Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
October 9, 2005

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

It’s something of a cliché to say about Bible stories that we find something new in them every time we read them. I’ve heard people say that many times, and I’ve often thought the person saying it was exaggerating. I mean, I don’t find something new in every Bible story every time I read one of them. Still, those stories are tricky. Sometimes they throw us a curveball, only sometimes the curve is so subtle that we miss it. Then, when we’re reading a story again we spot it. It can be an "ah ha moment," and we can get a new angle on the story, some new insight, some new understanding.

That’s what happened to me this last week when I reread the familiar Gospel story that I just shared with you. It’s not from the lectionary today. It’s from the lectionary for one Sunday last summer; but I didn’t preach on it then so I’m preaching on it now instead. It is the familiar story of Jesus’ prediction of his crucifixion and resurrection, of Peter’s appalled reaction, and of Jesus’ rebuke of Peter for having his mind set on earthly things not on divine things.

The curveball comes in the part that follows Jesus’ rebuke of Peter. It’s the line "For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it." Perhaps some of you, like me, have always heard that line: "For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it." The curveball is that while that’s what we may hear, it’s not what the passage says. The two parts of the saying aren’t perfectly symmetrical. Where we expect "those who lose their life will save it" we get instead "those who lose their life will find it." My ah ha moment last week was the realization that that difference between what we expect and what the passage really says changes the meaning of the story and opens up a whole new understanding of it. Let me try to explain.

Our verse starts out: "Those who want to save their...." That’s us, isn’t it? We all want to save our lives. Survival is, after all, a very strong instinct in us. Yet there is an assumption behind that statement that we need to draw out and examine. That assumption is that our life is something we actually already have. After all, you can’t save something you don’t have. You can’t keep, protect, preserve, or safeguard something unless you already have it to keep, protect, preserve, or safeguard. That may seem obvious, but maybe it’s so obvious that we take it for granted and don’t really see it. We all have our lives, don’t we? Well, maybe not. The second part of our verse this morning casts doubt on that assumption. It says that those who lose their life for Jesus’ sake will find it. You don’t find something that you already have. You find something that you don’t have. If in losing our life for Jesus sake we find it, then we must not already have it.

But if we don’t already have our life, how can we lose it, for Jesus’ sake or at all? To find something you have to not have it; but to lose something, you have to have it. So how can you find something you have and lose something you don’t have? As Yul Brynner would say: ‘Tis a puzzlement. Or maybe it’s a Zen koan, something that we’re supposed to meditate on but not figure out. Or maybe it’s just another of those Gospel story curveballs I was talking about. And yet I think there is some meaningful sense that we can get out of it. Bear with me while I try to do that.

It seems to me that the way to make sense out of this apparent nonsense is to understand that Jesus is talking about two different lives here. Clearly he is focusing our attention on the second part of the saying: Those who lose their life for my sake will find it. The goal is to find our life, but to do that we have to lose something that Jesus also calls our life. That makes sense if, and I suspect only if, we understand Jesus to be saying that we have to lose one life in order to find another life. I believe that Jesus is talking about losing a false life that we have in order to find our true life that we don’t have. He is telling us that the life we are living is not our true life. Rather, our true life is something we are not living-and more than that. The false life that we are living is getting in the way of our finding and living our true life. To find our true life, we have to lose the false one.

Now, that idea may seem strange. We don’t normally think we are living a false life. Our life is our life and that’s all there is to it, right? Well, maybe not. You see, the idea that the life most of us are living isn’t our true life isn’t really all that bizarre. Psychologists and theoreticians of personality development actually have a modern a way of talking about the difference that Jesus was talking about so long ago. They don’t usually use the word life, however, as Jesus did. Rather, they usually substitute the word "self." They talk about the distinction between the true self and what they commonly call "the ego self." I believe that the life Jesus is calling us to lose is the life of the ego self, and the life he is calling us to find is the life of the true self that God indents to be.

If that’s true, then how are we to understand this distinction between the false, ego self and the true self to which God calls us? Our verse this morning gives us a clue. It calls us to lose our life for Jesus’ sake. Why for Jesus’ sake? The historian in me wants to answer that by saying that Matthew wrote this story for first century Christians who were facing the very real possibility of martyrdom at the hands of the Romans. In its historical setting, the line is a call to early Christians to persevere in the faith in the face of persecution in hope of an eternal reward. Yet if that’s all the verse is about, it doesn’t have much meaning for us. We’re not going to be martyred for confessing Jesus Christ as Lord. Fortunately, we can find a lot more meaning than that in the phrase "for Jesus sake." It is a call to lose our false selves, our false lives, in imitation of him. It is a call to lose our false selves, our false lives, for the sake of becoming like him and living the way he calls us to live. That is the life he is juxtaposing to the false life, to the ego self.

After all, the life that Jesus models is not the life of the ego. The life of the ego is about self-preservation. It is about self-gratification. It is about taking care of ourselves and of what is ours. It is about making distinctions between us and them, putting ourselves over "them," and doing whatever we can to preserve our sense of superiority and our smug self-righteousness. Let’s be honest now. Isn’t that how you live most of the time? It certainly is the way I live most of the time. My ego is great at putting other people down, especially people who are different from me, who live differently than I do, who think and believe differently than I do. I’m great at building walls around my ego, walls of self-justification and self-preservation that keep other people out and defend the sense of superiority that if I’m honest I have to admit that I feel most of the time. That’s the life of the ego self, and Jesus will have none of it.

What does Jesus say? I must suffer and be crucified. Why? Not for his sake. He didn’t need all that. No. Jesus had to suffer and die for the world’s sake. For our sake. We’ve talked a lot before about just what that means, and I won’t go into it more this morning. The important point here is that Jesus is not living, he is not modeling, the false life of the ego self. He is living, he is modeling the true life to which God calls all people. It is a life that finds its purpose and its wholeness not in self-preservation, not in self-justification, not in self-righteousness, but in a life of giving, a life of caring. In other words, a life of love. That, my friends, is the life that Jesus calls us to find by losing the false, ego-centered lives that we in fact live.

The Christian tradition has a word for what it is that Jesus is calling us to. That word is transformation. The Christian life is the life of transformation. The Christian way is the way of transformation. It is a way of leaving behind our narrow, self-focused concerns and cares. It is a way of daring to move beyond that way of being to a new way of being that is nothing less than life in the Kingdom of God. If we are not on the road of transformation, we are not walking with Jesus.

And it’s so hard, or at least we think it is. We find it so scary. We find it so foreign. Every day our culture tells us that the ego life is the true life. Every day we are bombarded with messages that tell us how to make our life better, not how to make the world’s life better. We are told that our primary concern should be the financial security of ourselves and our families. We are told to make our homes fortresses with sophisticated and expensive security systems or even to live in gated communities that give the illusion of keeping the world out. Our politics work the same way. We are told to vote our own self interest not our country’s-and certainly not the world’s-best interest. That, by the way, is a non-partisan statement. Both of our political parties tell us that. Our nation lives an utterly out of control ego life, pursuing international unilateralism that cares nothing for the rest of the world despite its flowery rhetoric to the contrary. The transformation to which Jesus calls us means a revolution, a revolution in our personal lives and in our lives as citizens of this country and of the world.

And the church in its most vocal and visible manifestations among us today calls people not to transformation but away from it. It calls people away from it by telling them that the faith is only about praising God. Praising God is a good thing, but it has a dangerous side to which the church more often than not succumbs. Praising God usually comes down to praising God that we are not like others, like the Pharisee in the Temple. I saw a man with a jacket yesterday, for example, that said: "Thank God I’m an American." That, folks , is ego living. That is living that leads to self-righteous complacency. The true faith of Jesus calls not to such a life but to a transformed life in the image of Jesus.

And we think we can’t do it. We think we can’t do it because we don’t have enough faith. Friends, transformation is only hard, it’s only scary if we listen to the wisdom of the world and not to the wisdom of Jesus. For Jesus tells us that we can do it. We can do it because God’s grace holds us and walks with us every single step on the road of transformation. Jesus calls us to lose our false, ego life for the sake of finding the new life of transformation; and Jesus doesn’t call us to do the impossible. So let’s get on with it. It isn’t something that happens over night or once for all. It is a life-long process, a life-long struggle. It isn’t something we can do on our own. The great good news is that we aren’t alone, and we don’t have to do it alone. It is Jesus who calls us to the journey, and Jesus walks with us every time we dare to take another step forward. With faith in God through Jesus Christ our Lord, we can do it. Amen.