How many of you know what BASE jumping is? BASE jumping is the very scary sport of jumping off Buildings, Antennae, Spans, and Earth objects. If you want to do it more than once, you jump with a parachute or perhaps a hang glider. Some of you may have seen examples of this daring sport on television. An example:
Austrian extreme sportsman Felix Baumgartner, 30, took a sunrise swan dive off the outstretched hand of the Christ the Redeemer statue overlooking Rio de Janeiro. BASE jumpers, who parachute from fixed objects, often run afoul of the law. So Baumgartner had to smuggle his chute and kit (including the crossbow and steel cable he used to climb the 100-foot concrete-and-soapstone structure) onto a train carrying tourists up the 2,300-foot mountain, then scale the statue under cover of night. "This was real hardcore," said Baumgartner, who survived the jump and was whisked away in a waiting car. "Now I know why none of my colleagues have tried this before."1
Timothy F. Merrill, author of Learning to Fall: A Guide for the Spiritually Clumsy, wrote this about falling:
Unlike myself, many people enjoy the emotions of falling. They jump from airplanes, hot air balloons, bridges, skyscrapers, and high mountain cliffs. They dive off 30-meter platforms and oceanside bluffs ... But if you don't have enough altitude, grabbing a parachute isn't going to help much! It is important to gain altitude in life, rise above the battle, get beyond the irritations you have hitherto felt were so important.
He then quotes Ray Bradbury who says that ... if we listened to our intellect, we'd never have a love affair, we'd never have friendship, we'd never go into business because we'd be so cynical ... That's nonsense. You've got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.2
Wow! Sounds like risky, exciting business, this jumping off things and building wings in flight!
What I'd like to suggest this morning is that it is just such out-of-the ordinary, pushing-the-envelope stuff which enables us to experience the fullness of life for which God created us, and to which we are called in Jesus.
Over the last few weeks we've been looking at that marvelous little letter called 1 John, nestled between 2 Peter and 2 John in the New Testament. Last week we read from the first few verses of the fifth chapter, in which the author made it clear that it is a faith centered in an understanding of God we have come to know through Jesus, which enables us to tackle the challenges of the world.
Today we continue in the same fifth chapter. Here the author focuses on what he calls "the testimony" which God has made through Jesus. It's one of those precious verses in the Bible where the writer seeks to condense the whole message, or "testimony" of God to humanity, in a few words. Here is what the author of 1 John says in the eleventh verse of chapter 5: "And this is the testimony: God gave us eternal life, and this life is in his Son."
The testimony of God is that God has given us eternal life, and this life is seen and explained and revealed in Jesus Christ.
So what is this eternal life? There is a place in the Bible where eternal life is defined. Here is what Jesus says in the Gospel of John: "And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent" (3:17 RSV).
So eternal life is more than just life after death or immortality. This verse would indicate that we're talking about a quality of life that can begin now -- a life that is marked primarily by knowing and relating to God. And further, and this is what I want us to note today, this knowing of God is to be found in Jesus (v. 11).
So what does that mean? I believe it has a very practical and vital meaning for you and me in our Christian lives. Eternal life is to be found in Jesus because it is through walking in his footsteps that we learn to trust in God and thereby know God.
What does it take to get a glimpse of this thing called eternal life? It just doesn't seem to work very well just to think about it, right? It goes back to that great line that "you can act your way into thinking much easier than you can think your way into acting." I believe that is why John writes that "eternal life is in God's Son." It is Jesus who is always BASE jumping, always doing crazy, unexpected things. And as we walk and jump in the footsteps and hang gliders of Jesus, we get our wings, we experience eternal life. We learn to trust and learn the joy of the life with God we were created to experience.
Life with God that we access through Jesus is not a life where we are always worrying about whether we've done this or that wrong. Life with God, eternal life in which we know God, is not trying to communicate with a God who is always looking for the corrections, the grammar checks. Life with God, eternal life, is not just an anxious life, wondering whether, after we've done our best piece of work, the Great Spell Checker in the sky will ignore our effort and instead see our mistakes. Ever have a love letter to your parents returned with the misspellings underlined? That's what many people feel any effort to be faithful to God will result in.
The testimony of God, says the writer of 1 John, is that we have been given eternal life, and if you want to know what that is, don't sit at home pondering. Go BASE jumping with Jesus! Do what Jesus would do, who lived eternal life! Go on a work camp. Go serve food in a soup kitchen. Work with youth. Visit the elderly. Teach a Sunday school class. Tell your boss to stop using the Lord's name in vain. Tell your best friend to cool it with the swear words. Find new ways to love and forgive friends and members of your family, beyond what is expected. Go BASE jumping with Jesus, and you will find eternal life. And even if you fall, God's Spirit and the Body of Christ are there to catch you.
What would eternal life look like? I'll give you one example:
Two brothers worked together on the family farm. One was married and had a large family. The other was single. At the day's end the brothers shared everything equally, produce and profit.
One day the single brother said to himself, "It's not right that we should share equally the produce and the profit. I'm alone, and my needs are simple." So each night he took a sack of grain from his bin and crept across the field between their homes, dumping it into his brother's bin.
Meanwhile, the married brother said to himself, "It's not right that we should share the produce and the profit equally. After all, I'm married, and I have my wife and children to look after me in years to come. My brother has no one, and no one to take care of his future." So each night he took a sack of grain and dumped it into his single brother's bin.
Both men were puzzled for years because their supply of grain never dwindled. Then one dark night the two brothers bumped into each other. Slowly it dawned on them what was happening. They dropped their sacks and embraced one another.3
Those brothers tasted eternal life.
Pray that this week you might be led to do some BASE jumping with Jesus, the out of the ordinary, the thing you can only do by God's power, and in the process, find the wings of eternal life.
1. Art Koan, "The Big Picture: Brazil," Life, February 2000, p. 22.
2. Timothy F. Merrill, Learning to Fall: A Guide for the Spiritually Clumsy (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 1981), pp. 81-85.
3. Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen, A Second Helping of Chicken Soup for the Soul (Health Communications, Inc., 1995), p. 37.