Kept
2 Timothy 4:6-8, 16-18
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It used to be thought that humans were the only animals that knew about death. Research of non-human animals suggests that some mammals recognize and respond to the death of one in their community- a group of chimpanzees, for instance, who were observed caring for an elderly female who was dying and then avoiding the place where she died. But humans may be the only animals that have the capacity for self-reflection that gives them an understanding that they themselves will die. At our most honest we don’t just recognize and grieve over the death of one of our own, we know that one day we too will die. Of course, we’ll do just about anything to avoid having to think about that. We’ll go to great lengths and considerable expense to forestall our inevitable demise as long as possible. And one of the sad commentaries on religious faith is how frequently it is neglected until a person is facing death and fearful of what comes next, how the most pressing religious question that people seem to have is where they will go when they die. Whole theological systems have been developed over a question that rarely, if ever, comes up in scripture. Even here in this letter to another leader in the church we hear the voice of Paul as he approaches death focusing less on what comes after, and more on what it means to live a life of faith. From the sound of it, following in the Way of Jesus, trusting in the love of God that makes us wholly ourselves is more about the life we live before death, than whatever life comes after.
And for Paul, such a life is framed by some very specific images. First, he talks about his life being poured out as a libation. This is not the language of a college house party where libations flow freely. Rather, it is the language of worship, and more specifically the language of sacrifice. The ancient worship practices that form Paul’s worldview are centered around the altar at which the people offered their sacrifices. They would offer whole burnt offerings of animals- bulls and sheep, even birds and the like. Unsurprisingly, the key element of such offerings was the blood of those animals, their life source. This is why blood sacrifice language is so heavily used by writers in the early church, Jesus’ death is viewed through the nearest lens of worship that they had. But it wasn’t just animals that were offered on the altar. Grain from the harvest would also be placed there. This is the gift that Cain offered, that was deemed lesser than Abel’s offering of livestock and which led to all kinds of trouble. Finally, you have the offering of oil, or wine- libations- poured out on the altar of sacrifice. Sometimes the sacrifice was offered as an appeasement, sometimes it was offered in gratitude. But the idea was always the same. Sacrifice starts with the recognition that everything that we have, whatever we have, regardless of our own contribution, originates with God, from whom, as our sung Doxology every week puts it, “all blessings flow.” At its best, sacrifice is the spiritual discipline of taking something of value- a cow, a lamb, grain, wine, oil- and offering it up to God in recognition of God’s goodness. So, what Paul is getting at is this notion that his life, our lives, are lived at their best when they too are poured out before God as a form of worship and sacrifice. To do so is to acknowledge our lives are not our own. That’s the answer to the first question of the Reformed catechism that came out of Heidelberg, Germany. What is your only comfort? That I am not my own. When we trust that to be true, then we begin to live not for ourselves, but in service to something larger. Not out of obligation or guilt, but out of gratitude for the gift of a life that is far from self-made, but is given to us by God.
Of course, it’s easy for that to get twisted into some kind of transactional economy. That’s some of what was happening in the Temple of Jesus’ day that got him so worked up. Not everybody had an animal, or grain, or wine to offer. So, they could buy those commodities in the courtyard in order to have something for the priest to offer on their behalf. What was meant to be a personal act of worship and acknowledgement of God’s abundant goodness got turned into a side hustle that became a full-fledged commercial enterprise. Fast forward fifteen hundred years. Martin Luther and others recognized the abuse of power taking place in the church. Forgiveness was being sold for a price. Pay the priest to say a mass on your behalf to work off an afterlife sentence to purgatory that your sins might have earned for you. Just as simple as this for that. The church had cornered the market on forgiveness. If you wanted what they had to offer, you had to play by their rules, give them what you want. It was a successful business model, just look at the beautiful medieval cathedrals financed by it. What the reformers recognized was how far such a practice was from what was supposed to be good news.
What makes the good news so good is that Jesus subverts every transactional instinct that we have, every human inclination that suggests life is only what we make it, that God’s favor must somehow be earned, that what we get from God is dependent on what we give to God. One of the things that we are saved from by Jesus is having to worry about being good enough to get in on an afterlife, because that really isn’t what any of this is supposed to be about in the first place. There is no good enough. The sacrifice of Jesus on that cross is meant to be the end of the kinds of sacrifice we think we have to make in order to satisfy some notion that God is mad at us.
Maybe the good fight that Paul fought is the one with himself, the one that each of us have with our own feelings of inadequacy, our own sense of guilt at the things that we wish we hadn’t done, or the things we think we should have done. What the reformers tried to recover is the sense that salvation is as near as our willingness to trust God’s generous offer of forgiveness that frees us from such self-destructive cycles. Those cycles might build cathedrals, but at the cost of bankrupting our souls. Notice that he says nothing about winning this good fight. We don’t win the fight. We can’t win that fight. If we could, we wouldn’t need Jesus. Likewise, it isn’t about winning the race, it’s about finishing, about seeing it through to its completion. The fight, the race, they’re already won. If our habit is to fight to prove our own worth, that fight’s been won. Our worth has been established by the sacrifice God made for us on the unholy altar of a Roman cross. If our habit is to race for glory, that race is won by God whose glory is demonstrated in the selfless love of Christ. What makes the fight good is not having to fight it for ourselves, but joining Jesus in fighting for the worth and dignity of all. The race we have to finish is the one we run in our love and support for others. The product of our trust in these things isn’t some afterlife upgrade, but the establishment of God’s power and purpose on earth as in heaven. It is the appearance of what God has made right in Jesus by subverting every economy that would have us trade our lives for the promise of something later, and instead gives us our lives- our full, eternal lives- here and now, to be poured out in love and gratitude.
And here’s the thing. When we do that. When we make faith the active trust given to God’s promise that we are indeed enough, made good in God’s own image, instead of some passive waiting game for something else. When we know ourselves to be set free from every expectation that something is owed for what we have, and instead live freely out of a desire to contribute our own valuable gifts to the world. When we do that, death cannot touch us, because we know to whom we belong- in life and in death.