Resurrection Letter No.9

                                                                                                                                                                                    

Dear Good Shepherd and friends,

I've been thinking about our lives. 

I often think in song lyrics. What I mean is that I have and still do listen to enough music that often song lyrics become my language or point of connection for thinking. That and the Bible. Sometimes song lyrics can have greater influence. But anyway, I digress.

There's a lyric by a rock band named Guardian that I sometimes think of. The song is titled, "Are We Feeling Comfortable Yet?" The lyric goes: 

         "Pondering death is a dirty biz. Makes you wonder when your appointment is.
         Shift to the left, shift to the right,
         fidget, lock knees, cough, cough, fidget, don't scratch,
         don't break down in sweat, are we feeling comfortable yet?"

The song lyric captures the uncomfortability many people might feel when we honestly face up to the reality of our death. We get fidgety. We get uncomfortable. We want to dodge the subject. We'd just rather go about our business and seek some idea of happiness. The song intentionally forces uncomfortability.

Some people have said that unless you face with the reality of your death, you won't face your life well. 

I agree.   

There's a song from the musical "Rent" called "Seasons of Love." The main line in the song goes: 

         "Five hundred twenty five thousand, six hundred minutes; 

         Five hundred twenty five thousand moments so dear;
         Five hundred twenty five thousand, six hundred minutes;
         How do you measure, measure a year?"

525, 600. That's the minutes we're allotted in a year's time. Do the math, and you can calculate about how much time you have in minutes for a certain amount of years. 

There's another way I like to look at things. I like to think of things in terms of Saturdays. I'm in my 45th year of life. Let's say I live to 70. There are 52 Saturdays in one year. That means I have roughly 1,300 Saturdays left. 

That's not a big number. I should use them wisely.

 

How many Saturdays do you have left? Are we feeling comfortable yet?

_________________________________________

So, here's my statement for living my days wisely in the face of my (and your) end: In my time on this earth, I refuse to accept the world's terms for living life.

Consider the language of the money market in our culture. The principle is to invest money in the things that will yield the greatest return. 

If we are made for more than this one life, and if this life is, like Jesus says, more than "what we will eat, what we will drink, what we will wear," than you'd think that the best investment of our lives would be to invest proportionally. 

Let's put it this way: if when we die we take nothing of what we worked for or accumulated -- nothing -- then it makes little sense to invest so much of ourselves and our lives in such things as if this is what ultimately matters. 

Or, if when we die all of our allegiances, groups, tribes, all of our attempts to distinguish ourselves from others and all of our systems of evaluation that we use to judge others -- if in the next life there are no such things, no Americans, no conservative or liberal, no this small town vs. that small town, no rich, no poor, no smarter, no more athletic or less athletic, then why are we spending so much of our time building our lives according to these categories, investing in what will yield absolutely no return in what actually matters?

The things we invest our time, our energies, and much of our lives in are often remarkably short-sighted. Not only that, but who sets the terms for judging and evaluating quality of life? I've wondered this a lot in my years since I've been out of school. Who decided who the cool kids were and who were not part of the cool or popular group? Whose rules make those arbitrary decisions?

And even after school, we're told that when you're an adult you grow up and move past those things. But, let's be honest, adults don't. Sometimes these flimsy ways of living get more entrenched. And by osmosis, we pass these ways of living on to our children. The cycle never stops.

The real problem is this: we generally live our lives according to those arbitrary decisions, those made-up rules and systems of setting one group apart from another, of evaluating ourselves and others.

I refuse to accept those terms of living.

Our behaviors often follow where our investments are. Jesus said it a little differently: "Where your treasure is, there your heart is also" (Matthew 6:21). 

If we're concerned with making money and making an impression on others that we have the "good life," trying to impress those around us with our accomplishments, chasing after the things our particular culture sells us, busying ourselves with work, or setting ourselves apart from others according to some arbitrary value system, then this is where our behaviors will be patterned. And we'll treat certain people with more or less favor based on how they measure up to our standards of what's important. And we'll pass this on to our kids and those around us, just by osmosis. We don't have to teach it; they learn it by living it.

_________________________________________

The message of the gospel of Jesus Christ is not a nice, feel-good message about getting to heaven when we die. It's supposed to turn our world upside-down, precisely because in our humanity we have it backwards. God isn't content with us having things backwards. He loves us too much.

I like how Jesus puts it in the parable of the farmer who built a barn in Luke 12:13-21. The farmer was spending all of his energies building his fortune: more product, a bigger barn, a life of luxury. Then he died and all of his stuff became someone else's junk. What good was it in the end? What did he gain? What was the return from his investment? Nothing.

Or I think of how the Apostle Paul questions the "wisdom" of this world in 1 Corinthians. According to the world's "wisdom" certain people with certain credentials and qualifications have higher status than others. Paul calls foul. Not only that, but he scoffs at this way of thinking. He calls it "foolishness." He says that the wisdom of the world actually blinds humanity to knowing God. 

Christianity is not "Jesus + our cultural values = the good life." The gospel is "Jesus blows up everything we think." 

If you're not uncomfortable, you don't get Jesus. That's what the gospel is all about, really. Pulling the cultural and social value systems we stand on out from under us, because everything human is dead, going nowhere. We all know it.

Just as in raising Jesus from the dead, God rejected the terms of death as the only realistic option, so also in his life Jesus rejects the terms of living set by the world as the only viable option for living. And then he says, "Follow me." This is the best life, this is resurrection living.

I want to use my 1,300 Saturdays wisely. Which means I reject the terms of living set by our human short-sightedness and our cultural frameworks. I want to align with Jesus. Period. I don't do it perfectly, but I want it to be the thing I pursue, the investment that gives the greatest return. And I want my kids to reject them, too. I want my children to see above and beyond, to see life and live it for what matters. I want this for my church, I want to challenge you and your family to do the same.

So, what's the alternative, you ask? Read the gospels, take Jesus seriously. Jesus says it best: love your neighbor as yourself. Invest in that. Take as much time investing in time spent with your spouse, your kids, your friends, and, yes, even your enemies. Learn to love them. It matters more than our work, our accomplishments, our games and our toys. In doing this we truly live. 

In defiant hope,

Pastor Kyle