Monday, October 31, 2016

Meet the Press

"Meet the Press"
Habakkuk 1:1-11


MTP:  Welcome to, "Meet the Press."  We're fortunate to have with us one of the rising stars in prophetic circles: Habakkuk.  Do you pronounce your name Ha-bak-kuk or Habak-kuk?

Habakkuk:  Either is fine.  Most people just shorten it to "Kuk" (Kook).

MTP:  Uh…OK.  Well, Mr. Habakkuk, first tell us a little bit about yourself.  Not much is known about you.

Habakkuk:  No.

MTP:  No?

Habakkuk:  No.  I won't tell you anything about me.  Being a prophet of the Almighty God isn't about me.  It isn't about getting to know me.  It's about God.  Getting to know who God is.

MTP:  Well, this should be interesting.

Habakkuk:  Probably not.

MTP:  Right.  OK.  Let's get started.  You've been attracting a lot of attention lately for your law and order messages.  Tell us more about that.

Habakkuk:  (Pauses for a long time staring at the correspondent.)  Basically, I'm just sick of it all.  With our rulers, the scarcest commodity is the truth.  Religious nut-jobs killing people for religious reasons.  Our police have a "stab first, ask questions later" attitude.  Drunkenness.  Drug addiction.  Children are mistreated by parents.  Babylon.  Assyria.  Egypt.  All trying to take over the map.  My eyes soak up corruption and violence.  It leeches its way into my pores.  It's becoming a part of me and I'm sick of it.

MTP:  It's just the way the world is.

Habakkuk:  No.  I don't believe that.

MTP:  You can't deny reality.

Habakkuk:  But that's what's so frustrating!  I can't deny reality.  And I hate this world's reality.  I hate being lied to.  I hate looking people in the face, them smiling or with some smug expression of authority, and lie to me through those faces.  Why can't people just tell the truth, take their lumps for telling the truth if they have to.  At least they'd be holding on to some integrity.

MTP:  (said with a smiling, lying face)  I feel your pain.  But like I said—It's reality.
Habakkuk:  There has to be another reality!  There has to be something better going on in the world than mayhem, crime, and cruelty.

MTP:  Aren't you one of those believers in God?  Certainly your God must be doing something good in the world.  You say you speak for God—you're a prophet.  What does your God have to say about all the injustice?

Habakkuk:  (Sits and stares at MTP person again with a long, sobering expression.)  God.

MTP:  Yes, God.

Habakkuk:  Well, that's a good question.  I've been asking God those kinds of questions for so long.

MTP:  Get any answers?

Habakkuk:  Yeah, but I didn't like them.  I know you and your audience isn't going to like them either.

MTP:  Try me.

Habakkuk:  (Another long pause.)  Well, I asked God why God allowed all these lies and all this violence to just go on and on and on.  God said, "Me!?  Why do you and everyone else allow it to go on and on!"  God said, "You're the ones living with it.  Why don't you do something about it!?"
Then God said, "You never challenge all this violence and lies.  All you do is get used to it.  You throw up your arms and say, 'We just cant do anything about it.  Guess we'll just have to get used to it.'  That's what make me sick."

MTP:  And have you ever wondered if your God is all wrong?  Maybe some of what's going on in the world isn't that bad.  It's progress!

Habakkuk:  (Stares at MTP and shakes his head.)  That's the attitude that caused God to say the other thing.

MTP:  "Other thing?"

Habakkuk:  Yeah.  About punishing our nation.

MTP:  God's going to punish our country!?  How, pray tell?

Habakkuk:  God's tired of the mess we've made of this nation.  Tired of our waywardness.  Tired of the people living as if God didn't exist.  Tired of indifference.  Tired of people drifting away from God's churches.  No one listens any more in this country.  No one cares.  God is tired of being 8th or 9th or 10th on people's priority list.  So, it's time for a little attention getting—a little punishment.

MTP:  How is God going to do that?

Habakkuk:  God's going to send a foreign army.  Maybe the Babylonians.  Or the Egyptians.  Or both.

MTP:  God's going to send the Babylonians as punishment?

Habakkuk:  (Nodding his head, yes.)  They're going to sweep across this land in numbers like the sand on the beach, with the ferocity of a locust swarm.  They will make us all look like a pathetic laughing stock as they strip us bare and spank us.

MTP:  (Snickering)  Really?  That's going to happen?  God's going to use the Babylonian armies to spank us?

Habakkuk:  (Folds his arms, leans back and stares at MTP.)  People in this country need to see how serious God is about cleaning up all the corruption, violence, and lies.

MTP:  So God's going to clean up the violence in our country using violence, inflicted by another country's army?  That makes no sense.  Why does God need to use some other country's Godless army?  Why doesn't God just do it himself?

Habakkuk:  To alter your phrase from earlier, "It's just the way God is."  (Pause)  Maybe some day, God will come to earth and take care of our violence, lawlessness, crime, and cruelty in a personal way.

MTP:  What if…

Habakkuk:  Yes?

MTP:  What if we changed?  What if we were sorry?

Habakkuk:  (Looking at MTP, again for a long time, but smiling; then leaning in to MTP)  You have no idea how long I have hoped for that—how I have dared to think that such a thing was do-able.  Do you think…

MTP:  Do I think it's possible…that a country can change?  That God would change God's mind and save us all?  I don't know.  You're the one who's in the God business.

Habakkuk:  I'm one of those hopeful kinds of people.  And I do the whole prophet thing backwards.  I know I'm supposed to listen to God, and speak God's words to the people.  But I end up listening to the people and making their case to God.  And I just think, if there's going to be a change in our nation, it has to start somewhere.  With a small group of believers.  Start making the change, living the change, and multiplying the change.

MTP:  Interesting…

Habakkuk:  People are so fascinating, don't you think?  At least they are to me.  I keep telling God we're all a mix.  We definitely aren't all good, be we as individuals aren't all bad either.

MTP:  So how does God separate out the one from the other?

Habakkuk:  That's what I keep asking God!  Human beings are infinitely more complex.  (Pause.)  I keep telling God to give us a break, cut us some slack.  It's really hard to figure out this being human thing.  And God ought to know that, since God made us all. 

MTP:  How does God respond?

Habakkuk:  God's a good listener, despite the times He says He's going to wipe us all out with some other country's army!  I told God once He ought to jump into our world as a human being and try it out.  It's not as easy as it looks, being human.

MTP:  Interesting suggestion.  What did God think?

Habakkuk:  God said, "You're way ahead of me."

MTP:  What did that mean?

Habakkuk:  I'm not sure, but I got the idea God has a plan.

MTP:  So, is God going to sweep our country clean with some army?

Habakkuk:  That's probably still going to happen.

MTP:  Well, folks, time to start packing.  Get out while you can.  That according to our guest, the prophet Habakkuk—the one who speaks for humans to his fiery God.  Let's hope Habakkuk can get a good word in for us all.  See you all next week.  Maybe.

Monday, October 24, 2016

The Handwriting On The Wall

"The Handwriting On The Wall"
2 Timothy 4:6-8

Many of you know I have a defibrillator in my chest.  It does a lot of things.  One of those things is monitor what's going on in my heart.  Every 90 days it sends a report about my heart to the Heart Hospital in Wichita, using this other device that sits on the table by my bed.

After the last 90 day report was sent in a couple of months ago, the nurse at the cardiologist's office called and said, "You need to get in here as soon as possible—within the next week.  That's a scary call to get.  Especially when that's all she'd say.

I went in the next day after she called, and the electro-cardiologist, Dr. Parikh, told me my defibrillator had gone off a couple of months prior.  I had no idea.  "I thought I'd feel a jolt," I said.
He said, "You probably passed out for a second before the jolt came—then you would have woken right up, not knowing what happened.  That passing out and jolting took a second, maybe two.  Then Dr. Parikh said, "If you didn't have the device in your chest you would be dead right now."  That's what gave me a real jolt—his statement.

The device logs everything, so I was told what day my jolt happened, what time of day, etc.  I pulled out my iPhone and checked the date and time.  Nothing much happened that day, according to my calendar.  Except for the fact that I could have died that day.  It was a Thursday, 10:34 a.m..  I would have been sitting in my chair, behind my desk.  Totally oblivious to what had just happened.

Leigh Ann Curtis has a similar device in her chest, and has been thumped a couple of times by it.  One of those, Joel got in on it, catching Leigh Ann as she was going down.  So she knows what it's like, more than me, since, as I said, my heart's disrythmia made me pass out first.

I haven't told very many people about it.  I told my friend Gordon Stofer about it one day, when we were chatting, comparing medical notes.  He said, "Whoa! That's great!  The device worked!  You're alive!"  And that's true.  It's the reason he embodies our Optimist Club Creed.  That's what I should be concentrating on.  But I confess I have been a bit freaked out since hearing the report from my electro cardiologist.

I feel like I'm caught in this "twilight zone" between Gordon's reaction and the Dr.'s words.  I'm alive!  But I could have died.  When I was talking to my son and daughter, Ryan and Kristin, about it, I said that part of it is the difference between a hurricane and an earthquake.  As we saw with hurricane Matthew in Florida, they could track the storm, they had a good idea where it was headed, the computer had given them several models of where Matthew would end up.  The storm did exactly as expected.

But with an earthquake, you never know when it's going to hit.  My heart problems are not vascular.  My issues don't have to do with clogged arteries.  It is all electrical: pulses that constantly misfire, and evidently now, misfire between the nerves in my heart that can put me down.  For good.  And I'll never know when.  I won't have any soreness in my shoulder or arm or back to warn me.  Or have any forewarnings that feel like indigestion.  Nothing that can be tracked and measured and monitored, like other forms of heart disease, or cancer, or other assorted deadly and chronic illnesses.  That total lack of warning is part of what has gotten me a bit distressed.

The handwriting is on the wall.  Which is a biblical term, if you didn't know.  It's from the Old Testament book of Daniel.  The king of Babylon has a vision of a huge hand writing an indecipherable message on the wall.  Only Daniel, one of the captive Jews from Israel is able to tell the king what the handwriting on the wall means—that he, the king and the Babylonian kingdom, is doomed.  That night, the king dies.

For Paul, also, he has seen the handwriting on the wall.  When he wrote the second letter to Timothy, Paul was in prison.  He wasn't just under house arrest as he was before, waiting to make the gospel known to Caesar, free to come and go as he pleased.  Now, he's in a dark dungeon in Rome.  He knows his death could come at any moment.  The second letter to Timothy is the last he wrote before he was beheaded.

Part of the reason Paul is writing to Timothy is to ask Timothy to come see him.  Paul is lonely.  Because he has been labeled an enemy of the empire, everyone else deserted him.  Maybe they were afraid they would be arrested also if they were associated with Paul.  Some were ashamed of Paul—here was someone who devoted his life to Christ and the gospel, and look where it got him.  So they abandoned Paul, and feeling that abandonment, he was lonely for his friend Timothy.

In the old Bob Newhart show, Bob played a psychiatrist.  In one of the shows, he was standing in front of an elevator door waiting for it to open.  He was reading.  When the door opened, he hadn't paid attention.  The elevator car wasn't there.  Unaware, Bob stepped into the empty shaft.  At the last second he grabbed one of the cables and swung himself back to the floor he was on.  The whole show was about his near death experience.

His wife, at one point doesn't understand why Bob is so worked up.  "I just see death as part of life," she says to him matter-of-factly.  After a pause, Bob said, "Yeah, the last part."

So it is that Paul is asking Timothy to come and spend that last part with him, so he won't have to face death alone.

But also, here at the end of his letter, Paul is doing something else.  Knowing death is coming, he evaluates his life.  He talks out loud thoughts about how he feels about his life as he stares the good possibility of the end in the face.  He sees the handwriting on the wall, so he ponders his life, what he has accomplished.  Which is a bit of what I have been doing these past couple of months since getting the news from the cardiologist.

Paul uses a lot of imagery in his life review.  So I want to go through some of that imagery with you.  Maybe it can help you pause, maybe just for this moment, and think about where your own life has gone, what you have done with your life, what more you could do, so that when you see your own handwriting on the wall, you, like Paul can feel good about it all.

The first image Paul used is the "drink offering."  A drink offering was wine that was poured out upon the altar in the temple.  The altar was a huge, natural rock in the temple, upon which the sacrificial animals were slain for the forgiveness of the people's sins.  The wine could be poured out on the altar as a cleansing and purification of the altar before a sacrifice was make.  Or the wine could be an offering itself given to God.  Poured out.

Paul was using that image as a way to describe how he felt his life had been.  It was a life poured out for others.  It was a life poured out for God.  It was a life given in sacrifice to do the will of God.  His life wasn't one controlled by his selfish desires.  His wasn't a life of narcissism and self-indulgence.  Instead it was a life totally given to the will and purposes of God.

As I'm looking at my life, those are the two choices it seems I have.  Or, we have.  How much did my life sing along with Frank Sinatra, "I did it my way"?  Or, how much did my life sing along with St. Paul, "I did it God's way"?

Secondly, Paul says his time of departure is at hand.  The word, in Paul's language, for departure literally means, an unloosing.  It's like loosing a boat from its moorings.  Paul is ready to have his life untied, and set sail for that distant shore.

For most of my life, I was no where near ready to be "unloosed."  As a single father, I couldn't stand the thought of leaving my kids, especially by death.  Any way I could, I secured that rope to the dock.  I'm not so anxious about that now.  As I have pondered over the last couple of months, I think we all have to be prepared, at any time, for our departure, our unloosing.  No matter what stage or age we're at.

As Ryan has told me a few times, he believes life is precious.  And what I've been taught is that life is precious because you never know when you will be loosed from your moorings.  So we need to make the most of the time we have, while we are moored, while we are tied to this life.  Don't waste what God has given you.

Thirdly, Paul said he "fought a good fight."  Life was a struggle.  He was in competition with an adversary.  And at the end, he felt good about that fight and struggle.  It made me think about the times I have struggled with my adversaries, the times I have tripped myself and fallen on my face big time, the times I gave into anger at God and should have kept my mouth shut, the times I have drifted in doubt and self-doubt.  I wonder about this one.  If I can say, evaluating my life, if I have fought the good fight.

Maybe you have seen the movie, or read the book, about Mother Teresa that describes how much she questioned, her awful times of doubt, her struggles with the great evil in the world.  All of that was an internal fight, in which she wrestled with her internal self.  I am no saint, like she is.  But I feel her internal struggles about "fighting the good fight."

Which leads to the next way Paul pondered his life at the end.  He said, he had "finished the course."  Finished doesn't mean just ended.  Finished means "accomplished" or "fulfilled."  It is the same word Jesus used on the cross when he said, "It is finished."  He and Paul meant, when they came to the end they hadn't left anything undone.  They had fulfilled everything they had been commissioned by God to do.

Fighting the good fight has most to do with coming to the possible end of your life knowing that you have, by fighting the good fight, however old you are, or however along in life you are, that you are confident, up to that point, that you have "finished the course"—you have done ALL God has wanted you to accomplish.

And the last thing Paul says, in evaluating his life at the end, is, "…I have kept the faith."  The word "kept" is a great word in the Greek that spoke and wrote.  This word, "kept", literally means guarded, or more so, built a fortress around.  Paul was writing, at the near end of his life, that he was sure, that above all else, he had built a fortress around his faith.  He had guarded and protected his faith above all else.  He protected his faith because it was the most important, the most vital, the most meaning-full part of him.

So, I've been asking myself, as I hope you are asking yourself, "What is it that I have built a fort around, and protected above all else?"  Has it been my faith in Christ?  Or has it been my career, which is something else entirely?  Has it been my faith in my Lord Jesus, or has it been my ego?  Paul wrote in his last letter, he had kept the faith.  I want—and I hope you want too—to say the same.

After doing this self-evaluation, Paul smiles.  He knows that his life is solid in the Lord.  Because of that, what awaits Paul after death, is the crown.  In Greek, it is the stephanos.  It's my name.  The stephanos is the olive branch crown given the victors either in war, or in the Olympic games.  Such a crown was the most honored, the most coveted item a person could attain.  Paul knew such a crown was waiting for him, placed upon his head by the Lord Himself—the Lord whom Paul had loved and served his whole life.  The Lord whom Paul poured his life out for.  The Lord who would one day soon unloose his moorings.  The Lord, Paul had struggled and fought the adversary for.   The Lord, Paul fulfilled his life for.  And faith in the Lord that Paul had built a fortress around and protected.

That's how Paul evaluated his life at the end.  It is what I ponder ever since I found out about that fateful Thursday, when death was near, but I was given more.

Sunday, October 16, 2016

A Chair With A Name

"A Chair With A Name"
Matthew 6:13




Soon after the Murrah Federal Building Memorial in Oklahoma City was finished, I happened to be traveling from Colby to Austin for a week of study leave.  I decided to stop in Oklahoma City for lunch and go to the Memorial site where the bombing of the Murrah building was.

It was one of those places and experiences that had a profound and sobering effect on me.  The  long reflection pool, the bronze gates of time at each end of the pool.  But what effected my somber mood at that place was the field of chairs.  And the utter quiet of the place, especially as a number of people, almost worshipfully wove in and out of the chairs.

There are 168 chairs—one for each of the victims of the bombing of the building that took place on April 19,1995.  There are tall chairs for the adults who were killed and short chairs for the daycare children who were killed in the building.  On each chair is a name.  A name of a person, who at 9:01 was alive and going about their day.  But one minute later, at 9:02 was dead from a bomb blast created by Timothy McVeigh.

I think the bombing of the Murrah building affected me more than 9/11.  Maybe because it's closer than New York.  It was in our own front yard, so-to-speak.  And it was one of the first of what has become a string of terroristic, sadistically evil acts in our country.  And it wasn't instigated by some radicalized foreigner.  Timothy McVeigh was an American.  Why would a citizen of our great country create a bomb that unleashed such a devastating carnage on innocent people?  Your immediate answer may be something like, "Timothy McVeigh was the embodiment of evil."

Fortunately, a similar explosion was averted this past week in Garden City, where three degenerates were going to blow up an apartment building that housed a large number of Somali immigrants.  The Somali's were all Muslims.  The shock waves and after effects of evil would have spread across our state like a wildfire, had those demented men succeeded.  Which is what they hoped would happen by their evil act.

The concentric circles of grief from The Murray building bombing were almost too much for me to understand at that time:  168 people dead, 168 families impacted involving how many people, and all the friends of those 168 people, all the firefighters and police who were first responders who found the 168 dead, not to mention all of us who watched our televisions with gaping looks of disbelief at scenes of a building with it's whole front blown away, exposing offices like gaping wounds in a human body.  How will all those wounds ever be closed and healed?  Have they ever been since that awful day?



In the picture we are looking at (looked at at the start of this sermon), there is a man embracing the chair of a loved one killed that day.  What struck me is that what that man is attempting to embrace is the family member he lost; but at the same time he is being forced to embrace the great evil that took the life of that family member from him.  It is a weird combination, isn't it?

The memorial site itself is this messy mix of a place of atrocious evil that has now become a sacred place, where people whisper as if they were in a sanctuary.  Imagine the before and after pictures of that place.  The Murrah Federal Building with its whole front facade blown away.  Then a picture of a long reflection pool, the gates of time at each end of the pool, and the field of chairs.  Go back and forth in your mind between those two pictures.  Bombed ground to sacred ground.  The panic-filled busy-ness of a blown up scene, now a still and glassy pool.  A place of killing evil now a place of somber sacredness.



I imagine the difference of those two pictures in my mind, and just maybe that is how we need to deal with the evil that we face in life—how do we transform that evil into sacredness?  This sermon series is about how to find meaning in our lives.  One of the stark realities of life is that evil can take away our meaning in life.  Either leach it away inch by inch, or devastate us with its explosive quickness.  The mystery is that evil can bring us meaning in life, not through its evil, but through forcing our reaction to that evil.

Evil has a plan, I think.  And that plan is to get us to react in a negative, life draining way to whatever evil threw our way.  Evil wins not by the evil in itself, but in any of our defeated reactions to what has happened.

I've been watching the past season of the show, Bones, on Netflix.  (Anyone watch that show?  It's about a team of forensic scientists who solve murders for the FBI.)  One of the characters in the show, Hodgins, was examining the body of a police officer who had been murdered.  Unbeknownst to Hodgins, the person who left the dead body of the murdered police officer, had put a bomb in the ribcage of the corpse.  When it went off, Hodgins survived, but was paralyzed.  The evil act was killing a policeman, then planting a bomb that would injure even more law enforcement people.

Hodgins was understandably bitter.  Pent up anger, that turned into demeaning outbursts.  From his wheelchair, he lashed out at his co-workers, his friends, and especially his wife.  Evil was winning.  Hodgins was giving in to that evil.  He had other choices of how to react, but he chose to let the evil of the murder and the bombing get the better of him.  That one, instantaneous act changed his life—but for him and his reaction, for the worse.  The evil of the bombing became the tragedy of another man losing his meaning in life.  It wasn't the bombing itself.  It was the bitter reaction Hodgins chose that compounded the evil.  Hopefully in future episodes, Hodgins will work through that.  But what if he doesn't?

What if we don't?  What if we allow the evil in the world to also destroy and compromise our sense of meaning in life? Somehow we have to overcome the evil.  That's what we're praying when we say that phrase in The Lord's Prayer:  "…deliver us from evil…"  That phrase is a little misleading.  Most people pray that phrase thinking that they are praying that God would keep them away from evil—that God would put up a spiritual blockade so that evil never touches us.

But the word "deliver" really means to "rescue."  "Rescue us from evil."  That has a whole different meaning.  It means the evil is already upon us.  It is overpowering us.  It is getting the better of us.  By praying the Lord's Prayer, and that phrase in particular, we are praying for rescue from an evil that is already happening to us—right now.

What we need to be rescued from is not only the evil that is beating us down, but also the evil that wants us to react to it, when it is over, with feelings of guilt, anger, bitterness, hollowness, frustration and more.  Once the evil event is over, then comes the wave of emotional reactions that can destroy us just as surely as the event itself.  What we are asking God to rescue us for is so we won't give up our sense of meaning in reaction to evil, that God had given us before the evil attacked.

What we are asking God, through that phrase in The Lord's Prayer, is to remove the toxic impact of evil.  It's those toxic leftovers from evil events that usually get us.  Most of us, remarkably, get through the big, awful experiences that we would also label as some kind of evil.  What we have the harder time doing is dealing with the toxic after-effects that have a way of poisoning our personal meaning.

Last year, on the 20th anniversary of the bombing, a Remembrance service was planned.  One of those who attended was paramedic Darrell McKnight who now looks like an off-duty Santa Claus, and talks in a low rumble. He has struggled with drug addiction and developed post-traumatic stress disorder, which he attributes to the bombing. 

"To say how the bombing has affected my world would simply be that April 19th was a game changer in my life," McKnight said. "I don't think you could have been there without being affected by it deeply…That was a lifetime of trauma."

The ensuing 20 years have have taken their inexorable toll on McKnight, who said he's never been able to remove memories of being handed lifeless babies he could do nothing for, or of seeing corpses displaying the bomb's full brutality.  He remembers talking to a woman he had found trapped under tons of debris. The woman was injured so badly that she would surely die and McKnight said he was unsure whether she was even aware the rescuers were there.

One of the ways McKnight chose to cope was through drugs, most notably, methamphetamine.  "(It's) a great way to self-medicate ... I'm really open about my addiction issues that came after the bombing," McKnight said.  He's been clean now for 4 years, he said, "dealing with life on life's terms rather than Darrell's terms.  It hasn't been real easy."

"Deliver us from evil."  "Rescue us from evil."  The evil is not just the bombing (or whatever other atrocity evil explodes into our lives).  Evil is the continuing toxic effects to such an experience, that on a continuing basis makes us say, "It hasn't been real easy."  But that's what Jesus wants us to pray for—to be rescued from that ongoing toxicity that threatens to take us over.  Jesus wants to restore a sense of deep meaning back into our lives.

Jesus doesn't want us locked into the downward spiral of spirit draining after effects to evil, just as much as we don't want it to happen.  Like Darrell found, the further he got into his toxic reaction to the evil he saw, the harder it was to free himself from it.

Jesus Christ is able to purge the toxic poison of evil's hold on us, take it upon himself, and do away with it.  We can't do that for ourselves, because once we allow those toxins into our spirit, they become entrenched and we are their prisoner.  Only Jesus can deal with that level of the after-effects of evil.  That's what Jesus wants us to go to him in prayer for, so that we might be rescued from evil.

Monday, October 10, 2016

Like Oysters Explaining Ballerinas

"Like Oysters Explaining Ballerinas"
Isaiah 55:8-9

For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
nor are your ways my ways.
This is the word of the Lord.
But as the heavens are high above the earth,
so are my ways high above your ways
and my thoughts above your thoughts.  (Revised English Bible)

In her essay, "Waltzing with the God of Chaos", the Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor wrote:
I am so reluctant to talk about God and what God thinks and how God acts.  I have such a red flag there.  I go there, but when I do, I'm very reminded of Robert Capon saying, (in talking about God) we're like oysters trying to explain ballerinas.

I talked with my son, Ryan, about his faith this weekend and found this is one of the things that bugs him the most—people speaking for God, people who say they know God's mind, what God thinks, how God feels about specific issues and situations in the world.  To Ryan it is the height of arrogance to say you know what God thinks.  And I totally agree.

So, how can I talk about God without falling into that same arrogance?  How can I tell you who God is and who God is not?  I'm in this sermon series about what it is that gives life meaning, and I firmly believe our belief in God infuses life with meaning.  But how do I say that without totally misleading you about God?  It's a fearful thing to stand before you and speak with assurance and confidence about the person of God, and hope I'm not totally messing up.  I feel that way more and more as I have progressed into my 37 years of ministry.  I think when I was younger, I was much more arrogant and willing to tell people exactly what God was like and what God thought.

So this is going to be a tough message, and as I sat writing it at the end of this week, I wasn't sure where I was going with it.  It's a weird mindset to be writing a sermon in which I wanted to tell you God is the best one to give your life meaning, but, at the same time, according to this scripture, realizing how fundamentally different God is from us in terms of thinking and acting.

I was talking with a woman from another church one time.  She was trying to get to California before her grandmother died.  A bunch of crazy events happened that conspired against her and she didn't get to make the trip.  She even ended up missing her grandmother's funeral.  She said, "Well, God had a plan and getting out to California just wasn't his plan.  God must have something else in mind for me."
I replied, "And maybe not getting to California had nothing to do with God at all.  It was just a bunch of sorry events and circumstances that got in your way."

Now before you chastise me for being very unpastoral, and having a terrible bedside manor with this woman, or selling God short and not defending God like I should, let's look at the mindset that informed our responses to her situation.  Because it is the same mindset:  Neither of us know what God is thinking, what God is up to, and so we must try and surmise what it is we think God is thinking.

The woman did not know what God was intending when she was unable to get to California.  Maybe God was intending something.  Maybe not.  But in order for the woman to make sense of her situation, she had to give God the benefit of the doubt—God had some intention for her, she just did not know what that was.  God was up to something.  She was unable to figure out what that something was.  But it was something.  It was not just nothing.  All she had to do was figure out what God was thinking.  Then she would be at peace with what happened.

My response to the woman was different, but from the same mindset.  I am unwilling to blame God for everything that happens.  Whether she realized it or not, this woman was blaming God for not getting her to California.  She wanted God to defend himself, and make his reasons clear.  I was not willing to go that far.  I imagined God "up there" looking down, thinking, "Look, lady, it is not my fault you did not have enough money for the plane fare.  Maybe you should not have bought that new laptop that left you short of money.  Do not ask me what I was thinking; what were you thinking?  Where are your priorities?"

I thought that in my head.  But I did not say it to the woman.  Maybe I should have.  Maybe I should have said something like, "Look, the problem is not with God or what you think God is thinking or not thinking in terms of your situation.  The problem is your screwed up thinking—your screwed up theology—of who you think God is, and how you think God should act.  You have all kinds of messed up expectations about that."  But I didn't say that out loud.  Are you feeling better about my pastoral abilities, now?

A lot of people think they know what God should be thinking.  A lot of people think they know how God should be acting in certain situations.  A lot of people think they know the ways of God, or at least what they should be.

But not according to God's statement here in Isaiah:  "For my thoughts are not your thoughts…"  The word "your" there is plural, which means all of you.  If God was a southerner, it would read something like: "For my thoughts are not like any of all you-all's thoughts."  Get that in your heads.  God does not think like you.  At all.  In any way.  The converse is also true:  You do not think like God.  At all.  In any way.

God's ways are not like any of our ways.  Our ways are not like any of God's ways.  When you look up at the night sky, and see the stars, the distance between you and those stars is representative of how different God's thinking and ways are from ours.  Some of those stars you are looking at are already dead, and their light has gone out.  It's just taken their light that long to travel the huge distance so you could see it.  That great distance is descriptive of how large of a gap there is between how God's ways are from ours, and ours from God's.  Does that blow your mind, or what!?

Let's just stop and think of the ramifications for that biblical truth that God doesn't think like us, act like us, nor are God's ways anything like our ways.  What does that mean for all the issues, large and small that we squabble about in the church?  Think of all the ways people on either side of some issue that is effecting the church try to angle God on their side.

What this statement of God means is that, just probably, both sides are wrong and have nothing to do with God.  What this means is that there just may be a third side to every issue, and that's where God resides, and it has nothing to do with any of the sides we human beings are on.  What if, in all our arguing, and side-taking, and issue bashing, we are ALL wrong?

But beyond all of our arguing and side-taking, how can we know that what we have interpreted as God acting in our life is really God acting in our life?  Maybe God has acted in our lives in ways we have totally missed—because they don't measure up with our mindset about the ways of God.  Maybe things that have happened in our lives have been totally misinterpreted, as to God's activity.  How can you be sure, if God's "ways are not your ways" and God's "thinking is nothing like your thinking"?

Am I or my questions getting bothersome?  I, at least, hope I'm getting you thinking.  Because this is really important in our approach to God and God's approach to us.  How can we know we are making a connection to God if God's ways are so different from our ways, and God's way of thinking is way off from how we think?

I'll share one answer to those questions that was reaffirmed to me in an article I got this week, forwarded from our presbytery office.  I shared a copy of it with Alan Luttrell, because it has to do with our vivid vision and our work in growing the church.  The title to the article is, "Can We Wait for God's Spark?"

One of the main points of the article is that our relationship to God (notice I said "to God" not "with God")—our relationship to God is one of responding, not initiating.  Most of the problems we get into with God come from the times we initiate what we think God is up to, rather than responding to what God is up to.  We like to tell God what God is doing, then get on board with that.  What that means is that it's all about us.  Whatever we think we're doing for God, was really started by us, so we're only doing what we want to do.

But the article made the point that God issues a spark—an idea, a ministry, a work, an inspiration.  God is the initiator.  Then if we respond to that spark, a fire starts, and God's work becomes inflamed in us.  Like the burning bush Moses saw.  The burning bush was a spark from God—a God initiated self-revelation, if you will.  Moses took notice of that bush, and became immediately inflamed with the work of God of freeing the Hebrew slaves, of starting a new people, and taking them to a new place.  The point is, God started it in God's way.

That's how it has to work with God.  God has to be the initiator.  We are only the responders.  That way we know what we're doing, the direction we are moving, the ways we are thinking, the meaning we are finding in life, are God's ways and not our own.  That takes a lot of patience and listening and watching on our part.

The article made the further point that usually God's way, and God's thinking is disruptive.  Certainly God's way of handling the Hebrew slave problem in Egypt became very disruptive not only for Pharaoh, but also for Moses who ended up being the people's leader, as well as for the people who Moses marched out into the wilderness, ending up wandering around for 40 years.

Think of all the ways of Jesus with people he encountered.  If Jesus really is God in the flesh, then Jesus' ways are certainly not going to be our ways, and Jesus' thoughts are not going to be our thoughts.  Jesus' ways and thoughts are going to be disruptive to people's lives.  And that's what happened.  Jesus healed a lame man by the pool of Bethesda.  The man had been lame for 38 years.  Jesus made him stand up and walk, which the man did.  But by doing so, Jesus disrupted his life, making the man now take responsibility for his own life, which he hadn't done for 38 years.

Jesus had several encounters with different Pharisees, and each one was a disruption of their theology and beliefs and religiosity.  Jesus tried to free God from their boxes of theological constriction.  But they couldn't do it.  Only one, Nicodemus, who came to Jesus by night, was willing to almost give God God's freedom, as Jesus described God:  Like the wind that blows where it wants.  Or Paul, who was a Pharisee, who the Risen Christ disrupted right off his donkey one day, and who truly understood the disruption of the gospel message of the grace of Jesus Christ, a forgiveness of sins that is not earned by anything you can do, but is freely given to Jew and Gentile alike.  How disruptive is that!?



God can change your life.  God can infuse your life with more meaning than you could find anywhere else.  I believe that is true.  But you have to do two things first.  You have to let go of everything you think you know about God, and what you think God thinks, and the ways you are assuming are God's ways.  In other words, you have to let God be God in the way God wants to be God, not in the way you want God to be God.  That is a hard and scary thing to do—to let God be free, to be God as God wants to be.

And secondly, you have to let God disrupt your life with the thinking and ways of God.  God can fill your life with meaning, but you have to let God disrupt the meaning you think you already have, the meaning you probably built yourself, the meaning that has nothing to do with God.  You have to stop and listen and pay attention for the God who is totally other from what you are, so that God can initiate meaning like a spark into your life.  And then so you can respond to that spark, and meaning can burst forth like a flame in your life.

Monday, October 3, 2016

The Meaning of Dirt

"The Meaning of Dirt"
Genesis 2:5-15

I grew up in a big city.  The big city of Seattle, Washington.  The population of the greater Seattle-Tacoma area is 3.5 million people.  I've lived in other big cities.  Spokane, Washington.  Louisville, Kentucky.  Bakersfield, California.

And I've lived in really small towns.  Spearville, Kansas with about 600 people.  (That's about how many people were in my high school class.)  Hickman, Nebraska with around 1000 people.  Leoti, Kansas with about 1400 people.

Because of my varied living situations and background, I think I have a unique perspective about people and their geography.  What's the difference between living in a huge city like Seattle, and living in a tiny town like Spearville, Kansas?  Here's one.  When I moved to Spearville, one of my city friends at the time sent me a t-shirt.  The front of the t-shirt read, "Small Town:  A place you don't need to use your turn signal—we already know where you're going."

Let me back up here a bit.  I want to answer my question about the difference between living in a large city vs. living in a tiny town.  But I want to answer that question in this sermon, as the first of a series of sermons, titled, "The Life of Meaning."  Not, the meaning of life.  But the life of meaning.  What is it about life that gives a person meaning?  That gives you meaning?  How do you know if your life has meaning?

I'm going to give you three ways to decide the answer to those questions.  Today I'm going to tell you about how a clear understanding of dirt will determine the kind of meaning your life has.  Next week, I will talk about dealing with God—who God is and who God is not—as a way of finding meaning in life.  And two weeks from today I will talk about the reality of evil, and how evil in the world shapes the meaning you find in life.

So, I started out talking about cities and small towns.  How many of you have been to Wichita or Kansas City.  What's one of the first things you notice as you drive into downtown Wichita or Kansas City?  It is so obvious, you probably don't even notice it.  What is the obvious thing you don't notice?  Give up (in case no one answers, or gets it)?  The answer is, how much dirt is covered up by concrete, asphalt, brick and mortar.

Imagine what Wichita, Kansas City, or Seattle looked like before they were cities.  Seattle was an evergreen forest covering seven hills.  Now the trees are cut down and the hills are covered with concrete and asphalt.  Imagine all that dirt, under cities all over the world, covered.  Dirt is a living entity.  But under concrete and asphalted cities it is cut off from the air, the sun, the rain.

According to the scripture story, we were made from the dirt, not from concrete and asphalt.  Or, if you accept the evolutionary story of the beginning of humanity, you start with the primordial soup, the swampy mud from which the first organism crawled.  Whichever, you start with dirt.  With mud.

That's one of the main answers to my first question about the difference between Seattle and Spearville.  In Spearville you are surrounded by a veritable ocean of dirt.  When that dirt is plowed and planted—and even when it isn't—you can smell it.  It's richness as a living thing is unmistakable and undeniable.  In a small, rural town we are surrounded by dirt.  By a living thing full of organisms both microscopic and macroscopic.  In a small town you have to learn how to live with the dirt, how you are a part of it, and how it is bigger than you and controls everything about you—even to the point of embracing you when you die.  Dirt is your beginning and ending.

So what does that mean?  What does that have to do with your life of meaning?  I'm going to get some help here from a woman by the name of Phyllis Tickle.  That name strikes fear and dread in the hearts of our Sunday School class.  We just got done reading a book by Phyllis Tickle in Sunday School titled, The Great Emergence.  The book was, shall we say, "thick."  Not thick in terms of a lot of pages.  But thick in terms of really hard to understand.  And it's all Gordon Stofer's fault.  Jennifer Barten gave it a one out of five star review on Goodreads.

Anyway, Phyllis Tickle is an interesting character.  She and her husband and seven kids used to live in Memphis.  She said her kids understood life in terms of how "…everything was brick and concrete and asphalt in their lives."  So she and her husband uprooted their family to the little town of Lucy, Tennessee, into a backcountry farm they named, "Lucy Goose Farm."  She said, "…all our friends thought we were crazy."

After a few years on the farm, Phyllis Tickle reflected:
Out here, living this way…the first thing you learn is that we're not the measure of anything.  We're never going to win out here.  Do you know what I mean?  Enlightenment and Western civilization in the last three hundred years has been built on the notion that man is the measure of all things.  That's bull!  Man's the measure of absolutely nothing.  But you forget that, when you're in the city and everything is scaled to man.  Everything is human size.

I think part of what Phyllis Tickle is saying is that in a city everything is mostly artificial.  Artificial environments where you can keep the elements out and not have to be bothered by them.  We do that somewhat in smaller, rural areas, but not so much as most of the world around us.  In cities, life and all it contains is squared off, put on a grid, and connected not by options but by one-way streets.  Even with all the tall buildings, people in the city are protected from seeing the sky.  Thus, the only measure of life in that kind of contained and manufactured environment, is people.  People are the be-all and end-all of everything that exists.

But in rural areas, I have found there is an entirely different world, where, as Tickle says, "Man's the measure of absolutely nothing."  Let's take the sky and the land as an example.  After living in cities through my mid-twenties, I moved to Spearville, Kansas for a year.  I took a year off from my three year program at seminary, to get a year of practical experience in the church.  To find out what being a pastor was really like, apart from the rigors of arguing theology.

One of the things I remember feeling was how oppressive the openness was.  Isn't that weird?  There was so much sky!  A 360 degree panoramic view of the sky with nothing in the way.  And a 360 degree panoramic view of dirt, for as far as my eyes could see.  Dirt and sky.

I wrote a poem about it, at the time:

i am currently in Kansas
waiting for a tornado to carry me to Oz
living in solitude
out on the high plains
under the expanse
of so much sky,
within the emptiness
of so much land,
i am becoming
simply me

I'm glad I kept this poem, particularly for the last line.  I started out with the attitude of a lot of my friends who worried about me living so deeply rural.  Those who have dared to come out and find me under this expanse and emptiness interpreted it as I had:  "There's nothing to see here!"  I saw all the land and all the sky as nothing.  It took a long time to switch that meaning from, "There's nothing to see here," to, "There's too much to see here."  Too much sky.  Too much dirt.

I slowly began to see the wisdom and truth in Tickle's statement, "Man's the measure of absolutely nothing."  Out here under "so much sky" and "so much land" I discovered how small I really am in the largeness of that sky and dirt.  Some people come to that revelation when they look up at all the stars at night.  I came to that revelation as I spun in a slow circle one day and took in the enormity of so much in respect to my size as a human.

That revelation, for me, became what I believe must be the starting point for us all:  I am not the measure of anything.  I am simply a small part of a much bigger world than I ever imagined.  I am surrounded by a world that is alive and dynamic and growing.  I am a small piece of a huge world that was created way before humanity came to be.  In fact, again if you believe in the creation story, humanity was the last thing to be created.  Everything was done when we moved in.  Thus we had nothing to do with this big world we have found ourselves in.

The unspoken myth or lie that we come to believe if we live in the cities is that, "This was all created by us.  We are the makers.  The designers.  The builders of our own world."  Everything is designed around human beings.  Tickle was right—in cities we are the measure of all things.

Once I moved to Spearville, and the other various small, rural towns I've lived in, I found out that was a lie.  There's a much bigger world that we are a part of, and that world and it's largeness becomes invisible in cities.  Or at least we try to make it so.

The truth I discovered, just by changing my geography (or as Kathleen Norris calls it in her book, Dakota, "spiritual geography") was that I can't find myself, I can't discover the life of meaning, living a small life, living a cramped life in an artificial environment like cities.  I can only find my place in the largeness of life under so much sky and the emptiness of so much dirt.

There's another aspect of rural that I discovered, that Phyllis Tickle identified so well once they moved from Memphis to Lucy, Tennessee.  She wrote:
Here, everything is alive.  And because it's so alive…and because it really is going to win—it's going to bury us…Some day, they're going to find us under mounds of kudzu.  But the truth of it is that, while all of that's happening, there's also such enormous permanence here, such a consistency of cycles, and a magnificence of all of the growth that's happening here, that you are caught in majesty that doesn't require anything of you except just a sense of, "Yeah, it's here.  And God bless me for the time I'm part of it.  How wonderful to be a part of it."

I think that's what I meant when I wrote that line at the end of my poem, "…I am becoming simply me."  There isn't a whole lot that you feel is growing in the city.  All the concrete, asphalt and bricks keep that from happening.  Where there are no growing things, there are no growing humans.  Once in Spearville, it wasn't just the enormity of the sky and the dirt, but also the enormity of growing things.  Everything is alive.  It caused me to discover I was alive also, and part of a much larger world out here that is alive, and grows and becomes.

Out here, living with so much dirt, the measure of all things is life itself.  Growing, teeming, vibrant life.  Again, that is what I began to discover is what brings life meaning—realizing, as the creation story tells, we are all dirt, that is our beginning point, and we find ourselves best in the midst of so much dirt and so much sky.  Because it's not just the dirt.  It's the growth.  The life.  That the measure of all things, the measure of meaning is life itself.  That is where we all must begin if we are to find the life in meaning.