Reading:
Mt. 16:21-27 Proper 21A
9/1/02
The Rev. Karen Siegfriedt
St. Jude the Apostle Episcopal Church, Cupertino,
CA
It was the first day of my vacation. It had been a good day. The time was approximately 9:40pm. I was driving home with my niece and her friend from an evening of rides and fun at the Santa Cruz Boardwalk. The girls were singing in the back seat having a great time. They had wanted to spend more time at the boardwalk. However, it was getting late and I wanted to be alert when navigating the freeway at night. We were on Highway 17, not too far from the 280 interchange.
All of sudden, I heard a loud bang, as if a car had hit something in the road. Ahead of me, two lanes over to the left, I saw a car swerve. I thought to myself, those cars over in that lane are going to get into an accident. Immediately, I began to pull over to the right to avoid any potential strayed vehicles. All of a sudden I saw the car spin out of control, in circles. There was a young woman in the car with what looked like a cell phone to her ear. Her car was heading in the wrong direction, coming directly at me. I began to firmly apply the brakes and pull over as far as possible into the breakdown lane. But her car kept coming at me. I remember exactly what I was feeling at the time. I was feeling anger! Here I was, a responsible driver, taking extreme care to drive defensively. I had two young girls in the back seat and our lives were about to be snuffed out. About one second before we were about to hit "head-on", I yelled out, "We are all going die." Both cars then came to a complete stop about 2 inches from each other.
I quickly checked on my passengers and then noticed that the woman was moving her car into safer ground, away from the heavy traffic. I jumped out of my car, ran to the emergency phone on the highway, and reported what was happening. Several objects that had fallen out of someone's truck were strewn on the highway. Within minutes, the entire highway 17 was closed down. I could see in the distance, a police car, scanning back and forth over the several lanes of the highway while the traffic inched behind him. The man, who had been in the car driving behind me, ran out into the highway and began to retrieve the fallen objects. The police stopped, checked on us, received a report, and then helped us get back on the highway. There were no injuries to ourselves or to our cars. We were each given another opportunity to continue life.
I had often wondered how I would react when faced with death. Would I be fearful? Would I be at peace? Would I be ready to go? While I can't speak about my death or even my dying process, I can speak to this incident that put me on the brink of death. To put it bluntly, I was very angry. I was angry that I was doing all the right things and yet I had no control over whether I would live or die. I was angry that things fall out of trucks and that people use cell phones while driving. I was angry at the capricious nature of death. A near-fatal experience like this really makes you think about your life and about your death. Jesus said: "Those who want to save their life will lose it and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life?" What I would like to talk about today is life and death. I will use the gospel as my text.
In today's gospel story, Jesus realizes that his days are numbered. He has been on a three-year journey as a prophet, healer, teacher, and messenger of the reign of God. He has preached the Good News, a news that is somewhat counter-cultural to the conventional wisdom of the day. As he gains in popularity, he begins to experience increasing opposition. He knows what is in store for a poor Jewish boy who has no money and no standing within the ecclesiastical or political establishment. So he begins to share his inevitable death with his disciples. Like most people who have difficulty coming to terms with death, especially the death of a young person, Peter doesn't want to hear Jesus talking about death. And so he rejects this bad news outright.
How Peter reacts is not too different from how many people react when their loved ones are dying. I see it all the time. Instead of allowing the dying person to express his thoughts and feelings about the death process, relatives and friends can't bear the impending loss and so they silence the dying person by saying: "Oh, you are going to be fine. Don't give up. We'll find you a medical cure. Just hang in there." Imbedded within the fear and rejection of death is the conventional belief that a good life is a long life; a life that is to be prolonged as much as possible. You can recognize this belief by many of the axioms that make up the conventional wisdom of today. Axioms like: "The longer you live the luckier you are." "The one who dies with the most toys wins." "The bigger the better." "Make sure you have the best medical insurance so that you can live a few extra months." "The more the merrier." These axioms would have us believe that more is better and that quantity is more important than quality. But Jesus say no to this kind of thinking.
When I lived in Los Gatos, I had a neighbor who was about 85 years old. She had lost her husband some 25 years earlier and since that time, she limited her life by feeling sorry for herself. She rarely went out and never reached out to those in need. One day, I was filling out one of those health forms, stating my wishes for health care if I were to end up in a vegetative state. I was clear that I wanted only hydration and pain medication; no heroic efforts. My neighbor was appalled at my decision and claimed that she wanted everything possible done in order to save her. I asked her, why? She replied that she wasn't ready to die, that there were so many things she still wanted to do. I suggested she should start doing them now!
About a year later, she became more fragile and needed some help. I arranged to get her a live-in person to help her out for a great price of $1000/month. This live-in person was a wonderful woman who had very little money. Several months later, I found out that my neighbor who had over a hundred thousand dollars in the bank and a house that was worth almost a million dollars, was paying her live-in only $400/month. I was appalled and asked my neighbor why she reneged on the agreement. She claimed that she was worried about her finances and wanted to leave her only son some money when she died. So, in order to alleviate her anxiety, she stiffed her helper. Within a year, her son died of cancer, my neighbor was carted off to a nursing home, and all of her worldly goods were taken over by a grandchild. Jesus said: "For what will it profit a person if she gains the whole world but forfeits her life?"
There is no way to recover the loss resulting from a wasted life. We were not born to struggle, to accumulate things, to experience a few pleasantries, only to be buried six feet under at the end. Life has more meaning that that. Today's gospel gives us an opportunity to think about the meaning of life. Today's gospel gives us an opportunity to live differently. Today's gospel calls us into consciousness by choosing a life that is meaningful. And what makes life meaningful? A life of radical love is what makes life meaningful. Radical love requires us to move beyond our own cravings and small circle and reach out to make a difference in the world. Radical love requires us to move from a place of comfort and convenience to a place of sacrifice. Radical love requires us to move from a place of safety to a place of risk taking. For love to grow, we have to let go of living only for ourselves. The great paradox of Christian life is- that by dying to ourselves (meaning our ego-driven, self-serving cravings) we live; by giving we receive.
Death is not a meaningless accident in our lives but rather one chapter of the human life- cycle. Each of us is going to die. Some will live to a ripe old age while others will die prematurely. I think that one of the reasons death is so frightening to people is because deep down inside there is a small still voice questioning them: Have you given it your best? Have you lived a conscious life? Did you chosen radical love as your ultimate goal? In the end, the tragedy will not be that our physical life is over, but rather that we will not have truly lived during the years we have been given. Jesus calls us to a life of quality, not quantity. For in the end, it will not matter how many years we have lived, but rather how much we have loved.
| Updated 9/14/02 |
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