Meg Peery McLaughlin
Life Worth Living: Finding your Life
January 5, 2025
John 12: 20-26
Prayer of Illumination
We are looking for life, O God.
Your word is a lamp unto our feet
And a light unto our path.
Speak, we are listening. Amen.
20 Now among those who went up to worship at the festival were some Greeks.21 They came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, and said to him, “Sir, we wish to see Jesus.” 22 Philip went and told Andrew, then Andrew and Philip went and told Jesus. 23 Jesus answered them, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. 24 Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain, but if it dies it bears much fruit. 25 Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. 26 Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also. Whoever serves me, the Father will honor.
This is the Word of the Lord.
Thanks be to God.
I need some help to get this sermon started,
especially from the children, or those whose childhood is . . . in more recent memory.
If you give a mouse a cookie,
(he’s going to ask for a glass of milk).
The classic book by Laura Numeroff,
illustrated by Felicia Bond shares the adventure of a mouse
who once he gets his milk, then asks for a straw,
then a napkin, then a mirror to make sure he doesn’t have a milk mustache.
It all ends with the mouse becoming thirsty,
and asking for a glass of milk.
And, of course, chances are if a mouse asks for a glass of milk,
he’s going to want a. . . .(cookie to go with it).
There is something circular about this time.
The end of one year, the beginning of another.
If you give a human a new year,
she’s going to make a resolution.
And if she makes a resolution,
it will probably be about having a good life.
But, what does living a good life mean?
What does living a good life look like?
Researchers say only 9% of Americans will keep their New Years’ Resolutions,
though some say it’s only 6%.
And year after year, the top two resolutions for living a good life
are saving money and exercising more.
Which makes you wonder if wealth and health are what make us truly happy.
Yale theologian Miroslav Volf started exploring this question
because of a story about his father,
who found a life worth living
even though he was not healthy, nor wealthy, nor happy at all.
Volf’s father, at 18 years old, just after WW2, in then communist Yugoslavia,
was forced on a death march for a month and a half,
marching 30 miles a day on 200 calories.
The ones who survived were then imprisoned.
Volf says his dad was in hell, experiencing hell around him, and hell inside him.
And yet Volf says his father found joy in hell.
A fellow prisoner, a little bit of a weird guy – tall, his limbs going in every direction, and yet possessed of some kind of inner beauty,
kept talking to his father about the love of God.
Volf said it was somehow an affirmation that there is a primacy to goodness,
A primacy to love over whatever hatred was boiling in his dad’s soul
in reaction to all that hellish hurt, and his father relented
to the idea that God is love, even there, even then.
Volf now teaches a class at Yale called A Life Worth Living
where he asks what makes up a good life—
and spoiler alert if you read the book—it’s not health and wealth,
no offense to your resolutions.
This January here at UPC we wanted to turn to scripture to ask that question.
What does it mean to be alive? What makes a life worth living?
Seems like a good way to begin the year.
Every one of the four gospels has some version of Jesus speaking about finding your life. Mark’s Jesus says:
Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.
John’s Jesus, as Eugene Peterson translates him, says:
Anyone who holds on to life just as it is destroys that life.
But if you let it go, reckless in your love, you’ll have it forever, real and eternal.
Jesus speaks these words in chapter 12, when some Greeks show up to see him.
And I almost feel bad for those curious Greeks,
for we know what Jesus is about to say about
falling and dying and losing and letting go.
I want to intercept them and ask:
Are you really sure you want to see Jesus? Really see him.
Because, once you do, you can’t unsee it.
And what Jesus says about living may make you want to bail, trust me.
Because, did you hear him? Falling, dying, losing, letting go.
We just got the baby Jesus born for crying out loud.
Can’t we just hold him, preacher? While he’s cute and cuddly.
But that’s the thing about Christmas—
when we celebrate that Jesus is born,
it means he has a life
a real life
and when Jesus asks us to follow him and live like he does
we cannot leave out the fullness of that living,
which includes dying,
and includes living with the knowledge that death is part of the deal of being alive.
Over break I had made the unfortunate parenting decision to watch an old movie with the family. I’m hesitant to admit this to you, because I care about what you think,
but I have a strange love for the 1998 sci-fi film Armageddon.
(I don’t blame you if you are now judging me for this terrible taste.)
Watching movies with Caroline is challenging because she is always asking questions.
To her credit Armageddon is an intense movie,
and I’d given her a bit of an overview,
that a giant asteroid was threatening to hit the earth
and these drill guys had to go up into space to break it in half to save humankind.
But as Caroline started to get connected to the characters,
She’d ask: Does he die?
Next character graces the screen:
Does she die?
Over and over, Oh, no, does he die? Who dies?
Eventually, she wore me down,
and so I told everyone about halfway through the movie,
exactly who was going to die.
I actually thought it might help, knowing ahead of time, you know to prepare.
But I was woefully wrong.
When, ___ dies, let’s just say a main character dies,
Caroline crawled in her dad’s lap and just wept and wept and wept.
The next morning she came down the stairs and the first thing she said was:
I cannot believe you like that movie, mama.
I can’t believe you like it.
But you do, don’t you, church?
Not the movie, of course, you have much better taste.
But you like life, don’t you?
Even knowing what you know about how fragile it is
how achingly precious it is for you, for those you love most?
It’s the best life, actually, is it not?
One where you are awake enough to falling and losing and dying and letting go
that you really truly live?
As one scholar wrote, when the time comes,
you can live small or you can live large–
you can hang onto the grain you have or you can gamble it all for love.
It’s no mistake that Jesus statement on how to live
comes just after one of his followers pours everything out for love.
It was almost the Passover and the plot to kill Jesus has been hatched,
And Mary is at dinner with Jesus and she takes out costly perfume
and empties every single drop onto Jesus feet.
Looks like a waste, all of it falling to the dusty floor.
But in that moment she finds a life worth living—
a life of love, love received and love poured out.
Remember, church, how Jesus said:
Those who love their life lose it,
and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.
Whoever serves me must follow me.
If you give a human a life,
it’s going to mean that it will eventually end.
And if it ends one day
the human will want to live it in such a way
that honors the preciousness of that gift.
And if he lives in that way
he may not always be healthy
she may not always be wealthy
But when they let it all go for love
then, they’ll really have a life.