Scripture: Romans 6:1b-11
Given on 5/26/2019
Mount Everest, the world’s tallest mountain above sea level (Jameson would want me to add that “above sea level” part) has been in the news a lot the past few weeks for all of the wrong reasons. At 29,009 feet or 5 and a half miles above the oceans, Everest is a challenge in and of itself for adventurers—wholly different from any of the other tallest peaks in the world. Over the past two decades, Everest has become an incredibly popular destination for climbers who wish to summit the highest point on the globe. This year, the reports have centered both on the amount of trash that has accumulated at the various stations along the climb and more recently, the number of people who have died trying either to get to the top or to return to the bottom. An image tweeted out by a British outdoor journalist from near the peak showed an almost dystopian reality of climbers in heavy coats, with oxygen tanks, all waiting to summit the mountain but spending a long time in what climbers call the “death zone” above 26,000 feet where oxygen deprivation and frostbite can quickly become deadly. This year, at some stage of the ascent or descent 10 climbers have died in that zone largely because the wait times to either get up or down have become dire and at that height one’s brain stops functioning in the manner in which it was intended and judgment is largely compromised. I’ve thought a lot about Everest this week with these reports coming in because I have been somewhat of an Everest enthusiast. A few years ago, before I had a wife, or kids, or a job, or any of the responsibilities that come with moving into adulthood, my father gave me a copy of Jon Krakauer’s book, Into Thin Air. The book is an accounting of the time Krakauer spent trying to ascend to the top of Everest and the tragedy, similar to this years climbing season, that occurred the year that he was there. And Krakauer is a great writer. He’s now written, at least 6 books that have appeared on the New York Times bestseller’s list and before that he had enjoyed a successful career as a features writer for Outside magazine. And somewhere in between Krakauer’s writing, the subject matter, and the wanderlust experienced by a junior in college with a greater sense of imagination than personal safety, I quickly became enamored with the idea of climbing Everest. Now, a couple things to keep in mind, as has been previously established, I am completely terrified of heights. Any higher up than a standard 6 foot tall ladder and I start to get a little nervous. Sweaty palms and brow, raised heartbeat, visions of plummeting to my demise, all of this starts to swirl in my brain and so I’m not really the best candidate to attempt a mountain that routinely flummoxes the most seasoned of climbers. Also, it costs a lot of money, like a lot, to even arrange the trip to attempt the climb. It takes months and months of preparation and both the trip and the climb are done in several stages that require traveling by everything from plane to yak and while, I suppose, it is theoretically possible for a 20 year old man with the knowledge of how to use the internet could theoretically arrange such an adventure, this 20 year old man was not the person to attempt it. But there was a time in my life in which, at least in my head, I could see myself going on such a voyage. And even now, there is a part of me that, again, at least in my head, believes that I would overcome all my clear and apparent shortcomings for a shot at standing on the top of the world and looking down over all of it at once. All that being said, if you study the concept of climbing Everest, even a little bit, you become aware of a number of things. One, it is a journey. It takes, at a minimum, months and months of traveling by the aforementioned plane and yak, of rising in elevation and then spending time acclimating to the elevation. There are a couple of different ways that one can get there but both require travel through either Tibet, a country that China would very much like to pretend doesn't actually exist and that lives under the threat of Chinese annihilation like all the time or Nepal, a country that is desperately poor and lives on, among other things, the milk of the, again aforementioned, yak. I should stop at this point and mention that I’m willing to bet that I’m the only preacher in the world outside of Kathmandu who has made three references to the noble yak in his sermon today. Two, it is exceedingly dangerous. Each year, climbers at multiple stages of the ascent fall, pass out due to lack of oxygen, become confused and lost because of lack of oxygen, and have other health related emergencies that leave them stranded in a part of the world in which the air is too thin for helicopter blades to actually work. In fact, the only way to get an emergency medical team up to one of the first stages of the climb is to start low enough to where helicopter blades will catch the air, produce enough velocity to fling yourself at the side of a mountain, crash into the mountain on your skids and slide down into the landing area. Which, if that sounds bad, getting back down is even worse. In order to fly back down the mountain, you gun the engine of the helicopter hard enough that it lifts up the helicopter just a bit at which point you face back down the mountain and use some combination of gravity and gliding to get back to a point whereby your blades will once again function properly. And if you do die attempting to crest the summit, climbers all know, that wherever you stop will, in all likelihood be your final resting place. It is simply too hard and requirers far too many resources to retrieve and transport bodies back down the mountain to attempt it. When persons do perish on the mountain, they join the others in a memorial to all persons lost trying to make this most storied of summits. Third, and most importantly, you cannot do this climb alone. Between the movement of one’s gear and rations, the supplies retrieved at each stage of the climb, the network of doctors, pilots, cooks, and, of course, sherpas, the native people who, because they are always used to the level of oxygen deprivation at that high an elevation, assist westerners with hauling all their stuff up the mountain. Even Sir Edmund Hillary, who famously became the first westerner to reach the top of Everest, had a sherpa named Tenzig Norgay to carry most of his stuff and assist in his climb. To date, the number of people who have completed the climb without the use of assistance or oxygen is small compared to the overall number. You simply cannot do this by yourself. In the most recent report from the mountain—one about the death of an avid climber from Utah man who had left his job to try to summit the highest peaks on each of the continents. Everest had been his last and it was on the descent that he had passed away from oxygen deprivation. They interviewed the head of one of the companies that puts together these expeditions to Everest and the thing that stuck was his lamentation over the lack of teamwork amongst the climbers. In his mind virtually all the tragedies that had occurred on Everest this season could be attributed to a lack of shared community and responsibility amongst the climbers. I’ve thought a lot about this idea about of needing one another as I read over Paul’s letter to the church in Rome and especially the passage that we have for today.
In today’s scripture, Paul begins with this notion that, no doubt, would have held a lot of sway in first century Rome, at a time in which hedonism and excess were simply the order of the day for many. It is this belief that if God is a God of love and grace, as Christians claim God to be, then doesn’t it make all the sense in the world for us to sin all the more knowing that to sin means that God’s grace, God’s love will be made all the more powerful. Think of it this way, if having to forgive a few things is good, having to forgive a lot of things is even better. God’s grace is made all the more powerful with the more sin that it must cover. But Paul is quick to reject this notion. “By no means!,” he retorts. In other words, simply because one can sin does not give one license to sin. Simply because forgiveness is offered freely and without merit does not mean that this is the life to which one should aspire. For those who have truly experienced the love of God, the forgiveness that is made possible by the life, and the death, and the new life of Christ, we, too, must be led to a place in which we are also dead to sin. Indeed, death to sin, is the first and only requirement to becoming truly alive in Christ. As believers, we bit-by-bit, inch-by-inch die to self that Christ might be born and reign over our souls. That we might have, as Paul says, “newness in life.” When we become united in Christ, with Christ and with one another, we each die to all that is not Christ. We each allow that part of us that has become separated from the love of God, to whither and to die and to fall away so that in Jesus we might experience life and experience it in abundance. We each allow those parts of us that cause stress and grief and dis-ease, to pass away that, in Christ, we might gain a peace that surpasses all understanding. We each allow that part of us that is temporary, that is finite, that thinks only of ourselves and our place and status in this world to pass on that that piece of each of us that is infinite, eternal, forever might begin living for God and for one another. We each stand at the precipice of eternity, but, in Christ, we must be willing to forego that which is finite, perishable, dead in order to take that step into the infinite.
But here’s the thing, we cannot do this by ourselves. Death is hard—physical death, emotional death, spiritual death. It is hard and humbling to think and to know that a part of us must die to sin that we might be alive in Christ. A part of us may need to be burned away like dross in order for us to see the gold of God a’glow in the center of our being. That which is broken must pass away so that that which is holy might be born again and anew and never, ever die. That which is eternal must always be allowed to swallow that which is temporal, finite, ephemeral. But apart from one another we are far too often blind to the brokenness, the sinfulness, the mangled parts of our lives that must be washed away in the love of Christ. Apart from communities of faith we are forever and always tempted to cling to the stuff of the world and this life and not simply let go and allow the spirit unfettered access to our souls. Apart from one another we are just egotistic and selfish beings who see the world through our own lens with no help from another and how scary can that world look? Apart from our family, apart from our friends, apart from our church family, what is there? Even as we each prepare ourselves to stand before the holy light of God, to sup at the great feast of heaven, to feel the spirit rising up in us again and again, we always only ever do so with one another, with our sisters, with our brothers, with Christ. Our faith teaches us time and time again that we only ever journey up God’s holy mountain—the place where no one will ever hurt or kill again—by linking up with one another. And this is different from how the world teaches us. The world teaches us that we go up mountains as individuals, pushing our way up to the top, not being concerned with the plight of the person next to us. But on God’s Mountain, we know that we only carry one another, we only walk hand in hand, we only ever move towards the light of forever as a people, as a race, as a creation.
Sisters and brothers, from the cold, hard, darkness of the tomb emerged light and life eternal. And it is a light that we are to bear to the nations. It is an eternity that we are called to start experiencing right now. From that tomb to the upper room came the spirit of the risen Christ transforming a bunch of scared tax collectors and fishermen into the most courageous force within the history of the world. From that tomb, to a road on Damascus, came the voice of God to Saul, bringing redemption to the life of one who was a broken as anyone and birthing Paul, the great evangelist of our tradition. From that tomb, comes the spirit of God to us, to transform us into the disciples of today, the ones we have been waiting for, the repairers of the breach, unifiers of all of God’s children. From the tomb comes a faith that can move mountains, a hope that can overcome despair, a love that tears down all the walls we build around us. Faith, hope, and love, remain these three, and the greatest of these is love. Glory be to God in the highest and on earth, peace, amongst all of God’s children. Alleluia, amen.
Image taken from: https://abcnews.go.com/International/die-mount-everest-limited-weather-windows-2019/story?id=63253991