Come Di(n)e With Me

We work to make our churches attractive and welcoming.  We consider ease of parking and temperature and logos and the volume of our music.  We sometimes forget that what we are asking people to is signing up for their own death.  We try to make it kind of appealing.  And comfortable.  “Come and die” is quite a challenge to market. 

In Luke 14, we get a rather sobering description of the cost of discipleship.  Jesus is pretty gutsy.  He’s asking for it all.  “Set aside everything else that is important to you.  It all has to take the lower places now.”  And He doesn’t even apologize.  He doesn’t have to, because He’s living it out Himself, now doing ONLY what He sees the Father doing.

It occurs to me that the idea of giving something up for Lent is rather ironic.  If I had already been living fully for Him, taking stock of my life regularly as I really do try to do, there wouldn’t be anything left to “sacrifice” for Lent.  But this year, food intake, my tongue, and lack of exercise have all still made the cut.   That sounds rather petty compared to what He modeled, and yet, apparently, these other things have taken an improper place in my life.  He asks me to die and let Him determine what happens from there.  It is what He did (with what we would call a good ending) for Abraham with a ram, for Daniel in a lion’s lair, and for Jesus in a tomb.

Of course, there aren’t guarantees. For John the Baptist, Peter, and Paul, it didn’t go so well.  Neither was it a certainty as Daniel’s three friends were being bound and dragged to the fiery furnace centuries earlier, but they were willing to believe no matter the outcome.  What they all knew, as did the Christians in the middle east who have recently been beheaded, and do those who are still being pursued, is that following Jesus is worth the cost. 

Whether immediate death or not, the story doesn’t end in a tomb for anyone who trusts Him.  There IS the feast and the life after death and, for some, the opportunity of continuing on earth to help others find the way and be healed. That is the astonishing Good News we are the stewards of.  Our death, if our lives have been offered to Jesus, is there for His use and joy.  Our death is never the last word.  He, the Alpha and Omega, is. 

Churches are excellent at putting together bountiful tables for our traditional pot luck dinners, and we do have a reason to celebrate the life we are a part of.  Let’s just remember, especially in this time of such intense realities for our brothers and sisters in other parts of the world, that we are called to follow, to carry our cross.