Dear friends in Christ at Peace and Grue,
The climax of the Christian story is the death and resurrection of Jesus. The center of the Christian life is the belief that we die and rise with him. In preaching and practice the Christian faith proclaims a cataclysmic breach in the ages: our former lives passing away; but new life, the very life of God recreating us as we are baptized into Jesus’ death and resurrection. The language of life and death is crucial to the Christian faith, (see John 12:24, Romans 6:1-11, Galatians 2:19-20) yet this idea with its store of images and concepts do not shape our thinking and living. We are listening to cosmic news but only hear more pedestrian religious views. We settle for these pedestrian religious views because they are less threatening to individuals who wish to be masters of their lives. I would rather hear Christianity enriches my life than that my life is dying and must pass away in order to be renewed.
Relationship language is less threatening because it pertains to something secondary to who we really are. Relationships are a matter of the individual’s own choosing. The creature can decide whether or not to enter into a relationship with its Creator, which means that the Christian faith must meet the individual’s religious criteria (the real authority) before it is accepted. We might guard against this in other ways, but the language of life and death most decisively keeps this at bay. For life is given to me, death happens to me, and nothing that I am escapes or determines the redemption God works in me. “We know our gospel is true,” Luther wrote, “because it takes us outside ourselves…We conclude, therefore, that a Christian lives not in himself, but in Christ and in his neighbor. Otherwise he is not a Christian. He lives in Christ through faith, and in his neighbor through love. By faith he is caught up beyond himself into God. By love he descends beneath himself into his neighbor.”
Because we do not accept death as part of life, we strive to preserve our lives a little longer by leading lives of consumption hemmed in by excessive demands for security and health. In this way we take from the lives of others (present and future) in order to keep our own. These are natural consequences of sin, but God rejuvenates the lives of those who expend themselves for others. It is as though God says to us through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus: “Do not fear living for others. As you provide for others so I will provide for you. You are drawing from an eternal life which is yours in Christ, so be generous with life. Even though your life is passing into death (in part because of the work and burdens I place upon you), I promise that you are heirs to all that is mine.”
Now this is our hope (for God cannot be put to the test) and “hope that is seen is not hope.” As death is part of life, so we can see that dying is part of living. The world rejects that and as a result its living is really dying. Christian life accepts it, and believes that living is expending life for others, clinging to the promise that our lives are God’s instruments to preserve and recreate life and even enter into God’s own life through Jesus who gave up his life for the world. This is the message of Lent, which starts on Ash Wednesday (February 22) in which we are reminded that “you are dust and to dust you shall return”, and culminates during Holy Week (April 2-8), before the great festival of Easter (April 9) in which we celebrate the Resurrection..
In Christ,
Pastor Dan