“I am crucified with Christ; nevertheless I live; yet not I but Christ liveth in me; and the life I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”

(Galatians 2:20)

Recently we all witnessed a thrilling drama taking place in far away Russia. All over the world, minute by minute, people were glued to their television sets. Presidents and kings, heads of state and private citizens, all classes and conditions of people were avidly watching each act of a gripping drama.

The action shifted back and forth: now to the kidnapping of Mikail Gorbachev and his family in the Crimea by a tyrannical junta in a military coup that threatened to throw the whole society of Soviet peoples back into a cruel police state; and then the scene would shift to the heroic efforts of Boris Yeltsin in Moscow as he adroitly marshaled the passive resistance of freedom loving Muscovites and kindred spirits all round the world to resist by moral suasion the forces of tyranny.

Some people are now saying that this drama we watched will go down in history as the most momentous event of the 20^th century.

But what made it so enthralling, so compelling of our attention? Was it the heinousness of the crime of the kidnappers? Was it the military threat to the freedom of the Soviet people? Was it the political struggle between those contending for democracy and a market economy and those still clinging to the old system of Marxian communism?

I’m inclined to believe that the factor of superlative interest for all of us in that Russian drama was just this: here were brave people putting their lives on the line for something they strongly believed in. Wasn’t it this that gripped our hearts, glued our eyes to the TV, and squeezed prayers from our lips for those brave souls putting their lives on the line for freedom and mercy and justice and truth? Boris Yeltsin and his colleagues barricaded in the Federal Building refusing to yield to the military junta, and the courageous young people surrounding the Federal Building defying the curfew order and opposing the massed tanks with their prostrated bodies on the pavement — all laying their lives on the line for a good and noble cause.

Does this experience tell us anything about ourselves — this universal human fascination in watching people hazard their lives? Does it just mean that the popularity of the bull fights in Spain, Mexico and Portugal, and the gladiatorial games in ancient Rome, and the violence on the American TV screen in our homes today, are the inevitable response of the purveyors of entertainment for us because human beings are basically violent and cruel creatures who love to see human life laid on the line?

Or does this mean that we are creatures who admire courage in others and covet it for ourselves — that we are fascinated to watch it displayed wherever we can find it: in a Swarzeneager movie thriller, or a reviewing of the old Robin Hood saga; or the ever engrossing adventures of our astronauts, laying their lives on the line, hazarding other worldly dangers of weightlessness, airlessness, extremes of heat and cold, and even risking death in the lonely lostness of the far reaches of outer space? Is it all because we are so constituted that we are incurably infatuated with courage?

The Christian theologian would tell us that our fascination at seeing brave people put their lives on the line tells us something else about ourselves: that we have a built in readiness to receive the gospel story. For the essence of the story which the gospel tells is that the Great God of the universe is One who puts His life on the line for us men and women and our salvation. Yes, the invisible, eternal, and incomprehensible God has revealed the central core of His being as one who puts His life on the line for all human kind. Though the Almighty God who made the universe, set the stars in the galaxies of heaven, millions of light years away, and created all things, and endures beyond the reaches of time, gives us human beings some glimpse of Himself in the orderly wisdom of His physical universe and in the awesome beauty of His moral grandeur as revealed in the pronouncements of His prophets on justice, mercy, and truth; this great God has finally unveiled the mystery of His being most completely in the life and death of one brave man, Jesus of Nazareth — who put His life on the line for others.

Everything that’s done in Christian worship — the singing of the hymns and anthems — the reading of the Bible record — the preaching of the sermon — the enactment of the sacraments — is just one attempt after another to induce us, everyone, to make the spiritual pilgrimage to that cross, the place where a brave man put his life on the line for us.

Principal John Marsh of Mansfield said of Christian worship that it “seeks to take us back to that place where we learn anew what God has done to redeem us from sin and death, but so to take us back as to make us know that the same God is still active in the same way in the same world to save the same sinful race of men. Christian worship contemporarizes the gospel.”

The Book of Genesis tells us that when Hagar, the slave girl from Abram’s tent, ran away into the wilderness and was perishing, God came to her. Hagar was in the lowest depths of despair. She was heavy with child by Abram, her master. It was a conception that her childless mistress, Sara, Abram’s wife, thought she wanted and commanded, but when it actually occurred caused strife and jealousy between the women. Now, she, Hagar, a runaway slave perishing from hunger and about to give birth to a child that would be the cause of even greater strife, was visited by God who gave her assurance of his love for her and his protection for her unborn child. And the Old Testament record says that Hagar addressed this unknown God who had found her and saved her, as: “Thou God who seest me.”

There’s another important something our mysterious human fascination with life laid on the line should tell us about ourselves — just this: that we each one will find our fulfillment, our deepest peace and satisfaction in living this life we have, only through laying it on the line for something or someone.

Our admiration for the cool courage of Boris Yeltsin and his courageous colleagues in Moscow, putting their lives on the line for freeing the Gorbachev family and for all the benefits they were assured would accrue to humanity through their efforts, has its origin in our common human conviction, deep in our bones, that this is what we, too, must do somehow, if we are really to begin to live.

Christ on the cross is not only a revelation of the nature of God, but also a revelation of the nature of man, of every one of us, as God made us and intends us to be — at our best.

St. Paul understood this amazing paradox so well, not because it is logical, but because it had been pressed in upon him in his own experience. The Son of God who had loved him and given himself for him and rescued him from a life of self-seeking pride even at the heart of his religious zeal, had laid bare the secret meaning of life fulfillment to Paul — laying down his life for others after the pattern of Christ’s life and death. Exultantly Paul cries: “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless, I live; and yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life I now live in the flesh, I live by the faith of the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me.” Yes, Paul would sing:

“When I survey the wondrous cross

On which the prince of glory died,

My richest gain I count but loss

And pour contempt on all my pride.

Were the whole realm of nature mine,

That were a present far too small —

Love so amazing, so divine,

Demands my life, my love, my all.

Back during our national excitement and exultation over the incredible feat of those three brave astronauts who put their lives on the line to make the space trip to the moon and back, a young man visiting with Kurt Vannegut confided his deep, desolate dissatisfaction with the life he was living. When Vannegut said to him: “How can you talk like that with the American Space Program going so well?” The purposeless young man responded: “I’m one of the first generation of Americans to believe we have no future.”

But in that same week of the astronauts’ moon walk another young American, embarking from New York for Israel to serve in the Kibbutz program there, was interviewed about his purpose in going. He was asked why he, a Roman Catholic with a Master’s degree in Political Science from the University of Chicago, was going, paying his own travel expense, to Israel. And what did his parents think about his venture? His response was disarmingly simple, “They don’t quite understand it, but I’m not sure I do either,” he said. “Let’s say it’s emotional — a desire to do something for someone.” There it is — life laid on the line for something, or someone, beyond self bringing a sense of satisfaction and fulfillment.

In those unexpected emergencies of life no one of us wants to turn out to be a coward. We loathe and despise cowardice as much as we admire courage and valor. If our house caught on fire we would hope that we would try to rescue the members of our family rather than rushing out to save ourselves. We hope that if ever we are caught in an automobile accident we will be more interested in saving others than ourselves. But we can’t forecast what we will do in an emergency — put our lives on the line for others, or play the coward.

But what we fail to recognize all the time is that in the routine, the daily round of life, even more than in emergencies, we are either grasping life and living it courageously, committed, placed on the line for God in Christ, or we are missing our chance, shamelessly withholding the one thing we have to give — life itself.

The appeal and the satisfaction in the game of golf is making the little ball obey our bidding. Drive it down the middle of the fairway. Hook it or slice at will. Lift it sailing over a tree or up a hill. Roll it toward or into the cup.

The same thing is true in painting. A well-known watercolor artist wrote a book which he entitled, Making the Brush Behave. That’s what painting is all about — making the brush behave to transfer to the paper what you see with your eye and think with your thoughts into line and color and design.

So is it in living a life. We want to make the sum total of our time, energies, and resources fulfill our purposes, achieve our goals, not flake out and flounder about. But how? God in Christ shows us the way. That is what Paul’s text is all about — “No longer I live but Christ liveth in me.” God in Christ laid His life on the line for us. And we, by His grace, are given the power to make the commitment, the skill to do with human life what the creator intended human life to be used up for, and burned out in doing, laying it on the line for others in Christ’s name.

There are other styles of life. Sure. Man has been free to choose any from prehistoric times: head-hunting, wife-burning, pleasure-seeking. But are we among those who exercise our human power of discrimination to affirm that the ideal of life laid on the line redemptively in Jesus Christ is the life that completely satisfies us?