Losing Your Life for the Good Story: Embracing Change and Community Worship
by Sarah Werner
Mark 8: 34-37, First Nations Version
He then gathered his followers and the crowd around him and said, “Any who wants to walk the road with me must turn away from their own path and carry their own cross as they follow me to the place of ultimate sacrifice.
“The ones who hold on to their lives will not find life, but the ones who are willing to let go of their lives, for me and for the good story I bring, will find the true life. How will it help you to get everything you want in this world but lose the true life? Is there anything in this world worth trading for it?”
I love the words of this scripture in the First Nations Version. This is a well-known text, and hearing it in a new voice gives new meaning to some of these oft-repeated phrases. I particularly love the reframing of eternal life as “the good story.” We usually think of this passage as a call to sacrifice ourselves, to die a valiant death like the Anabaptist martyrs or the early Christians. But, losing your life isn’t usually literal in the way of martyrs and freedom fighters. It’s often subtler than that—restructuring your life around caring for others, around advocating for the marginalized, around the reality of a warming planet. What does it mean to lose your life for Christ, to reorient towards eternal life—the kin-dom of God—the perpetuation and thriving of life on this planet, far beyond your own life span?
Walking in the way of Jesus, losing your life, means orienting your life towards God, towards others, towards life as a whole instead of your own individual wants and desires. Worship is a communal expression of our faith and one of the ways we live out this commitment to live for one another. Sharing our joys and concerns through prayer, singing hymns together, and hearing scripture are all ways we connect with one another and live out the good story collectively.
Losing your life—for Christ, for others, for the earth—is a countercultural notion. Our modern western society privileges individual choice, autonomy, and freedom. While this is noble in theory, in practice this comes at the expense of the wellbeing of the human community and the earth itself. Being able to make your own choices about where to live, whether or who to marry, what kind of work to pursue, these are all good and important things. But at some point, we got lost and started valuing our autonomy more than we value the wellbeing of all life. This can extend to our worship practices.
Living into the good story, individually and communally, also means embracing change. All of us are changing all of the time. We live in a rapidly changing climate, in a changing human culture. Nothing stays the same for very long. But many of us are perpetually and incredibly resistant to change. We want things to stay the same, if things are going well for us, and are resentful of any kind of disturbance to our comfortable lives. And there are many things that are worth preserving, family traditions, memory, our faith commitments. But none of these are entirely immune from change, including our worship life together.
The truth is that we all lose our lives eventually. We only get to walk this earth for a certain length of time, and Lent is a season when we remember this, that we come from and return to the fertile soil. Lent is also a time when we remember that Jesus’s time on earth with us was also brief. He certainly made the most of it, healing and teaching about the coming transformation of the world. If we learn anything from Jesus’s ministry, it’s that clinging to the status quo only leads to death, and you’re liable to have your table turned over in the temple by a prophet in righteous indignation if you try to hold onto it.
In the natural world change and adaptation are the basis for the vast diversity of life around us. Animals, plants and other organisms make the most of their particular environment, learning, growing, changing as the ecosystem they are part of changes. There’s nothing inherently scary about change. It’s just that we get so used to the way things are that we resist any attempt at adaptation, even when we are suffering. What in our church community is changing? What worship practices are evolving? What traditions are worth holding onto, and what might we need to let go of to become communities that truly live into the kin-dom of God?
In this context losing your life to be part of the good story can be a positive thing. Learning to live as part of your watershed, part of your community (both human and beyond-human). Learning to live for others, to be part of a global movement of peaceful transformation. Love has an inherently self-sacrificial quality to it, in that your life isn’t all that matters. Like a parent who loves a child, or a spouse, is willing to give up everything for their safety, for their happiness. This is unhealthy when it is one-sided, but mutual love is mutually self-sacrificing; it is about becoming part of something larger. And also, God is with us always, through every change, every upheaval, every adaptation. Even if worship isn’t the same as it was when you were younger, God is still at work among us.
What might it look like in our faith communities to live for something more than ourselves, our families, or our own security and comfort? This will mean different things for different folks. Some people do indeed follow Jesus in giving all they have to the poor and dedicating their lives to service. But we can’t all be monks or nuns or hermits living off the grid. Living for others means making decisions based on what is most beneficial for our fellow humans and for the created world. It means sharing from the bounty of our lives instead of hoarding it for an imagined apocalyptic future. Love itself has an inherently self-sacrificial quality to it. Once you love someone, your life becomes bigger. You’re no longer all that matters. In the context of worship it means weaving your life together with the lives of those around you and building something beautiful together.
What we need in our world is peacemakers, adapters, communities who live into the good story. The world needs people to think beyond the course of their own lives and to remember that they are part of a very old story. This story began long before we came into existence, and will continue far after we die. So, what will you begin that will outlive you? What seed will you plant, either in your congregation or your life, that will take a hundred years to mature when your body has long returned to the earth?
Sarah Werner is the communications coordinator for Central District Conference, MC USA and the leader of Olentangy Wild Church in Columbus, Ohio. She is the author of Rooted Faith: Practices for Living Well on a Fragile Planet (Herald Press, 2023).