Over the past year, I’ve listened to the oral arguments of a couple hundred Supreme Court cases. I know; I’m obsessed. It started last April with Obergefell, the equal marriage case, and it took off from there. At first I insisted on listening to every argument from a particular term, but after a dozen or so cases on bankruptcy law, I gave myself permission to jump around and choose the cases I am most interested in.

I’m fascinated by cases about capital punishment, or religion, or freedom of speech. I’ve also found that I’m particularly interested in cases in which states face off. When Indiana and Ohio go toe-to-toe, it’s usually a good listen.

Take a case like Tarrant Regional Water District v. Hermann from 2013. While their names don’t appear in the title, this case was basically Texas versus Oklahoma. It was an argument about water in the Red River, and both states thought they were being cheated out of their fair share. Or take a case from the term that just ended, V.L. v E.L., or as it could be called, Alabama versus Georgia, in which Alabama declared that it would not honor a second parent adoption performed by its neighbor. What I love about these cases is the way that states behave just like the people who live in them, each trying to get as much as they can for themselves while trying to avoid any obligations to the other. And, when the court gets it right, it reminds the states of their duty to each other, of their commitment to be in relationship.

In cases like these, you see the complicated way in which our separate states are united, and the way, often, that they struggle against that unity and what it costs them. Every state presses its own advantage, and none wants to pay for another’s well-being. They rebel against the idea that their relationships with one another might require sacrifice.

That mutual sacrifice is a foundational principle of our country, but it has been controversial from the beginning…as the musical Hamilton teaches us. In that famous rap battle between Alexander and Thomas Jefferson, about Hamilton’s plan to establish a national bank and have the federal government assume state’s debts, Jefferson gives the argument succinctly, “If New York’s in debt, why should Virginia bear it?”

But if the idea of mutuality has always been a hard sell, it is an idea particularly out of favor in our nation and our world today. You won’t win any election today suggesting that in order to form a community, a society, a nation, we are asked to give something of ourselves, to sacrifice some of our wants and needs for the good of the whole, that relationship comes at a cost. Whether it is fights about water, or adoption, or whether to remain in the EU, or to sign a climate compact, or to help resettle refugees, a central question of our time is “What are we willing to sacrifice to be in relationship with each other?”

Of course this is not just a question for states but also for the people who live in them. Each of us is asked what we will give and what we will give up for the sake of our relationships. Where will we strike the balance between the freedom of non-interference and the cost and benefit of mutual sacrifice? What am I willing to do for you and more importantly, for those I don’t know or don’t like? A friend said this week that she tries to hide her needs so that people will see her as easy to befriend. Many of us can probably relate. I am hesitant to ask others to deny themselves on my account and hesitant to deny myself even for a friend’s sake. Whether it’s someone who needs to talk about their grief when I’d rather stay in a good mood; or someone who needs a ride to the airport when I’d rather sleep in, that question stays with me, “What am I willing to sacrifice to be in relationship?”

For those who seek to follow, even imperfectly, the way of Jesus in personal involvement with each other, Matthew 16 seems to make the right answer clear. “If any want to become my followers, 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.” The kind of life into which Jesus invites his disciples, invites me, is a shared one, a life of sacrificial love.

This becomes even more obvious if we hear the story that leads up to Jesus speaking these words. He has just told his disciples for the first time that he will be killed. And Peter, looking out for his friend, says, “God forbid!” He wants to protect Jesus from suffering and death. And it’s this caring reply that gets the strongest rebuke Jesus gives in scripture. He shouts, “Get behind me Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”

Jesus rejects the idea that love can exist without sacrifice, the idea that he could be spared the suffering that his relationship with them will bring. The idea that we can love without giving of ourselves is a human idea. And the divine reality is that the question Peter has in mind, the question with which I began, “What am I willing to sacrifice to be in relationship?” is a false one. It suggests that there is somehow a way to exist without being in relationship, a way to live outside of connection to each other. Jesus tells his disciples that such an existence is not life, but the loss of life, that in seeking to save him from giving himself to them, they are condemning him. There is only one way forward, a way of self-denial, a way of mutuality. The real question we must ask is not what we are willing to sacrifice to be in relationship, but “Given that we exist in relationship, knowing that our lives are inextricably connected, how can I hold back even my life from you?”

I think this is what Denise Levertov is talking about in her poem, “At the Justice Department November 15, 1969.” The date to which the title refers was the day of a huge anti-Vietnam War demonstration. 500,000 people gathered in Washington to protest the war which President Nixon had promised to deescalate when he came into office 10 months before. In the midst of that protest, tear gas canisters are fired, and the poem’s narrator, blinded and retching, helps to drag friends and strangers up out of the fog, even as she too is helped by them.

She has chosen this nausea, wants this anguish, she says. She has chosen to taste the bitter taste out of her love for those with whom she marches, and out of her love for those on the other side of the world whom she has never met. She wants to be there because love has called her to be there. Even in the bitterness she opts for a life that is real.

And, like Jesus, she discovers, even in that smoke and pain, not defeat, but “a kind of joy.” She finds in her sacrifice a reward. It is the reward of being right where she needs to be, of the love made known by holding one another through the choking fog. If following Jesus means taking up the cross of self-sacrifice, it also means the experience that maybe you’ve had of realizing in a difficult situation that you are just where you need to be. When we give ourselves for love, when we sacrifice for the sake of personal involvement with each other, the result is not despair but “a kind of joy,” a satisfaction. When we lose something of our life for someone else, we discover in the depth of that loss a new life. The only life, according to Levertov. As she pours herself out for others she understands that there is in fact “no life other, apart from.”

The only real life is the life of relationship, the life that we discover when we are willing to risk ourselves for each other. If we seek to hold onto our lives by holding back from the other, whether it be water, or shelter, or love, the life we have hoarded for ourselves is lost. It is no life at all. But if we spend our life on those around us, on those we love and on those we do not, the life we believe we have lost will truly be found.

This weekend we celebrate Independence Day, but if our nation and world are to have a future, if we are to have a future, we must recognize and celebrate our dependence on each other and on all creation. The only real death is to attempt to have a life apart from the whole. The true loss is to see another blind and retching, hungry or thirsty, to know the pain and exile of the huddled masses and believe oneself to be separate. That is to disconnect oneself not just from those individual lives but from life itself, from the creative current of energy that runs through all things, the one life we share. No other, apart from.

There is a trick of grammar in our translation that makes this message plain. It’s probably not good biblical scholarship to depend upon a mistake of translation, but I think it works here. The passage reads, “Those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.” There’s a subject-object disagreement as it’s written. Plural subjects but a singular object. It should say, “Those who want to save their lives, will lose them, and those who lose their lives for my sake will save them.” That would be correct. But it would also be wrong.

Perhaps the translator knows, as Levertov does, as Jesus does, as we know, that life is always singular. One life we share. In our city, our country, our world. There is no question about it. We exist in relationship, and the only thing we can decide is whether to perish in independence or live in mutuality and love. One life we share. When we want to and when we don’t. When it is convenient, and when it is exhausting. When it feels like a choking fog, and when it provides “a kind of joy.” One life we share. A life of connection; a life of pain; a life of love. Given away and received. Lost and found. Again and again. No life other, apart from.