Fifteenth Pentecost, Proper 17, 2005:

Reaching the end of a job interview, the Human Resources Director of a Fortune 500 company asked a young engineer fresh out of Virginia Tech, “And what are you expecting for a starting salary?”

The young man said, “In the neighborhood of $125,000 a year, depending on the benefits package.”

The interviewer said, “Well, what would you say to a package of 5 weeks paid vacation, 14 paid holidays, full medical and dental, a company matching retirement fund of 50% of your salary, and a company car leased every 2 years, say a red Corvette?”

The young engineer sat straight up and said, “Wow!  Are you kidding?”

And the interviewer said, “Yeah, but you started it!”

No reason not to aim high, I suppose.  That young man may have student loans to pay off.  He wanted to live the good life from the first paycheck on.  I would pray that he learn life’s greatest lessons without too much pain or hurt.

One of those valuable lessons is found in the Gospel for today.  The one called Jesus the Christ gave a recipe for living in a world where everything is of value, where there is peace in the soul, joy in the heart, and life is lived on tiptoes.

Matthew records Jesus as saying, first, that the person who strives to always play it safe ends up losing.  Matthew was writing his version of the Good News primarily to Jewish converts sometime between 75 to 90 A.D.  Those were some of the bitterest, most severe days of persecution.  He was telling his readers that the time may well come when a person could save their life by abandoning their faith, but if one did that, far from saving one’s life, in the very deepest sense of the word one would be losing life.  The person who is faithful may die but they die to live.  The person who abandons their faith for safety may live, but they live to die.

In our own day it is not likely we will face martyrdom, but the fact remains that if we meet life in a constant search for safety, security, ease, and comfort; if every decision is taken from a worldly-wise, cool, calculated point of view, we are losing all that makes life worthwhile.  Life for many has become a soft and flabby thing, when it might be an adventure.  Life for many has become a selfish thing, when it might be radiant with service to others.  Life for many has become an earthbound grind, when it might have reached for the stars.  C.S. Lewis said that he believed in Christianity just as surely as he believed in the sunrise; not because he could see it, but because by it he could see everything else.  It remains profoundly true that the person who uses the standards of the world to design, live, and judge life have ceased to be what they were created to be, for we have been created in the image of God.

The second ingredient for spirit-filled living is to remember that the person who risks all and maybe looks like they have lost all are the ones who find genuine life.  It can be observed over and over in history that it has always been the adventurous souls, not worrying what the world might say about them, who have written their names on the collective conscious of generations and made the great contributions to the wellbeing of society and the advancement of God’s Kingdom on earth.

Without great risks many medical advances would not have been made.  Without personal risks none of us would have been born; childbirth is not for sissies.  It is the person who is prepared to bet that there is indeed a God who loves, protects, and forgives who end up finding abundant life in this world and eternal life in the next one.  It is a sound theological doctrine that we were not created to live safe lives but glorious ones.

The third ingredient for spirit-filled living is to heed the warning Jesus issues in today’s Gospel.  Suppose we play it safe.  Suppose every decision is made on the basis of what we can get out of it.  Suppose a person gains the whole world and Donald Trump becomes their apprentice.  Then suppose the day comes when they find that kind of life is not worth living?  What can that person give to buy back their life again?

The grim truth is that nothing can buy back that life.  In every decision of life we are doing something to ourselves.  We are making ourselves into a certain kind of person.  We are building up a certain type of character.  We are being shaped and molded by the things we give ourselves to as first priority.  We are making ourselves able to do certain things and unable to do others.  It is perfectly possible, in a free enterprise, capitalistic society for a person to gain all the things on which there heart is set and then awaken one morning to find they have missed the most important things of all.  In the twenty-eighth year of ordained ministry I have yet to sit by the bedside of someone as they prepare to pass from time to eternity and hear them say, “I wish I had spent more time at the office.”

So, what does it all mean?  We owe all that we are, all that we have, and all that we may become to Jesus the Christ.  There is nothing that a person can give to Jesus the Christ in place of his or her life.  Oh, it is possible to try and give our money to the work of Christ in the world and withhold investing ourselves.  It is still more possible to give lip-service to the work of advancing the Kingdom and withhold our hearts.  But, we do so at our peril. 

The only possible gift to Christ is our whole life.  When Jesus called Peter to follow him he also got Peter’s fishing boat.  Probably not much to look at by worldly standards, but that boat served as the pulpit from which Jesus preached one of his first sermons, one that resulted in adding many more disciples.  That fishing boat also served as the means of escape when the religious authorities wanted to kill him.  Had Peter withheld that boat, church history might well have told a different story.  When you or I withhold something that is not really ours to begin with, church history will record a different story, as well.

He gets it all.  Once we understand that we begin to see our calling to follow Jesus the Christ into a life of service.  We make a commitment to make some progress every day in doing the Lord’s work.  We make a commitment to make some progress every day in serving others in the Lord’s name.  We make some progress every day in liberating our souls and the souls of others who are imprisoned by hate and prejudices.  We make a commitment to make some progress every day in enlarging our own hearts and the hearts of others who are obsessed with the acquisition of money and things.  We make some progress every day in seeing our own lives and the lives of all our brothers and sisters everywhere as belonging to Jesus the Christ, precisely because he bought them back from eternal damnation and estrangement. 

We should never make the fatal mistake of thinking God in Christ will accept anything less than everything about us.  Amen.