"At its core, perhaps war is just another name for death," wrote Tim O'Brian in a way that it caught my sermonic eye for a weekend such as this. "And yet," he goes on, "any soldier will tell you, if he tells the truth, that proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life. After a firefight, there is always the immense pleasure of aliveness. The trees are alive. The grass, the soil--everything. All around you things are purely living, and you among them, and the [life] makes you tremble....it's odd [he concludes]: you're never more alive than when you're almost dead."Firefights have not been my lot--at least not literally. Nevertheless, I suspect there are a multitude of stories we could tell each other, you and I, which confirm this odd truth of our lives, this unavoidable paradox of our deaths: that we're never more alive than when we're almost dead. Engines that have failed us while flying through the air; cars totaled and away from which we have walked; diagnoses that have left us aware and grateful for every day given; the fear that stalks us before surgery and so chastens us in recovery; the ravages of age which make us daily to know our end; and, on this Memorial Day weekend, for some in the crowd, the firefights, after which the world teemed with aliveness.
It would seem death's impingement upon our lives has the effect of making us hold, all the more fiercely, to each day's given grace, because, as O'Brian puts it, "You recognize what's valuable. Freshly, as if for the first time, you love what's best in yourself and in the world, all that might be lost. At the hour of dusk you sit in your foxhole and look out on a wide river turning pinkish red, and at the mountains beyond, and although in the morning you must cross the river and go into the mountains and do terrible things and maybe die, even so, you feel wonder and awe at the setting of the sun."
The feeling soon fades, of course, because that generally is all there is to it: a feeling, a psychological state, which heightens our senses for a time, until time returns us to the daily round. Who can live with such intensity? That is probably why the secondary effect of death's close brush has more to do with our renewed taking of precautions: seat belts securely fastened; cholesterol banished from our diets; airline records monitored long before reservations are made; security systems beamed throughout our homes. It is as though the lesson to be learned is a lesson in control, in possession, in domination of the factors which could, if not watched diligently, do us in. A heightened sense of life's dearness in the face of life's end notwithstanding, our apparently human instinct is to circle the wagons, strengthen the fortress, step back from any near reminders of our fragility.
How could we so completely miss the point? For was it not so that before--when we had no close reason to doubt our health or our safety, our security or our longevity, when we thought ourselves to be at a distance from our deaths--was it not so that we took the sunset at face value, walked past a child's smile without a thought, tasted raspberries with a modicum of delight, wakened with scant awe before the dawn? Conversely, when we thought ourselves near death, when we were without defense, when we had control wrested from our hands and life was clearly not ours to possess...then, in utter vulnerability, did we not know ourselves as closest to the treasure that is our life? All of which leads me to ask on this Sunday, when we remember those who never made it back to the foxhole, and honor those who did: is there not something more than a feeling to be gained from life's proximity to death...a point to be made about life's essential vulnerability?
"We have this treasure in earthen vessels," writes Paul in words that turn us from our near misses to God's tender mercies. The treasure of which Paul speaks is the gospel...the earthen vessel our humanity. It is an image easily lost on us in this day, though those who have walked the hills of ancient Palestine with shards of first century pottery beneath their feet know how fragile a thing Paul had in mind. He tells us, in the first place, that we were created and constituted in vulnerability: earthen vessels easily shattered we are, every one. That is how God intended us.
But vulnerable not just within our selves or for our own sakes, says Paul: rather he says we are called into vulnerability for the sake of the gospel we have been given. In a sense, we who would follow Jesus Christ--follow this God who chose the vulnerability of a manger from the security of highest heaven...and who, for our poor sakes, became vulnerable unto death, even death on a cross--we who would follow Him are called to live where life and death do battle daily, where without the gospel, death would seem to have dominion.
That place is not easily discerned. Suffice it to say--in our homes, our offices, our neighborhoods, our community--we discern that place only as another dares enter in and draws fire, or dares do battle with the dragons of darkness, or dares the gospel's truth in the face of a lie. Usually these are the places wherein one's own life or livelihood or reputation or future is forgotten in the face of another's need or right or honor or existence. Dramatic examples are too much with us these days: a teacher shielding the bodies of her students or a peer wrestling guns from a classmate's hand with no thought of self or safety.
Though there are the quieter tales lost to the headlines. I think of the story told by Annie Lamott about an eight-year-old boy who was informed that, without a transfusion, his younger sister would die: "His parents explained to him that his blood was probably compatible with hers, and if so, he could be the blood donor. They asked him if they could test his blood. He said sure. So they did and it was a good match. Then they asked if he would give his sister a pint of blood, that it could be her only chance of living. He said he would have to think about it overnight.
"The next day he went to his parents and said he was willing to donate the blood. So they took him to the hospital where he was put on a gurney beside his six-year-old sister. Both of them were hooked up to IVs. A nurse withdrew a pint of blood from the boy, which was then put into the girl's IV. The boy lay on his gurney in silence while the blood dripped into this sister, until the doctor came over to see how he was doing. Then the boy opened his eyes and asked, 'How soon until I start to die?'"
We who would follow Jesus are called into vulnerability for the sake of the other: to live where life and death do battle daily. Such vulnerability constitutes our aliveness, in O'Brian's words; such vulnerability proclaims the gospel's truth, as in losing our lives, we find our selves. Hence, "we are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed." It sounds like life in the midst of a firefight! It is!
But it is more. For the purpose of our vulnerability, of these earthen vessels sent into the fray, according to Paul, is that God's power be revealed in the very places where evidence would deem God powerless: earthen vessels, we are to show that the transcendent power belongs to God and not to us. How we do that, again, is not easily discerned, save I believe, as we live, moment by moment, aware of the One on whom we must depend for everything. "One of the most important and radical of religious perceptions," said Santayana, comes upon us when the human spirit perceives that "though it is living, it is powerless to live; that though it may die, it is powerless to die; and that altogether, at every instant and in every particular, it is in the hands of some alien and inscrutable power."
Alien and inscrutable, that is, until Christ came. For though he was afflicted as we are, perplexed, persecuted, struck down... moment by moment, we listen as he beseeches his Heavenly Father in weakness for strength, in darkness for wisdom, in fear for the will to will God's will, revealing God's power and not his own, receiving God's strength for the asking. "We do not possess strength or righteousness or knowledge," wrote theologian Arthur McGill a few months before he died. "We constantly receive them and expend them." Ours was meant to be a life of daily receiving and daily giving...a life lived in full awareness of our utter reliance on God's grace...a life knee deep in needs and thus kneeling before Him who alone answers our prayers, as crouched in our foxhole, trembling, we pray.
To live not only in vulnerability, but in such dependence upon God [God does not send us out there alone!] is to emerge from the firefight neither crushed nor driven to despair nor finally forsaken nor destroyed. Rather it is to bear witness, by way of such dependence, to Him who strengthens you. Emptied of most everything we had counted as our strength--afflicted, perplexed, persecuted, struck down--broken but given to trust that our strength is in God alone, we receive our life back and transformed, more proximate and precious than when we thought we possessed it. Earthen vessels...vulnerable and dependent... why?: "to show that the transcendent power belongs to God and not to us."
You could say in fact, though we live otherwise, we are the Israelites in the desert. No storing up. No putting away. No guarantees that what was given yesterday will be usable again today. We are the soldiers in battle. In the morning we must cross the river and go into the mountains and do terrible things and maybe die...even so, we feel awe and wonder at the setting of the sun. Having nothing to lose, we can risk all. Having Christ to gain, we can bear all. Having God to strengthen, we may ask all. Such a life is, as McGill put it, "an endless discovery of new forms and new levels of need...of endless opportunities for new dimensions of beseeching."
Though finally it is the case that our vulnerability and our dependence constitute life's fullness because they place us, again and again, in the way of grace: in the place where we receive this life we do not deserve anew each day from Christ, that we may lay it down again and again for love's sake. Our proximity to life, my friends, has everything to do with our proximity to Him. Though strangely not now to his life, but to his death. Paul knew, in the midst of the firefight which had become his life, that it was no longer his own death which faced him and forced him to his knees, but it was the death of Christ which gave him the power to live.
You and I finally cannot bear the nearness of our own deaths, nor can we accept our vulnerability, nor can we acknowledge our dependence, save as we carry in us the death of Him who made death to have no dominion. He has borne what we cannot bear; he has suffered what we cannot endure. In Him we know that it is not our deaths that bring us close to our life--neither the firefight nor the plane falling from the sky nor the near miss on the highway nor the reprieve from the doctor's knife--but it is God, who to us has become vulnerable in Jesus Christ and who, by His death, has bid us live with grateful abandon.
Then it will surely follow, as those who carry Christ's death in us, he will carry us without fear of dispossession, vulnerable and dependent on grace alone, to every place of human need, to every condition of human existence, to every valley where death would have dominion, to every heart where life has ceased to amaze.
"Divinity," writes Annie Dillard, "is not playful. The universe was not made in jest, but in solemn incomprehensible earnest. By a power that is unfathomably sacred and holy and fleet. There is nothing to be done about it, but ignore it, or see. And then you walk fearlessly, eating what you must, growing wherever you can, like the monk on the road who knows precisely how vulnerable he is, who takes no comfort among death-forgetting men, and who carries a vision of vastness and might around in his tunic like a live coal which neither burns nor warms him, but with which he will not part."
So we carry in our bodies the death of Jesus, that the life of Jesus may also be made manifest. Thanks be to God.