However, God calls us to more than an emulative attempt – God calls us to a death to the ego so our selves can be reconstituted through an empowering of the Spirit. The Spirit enables us to die to those things we hold so tightly that we do not wish to let go.
As Walter Brueggeman says, “We want nothing that secures us to die.” Our family connections, our careers, our successes and even our failures can offer us security – we resist giving these up.
The deaths God calls us to live include refraining from entering the fray of gossip; being understanding to an overworked and underpaid salesclerk; taking the time to listen to someone’s pain or joy; going out of our way to be generous, praising or even confronting; and making time to recognize God at work in our lives and the lives of people around us.
The last line of St. Francis' prayer says it well – "It is in dying that we are born to eternal life." It is out of this daily dying and, in fact, in the very process of dying, that we proclaim our life in Christ to ourselves and to the world around us. It is through our willingness to pronounce in word and deed that Jesus Christ is Lord that we further God's kingdom in our own lives and in the lives of others.
During this Lenten season, those of us who claim Christianity would be wise to acknowledge frankly that being willing to die daily is incredibly difficult. Our call to be living sacrifices is, however, tempered with the quip that the problem with living sacrifices is that they are continually trying to crawl off the altar.
I suspect God is intrigued by our human machinations and even – dare I say – revels in the creativity we use to escape death. Nonetheless, God's gracious hand supports and guides us in our commitment to this journey of inward and outward death and those mysterious dimensions we once again claim on our journey towards Easter and beyond.
