Following Him — no other choice!

Mark 8:34-38 for Lent 2 B

On August 5, 1949, a fire ignited in a remote forest in the Montana wilderness. A crew of 15 experienced young firefighters parachuted into the area, ready to extinguish what looked like a manageable fire.

No one anticipated a blowup-an uncommon, yet lethal, occurrence in forest fires. In a blowup a manageable forest firs is unexpectedly transformed into an inferno that rages through trees at up to 30 miles per hour.

Strung out in a line, the firefighters climbed the south side of Mann Gulch with the blaze above them. Traversing the densely wooded slope, they moved closer to the fire line. But the foreman, Wag Dodge, didn’t like the angle. Something about the look of the fire bothered him. Dodge instructed his men to cross the gulch.

The terrain on the north side of Mann Gulch was different. Dense stands of timber gave way to waist-high fields of “bunch” and “cheat” grass. Fire moves slowly through timber but races through open fields.

With Dodge leading the way, the crew finished the traverse of the North Slope and stopped for a breather. As they gazed across the gulch at the fire, which now looked less manageable, the flames jumped to their side of the gulch and began licking through the grass. Later, one of the smoke jumpers reported, “Below in the bottom of the gulch was a great roar without visible flames but blown with winds on fire.”

A blowup.

In panic, the men broke for the ridge above them. The 76-degree angle of the slope made escape all but impossible. Howling, spitting, and convulsing behind them, the fire beast lapped at their heels, the intense heat melting their lungs. One by one, the inferno consumed its victims.

Only three of the 15 men lived. Two of them beat the fire to the top of the ridge. More amazing, however, is how Wag Dodge survived.

Unlike the others, Dodge realized that escape on foot was impossible. With the fire roaring toward him, Dodge did the unthinkable: he bent down, struck a match, and ignited a fire that, pushed by the wind, burned quickly up the hill. The foreman then stepped into the hot ashes of his own fire and found refuge. He waved for his crew to join him. No one did. Quickly passing over Dodge, the fire looked hungrily for combustible fodder elsewhere.

According to the two other survivors, “The whole crew would probably have survived if they had understood and followed Dodge’s instructions.”

Sometimes what seems right is the wrong thing to do. Walk into a fire to survive a fire? Who would do such a thing? One did and he survived. Twelve more would have survived if they did what, to them, seemed the exactly wrong thing to do: walk into the fire.

In today’s Gospel lesson Jesus calls us to do something that sounds even stranger than Wag Dodge called his crew to do.

• If you want to save your life, you have to loose it.
• If you lose your life for Him (and His Gospel) you’ll save your life.

How can this be true? How can we save something by losing it? These are crazy sayings… and yet Jesus calls us to what I like to call “Gospel craziness.”

Like Wag Dodge, Jesus calls us to trust in Him. If we trust in Him we’ll be okay. We can trust Him because we know who He is and what He’s done for us. Why do we know this? Because of what Peter (and others) found to be amazingly crazy when Jesus first spoke it:

And <Jesus> began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes and be killed, and after three days rise again (Mark 8:31).

Jesus will suffer, be rejected, killed, and rise again.

Save people by dying? Dying and rising? To Peter it made as much sense as running into a fire to survive a fire. That’s a crazy thing to do. That’s why most of the firefighters ran up the ridge-and died.

That’s Jesus point. For us to live, we need to die. If we lose our life, we’ll gain it. We lose our lives-our sinfulness, our brokenness-to gain His life-holiness, a restored relationship.

God wants us to be restored into a right relationship with Him. The only way we can be so restored is through Jesus and what He did for us. What did Jesus say He would do? He will suffer, be rejected, be killed, and then—amazingly, surprisingly—rise again.

Jesus’ disciple will deny her or himself and follow Jesus-no matter what-since she or he has no other choice.

“For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?” (Mark 8:36)

Of no value!

For what can a man give in return for his soul? (Mark 8:37)

Nothing! We need to follow Him—we need a faith relationship with Jesus—since we have no other choice!

Like the firefighters in a “blowup,” you can run through your life as fast as you can, trying to make it on your own. Two of fourteen-that’s 14.29%-of the firefighters made it that way. Those aren’t very good odds on which to stake your life. Would you risk your life on something that has a 14.29% possibility of success?

Yet the odds are even worse for us gaining a relationship with God by who we are and what we do. You have a one in one gazillion chance. Actually, you actually don’t even have that much of a chance. We all sin; therefore we all have a broken relationship with God.

It’s like the nursery rhyme-Humpty Dumpty-which I mentioned last week.

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty together again.

You can’t put yourself back together again. You can’t put your broken relationship with God back together again That’s what sin does-it breaks the relationship apart-between you and God, between you and your neighbor.

How are we put together again? How can we be put back into a right relationship with God again?

And <Jesus> began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes and be killed, and after three days rise again (Mark 8:31).

Jesus had to suffer, be rejected, and be killed. He had to rise again. Like running into a fire to escape the fire, Jesus had to die so we might live.

Following His example, we do something just a crazy from the world’s standards: we come to Him by denying ourselves, taking up our cross, and following Him. We save our lives by losing them. When we lose our lives for Him, we find—we save—our lives.

Imagine the courage it took. Wag Dodge knew he had to walk into a fire to save his life. Walk in he did. If everyone had followed his lead, they would have all survived.

Jesus walked to the cross. Imagine the courage it took to go to the cross. He died on it, that through His death we might live. Since He died, we can live—now and eternally.  We receive a relationship that was broken by our sin.

That’s what Lent is about. It takes courage—God-given courage—to stand before Him and repent of our sin. It takes courage—God-given courage—to let go of our lives to gain all His life—and death—won for us.

Yet we have no other choice but to follow Him to live, for true life now and life with God for all eternity.

Regards, in Christ,
PJKreft
2009-03-02