“Whoever wishes to save his life will lose it.
Whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”
The culture of India is an ancient culture.
It is thousands of years old.
And in that culture, they have come to understand life in four stages.
The first stage is called the Learner stage.
It is where we learn to walk and talk;
we learn to eat; we learn to study;
we learn to work.
After we are born, we have to learn all those components.
The second stage they call the Householders stage.
It is where one creates a household;
one sustains a household;
works it, grows it and sustains it.
That includes building a family or an extended family;
and all that goes with it;
building our house literally or purchasing a house
and then maintaining it.
That is the first half of life.
The third stage they call the Forester or Seeker.
After we have our household then we go and we seek.
We go out into the forest to seek wisdom.
We go out into the wilderness
and gather all of the riches that wisdom offers for life.
What we traditionally might even call the desert experience.
Then there is a fourth stage.
It is called the Master or Guru stage.
It is the stage in which one gives back all the wisdom
to all those in the first half of life,
helping people to learn, to grow;
helping people to gather and create their own household
but more importantly helping people to seek wisdom;
to find wisdom and to come then to impart wisdom.
There is great wisdom behind these four stages of life in the Indian culture.
And we, who are such a young culture here in America,
only a couple hundred years old, have much to learn from that.
We have much to innovate, too.
But I think for many of us, we have gotten to the first two stages of life,
the first half of life, and we have not moved on beyond our own household.
This is where this gospel comes in.
Jesus almost exclusively critiques this first half of life
and these two stages of learning and growing one’s household
and pushes people to move into the second half of life,
these two last stages, the third and fourth,
seeking wisdom and then being a master and an imparter of wisdom.
In this gospel in particular, Jesus really goes at Peter and the disciples
in a radical way because his impending death is coming.
He is sort of in a sense running out of time
to impart his wisdom to them.
He tells them, tells Peter, “You are not thinking right.
You are not thinking the right way.
You are thinking like human beings.
You are not thinking like God.”
And there is this distinction between God’s will and our will.
I like to think of it as God’s grace and our will;
that we tend to hold onto our will and
what we really need is grace to let go.
This whole second stage of life is about letting go.
And that is what Jesus speaks to in today’s gospel.
He talks about giving up one’s life to come and to follow him.
He talks about this cross.
I have to admit that for most of my life
I have misunderstood this gospel passage.
I have always seen it,
and I know that many of us see it this way,
our cross as we often see it as the foibles of other people;
my cross is my wife’s doing this or
my husband’s habit of doing that.
And we tend to say, ‘Oh, I put up with it
like that is my cross.”
Or we tend to point to idiosyncratic behaviors that we might have
and we say, ‘Well that is my cross.”
I don’t know if Jesus would be referring to the cross quite in that way!
The disciples would not have been able to understand
this at this moment because Jesus had not yet been crucified.
That is the struggle for us.
When we cannot know it at the time it is happening to us
because we do not have the eyes to see it.
It is a bit like when we are driving
and we see something in the rearview mirror.
It tends to be that an awful lot of the wisdom
that we see comes through a rearview-mirror approach;
that when we have passed it,
we see how it has impacted our life.
This is what Jesus is trying to get across to them,
“You have to give up stuff;
you have to give it all away.”
This doesn’t make any sense
until we are living the second half of life.
There is great wisdom to the four stages of the Indian culture.
We in America define ourselves largely
by what we have accomplished;
what we have whether it be something;
what we have done in a “title” or whether it is the “stuff” we have.
The Lord is saying to us today is to let go.
To let go of the stuff.
And to move onto the wisdom part of life.
To in a sense grow up and move onto the next stage.
What does that mean for us?
On a personal level for me
I just moved from Holy Spirit Parish to St. Simon’s
over these last several months.
And it has been a real project of letting go.
It is amazing how much stuff I gathered in 16 ½ years.
And it is almost embarrassing for me to say
but I had to let go of a lot of stuff,
books, clothes, things that.
I don’t even know where I got half the stuff
but moving from a house into a room
requires you to let go of a lot of things.
And it has been incredibly liberating.
Truth be known, I still need to let go of a lot more stuff
and I suspect that is a challenge for us all.
All of us have something to let go of.
Now maybe it is a purging of your household
and maybe because we are spending
so much more time in the house we are saying,
“Why do I have this,
why do I have that?”
And we start to recognize stuff and we say,
“I have so much stuff.”
But it is more than just the stuff of life
that the Lord is asking us to let go of.
There are attitudes that the Lord is calling us to let go of
and to seek wisdom;
to be the forester to go and
to seek into the wilderness now new attitudes; new understanding.
We might be called to let go of bias, prejudices
maybe even some that we did not even know we had;
they were built into us because we were unreflective
about what has happened for us.
Or maybe it is stuff that you are being asked to let go of;
or maybe there are people who you have to let go of
that have not been good for you;
have not helped you to be a wiser, kinder or gentler human beings.
You see for everybody who is watching this today
and everyone who is here,
there is probably a different challenge to let go of.
We have to go to the Lord and to ask the Lord
what is it that you want me to let go of.
Some of us already know what it is
but most of us will have to go and say,
“Lord, what is it that you want me to give up;
to come and to follow you?”
We are all challenged to move beyond the first two stages of life
and to move onto the wisdom stages of life, the second half of life;
to seek and to find and then to be the giver of wisdom
to all who are willing to learn and
to grow but we first must grow and listen to the Lord.
And from that wisdom we receive then we become Seekers,
who are willing to become Masters.
“Whoever wishes to save his life will lose it.
Whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”
