sense of selfhood—this part we play through which we interact with one another and build an experience of this world—we build what we call a “life.”

And that “life” is going to end. When it does, what will it mean about me?

Well, that you were—and are—human. And that’s pretty much it. The “life” you built is gone without you to inhabit it, and the eternal part of you returns to God in perfect love and oneness and to true life, eternal life, and the quest to understand who you are in your separation from love is complete—you have finished. The separation is over.

So take all of this existential angst I’ve stirred up (you’re welcome), and focus through that on Peter in today’s gospel reading. His character in this conversation is the embodiment of all our deepest fears in this human experience—he’s afraid of them too: disappointment, failure, suffering, betrayal, death. And Jesus says to his disciples: I am going to do all of the things that you kids are the most afraid of just to flip all your fear on its head. And when I do, it’s going to save you.

But Peter…this doesn’t work for him. Peter was expecting a revolution! An insurrection! He had tasted oppression and injustice at the hands of the Romans, and his salvation was supposed to come by taking their power back! Jesus was supposed to fix things here and now, not abandon his disciples while they still needed him—there was still work to be done!

This is exactly what we want when we are focused on this small, individual experience in the universe that I call “me,“ the blip on the cosmic radar that fights and blazes its way into oblivion. So Peter is suddenly standing in a strange place—he resists his teacher Jesus’s work, because even Peter’s Biggest Dreams are too limited.

And you know what Jesus says!? “Get behind me, Satan.” He tells him he’s consumed with the things of the world, and his request of Jesus is the very request of the adversary—the meaning of the word “Satan.” “Get away from me, Satan.” 

He’s telling Peter his short-sightedness directly opposed the will of God, because the will of God is anything but short-sighted.

Put another way, Jesus could have said, “Peter you’re letting your fear control you right now, and you’ve lost all perspective of everyone and everything other than you.” 

That’s the struggle we face: Your life is insignificant if you try to make your little flash in the pan into anything more than that. The world around us tells us to make something of ourselves, but Jesus says our lives take on meaning only when we see their imminent end completely surrender to it.

When you see the fleeting nature of this life on earth, you can fight and push and try to make your tiny fleck of existence mean something special, or you can surrender. Surrender to the Greater Whole, the Big Picture, the Cosmic Glory that has been and is and will continue its unfolding in all directions before and after you.

When you surrender to this, suddenly your life takes on the significance of the entire Cosmos—as you live, the force of Love and Life that gives all of this existence and keeps it all going is free in you! This is the freedom of faith. Faith not in an easy or painless existence—as evidenced in today’s reading by a couple starting a family in their 90’s, or Jesus walking steadily to his cross. Faith isn’t an Easy Pass, it’s an invitation to a different reality altogether.

Faith is participating in the unseen reality of the Love of God. Faith is freedom from the fears and limitations of this temporary world.

You are free from the need to make something special of your life because you realize that actual Life is so much bigger than your small existence. You are free to give and receive life. You are free to give yourself fully in Love to others, and in so doing, you are free from the burden of fear about who you are and what it all means.

The psychological word for that fear that tells us to figure out who we are is “ego.” Ego is our experience of separateness from God. Ego is who we think we are when it’s anything other than One With All Things.

And ego is our invitation back to God. Recognizing our separateness from God is always an opportunity to come back to Love, come back to Communion, come back to Oneness. Again and again, let go of your definitions of yourself. Let go of the temporary life you cling to, and receive in its place eternal life and glory. 

Again and again, we remember our connection to one another and to God. When we do this, we die to ourselves.

Every time we surrender to the Great Love that is life, we choose faith—we take up our crosses and we follow Jesus into that which we cannot fully see. We open our finite minds and these temporary bodies to the possibility of our Infinite God. It is scary! But it is faith. Faith means surrender and vulnerability and opening ourselves to the grief and passion and unpredictability that comes with a life completely open to Love—this is faith and nothing else. Faith is surrender to a reality much bigger than we can see or fully know—and it is the way to life forever in Christ.