Monday, June 23, 2014

Finding by Losing

The Rev. Joshua Rodriguez

Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.

What are you willing to lose for Jesus? What are you afraid that Jesus will ask you to give up for his sake?
Those aren’t easy question to answer, are they? Our Gospel reading this morning isn’t an easy one to hear. It brings up disturbing questions, like: Do I love Jesus more than my mother or my father? What am I afraid of? This passage from Matthew’s Gospel is one of those bits of scripture that often gets referred to as a “hard saying of Jesus.” That’s a bit of an understatement, isn’t it? This is really challenging stuff, and I’m willing to bet that it’s not the sort of thing that you were hoping to hear when you came to church this morning. It’s certainly not what I want to hear Jesus say to me. But it is something we need to hear.

This section of Matthew’s Gospel is part of a much longer speech that Jesus gives to the twelve disciples before he sends them out on their own for the first time. Jesus is preparing them to go out to by two to preach that the “Kingdom of Heaven is near.” More specifically, he’s preparing them for their preaching to be rejected. He’s preparing them to be told that his miraculous powers come from the devil. He’s preparing them for death threats. He’s preparing them to be disowned by their families. He’s warning them: things are not going to be easy. And he’s giving them a chance to say, I’m sorry, Jesus, but you’re asking more than I can give. He wants them to know what they’re getting into.
           
You see, preaching that the Kingdom of God has drawn near often gets people into trouble, because it points out how fragile and transient human kingdoms are by comparison. Preaching the Kingdom of God, where self-sacrificial love is the basis for all authority, points out that human kingdoms are based on the domination of others. Preaching the Kingdom of God calls on people to change, and none of us like change.
These fears of being beaten, slandered, killed, or disowned were all too familiar to the community for which Matthew’s Gospel was written. They were excluded from daily life in their communities. They were shunned by their families. They were beaten and killed by the Roman authorities. The thought of losing their life for Jesus’ sake was a very real possibility.

Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.

It’s easy to look around today and think that Jesus’ words don’t also apply to us, not really. We’re not in any real danger of being beaten or killed for our faith. But still, when I read this passage from Matthew’s Gospel, I hear those questions at the back of my mind: What are you willing to lose for Jesus? What are you afraid that Jesus will ask you to give up for his sake? And there’s another one, one very similar to a question those first disciples had to have asked themselves: What injustice is Jesus calling me to confront?

These are still dangerous questions. In Canterbury Cathedral in England, there's a chapel dedicated to the martyrs of our own times. It’s easy to think of martyrs as people who lived long ago, people who the Romans fed to lions, but even today, people find themselves losing their own lives for the sake of Jesus. One of the martyrs honored in that chapel in Canterbury Cathedral is Jonathan Daniels, an Episcopal seminarian who was martyred in Alabama in 1965. Daniels was participating in a Civil Rights protest, and he gave his own life to shield a young, unarmed African American girl from a gunman. Daniels found himself called to confront injustice in the name of Jesus Christ, in whom there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, but in whose kingdom we are all children of one Father.

Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.

We’re called to live our lives with our eyes fixed upon Jesus, the author and perfector of our faith. The point isn’t to seek martyrdom, or alienate our parents, as if those things would somehow make us more lovable to God. The point is to call us to walk as Jesus walked. We know where that path ends. Jesus wants us to know that it will be difficult, but God will be with us. God whose eye is on the sparrow also watches over us. We are called to live lives that are not ruled by fear. We are called to call the powers and principalities of this present age to account, proclaiming that in Jesus Christ, the Kingdom of God has drawn near. And, in losing our lives, we find life in Jesus. It’s a paradox. I can’t explain it. But we’ve all experienced it. We experience it in bread and wine that draw us together as one body in Jesus Christ. We experience it in water that proclaims that we are part of God’s family. We experience it in the work of this community, when we feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and comfort the sorrowful. In all of these things we are reminded that we do not live for ourselves. We live for one another, and for God. And once God leads us beyond concern for ourselves alone, concern for what we will eat or what we will wear, we find true freedom, true life in Jesus Christ. Amen.

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