“I am come that they might have life,

and that they might have it more abundantly”

(John 10:10)

Loss of life by death is always sad. Sometimes it is appalling. Last week, on April 3, that dire day when a whole cavalcade of tornadoes roared through the midsection of our nation, four hundred people were killed. They lost their lives by death. Since the first of this year, fourteen members of the Idlewild congregation have died — some young, some old. All lost their lives by death.

There’s loss of life by sudden heart attack, by the slow attrition from the infirmities of age, by raging, uncontrollable cancer. Daily, our shocked attention is called to loss of life by death.

This Holy Week reminds us that even for the Son of God there was waiting for him on that dark Friday, as the price of his humanity and the cost of accomplishing his mission, the loss of his life by death on a cross.

But as bad as loss of life by death always is, there is something worse.

Have we begun to calculate that more appalling loss of life that is lost, not by death, but in the midst of life? This is the thing that disturbed the soul of Stephen Vincent Benet and wrung from him those never-to-be-forgotten words in A Child Is Born: “Life is not lost by dying! Life is lost minute by minute, day by dragging day, in all the thousand, small, uncaring ways.”

As Jesus looked out on life, this is what sickened our Savior most, not loss of life by death — he knew how life could triumph over death — but rather Jesus was appalled by the loss of life in the midst of life. We know that Jesus very seldom spoke of sinners. That was the word the Pharisees and the Scribes used to describe the people whom they considered to be living lives of less moral excellence than their own. “Sinners,” they said in scorn and disgust. Jesus used another term. He spoke of “the lost.” What did he mean by “the lost”? He meant the people who were losing life in the midst of life, whose precious resources of life, time, energy, emotions, opportunities were all slipping away from them because they were investing in doomed enterprises. Jesus said this precious possession of life can be lost in the midst of life in many ways. Sometimes life is lost as a coin gets lost, not through any fault of the coin, but through carelessness and mishandling by people. This is what happens so many times to small children. The precious possession of life is lost for them through the carelessness of others. Jesus said life can also be lost in the midst of life as a sheep gets lost through heedless wandering away from the good life at the shepherd’s side. The lost sheep doesn’t intend to get lost. He just follows his own selfish and animal instincts until suddenly he finds himself lost. Jesus said sometimes life is lost through calculated self-will, just as the son and heir of a wealthy and generous father can choose to renounce and to refuse the life at his father’s side and take his willful way into the far country. Innumerable are the ways that life can be lost in the midst of life. But however it’s lost, Jesus says it is always deplorable waste and pitiable tragedy, and it wrings the heart of God, who is restless and untiring in his search that the lost may be found. And, of course, this is what the Incarnation is all about, and this is what the cross as the climax of the Incarnation is all about, that we celebrate and experience by God’s grace in the keeping of another Holy Week.

Are you and I beginning to understand the significance for ourselves and for our times of Jesus’ clutching concern about this loss of life in the midst of life? Are we aware of how life may be lost, our own life or life dear to us, through overindulgence? Years ago, when we used this term overindulgence, it meant to most of us letting alcohol get the best of our lives. An old movie, The Lost Weekend, made this dramatically clear. It chronicled how a poor alcoholic lost, not only the consciousness of what took place in one weekend because he was inebriated, but his job, his family, his self-respect, and how someone’s life was lost, all through his overindulgence. And, of course, the problem of alcohol for many people is still with us. But in our time there is the additional problem of drug abuse, which is causing so many of our choice young people to lose the best that life has to offer them in the midst of life.

But are we aware of how life can be lost through negative emotions, through harboring jealousy, pride, hatred, an unforgiving spirit, envy, and all those other negative emotions that are such destroyers of the inner person, that so poison our minds and spirits that it is not possible for a clear, clean, unselfish, helpful thought to swim in and motivate us? How many people who are the strictest teetotalers, who are so careful about guarding their lives from any sort of harmful drug abuse, are nevertheless subject to these deadly destroyers? Are we not aware of how these can disarm us before we fight the real battles of life?

Are we losing life in the midst of life, minute by minute, day by dragging day? If so, where are the leaks? How many times do we hear people say, “Oh, there is so little time to enjoy your family, your friends. We are so pushed by the frantic tempo of these days. Our lives are too crowded”? How many times do we hear someone say about a wonderful life that is cut short in youth or in maturity, “Why, life was just stretching out before that one and suddenly he is gone. What a pity he had just begun to live”?

And yet, are we among those people who squander what precious bit of time God gives us in fussing and squabbling and pouting and nursing hurt feelings and carrying a grudge, instead of loving and serving and enjoying every moment of these wonderful human relationships? Of course, it’s in relationships that we win or lose this thing we call the opportunity of life. It’s there that we find contentment or run into despair. This is where life is saved or lost.

I wonder if we have caught on to the compelling urgency of Jesus’ warning to us and to our own nation this very moment that life be not lost in the midst of life. Just as we move toward the celebration of the two hundredth anniversary of our nation, are we going to lose the dream of the patriots who founded this nation on those enduring, high, idealistic principles? It can be lost, you know. I remember a striking book by that provocative Quaker Elton Trueblood that was published about twenty-five years ago in which he talked about the quality of life in the nation. He gave it the title The Life We Prize. Here is what he wrote:

What we are now experiencing in the Western World is really a depression, but it is not the depression which has normally been expected, namely, an economic one. For several years various persons have warned that a depression might come, and we have said up to now that the prophets of doom were wrong about this, but actually the prediction has materialized, though in an unexpected way. What we have is a moral depression. The stock market is still strong, and the price structure has not broken, but something more serious is happen­ing and will become much worse unless we can take steps to check the movement….

… What is really tragic is not death for a reason, but the slow petering out of life in self-indulgence.

Well, that was more than twenty years ago, and the slow petering out of life in an avalanche of cheap and shoddy living has grown in intensity through the years, and now the stock market has broken, and the value of the dollar moves rapidly toward the ultimate of zero purchasing power as it dwindles week by week, and the spreading Watergate scandal involves more and more people in places of high trust and responsibility in our national life.

Collectively and individually in America today the world’s corrosive stain is destroying the moral grandeur of a once great and spiritually sturdy people. Whether you call it the Watergate mess, or the era of electronic snooping to destroy the rights of personal privacy, or the epoch of income tax temptations — whatever you call it, it all boils down to this: We are losing, or we have already lost, the good life right here in the midst of life, little by little in a slow landslide of cheap and shoddy living. And it is not only in Washington but here. For Washington, alas, has no originality. Washington but reflects the image, the hopes, the fears, the convictions, and the conduct of Mr. and Mrs. America, Main Street, and RFD.

But the story of our condition is not all sad, because we still have the gospel of God’s love for a desperately needy world. You see, the big business of religion is to save life from being lost in the midst of life. Oh, how strange it is that some people should get the idea, the very perverted idea, that religion is something designed to fence life in, to restrict, to deny, to keep people from certain delightful and enjoyable experiences. “Oh, no,” says the man in the street or the person to whom you talk about the Church and the religious faith, “oh, no, I don’t want to be fenced in. I don’t want someone to tell me what to do and when to do it. I want to enjoy life while I have the time. Perhaps later, but not now.”

There are people who really believe that the Christian religion dangles before people the prize of a promised heaven after this life on condition that one will renounce some of the joys and broader experiences of this life. How far this is from the mind and the message of Jesus Christ. Listen to him: I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.” Jesus came to make it possible for every person to enter here and now into an abiding relationship with God through faith in Christ, a relationship that would immeasurably enrich and broaden and increase in every dimension that person’s life. To the returning prodigal the father says, as he hugs him close to his heart, “This my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found.”

Any person who is away from this blessed relationship with God in Christ is lost, and life, the best of life, is lost. Any moment in time, any experience of human relationships, any event in history is lost if it is away from the redeeming, transforming power of Christ. In him was life and the life was the light of men.

But how not to lose life but to save it? What word has the Christian faith for us here? What does it tell us to do? It’s the very simple but very difficult paradox: How to save life? Why, give it away. A compassionate woman went into a veterans hospital to cheer up the sick and the wounded. She came to a bed where a young veteran was sitting upright, and she noticed that the right sleeve of his pajamas was empty. She started back in horror, exclaiming, “Poor lad, how in the world did you lose your arm?” The veteran stiffened and said, “Madam, I did not lose it. I gave it for my country.”

And Jesus, how did he lose his good, young life at thirty-three, cut short on a cross? He didn’t lose it. He gave it. Listen to him: “No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself’ for “the life of the world.”

It’s all in the way we live it, you see, day by day. We need not be losing life to age or disease or negative emotions or pressures of the time, in all our small, uncaring ways. No, if with a will and a sense of dedication we give it, offer it up entirely with a holy passion and purpose to God through Christ, life is never lost-not even in death. For Christ’s man or woman, death is only one other experience, an event in the life eternal. It’s the turning of a corner, the going into another room in the Father’s house where another phase of life, of the same life, is lived with God in a broader and more blessed way.

When Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island was first published, one of the critics gave it a very unfavorable review. His opinion was that the work was too romantic, written undoubtedly by a man who didn’t know anything about the harsh realities and tragedies of life. But, of course, it was just this seamy side, this suffering side of life, that Stevenson had always been up against. He had fought a battle against an incurable illness since he was a small child. He had to write all his thrilling adventure stories, not out doing some daring thing, but propped up in bed, usually with a raging fever. Yet the spirit of Robert Louis Stevenson was unbroken, unbowed, and unembittered because he had experienced this redeeming relationship with God through faith in Jesus Christ, which saved him from loss of life, precious life, in the midst of life.

When Stevenson died at forty-four and was buried in Samoa, the friendly natives there put these lines up above his grave, lines that he, Stevenson, had written for this purpose:

Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse that you grave for me:

Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.

“Life is not lost by dying! Life is lost minute by minute, day by dragging day, in all the thousand, small, uncaring ways.” But it need not be lost — ever — if we give it away, offer it up to him who says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.” “I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.” “Fear not … it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.”