Loss that leads to life by Stewart Perry
It’s an exciting weekend for me, my Rugby League team gets it’s first points of the season… they have a bye… So far this year they have lost every single game… 8 if you’re counting. I love to win, I’m competitive by nature, & I love it when my teams win. However, in sport as in life, you just can’t win all the time. Loss is important, loss is part of God’s created order in the world & something that I think we should be better at embracing. I know it’s an area of my life that always needs work.
We’ve just begun a sermon series on Sundays across our 3 churches titled: “life in all it’s fullness”. Continuing to add, to gain, to win in every aspect, is not life in all it’s fullness. For one, it’s a fairy tale & secondly it just doesn’t happen, & if it did it would be incredibly unhealthy.
In Matthew 19 a wealthy & seemingly successful young man asks Jesus what he must do to have eternal life, thinking it was like everything else he’d accumulated or been given. He thought he could do something to gain something. But Jesus response is that he has to lose everything & he went away grieving. Ironically he experiences loss which is manifest in grief. I’ve always hoped that he goes away & recognises the folly of his life & becomes instrumental in the early church, but scripture doesn’t give us those details & maybe that’s part of my personality wanting everything to work out for the best. In life there isn’t always a happy ending to the story & loss can become all consuming.
Last weekend I had the privilege of leading the Anzac Day commemoration at Robina & I know Eron had a similar privilege in Burleigh Heads. As I reflected on that experience, the recognition of loss has become part of the Australian character & culture. It’s not a day where we celebrate war & winning. It’s a day we recognise that loss has shaped us as a nation. There’s a deeply religious part of Anzac Day commemorations that many might miss because we hardly ever explain the symbolism. The Last Post is played then a minute silence to reflect on the death & the loss. But after the Last Post, Rouse is played. Rouse is about resurrection & bids us to get up & keep going & embrace life.
In some circumstances in the natural order of things we can’t have new life without loss. From a spiritual perspective, loss when it is experienced in relationship with God, through Jesus & grounded in Christian community can not only be beautiful to witness in the outpouring of compassion & support, it can also lead us to recognise the hope we have. Loss balanced with hope & surrounded in love is life in all it’s fullness.
This week we learned that foundation headmaster of All Saints Anglican School, Rev’d Canon Len Nairn passed away. I only had the privilege of meeting him a few times but I’ve seen, multiple times this week, how people have been able to reflect on their experience of him & the legacy he left, the relationships he nurtured & the ones that nurtured him. Although there is deep sadness, it’s clear that sadness has been met by hope & the love of God and it has been a beautiful thing to witness.
God suffered the ultimate loss in the death of Jesus to bring us life. Life in all it’s fullness is not running away from loss, it’s allowing it to be met by hope & love. When that happens, new life is not only possible, it’s the most likely outcome. We will always have grief, loss, trials & hardship to contend with. Life in all it’s fullness is not praying all that away, it is praying that we recognise that God is with us through all those experiences, our church community is with us to walk with, & that we do have the hope of eternal life. Eternal life is not transactional, like the rich young man had hoped. It is relational. Sometimes that might appear messy & complex, but God brings beauty out of life’s messy complexity & I believe that is life in all it’s fullness.