This Week's Light Service Sermon

Light Service Sermons for the Month
Extremophiles
Pentecost XIV
DATE:August 29, 1999
TEXT: Matthew 16:21-28

"To all of you Saints here this morning, grace and peace to you from God our Father, from His Son, Jesus Christ and His Holy Spirit. AMEN

You've never meet this creature from the black lagoon. That's because it's a microorganism. You can't see it. And because the only place it lives is in environments where the temperature is at least 170 degree Fahrenheit with an optimum temperature of over 215 degrees. Water boils at 212.
Its name is "Pyrococcus Furiosus." Let's do that again. First name: Py-ro-coc-cus. Last name: Fur-i-o-sus. Good!
Pyro is only one of many microorganisms attracting the attention of scientists today. Biotechnologists are learning a lot from organisms living way out there, in dangerous places, on the edge. They call these microbes "extremophiles" -- a name that literally means "extreme-lovers."
Extremophiles are microorganisms that thrive in hot springs, polar ice caps, salty lakes and acidic fields. Not the kinds of places you'd want to be vacationing this summer! They simply love to live in conditions that would kill humans and most of the plants and animals we have come to know. "Extremophile microbes are also busy industrialists," reports The Futurist magazine, "producing enzymes that are enormously useful in food, chemical, pharmaceutical, waste treatment and other industries."
Let's go back to our little friend Pyro. Let's say you need a bleaching agent for making white paper. What you really need is an extremophile. So you contact Diversa Corporation, a California biotech firm, which tells you that a bleaching enzyme produced by Pyro and some of his hyperthermophilic relatives (who are living in the scalding geothermal springs of Yellowstone National Park) could provide an alternative to the chlorine you have been using in your paper-whitening processes making it not only a good change for the environment but also much cheaper. By the way, Yellowstone's extreme environment also yields substances useful for making perfume, beer and other commercial products (Cynthia G. Wagner, "Biotech Goes to Extremes," The Futurist, October 1998, 11).
We've heard of other kinds of extremophiles, extremephiles of the two-legged kind. Perhaps we just didn't realize it. Today's reading points us to the Greatest Extremophile of All Time. In the district of Caesarea Philippi, Jesus reveals himself to be an extremophile, showing his disciples that "he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised" (Matthew 16:21). When Peter objects to this extremely painful prediction, Jesus reels around and says, "Get behind me, Satan! ... you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things."
He then calls his disciples to join him in being one who lives in extreme environments. "If any want to become my followers," says Jesus, "let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it" (16:24-25).
Following the strange logic of extremophilic microbes, disciples are to do enormously useful work while living in environments that would kill most people. They are to experience suffering, self-denial and even loss of life, but in the process serve others, and ultimately find their real selves. The divine irony of the gospel is that loss for Christ's sake leads to heavenly gain.
I know what you're thinking. "All things in moderation. You have got to be kidding! Not me. I don't want to live on that kind of edge." And most people don't. But we in this room are not "most people." We are Christians. We in this room are further down the road to maturity or at least we say we are. We call ourselves "followers of Jesus." And where is Jesus leading us? To the edge--to self-denial, to sacrifice, to service.
The benefits of being an extremophile are found on several levels. For starters, life in a challenging environment can make us stronger, wiser and more secure in our convictions. It was no accident that the ancient Israelites got stronger through their period of oppression in Egypt: Exodus tells us that the Egyptians set taskmasters over them to oppress them with forced labor, and under the whip the Israelites built the cities of Pithom and Rameses for Pharaoh. "But the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and spread, so that the Egyptians came to dread the Israelites" (1:11-12).
Sometimes life breaks us, but then we become stronger in the broken places.
Sometimes challenges overwhelm us, but then we acquire wisdom that helps us to meet and overcome those challenges.
Sometimes we lose our faith in people and in the world around us, but then our faith in God becomes more secure.
We learn that every breath we take is a gift from a loving Lord, and that the promises of God are more trustworthy than any promises made to us by bosses or teachers or family members or friends.
An extremophile is not a person who spurns the world, but is instead a person who discovers that the world does not contain her salvation. Strength and wisdom and faith are always to be found on the edges of the world's comfort, in the challenging places where God resides.
This is not to say that an extremophile is an extremist. Christians who live on the edge are not people who go looking for oppression or suffering or martyrdom.
Take Julia, for example. Twenty-four-year-old Julia Butterfly Hill has spent a year living in a tree she calls Luna. This forest activist scurried up the boughs of the old-growth redwood in California to protest the logging practices of Pacific Lumber Company.
"People ask me what it will take for me to come down," she says. "I want to come down to a world where there is no more clear-cutting, no more herbicides sprayed on our trees, and the remaining 3 percent of our ancient forests are protected forever."
While we may admire Julia Hill for going to great lengths to take a stand for her beliefs -- perching as a lightning rod 180 feet above ground in a giant redwood -- many question the effectiveness of making ultimatums from extremist positions. Christian extremophiles take stands not in timbertops, but at timberlines -- in the rough-and-tumble engagements with other people, where life is harsh and difficult ("Random Notes," Rolling Stone, February 4, 1999, 17).
It is where people live -- in the marginal and transitional worlds of Egyptians and Israelites, blacks and whites, rich and poor, GenXers and retirees -- that extremophiles take their stand. It is in the midst of real-life joys and pains that they lose their lives for the sake of Christ, and in this process discover a life that is radically real and extremely worthwhile. Extremophiles are disciples who are:
* Extremely compassionate: willing to visit the infected sick in hospitals, the incontinent elderly in nursing homes, and the immune- deficient AIDS patients in hospices.
* Extremely humble: able to see that every good gift comes from God alone, and that personal talents and resources should inspire gratitude, not pride.
* Extremely patient: committed to working with challenging children, adolescents with attitude, and young adults who are struggling with their faith.
* Extremely forgiving: willing to forgive not just once, or twice, but again and again, because they know that God has forgiven them again and again.
* Extremely loving: volunteering to do Bible studies in prisons, sing-a-longs in retirement homes, and dinners in homeless shelters.
* Extremely faithful: living out a committed and trusting relationship with God, with spouse, with family members and friends, knowing that faithful living in an uncertain world is at the heart of a life that is real and worthwhile.
Extremophiles do all this enormously worthwhile work because it gives them great joy. It gives them a sense of satisfaction and a rush of pleasure that could never be found by punching a clock and drawing a paycheck. To make our activity look GOOD for people is a challenge for us all, and it can be good if we take up our crosses with conviction and do the work of discipleship.
The call of Christ is to be extremophiles, not extremists: people who discover strength, wisdom and faith in challenging environments, and who find a rush of joy and satisfaction in being extremely compassionate, humble, patient, forgiving, loving and faithful.
"God has not promised us safety," warns Stanley Hauerwas of Duke Divinity School, but rather "participation in an adventure called the kingdom. That seems to me to be great good news in a world that is literally dying of boredom" ("Preaching As Though We Had Enemies," First Things, May 1995, 48).
The adventure called the Kingdom is an adventure for Pyro-Christians -- people of God who can warm things up, set the community on fire for Christ.
It is an extremophilic journey that challenges us to do enormously useful work while living in situations that would terrify most people, way out there, in dangerous places, on the edge.
It may involve suffering and self-denial, but in the process it will enable us to serve others and ultimately find our real selves. Such an extreme adventure will be threatening, challenging, thrilling and satisfying -- but never, ever boring.
AMEN