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The cords of death entangled me, the anguish of the grave came over me; I was overcome by distress and sorrow. Then I called on the name of the Lord: \u201cLord, save me!\u201d \u2026\xa0 For you, Lord, have delivered me from death, my eyes from tears, my feet from stumbling, that I may walk before the Lord in the land of the living. (Psalm 116:3-4, 8-9)

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Death and life.\xa0 It shows up all over the Bible, not just in the story of Jesus and his death on the cross.\xa0 I hope you don\u2019t feel that I\u2019m unduly belaboring the point from Sunday\u2019s sermon, but death and life is one of the most central threads through the scriptures.

There are perhaps two things worth underscoring here in Psalm 116.\xa0 Firstly, that it is God that saves us from death.\xa0 And he does it precisely at the moment when we give up all of our hopes in any other form of salvation and simply cry out to him: \u201cLord, save me!\u201d\xa0

This is the story of any journey of repentance we have ever been on, but it is also the story of any other spiritual journey we can be on.\xa0 This is the journey of learning to forgive.\xa0 This is the journey of grieving.\xa0 This is the journey of love and of marriage, and of so many other things that require more of us than we can actually give or do.\xa0 In each of these cases there comes a moment when we say: I cannot love this person again, not after what they did, unless it is by your grace\u2014Lord, save me!\xa0 Or, I cannot carry on without this person I loved unless it is by your grace\u2014Lord, save me!\xa0

Each of these are moments of death and surrender.\xa0 Moments of dying with Jesus.\xa0 But those are also the moments when we meet Jesus most profoundly.\xa0 Because he comes.\xa0 He delivers us from death, he is present with us in our sorrow, he gives us the grace to forgive, or to love, or to be transformed, or to turn away from sin.\xa0 He gives us, in other words, new life.\xa0 He saves us.

And this is the second thing to underscore.\xa0 Dying with Jesus is not just about dying.\xa0 If it\u2019s only about that part\u2014it sounds too hard and masochistic, frankly.\xa0 Thankfully it\u2019s not only about dying.\xa0 It is about that fact that it is in death that we find new life.\xa0 In those little moments of death, the new life of Christ is also born within us as he saves us again. \xa0Brings us more fully into the land of the living where we experience yet another taste of that \u201clife to the full\u201d that Jesus promises.\xa0

I don\u2019t know what else to call this other than a paradox.\xa0 But it is why the Christian church has chosen to mark itself with an instrument of death as its identity symbol all these years.\xa0 We are marked by the cross.\xa0 It is the symbol of Christianity--because Christians know that this cross means far more than just death.\xa0 It means life, true life, full life.\xa0 The only kind of life that is life: the life lived by those who have faced death, surrendered themselves to God, and have been raised on the other side to new life in Christ.\xa0

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