A few years ago, just before Thanksgiving, Tom Lind, a salesman from Montana, was making his rounds, traveling his regular route along the southern Oregon coast. As usual he was in his older model pickup, piggybacked with his small camper.

Looking to continue his route south and east, Lind made a fateful spur-of-the-moment decision. He opted to take the scenic route. Only a few miles on this blue highway, however, the elevation rose rapidly and good ol' Oregon drizzle transformed into swirling snowflakes. Tom was in his big pickup, so he kept going. But the snow kept coming. Soon Tom found himself in the middle of a blizzard whiteout.

Forced to pull over, Tom stopped for the rest of the day. By nightfall his pickup was a slightly discernible lump of white in a vast landscape of snow. Still Tom wasn't terribly worried. He was in his big pickup Soon the road-clearing crews would be along and would help him escape the cold clutches that held him and his truck captive.

What Tom didn't realize was that the scenic route he had chosen was closed after the first winter snowfalls. The Forest Service didn't maintain that road in any way. They would not be coming up that way until spring thaw.

But Tom didn't know that. Convinced that someone would be along as soon as there was a break in the weather, Tom determined to do the smart thing: stay in his big truck. Avoid the risks of exposure or getting hopelessly lost in a snow drift by hunkering down in his big truck.

As soon as he failed to arrive at his next sales appointment, family and friends, state and local police forces began searching for Tom. No one thought to venture up the little used, completely snow-blocked back track Tom had chosen. When the weather cleared and blue skies and sun shone down on Tom's trapped vehicle, the salesman opted to continue being smart and safe: he stayed with his big truck.

It seems impossible to understand now, but Tom stayed with that big truck for over eight weeks. He kept a journal of his thoughts, his hopes, his fears, his considered options. But still he sat in that big truck. Eventually he grew too weak to have any real options anymore. By Christmas he couldn't have walked out if he had wanted.

At the end of January a group of back-country skiers inadvertently came across Tom and his safe haven big pickup truck. Tom's journal revealed he had finally died sometime around January 15. His emaciated, dehydrated body was still in his truck. In trying to minimize his risks, Tom thought he was opting to stay safe. It turned out Tom was opting out of life.

Life is risky business. Right now we may be focused on those who are standing at risk as members of the armed forces. But the truth of creation is that all of us stand in harm's way every day of our lives. We may no longer think of ourselves as part of the food chain. But the truth is the mere fact we're breathing puts us on the list to someday NOT be breathing.

Like Tom and his big pickup truck, we may believe that seat belts, FDA regulations, security alerts, and smoke detectors can keep us safe. But the truth is we're fragile, fallible, fractured creatures whose lives are always hanging in the balance. Every one of us is only one breath away from eternity. Five seconds is all that separates us from forever.

Getting stuck on a snowy road is an experience with which all of us can identify. So too is the example Jesus gave his listeners of the wheat grain. Just as we're (almost) all drivers, so was Jesus' audience almost all farmers. The weaknesses and fallibilities of a car-the weaknesses and fallibilities of a crop-these are common, personal, everyday information. The organic nature of the wheat grain led to Jesus' natural rendition of the conclusion: the grain of wheat would either submit itself to death--falling into the fertile ground voluntarily--or would experience dying on the vine. When the wheat grain falls into that fertile ground, it's then, and only then, assured of a new starting point in life.

Disciples of Jesus live not in a logic of control but a logic of risk. For the Christian the contrast isn't between risk and safety, but between risk and danger. A strategy of safety always fails. A strategy of risk sometimes succeeds. As our text makes clear--a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, thereby producing much grain (John 12:24)--Jesus' teaching sanctions and elevates human risk-taking. (See also Jesus' parable of the talents [Matthew 25:14\-30].) Early disciples of Jesus left the security of home, temple, and tradition and risked it all on Jesus (Mark 7:5).

We worship a risk-taking God. When God created the universe, he took risks by creating a world endowed with freedom. God didn't make us automatons. God gave us freewill, which meant he risked our rejection, and risked our refusal of righteousness. And God continues to take risks by forming ever more complex structures of organization. The unfinished nature of creation, and God's invitation to us to join in the continuing creativity of the divine, means that God also must endure the risks of our creativity.

The language of love is the rhetoric of risk. Anglican theologian William Hubert Vanstone has developed a phenomenology of love in which he argues for three marks of authentic love: (1) love is limitless, (2) precarious, and (3) vulnerable. 1. Limitlessness: love goes to extremes, even risking being misunderstood, to express faithfulness and devotion; 2. awareness of the precariousness of love: love is fragile and needs constant cultivation; 3. vulnerability of love: giving is endangered.

Niels Henrik Gregersen has thought the most about a theology of risk. In his just-published Trinitarian Theology of Risk-Taking, he notes that "The more risks God is willing to take within the order of creation, the more God must be able to absorb the risks and restore the loss incurred on the creatures in the order of salvation. If not, divine risk-taking falls out of the logic of love." (232)

But the limitlessness, precariousness, and vulnerability of God's love for us means that "God is not only taking a risk in creating a world of freedom, and not only enduring and overcoming the risks of creation. According to Christian tradition, God is also assuming the victim's role in the incarnation of the eternal Son."

The story of the cross and resurrection of Christ is the story about how God the creator, who has exposed others to risks, also bears the risks and succumbs under the burden of risk. On the cross God is depicted as self-giving, even to the point of death. Since he had no offspring, Jesus is the icon of a loser in the evolutionary arms race. Since he was not able to make use of the protection of social networks, Jesus is the icon of an outsider, who refuses to play the game of success in social competition.

When Christians believe that God was in Christ, God is thereby proclaimed to be the co-carrier of the costs of creation. In an interconnected world, risks are shared risk, and the creator didn't withdraw from the ethics of sharing risks, even to the bitter end. . . . So deeply has Christ united himself with the role of the victims of risk that God does not only passively endure risks, but is also actively transforming those who lose in the game of risk-taking. For, as it's proclaimed, only the one who is willing to lose life, shall gain it." (Niels Henrik Gregersen, "Faith in a World of Risks: A Trinitarian Theology of Risk-Taking," in For All People: Global Theologies in Contexts, eds. Else Marie Wiberg Pedersen, Holger Lam, and Peter Lodberg [Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002], 233, 214-233.)

In Rob Weber's new book, [Visual Leadership: The Church Leader as Imagesmith, he tells a story about a hermit crab and what it taught him about risk-taking.

Being asked to go start something new is a somewhat frightening task. It's at once frightening and exciting. When the district superintendent called and asked me if I would consider being the pastor of the new church start (in Shreveport, LA), I wanted to make sure that it was what God wanted me to do and not just something that looked new and exciting. My wife and I were trying to discern whether we should take the opportunity to move and be part of the planting of a new congregation, so we went down to the land and walked around. We walked across the area that used to be covered with trailers, with many of the remnants still there. Then we climbed over the old barbed wire fence and walked into the towering pines. We talked about possibilities. We talked about the difficulty of leaving our current congregation. After a while we stopped to pray. I'm not one who usually asks for signs, but as we stopped to pray, I asked God to help me see what I was to do. I wanted to do what was the best thing for continuing to extend the Kingdom. We bowed to pray.

As we finished praying, I looked down at my feet, and there on the ground was a big pink conch shell half-buried in the pine straw. 'Now, what is a big pink conch shell doing half-buried in the pine straw in the middle of some undeveloped, unimproved woods in north Louisiana?' I thought. I wasn't sure, but I picked it up and started to imagine.

If you have played at a coastal beach, you have almost certainly seen a hermit crab in one of the tourist shacks. They're those little fuzzy crustaceans that inhabit the discarded shells of other creatures. They find a shell, move in, eat, and grow. Then they get to this point, after they've scuttled around and eaten enough seaweed, that they've gotten big enough to need another shell, and if they don't find another shell, they cease to grow, and eventually die. The decision to move [is] a critical point in the life of a hermit crab. If they decide to go to the other shell, they take this moment of risk where they move beyond the protection of one shell into the other shell." --Rob Weber, Visual Leadership: The Church Leader as ImageSmith (Nashville: Abingdon, 2002), 32-3

Jesus is inviting you this morning to live a new life. Jesus is inviting this church this morning to move from a haven of safety and refuge to risk movement and mission out in the world.

Are you willing to move out of the shell you're in? Are you willing to risk following Jesus. Are you willing to risk life? Are you willing to get out the shell of YOUR big pickup truck and face the future?

What a caterpillar calls death and the risk of the unknown, we call a butterfly.