Trinity Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)

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Sermons

April 2003 (click here to return to "April 2003 Sermons" page)

5th Sunday in Lent (April 6, 2003)

“Choosing Death?” Dr. Julie Adkins

Text: (Jeremiah 31:31-34)

SERMON

In order to have eternal life,

one must die.

Well, that just sounds like a flat-out contradiction, doesn’t it?!

Like saying,

if you want to get out of debt,

you need to start spending more money.

Like saying,

if you want to lose weight,

you must eat and eat all the time.

I wish.

It just doesn’t make sense.

Why would Jesus say something crazy like that?

I mean,

for even longer than we’ve been trying to turn lead into gold,

humankind has tried to find the secret of immortality,

hopefully with eternal youth thrown in as part of the bargain.

History tells us of explorers

seeking the fountain of youth.

Literature has created the “Picture of Dorian Gray”

in which the face in the portrait grows older and older,

while the man himself stays young.

And the possibilities intrigue us.

For centuries, human beings have tried all sorts of creative methods –

magic potions, drugs, machines,

the occult, anything,

why, even prayer sometimes,

to keep ourselves and our loved ones from growing older,

and from the inevitable end of this life.

And Jesus comes along,

and says to us that the way to everlasting life is death?

That’s crazy!

Death is the very enemy we’re trying so hard to avoid!

And so, we ignore Jesus, in this case, anyway,

and hope he will go away, or see things more sensibly,

and we keep trying, somehow,

to figure out a way to save our own life.

And I don’t think it’s so much that

we’re afraid of death,

though that enters into it …

we simply don’t want to leave this life.

We’re mostly quite comfortable here.

Of course, we’re not happy 100% of the time,

but then, nobody else is, either!

All in all,

things are pretty good on this earth where God put us.

And so, when most of us wish for, or dream about,

immortality, or everlasting life,

we mean life as we know it right now.

Maybe with the problems worked out of it, to be sure …

but what we want is this life,

with the people we know and love,

in the places we know and love.

It isn’t perfect by any stretch of the imagination,

but it’s what we know,

and have learned to cope with,

and would rather stay with.

I think it’s a safe bet that most of us,

given a choice right now between this life as we know it,

and death, with God’s promises of what lies beyond,

most of us would choose this here life.

Something which is known to us, and familiar,

nearly always seems preferable

to something unknown, or unfamiliar,

or never-before-experienced.

So most of us choose to stay as we are –

and that’s true whether we’re talking about

a choice between life and death,

or something on a much smaller scale.

One of God’s greatest gifts to us

is the freedom to choose,

or free will, if you want to call it that.

But paradoxically,

this great gift is also one of the things

that most gets in the way of our relationship with God.

And it has been so ever since those first humans

chose to eat that fruit which had been forbidden them.

God makes it very easy for us

to say no to God.

And so, very often, that’s exactly what we do.

We choose in favor of what is familiar and comfortable and already here,

rather than what has been promised,

but isn’t clear, and isn’t yet visible,

and is, therefore, very scary.

A real obvious example of this –

that to some of us will seem extreme,

but to others of us won’t at all –

is the kind of addictive behaviors that people get stuck in.

There are so many kinds of things

that people can and do become addicted to …

drugs and alcohol are the obvious ones that come to mind,

but there’s also money, food, sex, power …

Now we know,

people don’t wake up one morning and think,

hmmm, there’s not enough excitement in my life,

I think I’ll go out and get addicted to something.

We understand that it comes about gradually.

But even so, we often still wonder,

how a person who seemed so sensible

could become addicted,

and not see it happening until it’s too late,

and not be willing to do anything about it.

I suspect it has to do with the same fear of the unknown.

An addiction usually becomes physically draining and often painful,

emotionally damaging, financially ruinous,

sometimes even life-threatening,

and yet, to the addict,

the addictive behavior is still oddly preferable to the alternative.

Better to wake up hung over each morning

than to face the day without a drink …

Better to go to bed with a stranger

than to sleep alone …

Better to go max out the credit card yet again

than to face the emptiness we feel if we don’t …

An addiction, even though it’s painful,

is familiar.

Somehow, at least when it began,

it helped the person to cope with life.

And what the addict realizes,

and most of the rest of us don’t,

is that in order to kick the addiction,

you must die to it.

You cannot give it up painlessly,

a little bit at a time.

Alcoholics are not healed by

giving up one more drink each week

until they’ve completely stopped.

Most smokers can’t quit

by cutting back a few at a time.

Compulsive eaters aren’t cured that way either.

You have to stop, cold turkey,

no more, the end.

Obviously in the case of food, you can’t quit eating,

but you must quit buying and eating all those things you binged on.

You have to die

to that which has kept you going up till now.

That’s frightening to think about.

It takes so much commitment to stay with it,

and so much trust,

that what comes after that death

is somehow, eventually, going to be better.

That’s one reason Alcoholics Anonymous is so successful …

it provides support for a difficult decision,

and it offers living proof that there is life, good life,

beyond that first death of giving up the bottle.

But back to most of us,

who aren’t particularly addicted to anything.

We too are fearful of the unknown.

We may have dealt with it in different ways,

but the fear is the same.

And when Jesus says we must die in order to have life,

we don’t much like the sound of that!

He uses a pretty good example,

especially for the mainly agrarian society he lived in:

about how a grain of wheat must fall into the earth and die

before it can bear fruit.

That’s very true, so far as it goes.

But if a grain of wheat had a choice in the matter –

you have to wonder if it would choose

to give up its own life

so that new life could arise.

That is the dilemma and the choice that we face.

But when it comes to talking about

people, and not grains of wheat,

we’re not always talking about a literal, physical death.

That’s certainly a fearful issue for many of us,

but there is another death we must face first.

And in this respect,

we are perhaps more like our addicted brothers and sisters

than we would care to admit.

There are certain aspects of our lives

to which we must die.

And in a way,

it’s harder for us than for the addicted person,

because it’s not as easy to see why

the things we do, or think, or say,

are so harmful.

It’s easy to recognize

how illegal drugs harm a person …

it’s not so easy to see

how greed, or competitiveness, harm us.

In fact, over the short haul

they seem to benefit us!

Nevertheless, we must die to certain things

in order to truly live.

You could say that we have to die to sin,

and that is certainly true,
but it is also said so often

that it’s kind of lost its punch.

Maybe a better way to say it is that

we have to die to self.

To give up putting first

our own interests, our own concerns,

our needs, our wants, our life.

That’s devilishly hard,

because at some level we are genuinely afraid that

if we don’t look out for ourselves,

no one will.

After all, everyone else is too busy

looking after their own interests, right?!

This sounds like a good way to get stomped!

And that might be true,

except that it leaves out

the most crucial element of the whole equation:

God.

We die to self because God says it is necessary,

not because we dreamt it up on our own.

And when God asks us to do something,

God makes sure that, if we are faithful,

God is faithful.

God can be trusted,

even in the midst of the unknown.

Especially in the midst of the unknown.

Now I realize,

that probably every one of us who has lived long enough,

has been surprised by God at some time or another.

God does promise to care for us,

but not necessarily in the way

that we think it ought to be done!

If and when we die to self,

things won’t necessarily become easy,

just as when an addict does to his or her addiction,

life doesn’t suddenly have all its problems solved.

The only think

that will ever persuade us to die to self

is not the promise of eternal life,

though that’s a helpful incentive …

it’s the promise that God can be trusted.

We do have the power to choose against God …

that’s always an option open to us.

But when we use our power to choose for God,

then God’s power becomes available to us.

If we can suspend our fears just long enough

to say yes to God,

and to the future that God has in mind for us,

even though it is unknown and so far unfamiliar,

we are assured, as Jesus says,

that we will bear fruit,

that we will have eternal life,.

and that God will honor us.

God is for us,

none can be against us,

not even death,

not anything at all.

Let us choose death,

and so live as God intends for us to live.

Amen.