Poured Out

“As for me.” Why do we need this? It is almost embarrassingly personal, a private message between the mentor and protégé, and we seem like voyeurs listening in. Maybe we should just draw the curtain closed around the hospital bed and let them have their chat while we tend to other things.

Except that here, as in all things, there is a lesson to be learned. A life to consider, perhaps to model. We listen in and hear a challenge to the kind of life that gospel requires. Requires? Demands? That doesn’t seem right. The kind of life that the gospel affords or invites. A door is opened into this kind of life, this all-or-nothing life. And the one who opens the door stands with you to the very end. But perhaps we’re getting ahead of ourselves here. Let’s look at this life, this poured-out life.

The description is poured out as a libation. Libation is not a word we encounter all that often. The Greek is σπένδομαι, (stendomai), and sometimes it means to be put to death, to have one’s life’s blood poured out. It means to give one’s all, withholding nothing. A libation is a liquid sacrifice as opposed to a grain sacrifice or meat sacrifice. It would not be a misuse to speak of blood, sweat, and tears as part of the offering. We talk about that total commitment calling forth our vital essence, our full selves.

It is not, however, implied that the only way to be poured as a libation is to die, that only the martyrs can be said to have been poured out. We can, instead, read this as a call to live, not to die. Not to diminish those who die for the faith. Even in our so-called civilized world today, there are those who do make this ultimate sacrifice with frightening regularity. But we need not issue the call to die from our pulpits week by week. Instead, we issue the call to live. But to live fully.

The mentor describes the life as one of fighting the good fight, of running the race. Choose your metaphor. The image of fighting might be uncomfortable for some in such a contentious time. But we fight for air; we fight for rights. There are fights that carry all sorts of connotations; it is important to choose what communicates best. The verse says, “the good fight,” which brings to mind the late Congressman John Lewis’s call for us to get into good trouble—trouble for the right purposes, trouble to bring about the right change. Fighting for the sake of fighting or to prove strength or toughness is not a good fight. But the fight for justice, for redemption, for transformation, might be.

Or maybe just keeping the faith would be the place to settle for this moment. What does it mean to keep the faith? Keep it to oneself? Keep it hidden away and safe and secure from all alarms? Keep it unchallenged, unexamined, tucked into some rarely visited corner of our existence? Surely not. No, the call is to keep the faith before us always. To let faith, to let Jesus, be the measure by which our lives are measured. We keep the faith when we live it every day. We keep the faith when we don’t set it aside when the choices get difficult. We keep the faith when challenged by divisiveness or hatred and prejudice, we don’t set it aside to go along and get along. We risk security and privilege by keeping the faith.

We keep the faith by listening to and leaning into the words of Jesus, by looking at his life as the model for our own. We keep the faith even when others seem to be swayed by something less than the faith of Jesus, something that resembles the faith of nation or race or moment. Paul, facing the end of his life, declares that he has kept the faith. We, facing another day of living and choosing and leading, declare the same.

The second set of verses, then, leans toward the author of that faith—the doorkeeper who invites us into a new way of living in the world. “The Lord stood by me,” the verse declares, even when no one else would or did. The Lord was the source of my strength, the source of my proclamation, the power to risk moving beyond the safe boundaries into a wider world with this hope and promise. There was a new sense of safety and a new understanding of security because of the one who stood beside.

“I was rescued from the lion’s mouth.” But wait, was he? What does rescued mean for Paul? How does the writer understand this concept? It obviously doesn’t mean avoidance of suffering, a lack of hardship. Here is where we wrestle with this idea of rescuing. We want the message to be one of safety, a lack of pain or suffering. But that isn’t the promise. That isn’t the rescue. Instead, the rescue is inclusion in the kin-dom of God. The rescue is a relationship that never wavers, a presence that is real and felt and claimed. The rescue is an identity that is found in living poured out as a libation. We find who we are as we give ourselves away. We hold on to our true essence when we spend ourselves in the cause of Christ. We are poured out, so that glory is given to the one for whom we pour. And there we find the joy in living fully.