Chapter meetings are the regular meeting for all the clergy and readers in a Deanery. In a previous Deanery we had some sessions where we shared with each other our thoughts and feelings about ministry. At one meeting we shared our motivations for ministry and, at another, we talked about those things that we found threatening in ministry.
Talking about the things we find threatening is itself a slightly threatening thing to do. Think about your life and work for a moment and the things that you find threatening. You might find yourself talking about tensions in relationships, unethical work practices, increasing demands on your time, the possibility of redundancy, mounting debts, nuisance neighbours, racial tensions, or fear of crime, among many other possibilities. Sharing things that we find threatening can open up some very personal things and so we felt vulnerable at that Chapter meeting as we shared together.
But although we felt vulnerable during the meeting, as we shared things that were personal to us, we did not go away from the meeting continuing to feel vulnerable. Instead, as each person shared, we felt a closer identification with each other and were able to support each other by praying together before we left. In that meeting our willingness to be vulnerable moved us to a place of greater understanding and support for each other.
As we go about our daily lives there are many situations in which we can make us ourselves vulnerable. Each time we come to church we publicly confess our sins. If we genuinely do this and genuinely understand the significance of what we are saying and doing together, then we are all publicly acknowledging specific failures in our lives, relationships and witness during the past week. That is, or should be, a place of vulnerability. As we care for others, we experience vulnerability. In a serious illness, we can see a person that we love decline mentally and physically sometimes with little that we can do to prevent that. We are torn up inside but need to stay in that place of vulnerability in order to support that person in their illness. When we witness crime, do we call the Police or intervene? Doing either may also make us vulnerable. In our world, we are faced with significant issues of disadvantage and oppression. If we take a stand on these issues then, again, we can make ourselves vulnerable.
In our Gospel reading (Mark 8: 27 – end) Jesus said that those who follow him must forget self and carry their cross. Those who want to follow him have to lose their lives, he says. This is the ultimate vulnerability and it is what Jesus modelled for us by going to the cross with all the rejection and suffering that that particularly horrific form of death involved. But Jesus is quite clear and specific in what he says. That is what he had to do, anyone who tried to prevent that from happening was doing the Devil’s work (even if that person was Peter, the leader of Jesus’ disciples and the person who had just realised who Jesus actually was), and we are to follow in his footsteps. This is a call into vulnerability coming from a God who deliberately makes himself so weak that human beings can take him and kill him.
It is an incredible statement that contradicts our gut human instinct about the right way to live life. Scientists tell us that life is about the survival of the fittest and what follows from that is that living selfishly by protecting ourselves and our interests is the way to survive in life. That is our gut instinct as human beings about life. We see it in many words and phrases that are in common usage. We’ve all heard people talk about looking after No. 1 or how you’ve got to look out for yourself because if you don’t know one else will. Much of the way we organise society is about reducing our sense of vulnerability through extra security or by minimising pain. Faced with a crime situation many people will simply pass by rather than help and we often try to lead a quiet life rather than take a stand on issues in our community and world.
Jesus says that when we live like that, trying to save our own lives, that actually we lose them. When we live life by thinking of ourselves, protecting ourselves, building barriers between ourselves and others, then we have missed the whole point of life and cannot live a life of real engagement with God, other people and the world in which we live. In other words, when we live selfishly, we are dead to the world and all that is in it.
The alternative that Jesus maps out for us here is scary but it is the way, he says, to real life. “Whoever wants to save his own life will lose it; but whoever loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it.”
Why is it that vulnerability will lead us into real life? The Chapter meetings I mentioned give us a clue. As we make ourselves vulnerable to others, we find what we share in common (we can’t find that out if we’re only thinking of ourselves) and we find ways in which we can help or support each other and ways in which we can work together for the good of all (we can’t find that out if we only want things for ourselves). Through the experience of vulnerability, we are born into a new world, a new way of life; a shared way of life.
This is an experience of resurrection which is what Jesus promised to those who are prepared to lose their selfish way of life for his sake. It is what Jesus himself knew he would experience: “The Son of Man must suffer much and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the teachers of the Law. He will be put to death, but three days later he will rise to life.” Paul wrote that Jesus’ death has destroyed the diving wall of hostility between Jew and Gentile making one people who are reconciled to God. That is resurrection. That is losing your life in order to find it. That is leaving selfishness through vulnerability in order to find solidarity.
We are called, as followers of Jesus, into this way of life. It is scary, there are no two ways about it. None of us feel comfortable with vulnerability – whether it is emotional, physical or spiritual vulnerability. But it is our willingness, Jesus says, to become vulnerable with others that leads into the experience of unity and solidarity that is a resurrection into the way that life was created to be. We are not created for selfishness we are created to love God and to love others and we only truly live when we do so. May it be so for each one of us. Amen.
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Adrian Snell - Son Of The World.
