Why Not Me?
Proper 18 (23), Year C
Harry, a Baptist colleague and neighbour from the time in my first parish, died at age 49. I had moved away four years earlier and learned of his death through a clip on CBC radio about “Notable Canadians.” I also learned that Harry had recorded a video for his own eulogy in which he said of his diagnosis with pancreatic cancer, “At first I thought, why me? And then I thought, why not me?”
My father-in-law died last October, a week shy of his 97th birthday. His 35 years of retirement were spent fishing, building furniture, and spending time with the grandchildren who lived close. It was made possible by a time of political and economic stability.
It is unlikely that my retirement will look like his, should I live long enough. Reasons are multiple.
Retirement is a recent invention. It only appeared in modern industrialized societies at the beginning of the 20th century where the popular narrative for retirement is that my working life was for someone else, and that my retirement is for me. It’s not a big step from there to spending my children’s inheritance. The notion that my retirement is about me is born of the idea that my life is about me, and that is where it clashes with the Gospel reading for this Sunday.
Jesus addresses some who in their enthusiasm want to follow him. They are unaware of his mission, even if they know that he is on the way to Jerusalem. And so Jesus asks them to count the cost. His words are harsh as he declares that his followers must be willing to let go of that which is most precious to them, familial relationships, possessions, and even one’s own life. It is not that they must abandon these but they must subordinate them to their loyalty to him. The clash with “family values” aside, these have been difficult words for the Church throughout the centuries, but especially for an accommodated Christendom. Making the mistake of identifying progress and capitalism with Christian values, we did not expect to suffer, other than what comes from being human, and so personal suffering came to be understood as carrying one’s cross.
When I was in youth group we sung a hymnic version of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s poem “By Gracious Powers.” We did not know what to do with verse three,
And when this cup you give is filled to brimming
with bitter suffering, hard to understand,
we take it thankfully and without trembling
out of so good and so beloved a hand.
We told our pastor that we felt like imposters singing the verse. He wisely answered that we should sing it as a prayer, so that one day we could sing it with the martyrs.
That clashes with living my best life now, though the scriptures witness that our best life is lived in God, and in obedience to God.
There are times when I say that I look forward to retirement. I used to think that this was an expression of my desire to at last somehow disassociate myself from the institutional church. But last week it dawned on me that it more likely is part of my fatigue with what is going on in the world. I am tired of propaganda and spin, of the erosion of democracy, of xenophobia, of unrestrained capitalism and resource extraction in denial of the climate crisis, and so forth.
But retirement would not solve that problem, I would only have more time to fret about it, unless I thought my life was about me.
And so it seems that the Western Church’s inability to understand the carrying of one’s cross has found an answer. There are plenty of crosses to go around and it is time that we come alongside those who carry them. And if the verse from Bonhoeffer’s poem says it too starkly, perhaps Rubem Alves can help us. “... suffering and hope, live from each other. Suffering without hope produces resentment and despair, hope without suffering creates illusions, naiveté, and drunkenness ...” (Rubem Alves, “What is Hope?”) We can’t have one without the other.
The world cannot afford for Christians to live private lives that know the hope of heaven but do not understand the incarnation. The world needs the Church to live in the (reality of the) reign of God that has come among us in Jesus, a reign where the last come first, strangers are welcomed, truth is spoken, captives are released, the hungry are fed, the oppressed go free, and the poor have Good News brought to them. There is a task for my retirement and for yours, but it can’t wait until our retirement. I may have had other plans, but Harry’s question, “Why not me?” applies here as well. And that is good news.