The other morning, on the way into work, I was driving in the far left lane when I saw something very unusual flopping around wildly in the middle lane just ahead.  At first, it was unidentifiable.  As I got closer I was able to make out that is was a chicken, of all things.  In rush hour traffic on I-30!  And, it was in deep trouble.  I’ve seen lots of unusual things on the Interstate at rush hour.  Like a woman talking on a cell phone while applying eye shadow at seventy miles per hour.  Look ma, no hands!  But, a chicken?  This was a first.  My eyes finally laid hold of the Pilgrim’s Pride delivery truck just a few car lengths ahead.  Obviously, the chicken had worked its way out of one of the cages and fallen, injured, onto the highway where it was about to run afoul of tons of oncoming steel.  Of course, everything I’m describing to you took place in a matter of seconds, the exact length of that chicken’s life expectancy in the middle lane of westbound I-30 at rush hour. 

Later, Nancy asked why I hadn’t stopped to help the poor bird.  I guess the significance of answering the profound philosophical question about why the chicken crossed the road paled in comparison to it just getting on across quickly and then figuring out a reason later.  Nonetheless, I just told her I didn’t help because I was too chicken.  But, something about watching that poor animal flail away in absolute futility tapped into my emotions that morning.  Aside from my love for animals of all kinds, that bird’s dilemma seemed to illustrate what I was feeling at the beginning of a day that already had me by the throat before I could even get started.  I could only pray it would end better for me than it was about to for that chicken.  In the chicken’s case, though her existence might have served a more glorious purpose Kentucky-fried, cordon-bleud or as a companion to a beautiful dumpling, her day and life were about to end badly and for no good reason. 

God gives us a better option.  One that sets us apart from all the rest of his creation.  Regardless of how the days of our lives get started and though we may not have much of a choice in how or when they end, we actually do have some choice in why we die and, therefore, why we lived at all.  Otherwise, we’d only live utterly futile lives having served no greater purpose than to consume our fair or unfair share of chicken and dumplings along the way to dying.  God has gifted us for more.

Jesus had bad news and good for Peter.  Bad news first.  “‘I tell you the truth, when you were younger you dressed yourself and went where you wanted; but when you are old you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go.’  Jesus said this,” the scripture says, “to indicate the kind of death by which Peter would glorify God.  Then he said to him, ‘Follow me!’”

No choice in how or when he died, Jesus told Peter.  Just a choice as to why.

Interestingly, when Jesus described Peter’s senior adult years he actually spoke of something that could happen to any of us.  Many of you have grieved over the prospect of taking loved ones to nursing homes.  Once strong and independent, dressing themselves and going where they wanted they must now be dressed and led by others to places they don’t want to go.  Who among us doesn’t fear that?  Growing old, one woman my senior by many years once told me, is scary. 

An older couple was once visiting in the home of another couple with whom they had been friends for years.  When their wives went to the kitchen one man said to the other, “I really admire the way you say so many nice things to your wife.  I notice that you always call her sweetie or honey or something like that even though you’ve been married for over seventy years.”  “Oh,” his friend said, “it’s not that I’m being nice.  I just call her those things because I forgot her name ten years ago.”  Sometimes all we can do is laugh.  Either that or we’d have to cry at the prospect of losing more than our memories.  Our ability to dress ourselves and go where we choose, our very independence, is at risk.  The bad news Jesus was giving Peter is news that may be waiting for all of us. 

If you think about it in the bleakest terms, it’s all futile.  Looking back on it all, the writer of Ecclesiastes wrote, “Vanity of vanities, All is vanity.  What advantage does a man have in all his work which he does under the sun?  A generation goes and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever.  (Ecclesiastes 1:2-4).”  Sounds something like an experience Foy Valentine recently had.  Walking through some east Texas woods he was touched by the futility of human labor.  This was ground his father cleared by hand with axe and mule team some seventy years ago so he could plant corn.  In the end, Foy wrote, the ground had “reverted to its original status without so much as a remaining furrow to mark my father’s prodigious labors, which must be something of a parable of all human endeavors . . .. (Foy Valentine, “A Walk in the Woods,” Christian Ethics Today, Vol. 7, No. 3, June 2001, p. 30).”  So, why spend our days building what others will only implode or nature will only reclaim after we’re gone?  Especially if, no matter how well we live, we have no say in whether or not our lives end badly.

Bad news, Peter, Jesus said, the end of your life will be ugly.  We don’t know exactly how that happened for sure.  Some speculate that he was crucified himself and the imagery of Jesus’ words here may well be a foretelling of that.  But, history didn’t leave us an obituary indicating the time and place.  No coroner’s autopsy, either, to tell us how.  What we do have is an epitaph; we

know why.  Peter’s life and his death, Jesus said, “‘would glorify God.’”  So, having given Peter the bad news first that his last day would be his worst, Jesus now gives Peter the good news.  Though the end of his life would be ugly, in the way he lived, he could give it a beautiful meaning.  Which is why Jesus ended his words of foreboding and promise with one simple command, “‘Follow me!’”

So, unlike a helpless beast consumed by forces over which it has no control, we’ve been given this incredible gift from God.  We have the power to participate with him in giving greater purpose to our lives than their beginning and ending might suggest by following him.  Jesus had already told Peter what that purpose was.  Three times, having asked Peter about his love for him, Jesus said that the way he should demonstrate that love was to love the people Jesus loved.  “‘Feed my sheep,’” Jesus said.  The purpose of our existence and the meaning of our lives is something we discover as we lose ourselves in loving those Jesus loves.  Even if others take us where we don’t want to go, in the end, we’ll find ourselves only where God wants us to be by loving those Jesus loves.  But, as Jesus warned Peter, we’ll have to be careful about one particular distraction.

As Jesus and Peter are walking along and having this conversation, Peter sees John, “the disciple whom Jesus loved,” and asks Jesus, “‘Lord, what about him?’”  We don’t know why Peter asked the question.  Maybe he was scared of dying so miserably alone and wanted to know if John would be there, too.  Or, maybe he was jealous.  He knew of Jesus’ special affection for John and maybe he didn’t understand why Jesus seemed to favor him over others.  Why is it that God seems to give others breaks we never get?  Better looks and more money, better health and more friends, fewer problems and more opportunities.  Why should we follow a God who plays favorites?

There is no simple answer to why some people appear to be given more than others.  Part of the answer is found in the fact that things are not always as they appear.  Few of us would actually trade lives with anyone else if we could actually see beyond what only appears to be true to what is true.  Part of the answer is that our values are often so superficial.  We distinguish between beautiful and plain.  God loves all of his beautiful creation.  Part of the answer is that God can do what he chooses because he is God and we are not and he, therefore, does not answer to us.  The creator never answers to the created.  But, we are never more at risk for losing touch with our unique and divinely given reason for existence than when we are distracted by what God appears to be doing in anyone else’s life.  “‘What is that to you?’” Jesus asked Peter.  It is frightening how much of our lives we spend comparing ourselves to others on nearly every level and coming to jealous conclusions with the results.

This past week the cover of a magazine I’d never seen before caught my eye.  Obviously marketed for Houston’s elite, at least based on the ads and articles, the cover story was entitled “Why We Hate Dallas.”  (Roger Gray, Inside Houston, May 2001)  Written from one person’s extremely shallow experience with a narrow segment of Dallas’ population, it goes on and on about the pretentiousness of Dallasites as compared to Houstonians who, of course, are more genuine, sincere and real.  This despite the fact that within its eighty-eight pages I counted no fewer than eight advertisements for surgical centers that specialize in liposuction and breast enlargement not to mention a special advertising section for plastic surgery.  All this so that a Houston woman’s rise to a prominence, in which no true Houstonian has any interest, can be augmented by an artificially more beautiful stature. 

It’s very dangerous to compare ourselves to others for any reason.  More often than we care to admit, what we envy or despise in others is a reflection of our own defects.  “‘What’s that to you?’” Jesus asks any of us who, consumed with how we measure up to others, risk losing the discovery of why he created and loved us enough to give his own personal call on our lives.  God’s call on our individual lives and even our church stands on its own apart from all others.  Feathers, beaks and pecking order aside, what truly separates the men from the chickens is whether they discover and live out the true purpose of their existence.  That we were born to live, whether in poverty or prosperity, health or sickness, power or weakness, to live and die to glorify the God who created us by writing new chapters of human history entitled “Why We Love Dallas, Those Who Hate It and Everyone Jesus Loves In Between and Beyond.” 

Living at the risk of dying or not is not the question we’ve been given with which to struggle.  The one thing we do all have in common is that we will all die one way or another if Jesus doesn’t come first.  Indeed, the oldest woman in the world on record died at 115 this past week in France.  She’d lost her first husband in World War I and outlived a second.  She even survived being hit by a car at 103, her age, not the car’s speed.  In the end, however, despite having outlived everyone else born the same day as she was and many since, she died.  We had no choice in how or why we came into this world and we’ll have little choice, most likely, in how we leave.  It is only ours to decide how we’ll live between those two moments of entry and exit.  And, though how we answer that question may not allow us to control how our lives end, it does afford us the possibility of having lived in such a way that we give a beautiful reason to them no matter how they started or ended.

The difference between Timothy McVeigh and his brothers in arms of another generation is not that their lives ended badly.  Thousands who stormed the beaches at Normandy fifty-seven years ago this week died indescribably horrible deaths.  It was in the reason for which they died that their lives and deaths had more beautiful meanings.  McVeigh may have been given the chance to choose, to some extent, how and when he will leave this world.  It was in his surrender to jealous rage that he forfeited the chance of his life having a beautiful purpose. 

Jesus died the worst of all deaths; his ending was the ugliest.  It was the reason he gave his death by the loving way he lived on the way to dying that gave what was so very ugly a very beautiful purpose.  Put simply, whether we die peacefully in our sleep or at the end of long and grueling agony, we are giving meaning to our future deaths by how we are choose to live this very moment – by whether we are loving those Jesus loved.  With each breath and each step we are making one more mark in what will be the cumulative total of our epitaphs that speak of self-centered meaninglessness or self-surrender to the greater purpose of loving all whom God gave us to love.

If our days are consumed with jealousy and rage at what God is doing for others but not for us instead of what we are doing for God by loving those he loves then that is all the meaning our lives will have.  Then, no matter how we die, we will have never lived.  Jesus said, “‘You must follow me.’”  What we do with the next step we take after we hear that call will make the difference in whether it mattered that we ever even took one step at all.

Amen.