The Second Sunday in Lent

"Putting our Lives in the Lost and Found: Self-abandon and Salvation"

The Rev. David Frazelle

“Whoever would save his life will lose it; and whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it.” – Mark 8:35

In today’s gospel reading, Jesus gives us a paradox that lies at the heart of the Christian mystery. “Whoever would save his life will lose it; and whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it.” How can it be true that someone who tries to save his life loses it, and that someone who loses his life for Jesus’ sake will save it?
Perhaps the easiest way to enter this paradox is to recall a simple experience in your own life that might reveal the truth of saving your life by losing it. I wonder if you can remember the first time you made something for your mother or your father. Your parents had spent years taking care of you and your life. And then someday a kindergarten teacher or some other adult gives you the resources to make some gift for your parent. It might have been a valentine cut out of construction paper, or a less-than-symmetrical glazed mug, or an attempt at clay sculpture, or a very, very abstract piece of art. Whatever the gift, it was the first time you can remember freely giving anything to your parents. Do you remember a swelling pride that rose in your chest as you presented your family member with this first masterpiece? Do you remember how alive that gift made you feel. Do you remember finding a new part of yourself, by giving part of yourself away?

Now these feelings do not seem to make sense. You had nothing to gain materially by this gift. The giving served no interest of your own. But this gift to the life of another made you feel alive in an ecstatic new way.

If you cannot recall such an experience, perhaps you remember another experience in childhood or adulthood wherein you discovered new life by giving the gift of your presence or your creativity or your help. Perhaps you can remember a time in a relationship with God or another person when you found yourself by giving yourself to another.
These experiences of giving our lives to another give us a glimpse of the gospel paradox that Jesus names: “Whoever would save his life will lose it; and whoever loses his life for my sake and the for the sake of the gospel will save it.” A Jewish philosopher named Levinas elaborated on this paradox by saying that, ironically, we are most ourselves when we are giving ourselves away, that we are most alive when we are spending our lives away to another. The gift of self is the essence of self. “Whoever would save his life will lose it; and whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it.”

Well, if we accept that this paradox is true, if we accept that we can find our lives by giving them away, then how do we go about doing something about it? How do we move forward with the gift of our lives to God? We cannot simply wake up one morning and say, “I give up myself for Lent,” and be done with it. And we know that it is not helpful to lose our lives by ignoring our own needs. This lack of caring for oneself leads to no longer having a self to give away to God. So how do we find our life by losing it for God’s sake?

In Lent, the Church’s Tradition asks us to look in two different directions for ways to abandon ourselves more freely and more fully. The first place to look is in what we are doing already. Can the things we do be done as a gift to God. Can what we already do be done for the sake of Jesus and of the gospel?

To take a common example, marriage and family life form the core of how many of us give our lives away. If we are giving a great deal to our households and the people in them, can that gift of self be more fully integrated into our spiritual lives of responsiveness to God? We are so close to the people in our homes that it can be easy to miss this spiritual reality: Christ is present in them, so whenever we serve them, and whenever we suffer with them through hard times, we are serving the suffering Christ in them.

To choose another common example, what about our work? For those of us who work outside the home, what about the enormous amounts of time and energy we spend to earn our daily bread? Can this expense also be a gift to God? Whenever we listen for the work to which God is calling us, we are giving ourselves to God and finding our lives. Whenever we find our recover our passion, whenever we discover the work or people or cause for which we are willing to suffer, we place ourselves at God’s disposal.

To pick a final example of what we are doing already, what about this very worship service, in which we offer ourselves for God’s good use? We open ourselves to God’s Word in Scripture. We respond to God with a statement of faith and with prayers. And then we move beyond words and strengthen our bond with God by taking the presence of Christ into ourselves at communion. When we show up for church, we allow God to train us to give our lives back to God.

In all of these examples – family, work, and church - part of the Lenten spiritual dynamic is to step back from them, examine the motivations underneath them, and pray for the grace to do what we already do more and more for the love of God.

God also asks us, however, to look in one other direction for how we might find our lives by giving them away; and Lent is the Church’s most privileged time for doing that searching. This second direction is found in extending traditional spiritual practices, such as those we just named, one step beyond our comfort zone. For example, we might be adept at serving or hosting family or friends, but are we comfortable serving or eating with a homeless person? Are we afraid of even seeing a homeless person? Or in prayer, we might have memorized the Eucharistic service, but are we scared of other kinds of prayer? Are we afraid of spontaneous prayer, or silent prayer? Discomforts and fears like these can be clues to how God might be calling us to stretch and grow. When we answer those calls and widen our spiritual practices a bit, God frees us from our fears and fills the newly cleaned-out spaces in our souls with love and life.

Jesus is always asking his disciples to take the next step in giving themselves away for the sake of the gospel. What piece of your life needs to be offered to God? What is your next step? What is mine? As a parish, what is our next step? These Lenten questions can feel scary, but we face them with a hope that is the heart of the Christian Faith. We face them with a hope that is the foundation of our baptisms. It is the hope of our participation in the Paschal mystery of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. “If any man would come after me,” Jesus said, “let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it; and whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it.”