This past week, as you may know, I had the chance to return again to the Baptist Theological Seminary of Richmond in that city and attend that school’s annual preaching conference.  Every now and then it’s helpful to go and listen to some folks who know how to do it really well and there are some helpful seminars available (which I actually attended).  Not least significant to me is the fact that I had the opportunity of worshipping this week on several occasions in which someone else had to sweat the details.  But, because that seminary is located in Richmond, I also got to take in more than just a little history. 

Richmond is rich in history itself but it is also strategically located at the geographical heart of some of the most formative events in American history.  Nancy and the boys were able to be with me for part of the trip.  Whether Griffin and Cameron have now had the privilege of being exposed to places they might have otherwise only read about or had more history crammed down their throats in four days than any Nintendo-oriented brain should be asked to handle depends on who you ask.  We did Richmond on Friday a week ago, Washington, D.C. on Saturday, Petersburg on Sunday and Jamestown and Yorktown on Monday.  But, I wanted my sons to actually see and touch and walk in places where others had lived and died so that, today, they are free to play Nintendo, worship in the church of their choice and someday, perhaps, actually go to the college of their choice, choose their own course of study and then, having the freedom to work and choose where they wish, make their own creative contribution to culture and history.  This past week was a short course in the cost of that freedom. 

Now, I like to take my sons to places like that because, any time we can close the distance between ourselves and the history that brought us here, we benefit.  If we keep too great a distance between the freedoms we experience and a personal understanding of what that freedom cost we are starting down the road to that place where it is impossible to use that freedom properly.  This past week, for example, was only the twenty-fifth anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War.  Though that’s not long ago in the dimension time measures, in terms of national memory, it’s in danger of becoming lost by the next generation.  Two-thirds of American students ages twelve to seventeen have never been taught about the war.  And, fully one-third of those same students can’t even find Vietnam on a map.  (David Hackworth, “The Point Man,” Modern Maturity, May-June, 2000)  Some of you who have already been to the Holy Land tell me that it brings the Bible to life in ways just reading it never can.  Bethlehem, Gethsemane, the cross and the tomb all seem more personal to you now that you’ve closed the distance between those places and your own personal experience. 

So, I wanted to actually let my boys step into that sixty by twenty-five foot Chapel called St. John’s Church on Richmond’s east side.  I wanted them to actually see the very pew into which Patrick Henry slumped in 1775 after his extemporaneous and treasonous speech in which he had pleaded with his fellow countrymen to join him in seeking independence from England.  The very one that ended with the words, “give me liberty or give me death,” that actually ended up igniting the American Revolution. 

Words said less than fifty miles from a little place called Jamestown where, just one hundred sixty eight years before, his forefathers and ours established the first permanent English settlement on American soil.  A place itself just about thirty miles from another nondescript seaside community called Yorktown where, in 1781, the British finally surrendered their armies to the American and French forces in an act that finalized what started at Jamestown, what Patrick Henry called for and that for which thousands upon multiplied thousands have paid since then with their very lives to sustain, our freedom.

When I look back on this week, I think that is what struck me most of all. Aside from the colorful details, it was the dimensions.  It’s just not that far from Jamestown to Richmond or from Yorktown to Jamestown.  You can drive the whole distance in less time than it takes to drive from the east side of Dallas to the west side of Ft. Worth.  When our forefathers were marking out the dimensions of freedom for which they were willing to die the line over which they dared their enemies to step was often drawn, quite literally, in their own backyards.  It just wasn’t that far from where the fight they started got finished.  It was a much simpler task for them, than for most of us, to measure the distance between the life they sought for those they loved and the death they would have to die in order to obtain it. 

And, that is what is troubling Jesus in the scripture we have read this morning.  The dimensions are closing in on him.  Though it was never far from Bethlehem to Golgotha, from birth to death for Jesus geographically, the dimensions of time, space and purpose have now triangulated in on him.  “The hour has come,” Jesus said.  “This is now the time and place for me to die so that you may live,” he was saying.  He could now measure the distance between the life he wanted for us and the death it would personally cost him not in miles but in yards and not in years but hours.  It was up close and personal.  And, it gave him grief.  “Now my soul is troubled.  And what should I say, ‘Father, save me from this hour’?  No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour.” 

What Jesus knew was that the distance between the life he wanted for those he loved and the death in which they lived because of their sin could be measured in the dimensions of his willingness to die for them.  That was “the reason” that gave “this hour” its meaning.  And, though it was painful and grievous, what drove him toward self-sacrifice was his very personal awareness that there was no other way for him to give us eternal liberty than through his willingness to let others in that moment give him death.  “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies it bears much fruit.”

And, he wasn’t just talking about himself.  He was talking about all the others who would face the choice of following after him.  This is a short course in life and freedom we are getting here.  We can’t be in such a rush to get to Easter, to the empty tomb, that we bypass this lesson.  In just a few short extemporaneous words, Jesus ties the meaning of our liberty and his death together with the death we must die if we would know the life that God means for us.  “Those who love their life will lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.”  So, here is the meaning of the short course Jesus is teaching.  If Jesus had kept his life we would have lost ours.  Only by Jesus losing his do we get ours.  What we keep, for our sakes, we lose.  What we lose, for God’s sake, we keep.

So, this is what this text means to me as I am preparing myself for Easter.  I am by no means suggesting it is the only meaning of this text or that it should necessarily be the one that applies to you today.  I am simply telling you that this is where this text comes close to where I live.  I’ll let you just listen in on my confession.  What troubles me, even more than the fact that “this generation” of young folks can’t find Vietnam on a map is how little it has actually cost me to be a Christian.  What troubles me is how I have lived my whole life carefully “budgeting” Jesus into my time and my life and, literally, into my budget and carefully measuring the price only in terms of what I could actually afford without it hurting too much.  When I look around for something to measure the dimensions of the price I have paid to serve Christ I don’t have to look for a very long measuring tape.  What troubles me are these words of Jesus, “those who love their life will lose it.”  Do those words trouble you?

This thing called being a Christian and how living and dying work together in the creative will of God, according to Jesus.  He died for us that we might live.  But, Jesus’ death on the cross and the suffering that went with it were not something Jesus did to change God’s mind about us.  The cross was something Jesus did for us to change our minds and our hearts about God and about dying and living.  It was something Jesus did to show us the way to living so that when we die everything we lived for doesn’t die with us.  What we keep to ourselves dies with us.  Only what we give it up freely to the greater eternal purposes of God lives after we die.

I have to confess, as well, that from the very first day my first son was born I have been grieving the day my boys would leave home.  To be honest, in the last couple of years I have come to appreciate the fact that adolescence is God’s gift to parents to help them want to let their children go when the time comes.  But, I still think that, though I will rejoice at the maturity their leaving represents, you will have to let me catch my breath and sit down for just a minute the day they actually drive away.  Yet, the most unloving thing I could do is find some way of manipulating my sons into staying home just to keep me happy.  The only way my sons will ever really live is if I let him go.  What we hoard dies.  What we release lives.  It’s that simple and that hard.  Jesus knew well that all grief finally comes to this.  We run out of time.  Something ends before we are ready.

Yet, if, anticipating what that ending will be like, we keep our lives to ourselves in fear of losing them then our fears will become their own self-fulfilling prophecy and, someday, digging through the layers of what used to be, someone will only find the fossilized remains of our self-centered existences.  If we let it go, surrender it, give it away, then the history of our self-sacrifice will be a living witness long after our bodies have turned to dust.  That is what this text means to me today.  What does it mean to you?  What should it mean?  To you?  To our church?  What does or should it mean?  In the way we spend our time?  In the way we budget?  In the way treat people?  In everything this is the principle at work.  If we keep it we lose it.  If we let it go it lives.  That is both warning and promise.

This past week we stayed with Nancy’s brother-in-law, John, and his wife, who live in Richmond.  Though we’d been there before we needed a little refresher course on how to get to his house so John sent us a map.  However, about halfway there, we found ourselves getting confused.  Map in hand, we couldn’t figure it out.  When we finally did get to John’s house we laid the map out and began teasing him about not knowing his way around the very city in which he has lived for twenty-six years.  It was then we discovered the problem.  John had given us the right directions.  He had just assumed that we were going to start from one place in the city when we actually started from another.  Simple lesson in map making.  Leading people to the right place means not making any assumptions about the place from which they are starting.   

We’re constantly asking ourselves questions about where we should go.  Which college?  Which career?  Which person to marry?  Which direction of ministry for our church?  All good questions.  And, most people here, I believe, genuinely want those questions answered in ways that would honor Christ.  Jesus even talked about that in this text.  “Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am there will my servant be also.  Whoever serves me the Father will honor.”  I can only speak for myself but I’m certain I’m speaking for many this morning when I say that, when it’s all said and done, I want to end up where God wants and where he alone honors.   

We don’t know for sure, right now, exactly what that place will look like when we get there.  And, we’re not sure how to measure the dimensions between here and there in terms of time or space or quality of life.  But, what is clear from what Jesus has said is that, if we want to get where he is going, if we genuinely want to “serve” and “follow” him, we are going to have to start from the same place he did.  We may not know how far it is to journey’s end.  But, the starting place is not that far from here. 

We already have it marked on the map for us.  With these words, Jesus drew a circle around that place where the journey to eternity begins.  If your words fail, then just use his.  Looking at the choice between hoarding and losing, living and dying, Jesus said, in words we can say, “Father, with all of my, with everything I am and all that I have and ever hope to be, “glorify your name.”  That’s not all there is to the journey.  But, that’s a good place to begin.  And, that’s a place not far from here.

Or, is it?