Learning The Clutch

"Learning The Clutch"
Ecclesiastes 3:5-6

Ever had to teach someone how to drive a stick shift?  Like a family member?  It's one of those things you should never do for a family member.  It's similar to wallpapering with your spouse.  You just don't do it.  It does not enhance marital bliss.  Teaching your child how to drive a stick shift does not create a fun bonding time.

Nobody taught me how to drive a stick shift.  In our white bread, suburban neighborhood there was one little grocery store.  My next door neighbor owned it.  Medina Grocery.  I started working there when I was 12 or 13.  I continued working there through my first year of college.

I started out as a stock boy and a bag boy, carrying groceries out for all the characters that came into that little, oil wood floor store.  People didn't come in just to get groceries.  They came in for the experience.  For the conversations around the produce section, or a cup of eggnog in the back room.  Eggnog that had extra ingredients.

Medina Grocery also had a home delivery service.  People would call in their orders.  I'd get a grocery cart and get all their list of stuff off the shelves, and put it in a box on the back table.  Write their name on the outside of the box.  Organize the table filled with boxes for the delivery guy, in the order he'd be delivering them.

The delivery truck was an old Dodge panel job.  Fire engine red.  Medina Grocery printed on the side with a picture of a cartoonish guy running with a bag of groceries, some of which were flying out of the top of the bag.

By the end of my working tenure there, I was the delivery guy.  The first time I was the delivery guy, I wasn't the delivery guy.  The regular guy was sick, and John Frost, the owner, asked me if I knew how to drive a stick shift.  I said, "Sure."  I didn't.  That's what I mean when I said no one ever taught me to drive a stick shift.  I taught myself on that maiden delivery run.  I taught myself out of my own teenaged arrogance and fearlessness.

It was a three-on-the-tree.  If you don't know what that is, don't learn.  Just stay away from it.  You'll be fine.

How many of you have been to Seattle?  I'm not sure if you noticed, but it's a rather hilly place.  So on my first ever delivery run, driving a three-on-the-tree stick shift, I was going up this hill.  There's a stop light a fourth of the way up the hill.  I got stopped by the red light.

When the light turned green, I put it in gear, let out the clutch and killed the engine.  Did it again.  And again.  And again, about six or seven times.  The light turned yellow, then red.  I'm still there.  About 10 cars are lined up behind me.  I did that through three cycles of green to red lights.  The line of cars behind me was a quarter of a mile long.

I'm in a red panel truck with Medina Grocery painted on the sides.  Everyone knows where it's from.  Finally, at the next green, I gave that thing all the gas, popped the clutch and squealed the tires of the Medina Grocery truck for about a block up the hill.  I was now an expert stick shift driver.

I didn't know anything about stick shifts and clutches and how they worked.  I'm not even sure if I understand them now, and I drive a six speed stick shift in my truck.  The nice thing is, I don't have to be worried about being trapped at a light on a hill in Kansas.

But the way I understand it is, when the clutch peddle is pushed in, it releases the transmission's effect on the drive train.  Think of the drive train as a spinning plate.  The clutch pads are on both sides of that spinning plate.  When you push in the clutch peddle, the two clutch pads get pushed away from the spinning plate.  Put the drive train in gear, or change gears.  Then let your foot up slowly on the clutch peddle, easing the two pads back on to that spinning plate.

If you let up quickly on the clutch peddle, the pads grab too quickly and violently on the drive plate and the engine dies.  That's what I was doing in the Medina Grocery truck.

So it's a two step process with the clutch.  It's letting go.  And then easing back on.  Letting go.  And easing on.   In learning to drive a stick shift using a clutch, (and I'm not teaching anybody, so don't get any ideas) the hardest part is the easing back on.  Letting go is easy.  You just push on the clutch peddle.  Simple.  It's the easing back on to the source of power that's the toughest part to learn.

It's the opposite in life.  In life, the letting go is the hardest part.  The releasing.  The pushing back from.  The changing.  The divorcing.  The teenager driving on their own for the first time.  Or, the child going off to college.  The retiring.  The misheld expectations or assumptions.  The dying.  It's that hand opening release on the power that drives our life that is the hardest.

Ranier Marie Rilke has the poem:
We need, in love, to practice only this:
letting go.
For holding on
comes easily: we do not need to learn it.

Animals have it easy.  They run on instincts.  They gather food.  They find a mate.  They make babies and take care of those babies.  They defend their turf, nests and territory as best they can.  The live, they die.  They eat or get eaten.  Certainly they deal with resistance, pain, and struggle.  But they do all that on an unthinking, instinctual level.

But humans.  We do most of the same things.  But along with all that comes self-reflection.  Self-awareness.  Along with that comes blame, guilt, self-pity, worry, and resentment.  Both animals and humans have memory, but memory works different for us.  Our memory can be used to inflict emotional pain on ourselves.  Our memory serves to hold on to certain recollections that do nothing more than make us feel bad about ourselves.  We just can't or won't push the clutch peddle in and release those things, so we can change gears and move forward differently.

That's why I like these verses in Ecclesiastes, made popular in the song, "Turn, Turn, Turn" by the Byrds back in the '60's.

For everything there is a season,
a time for every matter under heaven:
...a time to gather stones together,
and a time to cast away stones;
a time to embrace,
and a time to refrain from embracing;
a time to seek,
and a time to lose;
a time to keep,
and a time to cast away...

I like the back and forth in this poetry.  It's like the motion of working the clutch.  There is the pushing in of the clutch--the releasing, the freeing, the letting go.  And there is the easing back out the clutch, the easing into new ways to grab hold of, to live and move through this life.  There's a rhythm to this letting go, and easing back into a hand hold.

The problem is that we humans want to grab and hold on as much as we can.  We don't like having to do the other:  the letting go.  Think of all the grasping and grabbing that happens:  Our country as number one in the world and the force that needs to be exerted with which we uphold that status.  Holding on to our standard of living which, in order to do so, creates economic exploitation, greed and over-consumption.

When suffering or sick, the fear that comes with illness causes us to hold on to health or life--and certainly that is a good thing to do.  We don't want to give up and let go every time we have a cold, or face some kind of illness (or heart condition).

When facing death our cultures whole stance is death-denying, in an attempt to hold on to that last breath.  Everyone around the dying person plays a part in that conspiracy of denial, which makes it all the more difficult for the dying person to let go.

We want, as the poem in Ecclesiastes states, the gathering, the embracing, the seeking, the keeping.  It's much harder to open up and allow the casting away, the refraining from embracing, the losing, and the casting away.

There are some paradox's to the act of letting go.  One woman I dealt with a number of years ago just couldn't relax.  We talked about different relaxation techniques, but try as she may, she couldn't get there.  What I discovered, in dealing with her, is that trying doesn't produce relaxation.  Trying is just another form of the energy of control.  If she controlled all the facets of her relaxation techniques, then it should work, right?  But just the opposite happened.  The more she tried to relax, the less relaxed she became.  Especially when what she tried didn't work.

The paradox was that in order to relax she had to let go of trying to relax.  She had to let go of her sense of control over her relaxation.  Relaxation was only going to come by just letting go.

The more controlling we are, the more grasping we are, the more we become unyielding and unopen.  In one of the monasteries I was in, there was a beautiful chant the monks recited.  It was in Latin, and is much more beautiful in Latin, but the English translation is:
Come Holy Spirit
Bend what is rigid in us,
Melt what is frozen.

I really loved that chant, because it reminded me that the more rigid and frozen we are, the less yielding we are to God's Spirit, and God's work in our lives.  The more we are unwilling to open ourselves up and let go, the more we try to be in control, the less we will simply relax into the Spirit of God.

Yielding and opening up to God has the element of allowing in it.  As we let go, and yield ourselves to God and God's Spirit, that means we are allowing that to happen.  We have an attitude of receptivity, rather than grasping.  You can only receive something, if your hands were already full, by opening your hands up and letting go of what we are holding on to so tightly.

Yielding to God means allowing ourselves to take God as God presents God's self to us, and to take life as God presents life to us, rather than trying to control our experiences with God, and everything else about our lives.  Yielding and allowing means embracing God as God is, not as we think God and life should go.

And then a huge part of this yielding and relaxing into God means trusting that God is at work in the letting go.  If we are experiencing too much stress and strain in life, it may be a sign or signal that, when we should be yielding, it has degenerated into control.

In one of the silent retreats I was on, the monk instructed us to think about this question:  "How do you practice with the Cross?"  I thought, That's a really weird question.  But of course I couldn't say that because it was a silent retreat.

But the more I thought about it, I realized it's an awesome question.  The Cross is the prime instance of yielding, letting go, and total relaxing into God.  It is the trusting and confident abandonment of self into God.  Without the Cross, we lose touch with our understanding, capacity, and need to yield before God.

And in that yielding is an expression of the deepest love.  Love is precisely a yielding--a letting go of a space we have filled with self, and once emptied, we can then invite and receive the beloved into that space.  That is the kind of self-emptying, letting-go-love of Christ on the Cross.

One woman, whose young child had died, said, "My heart is broken, but it is broken open..."  That's a beautiful expression of allowing God, when we have been hurt deeply, and our empty places are filled with pain, to break that space open, so the pain can go, and the love of God can fill that emptiness.  To clutch the pain, to grasp for it, to hold it in, will never allow us to be open and yielding to the loving God who wants to come to us with compassion.


That Medina Grocery delivery truck and I became friends after a while.  I learned the rhythm of totally releasing, and then easing into the grabbing hold of the power drive.  But I had to release first, totally let go, before I could then reaccess the power.  As I said, that's the hard part for us--releasing, yielding, and letting go.  Releasing is the only first step in going forward, and going smoother.

Two Important Questions

"Two Important Questions"
Genesis 1:1, 31-2:1
Psalm 24:1-2

The earth is in disaster mode.  It isn’t because the earth itself is a disaster.  It is because humans are making it so.  Global warming, caused by our industrialization, driven by burning fossil fuels, is resulting in dramatic climate change, the destruction of the ozone, the near total melting of polar ice caps, and more, has pretty much put us past the tipping point.

My son, whose specialization is sustainability, who has a brain that sees the big picture of all the interrelatedness of what’s going on, who researches a huge number of reports from disparate sources, summed up our state of affairs in a conversation I had with him recently with the statement, “We’re screwed.”

From floating islands of garbage the size of Delaware out on the Atlantic Ocean, to deforestation in South America, to China and the United States gobbling up a huge majority of the worlds natural resources, to the internal combustion engine that propels all of our vehicles, to the coal fired plants that provide our electricity, and more, all adds up to a catastrophic mess.

Sustainability experts talk about the “tipping point”.  It’s like when it snows, and the tiny, individual snowflakes begin to pile up on a branch.  Thicker and thicker they accumulate.  Until finally, one too many alights on the pile, and the branch breaks.  That’s the tipping point.  Too many negative effects pile up on the earth, until one too many begins the process of a broken world, and it’s too late to make it right.  The world, like Humpty Dumpty is having a great fall, and all the kings men and all the kings horses can’t put Humpty Dumpty together again.

In the book, Limits To Growth, about the world over-population problem--that feeds into all the other problems I’ve listed so far--the authors use the illustration of a farm pond.  The farm pond has lily pad plants growing on it.  The lily pads double their coverage of the pond every day.  So, on what day does the farmer need to clear the lily pads if she doesn’t want her pond totally covered?  The answer is the day the pond is half covered.  But if the farmer looks at her pond, without thinking about the doubling rate of growth, she will think, “Oh, half the pond is still clear; I have plenty of time.”

It’s called, the exponential growth of disaster.  Or, as I have mentioned, the tipping point.  We’ve gotten our selves and our world in an inescapable mess.  The pond has already been half covered and we are in the next 24 hour period, so-to-speak, when the ecological disasters will fully take over our earth.

How did we get to this point?  A large part of it, for me, has to do with the answer to a couple of questions.  They are primary questions that arise out of the first verses of the Bible.  They are questions that form the foundation of one of the most important themes in scripture.  We can’t avoid these questions.  These two questions are asked of us continually by scripture.  The problem is, if we answer these questions wrong, everything else in our lives--including our relationship to the world--will end up in a mess.  So the answers to these questions will determine the wellness or disaster of our personal and global life.

The first question is (drum roll, please):  To whom does all this belong?  “All this” includes you.  To whom does the earth and all in it belong?  It’s a question of ownership.  Like I mentioned, if you answer this question wrong, everything else will go wrong.  Not only ourselves, but the earth will suffer.  And suffer it has, which lets you know humanity has been getting the answer to this question wrong for a long time.

The right answer is that humans do not own the world, or any part of it--especially ourselves.  As the opening to Psalm 24 states (as in the rest of the Bible):

The earth and everything on it

    belong to the Lord.

    The world and its people

    belong to God.  (CEV)

There are a couple of words in both Hebrew and Greek for our word “everything” or “all.”  There is a separate word if I was talking about all of you in this sanctuary.  But there’s another word that is used as a universal all, meaning all people everywhere and at every time.  That is the word used here--the universal “everything” that encompasses literally everything.  Everything belongs to the Lord.

So, it comes down to what I call theological math.  If everything in the world, including every person in the world, belongs to God, what else can belong to us?  It’s pretty simple math.  God has ownership over EVERYTHING.  That leaves NOTHING for our ownership.

Ownership implies power and control.  That’s why we like ownership.  When you think about it, a great deal of our human laws hold up the concept and rights of ownership, especially land ownership.  But in the law of the Bible, the 25th chapter of Leviticus, for example, underscores what God thinks about land ownership:  “The land is mine; with me you are but sojourners and tenants” (vs. 23).

If there is nothing in this world that is ours, but everything is God’s, then that changes us from owners to tenants.  We have been given everything we have, by God the owner, to take care of it for God and on God’s behalf.  If we thought we were owners, then we also mistakenly thought we only have to answer to ourselves about what we think we own.  But if we own nothing, and we are only caretakers for God, the real owner, we have to answer to God for what we do with what is Gods.

This correct, Biblical perspective changes everything in terms of how we interact with the world--that is not ours.  Think of what that means.  If God owns everything, and everything is God’s, how we treat everything is making a statement of what we think about God and God’s ownership.  To abuse the world, to fill it with toxicity, to lay it waste, to trash it, to erase it’s protective abilities to sustain all life, is to say to God, “I don’t care a twit about your ownership of this planet, and therefore I don’t care a twit about you.”

The other danger is to claim ownership, which gives people the false sense of power and control over what they think they own, and therefore do as they please with it.  That attitude sends the same message to God:  “You, God, don’t factor in at all with what I’m doing and the decisions I’m making with what I think is mine.”  You have no say, God, because I own it!”

So the destruction we have wrought upon nature and the world and each other and ourselves is not just bad stewardship.  It isn’t just stupid economics.  It is the most horrid of blasphemies.  It is flinging God’s gifts, owned by God, into God’s face, as if they were of no worth beyond our own self-acclaimed power to destroy them.  Dante and other Christian thinkers have been unanimous that “despising Nature and her goodness was a violence against God.”

The awful question then becomes, how can modern Christians have so solemnly folded their hands while so much of the work of God was and is being destroyed?  And further, not only how have we just sat by with folded hands, but how have our hands been complicit in claiming ownership, and by that claim, do what we want with God’s world?

All this leads to our second big question.  Remember I said there were two important questions--it’s in the title of this message anyway.  It’s a very similar question to the first.  It is:  Whose story are we really living?  If we can yank ourselves from the mistaken notion that we own anything in this world, and give in to the truth that total ownership belongs to God, then what does that say about how we live?  What does that say about the decisions we make about our lives?  What does that say about the story we are living?  Is it our story, or does even our story belong to God?

It becomes just as huge a question as the first (To whom does the world belong?)  If that first question shocks us awake, then the second tandem question should do the same:  What sort of life story would be the most responsible in a world that is totally God’s?  What is, then, the life of a tenant and not an owner in this world?

I hope you’re beginning to get a glimpse of how radically different life would be, in answer to these two questions, not only in your individual life story, but in how we treat God’s world.  Can you get a glimpse of how messed up we are, and how far we have strayed from anything God intended and designed?

How are we going to stand before God and give any kind of plausible answer to his two questions, when we, and all those others in the world are living by destroying God’s world, and who see the murder of Creation as an OK way to live?  How can we even lift our heads to God’s gaze, as God looks at a world that God, at creation, called entirely good, but we have taken that goodness, by our own sinful grasping at ownership, in order to pollute it entirely and destroy it piecemeal?

The creation destroying machinery of the industrial economy has been instrumental in making legitimate this form of blasphemy before God and God’s good world.  In it’s stance before the world, this creation destroying machinery, fueled by our misguided sense of ownership, and the lostness of our personal story, has treated neither God nor God’s world with the respect the true Owner deserves.  There is no awe, reverence or cherishing in such machinery leveled at God and God’s world.  There is only a sinful show of contempt.

I confess, I’m more cynical than I used to be, in relation to a few things.  One of those is hope about the world.  That is, my hope in people to turn around and quit raping God’s creation.  On a macro level, it’s never going to happen.  That is, unless God turns his world loose on humanity, wiping most of us away and starting again.

My hope still remains, though, on a micro level.  On a personal level.  I think we can make major turn-arounds in terms of our individual life story, to live in a way that honors God’s ownership of all we have; to live into a story that is God’s story and not our own; to live responsibly as stewards and tenants in God’s world, in the location we find ourselves.  That would give honor to God, and end the life of blasphemy.  It would give us the confidence to stand before God both now and in the end, and be able to say:  “Here is what you gave me, Lord; I give it all back to you cared for, cherished, and whole.”

The Laughing Donkey

"The Laughing Donkey"
Genesis 21:5-7
Psalm 126


I wanted to put last week's sermon and this week's sermon together as bookends.  Last Sunday's sermon was about revenge, and turning our desire for sweet vengeance over to God.  It's an immensely difficult task to let God handle our lip smacking revenge.  We pray for vengeance, but then we want God to allow us to be the answer to our own prayer, and exact those just desserts upon those who have hurt us, humiliated us, or taken advantage of us.  We're even unsure we want to turn our retribution over to the "justice system" and the courts, lest they not do what really needs to be done--in our eyes.

So, today, we will look at another Psalm that is the result of doing what God wants in terms of our vengeance--letting God handle it.  If we can do that.  If we can, with trembling hands and bitten lips, turn our ideas and desire for retribution over to God, Psalm 126 is what will happen--what God will do.

Psalm 126 is in a cluster of Psalms, called "songs of ascent."  They range from Psalm 120 to Psalm 134.  Each of these Psalms is a processional Psalm:  that is, it's sung or shouted as a group of people walk along in parade fashion.

From the title, "song of ascent" you can figure out that the people are parading up.  They are ascending.  The place the people are ascending to is the temple on the hill upon which Jerusalem is built.  The people, on high festival days, would start at the bottom of the hill, down near the garbage dump of Jerusalem.  They would start marching up the hill, singing or shouting Psalm 120.  As they ascended, they would take each of these 15 Psalms in order, and sing them as they paraded up to the temple.

Once they arrived at the Temple, the doors would be closed, and the High Priest would be standing in front of the doors.  The people would sing Psalm 134, and the Priest would swing the doors open and the people would process in.  It was all quite dramatic.

Eugene Peterson calls these Psalms, "Pilgrim Psalms," because they are about movement.  The Psalms of Ascent are about people going someplace--towards God, towards the presence of God.  These Psalms are about a faith journey, enacted by a long processional, uphill, with singing, all by a large group of fellow worshippers.

William Faulkner, in writing about these Psalms, wrote:  "They are not monuments but footprints.  A monument only says, 'At least I got this far.'  While a footprint says, 'This is where I was when I moved again.'"

Psalm 126, the Psalm we're looking at this morning, served as a pause.  At this point the people would have been almost half way up the hill in their parade.  They would be able to see from whence they came, and how far they yet had to go.

A number of years ago, I went to something called, "Pause For A Purpose," out at Azusa Pacific University in Southern California.  It was the year before Ryan, Kristin and I ended up moving out to California.  And Azusa Pacific ended up being where Kristin went to College.

We were living in Nebraska at the time, and The Lord was preparing the three of us for a move.  Ryan and Kristin were going to be going out to California to college.  What was I going to do?  Where was I going?  What shape would the ministry take for me in the future?  I had a desire to do something entirely different than what I had been doing.

So, during this three day conference, "Pause For A Purpose," I did just that.  I removed myself from my ministry in Hickman, Nebraska and paused for a purpose.  Just a short pause, in the company of many other Christians who were doing the same thing, simply stopping from their everyday life, and taking some intentional time to reflect about past, present and future.  To stop, if just for a short time, to still all other voices, and listen intently for God's voice.  It was a Psalm 126 time for me.

In just those three days I was able to do some assessment.  I pondered the scenery of where I've come from--the places where I've been, and what happened in each of those places.  I was able to gain perspective of how far I've actually come.

And in that Pause For A Purpose, I was able to celebrate in worship with other believers, not my own progress, but what God has done to get us all where we were at the time.  To look back, from this present moment, and see God--celebrate God's acts of salvation and grace.  All of that looking back, gave fresh energy to where I felt God was leading, based on where I had been.  I returned to Nebraska, ready to make new decisions, and move forward, simply because of my Psalm 126 pause in the middle of my  journey.

Much of the message of Psalm 126 is in the details.  For example, pay attention to the verb tenses in this Psalm.  This Psalm is not just one of many creating movement, but there is movement within the Psalm itself from past to present to future.

Verses 1-3 are in the past tense:  God returned Zion's exiles...we laughed, we sang.  This is a Psalm that is the flip side of last weeks Psalm.  In last weeks Psalm, we heard the depression and anger of a people who had been taken away as captives to the Babylonians.  Children and old people were ruthlessly slaughtered.  Past and future of a culture seemed gone.  Revenge seemed the only response.

But 70 years later, Cyrus the Persian, with his steam-rolling armies flattened the Babylonians.  Cyrus issued an edict freeing all Babylonian slaves.  The Israelites who were still alive, and still remembered Jerusalem, were allowed to go home.  God had indeed, through Cyrus and his armies, inflicted the revenge the Israelites prayed for through last weeks Psalm.

So Psalm 126, sung during the processional up the hill, is a symbolic looking back at a terrible time in a history of a people, when they experienced total disruption and destruction.  Trusting God with their desire for retribution, God came through.  And it is to God that the processing people give the glory:  "God returned the exiles," "the LORD has done great things for us."

At the end of verse three, the tense shifts to the present tense:  "we are glad."  Looking back during this pause, halfway up the hill, remembering the past, makes the people feel gladness right now.

Present joy and laughter can't be separated from a past full of exile, drought, tears, even Crucifixion.  The present tense, the present moment, acts as a scenic overlook, that creates awe and wonder and most of all joy, in the present.  Joy and laughter lives in the present, but that present is bordered on one side by memory of God's saving action in the past; and on the other by hope in the future--God's future, just as the past had been God's past.

Then verses 4-6 make the shift into the future tense:  will shout hurrahs...will come home with laughing.  The midway pause has served to create anticipation for what God is going to do.  If this is the way God acted in the past, do we have any reason to believe the Lord will change his way of acting in the future?  NO!  As in the Message translation, the future tense is signaled by laughing phrase, "And now, GOD, do it again!..."

The metaphors used to describe God's future are powerful.  Rain and streams in the Negeb, a southern desert in Israel.  A sudden, unexpected outpouring of rain that is able to transform the landscape.  I read this week that Death Valley has had record high temperatures:  129 degrees!  Idiots are driving out there to get their picture by the large digital thermometer they have there.  But I remember a few years ago when record rainfalls were recorded in Death Valley in the Spring.  Wildflowers that hadn't bloomed in decades were like explosions of color on the hillsides and floor of Death Valley.  People were traveling from all over the world to witness this exceptionally rare event.

That's the powerful image Psalm 126 is picturing about God's future activity--God's grace and life, suddenly, beautifully, powerfully transforming the landscape of beaten down people's lives.

The other image of God's future in Psalm 126, is that of farming.  It seems to me, now that I've lived around farming operations most of my ministry, that cropland is a place of intention and expectation.  All the farmers I know plant in hope.  Whether they are planting into dust or mud, whether they are planting after a harvest of tears, either from hail or drought, even though they may plant with tears in their eyes, there is still the expectation that this year will be different.  The hope of a good harvest.

The Hebrew term that is translated, "he that goes forth weeping" literally means to go to-and-fro.  With a sense of aimlessness.  Of not knowing exactly what you're doing, or why you're doing it, but you're doing it anyway.  Even then, says Psalm 126, we plant in God's future, under God's sight, in God's story.

Notice the emphasis on the swing of the people's disposition in God's future:  from sowing in tears to reaping with joy; from weeping to laughing; from being heavily laden to singing for joy while carrying a different kind of load in God's abundant harvest.

The future of God is filled with laughter.  Frederick Buechner wrote a new beatitude that has to do with living into God future, of recognizing and laughing about the power of God to break the chains that imprison us.  Buechner wrote, "Blessed are they who get the joke."

God's hilarity delights in life, and freedom, and grace.  God delights in making us laugh about life, even after we've just cried.  When we least expect it, especially in the face of difficulty and despair.  God's hilarity confronts and confounds the powers that be.  God's hilarious grace is God's favorite modus operendi for breaking through the barriers that have either been constructed around us, or that we ourselves construct around ourselves.

We never know, either, when God's hilarious future will infect us with laughter.  We never know exactly where to look.  In a Bill Moyers TV special called, "The Urge To Create," Moyers was told by one of the artists, "If you know what you're looking for, you will never see what you do not expect to find."  I think it's a great statement of how God's laughter comes in our dry and desperate lives.  If we "know" how God will appear in our lives, we will never see or experience God in unexpected times, places, or guises.

One of the best illustrations of this is a painting by Renaissance painter, Piero della Francesca, titled, "The Nativity."

The infant Jesus is laying on the ground, cushioned by a part of Mary's long dress.  She is dressed elegantly, with every hair in place as if she's come not just from childbirth, but the beauty salon.

Five angels dressed in Renaissance garb are standing over the babe, carefully grouped together, singing quietly accompanied by lutes.  They are standing in perfect choral formation.

In the background are the men, solemn and removed.  Joseph is seated, turned away from Mary and the Christ-child, staring off in the distance.  Two shepherds are at his side, one with fingers pointing to heaven, just in case we don't quite get what's going on here.

The terrain is bleak and austere--desert-like.  The little shelter looks like it has holes in the roof, and why are Mary and the newborn baby Jesus outside of the shelter, exposed to the elements?

All the elements in the painting are tightly controlled.  That is, all except one.  In the very back, peeking out over the shoulder of an angel is a donkey.  With its head thrown back, mouth wide open, teeth gleaming, it brays in laughter, freely, gloriously.

In all this order, Piero, has for me, painted a great picture of the unexpected incursion of the laughter of God, depicted by the laughing donkey.  It is the hilarity of God, that pushes its way into our seemingly mundane, orderly (or disordered) and serious lives.

It is only at the points in our lives when we pause, and take a look around us, how everything seems to be so serious, so solemn, trying to bring order out of disorder, looking back at an aimless, wandering past, and looking forward to an unknown future, only in those times of pause--a Psalm 126 time--do we see the laughing donkey of God.  Over and over, God breaks through with a glorious bray and a grace-filled laugh.

If we can pause, catch a glimpse of and the sound of God's laughter, and most importantly, join God in that belly laugh, we will be able to move into the future--God's future--much lighter for the remainder of the journey, until we meet The Lord of laughter at last.

Don't Get Even; Get Mad

"Don't Get Even; Get Mad!"
Psalm 137; Matthew 5:38-39


Ten mountain climbers in Pakistan are shot dead by a new faction of the Taliban.  The climbers were rounded up by this militant group, blindfolded, forced to kneel and then were all shot in the head.  The message the Taliban gunmen was the foreign climbers were killed in revenge for drone attacks on Pakistan.  Should there be revenge for their revenge?

Edward Snowden, a contract worker for the National Security Agency is charged with disclosing secret U.S. surveillance programs.  Is he a hero for freedom of information and government spying, or a goat who betrayed his government?  Should there be revenge against not only him, but China, and Russia for shielding him?  In one article this week it said the US government would take “a restrained approach to any retribution” against China and Russia.

Two brothers let off bombs at the Boston Marathon.  Marc Fucarile was one of the victims injured in the bombings.  His right leg had to be amputated, and his left leg was badly damaged.  It’s not clear if he’ll have use of it.  The full consequences of his injuries may not be known for years.  What should be done to the bombers?  What kind of revenge?

And all the shootings:  Gabby Giffords in Arizona; the Newtown School in Connecticut; the theatre shooting in Colorado; the Santa Monica shooting in California, and on and on.  What kind of revenge should be had on such heartless killers?

And another article this week about two teenaged girls, who took a third girl out to a remote location and stabbed her to death.  The three girls were close friends since they were eight years old.  The two girls counted down, “3-2-1” then took out their knives and brutally stabbed their friend to death and left her body under a pile of branches.  No one knows why, and her parents are understandably in shock and horror.  What form should their revenge take?

Heinrich Hein once wrote:
My nature is the most peaceful in the world.  All I ask is a simple cottage, a decent bed, good food, some flowers in front of my window, and a few trees in my yard.  Then if God wanted to make me wholly happy, he would let me enjoy the spectacle of six or seven of my enemies dangling from those trees.  I would forgive them all wrongs they have done me--forgive them from the bottom of my heart, for we must forgive our enemies.  But not until they are hanged!

Or as Calvin, in the “Calvin and Hobbes” cartoon speaks for most of us:

That’s what we want.  Incineration.  Swift and painful justice.  Or a posse, a tall tree with sturdy branches and a new rope.

Our two major reactions to these kinds of events are horror and revenge.  It’s the second of these reactions--revenge--that I’d have us think about this morning.

Psalm 137 is a perfect piece of poetry reflecting the deep sadness and the unremorseful desire for revenge.  The situation behind the Psalm is this:  The Israelites had been enslaved by the Babylonian armies.  Jerusalem and the Temple were destroyed--literally leveled.  Only the strong, able-bodied adults were allowed to live, being marched off to serve as slaves in Babylon.  Children, babies, old people were massacred.

As a form of totally insensitive mockery, that only an arrogant victor could muster, the Babylonian captors asked the slaves to sing songs from their homeland.  But how could the Israelites sing to captors who killed their children and their grandparents?  All they could think of was revenge--to see the Babylonian’s babies smashed against the walls and rocks, as was done to their own.

In one science fiction movie, a mad scientist figured out how to make a serum that would bring inanimate objects to life.  He tried his serum out on a statue in the town park of a great general.  Sure enough, the statue gave a quiver and the general, creaking a bit at the joints, climbed down from the pedestal.  The scientist was overjoyed.  “I have given you life,” he exulted.  “Now tell me, what is the first thing you are going to do?”
“That’s easy,” rasped the General. “I’m going to find a gun and shoot as many pigeons as I can.”

When we get dumped on by someone, the natural reaction is to figure out a way to dump back.

That’s why I like the Psalms.  As Bernhard Anderson wrote in his commentary on the Psalms, “The laments of the Psalter are raised from the depths of human misery from which the emotions of bitterness and hatred often well up” (page 89).

The psalmists--indeed all of scripture--takes evil seriously, as well as the emotions evil evokes.  Enemies are taken to be more than human.  Such enemies are seen as representatives of all evil forces that threaten life and God’s good order.  Such enemies are so powerful, and we become the victims of the structures of their power, that we, like the psalmist, end up feeling helpless a lot of the time.  We rage with vengeance because something we love, or about our love, has been hurt or destroyed.

One of the reasons we feel helpless is because of the randomness of such brutal power.  Maybe you’ve seen the bumper sticker, “Practice random acts of kindness and senseless acts of beauty.”  We are surprised, in a very pleasant way when we are the recipient of some unexpected kindness.

And we are horrified when we are the recipient of some unexpected abuse or ugliness.  It creates massive insecurity.  We never look at the world quite the same.  We will always be looking over our shoulder, wondering.

That’s the power of the enemy and of evil acts done by demented people:  its randomness.  All it takes is one such person to walk into a political gathering, a movie theatre, an elementary school, and all our sense of security goes out the window.  Our political leaders try to reassure us, but their words sound hollow and are only received with skepticism.  We are told that we are safe.  But are we?

The sobering truth is, no one can be proactive against such random evil.  We can only react after it has had its day.  The majority reaction is revenge.  “We got Osama bin Laden!”  We got revenge.  But then mountain climbers in Pakistan are shot in the head. Car bombings have increased in Iraq--1000 people were killed just last month alone.  Where does it end?

A man noticed the following classified ad in the newspaper:  “For sale.  Mercedes Benz 450 SL.  $50.”  Although he was certain it must have been a typo or misprint, the man decided to answer the ad.  The seller was a middle-aged woman.  She showed the car to the man.  It was a beauty: very low mileage, mint condition.

The man said, “It’s a beautiful car, and I would like to buy it, but the price--$50?  What’s the catch?”
The woman answered, “There’s no catch.  You see, my husband is in the process of leaving me for another, younger woman.  He doesn’t know I know.  They are on a trip together now.  Three days ago, I received an email from him saying, ‘Sell the car and send the money.’  So I am.”

Revenge can be so sweet.

We even have scripture to back up our revenge.  It’s called the “law of retaliation.”  It’s in both Leviticus and Deuteronomy:  “Don’t feel sorry for the person: It’s life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot.” (Deuteronomy 19:21)

But in Psalm 137, the psalmist seems unwilling to exact the revenge themselves, but hopes someone else will do it.
And you, Babylonians--ravagers!
A reward to whoever gets back at you
for all you’ve done to us;
Yes, a reward to the one who grabs your babies
and smashes their heads on the rocks!

By inference, it seems she wants someone else (God?) to carry out the vengeance for her.  She concedes her wish for retaliation to the all-powerful hand of God.  She unashamedly expresses her vengeance honestly before God, and then entrusts her precious hatred to God, hoping that God will take it seriously.

But we wonder.  Can God be trusted with our precious hatreds and desires for revenge?  Deep down, we have an understanding of what God will do with our desire for retaliation.  God will take our wishes seriously enough to recast them, change them.  Maybe even change us.  The law of retaliation makes us smile with a smile of contented justice.  Makes us smack our lips at the taste of revenge.  But we know God.  And we know God speaks other words.  God speaks of justice.  Justice is vengeance that has learned wisdom from God.

Yes, God speaks other words.  Words like Leviticus 19:18, “Don’t seek revenge or carry a grudge against any of your people.  Love your neighbor as yourself.  I am God.”

And Paul to the Romans, “Don’t insist on getting even; that’s not for you to do.  ‘I’ll do the judging,’ says God.  ‘I’ll take charge of it.’”  (Romans 12:19)

And, of course, Jesus, as was read earlier, “Here’s another old saying that deserves a second look:  ‘Eye for eye, tooth for tooth.’  Is that going to get us anywhere?  Here’s what I propose: ‘Don’t hit back at all.’  If someone strikes you, stand there and take it.”  (Matthew 5:38-39)

This difficult teaching of Jesus is meant precisely for the moments in which the urge to avenge is strongest.  We are getting slapped around.  We are being disrespected.  Humiliated.  Taken advantage of.  Respect in our world is communicated through power.  Weakness or passivity--just standing there and taking it--invites others to take cruel advantage.  It is precisely in those moments of cruelty that Jesus is asking us to stand fast, but not hit back.  And he doesn’t ask us to do anything that he himself didn’t end up doing in his trial, whipping and Crucifixion.

The psalmist behind Psalm 137 lets us know that we are certainly allowed to plead for divine vengeance.  But we aren’t supposed to be the answers to our own prayers.  We are allowed, as this Psalm is an example, the “speech of assault.”  We are allowed to get mad.  To yell it.  Scream our desire for revenge.  Even sing it.  Certainly vent it.  Bring it to speech.  It’s OK.  Because speech isn’t fatal.  Getting even is what turns brutal and lethal.

With God, all subjects and all emotions, even the darkest ones, are legitimate material for conversation.  Putting up a pretty front, in the face of our anger and feelings of retribution, may not yield much with God.  Let God know exactly what’s going on in your head and heart.

We all operate out of the sense, when wrong or hurt has been done, that the moral order is out of balance, so we think we need to make it right again.  Until the offender has gotten his/her just desserts, the moral universe will be askew.  So we justify to ourselves that vengeance is not the end in itself.  Something larger is going on: the maintenance of the moral coherence in creation is at stake!  And we think we get to be the ones who restore that coherence.

But one of the themes of the Bible is that vengeance doesn’t get to be human business.  We don’t see the big picture.  Only God does.  And it is into God’s hands that we are to place our words and feelings of revenge, and let God handle it from there.  Can we trust God with something as precious as our need to strike back at those who hurt us, humiliate us, offend us?

That’s where the Psalmist takes her anger--to God in prayer through the poetry of this Psalm.  Prayer is the most powerful place available, given us by God, for the transformation of our vengeance.  Because the transformation of our vengeance has to start with our heart--not the aggressors actions.  The only way we are allowed by God to enact revenge is through prayer--talking it through with God.  And then, out of our prayerful conversations with God, reaching out not to strike back, but to serve in acts of hospitality and concern for the abusive one.

That’s the tough part.  Can you do that?

In Your Dreams

"In Your Dreams"
Job 33:15-18


I switched topics this week.  My dream a couple of weeks ago about Gordon Stull getting an exotic illness, the only symptom being, it makes you buy books for no reason, got me thinking about dreams.  What they are.  Why do we have them?  And more importantly, how does God use them?

We spend more of our lives sleeping than anything else.  30 to 35% of our lives are spent asleep.  About 25 years, if you live to be 75.  25 years asleep!  Sounds like a lot of time wasted for how little of it we get in this life.  But if we try to totally deprive ourselves of sleep, we’d last about four weeks--about the same amount of time we can go without food.  No sleep means death.

And during all that time asleep, of course, we dream. All kinds of dreams.  Some are sheer entertainment.  We have a lot of disjointed thoughts and impressions floating around in our minds.  During sleep, sometimes all that unconnected stuff gets connected in weird ways that make perfect sense in dreams, but not when we wake up.

There are a lot of dreams recorded in the Bible.  Joseph had a dream that his father and brothers would one day bow down to him, represented by sheaves of wheat.

Once thrown in prison in Egypt, the royal baker and butler each had dreams, and Joseph, who was also in prison, interpreted their dreams.  Which gave Joseph a face-to-face with Pharaoh, who also had a dream about cows, which represented seven abundant years and seven years of famine.  Joseph told Pharaoh, “Do not interpretations belong to God?”

The same thing happens to the prophet, Daniel, who ends up interpreting King Nebuchadnezer’s dream about the giant statue made out of different metals.  Daniel, in a Joseph kind of statement, tells the king, “...but there is a God in heaven who reveals mysteries…” (Daniel 2:28).

In the book of Matthew, we have Joseph getting a string of dreams guiding him through his feelings about Mary and her pregnancy.

The apostle Paul has a dream that directs him to go over to Macedonia to preach the gospel, and opens the way for his missionary journeys.

Dreams, as Joseph and Daniel say, are mysteries.  In the Bible, both the giving and meaning of dreams, are seen as one of the main ways that God communicates with people.  When you think about it, dreams come when your conscious mind is basically disconnected.  All your logic and reasoning is suspended while you sleep.  Your self-styled defense systems that you use extensively while awake, have had their wires cut by God while you sleep.  God can get at you in your dreams, and you can do nothing about it.  We are all defenseless before God when we sleep.  And God seems to like it that way.

Morton Kelsey has written extensively about the Christian spiritual life.  I don’t agree with everything he writes about, because he’s a bit too “new age” for me.  But one of the ideas he has written about has to do with the spiritual world and our everyday world.  Kelsey thinks the spiritual world serves as a foundation of our everyday world.  The two can come into contact with each other, forming connections, or easy bridges between the two worlds.  Especially in dreaming.

Psalm 16:7 says,
I shall bless the LORD who has given me counsel;
in the night he imparts wisdom to my inmost being. (REB)

And the verses from Job 33, read earlier:
In dreams, in visions of the night,
when deepest slumber falls on mortals,
while they lie asleep in bed
God imparts his message...

God has a way, through our dreams, of getting in touch with us, cutting through to parts of ourselves that we’d maybe rather leave hidden, parts of our waking world lives that we’d rather avoid.  And whether we’d like to admit it or not, a large part of our avoidance behavior while we’re awake has to do with God.  But when you fall asleep, and when you dream, God’s got you!  And there’s nothing you can do about it.

The language God uses in dreams is largely symbolic.  Like poetry.  In a sense, God makes us all into poets when we sleep and dream, filling us with poetic imagery.  As you can imagine, these symbols and imagery in our dreaming are specific to the individual and can’t be standardized or universalized for everyone.

The problem with that, is the more we move into a technological and scientific way of being, we lose the ability to value and understand the symbolic.  Behind symbols lies a kind of power that evokes feelings.  Strong feelings.  That’s what God is after in our dreaming.  To get a hold of us to the core of our feelings, hoping to evoke some change or insight.  For example, if your marriage is in trouble, you may dream of an earthquake where all the buildings around you--all that is supposedly substantial in your life--are shaking and breaking apart.  You may think you just had a scary dream about an earthquake, but it may go much deeper than that.

Here’s another fun example of that.  Elias Howe spent many years trying to perfect his sewing machine.  But he was stumped about how to attach the thread to the needle.  Then he had a dream.  In the dream he was given 24 hours to complete his invention.  If he failed, he’d be killed by cannibals with their deadly spears.

Howe worked feverishly to meet the deadline, but still couldn’t overcome that one obstacle of the needle.  The cannibals surrounded him and slowly raised their spears.  As they got closer and closer, Howe noticed that all the spears had small holes in their tips.  He woke up sweating--but still alive.  And now he knew what to do. He’d put a hole in the end of the needle!

Now God may not be trying to get you attention about some invention.  As I said, the Holy Spirit puts us in touch, through our dreams, with the images that have the power to get our attention for God.  So these images, and the attention they gain, have to do with a lot of things from God.

First, God uses dreams to reassure us.  These kinds of dreams, through their imagery are trying to let us know we can trust God, that we can be encouraged by what God may or may not be doing, which in turn gives us a sense of fearlessness.

When my daughter Kristin was about four or five, she woke up, and bounded down the stairs to tell me about a dream she had.  She said God came down to her room and played with her.  And then God took her up to heaven and played with her up there.

What a great dream!  She was excited by it.  But it had the opposite effect on me as it did on her.  For her it gave her a tremendous childlike trust in God.  But for me, I wondered almost instantly if God was preparing her for her imminent death.  Preparing me, possibly, for her early death.  For a little over a year, I lived in fear that there was going to be something that happened that would take Kristin away, by death.  I never told her of my fear.  I became very overprotective, that year especially.

Finally God got a hold of me and asked me, since I couldn’t let go of my fear over Kristin’s dream, if I could trust him with Kristin’s life.  And with Ryan’s life.  I suddenly realized, as parents, we all have to come to that place of entrustment--of giving our children’s lives over to God, even and especially when they are alive.  Then, perchance they do die, then we know into whose hands their lives have gone.  It became a very important dream--even though it wasn’t my own--that brought me to the place of reassurance that in life and death, my children were always in God’s hands.

Secondly, there are dreams God sends that guide us.  The guidance in these dreams may have to do with our true identity in God.  We may be really confused about who we are, and who we were meant to be, compared to who we are turning out to be.

Or we may be struggling with our calling, and what it is that God meant us to do in life.  I talked about that a couple of weeks ago.  Larry Culliford, in his article, “Powerful Dreams” told about one of these kinds of dreams that he had.  This is how he described it:

In the dream, I was in a damp, grey, barren landscape of vast horizons under a dark, cloudy sky. I was holding a prospecting hammer. Over my shoulder, there was a collecting sack. In the far distance, I could see just two or three isolated figures, heads bowed like mine, eyes down towards the ground. I was strolling beside a fast-flowing stream, one of several criss-crossing the desolate area. At first I felt lost, unsure of what I was doing or seeking. Soon, however, I stopped, noticing a small, beautiful, teardrop-shaped ingot of purest gold in the mud at my feet. Dislodging it easily with the hammer, I picked it up and placed it in my bag. Immediately, I noticed another of these small but perfect golden teardrops, then another. I knew somehow that I could reap this treasure because I could see it, whereas most others could not. People were away in the towns nearby, enjoying themselves, and had set aside all interest in prospecting – in seeking their true prospects. Their vision for such things had atrophied.  (Larry Culliford, “Powerful Dreams” in Psychology Today)

Culliford realized from his dream what he was to do with his life was close at hand.  That he had to look in the “mud”, not in the clear running water of the stream.  That there were “prospects” that God wanted him to see for his life.  Everyone else was lost in mediocrity.  But when he got down into the mud, he found the unexpected--his true life and true self and true mission.

Emily Bronte has her heroine, Cathy, in Wuthering Heights, say, “I’ve dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they’ve gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind.”  Those are the kind of dreams God uses to help get your attention about who you are and where you’re going in life.


Thirdly, dreams seem to increase when we are doing some hard work of self-examination.  Dreams allow God to get into our emotional and psychological selves in the safe place of our dreams.  Our defenses are down, and God can tell us some things in no uncertain terms.  God will always tell us the truth, especially if we are paying attention in our dreams.

Roy Fairchild, late professor of Pastoral Care and Spiritual Direction at San Francisco Theological Seminary, told a story at a workshop I attended about a dream he had.  He had been deeply depressed for months.  He had to take time off from teaching at the seminary.

One night he had a dream.  He was building a house.  He was making a poor job of it.  Studs not straight.  Bent nails everywhere.  It was a recurring dream.  Same kind of poor construction, time after time, night after night.  With each segment of the dream, frustration grew.  Depression deepened.  But at one point a carpenter showed up to help.  Together they straightened the studs.  The form of the house started taking shape.  They put the ceiling joists on.  The house was coming together.

Fairchild was telling his spiritual guide about this recurring dream, and how he could not make sense of it.  The therapist asked, “Do you know any carpenters?”
“That’s just it; I don’t,” said Fairchild.
The therapist then asked, “Wasn’t Jesus a carpenter?”

All of a sudden it all started to make sense.  Jesus was helping him rebuild his life, one task at a time.  Fairchild realized he was trying to put his life back together all by himself.  He had totally ignored Christ in that process.  The more he tried to do everything without Christ, the bigger the mess.  God was letting him know, through the imagery of building a house, that if he, Fairchild, let Christ help, his life would get rebuilt.  Everything changed after that.


There are all kinds of other reasons God gets our attention through our dreams.  To warn us of danger.  To give us commands in no uncertain terms.  To create wisdom, and solve problems.  Dreaming increases when we are learning new things--and maybe God is a part of that as well.  And God can use dreams to help us respond to threats in our lives--triggering our fight or flight responses.

In all of those, pay attention.  Pay attention to the imagery.  Pay attention to what God is trying to get across to you when your defenses are down.

J.M. Barrie, in his book, Peter Pan, has Tinkerbell say to Peter, “You know that place between sleeping and awake, that place you can still remember dreaming?  That’s where I’ll always think of you.”  In our dreaming, that’s what God is ultimately telling us--I’m always thinking of you, and trying to make connection to you.  So sleep, and be ready.

Bodies R Us

"Bodies R Us"
1 Corinthians 6:19-20


I don't know why God made my body so tall.  It would be nice to be of "average" height, whatever that would be.  6'5" would be a nice height.  That way, I'd have average sized feet and hands, and not worry about being able to find size 16 shoes.  I'd be able to blend in, in a crowd, rather than stick up above everyone like a palm tree.  I can't get away with anything--I'm so visible.

I'm an anomaly in my family, as far as this body goes.  No one is even close to being this tall.  My father was only a short guy at 6 feet.  My mother about 5'7" or 5'8".  My father used to tell his friends I wasn't only the tallest in our family tree, I was the family tree.  So I'm not sure how it is that I got this body.

I used to be averaged height, up until 8th grade.  At the start of eighth grade I was 5'5".  By the time I started 9th grade I was 6'5".  When I got to school at the start of 9th grade, which was the last year of junior high when I was in school, the basketball coach thought I was a new kid who had transferred in.  I had to tell him I was there all along.   Before, I was invisible.  Now, at 6'5" I was highly visible.

I am very self-conscious about my tall body.  It’s one of the reasons I preach down here and not up there.  A couple of people told me I make the pulpit look small.  My body just doesn’t fit there.  There’s even a step up that makes me even taller in there.

When I was in seminary, the church I attended was pastored by Jim Catham.  He’s a tall guy, 6’7” or 6’8”.  When he preached, he’d lean down, and over the pulpit. (demonstrate)  I tried that a couple of times in my first church, but just wasn’t comfortable.

I usually get down, almost on my knees when talking to children because I don’t want to overwhelm them with this tall body.  Every time Shirley Elder goes out of worship, she looks way up, reminding me how tall I am.  A little girl in the grocery store, being pushed in the grocery cart by her mother, looked up at me and said, “Mom, look, a giant!”  Her mother was so embarrassed she raced off pushing the cart clear to the other side of the store.

I remember my mother being disgusted having to take me to the shoe store for new shoes every two months. I was afraid my feet wouldn't stop growing and I'd end up with huge clown feet.  Hearing the line that I had a "firm understanding in life" didn't help.  Neither did hearing the poem from my grandfather whenever he visited,

You're a poet
and don't know it--
you have Longfellows!

My favorite thing to do at the end of the day is take my shoes off.  It feels like I've been walking around with a couple of aircraft carriers all day.  Although, it is nice when I get a new pair of shoes.  I use the boxes for a storage shed, or an extra garage.  I always hated to go bowling, because my shoe size was right there on the back of my shoes for everyone to see.  *16* *16* *16*

But, I have to confess, my body changed my life, growing as it did that year, and continuing to grow through high school.  I started playing basketball.  All of a sudden I was a jock.  I was in with some of the cool guys--a group I only looked at from afar.

My coach, in that first year of my basketball playing gave me the nickname, "Big Dumb Kid."  It stuck.  But it didn't bother me because I had a whole new place in the social order of junior high and then senior high the next year.  All thanks to my body and it's amazing growth spurt.

Like most people, I've had a love/hate relationship with my body.  As I said, I wished I was shorter.  In my bathroom, in most bathrooms, I never get to see my face, just my chest, since the mirrors are for "average" people.  When I fly out to see Kristin and Nic, I hate being shoe-horned into airplane seats, waiting for the person in front of me to recline into my already jammed knees.  Dating has been problematic being so tall.  But it's just what is.

None of us gets to decide what kind of body we have.  Maybe in the future, as they unlock more and more of the human genome, mothers and fathers will get to decide what kind of body their children will have.

But as I get older I have begun to wonder how much of our bodies, especially as we age, is a result of genetics and how much is a result of our own choices.  That is, what we have done to our bodies in terms of eating habits, exercise, etc.  It all accumulates, and I discovered it gets harder to change things on the body as those accumulations pile up.  All in all, my body has served me well in these 61 years.

For girls and women, bodies and body image is such a difficult relationship between psyche and the body.  In one study, it was found that teenaged girls start getting depressed 45 seconds into looking at a clothing catalog or teen magazine.  The depression comes not from the articles, but from the advertisements and the models that wear the sassy clothes, or tout the lipstick on pouty lips, or flounce their hair.

Glamour magazine did a study of women and their attitudes toward their bodies.  The study found that 97% of women are "cruel to their bodies" every day.  Women think or say an average of 13 brutal thoughts about their bodies each day.  97%!!

Our relationship to our bodies is one of the most basic relationships we have.  It is more basic than our relationship with each other.  Our bodies are one of the main gifts God has given us in this life, if not the main gift.  Nobody does anything without a body.

The first thing God did, in creating humans, was to create a body.  Then blow the breath of life into the nostrils of those bodies (Genesis 2:7). There was a time, as was read in Genesis, that people were "naked and unashamed."  Now we're naked, and full of shame.  I would guess there aren't too many of you who can stand in front of a full length mirror, in the buff, for longer than 15 or 20 seconds.  The shame just creeps in.  That shame leads to self-judgement.  And for some the self-judgement leads to self-loathing.  And it's all about your body.

At some point in our lives we have to come to terms with our bodies.  We have to accept our bodies.  We have to be reconciled with our bodies.  We have to be friends with our bodies.  Maybe even forgive our bodies.  But most of all, as Paul says here in 1 Corinthians, we have to "let people see God in and through your body."  See God in your body.  Which means, that if you are letting people see God in your body, that you are also seeing God in your body.

Letting people see God in your body is entirely different than having a positive body image.  I think they feed each other.  But I think there's a difference.  Knowing that people can see God in your body, no matter what kind of body you have, is the ultimate positive body image.  Plus, it should free you from thinking you have to have a specific kind of body in which to bear witness to God.  There is no specific body type that God requires to be seen in.  It takes all the worry and self-judgement away.  The only qualification from Paul is, "your body"--let God be seen in YOUR body.

Paul was speaking to the Gnostic heresy in his day, that still has its claws in some Christian's ways of thinking today--especially as that relates to our bodies.  The Gnostics were a weird, off-shoot brand of Christianity in Paul's time.  One of their main beliefs was that the spirit and soul of a person was the most important, over against the body.  They believed that the body was so tainted by sin and corruption that God didn't even care about bodies.  They believed that Jesus, as the sinless Son of God, couldn't have had a real body like we do.  They decided Jesus had a different kind of spiritual body, with no physicality to it at all.  That when he walked, he didn't make footprints.

Therefore, to the Gnostics, it didn't matter what you did to your body.  A believers main concern, in their mind, should be their soul.  There was this soul/body split in the Gnostic way of thinking, that totally discounted the body and valued the body as pretty much worthless.

You see that way of thinking when you hear someone, in evangelistic fervor, ask someone if their soul has been saved.  My answer has always been, "Well, yes, and so has my body."

So Paul asks the Corinthians some basic questions that would steer them away from any Gnostic misbeliefs:  Do these Gnostic type of believers not read Genesis and realize that God made our bodies?  That if bodies didn't mean anything to God, God wouldn't have made them in the first place?  That the Savior coming into the world was called the Incarnation, which means "in the flesh"?  Do they not read the book of 1 John, that starts out:
Our ears have heard,
our own eyes have seen,
and our hands touched this Word.  (1 John 1:1)

Robert Morris wrote in his article, "Reclaiming the Body's Soul,"  "...bodies don't have a soul; they are souls-in-action"  (Weavings, XXII:5, pg. 32).  I like that.  I think St. Paul would have liked that too.  Our bodies are souls in action.  I got to see that this past Sunday.  Carrie Harrold did the devotion at the nursing home service last Sunday afternoon.  She had some great thoughts about the stories our Bibles tell.

But there was another devotional that happened before that.  Carrie brought Trysten along.  Deb was playing "Jesus Loves Me" as a prelude, and Trysten danced.  She whirled, and swayed, and hopped to the music.  Trysten has definitely picked up her mother's love of the full bodied expression of faith.  Trysten was a beautiful example of how the body is the soul in action.  I'm so glad I was there to witness it, and now bear witness to it to you all.

Think of all the other ways we can use our bodies as our souls in action in forms of worship.  We bow before The Lord in all things.  Some lay prostrated on the ground before The Lord in prayer and obedience.  Some whirl in ecstasy.  Some stand with arms raised in prayer and praise to God.  We fold our hands in prayer.  We kneel.  And like Trysten and her mother, people like King David danced before The Lord as the Ark of the Covenant was brought into Jerusalem.  Bodies, as souls in action.  That is one way to "let people see God in and through your body."

But that's not all Paul was getting at.  Just before that statement, Paul wrote:
You surely know that your body is a temple where the Holy Spirit lives.  The Spirit is in you and is a gift from God.  You are no longer your own.  God paid a great price for you.
Then comes his statement, "So let people see God in and through your body."

We hear and use statements like, "Accepting Christ into your heart," or "Make Christ a part of your life."  Your heart and your life has to do with your body--taking Christ into your whole self, a major part of which is your body.

As Paul said, our bodies are that temple into which the Holy Spirit enters.   To look upon our bodies with a disdainful eye, means disdaining the temple in which the Holy Spirit lives.  To harbor at least 13 brutal thoughts about your body each day, is to think brutally about the temple of the Holy Spirit.

But on the flip side, to look upon our bodies with awe and wonder, no matter what kind of body we have, how intricately each of our bodies are designed, is to look the same way upon this temple of the Holy Spirit.  To harbor nothing but thankfulness to God for our body, no matter what kind of body we have, is to offer God that same kind of thanks for the temple which is the abode of His Holy Spirit.

That's the best form of body image.  That's the best way to "let people see God in and through your body."

Just A Job, Or A Calling?

"Just A Job, Or A Calling?"
Ecclesiastes 1:1-9; 3:12-13


Suffice it to say, the writer of Ecclesiastes is not a happy camper.  He's discontented.  He's depressed.  He's fatalistic.  He's burned out.  If you were having a birthday party, he's not the one you want to invite--unless it's your 40th and you feel like having a bunch of similarly dour people around you.

What's even more interesting, and somewhat distressing to me, is the writer of Ecclesiastes calls himself "the preacher."  I personally like Peterson's translation, The Message where the writer of Ecclesiastes calls himself "the Quester."  Someone who’s on a quest.  Someone who's searching for something.  And the search is not an easy one.  It's a search for identity, for meaning, for truth, for finding what you're passionate about, to find out what you are really made of.

Another word for this is "calling."  Someone on a quest, who's following an inner voice on some great search, has a calling.  They are paying attention to something bigger than themselves, trying to discover who they are and what their place is in that "something bigger."

Maybe that's why so many translations of the Bible call this guy, "the Preacher," because we more often than not think of ministers as people who following a calling.  When we ministers are examined by Presbyteries, one of the big questions we are asked is to tell about our calling.  No one on the COM would ask something like, "Why do you want this job as a minister?"  Maybe someone from our presbytery's COM, but not the good ones.  The better ones want to know about your calling--your sense of how God in his largeness, reached out to you in particular and chose you for the ministry.

I don't know of any other profession that asks that kind of question when they are being interviewed or examined for their expertise for a certain job or occupation or career.  (Ask different people in the congregation if they were ever examined as to why they felt they were called.)

Here's what I believe.  I believe you were all called by God.  I'm not talking about the ministry, necessarily.  Just because you are a follower of Christ, you are in the ministry, whether you realized that or not.  But, I believe God called you to what He wanted you to do, how God wanted you to fit into His big picture, how God saw you on His timeline as it moves the direction God wants that timeline to go.  Whether you paid attention to that calling is another thing.



The difference between following that calling or not is the difference maker in the book of Ecclesiastes, and the tone of The Preacher.  The Preacher seems to have ignored his calling.  Instead he was on a quest to discover what he could that would fulfill him outside of his true calling.  The Preacher was making all kinds of futile attempts to make something of his life, other than paying attention to God.

Instead of becoming more and more, The Preacher discovered he was becoming less and less.  He tried this.  He tried that.  The usual things we try to plug into our lives to fill the void when we don't follow our calling is money, sex, power, adventure, and knowledge.  The Preacher tried all that.  Finally he got to a point in his life when he realized, "None of that worked."  All of it turned out to be worthless.  "It's all smoke," he says.

That's why I like this book.  Ecclesiastes challenges that naive egotism that ignores a person's sense of calling.  We go off in some direction that appeals to us.  We go after that direction with gusto and all the optimism we can muster.  We expect the result of our calling-less choices will result in a good life.

Ecclesiastes gives us a John The Baptist kind of bath--a cleansing, an AHA! moment, a paradigm shift, a purging of such egotistical thinking and living.  Ecclesiastes is a refreshing negation of the seductions that make us think we can make something of ourselves outside of our calling--outside of who God is and what God does to make something of us.

In terms of that calling, right at the very start of the book, The Preacher says

What's there to show for a lifetime of work,
a lifetime of working your fingers to the bone?

It's a rhetorical question.  The answer is, "Nothing," if you haven't followed your calling!  You have nothing to show.  Just the boney fingers of working at following your own inclinations.  No sense of accomplishment.  No particular meaning.  A lost identity given over to work that really was never you.  Never being truly passionate about anything.  Because all of that comes from following your calling.

I can say I have loved everything I've done.  I heard my calling when in seventh grade.  Sitting in church with my mother.  Listening to Rev. Burgess preaching from that tall pulpit.  Feeling the Spirit come upon me, call me by name, say to me clearly, "Steve, this is what I want you to do."  I was sure.  I knew, in the deepest parts of me that I was going to be a minister.  I have never wavered.  Never considered doing anything else.  It was a true calling.

When I was working with a therapist, when I was out in Bakersfield, she once asked me about my calling.  She was a person of deep faith.  I told her the full story.
"Interesting," she said.
"How so?" I asked.
"At such a young age--but at such an important age.  Seventh grade.  A time when you were beginning the search for your identity, as all teenagers do."  She stopped and looked at me as if I'd understand what she was getting at.  I looked back at her, evidently with my characteristic dense expression.  She continued.
"You have never seen yourself other than a minister, a pastor.  Of course you weren't a pastor in 7th grade, but you have always seen yourself either as a pastor, or person who is going to be a pastor, defining yourself by that self definition.  During your most formative years, you never got to explore or wonder who Steve Wing was as just a person, as most of us do at that age.  But because your calling came so young, that's all you've ever known your identity to be.  I'm just wondering who Steve Wing is, stripped of his pastoral identity.

Her wondering question blew me away.  I didn't know what to say, or how to answer her.  It wasn't one of those kinds of insights or questions I could throw out a flip answer and be done with it.  Think about it no more.

I remember that conversation when I've talked to friends, they're telling me about something going on in their lives, and they look at me and say something like, "Quit listening to me like a pastor; just be my friend."  Then I feel bad, or get a little defensive, because I know they are telling me the truth.  I don't know how to turn "the pastor" off.  I'm not sure I can, or want to.  It's who I am.  It's all I've ever wanted to be.  Notice I didn't say it's all I've ever wanted to do.

Because that's how I think you know you have followed your calling and you aren't just doing a job.  What ever it is you are doing is at the same time fashioning you into the best person you are being and becoming.

I can be the best listener I am not because I am a pastor, but because I followed my calling.  I have found meaning in life, not because I'm a pastor, but because I followed my calling.  I am doing what I am most passionate about, not because I'm a pastor, but because I followed my calling.

To tell you the truth, I don't know who Steve Wing is, stripped of my pastoral identity, because to strip that away is to strip my calling away.  To strip my calling away is to strip away my very best self, as fashioned by God, and not by me.

That's what The Preacher didn't realize, but it finally came crashing down on him.  If The Preacher is indeed King Solomon, son of David, as most think, then one of the wisest, wealthiest, most powerful men in the world at that time didn't get it.  He didn't get this calling stuff.  I'm even feeling a bit smug about that--I've understood something even Solomon didn't get.

If I remember right, the book of Ecclesiastes is the only book in the Bible that barely mentions God: only in the last verse.   And there's the problem.  God as an afterthought. With God as an afterthought, there is no calling.  With no calling there is no meaning, no direction, no passion.  And with no meaning, direction, or finding that which you are passionate about, you end up with a book like Ecclesiastes--trying to figure out life on your own, looking and living in all the wrong places, without the proper Godly motivation behind it all.

The Preacher, the Quester, the writer of this book is basically saying, if you want to follow in his footsteps, good luck.  Nothings going to work or make sense.  But with God, luck has nothing to do with it.  It's all about calling from God, and following that calling.