I am the life
Christ Church, 11th April 2001
I came across
these childrens’ exam answers:
The future of
"I give" is "I take."
The parts of speech are lungs and air.
A census taker is man who goes from
house to house increasing the
population.
Water is composed of two gins. Oxygin and hydrogin. Oxygin is pure
gin. Hydrogin is gin and water.
A virgin forest is a forest where the hand of man has never set
foot.
The general direction of the Alps is straight up.
The four seasons are salt, pepper, mustard and vinegar.
Oliver Cromwell had a large red nose, but under it were
deeply religious feelings.
A person should take a bath once in the summer, not so often in the
winter.
These are answers to test questions accumulated by music teachers:
Agnus Dei was a woman composer famous for her church music.
Refrain means don't do it. A refrain in music is the part you better
not try to sing.
Handel was half German, half Italian, and half English. He was
rather large.
Beethoven wrote music even though he was deaf. He was so deaf he
wrote loud music. He took long walks in the forest even when
everyone was calling him. I guess he could not hear so good.
Beethoven expired in 1827 and later died from this.
Henry Purcell is a well known composer few people have ever heard of.
Aaron Copland is one of your most famous contemporary composers. It
is unusual to be contemporary. Most composers do not live until they
are dead.
When
did you or by start living? This is the
most important question I believe God asks us.
Of course, this can mean different things. When Jesus said “I am the life” we hear him talking both about
his role in the gift of physical life, and resurrection life which we will
think about on Sunday, but most fundamentally Holy Week asks us to consider
what it means to be alive, truly alive.
Someone has said the glory of God is a human being fully alive. From the moment we are born, God creates us
not just to exist, to twiddle our thumbs in a cosmic experiment, but to be
fully alive. It's a question of
quality, of purpose. I talked a few
weeks back of how Dostoevsky's experience of a false execution made life
suddenly seem to blaze with reality.
Jesus said his followers would be the ones who knew life in all its
fullness, with this kind of intensity.
But the question is: how do we experience that life?
It's
certainly a difficult task for our world.
There are few who seem to know what it is to be truly alive. A man called George Carlin wrote this
recently:
The paradox of our time in history is that we have taller
buildings, but shorter tempers; wider freeways, but narrower
viewpoints. We spend more, but have less; we buy more, but
enjoy it less. We have bigger houses
and smaller families;
more conveniences, but less time; we have more degrees, but
less sense; more knowledge, but less judgement; more experts,
but more problems; more medicine, but less wellness.
We drink too much, smoke too much, spend too recklessly,
laugh too little, drive too fast, get too angry too quickly,
stay up too late, get up too tired, read too seldom, watch
TV too much, and pray too seldom.
We've been all the way to the moon and back, but have
trouble crossing the street to meet the new neighbour. We've
conquered outer space, but not inner space.
We've done larger things, but not better things. We've
cleaned up the air, but polluted the soul. We've split the
atom, but not our prejudice. We write more, but learn
less. We plan more, but accomplish less. We've learned to
rush, but not to wait. We build more
computers to hold more
information to produce more copies than ever, but have less
communication.
These are the times of fast foods and slow digestion; tall
men, and short character; steep profits, and shallow
relationships. These are the times of
world peace, but
domestic warfare; more leisure, but less fun; more kinds of
food, but less nutrition. These are days of two incomes, but
more divorce; of fancier houses, but broken homes. These are
days of quick trips, disposable diapers, throwaway morality,
one-night stands, overweight bodies, and pills that do
everything from cheer to quiet, to kill.
We
have multiplied our possessions, but reduced our values.
We talk too much, love too seldom, and hate too often. We've
learned how to make a living, but not a life; we've added
years to life, not life to our years.
It is
easy to bemoan the state of life around us.
But we can’t afford to get stuck there, because Jesus, who said “I am
the life”, is alive today and offers us life in all its fullness. How will we find it?
Now I don't know if any of you were hippies in the Sixties, but at that time it was common for people to go and try and find themselves by going around various countries, doing nothing and usually partaking of illegal substances. The problem was that most of them probably discovered that if we are looking for life within ourselves then we end up being like onions. If you continue to peel an onion and take off the layers in order to discover its life, you'll find that there is actually nothing inside it. And as people we are like that. We aren't made alive by our own resources or what is inside us. What gives us life is not what we are but what we are committed to. The cliche goes it's not who you are, but whose you are that counts. Martin Luther King said something which has always struck me veery powerfully: "Someone who has nothing they would die for, has nothing to live for." Ultimately it's what we place at the top of our list, or what we bow down to that gives us life, that creates what we become. And John tells us that to have life is this, "This is eternal life, that they might know you, the only true God and Jesus Christ whom you have sent."
To be
fully alive is to know Jesus Christ. If
we are committed to him, as he is to us, then we have a chance of escaping the
false life which so much of our world offers.
If we have something we are willing to lay our lives down for, then we
have something to live for. It's not
easy, but it's the way, the truth, and the life. When Jesus said “I am the life”, he was issuing us a fantastic
invitation, but he was also telling us that we won't find life anywhere else.
What
do we therefore need to do to be fully alive?
A man wrote this to his niece at the beginning of the last century,
"I want to prepare you, to organise you for life, for illness, crisis, and
death... Live all you can-as complete
and full a life as you can find-do as much as you can for others. Read, work, enjoy-love and help as many
souls-do all this.” That’s all good
stuff. But then he adds this: “Yes-but
remember: be alone, be remote, be away from the world, be desolate. Then you will be near God!" To do what we can to be near God is the
gateway.
“I am
the life” says Jesus. “It's a life I
offer you beginning now and stretching into eternity. You don't need to look anywhere else.” This Easter, let’s accept the invitation to become fully alive,
and let’s place our lives and love in the task of drawing near to the only one
who can offer us life.