Monday, February 26, 2018

Giving Up Ego

”Giving Up Ego”
Matthew 16:24-26

The Miami Dolphins won the Super Bowl in 1973 and 1974.  After the second title, coach Don Shula was exhausted.  He and his wife took a vacation, but he said he wanted to go somewhere nobody would recognize him.  So they took a vacation in a small seaside town in Maine.

When they arrived, it was raining so they decided to go see a movie.  When they entered the theatre, the house lights were on and the Shula’s were surprised that the small handful of people gave them a warm round of applause as they took their seat.

Secretly pleased, Don Shula whispered to his wife, “I guess there isn’t any place I’m not known.”
“I guess not,” she replied with a touch of sarcasm.

A man came across the aisle with a friendly smile and shook hands with Shula and his wife.  “I’m surprised you know me here,” Shula said.
“Should I know you?” the man replied with a questioning look.  “We’re just glad to see you folks—the manager said he wouldn’t start the film until at least ten people came in.”


The ego is probably the trickiest part of us.  It’s a necessary part of us, because it helps us function psychologically, as well as helps us adapt to the ways the world threatens our ego.  Our ego’s are effective problem solvers, successfully coping with life’s challenges.

But problems arise when our ego defenses get overly defensive.  That’s when ego rationalization takes over and we begin to distort the facts, make excuses, and believe our own lies.  We experience threatening events and we see them not as part of life but personal attacks.  Self-protection becomes more important than the truth.  We slip into the twin modes of blaming and anger in an attempt to avoid unpleasant feelings in the self.

Fully fanned, these ego defenses become what is called “ego psychosis.”  It’s a runaway complex in which we convince ourselves that we are the perfect embodiment of something special.  That only we have been called upon to deliver our unique gift to the world that was unavailable to humanity until we arrived on the scene.

Someone caught up in ego psychosis will rant on and on, sounding like their own ad copy, studded with superlatives about being the best, the highest, the first, the last, the only, etc. etc.    It shouldn’t take you long to put a face to this description.

One of the protections against this kind of ego problem is having a sense of humor about yourself—to be able to laugh at yourself.  Like Don Shula did in telling his vacation story.  You can tell how deeply a person is into their psychosis when they take themselves so seriously they can’t laugh at themselves.  Humor is an effective form of self-criticism.  Without it, you will sink fast into psychosis.

That is just one extremely thin slice of the pie of the ego.  Ego is both resilient and treacherous at the same time.  A piece of pie, like the ego, can hold together, or it can slurp all over your plate and make a mess.  It has to be dealt with.

And Jesus does, in this statement in the verses read by Shannon.
If anyone wants to follow me, he must say no to himself...If he wants to save his life, he will lose it.  But if he loses his life for me, he will find it.

That was the New International Reader’s Version.  In other translations, the phrase, “...he must say no to himself...” is a bit different.  In the Revised English Bible, it has, “...renounce self.”  In the English Standard Version, it has “...deny himself.”  In the Good News Translation, it has, “...forget yourself.”  And in The Message, it has, “Let me lead.  You’re not in the driver’s seat.”

The word Jesus used literally means, disown, abstain, or lose sight of.  These words make sense when you are dealing with some negative behavior trait.  Disown gossip.  Or, abstain from filthy language.  Or lose sight of pornography.

But Jesus is talking about the self.  The very core of who we are.  The very things by which we define ourselves.  Disown your self.  Abstain from your self.  Lose sight of your self.  Wow!  That is major.

I did a lot of thinking about this stuff about self and ego this week.  It was kind of quiet in the office with Jennifer being gone.  Don’t get me wrong.  I missed having her there in the office to chat back and forth with, but I kind of needed a lot of quiet thinking time with this one.  So it worked out well.  Or, at least you can judge, after I try to take you through what I came up with.  So bear with me.  Maybe I thunk too much.

I first asked myself, How did we get this sense of self in the first place?  How did this relationship with ourselves come about?  What were the intentions of this relationship with our selves?

Let’s say God created our sense of self, our egos.  As believers in God, that’s a logical place to begin.  God created human beings.  Thus God created our sense of self—our relationship with our selves.  We can’t know what God intended that sense of self to look like because we have so disfigured that by sin.  By self.  We could say that the relationship with self was the very thing that messed up our relationship with the self.  We might call that sin—original sin:  Allowing the self to mess up our selves.   Because, if we are honest, we are our own worst enemy.

Looking at Jesus’ statement, though, maybe it is a glimpse of what our God-intended relationship with our self was supposed to look like.  Look at the different words the different translations use to get at what Jesus was saying we should do to the self:  give up, forget, deny, renounce, say no to.

All of these words or terms imply an act of will.  An act of will is not easy.  Remember last week’s sermon—we need to give up any notion of life being easy.  This dealing with the self, with the ego, is something we have to force ourselves to do.  Since Jesus is telling us this is what we have to do, then this selflessness must have been a part of the original human condition—the way we were originally made to be.

The fact we have to shape ourselves by will power means that something powerful intervened in God’s intentions and got in the way.  Now it has to be willfully fixed.
Say no to your self.
Renounce your self.
Deny your self.
Forget your self.
Give up your self.
Get your self out of the driver’s seat.

So maybe, in the purity of creation, with the first humans, there was no sense of self.  Rather than individual self, there was only wholeness with the entirety of creation.  Maybe rather than individual self, there was God.  People only were as they fit in with God.  You only mattered because of how you fit in with all else, rather than demanding your individuality above all else.

I’m only speculating here.  I’m trying to imagine what a human being would look like, would be like, who was self-less.

What does a human being look like who says no to, renounces, denies, forgets, gives up self?  Can we even imagine it?  Yet, we must, since Jesus demanded that we do it.  And if Jesus demanded this shift from self, he must be assuming it’s doable, or he would have made the demand.  “Whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”

The words, “life” and “self” appear to be interchangeable here in Jesus’ statement.  “Whoever wants to save his self will lose it, but whoever loses his self for my sake will find it.”   If all you are worried/concerned about is your self, you will never gain your self.  People who are constantly in the self-help section of the book store, who are self-absorbed, who are trying to constantly figure themselves out—do they?  Are they ever satisfied with themselves?

If the answer to those questions is “no”, why?  Maybe Jesus is right.  The search for self is counter-intuitive.  It’s not by constantly being absorbed with self that you find self—but by totally letting go of self, that self is found.  Self is discovered when self is not looked for.  Self lives when self dies.

What if you look your whole life for your self, but you get to the end of your life and you are still looking?  You have spent your whole life—your whole self—in vain.  You end up saying to your self, “If only I could have found my self.”  But Jesus is saying, before you get to that point, say, “If only I could have let my self go.”

I know this all sounds screwy and totally mixed up.  I’m just trying to think through what Jesus said, and imagine (because I think all of what I am saying takes a huge amount of imagination) what it would be like to let my self go, and by so doing, find my self.

There is a qualifier in Jesus’ statement.  “...for my sake...”.  “But whoever loses his life (self, ego) for my sake will find it.”  For my sake.  For the cause of Jesus.  On account of Jesus.  In the interest of Jesus.  For the benefit of Jesus.

Here seems to be the difference maker.  As Paul wrote in his letter to the Philippians, “For me to live is Christ and die is gain” (Philippians 1:21).  Again, if the words life and self are interchangeable, then it is, “For to me, self is Christ...”. To find your self is to find Christ.

Ultimately, our life, our self, our ego, must be bound up in God.  Not self within self, but self within God.  What our selves looked like before our self took over, was a person immersed only in God.  Ego only made sense in God’s ego, as it were.  It took no will at all to be a self in God.  Now it must take all of our will to say no to your self.  To renounce your self.  To deny your self.  To forget your self.  To give up your self.  To get your self out of the driver’s seat.  And find your way back to your most true self for Christ’s sake.

Think of what the opposite is of all those:  To say yes only to your self; to announce only your self; to indulge only your self; to remember only your self; to grasp only your self; to put only your self in the driver’s seat.  Like I said, I’ve been trying to imagine, all week, what I would look like, what I would be like, if I could give up my self, my ego.  But you know what?  It doesn’t take anything at all to imagine myself the opposite.  To be full of my self and my own ego.  I can imagine that clearly.  I can see exactly what that would look like.

It would be so easy to give in to that.


But I am so intrigued by what Jesus said.  I want to find out.  I want to use my energy, imagination, and will to say no to self, to make that happen.  I hope you do to.  For His sake.  Not ours.

Monday, February 19, 2018

Giving Up Any Notion of Easy

“Giving Up Any Notion of Easy”
Matthew 7:7-11

I eat breakfast on Thursday mornings with Alan Luttrell and Rex Johnston.  Every once in a while, Alan will hit us with a big question.  One morning, a couple of weeks ago (January 25) was one of those mornings.  Alan asked, “What are your goals and aspirations for your future self; and, what are you willing to sacrifice of your life right now to attain those goals and aspirations?”

Rex scratched his head.  I scratched my head in thought.  It’s not one of those kinds of questions you can readily come up with an answer.  If Alan had asked, “So what are your plans for the weekend, I could have answered with a snap.  But not a question about my aspirations for my future self.

But I had to open my mouth and say something.  So I told him it’s one of those double-headed dragon kinds of questions.  The first head is figuring out our future self—what will make our future self joyful and at peace.  The second head is figuring out what we are willing to let go of, or give up, in order to make that future self happen.  Most of us would like to mold a future, joyful, peaceful self with as little expense as possible.

But that’s not how it happens.  If we are going to make some kinds of changes in order to create a future self we can live with, there will be a cost.  Not just financial.  I don’t think that’s exactly what Alan was asking.  At least I didn’t take it entirely that way.  I was thinking more of costs in terms of emotional costs, relationship costs, identity costs.  Things like that, that are much harder expenses to meet than just finances.

Alan’s question is a good one, and it is something I had already been thinking about as I get closer and closer to retirement.  So I’m going to use Alan’s question as the basis for a sermon series during Lent.  I’m going to concentrate on that second head of the dragon:  what we will have to sacrifice to attain whatever vision of our future self we are hoping to attain.

I’ve come up with a list of things we will have to give up, and it isn’t your usual list of things, like chocolate, or Pepsi, or TV watching, or whatever people normally give up.  This is a list of sacrifices that will be a lot harder than all that.


So, let’s get started.  The first thing you will have to give up, if you are thinking about making aspirations for a different future self, is the notion that things are easy.

I’m one of those naively optimistic kinds of persons when it comes to certain things.  They usually have to do with fixer-upper kinds of things: minor carpentry, plumbing, that kind of thing.  I say to myself, “Self, this will be easy.  It shouldn’t take any time at all.”  Then, half a day later, with water all over the floor, or fingers smashed trying to hammer in nails, I do what I should have done in the first place.  Call someone like Rex to come help—or just do it for me.  Then it would have been easy.  And it would have been done easily.

My sense is, that we approach big changes in our lives the same way.  We get an idea about the kind of person we want to be.  We think to ourselves, “Self, this will be a snap.  In two or three months I’ll be well on my way to being a new person.”  But somewhere along the way in that two or three months we find out this isn’t going to be easy.  It’s harder than it first appeared.  We are tempted to scale back, if not give up altogether.

It appears that Jesus does us a disservice in this regard.  Jesus makes it sound easy:
Ask, and you will receive; seek, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened to you.  For everyone who asks receives, those who seek find, and to those who knock, the door will be opened.

Easy peasy.  Piece of cake.  Just ask.  Just knock.  Just seek.  Nothing to it.  And since that’s all you have to do, everyone wins!  No probs!

Let’s go through each of these words—ask, seek, and knock—and see if Jesus is making it easy.

First, ask.

The word Jesus used in the Greek language in which he spoke, literally means to beg, to crave, or to desire.  So, it’s not just about asking.  There’s an attitude that a person has to bring with their asking.  Our asking must be more than a blithe or erstwhile question.  It’s not just asking as if the answer doesn’t matter.
What is my destiny?
What is my future self?

These questions and their kin must be asked with passion, says Jesus.  You don’t just want to know.  YOU WANT TO KNOW!!  YOU HAVE TO KNOW!!  Your very life depends on the answer.  That is the fervor that must be brought to this kind of asking and these kinds of questions.

We aren’t asking, “What’s for dinner?”  We’re asking, “What do I need to survive in the future—to really live, to feel like I’m really alive and matter?”

Thus, it’s the passion and craving we bring with the asking that is important in Jesus’ mind.  That’s the kind of asking that Jesus honors.

It’s also the kinds of questions we ask.  Dinner or sustenance?  Is it Friday yet, or, What did I do with my life this past week, and how can I live better next week?  The kinds of questions we ask will demonstrate the level of craving and desire with which we are asking.

Then, there’s a further question that asking implies:  Ask whom?  Asking implies there is another involved.  This isn’t just a conversation going on in your own head.  That’s a closed feedback loop. It’s like your head is a hula hoop, where you are the only one answering your own questions.  You are the only source of your information and answers to your asking.  That isn’t what Jesus implies.  Questions create dialogue with another.  That’s why Jesus said, “Ask.”  He wants us to get out of our own heads and engage another.  Question/answer.  Question/answer.  Question/answer.  Dialogue!

So, it’s not only your questions that matter.  Or the passion you bring with your asking.  But also, who you are asking your questions to and with.  Those whom you ask, those with whom you dialogue, will shape and determine your answers—the answers you passionately seek.

So, Alan’s original question:  “What/Who is my future self, and what am I willing to sacrifice to create that future self?”  Do you really want to know?  Or is that not your question?  Maybe you have another.  Something you need to ask that is driven by your passion?  Who are you going to talk with as you desire and divine your answers?

So, is asking easy.  Nope.  Not anywhere close to what we thought.

Let’s go on to the next:  Seek.

There’s a real surprise here.  The word that Jesus used in his Greek language for the word seek literally means meditation or worship.  Meditate and you will find.  Worship and you will find.

It’s more than being on a treasure hunt, seeking is.  In fact, seeking in Jesus’ vocabulary, has little to do with activity at all.  To the contrary, seeking is about slowing down, stopping, being still.

God, speaking through the Psalmist, said, “Be still and know that I am God.”  Or as the Revised English Bible has it, “Let be then; learn that I am God.”  (Psalm 46:10). Being still, or letting be means to be idle, to relax; literally it means to sink down, as in sitting on the softest and most comfortable easy chair.  Just sinking down into stillness.

To seek, as Jesus is describing it here, means to just chill.  To sink into worship, to relax into meditation.

The order of these words as Jesus said them—ask, seek, knock—may be important.  We do the seeking after we do the asking.  We ask our questions with passion and fervor.  We engage in conversation with another about the questions we ask.  We dialogue with another about our questions.  And then, when we have done the work of our asking, we seek.  That is, we move into worshipful meditation, and we do nothing but ponder what we have discovered from our asking.

We just stop and be still.  We take time to think.  We go into idle mode so we can meditate.

In worship, we are opening ourselves to God in an intentional way.  In meditation we are making ourselves accessible to God in an intentional way.  We aren’t talking.  We’re musing.  We’re absorbed into God like being absorbed into that easy chair.  We’re reflecting in God.

Being still, musing, meditating, being fully present to God, is not easy.

And thirdly, knock.

This one is pretty straightforward.  Sort of.  To knock means just what Jesus said.  It means knocking on a door.

But, like the word “ask”, the same question could be asked, “Knock where?”  Knock at which door?  Wherever the door is, or what the door leads to, or what kind of place the door is a part of.  That will determine the kind of response you will get when you knock.  Or, who will answer the door.

Why do we knock?  We knock to arouse a response.  To gain entrance.  Knocking implies this is not our place.  This is someone else’s place.  We want to be invited in.  We want to be a part of the place where we have knocked.  We may, or may not know the people inside this place, but we need to knock first to gain entrance.  The door upon which we have knocked must be opened for us from the inside.

But, again, as I mentioned these three words of Jesus might be in a certain order intentionally.  Once you ask, then, once you slow down and meditate and worship, then you will know at which door to knock.  You won’t know where to knock until you have done the work of asking and seeking.

You finally then can knock because now you know the house you want to live in.  You know the place you need to be.  You are ready to enter the life of the person you need to be.  You know what you need to give up, to sacrifice to become that person.  In other words, you are ready to knock and enter in.


OK; the title of this sermon is, “Giving Up Any Notion of Easy.”  Why are these three (ask, seek, knock) not easy?  Especially in the larger questions of life.

We aren’t naturally inclined to ask.  We ask questions that don’t matter.  We dialogue with others who have nothing for us, about the insubstantial minutiae matters of life.  We don’t initiate dialogue about the substantial.  We keep those kinds of dialogues internal, within the closed feedback loops of our own skewed thinking.  Only under duress, or in crisis, do we ever attempt to vocalize those questions of substance.

Seeking is hard because this kind of seeking requires us to slow down.  To even stop.  Meditation and true worship is a slowdown, clear out the mind clutter kind of activity in order to concentrate on God.  To listen to God’s Voice, in an intentional way.  Seeking is not about doing.  Seeking is about being.  Be still and know that I am God,” not, “Do something and know that I am God.”  How hard is it for you to just be and not do?

Knocking is hard because most of us haven’t spent the time in order to know which door to knock at.  Instead, we go door-to-door in an undiscerning way.  “Maybe if I just read this book; or maybe if I just watch this TV show or video; or, maybe if I go hear this speaker; or, maybe if I attend this conference...”. Knock, knock, knock, knock.  Do you know which door to actually knock on?


This is not going to be an easy journey.  But maybe a necessary journey.  If you are ready, let’s begin.  Ask.  Seek.  Knock.

Monday, February 12, 2018

Hear Ye! Hear Ye!

"Hear Ye!  Hear Ye!"
Mark 9:2-8

My guess is that people are more visually oriented than they are hearing oriented.  We depend on our eyes more for establishing what is real and what is not.  Seeing is believing.  Hearing alone is not trustworthy.  It’s not what you say, it’s what you do.  At least, that’s how we behave.

Just hearing takes too much imagination.  Using our imaginations is a lot of work.  That’s why we don’t do it.  We’d rather see a visual representation rather than have to just listen and use our imagination.  I can tell you about a YouTube video that I saw, and fill you in on all the details of the video and why it was so funny.  But chances are, you are going to look it up and watch it yourself, because, as I just said, seeing is believing.

More people go to movie theaters to watch movies than read books.  Along with that, more people watch television than listen to the radio.  Children aged 2-11 watch over 24 hours of TV per week.  Adults aged 35-49 watch more than 33 hours of TV per week, and that time increases the older we get.  The average American watches more than five hours of television every day.

That’s why I gave up television.  I was getting sucked into the vortex of binge watching when I got home from work.  I asked myself, “Self, what are doing with your life?  You’re wasting your life watching people pretend to be somebody else.”  So I quit.  Cold turkey.  About 7 years ago.  Some people ask me if I miss TV during basketball season.  Except for a few times Brad and Deb have me over to watch a game, for the most part I listen to the KU games on internet radio, and have to use my imagination; I kind of like that.

So I quit TV and started reading.  The average person reads recreationally 19 minutes a day.  I’ve been reading about 50 books a year for the past few years.  So, significantly more than the average.  My daughter read 100 books last year.  Some of those she listened to in the car while driving here and there in San Diego—it takes a lot longer to get around out there than driving here.  But even listening to books is so much of a different experience than the visual bombardment that happens when you watch so much TV.  As I said, imagination is ignited when listening—something that doesn’t happen when using your eyes and watching something.

I’m not making any kind of moral judgement about this.  Too much.  I only bring this up to further my idea that we are much more visual people rather than an audio or hearing people.  This is especially so when the truth is trying to be established.  In a court of law, what usually carries more weight is what people actually saw—an eye witness—rather than an ear witness.  We equate more power and authority to the visual image, the display, rather than the spoken word.  We haggle over words, but not with pictures.

For those of you old enough, do you remember what Uri Gregarian, the first Russian cosmonaut said when he got back to earth.  “I went up to the heavens and I saw no God; there is no God up there.”  Seeing is believing.  Or, not seeing is proof for doubt.

Then a cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud there came a voice, “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!”  Suddenly when they looked around, they saw no one with them anymore, but only Jesus.

Here is a classic instance of what I’m talking about.  The three disciples, Peter, James, and John hear a Voice.  They all hear it.  The Voice makes a simple, brief, yet direct statement.  The disciples immediately did what we would do—they looked around for verification of what they were hearing.  Just hearing wasn’t enough.  They had to see.  They looked.  But saw no one.

Even if they could have or would have seen the one speaking, it wouldn’t have mattered.  What mattered was what they heard:  “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!”  They heard a Voice (presumably the Voice of God) telling them to listen.  God didn’t say, “This is my Son, the Beloved; look at him!”  “This is my Son, the Beloved; watch what he does.”  God wasn’t instructing the terrified trio of disciples to look at Jesus and see all that he had done, was doing, and would do.  The word was listen.  Use your ears.  With God’s Son, it wasn’t what the disciples were going to see as much as what Jesus said was going to be important.  His words.  His speech.  His language.  God was signaling, at least to these three disciples, what Jesus was going to say was more important than what he was going to do.  That is, whereas most people would come to watch the show—see the miracles Jesus would perform—what Jesus would teach, was much more important.  Listen.  Hear.  Pay attention to what is said.

Jesus, on certain occasions, expressed his frustration that people wouldn’t listen, wouldn’t take him at his word, wouldn’t pay attention to what he was saying.  Jesus was frustrated that people constantly pressed him for something visual—a miracle.  As if his words weren’t miraculous enough in themselves.

And therein lies our problem.  Our God is an auditory God who speaks and expects us to listen.  Our God is one who creates worlds by speaking:  “Then God said, ‘Let there be light, and there was light.’”  Our God is one who speaks commands and expects us to hear them and by hearing, obey.  The decisive action of God is to speak, while ours is to listen.  The prophet Isaiah hammered away at that point again and again:

Hear, O heavens, and listen, O earth;
for the LORD has spoken.  (1:2)

Hear the word of the Lord,
you rulers of Sodom!
Listen to the teaching of our God,
you people of Gomorrah!  (1:10)

And those are just in the first 10 verses in the first chapter.

Even in God’s commandments, there is a warning about creating too much visual representations that could become rival objects of worship.  God warned Moses, in one of the 10 Commandments, “You shall not make for yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath...” (Exodus 20:4).  Do you get that?  God doesn’t want anything visual made that depicts God or what God has made.  That is dangerous according to this second commandment.

But it is equally just as dangerous to hear God and not listen; to listen, but not pay attention, or to pay attention and not obey.  The emphasis throughout the Bible, in God’s communication with people is on listening, not seeing.

When God said, “Listen...” to the three disciples out of the cloud, on that mount with Jesus, God was using a very special word.  It is a word that doesn’t just mean, “Hear what I have to say.”  To listen as God instructed them to listen meant, “revelation.”  Something is not just being spoken; something is being revealed.  If the disciples listened, if we listen to God’s Beloved, something important is being revealed to us.  It may be some aspect of God’s will for us.  Or, it might be a revelation of the person and personality of God.  But if we aren’t listening, if we aren’t paying attention, God’s revelation will pass us by.

Let me use the act of preaching a sermon as a kind of model for maybe what God’s expectations are, in this command that we listen.  Whether we say this assumption out loud or only to ourselves, we preachers idealize those who listen to us.  We see the people in the pews as hungry and thirsty for the word of God, who can’t help but be affected by the gospel, who have one question that pushes all other questions aside:  How can I best be a Christian?

We preachers assume that you who listen to us each Sunday (because there’s really nothing to look at that is worthwhile) go out of the sanctuary affected by what you hear, and challenged to assess and mold your daily lives accordingly.  We preachers make the assumption that all the people who make it to church on a given Sunday have come motivated by some deep spiritual desire to hear a foundation-shaking, eye-opening word from the Lord.  We make these assumptions because it would be hard if not impossible to stand up here Sunday after Sunday assuming the opposite—that you come for no reason at all.

The rub comes from an assumption, spoken or unspoken, from the pew side of the sanctuary.  Those to whom preachers speak are, as a rule, persons who often hear sermons, attend worship and find themselves at home in the church.  Almost too comfortably at home.  Fred Craddock, in a book about preaching, wrote, “Even for casual listeners there is a fairly high degree of predictability in the sermon, and surrounding the whole occasion is the dead air of familiarity:  we have been here before, and here we go again” (Craddock, Overhearing The Gospel, page 25).

One woman wrote in to Reader’s Digest about her great aunt who had become increasingly deaf.  A specialist suggested an operation to improve her hearing.  The great aunt promptly vetoed that idea.  “I’m 94 years old,” she said, “and I’ve heard enough!”

Preachers don’t want to imagine that that’s what the people in the pew are saying to themselves each Sunday, no matter how old they are.  “I’ve heard preaching all my life, and I’ve  heard enough!”

Just the sheer mathematics of sermon listening is enough to dull your ability to listen.  By June 30th of this year I will have been preaching in this sanctuary for 8 and a half years.  If you had been here every Sunday during that time period, you would have heard me preach about 406 times.  406 sermons you would have heard!  (They are all on the blog site, by the way, in case you want to go back and reread some of those gems!) And I’m just one in a long run of preachers whom you have had the pleasure of listening to!

But sadly, that just may be the greatest factor that hinders listening, especially the revelation kind of listening that God commanded the disciples to do.  The greatest obstacle to the ability to give the kind of attention to Jesus Christ that God desired is assumed familiarity:  we’ve been here before, I’ve heard it all before, here we go again.

I’ve drawn out this image for you so that we can understand that that’s what Jesus faced in his preaching and teaching—in trying to get people to listen to him.  The apostle Paul, preaching to the Gentiles and the non-religious was presenting something to people that was a first time experience.  They’d never heard such a word before.  They felt conviction when hearing the gospel, and they also found the power through God’s spoken word to do something about that conviction and change their ways.  But Jesus’ listeners were up to their ears in scripture, people who were in the pew for almost every sabbath service and religious celebration.

When you are that kind of creature of repetition and custom, it’s easy to assume that there is “nothing new under the sun” in a word from God.  But that’s a dangerous assumption.  I would dare venture the statement that those who say to God, “Here we go again,” have not, in fact, listened as much as they assume to be the case.  We have all learned to survive by partial deafness to the real condition of ourselves and our world that God desires us to hear.  Ultimately, that is a deafness to God.

We who are instructed by God to listen to Jesus have found creative ways to dynamite, bulldoze, and pave smooth the hilly terrain of God’s words.  We forget, or try to forget, that the point of listening to the Voice of God at all is to place we hearers in a position of risk and momentous decision.  To listen to God through Jesus is to become a person plagued with a sense of uncertainty about our condition before God.  That plaguing uncertainty is intended to motivate those who listen to redefine themselves according to the will and intentions of the One who speaks.

Listening to the Son of God is intended to create an appetite for more.  It is to percolate a ripple effect of inquiring, struggling, and seeking after God.  It is the hope of the listener of God that by truly listening, the distance they feel between themselves and God will be overcome.  But so often, we may silently conspire with ourselves to make sure no one—especially ourselves—feels guilty for listening to God so poorly.

As in Jesus’ parable of the sower, it is the soil on the path, so often traveled and so hardened by repetitious traffic, that it is no longer receptive to the seed.  But no one wants to be told they are that kind of soil—unresponsive, and in reality, unlistening.

Time and time again, God must gather himself together in a cloud overhead, and realign our attention:  “This is my Son, the Beloved; LISTEN to him!”

Monday, February 5, 2018

Gathering 'Round The Door

"Gathering 'Round The Door"
Mark 1:29-39

What’s it like to be ill, to have a disease, or to be possessed by a demon?  Most people know what it feels like to be sick.  A lot of you have been dealing with this flu.  Nick’s going through his second round with it.  Cindy Keller went through a painful infection that moved around her body.  Bill Keller’s dealing with thyroid cancer.  Shannon’s mom is facing a difficult heart surgery.

As far as I know, none of you are dealing with demonic possession...

But most of us who get sick with one thing or another assume we are going to get better.  That’s how God designed our bodies.  To heal.  None of us seem to be immune to different illnesses, but we all think, by hook or by crook, by doctor or by medical technology, by medications or treatments, we will get better.

What about those kinds of illnesses and diseases in which that assumption will not play out?  Jean Bloomquist has written an excellent article in the Christian journal, Weavings.  In her article she tells about the time leading up to when she found out she had lupus—a chronic, unhealable disease of the immune system.  Throughout the article she quotes from her journal—thoughts and feelings she had written about in the days and months after being diagnosed.  Her attitude and faith was challenged in a way it had never been before.

One of her early journal entries spoke of her wish for a typical and traditional, everyday life:
I remember thinking, Why can’t I just have an ordinary life—a simple ordinary life?  And then I realized no one does—or that everyone does, including me.

Jean Bloomquist realized that everyone has an ordinary life.  That is, everyone has some pain or sorrow or grief or illness that they bear.  Part of ordinary life, or part of being ordinary, means experiencing things you’d rather not experience.

There is an old Jewish Hasidic tale about the Tree of Sorrows.  People are allowed to approach the Tree and hang upon its branches their own individual burdens.  Then everyone circles the Tree, free of those burdens.

But they are not allowed to leave the Tree unburdened.  They are supposed to choose a sorrow, an illness, a burden from the Tree that will become their own.  No one can live totally unburdened.  As the legend goes, after everyone looks at all that is hanging there, each person always chooses to take their own burden back.

I wonder about all those people who gathered ‘round the door of Peter’s house wanting Jesus to be their Tree of Sorrow.
“Let me hang this one upon you, Jesus.”
“If I was free of this, Jesus, all would be well in my life.”
Acting as the Tree of Sorrows, did Jesus relieve them of their pain, but then ask that they take another?  My guess is, he did not.

He didn’t have to.  Because, what people, what we don’t realize is that when we are rid of one burden, another is there, ready to take its place.  It’s called the human condition.  We assume that those who were healed went away and never needed Jesus again.  But how many of those people were repeats?  They went away relieved, but came back another day, with a new, or enlarged burden.

That’s what Jean Bloomquist discovered.  We, all of us, are infused with the human condition and a simple, ordinary life means a life that includes a distinct burden (or burdens) that each of us carries.  Burdens that impel us to gather ‘round the door at Peter’s house hoping Jesus will touch us.

A burden that impels us towards Jesus.  A burden that impels us toward healing.  Jean Bloomquist mused in one of her journal entries about how, when people find out they have a chronic, incurable disease or illness, they want to study it.  They want to know all about it.

She said she did some of that with her lupus, but she shifted her focus.  She wrote, “I wanted to learn about healing.”  She studied the things that make for health.  She asked herself tough questions like, “What does it really mean to be healed?  What does it mean to be well.”

These were the hard questions for her as she coped with the mysterious and painful effects of the lupus.  Before the lupus struck, she knew what it was like to feel “normal.”  What if felt like to be “well.”  But lupus, as all immune system attacking diseases do, destabilizes most of your body’s functions.  After a couple of years of dealing with it, she forgot what a normal, well day was.

So what do you do?  Do you give in to the diagnosis?  Jean Bloomquist saw herself drifting that way the more she studied the nature of the disease.  People told her she should just accept the reality of the diagnosis.  But when she shifted her focus toward discovering the things that make for health and wellness, she found a new resolve to fight and get well, whatever that would mean for her.

I think about all those people who gathered ‘round the door at Peter’s house.  For how many years had they only looked at the nature of their disease?  For how long had they been told by well meaning “comforters” to just accept it and not do anything stupid?

Remember the story of the woman who had a hemorrhage for 12 years and had spent all she had trying to be well?  What was each day like for her, for 12 years running?  How long had it been since she even remembered what a normal day was?  Normal for her had become the day in, day out work of dealing with her condition.  “Well” was only a word in a dictionary that had no meaning for her.  Until that day she snuck up behind Jesus, touched the edge of his cloak and was healed.

When all the others came to Jesus that evening to Peter’s house, did they hear two little voices?
“What’s the use?  This won’t work; I should just accept the realities of my situation.”

Or, the other voice being,
“I can be healed.  I will be healed.  Jesus will heal me.”

My guess is, for those who gathered ‘round the door at Peter’s house, those two voices constantly wrestled with each other, alternating from day to day which has more power.

In his book, Letters To My Unborn Child, David Ireland described how he faced and dealt with an incurable neurological disease.  He wrote:
I have often asked myself, and have on occasion been asked by others, “Do I believe in faith healing?”  I have never taken the matter lightly.  On one occasion I asked a former bishop of the Methodist Church to lay his hands upon me.  Later I attended the service of a nationally known faith healer, not as an observer, but as one open to whatever God might will.  In neither case did my failure to experience a miracle in any way affect me negatively.
Today when I’m asked, “Do you believe God will heal you?”, my response is a question—one I have asked myself.  Do I really need to be healed?  It’s a genuine question, not a mere defense to avoid the issue...(Because) my faith is in the genuineness of God, not in whether He will do this or that to demonstrate His goodness.  I don’t need acts of miracles or wondrous words to prove it to me.  That’s not the nature of my relationship with God.

In my mind, that’s a statement of a mature faith in God.  I wonder about those gathered ‘round Peter’s door.  If Jesus didn’t touch them, if Jesus didn’t get to them, if Jesus didn’t heal them, would they walk away from that door with such maturity?  Were they more concerned about having faith in the genuineness of God, apart from the healing miracles?  Or, did they just come to be healed?  To use Jesus?

Did they come out of love for Jesus?  Did they come because of some new vision Jesus had given them about living?  Or did they come because they wanted something out of Jesus?  And once they got it, would they be like the 9 out of 10 lepers who were healed, then took off in every direction?  Or, would they be like the 1 out of 10 who returned to Jesus, because more than just his leprosy was healed?

Jesus doesn’t seem to sort the people out and heal only those who have pure motives.  Jesus doesn’t just pick out the ones who seem to have come ‘round the door for the “right” reasons.  The fact that people come and seek Jesus out seems to be enough for him.

Jean Bloomquist wrestled with this question of motivation as she sought healing.  She wrote in her journal:
What should I be doing to seek healing?  Do I kid myself by thinking I can “do” something?  It takes energy to pursue the possibilities, and sometimes I simply don’t have the energy.  Where does that leave me.  I pray.  I pray that my body may live in harmony with itself.  I give thanks for the healing already taking place.  (But) in the process of seeking healing, how do I find the balance between doing and being?  How do I know when to fight and when to let go?  When does letting go become passivity, or apathy, or worse, despair?  What is surrender?  What is grace?  Am I not to use what God has given me—my intellect, my resourcefulness, my curiosity, my desire for healing and wholeness?  I can’t help but believe that somehow seeking or striving counts for something.  For what, I don’t know, but I do believe it matters.

Maybe, that’s what Jesus honored as he healed all those who had gathered ‘round Peter’s door.  All those people’s striving counted for something.  What about those who didn’t strive?  Who didn’t get up out of their beds, and even try to amble down to Peter’s door?  Were they healed?  They didn’t even show up.

But the others, striving for healing and wellness, but maybe more importantly, striving for Jesus, became a large part of what they called “faith.”  That faith was not only shown in a dynamic kind of living and striving in the face of the unknown, but also in an opening up to Jesus.  In their yearning for what lay beyond their illness, their disease, their demonic possession, their burdens, they strove after knowing Jesus.  That striving, that reaching, counted for something to Jesus that day.

The people’s need drove them to Jesus.  The people’s need was to bring their human condition to Jesus.  They brought their condition to Jesus because they knew he was someone who could do things.  Many can talk.  Others can expound or preach or lecture.  But Jesus was effective.  And that’s why people brought their desire and need to be healed to him.  That’s why they gathered ‘round the door at Peter’s house.