THE LIFE YOU SAVE MAY BE YOUR OWN
Mark 8:31-38; Romans 8:31-36

A sermon given by the Reverend Beverley F. Edwards
March 12, 2006 / 2nd Sunday in Lent

The other day I rediscovered an old photo journal essay by Mark Patinkin. It illustrated his interviews with famine survivors in Ethiopia, but sadly, the pictures could as easily have been of Haitian hurricane survivors or of the Bantu genocide victims in present day Darfur. One picture, quite different from all the others, captured me. It showed a thin, young white woman wearing a doctor’s coat who stood, drooped in utter weariness, surrounded and clutched at by the bony black fingers of crowding refugees.

The caption identified her as a French doctor who worked at least sixteen hours a day for $400 per month. Despite her evident exhaustion, she had just signed up for another tour of duty in that camp. I was struck not only by the poignancy of the picture but, even more, by the incongruity of her presence in that place.

The refugees were there out of desperation, driven by the forces of drought and devastation to the point of death. This doctor had chosen to endure the same dirt and heat, the flies and night-cold she shared with those she served. Surely she must have been there out of some complex, inner compulsion of her own.

Whatever forces inspired her to go there must certainly have dismayed those who loved her--her mother, her boyfriend, her mystified colleagues. Yet, I picture that young woman as strangely blessed, because, unlike the refugees, she had chosen her life and found there some deep inner satisfaction so great that she planned to stay. Of course, by her choice, she renounced other available options to gain a life many of us would consider diminished and dangerous. Yet, that anonymous woman doctor is only a modern version of a host of risk-takers and life-losers whose choices have led them to the slums of Calcutta, to the prisons of Birmingham, to Gettysburg, to Plymouth rock, to Camelot, to Jerusalem.

The people I am lifting up are not compelled by duty, but by the integrity of their life itself; not by a "should" or a standard to be lived up to, but by a series of conscious, deliberate choices that result in the loss of one life and the gain of another. Although in that sense, it is a form of death, their choice is primarily a commitment to life, and not only their own life but a life lived for and with others.

Nor is the choice a decision to suffer per se. Masochists, for whom suffering is its own fulfillment, are not among these people. As St. Paul wrote to the Corinthians, "If I give my body to be burned and have not love"–that is, if I do not have an inward acceptance of that decision as right for me–I lose my integrity, "I gain nothing."

The people I am lifting up freely chose to lead a certain kind of dedicated life despite knowing full well the hardships and risks involved. I think of Bishop Tutu and Martin Luther King, Jr., and Cindy Sheehan. Among my friends who I consider to have made such choices, people many of you also know, I count Henry Shelton and Sr. Mary Reilly and Delle McCormack, our UCC minister who has gone from Barrington Church to stand with and for illegal immigrants at the violent intersection of the US- Mexican Border.

As I think of these committed people, I would not wish their lives to be different, for I realize they can do none other and survive. To force them to stop would equivalent to death. Even with the ones I know personally and love dearly, I try to support their decisions and keep my concerns silent.

Whether I always succeed is an open question for, in today’s Gospel, my sympathies are mostly with Peter. Perhaps, with hindsight, I am a little bit better able to hear and understand than Peter was when Jesus announced that he "must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes and be killed and after three days rise again." Even so, everything within me wants to change the story, wants to spare Jesus the humiliation and torture and pain. It seems so unfair that Jesus, the one person without sin, had to die. I resist the implications of the story with a cringing heart.

Jesus’ own violent reaction to Peter’s rebuke, "Get thee behind me, Satan," shows that Jesus himself wished things were different. Tempted in the wilderness by Satan, Jesus had made his choice and committed himself to the path. He was prepared but not eager to endure his own suffering. Yet, to hear from an intimate and beloved friend the anguished echo of his own pain almost undid him.

Peter never did understand and was in no way prepared for the crucifixion. For myself, the only way I can accept the inevitability of Jesus’ choice is when I consider his alternative. Jesus could have denied his self-identified calling, gone home and been a carpenter, perhaps married. He might have preserved his body until his eighties, but it would have been uninhabited by soul or vitality: he would have chosen death. Had he made that choice, there would have been no model for us, no resurrection possibilities of life after death, no support for those people who, through the centuries make their own choices despite being called crazy.

The choice Jesus made in the face of death was not to let death scare him off. In his mortality he prepared himself by facing death, staring it down, talking about it, accepting it as a fact for his life. In that showdown lies his Glory for, on the courage side of the fear of death, nothing has ultimate power over the soul. In the glory of Jesus, life itself is triumphant. As Paul writes to the Romans, "Through Christ neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Without Jesus’ choice where would Paul have found the strength to persevere in his own course? How would Peter have found the courage to chose to preach in the face of his own death? Mark wrote his Gospel for a young congregation facing persecution and the threat of martyrdom. Where would their hope have come from, what would have been the point of their witness without the death and glory of the Lord?

Perhaps all of this sounds mythic and heroic to us "little people", the multitude who do not feel compelled to be martyrs or saints or heroes on a grand scale. Yet, we are not immune either from taking up our cross, nor from facing the living/dying paradox for our own lives.

On the one hand, if we are not moved inwardly toward a certain course, it may be destructive for us to choose that direction because of external considerations of "duty" or "what other people will think." A forced choice is a form of death, and, as Paul said to the Corinthians, "If I give my body to be burned and have not love–that is, not a commitment, an inward acceptance of that decision as right for me–I lose my integrity, I gain nothing.

Perhaps just as everyone is gifted in some way so also each one of us has our particular cross. We do have choices to make, risks that are right for us to take. While they may not be as dramatic as those of Jesus, they are as crucial for our lives as his choices were for him. For "crucial" means cross. By our choice to risk, we conquer our fear of death and defeat death’s power in our lives. We are blessed with the freedom to make that choice and to know that our God walks with us in the decision making.

In a small way I know this in my own life story. When I finally understood that I was meant to be a minister, when I chose to let go of the perfectly nice life I had been leading to take on years of commuting, and studying and questioning, it felt serenely right. I had a supportive husband and family so the losses were minimal but for many who made such choices, that was not the case and yet they persevered.

I suspect that for those of you who are lesbian or gay, a similar turning point must have occurred, and with it a choice to live a life of integrity that fulfills you. Situations, circumstances, opportunities and given capacities shape all of our lives. All of us will die someday. About mortality we have no choice, but how we live until we die is ours to choose. The blessing is to have lived with such integrity that our own death is overshadowed by our life, our spirit triumphant over our circumstances.

Each of our crosses is different. Our particular call may be to heroism or to quiet endurance. Our cross may be dramatic or invisible. But it is the grace of God and the glory of Jesus Christ that we have been given the gift of freedom to choose life and the strength to live it all our days to the glory of God.

AMEN