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.