What does it profit you to gain the whole world and forfeit your life?

What does it profit you to gain the whole world and forfeit your life? Indeed, what can you give in return for your life?

If you take nothing else away with you this morning, remember these questions. Jesus asked them without offering an answer of his own. Mark recorded them without providing any guiding commentary either. For, in truth, they are questions that have no adequate answer. Once posed, they hang in the air. They drift in the imagination. And they are pertinent to everything you do in all the time you are given to live. Nothing happens that they do not address. These questions should be recited each morning and evening and in the face of every anxiety you may suffer. They can change your life. Don’t leave without them. Don’t leave them unattended because you are so busy from sun up to sun down trying, indeed, to gain the world.

Scripture is rarely obvious in conveying its message – a point that seems painfully lost for many people these days. Its texts require patience to understand, and they can be rightly interpreted only by means of repeated reflection. This is how we engage our lives with God, and only this engagement allows us to see the revelation God has set before us. Allow me, then, a short exercise in reflection that may offer some additional illumination to just these verses.

This past Monday, about mid-morning, the members of the Lyra Choir from Russia arrived, which set in motion a number of preparations. They moved their concert wear into the downstairs vesting room and asked about the availability of an iron. After acquainting themselves with this worship space, their leader, Sergei Tupitsyn, and I reviewed the liturgy for the evening. It was a fairly routine conversation: where would the choir sit, where would the clergy be, how would we walk in and walk out, what prayers would be said, when would the anthems be sung. When we were finished, I escorted the group to one of the houses where they would be staying, picked up groceries for their meals, ordered food for their dinner that night, and helped an extraordinarily dedicated parishioner prepare a reception. This is life. Whether we like it or not, it requires attention to a host of relatively mundane tasks.

Just before the service, the choir gathered on the front steps as the church filled. With the ringing of the bells, we started one more service of worship here. It’s been done many times on many occasions. Each of us has been here for some of them. It was a Monday night, a school night. Students had homework. The road was thick with traffic. People were going here and there, busy about many things.

The liturgy began with two anthems: the first a subdued Gregorian chant, the second, a robust expression of unbridled praise. As I was sitting off to the side, with six strangers commanding the center of the chancel – foreigners who knew very little English and knew much less about any of us – it began to dawn on me that, beyond all the planning, the many communications sent back and forth, and all the simple expectations by which we casually frame such events, when the music started, their voices announced something greater and utterly transcendent. Six singers filled every inch of this church with song, which is distinctly the sound of our humanity. Nothing else discloses us with such clarity. Their voices rang out as if drawn from the depths of the world’s soul. The music felt that immense. And the only way we as listeners could appropriately answer their song was by offering a matching silence, equally profound, the other side of our humanity.

When they finished their anthems, no one moved, as if our stillness could prolong the moment into timelessness. In that quiet, reverence was defined – the experience of knowing that you are immersed in beauty in the exact moment it is accomplished. We had gathered to remember the horror of terror and destruction, a day all too real five years ago when everything and thousands fell to nothing. And, in return, they, who could not share the memories as we do, offered something very like the voice of God calling form from out of chaos. To which the only reply from us, collectively, was a visceral sigh, acknowledging not just talent, but such goodness that it surpasses every threat and imposition of evil. This, they sang, is life – this brilliant and amazing concoction, of persons joined in prayer and song, in remembrance and praise, stopping in time to be together, stepping out of the many mundane pursuits that so occupy us in order to realize the splendor that accompanies us as close as our own breathing… What does it profit us to gain the whole world, but lose this? What, of all we buy and build and stash away, can we give that approximates a return of equal value for the inherent grace of this specific time given and shared?

The service that night was filmed, for which I am grateful. When I watched the tape, however, the effect was not the same. It was enjoyable. The singing was impressive. The camera caught a lot that I did not see. But, in translation, the service ceased to be beautiful in the same way. It had been transformed into a report, a record of an event. It could be viewed a hundred times, examined and critiqued from the safe distance of not being caught up within the experience. What had been an engagement had become a product, and the difference was striking. For the heart of beauty is not what is staged but what is lived, what surprises us, what, although remembered, is never replicable. It is the ability to see the depth of the eternal in the faces and voices of others whose own presence is fleeting, and, because of precisely that moment, to feel immensely blessed – not with goods, but, infinitely greater, with the good.

In our culture, we are inundated with products and reproductions. Paintings are rendered en masse in posters. Concerts mean less when recordings are readily available. It is possible to be immersed in a passing flood of stimuli, increasingly at our fingertips. The remote control is a perfect symbol for our times. We are able to sit and view almost anything in the world from the safe and comfortable remove of a chair or sofa, and as soon as we tire of one perspective, we can click to another, never moving, never taxing ourselves, never revealing anything about ourselves to others. We can consume our time as mere spectators, aloof and untouched by what we see. We may find things interesting or awful, thrilling or appalling. But viewing the world from at this digital distance, the experience of deep beauty eludes us. Gaining many things, we lose our lives. When, in contrast, if we lose ourselves in the real presence of others, we may find that what they offer us is our own lives made richer in return.

When our Scriptures speak of the Sabbath and of God’s command that we honor this time, the day is not meant to be an imposition to be greeted with grumbling or complaint. Nor is it merely a time for relaxation in the form of indulgence, letting the dust of the week settle while sipping coffee or sitting at the beach. Though we tend to make it both. The Sabbath is our opportunity to experience beauty, in the glory of God and the grace of community, shaped by mercy, hope, forgiveness, and love. It’s easy to miss these things, to hear without listening, to attend without being present. The liturgy can become just the rote repetition of familiar words made hollow. We can follow the movements like lemmings that run mindlessly and unaware into the ocean. We have the capacity to make anything dull, which may be as good a definition of sin as you’ll ever find. But all our appointed liturgical actions are intended to elicit the beauty of our lives, the very beauty that is often buried by an avalanche of other preoccupations – not just the beauty of attractiveness or prettiness, but the infinite loveliness of realizing, suddenly, how entwined we are, one with another, and all before God. Honoring the Sabbath is eagerly seeking this magnificent, astonishing engagement.

After the service on Monday, Sergei ran up to me and excitedly stated that the choir had never sung better. The stunning silence of the congregation, he said, our prayerfulness, had led them to sing from the inner recesses of their hearts. More than admiration, our reverence was our gift to them.

In the same way, isn’t this what the Sabbath is all about too, offering in our lives – of our lives – a silence, formed of awe and profound gratitude, before God and with one another, such that all the rest of our work and activities are clarified and we may find that our own singing has been made more beautiful too. This devotion, I think, is something of the return we can give... for the time we are granted.

As exceptions they announce extraordinary moments

My grandmother immigrated to the United States from the Netherlands when she was a young girl. Her parents left the northern region of Friesland and settled in southern Minnesota. For the time, it was a huge move and an enormous transition. In more ways than we can imagine today, with more depth of meaning, they left an Old World behind them, in order to begin life again in a strange but promising New World. My great grandparents took almost nothing with them, no remnants of a former time: no photographs, no treasured books, no heirlooms to pass on. In their minds, everything meaningful was strictly ahead of them. They even left their language at the docks. No Dutch was spoken on the farm. It too had lost its use. English was the language of the future.

For nearly all my years growing up, my grandmother lived within our household. It never occurred to us that we were anything but Americans, pure and simple. There was never any talk about former ways or different customs or far away places. All the stories we heard were strictly Midwestern, and all our connections, whether relatives or friends, were contained within the radius of a few hundred miles. This was the entire world to us – with one exception.

For every once in a while, suddenly and surprisingly, my grandmother would utter a word in her native tongue – just a word, not a sentence, not a phrase, just a word. And she would utter it almost as if muttering, under her breath. She wouldn’t speak or declare or offer a pronouncement in Dutch. These were words that just seemed to slip out. And once out, they were never translated for us. We didn’t need translation. We somehow knew already what they meant. We could feel their sense. Just as we knew that whatever the word meant, any translation would be inadequate. We could intuit that no other word, in any language, was substitutable for what she had expressed.

This was our only and infrequent indication that there was more to our past than was generally acknowledged, and we found these moments intriguing. It was also clear to us that we had touched upon something grave or deep – something sui generis, all of its own, which was impressed on us by my grandmother’s recourse to a language that had been retired decades before. When these words arose, we learned to pay attention, because if our common vocabulary wasn’t up to the task, then the circumstances weren’t common either.

In the Gospel according to Mark there are three stories in which Jesus’ words were recorded not in Greek but in his own language, Aramaic, one instance we have heard this morning. In doing so, Mark left no clue as to why he made these choices. In any number of places, Jesus’ original tongue could have been similarly quoted. So it is logical to surmise that these three occurrences are exceptional cases and that as exceptions they announce extraordinary moments, disclosures somehow outside the ordinary sense of things. The implication may be that we should pay special attention, because something outside the usual is at stake, something grave or deep.

The most memorable of the utterances that Mark set down in Aramaic is the cry that Jesus let out at his crucifixion, when it had become brutally clear that he had been utterly abandoned. , “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani.” My God, why have you forsaken me? It’s a statement of wrenching gravity, for it thrusts before us the depths of human despair. This is precisely what we presume God would never do. Even if all else fails, God is supposed to be sure. God is supposed to save. God is supposed to smooth out all the rough edges and offer gracious consolation. So it is supposed. But Mark makes sure that in this moment the tremendous cost of being human is fully plumbed. Jesus’ exclamation holds true for all of us. This cry might be ours. It fits our mouths. It sometimes fits the stubborn realities of our world: in the streets of Baghdad, in the refugee camps of Darfur, amid the shanties of the Bateys in the Dominican Republic. It will fit the obstinate eventuality of our death. And here God surprises us with stark honesty, giving voice himself to the far edge of human life.

It is a cry that is matched, however, by a contrasting summons, made in an earlier story, in the first statement left by Mark in Jesus’ own language. Jesus comes to the home of Jairus. When he arrives there, all the household is gathered, crying because Jairus’ young daughter has died. Death seems especially cruel when it strikes children; it seems particularly immune to consolation. Yet it is in this moment of intense grief that Jesus, behind closed doors, gently says, “Talitha cumi.” “Little girl, I say to you arise.” This was Mark’s announcement of our opposite edge, delivered by God in person, in the depth of a native tongue. Jesus declared the promise that our lives are met, not lastly by death, but first and ultimately in this divine beckoning: rise up. At the far edge of our humanity, beyond the scope of our own language, beyond proof, beyond the possibility that this can become mere assumption or common belief, this is God’s word to us: arise. This is the mysterious exaltation, in which we may trust. God surprises us, by giving us ourselves, completely, both first and abidingly.

The third Aramaic quotation of Jesus lies between these other two, and it declares a freedom that lies between as well – it speaks not of the edges of life but about the freedom by which we can live in the midst of it. A man was brought to Jesus who for the entirety of his life had been both deaf and mute. Unable to hear, unable to speak, he was closed off and shut down from the world. Taking hold of him, Jesus sighed. It is a moment of compelling resignation. This too exemplifies us. We are so often like this man, trapped, stopped up. We can’t find the words that work. We often don’t know how to understand what we face. We live muddled and bound up, in a hundred different ways, small and great. But in this very moment the word of Jesus resounds, “Ephphatha:” “be opened,” he said. How dazzling this is if we truly hear it: be open. Look, speak, listen, discover and explore, don’t be afraid. It’s a magnificent imperative. This is the way to live, he said. God gives us this immense possibility. Be unstuck.

We tend to miss the magnitude of this command. We dismiss the message as blithely as we deny the miracle – an empty fable in our educated times, say the enlightened. Yet here is the strange irony – in so doing, we do not hear the actual story nor do we have words by which we can engage it. In rejection, the story renders us deaf and mute – when this need not be. From now and always, Jesus said, pay attention. Be aware. Absorb the world. Make this your habit, be ceaselessly, unabashedly, open. This is the very heart of the Christian message, this courage and this excitement.

What really counts in life? Over the course of years, in many ways both direct and indirect, my grandmother asked this question of her grandchildren. And we listened to her – she was, after all, more than seventy years ahead of us on the path. What really counts? Nothing but the present tense? Securing some vague notion of happiness, borrowed wholesale, from one moment to the next? In the words of the Prayer Book, being so immersed in things temporal and material that there is no room, no time, and no language left for things eternal and spiritual? Mark’s answer might better be framed in this way. What really counts is learning how to live as close as you can to these words: Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani – bearing the question that discloses our soul. Talitha cumi – trusting that the life that God gives is the life that God will eternally lift up. And Ephphatha, moving always toward this marvelous imperative invitation.

Be open, says God, in words that erupt from the core of his being, words so fitting that they are untranslatable. Be open all the way down to the real anguish of betrayal, all the way up to the redeeming of God. For our purpose as persons, as Christians, as the communion of the Church, is not to press upon the world a tight and constraining order, clamping down and binding up. It is rather to live in such a way that others look on us and are astounded by glimpsing a deep and uncommon heritage, an inheritance of faith that can be seen in the constancy of our compassion and the resilience of our joy. It is to act with such love that others may say with amazement as they said of Jesus, look, they do everything well; they even make the deaf to hear and the mute to speak. Ephphatha – no translation needed. It’s meaning and profundity is simply evident.

Faith, in Christian terms, isn't fundamentally about us

After beginning with a short salutation, the first Epistle of Peter proceeds with an opening statement, which, in its original Greek, is only one sentence. It’s difficult to render this grammatical form verbally, but it’s very important that all of what was written is understood to be one, single thought, contained as it is between an initial capital letter and, finally, a concluding period. Allow me to read it in full.

“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! -- By his great mercy we have been born anew to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and to an inheritance which is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who by God’s power are guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. -- In which you rejoice, though now for a little while you may have to suffer various trials, so that the genuineness of your faith, more precious than gold, which, though perishable is tested by fire, may redound to praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ. -- Without having seen him, you love him; though you do not now see him you believe in him and rejoice with unutterable and exalted joy. -- As the outcome of your faith you obtain the salvation of your souls. -- The prophets who prophesied of the grace that was to be yours searched and inquired about this salvation; they inquired what person or time was indicated by the spirit of Christ within them when predicting the sufferings of Christ and the subsequent glory. -- It was revealed to them that they were serving not themselves, but you, in the things which have now been announced to you by those who preached the Good News to you through the Holy Spirit sent from heaven, things into which angels long to look.”

Nine verses, one sentence. One thought. One single, but comprehensive proclamation. This, according to Peter, is the short version of Christianity, the first and smallest of steps in. How much of it do you remember? It’s the briefest of thumbnail sketches.

At the risk of doing some damage to its evident beauty and power, let me put this into more mundane language, something more like our own vernacular. Here is the same sentence again.

It is possible for us to give thanks to God because, by his own grace, shown in Jesus Christ, we have been afforded eternal life, which we may realize, in part, in our lives even now, just as we yearn for its full disclosure at a time that is yet to come. -- This promise does not erase the problems of the world nor does it resolve the difficulties we personally suffer. -- Faith does not protect us from trouble or guarantee us any prosperity; but it reveals how it is that love endures and goodness perseveres, through all things, even death. -- Seeing this in Jesus, in the testimony of the Scriptures, we have every reason to rejoice and to be glad in all of life, and this indomitable joy is what salvation means. -- This is not a dream or a fantasy, a wish that floats about without foundation. -- It has been a revelation slowly wrung out of the experience of generations. -- Its richness is mirrored by the costs incurred by all those who waited upon God, who looked for relief and redemption, who prayed for the advent of a Savior. -- Often, they searched in vain or looked in the wrong direction for precisely the wrong solution. -- Their missteps are our gift. -- They didn’t gain anything for themselves; they provided everything for us. -- From them, we have learned how we can say that Jesus is God’s Messiah, how, in him, all of the brokenness of history is not left strewn and scattered, but comes to fruition. -- Because of their witness, it is possible, too, for us to fold our own lives into this completeness – for God’s intentions are definite and his actions are specific. -- Having come to us as an individual within the world, we may trust that we, as individuals, are no less included within his mercy and his fervent compassion. -- This is a love of such magnificence, so marvelously extended to us, that even the angels yearn, too, for this kind of communion and intimacy.

One sentence. One beginning thought. What is striking about Peter’s sentence is its vast difference from what many take Christianity to be today. As far as I know, his simple statement doesn’t appear any T-shirts, and it certainly wouldn’t fit on a bumper sticker. It’s not reducible to a motto. Somehow, the proclamation, “My boss is a Jewish carpenter,” just doesn’t have the same impact or meaning.

For a while, the code letters WWJD were all the fashion: Christianity in an acronym – “what would Jesus do.” But, the more closely you read Peter’s text, the more it becomes clear that WWJD isn’t really an issue at all. It can’t be found anywhere, neither in Peter’s words nor, however vaguely, between the lines.

This week several stories ran about a Christian web site on which people could post anonymous but public confessions. It’s great reading for the prurient. In a coinciding interview, the founding minister explained the site by noting that confession is the first necessary step if you want to be successful in life. Wealth, he said, follows truth. But Peter didn’t say this either, neither directly nor indirectly. Nor did he suggest that along with faith comes a two stall garage and the cars to fill it, or great kids who will be accepted into the best colleges, or the house of one’s dreams, or the luck of the draw in a local poker game. In actuality, if you read his testimony a hundred times, you will still be unable to find any claim that God’s promise will make your life better materially. Faith is not a way to manipulate God into being advantageously on your side, suddenly bestowing extra benefits, no matter how many ingenious slogans are generated and slick marketing campaigns are conducted advocating exactly this. In spite of the popular talk in the American church, there is no quid pro quo in religion. God offers no prizes and grants no rewards, and faithfulness doesn’t lead to divine favors. Such talk is mercenary and grossly petty. I call it evangelical profanity, because it sullies what is holy.

If we listen closely to the text, faith, in Christian terms, isn’t fundamentally about us or about our condition or our particular circumstances. It isn’t even, primarily, about our faith. It is God who is faithful – who is faithful to us – and thus the worship of the church is rather, and far differently, our celebration of our inclusion in a love so broad that all the time of history is required to bring it to light. It is possible for us to perceive our own lives, not within the limited scope of the years we are given, but, more profoundly, as absolutely intrinsic to God’s eternal kingdom and infinite goodness. It is not (as many fervently declare) that God is for us and, therefore, must be against those others against whom we struggle. The truth that we are invited to see, with ever greater perspicuity, works in the opposite direction. It is that our lives are our participation in the glory of God, a glory that stretches from alpha to omega, that connects us, then, deeply, with all that was and all that will be, and that, as we profess each Sunday, in the fullness of time God will gather all the world together in reconciliation and wholeness.

This is all a long preface to understanding Paul’s concluding words from his letter to the Ephesians, which we have heard this morning. They make the same claim, and it is extraordinarily timely. “We are not contending against other human beings,” he stated. We are not contending against other human beings! Religion is not morality or politics writ large – especially when we are instructed to love even our enemies. The true foe is greater than any instance of evil or injustice. And here even Paul, the brilliant rhetorician, struggles for words. The battle is not with us, reduced to stupid debates about who’s in and who’s out. The battle is God’s alone, against “the powers and principalities and the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places,” against the deep shadow side of our world that beguiles us. And our calling, then, in the light of God’s own victory in Christ, is not to further divide an already fractious world with misguided attempts to determine who has been saved and who has not. Paul gives us a very different mission. It is, primarily, to stand fast, to live in the integrity of God’s assurance. “Let the shoes on your feet be the gospel of peace,” he said. In our present time, amid all the inflammatory words thrown about, aren’t these more important than all the rest: “Let the shoes on your feet be the gospel of peace!” Don’t be tempted into thinking that the fight is yours, Paul warns. The fight is already won, good news to which we are privileged to be witnesses, as people who may already live clothed in the grace that is God’s.

The drive of our world now seems to be an intensely restless desire for division and polarization, accomplished most severely in the name of religion. But this is not our message in any manner. Ours is, rather, to touch the truth of eternity within the time of our own lives, an eternity that gathers and redeems and loses nothing of all that was or is or will be. If we are to speak boldly, this is the only boldness with which we may speak.