Monday, August 27, 2012

This Is Not A Drill

"This Is Not A Drill"
Ephesians 6:10-12, 18


Are there evil forces in the world that are real and powerful beyond our comprehension?  Is there a cosmic battle going on?  I don’t know about you, but seeing these words from Paul about “...the wicked spiritual forces in the heavenly world, the rulers, authorities, and cosmic powers of this dark age” with which we are contending, always kind of scares me.

I kind of poo-pooed all this “wicked spiritual forces” stuff until college.  I was a sociology/philosophy major in college.  I took a class for sociology called “Deviant Behavior.”  My semester paper was on Satan worshipers.  I interviewed a couple of witches, who had become Christians.  In their past life, they were witches who were in charge of a coven of 13 witches each.  Some of the stories they told me about conjuring up spirits and stuff made the hair all over my body stand on end.

If we’re in a battle, as Paul says we are, we have to understand exactly what we’re up against.  This is not a drill.  We aren’t just practicing or rehearsing.  The battle has been joined.

People in most cultures formed mythic tales about evil and evil’s existence.  Especially the Greeks.  Homer told the legend of when Ulysses came to the island of Circe, the daughter of the sun.  Ulysses climbed the hill and saw in the center of the island a palace surrounded by trees.  He sent half his men and a commander to see if he could find any hospitality there.

When the men approached the palace they found it was surrounded by wild animals.  They had no idea the animals were really men, now changed into beasts by Circe’s spells.  Hearing the soft sound of music within the castle, Ulysses’ men made their way in--except the commander Eurylochus, who suspected danger.

Once in the castle, Circe served the men with wine and other delicacies.  When they had eaten and drunk their fill, she waved her hands over them and they were immediately turned into pigs.

Hearing what happened to his men, Ulysses went down to rescue them.  As he was going, he was met by Mercury, who warned him of the dangers of Circe.  When Ulysses would not be persuaded to turn back, Mercury gave him a flower, the fragrance of which he was to inhale.  By doing that, Ulysses would gain the power to resist all of Circe’s sorcery.

Armed with the flower, Ulysses entered the palace.  Circe entertained him as she had his crew.  When he had eaten and drunk, she waved her hand over him saying, “From now on, seek the sty and wallow with your friends!”  But, protected from the spell by the flower, Ulysses drew his sword and forced her to release his companions and restore the others around the castle to their human form.

To think there are evil forces waving their hands over individual Christians, and over congregations is a disconcerting thought, to say the least.  Looking at all that’s going on in main-line denominations across our country, there certainly does seem to be some Circe type spirit that is creating confusion, division and distortion.  Even in our own Presbytery of Southern Kansas, there are congregations imploding, and a systemic dysfunction in handling it all.  It does make you wonder about “...powers...of this present darkness and spiritual hosts of wickedness…” as Paul termed them.

As we have been given this great opportunity for ministry with the $100,000 gift by God and the amazing generosity of the giver, we, in our excitement, must be on the lookout for evil forces that will be used to disrupt, weaken, or water down the ministry we will create focusing on 3rd to 6th grade children.

How do we do that?  Mercury gave Ulysses a flower to undo Circe’s spells.  Paul, in these verses, says we have something much more potent than the aroma of some magical flower.  We have an awesome resource that will not only protect us from the evil forces in the world, but also do battle with that evil;  not just resist, but take the battle right in the evil power’s face.  That gift is prayer.

Paul uses three related words that let us know how amazing prayer is.  Paul wrote, “Finally, be strong in the Lord, and in the strength of his might.”  Let’s look at those three words and see what they mean for our praying power and our fight with evil.

First, “Be strong…”  Find your strength in the Lord.  This word that Paul uses describes how a believer, or a congregation, is made strong, or given power in the Lord.  It’s not a way you strengthen yourself, as if by doing a bunch of spiritual push-ups you will get strong.  This is an endowed strength, Paul says.  So instead of just saying, be strong,” what Paul is literally saying is, “Be made strong in the Lord.”

Whether you realize it or not, when you gave your life to Christ, you were made strong in him--he gave you a strength that is only his to give.  You have had it all this time.  Isn’t that amazing!  You’ve been made strong in Christ, and you realize that strength and use that endowed strength every time you pray.

Secondly, Paul wrote about being in the strength of the Lord.  This word Paul used describes not just strength as power, but supreme, superior, overarching power.  It is real, Godly strength that can utterly destroy any other power.  It is a strength of such magnitude that victory is assured every single time.

It’s the kind of strength that the boy David talked about when facing Goliath with a sling and a handful of smooth stones.  David said, “The Lord who saved me from the lion and the bear will save me from this Philistine” (1 Samuel 17:37)

Do you hear it in David’s voice?  It isn’t a cocksureness in his own ability.  It’s the personal knowledge of the undefeatable power of God.  In fact, the word Paul used for strength can also actually mean “victory.”  Let’s put that in the verse, so it would read, “Be strong in the Lord, in the VICTORY of his might.”

Our strength in prayer is not our own cocksure way.  It’s based in God’s victorious superiority over all powers.  When we pray, we aren’t praying in the spirit of anxiety about these woeful powers, principalities, and unearthly forces.  We are praying in the already won victory of our cosmically supreme God.  That makes all the difference in our praying.

The third word is might.  When we think of might we think of prowess and sheer force of strength.  But this word that Paul used literally talks about a kind of might that is shown in ability or capacity.  Not our ability and capacity, but God’s.  God’s capacity becomes our capacity.  God’s ability becomes our ability, as we immerse ourselves in prayer.  Think of the ways capacity is used:  capacity crowd--so many people a place is filled up; a cup filled to capacity--you can’t pour one more drop in there.  Capacity is the point at which you can’t fill a container any more it is so full.

Alan and I have breakfast together out at Ricks every Thursday morning.  Our waitress is alway Lori.  Before Lori, it was Lori’s daughter Chelsea.  Alan drinks coffee.  I don’t.  But every Thursday morning, Lori becomes a picture of God for Alan, because she keeps coming by filling up his cup.  He drinks some down.  She comes by and fills it back up.  No matter how much he drinks, she puts more in.

So Paul is asking us to imagine the capacity of God.  Imagine the overwhelming immensity that makes up the capacity of God.  Imagine the innumerable abilities that make up God’s abilities.  That is God’s might.  Now imagine God’s might in you, in our congregation!  The fulness of God’s capacity and ability is, through Christ, in you, in us.  When we pray we are being refilled to capacity with the capacity and ability of God!  We use some of God’s capacity and ability, our cup starts getting a little low; God comes by and fills it back up with his immense capacity.  Doesn’t matter how much you use, God fills you back up.  Means you don’t have to worry about getting too low, or using it up, or protecting what you’ve got.

Be strong in the Lord, in the strength of his capacity and ability.  Can you imagine it?  It blows my mind just trying.

Three amazing power words.  But not just words.  They are power qualities that everyone here has, in Christ, as you pray.  “...be STRONG in the Lord, in the STRENGTH/VICTORY of his MIGHT.”

Against these three amazing God words, the devil only has one word.  The one devil word is “stratagem.”  The sad thing about we Christians is that we end up concentrating too much on the one devil word and not on God’s three prayer words.  The stratagems of the devil.  Other translations use words like wiles, craftiness, devices, tactics, schemes, and tricks.  I like the word stratagem because it describes an intentional plan used to deceive an enemy in war.  It’s all the devil’s hocus pocus, waving his hand over us, thinking he can turn us all into pigs, and overpower God’s praying people.

Stratagem is a word that at one time meant a way, a path, or a road.  In the first verse of the first Psalm, David sets the agenda for all praying that will follow in the Psalms:
How blessed is the one who does not take the counsel of the wicked for a guide,
or follow the path that sinners tread…

That word "path" is the same word from which stratagem comes.  The devil is trying to deceive us into following his path, not Gods.  The devil is trying to get us slowly and gradually off the straight and narrow, and onto his path that leads to destruction.  The devil is trying to lure us off of God’s three power worded path.

I keep coming back to the book, Pilgrim’s Progress.  The main character, Christian, is making his way from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City.  At one point, he’s traveling along and the path became difficult, rocky, making walking hard.  He sees there’s another path not too far away.  It’s pleasant looking and smooth.  It’s running parallel to the path he is on.  He decides to take the smooth path, since it’s close to the one he’s on.  But gradually, the new smooth path veers farther and farther away from the original road to the Celestial City.  Christian ends up coming to a castle named Doubting Castle.  There lives a giant named Despair.  Christian becomes a prisoner until he is freed.

That’s the stratagem of the devil.  Trying to shift your feet, lure us away from the right path onto his path leading only to doubt and despair.  The devil is trying to shift our attitudes and conduct through the power of his deception.  He’s trying to lure us into his stratagem rather than claim God’s power, might and strength through prayer.  Without God’s power words there are only rationalizations for falling into the trap of the devil’s stratagems.

Like the overweight business executive who decided to shed some extra pounds.  He took his new diet seriously, even to the point of changing his driving route to avoid his favorite bakery.  One morning, however, he arrived to work carrying a gigantic piece of coffee cake.  His staff scolded him, but his smile remained almost angelic.  “This is a very special coffee cake,” he explained.  “I accidentally drove by the bakery this morning.  There in the window were a host of goodies.  I felt it was no accident, so I said a little prayer: ‘Lord, if you want me to have a piece of one of those delicious coffee cakes, let there be a parking place right in front of the bakery.‘  And sure enough,” he continued, “the eighth time around the block, there it was.”

When we are faced with some challenge we think we ought to pray.  Usually somebody says something like, “Let’s say a little prayer.”  As if praying is some little thing, some kind of formality or good luck charm to cover our bases before the battle.  “I guess we better say something to God,” we think to ourselves, “just in case.”  But there are no little prayers, when we realize, as Paul did, that prayer takes you into the strong, strength, and might of the presence of God.

Before a great battle, Napoleon would stand alone in his tent.  One by one the marshals and commanders of his armies would enter, grasp his arm in silence, and go out again.  Doing so fired them with fresh courage and renewed willingness to do battle for France.  I think now is the time for us to slip into God’s tent in prayer, grasp God’s hand, just touching the awesome presence of God for the challenge that lays before us.

I would like you all to go into that prayer tent often in the coming weeks.  Pray for our congregation as we seek to discern God’s will about this opportunity for ministry we’ve been given to touch the lives of children in our community--children whose lives could turn out very differently because of the ways they will be touched by our church and our ministry.

This kind of vision and strength can only be gained through our amazing inner fellowship of prayer with God.  Only through the strength and the might of God in prayer will we be able to change the devil course that may also be exerted against these children.

Wouldn’t we all desire the day when the devil’s scouts came back to him and reported, in complete frustration, that we--both individually and as a congregation--were found to be a hopeless cause; to hear the demons come before the devil and say with long faces, “I’m sorry, O evil one, but that Pratt Presbyterian Church is a hopeless case.”  Because a hopeless case in the eyes of the enemy means the prayerful victory has been won--we have been made strong in the Lord, in the strength of his might!

Monday, August 20, 2012

Closing The Loopholes, part 2

"Closing The Loopholes" (part 2)
Ephesians 4:25-32


Last week, the message was about the first part of these verses.  I talked about how Paul is instructing us to close up the loopholes through which evil tries to get in and disrupt our faith in Christ.

If we allow evil through these loopholes, says Paul, we are giving it a destructive foothold, from which can be launched an all out campaign to bring our faith in Christ down.  Paul gives us a list of six loopholes that need to be closed in a believers life.  The first three, that I spoke about last week, are lying, anger, and greed.  This morning I want to finish up with comments about the final three in Paul’s list:  foul and dirty talk, grieving God, and being unforgiving.


Popular artist, Norman Rockwell, once explained why he painted the kinds of upbeat scenes that he did.  “When I grew up,” he said, “I found the world wasn’t always the pleasant place I had thought it would be.  So I unconsciously decided that if it wasn’t an ideal world, it should be.  And so I painted it that way.”

This is the way to look at the loopholes here in Ephesians 4.  Paul is saying we aren’t perfect people.  The world isn’t a perfect place.  But God wants to paint us how we should be.  If we allow God to paint us in His own brush strokes, we (and hopefully the world around us) will end up looking more according to God’s ideal.  That’s Paul’s purpose in bringing his list to our attention.

So let’s turn to the last three of these loopholes that need closing.  The fourth loophole Paul speaks to has to do with the way we talk to each other.  He wrote:
Watch the way you talk.  Let nothing foul or dirty come out of your mouth.  Say only what helps, each word a gift...Make a clean break with all cutting, backbiting, profane talk.

We need to know what Paul is describing in his own Greek language.  He is actually using a lot of building, construction type terms that don’t translate well.

When he writes about foul and dirty talk, the words he is using literally describe something that has gone bad because it is rotten.  It’s a kind of rottenness, like deteriorated wood in an old house.  It’s gone bad with dry rot or termites, or it has become so weak as to be dangerous.

I love to go rummaging through old, abandoned, broken down farm houses.  These decaying structures are hidden behind aging shelter belts of trees, themselves old and weary looking.  The houses are sad visages with caved in wooden floors and collapsed wooden stairs.  Lath and plaster walls are crumbled away, looking like open and raw sores.  Layers and layers of once distinctive wall paper peels away like thin skin.  Rafters, like graying compound-fractured bones, hang down from above.  Sometimes I try to find a safe place to just sit and imagine the stories of the people who had lived in each of these crumbling homes.

There is no way to fix these kinds of houses.  They are absolutely unreclaimable.  You wont find any of these kinds of home on one of those "Flip This House" kinds of shows.  They are structures that have become totally useless, except for maybe being bulldozed, or just allowed to finally fall down.

That’s what Paul is describing as foul and dirty talk.  It’s using words that turn lives that were once proud structures of human living into sad ruins.  They are words that infect a person’s bones with dry rot.  They are words that scratch open sores on the walls of people’s spirits.  They are termite words that infest and eat away the inner strength of a person’s soul.  And there’s usually no way to fix the harm that’s been done.

“You’re an idiot.”
“You make me sick.”
“You’re ugly.”
“I’m through with you; how could anyone love you?”
“You’ll never get it, will you.”
“How could you be so stupid.”
“You’re a nobody, and you’ll always be a nobody.”
“I wish you were never born.”
“When are you ever going to amount to anything?”
“I hate you.”
“You’re a total waste of skin.”
“Can’t you ever do anything right?”
“You’re such a retard.”
“I give up; you’re hopeless.”

I read another one of those famous conversations between Sir Winston Churchill and Lady Astor, similar to the one I mentioned in the sermon last week.  At this occasion, Lady Astor marched up to Winston Churchill at a party and snapped, “Sir, you are drunk!”
To which Churchill retorted, “And Madam, you are ugly; but tomorrow morning I shall be sober.”

Life decaying words are spoken with voices that become so persistently loud in our heads, it becomes easy to believe them.  We end up living our lives under the spell of their poison.  Once that kind of destructive talk is out of our mouths, it’s impossible to stuff them back in and pretend we didn’t just say them.  What’s worse, foul and dirty talk may be permanently implanted in the listeners minds.  The people we speak them to will forever after hear those exact words over and over and over again, creating the kind of slow destruction and self-rejection Paul is describing.

One of psychiatrist, Scott Peck’s, books is titled, People Of The Lie.  One of his main points is that it’s not often the people who do some awful actions who are evil.  Instead, it’s the evil others in a person’s life who, with degenerate messages, have turned the person, who has to receive those words, into awful and terribly disturbed human beings.

In one story, Peck told about a patient who was constantly wrestling with psychological demons.  Peeling back the layers of the man’s pathology, Peck found out part of the beginnings of this patients disturbed life.

When the man was a boy, his father had committed suicide.  The boy was the one who found his father’s blood spattered body--the father had shot himself in the head with a handgun.

The next Christmas, the boy unwrapped one of the gifts from his mother.  There in the box was the handgun his father had used to kill himself.  “I just felt like you would be the one who could use it,” was the mother’s ghastly comment, as the boy stared at the unwrapped gift.  The boy didn’t know if by what his mother said, she meant he would also be just like his father; or, that she was telling him he should also commit suicide.  From there after, the boy was sent into a tail spin of psychological disintegration.

That’s why Paul says we should “say only what helps.”  Other Bibles translate this phrase with the word, “edifying.”  This also is a construction word.  It comes from the Greek word that means house, home, or family.  Except the form of the word used here means the act of building a house, building a home, building a family.  It can also mean bringing a building to completion.

Thus, the kind of talk that Paul says we as Christians should speak is only that which builds, as if you were building a home, building a family, bringing a person to a healthy and whole completeness.  We should be speaking to people with words that will help them move toward maturity and the completion that God intends.

Carol Channing, after having performed in almost 1800 productions of the Broadway musical, “Hello, Dolly,” was asked how she kept her performances fresh.  “If I start getting down,” she said, “I play the role to my father...I know he’s really not out in the audience.  He died 20 years ago.  It’s just the thought of his presence, of someone who knows and loves and encourages me, and who always had nothing but the best words for me.”

The challenge is that, with our words, we can help God close up this loophole in both ourselves and others.  Or, the scary flip side of this is that we can assist evil in opening up this loophole wider in ourselves or others, simply by the way we choose to talk.


The fifth loophole Paul says needs closing is the one that would cause grief to God.  The kind of grief Paul is describing is that which comes from pain, sorrow, or mental anguish.  It’s hard to think that God can experience these kinds of sad emotions.  But that’s the kind of pain described in Genesis, where it says:
God saw that human evil was out of control.  People thought evil, imagined evil--evil, evil, evil, from morning to night.  God was sorry that he had made the human race in the first place; it broke his heart.  God said, “I’ll get rid of my ruined creation, make a clean sweep:  people, animals, snakes and bugs, birds--the works.  I’m sorry I made them.”

As you can tell, it’s a sad kind of grief of God.  It should make us feel really small that God ever felt that way because of us.  It’s the kind of grief that God feels when human beings have thrown insult on top of insult at God, growing God’s pain into a total frustration--frustration that makes God feel like giving up on us.

Former heavyweight boxing champion, Joe Louis, wrote in his autobiography that Rocky Marciano thrashed him soundly in 1951.  In fact, when a doctor from the state athletic commission said, “Joe, you can’t fight for at least 3 months,” Joe replied, “Do you mind if I don’t fight no more at all?”

God also seems to get tired of being beaten up by the humans he created:  Beaten up by the uppercut of indifference; being sucker punched by two-faced hypocrisy; or, being round-housed by atrocities that human’s do to each other and then use God in support of their actions.  It’s a pained sadness that makes God not want to fight for us humans “no more at all.”

If the messages of foul and dirty talk have to do with people-to-people rejection, so I think this sadness of God has also to do with rejection: our rejection of God.

Here’s another way of understanding this pain of God.  First, recall Jesus’ baptism.  What did the voice of God say when Jesus came up out of the water?  “You are my Son, chosen and marked by my love, pride of my life” (Mark 1:11).  And then, in the gospel of John, Jesus tells the disciples that whatever he saw the Father God do towards him, he does towards us.  Every person Jesus talked to, every person Jesus touched, Jesus was trying to tell them the same thing God told him:  “You are my chosen, marked by my love, pride of my life.”

How many times, in how many ways did he say that?  “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son...”  And how often was that love, that wooing of people, of we the beloved, spurned?  Jesus looked across at Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives and said:
People, people...how often I’ve longed to gather your children, gather your children like a hen, her brood safe under her wings--but you refused and turned away!  (Luke 13:34)
Those are some of the saddest words in the entire New Testament.

This rejection is a two-edged sword, cutting at God’s heart.  One edge of the sword is the sad self-evaluation that we deserve no place in God's family.  That’s the self-rejection.  It’s the feeling that we are not worthwhile, or worthless in God’s eyes.  This feeling could come from all the messages I talked about in my point earlier about rotten talk.  It certainly doesn’t come from God.

The other edge of this cutting blade is that arrogance or self-rejection contradicts the wooing Voice that describes us as marked by God’s love and the pride of his life.  Being marked by God’s love expresses the core truth about who we are in God’s eyes.  But in so many ways we try to rebuff God, saying, “No we aren’t; we can’t be such an object of love or source of pride.”

What drives the knife home in God’s heart is that even though we refuse to claim the core truth that we are loved by God, claiming that we are somehow, and for some reason unlovable, what do we do?  We keep running around looking for someone or something that will convince us we are loved.  We go running helter-skelter, always anxious, always restless, always lustful, never fully satisfied, looking for a voice that will tell us we are the pride of their life.  God, through Jesus Christ, all along has been saying in so many ways, “You are loved, you are loved, you are loved.”  But we reply, “Nah, that can’t be true; it’s gotta be somewhere else from someone else.”  At that point, God is grieved.

The loophole and foothold evil is trying to create is the temptation to get us stuck in self-rejection or arrogance so that you never hear the Voice that tells you, you are loved and you are the pride of Jesus’ life.  Evil is trying to keep you from fully recognizing  that the core truth of your life is you are Christ’s pride, joy and love.  It’s time to close this loophole, and celebrate that fact and put an end to the grief and sadness of God.


The sixth and final loophole is being unforgiving.  You have all heard numerous sermons on forgiveness, and most of you have read Jesus’ teachings and Paul’s letters describing the height and depth and width and breadth of forgiveness.

In this final loophole that needs our closing, Paul says, “Be gentle with one another, sensitive.  Forgive one another as quickly and thoroughly as God in Christ forgave you.”  What more can I say than that?  Paul’s statement tells us that forgiveness comes from gentleness and sensitivity.  Paul is telling us that forgiveness is not something you sit around and study, but you get up and do it.  We are being told to think personally not only about all for which we have been forgiven, but also HOW we have been forgiven by God through Christ:  quickly and completely.  Once we’re done thinking about that, we are to turn and forgive others exactly in the same measure, and in the same way.  Fairly simple and straightforward.

But I know there is a person in your life you have the most trouble forgiving.  This person may be an obstinate, pigheaded ogre.  This person may be demanding, and can be very insensitive to you.  This person may have said, or keeps saying things that hurt you deeply.  In fact, you may keep hearing this person’s voice and their demeaning messages going round and round in your head.

And talk about unforgiving; this person may be totally unforgiving of you.  They are, in fact, your harshest critic, and they may be on your case all the time without respite.  They won’t let you forget your blunders from the past, and keep throwing them up in your face.  You wish this person would just go away, but whenever you try to put some distance between yourself and them, there they are.  This person may make you feel angry and depressed; and they make you feel about an inch tall.  In your darkest times, you may even wish this person would just die.  How can you forgive a person like that?

You know who that person is?  Besides hurtful others, this person I’m describing is the same  for everyone.  It is your self.  I’ll bet you all a dollar that the person you may have the hardest time forgiving is yourself.  Let’s take another look at Paul’s words, but let’s tweak them a bit:  “Be gentle with yourself, sensitive.  Forgive yourself as quickly and thoroughly as God in Christ forgave everyone else.”

To forgive others, to forgive ourselves means to participate in the amazing grace of God’s love.  If we can’t forgive ourselves, it may mean we haven’t fully understood God’s embrace of us.  If you leave this loophole open, evil will use it to slowly and totally immobilize your gifts, your ministry, and your purpose.  All that will be lost in the goo of self-criticism, self-hatred, and self-punishment.  You will never become the person God created you to be unless this loophole is closed for good and for God.


Little loopholes.  Little gaps in our spirits.  Small fissures in our faith.  They either let evil in, or maybe we use them to get out of what we know is the right thing, by God.  Either way, the result is giving evil a sure and certain foothold from which to operate.  With any loophole, evil will exert all the leverage it can against our spiritual life and Christian commitment.  Let’s take Paul’s words to heart and help each other, by God, close them up.

Monday, August 13, 2012

Closing The Loopholes, part 1

"Closing The Loopholes" (part 1)
Ephesians 4:25-32


Today’s reading from Paul’s letter to the Ephesian Christians warns against “giving opportunity to the devil.”  The New English Bible translates this phrase by warning us against allowing “no loophole for the devil.”  A loophole can be a small hole in a wall through which an enemy can shoot their weapon.  Just one shot from the enemy can bring us down.  We certainly don’t want to give the devil aim at our lives in any way, little or large.

And a loophole can also be an excuse or an evasion for not doing something we’re supposed to.  One time, a friend of W.C. Fields caught Fields reading the Bible.  “Why, Mr. Fields,” the friend protested, “I didn’t know you were a religious man.  Are you thinking about becoming a believer?”
“Why, no,” Fields replied.  “I’m only looking for loopholes.”

Little loopholes.  Little gaps in our spiritual armor.  Small fissures in our faith.  They either let evil in, or we use them to get out of what we know is the right thing.  Either way, the result is giving evil a sure and certain foothold from which to operate.  With any loophole, evil will exert all the leverage it can against our spiritual life and Christian commitment.

That’s why Paul sternly cautioned the Ephesian believers to be on guard against six specific loopholes that can allow evil into our lives, undermining their Christian faith.

The first loophole is lying.  Lying has been with us from the beginning, when Eve learned from the serpent how to twist the truth into both a bold-faced lie as well as half-truth.  One book I read made a convincing case that original sin is not pride or greed but lying--the misuse of language; attempting to make the truth a lie and a lie the truth.  Every time we participate in lying and half-truths we are passing the original sin along.  Basically, we teach our children how to skim on the truth by doing it in front of them.

So it’s no mystery that this list Paul gives the Ephesians starts off with each believer’s need to close the loophole of lying.  It’s not just a matter of closing it.  Paul says, “Throw it away; give it a heave as far as you can.”

A defendant took the witness stand.  The judge asked him to put up his right hand and answer the following question:  “Do you solemnly swear that you will tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?”
The defendant replied, “I’ll try anything once.”

What we find out once we start lying is that we have to remember everything we said to each person.  Lies breed like rabbits.  You tell a couple of lies, and all of a sudden you have a bunch of baby lies hopping around all over the place.  It isn’t long that they are totally out of control.  Or, it isn’t long before they are totally in control of you.  You start worrying, “What if my lies are discovered?”  It’s just not a fun way to live.

That’s why throwing off lying is so important in Paul’s mind.  Lying and falsehood have the power to undermine the development and growth of any and all of your relationships.  It totally breaks down trust between people.  And in a recent study I read this week, we lie on average--one way or another--eleven times a day; and that lying even affects your physical health.

Lying as a loophole not only gives evil a chance to destroy an individual, but also the whole church.  Paul says that we are supposed to be “members of one body.”  For one person, one member of the body to start lying infects the whole body of Christ, the church.

You think your lies have only to do with you.  But not so, says Paul.  The only way to keep your lies from infecting you and the body of Christ, says Paul, is to throw lying off; quit, right now, cold turkey; 100%; end it, now.  To do that may mean coming clean with the lies already told.  It may not be fun or easy at first.  But the health and restoration it brings to your relationships will be worth it.


The second loophole that needs to be closed is anger.  It’s interesting, isn’t it, that Paul didn’t write, “Never be angry”?  Instead, Paul wrote, “Be angry, but do not sin.”  I’m assuming that one of the reasons Paul wrote that, being the kind of person he was, was because he got angry a lot.  Paul had anger issues.  Paul was an intense, in your face kind of person.

Maybe Paul recognized that anger is one of those basic, universal, human emotions.  We all get angry.  We all deal with it differently.  One lady had a fender bender accident with her new car.  The neighbor asked her if her husband was upset.  “He didn’t say much,” replied the lady, “but all the smoke alarms in our house went off.”

And then there’s the classic story of Winston Churchill and Lady Astor.  It was well known that they absolutely hated each other.  Their anger at each other was legend.  One time they were both invited to the same gala.  Lady Astor, rather loudly, said to Churchill, “If you were my husband, I’d put poison in your drink.”
To which Churchill, equally loudly replied, “Madam, if you were my wife, I’d drink it.”

The word that Paul used for anger is the same word we get our English word, “orgy,” from.  Anger is an orgy of emotion.  It’s wild and unrestrained.  It’s the passionate rage that’s out of control, leading to some kind of self-justified revenge or punishment.

One mother was scolding her son, and said, “When that other boy threw rocks at you, why didn’t you come and tell me, instead of throwing rocks back?”
“What good would that do?” asked the son.  “You couldn’t hit the broadside of a barn!”
It’s that kind of rage that takes over that wants to get even and make the other person hurt.

An unhealthy anger serves no purpose.  It has a tendency to mushroom larger and larger.  The old therapeutic strategy was to get people to let out all their anger in ways that hopefully dispelled the explosive cloud.  So therapies like primal scream therapy was born.  People were to go somewhere and just scream all the violence and anger away.

But what reputable therapists found was that “getting out your anger” in these ways just created more anger.  Ventilating anger would throw a person into an irrational and almost evil rage.  People who were getting their anger out in huge bursts were having too much fun being angry, and it wasn’t working.

I think in Paul’s mind, that’s the sin of anger--letting it linger too long, letting it grow to a point that it consumes you.

My daughter, Kristin, when she was in junior high and high school, hardly ever cleaned her room.  It was a total blast area.  The floor was like an archaeological dig.  If you wanted to spend long enough in there, you could dig your way down to the 3rd, 4th, or 5th grade era.  I’d feel guilty walking in there because I just knew, with each step, I was destroying whole countries of dust mites in the carpet.

Once in a while I would explode, when I couldn’t stand it.  We’d go in there and clean it up together, and get it to a point of manageability.  And I’d try and lecture her saying, “Now if there’s a little mess, clean it up before it becomes a pile, and the pile turns into a full blown take over of your room.”  Guess how many times my lecture worked.  But the principle was sound.

That’s the same thing Paul is saying about how Christians should deal with their anger.  “Don’t let the sunset find you nursing your anger,” he said.  In other words, keep it to manageable levels.  Deal with it while it’s small.  Don’t even give it two days.  Take care of it, completely, by the end of the day.  If you don’t, you’ve created a loop hole for evil to get in.  Once in, it will grow to a whole pile of anger, and eventually a full blown take over of your life.  That’s the sin of anger.


The third loophole Paul mentions is greed, including two of greed’s ugly heads.  One ugly head is thievery.  “You shall not steal,” is in God’s top ten list.  Thievery is a form of greed that takes something of someone else’s because you have to have it for your own.

There’s lots of ways to be a thief.  Large corporations cooking their books is a form of robbery.  Or Bernie Madoff, who made off with a lot of people’s money in his ponzi scheme.  But it wasn’t just Madoff--it was also those who put their money with him who were driven by their own greed to get rich quick.

I had a friend who’s apartment was robbed.  Her roommate had an old and shoddy video camera and had been wanting a new one.  She said, “Let’s tell your insurance company my video camera was stolen so I can get a new one.  They’ll never know.  They’re a huge company anyway.”  Had my friend added the video camera to the list of stolen items, that would have been robbery as well.  I was glad when she told me that she didn’t put it on the list.

The other ugly head of greed that Paul mentions is the reluctance or refusal to give your excess wealth to the needy.  Paul said that God’s purpose for giving us the ability to earn an income is not to accumulate as much as we can, but so that we can give to the poor.

If we allow the evil one through this loophole, our lives will become dominated by our consumeristic culture.  The evil of consumerism seeks to program us to believe that more is always better.  Our inability to distinguish between quality of life and quantity of things will turn us into greedy, grasping, uncharitable people.

Comedian Paul Reiser, who used to star in the sitcom, “Mad About You,” has written a couple of funny books.  He admits he’s a consumer sucker.  Here’s one story he told on himself in his first book:

I was in the stereo store, looking at this VCR, CD player, laser disc, pants presser combination thing.  The salesman comes over.  “You know that CD play will hold up to 20 discs at a time.”
“Yeah?”
“Yes-sire e-bob,” he says.  “That’s over 18 hours of music.”
“Okey, dokey,” I say, and he wraps it up.  Then I got home and realized, Wait a second!  I’m not even awake 18 hours.  When would I use this thing to its fullest advantage?  The last four hours of music will actually be keeping me awake.  This is not something I need!

Reiser concluded his thoughts by finally recognizing the truth about compulsive greediness and the never-satisfied attitude that characterizes a culture that has let the evil one through this loophole.  Reiser wrote:

The problem is, they keep coming up with technology nobody asks for.  They believe we want freeze frame, search, and split screen and clocks that make coffee, and cameras that talk to you.  We don’t want that.  You know what I want?  I just want to lie down.  That’s what I really want.  If I could just lie down for a half-hour, I’d be happy.  It seems like I’ve been reading instruction manuals since 1987.  My head is pounding.  I want to write a letter, “Dear China.  STOP!!!  We’re fine.  This is plenty of stuff.  Why don’t you stop with the VCR’s and work on diseases.  Go cure a disease while I go lie down!”

His comments are funny, but it does make you wonder.  If we had bought less stuff and used our excess money for the poor, how many diseases could have been cured by now?  How many hungry children could have been fed?  How many people could have been inoculated with vaccines?  Every financial decision we make is ultimately a decision between greed and helping the poor.

The famous preacher and father of the Methodists, John Wesley, once said, “Work all you can, to make all you can, so you can give all you can.”  I think that’s good advice for how we can close this particular loophole of greed.


There are three more loopholes to come at the end of this 4th chapter in Ephesians, and we will look at them next week.

Monday, August 6, 2012

Old King Cole

"Old King Cole"
Luke 14:15-24


Old King Cole
Was a merry old soul
And a merry old soul was he;
He called for his pipe,
And he called for his bowl,
And he called for his fiddlers three.

We know from the rest of this nursery rhyme that the King got his pipe and bowl, that the fiddlers came at once, and they all had a jolly time celebrating with their musical instruments.  Some of the last lines of the rhyme read:

Oh there’s none so rare
As can compare
With King Cole and his fiddlers three.

What would have happened if the three fiddlers did not show up to make jolly with their King we do not know.  It’s not part of the rhyme’s tale.  We do know that it put the King in rare form to celebrate a little with a handful of his subjects.  We think of kings, regally going about their kingly business.  Rarely do we imagine them playing flute solos with a fiddle trio as a back up.  But certainly, even kings must get tired of all the hubbub of being king, and just desire to cut loose a little.

When Hirohito was Emperor of Japan, he took crowded working days in stride.  On occasion, he even met them with a wry sense of humor.  Grand Chamberlain Sukemasa Irie, a long-time adviser of the Emperor, recalled such an incident.
One day was so chaotic that when we brought the Emperor down to the main ceremonial hall to meet some dignitaries, it turned out that we had got the time mixed up, and nobody was there.  We, the responsible officials, were terribly embarrassed.  But the Emperor simply stood there a moment, bowed politely to the empty hall, and then said to us quietly, “Most interesting and pleasant.  It’s a shame we don’t have more ceremonies like it.”  And with that he walked spryly back to his office.

There are times when even little interludes like that can be more important than all the hectic push and pull of our everyday lives.  We lose our perspective about things of real value if we allow our everyday clamor to work its way into a position of prominence.  When we don’t give ourselves enough time out, we miss the opportunity to put some distance between ourselves and what we are doing in our lives.  When we lose that distance, we start making bad decisions that have long term effect.  We start taking ourselves and what we do too  seriously.  We forget that an important part of what God styled into the creation is the need for gaining that kind of distance through sabbath times of celebration.

It’s such an important part of God’s intentions, in the parable in Luke 14, as well throughout the Bible, the kingdom of God is described as a feast.  It’s like a banquet.  The kingdom of God is a big celebration, akin to a marriage dinner.  In fact, the version of this parable in Luke starts out a little bit differently in Matthew’s gospel:  “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding feast for his son” (Matthew 22:2).

Isn’t it interesting that of all the parables that Jesus told about the kingdom of God, they mostly had to do with celebrations:  a woman who celebrated after finding her lost coin; a man who celebrated after his prodigal son returned; a man who celebrated after having found his lost sheep.

Isn’t it also interesting that Jesus did not compare the kingdom of God to all the busy-ness of everyday living.  It’s the little surprises, the little interludes, the celebrative events that are separate from the ongoing churning out of our days.  These are what the kingdom of God is like.

How easily we get caught up in the river current of daily living so that we, like the three who made excuses in the parable, forego or even refuse such interludes of celebration.  In Jesus’ parable, the three excuses used for not coming to the feast sound, on first hearing, like acceptable excuses.  But all of them will be found wanting in the end.

The first person said he had bought a field and had to go look at it.  How many of you have bought something without looking at it first?  Especially a piece of property?  This excuse is starting off bad and going down hill from there:

“I just signed a contract and now I have to go read the contract over to see what it says.”
“I just hired an employee, and now I have to go meet her to see if she’s competent.”
“I’m just getting ready to go preach a sermon, but I got it off the internet and I’m need to read it to see if it’s any good.”

Are you getting a sense of how lame these excuses sound for not going to the feast?  They just sound lame, and way beyond common sense.

The second guest made the excuse that he had a new cow he had bought and wanted to go look at it.  Whenever we have something new, whatever it is, it can be very captivating.  Our time and attention easily get sucked away.  We let things hold an attraction over our time and lives, but we miss out.  The captivation can cause us to lose sight of other more important times of celebration.

Senator Paul Tsongas stunned Washington when he announced he wouldn’t run for reelection because he was suffering from cancer.  The disease was caught early and the prognosis was good.  He could have run again.  But he decided to quit politics after spending a weekend at home in Lowell, Massachusetts.  With him were his wife and their three daughters who at that time ranged in ages from three to ten.

“One night my children went to sleep with my arms around them,” recalled Tsongas, “and I realized that for seven years this might rarely happen again.  I used to walk my kids to school and think about reelection.  Now I walk my kids to school and think about them.  My life is richer.”  He began to savor and celebrate that which he hardly gave notice to before.  He was constantly going out to look at the “cows he bought” so to speak, rather than celebrating life with his family.  Tsongas added, “Someone sent me this quote, ‘No one on his deathbed ever says he wished he had spent more time on his business.’”

Yet, all the new cows, mooing for our attention, no matter what they might be for us, can cause us to pass up some invitations of infinitely greater importance.

The third guest used the excuse that he had just gotten married.  He wanted to stay home with his new bride.  Now this claim seems to be an understandable one.  Remember, though, that each of the guests had already accepted the first invitation to the celebration.  Why didn’t this guest just turn the invitation down in the first place?  That’s the way things happened.  A first invitation would have been sent out about the feast.  At that invitation you accept or decline.  Then the second invitation would go out when the feast was ready, and those who accepted the first invitation would come to the feast.

So all three of these guests had received and accepted the first invitation.  Then the excuses at the second invitation.  All the excuses have a shred of acceptability to them.  But by making them, the guests have reneged on their prior commitment to come.  In the end, their excuses were found wanting, no matter how high sounding they may be.

The issue is that by making their excuses, they are all making the fallacious assumption that their trivial business at hand was more important than the celebrative feast to which they had been invited.  They were taking their busy-ness and their lives too seriously.  By doing so they were totally missing one of the main intentions of God for his people in the point of this parable:  life as kingdom people is primarily celebration.

We think of our reformer forerunners in the church as stoic party poopers.  But when they were penning such things as the Shorter and Larger Catechism, teaching the young about the basics of the faith, what was the first question in both catechism’s?  Anyone know?  The question is, “What is the chief end of man?”  Anyone know what the young people learned as the answer to that question?  “Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and ENJOY Him forever.”

How many of you are enjoying God?  Enjoying your relationship with God?  Enjoying your time spent with God?  And enjoying life because of God?  Maybe the claims and excuses of busy-ness, of the new, and of the seemingly good are being allowed to grow too thickly around the simple and pure enjoyment we are to have in playing fiddle with God.

Those who eventually made it into the banquet were the ones who had no worldly obligations to get in the way.  They were the outcasts, the dispossessed.  It was the property owners who were first invited.  It was the ones who owned nothing but their lives who made it into the celebration.  They were the ones who so desperately needed something to celebrate.  They were the ones who needed some enjoyment in life.  The others, who had everything in the world to celebrate about--land, cattle, a good wife--were the ones who refused.  Odd isn’t it?

There was a young art student whose teacher put him to the task of painting a sunset.  He sat on the brow of a hill, trying to capture on canvas the glory that filled the western horizon.  But he spent too much time working on one detail.  The teacher came along and said, “Look, the sun is almost down, and you are spending your time putting a roof on a barn.”

We have been given the invitation and the possibility of putting the bright celebration of God into the picture of our lives.  But are we too busy concentrating on minor things that ultimately don’t matter in terms of the larger picture?  And then it’s too late.  The sun’s gone down.  The doors to the feast are closed.

God wants us to celebrate.  And God will, regardless of whether we accept the invitation or not.  God will find someone to celebrate with; someone who wishes to take advantage of and celebrate the opportunities to be with and enjoy God.  Someone who would love to fiddle while God piped.