You Bet Your Life

The scriptures referred to are Jeremiah 2:4-13, Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16 and Luke 1:1,7-14.

I was listening on NPR this week to 2 actresses being interviewed who had to go in opposite directions for their roles. In Brittany Runs a Marathon, actress Jillian Bell plays a 28 year old woman whose health so alarms her doctor that he tells her to lose 45 to 55 pounds. Which meant that the actress would have to lose weight for the movie. Because it was only a 28-day shoot, she lost 29 pounds before filming, wore a fat suit for the film's first half and then lost 11 more pounds during the filming. It took a real commitment for an actress who, in real life, was not a runner.

For her role playing the real-life civilian employee who helped two killers tunnel out of prison, Patricia Arquette gained 40 pounds for the series Escape at Dannemore. She could have worn a fat suit but decided to change her body to be more authentic. And she found that people treated her differently. Acquaintances in show business thought she must not be working. People who didn't recognize the Oscar-winning actress treated her as invisible. And that helped her with her Emmy-nominated performance as a frumpy middle-aged woman who dives headlong into relationships with 2 dangerous men. But gaining and maintaining that weight for the nearly year-long shoot took commitment in an industry where, she says, the people in power always find fault with your body no matter what shape you're in.

One theory of how humans got to the top of the food chain is that we are persistence hunters. Our lack of hair and our copious sweat glands allowed us to hunt down faster and bigger and stronger animals by not having to stop and pant after sprinting as they do. We simply don't give up. We are like the tortoise in the Aesop fable about it and the hare: slow and steady wins the race.

Of course there are times when to keep doing something ceases to make sense. The “sunk cost fallacy” is the idea that after you've put a lot of effort or money into something you simply must see it through, even when it has become apparent that the whole enterprise is going to fail. Sometimes you do have to cut your losses. It's especially important to wake up to that fact when you have been trying the same thing over and over and getting the same bad results every time.

It takes wisdom to figure out when to keep going and when to quit. You need to weigh the odds of your succeeding. You need to consider whether you can overcome all the obstacles. You need to know whether the reward will be worth all the effort. Vera Wang failed to make the US Olympic skating team and then failed to become editor-in-chief at Vogue. When she turned to designing wedding gowns at age 40, she found success. Edison tried more than 100 materials before finding one that would work as the filament for his light bulb. Both persisted but one changed the elements involved while the other changed her goal.

God, of course, thinks ahead and plans ahead. He doesn't change his ultimate goal which is to save the world but he does change his tactics. Though he doesn't give up on his people, or humanity in general, yet, as we see in our passage from Jeremiah, it must have been tempting. One can imagine angels saying, “You know, you used a flood to reboot the species once before. How about another do-over?” However, what God does do is let one of the empires that always surrounded Judah take them into exile. Nebuchadnezzar defeated the Jews, destroyed the walls of Jerusalem, burned the temple and took the aristocracy, the artisans, and anyone else he felt were valuable away to Babylon. And, as we said last week, that did make a change in the nature of Judaism.

They did make obeying God's law their focus. But as usual, over time, they found it easier to keep the external characteristics of their religion rather than the internal aspects of the faith. It is easier to wear a prayer shawl with tassels than to pray with humility and sincerity. It is easier to fast for a day than to give up sinful habits for a lifetime. It is easier to cut off a foreskin that to cut out the attitudes that lead to a true betrayal of the covenant with God.

And we Christians do the same. Like the oral law added to the written Torah, we have added ideas and positions that are not found in the teachings of Jesus and focus on them rather than what's essential. Christians are more likely to hold as suspect the faith of those who disagree on issues like abortion and homosexuality, neither of which Jesus ever mentions, than on our treatment of the poor, the disabled, the alien, and the imprisoned, about which Jesus is explicit. Part of this is our obsession over sexual matters. Though only 9% of the commandments in the Bible are about sex, it seems like a majority of the criticism of Christianity and its defense centers on such issues. Lost in this titillating topic is the essence of following Jesus.

The purpose of following Jesus is to become ever more Christlike. Jesus devoted his life to helping others. He healed those who were physically and mentally ill and by doing so, reintegrated them into the society that had excluded them. He forgave sinners. He taught the ignorant and opened the eyes of those who were spiritually blind. He advocated for the poor and disadvantaged. He ultimately sacrificed his life to save others.

Jesus didn't dress up in thousand dollar suits or demand million dollar personal transport or guarantee that his followers would become rich. Instead, he told his disciples to disown themselves and take up their crosses and follow in his footsteps. He told them to forgive others and show mercy and put down weapons and make peace and give sacrificially to the poor.

Which means we shouldn't be surprised when, at a meal with a leading Pharisee, he says “When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, in case they might invite you in return, and you would be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.”

Is Jesus serious? How does this make sense? Giving to those who can't pay you back is a bad transaction, which is what we have reduced everything to these days. People are evaluated every day of the basis of how they benefit us. So if they can't pay whatever price we conjure up for the medicine they need, let them suffer and die. If their mental or physical pain is such that they self-medicate with drugs that aren't medicinal, let them overdose. If they can't pay the high price of housing with wages legally kept low, let them live on the streets. If their brains are not fully functional and cause them to act out in public, put them in jail. If we assume this current group of immigrants will not provide needed labor and build businesses, in contrast to the majority of those who came before, exclude them. After all, our resources, and apparently our ingenuity, are severely limited and we, the richest country on earth, cannot spare anything.

That is short term thinking, which has taken over most of our businesses and consequently our government, which listens to business long before it listens to other people. So companies jettison sustainability to chase the next quarter's dividend. Politicians rarely think beyond what will win them the next election. Almost nobody thinks very far into the future, much less beyond their own life.

It used to be that leaders thought about things that would outlast them. President Franklin Roosevelt appointed a National Interregional Highway Committee in 1941. He didn't live to see President Eisenhower sign the Federal Aid-Highway Act of 1956 which connected this vast nation with a network of high-speed, high-capacity highways. It has had a major impact on commerce, tourism, and how we live. It was paid for by the federal government. So who benefited?

Businessmen used to think about things that would outlast them. Henry Flagler started the extension of his Florida East Coast Railway to Key West when he was 75. It took 7 years to complete the Overseas Railroad and in the end his people were scrambling to finish it so he could use it at least once before he died. He was able to travel all the way to Key West when he was 82. He died the next year. He had spent $50 million on the project and had to know he would not live to see all that money back. So who benefited?

The great cathedrals often took centuries to build. St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican took 144 years. York Minster Cathedral took 252 years. The Sagrada Familia in Barcelona was begun in 1882 and will be completed in 2026. The architects who designed them and the bishops who began their construction as well as those who continued it never saw the finished buildings. Who benefited?

But, you might say, Jesus isn't talking about institutions; he is talking about the lives of individual followers, whom he commands to do things that will not benefit them here and now and maybe never in this world. Why should we listen to him?

I recently read an article by a crime novelist who said that every story is a mystery if you don't know the ending. Of course in a good mystery, there are clues. Unless the solution is an outrageous plot twist, made up out of whole cloth and tacked on at the end, it should be organically part of what comes before. You should, as in the movie The Sixth Sense, be able to look back and see that, in the light of the ending, everything now makes sense.

We get this in the Bible. At the end of the gospel of Luke, 2 disciples are traveling to Emmaus and dejectedly discussing recent events. They are joined by a man who asks what they are talking about. So they say, “About Jesus of Nazareth. He was a prophet, powerful in word and deed before God and all the people. The chief priests and our rulers handed him over to be sentenced to death, and they crucified him; but we had hoped he was the one who was going to redeem Israel. And what is more, it is the third day since all this took place. And in addition, some of our women amazed us. They went to the tomb early this morning but didn't find his body. They came and told us they had seen a vision of angels, who said he was alive. Then some of our companions went to the tomb and found it just as the women had said, but him they did not see.” (Luke 24:19-24) The man who joined them then tells them how all of this could be found in the Hebrew Bible and, like a detective at the end of a mystery story, he lays out the clues and the solution. Plot twist: he is the risen Jesus!

Nothing in Jesus' life nor his ethics make sense apart from the resurrection. If you are looking for a religion that pays off big here and now, you don't want Christianity. As Paul said, “If our hope in Christ is good for this life only and no more, then we deserve more pity than anyone else in all the world.” (1 Corinthians 15:19, GNT) He says, “If Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith...Then those who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost.” (1 Corinthians 15:14, 18) Paul was a brilliant Torah scholar with a stellar future ahead of him in the Sanhedrin, the Jewish supreme court, before he left all that and became a follower of Jesus. He suffered beatings, whippings, a stoning, imprisonment, hunger, thirst, cold, sleeplessness, and finally martyrdom. Most of the Twelve died as martyrs. None of it makes sense if there is no resurrection.

I will go further. None of our lives make sense if there is no afterlife with a redressing of wrongs and a rewarding of selfless service. There is no justice in this universe if there is no final judgment. And so self-sacrifice for any reason other than the continued existence of your offspring makes no sense. Which means being anything other than good enough to others that you elicit reciprocal goodness towards yourself makes no sense. As the beer commercial used to say, “You only go around once in life, so grab for all the gusto you can.”

This is epitomized by Ayn Rand. She called altruism evil and said that “If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject.” She felt that altruism and capitalism were diametrically opposed and could not co-exist. She spoke against funding programs for people with disabilities and dismissed the idea of charity as a moral duty. To her the highest virtue was acting strictly in a self-interested way. Which explains why, though she rated Medicare on the same level as murder and robbery, she enrolled in Medicare when she got lung cancer from her decades of smoking. Such selfishness made sense to her.

Odd then that a team of neuroeconomists found that generous people are happier than selfish folks and not only was this reported by those in the study, the difference was seen in their brains. Another study showed that giving gifts to others makes us happier than buying stuff for ourselves. And the kicker is another group of studies show that selfish people earned less than generous ones. It's almost like we were designed to be generous.

Add to this the fact that religious people tend to have lower blood pressures, a healthier immune system, greater resilience, better health outcomes and a longer life. They have lower risks of anxiety, depression and suicide. Which is weird if this depends on believing in something that doesn't exist and acting on premises that are false. Maybe these are clues that they are true.

Blaise Pascal, the mathematician, physicist, inventor and theologian, once framed the question of belief in God as making a wager. If you bet that God exists and he doesn't, you will never know that. If God does exist, however, there is great benefit for the believer. If on the other hand you bet that God doesn't exist and you're right, you will never know that. But if you are wrong and he does exist, that could result in a very bad outcome for you. Pascal concluded that it makes more sense to believe in God, as there is great reward if you are right and no downside if you are wrong. And in general, it looks like having faith in God increases the odds of having a good life, one that is healthier, physically and mentally as well as spiritually.

As usual Jesus raises the stakes. He says to follow him we must deny ourselves and take up our cross. He says we must give to all who ask without expectation of return. We must forgive people whenever they ask it. We must give up putting ourselves first. We must share sacrificially and trust that God will be with us always, never leaving or forsaking us. We must empathize with those in prison and those who suffer. We must be faithful to our partners and not bedhop. We must not love money but be content.

In other words, we need to bet on the afterlife: resurrection with new bodies in a new creation where there is no death or pain or crying or mourning. A world where God lives among us and wipes away the tears and traumas of this life. Of course that means changing our life. It means shedding bad habits and taking on good habits. It means changing goals if they are selfish. To do that we must become the person God created us to be: a loving Christlike person, reflecting his image in all we think and say and do. Can we succeed and overcome all obstacles? Yes, with the help of God's Spirit, which is promised us. Is it worth the cost? Yes, because God is love and heaven is being wherever God is.  Heaven is also being among people who similarly love us and everyone else. That's a huge win. And does that mean the stakes are also high? You bet your life. But Jesus already bet his life that you are worth it.