A Cause Worth Dying For Is a Cause Worth Living For

A reading from the Gospel according to John.

Chapter fifteen, beginning at verse twenty-six.

But when the helper comes whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of Truth, who pro who proceeds from the Father, he will bear witness about me, and you also will bear witness, because you have been with me from the beginning.

I have said all these things to you to keep you from falling away.

They will put you out of the synagogues.

Indeed, the hour is coming when whoever kills you will think he is offering service to God, and they will do these things because they have not known the Father nor me.

But I have said these things to you, that when their hour comes you may remember that I told them to you.

I did not say these things to you from the beginning, because I was with you.

The Gospel of the Lord.

Grace and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

Amen.

When I was a teenager, I remember visiting Washington, D.C.

and being deeply moved by the rhetoric of sacrifice that one encounters there.

I'm talking about the kind of phrases that adorn war memorials and that say things like, all gave some, some gave all, or freedom is not free.

I think I understand now why those landed so powerfully then.

Because a young man is searching for something bigger than himself.

He's looking for something that he can give himself to, and in so doing, give meaning and value and purpose to his life.

He has an instinctual sense that a cause worth dying for must also be a cause that's worth living for.

Now, this is not exclusively the domain of young men.

All of us are made by God for more than the vain emptiness of looking out for number one.

All of us are drawn to find something bigger, something that will call us up and out of the narrow boundaries of our small lives.

We're all in that sense dying for a cause, for if we can't find something like that to give our lives to, or if the cause that we pledge ourselves to is not sufficient, not sturdy enough, then we wind up languishing in life.

Feeling like we're just going through the motions, wondering if all the tedium and busyness of our day-to-day is really going to amount to anything more than a hill of beans.

And judging by the number of times you hear someone saying, Man, I'm just exhausted, or talking about burnout, it seems to me that the causes that we are pledging ourselves to are proving to be insufficient.

They are letting us down.

We need something bigger and sturdier.

And perhaps that's one of the reasons why it seems that Christianity is having a moment now.

Or all who are baptized have this.

They have something that is big enough that they can give themselves to it and not exhaust it.

Something that is sturdy enough that it will hold them up.

Something that is firm enough that they can hold on to it with convictions that they will not cheaply let go.

Something that is powerful enough to make it worth dying for.

And a cause that's worth dying for.

Well, that's a cause that's also worth living for.

So in today's gospel, when Jesus speaks of this, when he speaks of that hour that is coming, when they will put you out of synagogues, that hour, that time, that day that is coming when you will face the end of a sword and be given the choice between your confession to Christ and your life.

My ears perk up.

Jesus indicates that we have reason to pledge everything, even our very lives, to Him and to the sake of His name.

And in today's gospel, he summarizes what this is that we are giving ourselves to, this great cause, in simple shorthand, that sounds like this you also will bear witness about me.

Now, when I say that phrase, I worry because I think that we have been conditioned like Pavlov's dogs to hear the word witness and instantly to think that that must mean that we're going to have to go canvas neighborhoods and cold call on strangers.

And so in your introverted heart of hearts, some alarm bell starts ringing when you hear that word witness, and you start thinking, you know what, if that's what I'm supposed to have to do, count me out.

The fact of the matter is that if that's what we think about witness, it is mostly due to the fact that there was this kind of evangelism craze that swept across America in maybe the 70s and the 80s and the 90s.

And so I want to set your introverted heart at ease and tell you that this word witness is much broader than that.

In fact, to Jesus, when he turns to the disciples and says this, he says, You will bear witness about me.

He says they will do this because they are with him.

And that clues us into what this really means: that when Jesus calls us to be his witnesses, we can understand that is the call to follow him, to be with Jesus, to live our lives, because by virtue of the lives that we lead in Christ, we will bear witness to him.

That's what he's talking about.

And yes, there will be moments when you are called on to use your lips and voice to speak the wonders of what God has done for you, but but we don't need to think that there is some imponderable burden upon us to conjure up this conversation every time we wind up in proximity with a stranger.

We could think about it much more simply than that.

Any parent that takes a child on their lap and reads a Bible story to them is bearing witness about Jesus with their voice, and even the most introverted among us would surely not be put out of our comfort zones by something like that.

Jesus calls us to bear witness to him, and I want you to see that this is as plain and straightforward as living your Christian life, as belonging to the church, as holding on to the faith and not letting go.

That's what Jesus is talking about.

But if I make it sound like that is no small matter, or no, no, it's just a simple matter, no big deal, I wouldn't want you to get the wrong impression.

After all, Jesus does say that there will be moments and times when this, when following him, living the Christian life will put you at odds with the world around you.

And we could hardly expect it to be any other way.

After all, we are well aware of the fact that our Christian convictions, our beliefs, our morals, are not at all in line with this world around us.

You can't expect to follow Christ and never find some point of conflict with the world.

It's just not the way that it works.

But again, maybe this is a place where we mistake what it means to bear witness about Jesus.

Because if we leave the evangelism craze of the 70s, eighties, and 90s behind and we get into the age of the internet, we can find a whole host of people who have come to the conclusion that bearing witness about Christ means furiously typing on a keyboard, adding your own snark to the comments.

And you can do this very easily.

It will not take much work.

All you need is suitable snark and a thread to comment on, and you can draw on yourself the ridicule and scorn of others.

But I would caution you before you pat yourself on the back for getting persecuted for the sake of Christ, to ask yourself whether this is really the best way to bear witness about Jesus.

Does it make sense to push back against road rage by raging against the guy who's losing his mind behind the wheel?

You're playing on their territory, aren't you?

And our witness to Christ has to run deeper than just the surface issues, the flashpoints that flare up in a culture war.

For beneath those superficial issues, there always runs the deeper scandal, the deeper offense, the offense of the cross.

This is true in our day, and it was true in Jesus' day as well.

You think about one of those superficial issues, one of the places where there were arguments about Sabbath keeping, for example.

Understand that beneath the surface, the argument wasn't merely about what you could or could not do on a given day of the week.

Jesus, with his teaching, was threatening the entire system that made it seem as if you could earn God's favor by your good behavior.

His idea of Sabbath is God's idea of Sabbath.

It's a day of rest.

In other words, a day when people cease their works so that they can simply receive by faith the gifts that Christ gives from the cross of life and salvation and forgiveness in Him.

That was the real rub, the real point of conflict.

And so if you and I are going to follow after Jesus, then our lives are going to conform to the shape of the cross, and that is what is going to put us out of tilt with the world.

And indeed, in our day, it is still an offense, this message of the cross that teaches us not to run from our limitations, but to accept them, to confess our weaknesses, our sinfulness, and even our inability to get ourselves out of this predicament and plight.

The message of the cross is still this offense that says, Before God you come completely empty-handed as a beggar.

And he acts and he gives all his gifts in Christ to you freely by grace for you simply to receive in faith.

Likewise, the cross is this offense to our notions that power and fame are things to be sought out for.

The cross proclaims God's triumph through weakness.

It demonstrates how God chooses and exalts the lowly and the despised.

It turns everything in that way upside down.

And maybe for us, especially today, the cross is that reminder to us that we do not live for ourselves alone.

But that Christ calls us to turn our lives inside out.

So that we live by faith in God and through love in our neighbor.

And that we do so without keeping some sort of careful ledger about how much time we're giving to others and how much we're holding on to for ourselves.

Since that is a path that lands us in misery.

And it is that daily dying to self that then gives value and meaning to even the most mundane and ordinary tasks in our lives.

It doesn't seem very glamorous, I know, to go through a regular day in any one of our lives, where you get up in the morning and you fix breakfast for your family, and then you wash the dishes, and then you rush off to do an honest day's work at your job, and on the way home you stop to visit with an aging parent and you mow a neighbor's lawn because they're not able to mow it for themselves anymore, and then you fall into bed exhausted at the end of the day.

That can seem like a tiresome rat race over and over again.

But one whose life has been called to follow after Christ realizes that such a day is a day that is entirely given over.

To dying to self, to living for the other, to bringing this witness of Christ into this world in the incarnate acts of our ordinary daily routine.

In fact, you could think about that dying to self as the way that the Christian visits the gym.

It's our daily exercise regimen.

Because look, martyrs aren't made overnight.

You don't go from being kind of lukewarm to being willing to give your life just like that.

Don't you think that those who are called by God to give that ultimate sacrifice were prepared for it because they had already been dying to self day after day, month after month, year after year, so that when that moment finally came, and when God called them to give up their bodily life, it was really just more of what they had already been doing.

Living to God, living outside of themselves, getting swept up in the great cause of the Christian church that follows after Christ and bears witness to him.

Now, I certainly hope that none of us here in our day will ever be put in that circumstance where we have to choose between being faithful to a confession of Christ and losing our life.

But I know this, I know that there are within this congregation great reserves of faith that are as yet untested, but should a time of testing come, would undoubtedly rise to the occasion and bear that kind of glorious and heroic witness to Christ that at times is what God calls us to.

And I know that because I see the lives that are led here.

I see the witness to Jesus in those simple daily tasks.

I see it in the fathers who lead their families to Christ, who get them up and out the door early on a Sunday morning and get them here to church.

I see it in the men who have learned that a man's strength is given to him in order to use it to serve others.

And so they put themselves out there to love and serve and help those around them.

I see it in the faithful women who come here and are attentive to those who are hurting and suffering in our congregation, who pray for them and who then become the answer to their own prayers by embodying love and sending a card or making a meal or reaching out with a cup of coffee and a hug.

I see it in those who work long hours on the job and then without complaining come here afterwards to volunteer, to patch the woodpecker hole that's back over the front door of our church once again, and to do such things without complaining, without counting the hours that are past, but because they love the Lord's house and love the gathering of God's people here.

I see it in those who invite their friends to come and see, say, hey, come to church with me, who sit down in the pew and welcome the stranger and the guest, who say, Here, we've found a home because here our Savior meets us as we gather together as the body of Christ.

I see it in those people who just keep coming week after week to lift holy hands in prayer.

And of course, I'm just brushing the surface here.

But anywhere that there is that kind of death to self, that Christian attentiveness to the other, that self-sacrifice, self-giving, those acts of love, you can count on it.

There is the witness to Jesus being carried out.

There is the place where the world sees Christ, the risen one, in all of his glory, now filling this earth by his body, us, the church, so that we might call more and more to him.

You know, I remember being moved by that rhetoric that I encountered in Washington, D.C.

It's my prayer that the boys and girls who are here today, the young men and the young women, would likewise be stirred by the call of Christ.

That Jesus has called us to something that's so much bigger than ourselves, and that he will never let us down, that we can give our lives to him, and at the end of our lives we'll never regret it.

They can be laid down, laid out, and so bear witness to Jesus.

Because we know that Christ is the Lord who is worth dying for.

And if Christ is worth dying for, well then you know He's also worth living for.