Readings

At about the same time that Abraham and Sarah were in Canaan, there lived in Egypt a bureaucrat named Sinuhe. Through circumstances not of his choosing he ended up spending time in Canaan. Eventually he got back to Egypt; here’s a section from his memoirs describing that happy return:

I was placed in the house of a Royal Son. There was noble equipment in it, a bathroom and painted devices of the horizon; costly things of the Treasury were in it. Garments of Royal stuff were in every chamber, unguent and the fine oil of the King and of the courtiers whom he loves; and every serving-man made busy with his task. Years were caused to pass away from my flesh, I was shaved and my hair was combed. A burden was given over to the desert, and clothing to the Sandfarers. And I was clad in soft linen, and anointed with fine oil; by night I lay upon a bed. I gave up the sand to them that dwell therein, and oil of wood to him who smears himself with it.

It’s an unexpected window on what must have been Abraham’s experience, moving from the urban comforts of Ur and Haran to the frontier area west of the Jordan River. He had moved there in response to God’s command and promise of land, posterity, and blessing. He arrived; he waited, and waited, and waited. Months turned into years, years into decades, and still he owned no land, and had no children.

I wonder what advice we would have given Abraham. I wonder what advice I would have given Abraham. At what point do you throw in your cards and walk away? We remember Abraham and hope to be counted among his true sons and daughters because he didn’t walk away. He was still there when God Almighty showed up after his 99^th birthday, confirmed the earlier promises by a formal covenant (treaty), and announced that within a year Abraham and Sarah would be changing diapers.

Abraham would have understood Jesus’ words: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” What else do you call leaving Ur & Haran for the outback, and staying for decades supported by nothing more than a promise?

“For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.” What was true of Abraham was true of Jesus as well. Abraham left Mesopotamia; Jesus left heaven. As that ancient hymn puts it:

who, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be exploited,
but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death—
even death on a cross.

Jesus does not ask of us anything he’s not already asked of himself.

“If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.” The Ash Wednesday service invited us to self-examination and repentance, prayer, fasting, and self-denial, and here we are.

“Follow me.” Also today folk sometimes experience Jesus calling them pretty directly to far-off places: Ur to Haran to Canaan. Usually, it’s a matter of doing the best one can to let Jesus’ life flow in ours in the midst of our responsibilities, to offer up lives whose faithfulness will give God joy.

It’s easy to hear Jesus’ words as unreasonable demand: deny oneself…lose one’s life. How might we think about that?

For starters, Jesus’ words echo a truth we’ve already met in other areas of life: any serious project requires self-denial. If I want to learn a musical instrument, or a sport, or a craft, I have to set aside time, time that I may want to spend doing something else. Or take a more serious project: becoming a parent or a spouse. Here we start out by signing a pile of blank checks. And then the checks begin to come in, some small, some large.

Our culture, of course, does not help us much here. Daily we’re told that the highest good is our individual self-fulfillment, and that our duty to self-fulfillment trumps any other commitments we’ve made along the way.

When we turn to Jesus, the temptation is very strong to understand the Christian way as another means of self-fulfillment. Fortunately, we have 20 Centuries’ worth of experience to remind us of why this is a bad idea. In pre-Reformation England, for example, it was necessary to set a limit on the size of the bishop’s entourage —cooks, falconers, hunting dogs, etc— during Episcopal visitations. At the popular level, a great deal of the energy that fueled the 16^th Century reformations was anger over this sort of clerical abuse of position.

Not that we have to wear bishops’ purple to participate. As disciples, we naturally try to save our lives. Here each of us face our own challenges. I, for instance, can be very jealous of what I call “my time,” so part of parenting involved the repeated challenge to be generous with time. Again, there have been times when I’ve found myself in a desert, and the temptation has been very strong to throw in the cards and walk away. Lent is a time to reflect on these particular challenges, and again ask for God’s grace to respond to them.

Now, a warning. There has been a strong tradition in our culture that values men’s selves more than women’s selves. Women are supposed to deny themselves to serve men; men are supposed to assert themselves. Jesus’ words are horribly misunderstood if they’re heard as supporting that tradition. In the Bible’s vision both men and women bear God’s image, both are called to be stewards of the world’s resources. Jesus has no interest in asking us to deny a self we have not yet learned to value.

To return to our theme, from the perspective of God’s project, Jesus’ words are absolutely necessary because the alternative —discipleship as self-aggrandizement— is so damaging to the Church, so damaging to our common life.

Follow me. Responding to that call may mean long stretches in the wilderness; it will mean a continual struggle against co-opting that call into another means of self-defined self-fulfillment. Friday mornings we pray “grant that we, walking in the way of the cross, may find it none other than the way of life and peace” and in quite unexpected ways God responds.

But there is a deeper logic to Jesus’ words than simply avoiding the Kingdom’s getting co-opted. We assume that we know who we are. So of course we’re in a perfect position to chart the path to our own fulfillment. “Captain of my ship, master of my soul.”

But spouses and parents know that as they give themselves to these roles they enter a voyage of self-discovery. Even more so the way of discipleship: in the process of following Jesus I discover who I am.

In an old Hassidic story, a rabbi receives a vision of the Gate of Heaven with many people outside. A voice of great beauty is calling out names, and people are entering the gate. But there are more names than people entering, so the rabbi asks an angel standing nearby, “Where are the people whose names are called and aren’t entering?” “They are here” —replied the angel— “but they do not know their own names. Only when they learn their own names will they be able to recognize them when they are called.”

As we continue to respond to Jesus’ call, we continue to learn who we are, we get better—God willing—at recognizing our own names.