Becoming Fully Alive

What makes someone fully alive? What things are truly life-giving? The answers to such questions motivate a great deal of human activity. Why do people get themselves deeply into debt acquiring all manner of possessions and experiences? No doubt they expect these to somehow enhance their lives, to make them more alive.

I saw this quote the other day on the Twitter feed of Eugene Peterson, Presbyterian pastor and author of numerous books including the Bible paraphrase, The Message. "The American self characteristically chooses advertisers instead of apostles as guides." In other words, we trust advertisers to lead us into a fuller and deeper experience of life than we do the messengers Jesus commissions.

As preeminent consumers, Americans are convinced that the secret to life lies in "more." We need more money, more things, more experiences, more stimulation, more information, etc. You don't have to look at this situation very carefully to see the parallels with addiction. No amount of "more" is ever enough, and people's lives can become totally occupied with the search for "more." Sometimes faith or spirituality become a part of this addictive pattern. People can seek to add spirituality or faith as another "more" in the hopes that this will be the one thing they lack. But Christian faith has always been more about letting go than about getting more.

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When Paul writes to the congregation in Galatia (the letter providing the second of the daily readings for this week), he is speaking as an apostle of grace. He is talking about how true aliveness comes as a gift and not an accomplishment. This sometimes gets lost when we reduce Paul to formula. "Believe the right things and go to heaven." But Paul never says anything like that. For Paul, salvation was never about going to heaven. He did fully expect to experience resurrection just as Christ had, but he insisted that the faithful experienced a new and wonderful aliveness in the present. And it is a gift, he says.

We Protestants, with our focus on grace and faith, have been prone to distorting Paul's teachings in a particular way. We've very often turned faith into the thing we must do to get the prize. Faith becomes our effort, the "work" we must do in order to get the "more" of salvation. It is easy to see how this can happen. If we are saved by "faith in Christ," that does sound like we have to believe in order to be saved. Yet Paul says that our restored relationship with God is not our doing, that it is a gift. How to make sense of this?

It turns out that the phrase "through faith in Christ" could just as easily be translated "the faithfulness of Christ." In fact that seems a much more likely translation to many scholars. It also seems much more in keeping with Paul's emphasis on new life - on our being fully alive - coming to us as a gift and not an accomplishment. For Paul, aliveness is not something that can be gained through a consumer type pursuit. It cannot be acquired. It is not the "more" of all "mores." It is the gift of all gifts.

Perhaps you have experienced how incredibly alive it feels to fall in love. But as wonderful as love is, it cannot really be acquired in any conventional sense. People will do all sorts of things and spend all kinds of money because they are in love, but this is the result of love and not what leads to it. Here love is a lot like grace, and of course God's grace is all about love.

In Jesus, God's love (often an unrequited love) comes to us, longing for us, seeking us no matter the cost. And how wonderfully and remarkably alive it feels to fall into that divine love.

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