"Predicting The Future Of A Culture"
Mark 9:33-37
Back in 1988, right about this time, actually, the world was supposed to end. But it didn’t, and life went on. It seems every five or ten years or so, some nut job gets a lot of publicity about the end of the world. Wasn’t it last year, that guy out in California, Harold Camping, who had it all figured out, September or October? Then the end didn’t happen, and he had to revise his schedule to December of that year. Still, here we are. And now, this year, we have the end of the world doom, supposedly predicted by the Mayans for mid-December.
We read an article for Sunday School a couple of weeks back about how people, because there have been so many predictions, are becoming hardened when the next one comes along. No one pays attention anymore. No one expects anything like that is really going to happen, because none have come true yet.
People come up with such intricate formulas. The one back in the ‘80s involved taking the year of the establishment of Israel as a nation, add 40 years, throw in an obscure Jewish holiday, and voila!--you have the official date of the end of civilization. God seems unimpressed with intricate formulas.
But I think there are certain variables that any culture needs to pay attention to, if it’s thinking in terms of longevity, and if the end is near. There are ripple effect facets of a culture that affect all the other facets. If any of these ripple effect facets are dealt a devastating blow, a culture could tumble. Thus, to decide what these larger issues are, and take care of them, will make us better able to see what kind of world we are heading into--predict better what the future of our culture is.
Out of his discussion with the disciples, Jesus puts his finger on one such larger issue. To not take care of this issue is to create the ripple effects of the demise of our culture as we know it. For Jesus, it has to do, first of all, with children. More specifically, the making of room for children in an adult world.
One of the catch-phrases that I’m getting sick of hearing in this election year, as in any election year, is about how children are used to stump any candidates platform. Whether these presidential hopefuls are talking about grain prices, or the economy, or the military, or education, they usually work in a phrase such as, “...because we are working for the future of our children, and making a better world for them in which to live.” A lot of bipartisan rhetoric; which is a nice way to say something else.
If I were running for president, the issue of the lives of children and other lesser-than’s is one I would address. But not for political gain. Instead, for it’s theological significance, and it’s importance in assessing and predicting the future of our country.
The presidential candidates have become misguided in the direction of the emphasis of children’s issues--if they speak about them at all. For the most part, the emphasis is directed at how we adults should be creating a better future for the children, on their behalf. The switch that Jesus made in his discussion with the disciples, as I see it, is that the future of a culture can be predicted best by how that culture treats its children in the present. It is not what kind of future-world we fashion for them that’s important. It’s how we relate to and treat children and receive them right now.
Our culture has become too adult-oriented, having lost most of its reverence for, or joy in childhood. Adults demand that kids grow up too fast. Television, movies, video games, and Youtube bring them face-to-face with too many adult topics and scenes before they are emotionally and developmentally ready to handle them. Even many toys force them, unthinkingly, into the adult world with buxom Barbie dolls, miniature fighting machines, not to mention the so-called learning toys and super-kid learning centers that push kids academically before they’ve even learned how to play.
The underlying message the child receives is, “How you are as a child is not good enough. You become a good child, a valuable child, by how fast you grow up, rather than for simply who you are.”
Dr. David Elkind is a child psychologist who’s written such books as The Hurried Child, and, All Dressed Up and No Place To Go. In an interview in a Sesame Street parents magazine (you can tell the depth of reading I’m doing these days), Dr. Elkind said:
Not all parents understand the importance of play. For both adults and children, play functions as a stress-relief mechanism. We all need a break from pressure. It’s even more important for kids because they don’t have adult defense mechanisms, and at the preschool age their sense of competence is under attack.
Listen to that last phrase again: “...their sense of competence is under attack.” Notice Elkind didn’t say their sense of identity is under attack. Nor their sense of self-esteem. I think he put his finger on an important distinction. We don’t value kids for who they are, but what they can do, what they can produce, and the levels of competence we push them to reach beyond that which is normal for a child.
That kind of ethic filters down into our children to the point where they quickly realize that the adults want to relate to them, but on adult terms, not the kids terms. Children soon realize they can be accepted only when they’re behaving like adults.
Now look what Jesus does. And in what context. The disciples have been debating about who is the greatest disciple. Who has brought the most people to Jesus. Who has been trusted the most. Who is leaned on the most for leadership. Who has understood the most of what Jesus has taught. Who was with Jesus the longest. Who had the best missionary outreach. Who has cast out the most demons. Who has healed the most sick people. Who has preached the most sermons. In other words, who is the most valuable for what he does. How “competent” he is.
Jesus’ response is to call a child over, show that child off to the rest of the disciples, put the child on his knee and give her a horsey ride and a hug, and send her on her way. After Jesus did that, he turned to his bickering disciples and said, “Whoever receives one child like this in my name receives me…” I like how The Message Bible translates these words: “Whoever embraces one of these children as I do, embraces me, and far more than me--God who sent me.”
I must ask a nitty yet important question: What does the “like this” refer to? “Whoever receives one child LIKE THIS in my name receives me…” Does it refer to the child, so that when we receive a child like the one Jesus received, then we are receiving him? Or, does the “like this” refer to the way in which Jesus received the child?
Receive a child “like this:” joyfully welcome and embrace them with no conditions; show them off and be proud of them simply for who they are, not for what they can do; look them eye-to-eye on their level, rather than making them climb too great a distance to ours. For there are times when it is not a matter of trying to get down to their level, but arise to it; that is, it is we adults and our ways that may have gotten lower than theirs, and we need to rise up, just to make it to a child’s level. “Receive one child like this and receive me in the same way,” said Jesus.
It’s interesting and at the same time sad that the disciples never quite got the message. A little while later (over in chapter 10) a bunch of parents were bringing their kids to Jesus so he could simply touch them. You can imagine all these mothers and fathers bringing their kids to Jesus like present day parents bring their kids to Santa Claus. They’ve got their smart phones out to take pictures or video of the event. The children are crying, the parents nerves are stretched thin as they wait in line to be blessed by Jesus.
What happened was the disciples also got tired of the whole thing and started sooshing the kids and parents away. “This is too important of a man to be bothering with children. He has too many other more important things to be doing than bothering with this throng of slobbering brats. Take them home! Go. Go!” Mark, who is telling us this story says that Jesus was “indignant” at the disciples. The dictionary says indignant means: Expressing anger at unjust, mean, or ungrateful treatment.
Then Jesus said, “Don’t push these children away. Don’t ever get between them and me. These children are at the very center of life in the kingdom. Mark this (and here Jesus is looking the disciples square in the eye): Unless you receive God’s kingdom like a child, you’ll never get in.” Again, Jesus uses this “receive...a child” formula.
We receive the kingdom of God like we receive children. How we receive children is how we receive Jesus. If we say, for example, “Children should be seen and not heard,” Jesus is saying, maybe that’s also what we think of him and how we think Jesus should be treated. How we treat children is how we ultimately treat Jesus and the kingdom of God. How we accept them, how we embrace them, what kind of conditions we put on them, has direct bearing as to how we receive the Lord and his kingdom. Jesus gauged our reception to him by our receptiveness of little children and how we treat them.
The reasoning of Christ, if I may be so bold to presume it, may have been this: An adult’s stooping to a child’s level has value in that it trains the adult to reach out to other helpless, powerless people--most of whom are other adults. Not only will the future, but also the righteousness, justice and compassion of the adult world be in direct proportion to how it treats it’s powerless lesser-than’s.
Through the prophet Isaiah, God told the people what they needed to do to put things right in their society:
Sweep your lives clean of your evildoings
so I don’t have to look at them any longer.
Say no to wrong.
Learn to do good.
Work for justice.
Help the down-and-out.
Stand up for the children.
Go to bat for the defenseless. (1:16-17)
And the Psalmist cries out in the name of God:
God takes his stand in his own congregation;
...vindicate the weak and fatherless;
Do justice to the afflicted and destitute.
Rescue the weak and needy;
Deliver them out of the hand of the wicked. (82:1-4)
How is the emphasis of power wielded in our culture? Against the lesser-than’s or for the lesser-than’s? Are the powerless embraced by, or pushed away from the influential and the powerful in our culture?
For Jesus, this would become a more important, personal issue. Jesus is the ultimate child. He kept telling the disciples that the day will come when he will be the most powerless, the most helpless, the greatest lesser-than that the world has known. He will be nailed to the cross, having been effectively run over by the adult world and judged as ineffective, unproductive, and mostly insignificant.
To receive Christ, then, as he received the child that day, is to receive him by embracing him with no conditions. That is, embracing him even if it means embracing the cross at the same time.
Receiving Jesus like he received the child means showing him off to others, just as he is. It means not being embarrassed about who comes to him and why. It means simply enjoying being with him, allowing ourselves to be touched by him, and bringing others to him to be touched as well.
I started out by talking about predicting the future. Again, let me emphasize, that how we (and by “we” I am talking about we adults in our adult fashioned world) receive children, how we treat them, in the here and now, has strategic consequences for our future. Not only, I hope you can see, for the lives of those children as they grow and mature, but also for our own lives. Because it is our attitudes of receptiveness toward children that is a direct indicator of how we will receive other lesser-than’s, and ultimately how we will receive Jesus himself. What more could influence and predict our future than that?
Monday, September 24, 2012
Monday, September 17, 2012
I Am What I Am
"I Am What I Am"
Mark 8:27--9:1
One of my favorite cartoons, that I liked to watch when I was growing up, was “Popeye.” I’m not sure why I liked Popeye. I thought Olive Oyl was a ditz. Bluto was a pinheaded jerk. I like watching Wimpy stack up all those hamburgers and eat them all in one gulp. I tried that once and it didn’t work. That was before I realized the magic of cartoons and you can do lots of stuff in cartoons you can’t do in real life.
I ate my spinach, out of a can, religiously, because I held on to the fantasy that if I just downed that stuff, like Popeye did, I’d be instantly stronger. If I ate my spinach, I’d have those forearms that looked like anvils. I’d be able to bop all the bullies who tormented my life. I think that’s why I liked Popeye. As I grew up and realized the fantasy wouldn’t happen, I suddenly developed a strong aversion to spinach. I have never touched the stuff since. The cooked kind, the kind that comes out of a can, that is.
It was my childhood hero, Popeye, who first coined the phrase, “I am what I am.” And that was followed up by, “I’m Popeye the sailor man.” Then he’d give a couple of toots on that corn cob pipe of his. Popeye was not a complex character. After all, he’s just a cartoon. But as a cartoon character, the extent of what he was, was summed up in five words: “I’m Popeye the sailor man.” What ever I thought Popeye was, whatever I wanted Popeye to be, from Popeye’s self-definition, all he is, is a sailor man.
It’s a tough lesson to learn, to allow people to say, “I am what I am.” Why is it that we have a hard time allowing people to be who they are, and what they are on their own terms? Instead, we try to fashion them out of our own image, making them into something they aren’t nor wish to be. We feel the pressure ourselves, from others, to be this kind of person or that kind of person according to others ideas.
Imagine how hard it was for Jesus. Jesus constantly tried to define himself on his own terms. But everyone around him had their own ideas.
In the part of the story read from Mark’s Gospel a few minutes ago, Jesus is preaching a self-definition sermon. He’s telling the disciples and the crowd of people standing around who he is. He’s telling them what kind of ministry he’s going to do. He tells them where his life is headed because of who he is. He plainly states he is going to experience terrible suffering at the hands of his listeners; he is going to be violently rejected; he is going to be murdered; and, then he is going to rise back to life after he is dead.
Get yourselves in the flow of what’s happening. First, Jesus spoke to a large group of disciples and the surrounding crowd. Then Peter took Jesus aside and criticized him for preaching such a terrible sermon, for saying such things about himself. Peter took Jesus aside, right there in front of the crowd. But Jesus returned the favor, and assaulted Peter, also right in front of the crowd. And then Jesus turned and addressed the larger crowd again.
Jesus did so, partially in response to something he saw in the faces of the disciples and the people who were watching the whole thing between him and Peter. I don’t know what Jesus saw in their faces, but evidently it was a collection of looks that needed to be challenged. It’s not clear who Jesus is actually talking to when he says, “Get behind me satan.” Is he talking to Peter only? Or to the disciples and the looks on their faces? Or the crowd? Or all three?
By bringing satan into the conversation, by saying, “Get behind me satan,” Jesus is signaling that this is a continuation of the temptation in the wilderness. Remember, before Jesus launched himself out into ministry, he spent 40 days and 40 nights in the wilderness. He ate nothing. He was there to get clear what his identity was before God.
Satan came and tempted him three times. The temptations were all about Jesus’ choice of his identity. First, would Jesus turn the stones into bread and eat, thereby defining himself and his powers as to be used for himself, first and foremost? Would Jesus take care of himself first, and pay attention to his own needs?
Secondly, would Jesus jump off the highest point of the temple and thereby wow the crowds? Would Jesus define himself by using his miraculous powers only for showy display? Would Jesus’ actions focus all the attention on himself for his own grandiose showmanship?
And lastly, would Jesus bow down and worship satan and thereby gain control of the world? Would Jesus define himself as a puppet of malicious power? Would Jesus define himself as a person who bows before quick opportunity with satan, rather than the harder and longer road of self-denial with God?
All those temptations were about Jesus deciding who he was going to be. He had some hard choices. Had he chosen differently, had he chosen to define himself according to satan’s whimsy, everything would have changed, and everything would have been lost.
So, here, Jesus was being pressured by Peter and others to give up his bleak self-definition. Jesus recognized it instantly for what it was. It was satan, coming at him again, using the disciples against him, trying to get him to define himself differently. Imagine having to be on your toes all the time, holding on to that which is ultimately most important: the self-definition you have chosen to be, letting go of all the other options. Imagine how hard it is to strongly and simply say, “I am what I am.”
As I looked at and thought about this story, I wondered what it was that Peter didn’t like about Jesus’ self-definition. And then I put myself in the story, and tried to imagine other people’s reactions.
Part of our Presbyterian process of calling a minister to a particular church involves bringing the person in who is the final choice of the Pastor Nominating Committee to meet the congregation. That final choice person gets to meet the congregation, preach a sermon in worship as well as lead worship. Then there is the congregational meeting and you all get to vote. Thumbs up or thumbs down.
Imagine it is the morning of the candidating sermon. The candidate the Pastor Nominating Committee has chosen, after looking at so many dossiers, and talking with people and interviewing, is standing up to lead worship. The church is packed. Everyone wants a look at the new guy or gal. The Pastor Nominating Committee is sitting proudly on the front row, waiting for the person to make a big first impression. As he or she leads worship, everything is clicking along great. Everyone seems pleased as worship progresses.
Then comes the sermon. The all important sermon. The candidate stands to preach. Everyone is anxiously waiting for a wowser sermon, a powerful message. Imagine, as the candidate opens his or her mouth and says this:
I want to tell you what kind of Pastor I’m going to be. This church is going to be the worst experience of my life. I will suffer for everything I say and do while I’m here. By the time I’m through here, every Elder, Deacon and Trustee will hate my guts. They won’t be able to run me out of town fast enough. The pews you sit in now will be totally empty, every Sunday morning, because everyone will have gone to some other church. Even your most loyal members will leave this church and not come back. In fact, people will hate me so much that a few of you will make it your personal mission to have me eliminated. It won’t be enough for them to throw me out on my chin, or assassinate my character. They will want to really assassinate me. They will justify their actions by saying it’s God’s will--that they are doing God and the church a favor. You will kill me; but I’ll be back. I will come to life again, after I’ve been dead and buried out in the cemetery. That’s what kind of Pastor I’m going to be.
Well, after everyone had sat there for a while with mouths gaping in disbelief at what they just heard, how long do you think it would take the moderator of the Pastor Nominating Committee to march up, take the candidate aside, away from the microphone and say, “Uh, what are you thinking? Are you crazy? That isn’t at all what we expected to hear. That isn’t what we wanted to hear. You’re supposed to make us, the PNC look good. You’re here to get votes, make us proud; you’re supposed to be the driver of the bus, not throw yourself under it! C’mon. Take a breather. Regroup yourself. Tell them it was all a big joke and preach something uplifting. You know, like Guideposts. Preach like Norman Vincent Peale or Joel Osteen. Be positive. Be funny and witty. Go ahead; show them what you can do.”
At that point, the candidate would have a decision to make. In that fictitious scene, the candidate has defined himself in a particular way. Probably just about everyone in that sanctuary, if the candidate had defined himself in that way, would want him to back down from that self-definition. If the candidate does, though, he wouldn’t be true to himself. If he doesn’t back down, then he will in fact be voted down as unacceptable. At least he would be rejected for who he really was, not for what others wanted him to be. At least he gets to keep some self-respect and integrity, even though it didn’t take him very far.
That’s what Jesus was facing in front of his disciples and the crowd that day. “This is what I am; this is who I am,” Jesus announced to the crowd.
I am going to suffer because none of you will understand me. You will reject me, mainly because you didn’t take the time or energy to get to know me. Your leaders will not only disavow me, they will literally destroy me. And then, believe it or not, I will arise alive. That’s who I am. That’s the kind of Messiah I am going to be. If you want to follow me, then that’s the kind of person you will be following. If you don’t like it, don’t follow me. But I will not change just so I am more marketable or suitable to your status quo tastes. Take me or leave me; that’s your choice. But take me or leave me on my own terms.
Jesus needs to be allowed to be who he is by his own self-definition. We want Jesus to be a lot of things. He can only be what he says he is. He’s not a hero like we define heroes. He’s not Superman, Batman, or Popeye. Jesus isn’t Indiana Jones or a Transformer or Spiderman. He doesn’t have a star on the Hollywood walk of fame.
He’s Jesus. He’s a person who loves the people the world hates. He has a very hard time with the those the world calls “The Beautiful People.” He eats with people we wouldn’t be caught dead with. He touches people that to us are sick and disgusting. He tells people to give up things they think are valuable, and tells them to acquire things they think are valueless. Instead of teaching people how to get ahead in the world, he told people how to get ahead with God, and be losers in the eyes of the world.
Pay attention. Pay attention to what Jesus says and does that gives us an idea of who he is by his own definition. And once we have paid attention to that, then we are faced with a decision. Will we follow Jesus as he is--as he defines himself to be? You can’t follow the Jesus of your imaginings, the Jesus as you’d like Jesus to be. Jesus will not allow us to do that. Whenever we reprimand Jesus for being something we’d rather him not being, or saying something we’d rather him not say, he turns and says to us, “Get behind me, Satan.” Jesus knows what’s going on.
When we try to fashion Jesus into something he is not, we are in league with satan, who tried to do the same thing in the three temptations in the wilderness. The tempter tried to get Jesus to be something he was not. To define himself in a way other than the direction Jesus wanted to be heading. Jesus said, “No. A thousand times, no; I am what I am. Follow me, or get out of the way.”
If you decide to be a follower of Jesus, you have to realize that in that following, you will be defined in a similar way as Jesus was. The world will look at you the same way it did Jesus. It will put the same kind of pressure on you as it did on Jesus to be some other way. You will wake up every morning of your life and you will have to say, “A thousand times, no; it’s Jesus’ way or no way.”
You will be enticed with all kinds of delicacies, all kinds of other self-definition options to veer away from Jesus. Your friends and most trusted colleagues may take you aside and try to rattle your cage, and dust what they perceive to be the cobwebs out of your head. You will even find yourself fighting against your own will to compromise your own determination and definition to follow Jesus.
It’s not going to be easy, is what I’m trying to say. It’s not easy to be a follower of Jesus. But as some point, usually every minute of your life, you have to say like Popeye, “I am what I am. I’m Steve the follower of Jesus.” Toot, toot!
Mark 8:27--9:1
One of my favorite cartoons, that I liked to watch when I was growing up, was “Popeye.” I’m not sure why I liked Popeye. I thought Olive Oyl was a ditz. Bluto was a pinheaded jerk. I like watching Wimpy stack up all those hamburgers and eat them all in one gulp. I tried that once and it didn’t work. That was before I realized the magic of cartoons and you can do lots of stuff in cartoons you can’t do in real life.
I ate my spinach, out of a can, religiously, because I held on to the fantasy that if I just downed that stuff, like Popeye did, I’d be instantly stronger. If I ate my spinach, I’d have those forearms that looked like anvils. I’d be able to bop all the bullies who tormented my life. I think that’s why I liked Popeye. As I grew up and realized the fantasy wouldn’t happen, I suddenly developed a strong aversion to spinach. I have never touched the stuff since. The cooked kind, the kind that comes out of a can, that is.
It was my childhood hero, Popeye, who first coined the phrase, “I am what I am.” And that was followed up by, “I’m Popeye the sailor man.” Then he’d give a couple of toots on that corn cob pipe of his. Popeye was not a complex character. After all, he’s just a cartoon. But as a cartoon character, the extent of what he was, was summed up in five words: “I’m Popeye the sailor man.” What ever I thought Popeye was, whatever I wanted Popeye to be, from Popeye’s self-definition, all he is, is a sailor man.
It’s a tough lesson to learn, to allow people to say, “I am what I am.” Why is it that we have a hard time allowing people to be who they are, and what they are on their own terms? Instead, we try to fashion them out of our own image, making them into something they aren’t nor wish to be. We feel the pressure ourselves, from others, to be this kind of person or that kind of person according to others ideas.
Imagine how hard it was for Jesus. Jesus constantly tried to define himself on his own terms. But everyone around him had their own ideas.
In the part of the story read from Mark’s Gospel a few minutes ago, Jesus is preaching a self-definition sermon. He’s telling the disciples and the crowd of people standing around who he is. He’s telling them what kind of ministry he’s going to do. He tells them where his life is headed because of who he is. He plainly states he is going to experience terrible suffering at the hands of his listeners; he is going to be violently rejected; he is going to be murdered; and, then he is going to rise back to life after he is dead.
Get yourselves in the flow of what’s happening. First, Jesus spoke to a large group of disciples and the surrounding crowd. Then Peter took Jesus aside and criticized him for preaching such a terrible sermon, for saying such things about himself. Peter took Jesus aside, right there in front of the crowd. But Jesus returned the favor, and assaulted Peter, also right in front of the crowd. And then Jesus turned and addressed the larger crowd again.
Jesus did so, partially in response to something he saw in the faces of the disciples and the people who were watching the whole thing between him and Peter. I don’t know what Jesus saw in their faces, but evidently it was a collection of looks that needed to be challenged. It’s not clear who Jesus is actually talking to when he says, “Get behind me satan.” Is he talking to Peter only? Or to the disciples and the looks on their faces? Or the crowd? Or all three?
By bringing satan into the conversation, by saying, “Get behind me satan,” Jesus is signaling that this is a continuation of the temptation in the wilderness. Remember, before Jesus launched himself out into ministry, he spent 40 days and 40 nights in the wilderness. He ate nothing. He was there to get clear what his identity was before God.
Satan came and tempted him three times. The temptations were all about Jesus’ choice of his identity. First, would Jesus turn the stones into bread and eat, thereby defining himself and his powers as to be used for himself, first and foremost? Would Jesus take care of himself first, and pay attention to his own needs?
Secondly, would Jesus jump off the highest point of the temple and thereby wow the crowds? Would Jesus define himself by using his miraculous powers only for showy display? Would Jesus’ actions focus all the attention on himself for his own grandiose showmanship?
And lastly, would Jesus bow down and worship satan and thereby gain control of the world? Would Jesus define himself as a puppet of malicious power? Would Jesus define himself as a person who bows before quick opportunity with satan, rather than the harder and longer road of self-denial with God?
All those temptations were about Jesus deciding who he was going to be. He had some hard choices. Had he chosen differently, had he chosen to define himself according to satan’s whimsy, everything would have changed, and everything would have been lost.
So, here, Jesus was being pressured by Peter and others to give up his bleak self-definition. Jesus recognized it instantly for what it was. It was satan, coming at him again, using the disciples against him, trying to get him to define himself differently. Imagine having to be on your toes all the time, holding on to that which is ultimately most important: the self-definition you have chosen to be, letting go of all the other options. Imagine how hard it is to strongly and simply say, “I am what I am.”
As I looked at and thought about this story, I wondered what it was that Peter didn’t like about Jesus’ self-definition. And then I put myself in the story, and tried to imagine other people’s reactions.
Part of our Presbyterian process of calling a minister to a particular church involves bringing the person in who is the final choice of the Pastor Nominating Committee to meet the congregation. That final choice person gets to meet the congregation, preach a sermon in worship as well as lead worship. Then there is the congregational meeting and you all get to vote. Thumbs up or thumbs down.
Imagine it is the morning of the candidating sermon. The candidate the Pastor Nominating Committee has chosen, after looking at so many dossiers, and talking with people and interviewing, is standing up to lead worship. The church is packed. Everyone wants a look at the new guy or gal. The Pastor Nominating Committee is sitting proudly on the front row, waiting for the person to make a big first impression. As he or she leads worship, everything is clicking along great. Everyone seems pleased as worship progresses.
Then comes the sermon. The all important sermon. The candidate stands to preach. Everyone is anxiously waiting for a wowser sermon, a powerful message. Imagine, as the candidate opens his or her mouth and says this:
I want to tell you what kind of Pastor I’m going to be. This church is going to be the worst experience of my life. I will suffer for everything I say and do while I’m here. By the time I’m through here, every Elder, Deacon and Trustee will hate my guts. They won’t be able to run me out of town fast enough. The pews you sit in now will be totally empty, every Sunday morning, because everyone will have gone to some other church. Even your most loyal members will leave this church and not come back. In fact, people will hate me so much that a few of you will make it your personal mission to have me eliminated. It won’t be enough for them to throw me out on my chin, or assassinate my character. They will want to really assassinate me. They will justify their actions by saying it’s God’s will--that they are doing God and the church a favor. You will kill me; but I’ll be back. I will come to life again, after I’ve been dead and buried out in the cemetery. That’s what kind of Pastor I’m going to be.
Well, after everyone had sat there for a while with mouths gaping in disbelief at what they just heard, how long do you think it would take the moderator of the Pastor Nominating Committee to march up, take the candidate aside, away from the microphone and say, “Uh, what are you thinking? Are you crazy? That isn’t at all what we expected to hear. That isn’t what we wanted to hear. You’re supposed to make us, the PNC look good. You’re here to get votes, make us proud; you’re supposed to be the driver of the bus, not throw yourself under it! C’mon. Take a breather. Regroup yourself. Tell them it was all a big joke and preach something uplifting. You know, like Guideposts. Preach like Norman Vincent Peale or Joel Osteen. Be positive. Be funny and witty. Go ahead; show them what you can do.”
At that point, the candidate would have a decision to make. In that fictitious scene, the candidate has defined himself in a particular way. Probably just about everyone in that sanctuary, if the candidate had defined himself in that way, would want him to back down from that self-definition. If the candidate does, though, he wouldn’t be true to himself. If he doesn’t back down, then he will in fact be voted down as unacceptable. At least he would be rejected for who he really was, not for what others wanted him to be. At least he gets to keep some self-respect and integrity, even though it didn’t take him very far.
That’s what Jesus was facing in front of his disciples and the crowd that day. “This is what I am; this is who I am,” Jesus announced to the crowd.
I am going to suffer because none of you will understand me. You will reject me, mainly because you didn’t take the time or energy to get to know me. Your leaders will not only disavow me, they will literally destroy me. And then, believe it or not, I will arise alive. That’s who I am. That’s the kind of Messiah I am going to be. If you want to follow me, then that’s the kind of person you will be following. If you don’t like it, don’t follow me. But I will not change just so I am more marketable or suitable to your status quo tastes. Take me or leave me; that’s your choice. But take me or leave me on my own terms.
Jesus needs to be allowed to be who he is by his own self-definition. We want Jesus to be a lot of things. He can only be what he says he is. He’s not a hero like we define heroes. He’s not Superman, Batman, or Popeye. Jesus isn’t Indiana Jones or a Transformer or Spiderman. He doesn’t have a star on the Hollywood walk of fame.
He’s Jesus. He’s a person who loves the people the world hates. He has a very hard time with the those the world calls “The Beautiful People.” He eats with people we wouldn’t be caught dead with. He touches people that to us are sick and disgusting. He tells people to give up things they think are valuable, and tells them to acquire things they think are valueless. Instead of teaching people how to get ahead in the world, he told people how to get ahead with God, and be losers in the eyes of the world.
Pay attention. Pay attention to what Jesus says and does that gives us an idea of who he is by his own definition. And once we have paid attention to that, then we are faced with a decision. Will we follow Jesus as he is--as he defines himself to be? You can’t follow the Jesus of your imaginings, the Jesus as you’d like Jesus to be. Jesus will not allow us to do that. Whenever we reprimand Jesus for being something we’d rather him not being, or saying something we’d rather him not say, he turns and says to us, “Get behind me, Satan.” Jesus knows what’s going on.
When we try to fashion Jesus into something he is not, we are in league with satan, who tried to do the same thing in the three temptations in the wilderness. The tempter tried to get Jesus to be something he was not. To define himself in a way other than the direction Jesus wanted to be heading. Jesus said, “No. A thousand times, no; I am what I am. Follow me, or get out of the way.”
If you decide to be a follower of Jesus, you have to realize that in that following, you will be defined in a similar way as Jesus was. The world will look at you the same way it did Jesus. It will put the same kind of pressure on you as it did on Jesus to be some other way. You will wake up every morning of your life and you will have to say, “A thousand times, no; it’s Jesus’ way or no way.”
You will be enticed with all kinds of delicacies, all kinds of other self-definition options to veer away from Jesus. Your friends and most trusted colleagues may take you aside and try to rattle your cage, and dust what they perceive to be the cobwebs out of your head. You will even find yourself fighting against your own will to compromise your own determination and definition to follow Jesus.
It’s not going to be easy, is what I’m trying to say. It’s not easy to be a follower of Jesus. But as some point, usually every minute of your life, you have to say like Popeye, “I am what I am. I’m Steve the follower of Jesus.” Toot, toot!
Monday, September 10, 2012
The Messy Task Of Touching Others
"The Messy Task of Touching Others"
Mark 7:31-37
When I was pastor in Colby, one of the roles I fell into was dealing with the transients who came through town. The church and the manse were next door to each other on state highway 24 that went east and west across the northern half of the state. And we were just a couple of blocks off of state highway 25 that went north and south through western Kansas. Colby, itself, was on Interstate 70. The church was in a very visible place and probably 90% of the transients who came through town stopped at the Presbyterian church looking for some kind of assistance.
I met all kinds of people in all kinds of conditions. Each year most of the transients had the same hard luck line, as if they got together for a transient convention in Florida or Texas each winter and decided what the story was going to be for the coming summer. And there were some memorable odd stories.
The ministers and churches in town, like here, had a system whereby we never gave out cash, but sent them to the sheriff’s office for aid. The deputy would run them through the national crime check computer to see if they were wanted for anything.
One guy I sent down to the sheriff’s office evidently didn’t know about computers and the internet. He went down to get some gas money and was promptly arrested for some minor charge in another state. He used his one phone call to call me up and ask for bail money. His car looked like it was straight out of the Grapes of Wrath, packed from floor to ceiling. He pulled out a vintage Fender Stratocaster guitar and told me he’d sell it to me for the $100 he needed for bail money. I didn’t have the need for an electric guitar at that time, but wished I would have bought it--it was probably worth thousands.
Then he pulled out a large set of old 45 records. He told me they were his babies, and he wanted them back. So if I gave him the $100, he’d give me the records. But when he got to where he was going, Oregon I think, he’d send me the $100 and the postage so I could mail them back. They were all in mint condition. I figured if I never heard from the guy, I could sell them to a collector for much more than $100. So I gave him the money, and off he went. About a year later I got a phone call from him, wanting to know if I still had his “babies.” I still had them; he sent me the money; and I mailed them off to him.
Another transient walked up the sidewalk to the manse. I was sitting on the front porch. He had a cup of coffee from Loves in his hand and a newly lit cigarette stuck in his mouth. He said, “Reverend, (they all call me Reverend) I’m just down on my luck. I just spent my last dollar on this cup of coffee and a pack of cigarettes, and I’m about starving to death.”
I said, “Sounds like you should have spent your last dollar more wisely. I can’t help you.”
He said, “Can’t or won’t.”
I said, “Won’t.” He walked on cussing me out all the way down the sidewalk for a least a couple of blocks.
Some people are scam artists--survivors who’ve been on the road for a long time. They know how to get by. Others are really sad cases, and I got to the point where I could almost tell which was which. But like I said, I was the one who ended up being in the trenches with most of those people. Other churches were tucked away back in neighborhoods, out of sight. Between Spring and Fall of each year, I probably dealt with four or five transients a week.
They all took up my time. There were times seeing a transient come in the church door was the last thing I wanted to deal with. They were, most of them, con artists, and I would sit and listen to their tales of woe. I would have rather been doing other “churchly” kinds of things instead of having to deal with some smelly “road warrior,” spinning out their tales and lies.
I had one guy who wanted to dig the weeds out of the cracks of the sidewalk in front of church with his screwdriver. Even before I could say no, he was down on his hands and knees scratching away at the weeds. While he weeded, looking at me through his coke bottle bottom glasses, he’d ask me theological or church related questions. Well, I didn’t want to get into a theological discussion with a transient who picked weeds with a screwdriver. I had a pile of other stuff I needed to do and talking with him was a major distraction.
But it turned out to be one of the most amazing conversations, because this guy knew what he was he was talking about. He asked questions that demonstrated he had an understanding and intelligence that was much higher than the average stray human being coming through town. And he came back the next year. And I think the year after that. Screwdriver in hand. My suspicion was he was someone like a college sociology or psychology professor doing research for a Ph.D.
The main thing was these people took up my time. And they smelled. And they were often belligerent and demanding, as if they were entitled to the maximum amount of help I could dole out. I would end up taking them to the sheriff’s department, or the motel, or to the grocery store. And for the people who I discerned as legitimately needy--especially those with kids--I would supplement with my own money what they received from the sheriff’s department.
It was easy for the members of the congregations to deal with the transients. The members of the participating churches would, through special offerings, give money for the Transient Aid Fund. But those members would never have to deal, face-to-face with the needy who came to my doorstep and rang my doorbell while I was eating dinner with my family. The congregation didn’t have to be interrupted at work or home to deal with a vagabond visitor.
Jesus dealt with it day in and day out. The world’s unfortunates were carried to him and plopped down in front of him with the words, “Do something.” A man born blind. A woman at the well who had half a dozen husbands. 10 people with leprosy--all at once. A demon possessed girl. All of them begged Jesus, desperate with need, looking to him for a handout miracle. Face-to-face encounters with the world’s dispossessed.
I confess, as you might be able to tell, my attitude was not always “Christian” in my dealings with such people. I felt put out, or aggravated that these stinky, destitute people who constantly made bad decisions in life, who went about conning their way through life, were taking up my time and energy when I had more important things to do.
That’s why I always marvel at how Jesus always takes the time. Always is gentle. Always makes such people feel like they are important simply because of who they were. That Jesus gave them his time in such an unaggravated way. With the deaf man, Jesus took him aside, away from the curiosity seekers, and treated him in a one-on-one, personal way.
And Jesus was always touching these people. If I shook hands with a transient, which I always do, I’d, when they left, go in and immediately wash my hands. But look at what Jesus does with this deaf man, who can hardly talk, touching him in such an oddly personal way. Jesus sticks his fingers in the man’s ears and spits on the man’s tongue. I should try that with the next transient who comes to the church office. I mean, what’s with that? But if Jesus just spoke, would that have been enough for the deaf man? He needed something more personal, more visible, so that he knew Jesus was doing something to him and for him.
Jesus took him aside, looked him in the eye, put his fingers in the guy’s ears and laid some spit on the man’s tongue. All of it a demonstration to the man of Jesus’ personal extension and attentiveness to the man. A messy, personal attentiveness that told the man he was being taken care of.
Mother Teresa in her book, No Greater Love, wrote about finding a man laying in the gutter. This is how she described the encounter:
His body was covered with maggots. I brought him to our house, and what did this man say? He did not curse. He did not blame anyone. He just said, “I have lived like an animal in the street, but I’m going to die like an angel, loved and cared for.” It took us three hours to clean him and his festering wounds. Finally, the man looked up at the sister and said, “Sister, I’m going to God.” And then he died. I’ve never seen such a radiant smile on a human face as the one I saw on that man’s face. See what love can do! … And this is where you and I fit into God’s plan. (pg. 23-24)
Hear that last sentence of Mother Teresa’s again: “And that’s where YOU and I fit into God’s plan.” God’s plan for we believers always has to do with going outside of ourselves. With extending ourselves to others. But those others may be people we would rather not have to deal with. They may not be people who are deaf--maybe they are. They may not be people who are covered with maggots, and whose rotting wounds have the stench of decay and death--but maybe they will be.
They will most likely be people we don’t care for. They are people who aren’t “our kind.” People who you have no respect for. Outsiders. People who are needy, in one way or another. At-risk, is what we call them these days. People who take up your time, who are demanding of your time; who interrupt your routine, who ask something of you that you’d rather not give. And it’s not money.
When I was up in Seattle at the end of July to disperse my parents ashes, I saw a lot of homeless people. When we went to the waterfront area, they were sitting along the sidewalk, out in front of nice restaurants like Ivars Acres Of Clams, looking for handouts. That would have been the easy thing to do. Throw a few coins in their coffee cans, maybe a dollar bill or two. But would I have seen the miracle if I just did that? Would I have, as Mother Teresa described, seen the radiant look of transformation on their faces?
One little old African American lady was sitting on the sidewalk, three bags of stuff beside her. She was banging on a cow bell with a drum stick. Her only contribution to society was beating out an annoying rhythm and taking up space on the sidewalk.
I wondered what life was like for her. How long she had been on the streets. Did she have any family or friends? Where did she stay at night? What’s it like for a woman to be on the streets? They are all interesting questions that went through my head as I walked by her. Questions that I’ll never know the answer to because I didn’t take the time to stop and ask so I could hear her answers.
I didn’t have time. At least I didn’t think I had the time. That’s what I told myself. I thought I had the luxury of being able to just walk by, pretending I didn’t see her, or hear her beat of the cowbell; just keep walking and forget her. Someone with whom I don’t have to concern myself. Too messy to get involved. Too time consuming to fit into God’s plan. Certainly I wouldn’t have to feel like I should get involved to the point of putting my fingers in her ears and touching her tongue--however that would be demonstrated for a lady with a cowbell and three garbage bags of possessions.
Who are the people you don’t notice? Who are the people you may not care to notice--people you try to avoid? Who are the people whose faces you glance into and then turn away, avoiding eye contact? Who are the people who aren’t worth your time? Who are the people you’d rather not have to deal with on a face-to-face encounter? (For me, right now they are all on COM.) Who are the people you are missing seeing what love and God can do, through you, if you’d only be willing to extend yourself to them, even if the encounter is messy and time consuming?
We’ve been challenged, through this $100,000 gift to make a difference in some of those kinds of people--children, 3rd through 6th grade, and maybe their families. It’s going to be hard and messy work.
People ask, “How come we don’t see miracles anymore, like Jesus did?” Maybe it’s because we walk past so many opportunities to make those miracles happen through us. I hope and pray to God, that we will see some of those miracles in the little faces of children whom we will touch in the coming years.
Mark 7:31-37
When I was pastor in Colby, one of the roles I fell into was dealing with the transients who came through town. The church and the manse were next door to each other on state highway 24 that went east and west across the northern half of the state. And we were just a couple of blocks off of state highway 25 that went north and south through western Kansas. Colby, itself, was on Interstate 70. The church was in a very visible place and probably 90% of the transients who came through town stopped at the Presbyterian church looking for some kind of assistance.
I met all kinds of people in all kinds of conditions. Each year most of the transients had the same hard luck line, as if they got together for a transient convention in Florida or Texas each winter and decided what the story was going to be for the coming summer. And there were some memorable odd stories.
The ministers and churches in town, like here, had a system whereby we never gave out cash, but sent them to the sheriff’s office for aid. The deputy would run them through the national crime check computer to see if they were wanted for anything.
One guy I sent down to the sheriff’s office evidently didn’t know about computers and the internet. He went down to get some gas money and was promptly arrested for some minor charge in another state. He used his one phone call to call me up and ask for bail money. His car looked like it was straight out of the Grapes of Wrath, packed from floor to ceiling. He pulled out a vintage Fender Stratocaster guitar and told me he’d sell it to me for the $100 he needed for bail money. I didn’t have the need for an electric guitar at that time, but wished I would have bought it--it was probably worth thousands.
Then he pulled out a large set of old 45 records. He told me they were his babies, and he wanted them back. So if I gave him the $100, he’d give me the records. But when he got to where he was going, Oregon I think, he’d send me the $100 and the postage so I could mail them back. They were all in mint condition. I figured if I never heard from the guy, I could sell them to a collector for much more than $100. So I gave him the money, and off he went. About a year later I got a phone call from him, wanting to know if I still had his “babies.” I still had them; he sent me the money; and I mailed them off to him.
Another transient walked up the sidewalk to the manse. I was sitting on the front porch. He had a cup of coffee from Loves in his hand and a newly lit cigarette stuck in his mouth. He said, “Reverend, (they all call me Reverend) I’m just down on my luck. I just spent my last dollar on this cup of coffee and a pack of cigarettes, and I’m about starving to death.”
I said, “Sounds like you should have spent your last dollar more wisely. I can’t help you.”
He said, “Can’t or won’t.”
I said, “Won’t.” He walked on cussing me out all the way down the sidewalk for a least a couple of blocks.
Some people are scam artists--survivors who’ve been on the road for a long time. They know how to get by. Others are really sad cases, and I got to the point where I could almost tell which was which. But like I said, I was the one who ended up being in the trenches with most of those people. Other churches were tucked away back in neighborhoods, out of sight. Between Spring and Fall of each year, I probably dealt with four or five transients a week.
They all took up my time. There were times seeing a transient come in the church door was the last thing I wanted to deal with. They were, most of them, con artists, and I would sit and listen to their tales of woe. I would have rather been doing other “churchly” kinds of things instead of having to deal with some smelly “road warrior,” spinning out their tales and lies.
I had one guy who wanted to dig the weeds out of the cracks of the sidewalk in front of church with his screwdriver. Even before I could say no, he was down on his hands and knees scratching away at the weeds. While he weeded, looking at me through his coke bottle bottom glasses, he’d ask me theological or church related questions. Well, I didn’t want to get into a theological discussion with a transient who picked weeds with a screwdriver. I had a pile of other stuff I needed to do and talking with him was a major distraction.
But it turned out to be one of the most amazing conversations, because this guy knew what he was he was talking about. He asked questions that demonstrated he had an understanding and intelligence that was much higher than the average stray human being coming through town. And he came back the next year. And I think the year after that. Screwdriver in hand. My suspicion was he was someone like a college sociology or psychology professor doing research for a Ph.D.
The main thing was these people took up my time. And they smelled. And they were often belligerent and demanding, as if they were entitled to the maximum amount of help I could dole out. I would end up taking them to the sheriff’s department, or the motel, or to the grocery store. And for the people who I discerned as legitimately needy--especially those with kids--I would supplement with my own money what they received from the sheriff’s department.
It was easy for the members of the congregations to deal with the transients. The members of the participating churches would, through special offerings, give money for the Transient Aid Fund. But those members would never have to deal, face-to-face with the needy who came to my doorstep and rang my doorbell while I was eating dinner with my family. The congregation didn’t have to be interrupted at work or home to deal with a vagabond visitor.
Jesus dealt with it day in and day out. The world’s unfortunates were carried to him and plopped down in front of him with the words, “Do something.” A man born blind. A woman at the well who had half a dozen husbands. 10 people with leprosy--all at once. A demon possessed girl. All of them begged Jesus, desperate with need, looking to him for a handout miracle. Face-to-face encounters with the world’s dispossessed.
I confess, as you might be able to tell, my attitude was not always “Christian” in my dealings with such people. I felt put out, or aggravated that these stinky, destitute people who constantly made bad decisions in life, who went about conning their way through life, were taking up my time and energy when I had more important things to do.
That’s why I always marvel at how Jesus always takes the time. Always is gentle. Always makes such people feel like they are important simply because of who they were. That Jesus gave them his time in such an unaggravated way. With the deaf man, Jesus took him aside, away from the curiosity seekers, and treated him in a one-on-one, personal way.
And Jesus was always touching these people. If I shook hands with a transient, which I always do, I’d, when they left, go in and immediately wash my hands. But look at what Jesus does with this deaf man, who can hardly talk, touching him in such an oddly personal way. Jesus sticks his fingers in the man’s ears and spits on the man’s tongue. I should try that with the next transient who comes to the church office. I mean, what’s with that? But if Jesus just spoke, would that have been enough for the deaf man? He needed something more personal, more visible, so that he knew Jesus was doing something to him and for him.
Jesus took him aside, looked him in the eye, put his fingers in the guy’s ears and laid some spit on the man’s tongue. All of it a demonstration to the man of Jesus’ personal extension and attentiveness to the man. A messy, personal attentiveness that told the man he was being taken care of.
Mother Teresa in her book, No Greater Love, wrote about finding a man laying in the gutter. This is how she described the encounter:
His body was covered with maggots. I brought him to our house, and what did this man say? He did not curse. He did not blame anyone. He just said, “I have lived like an animal in the street, but I’m going to die like an angel, loved and cared for.” It took us three hours to clean him and his festering wounds. Finally, the man looked up at the sister and said, “Sister, I’m going to God.” And then he died. I’ve never seen such a radiant smile on a human face as the one I saw on that man’s face. See what love can do! … And this is where you and I fit into God’s plan. (pg. 23-24)
Hear that last sentence of Mother Teresa’s again: “And that’s where YOU and I fit into God’s plan.” God’s plan for we believers always has to do with going outside of ourselves. With extending ourselves to others. But those others may be people we would rather not have to deal with. They may not be people who are deaf--maybe they are. They may not be people who are covered with maggots, and whose rotting wounds have the stench of decay and death--but maybe they will be.
They will most likely be people we don’t care for. They are people who aren’t “our kind.” People who you have no respect for. Outsiders. People who are needy, in one way or another. At-risk, is what we call them these days. People who take up your time, who are demanding of your time; who interrupt your routine, who ask something of you that you’d rather not give. And it’s not money.
When I was up in Seattle at the end of July to disperse my parents ashes, I saw a lot of homeless people. When we went to the waterfront area, they were sitting along the sidewalk, out in front of nice restaurants like Ivars Acres Of Clams, looking for handouts. That would have been the easy thing to do. Throw a few coins in their coffee cans, maybe a dollar bill or two. But would I have seen the miracle if I just did that? Would I have, as Mother Teresa described, seen the radiant look of transformation on their faces?
One little old African American lady was sitting on the sidewalk, three bags of stuff beside her. She was banging on a cow bell with a drum stick. Her only contribution to society was beating out an annoying rhythm and taking up space on the sidewalk.
I wondered what life was like for her. How long she had been on the streets. Did she have any family or friends? Where did she stay at night? What’s it like for a woman to be on the streets? They are all interesting questions that went through my head as I walked by her. Questions that I’ll never know the answer to because I didn’t take the time to stop and ask so I could hear her answers.
I didn’t have time. At least I didn’t think I had the time. That’s what I told myself. I thought I had the luxury of being able to just walk by, pretending I didn’t see her, or hear her beat of the cowbell; just keep walking and forget her. Someone with whom I don’t have to concern myself. Too messy to get involved. Too time consuming to fit into God’s plan. Certainly I wouldn’t have to feel like I should get involved to the point of putting my fingers in her ears and touching her tongue--however that would be demonstrated for a lady with a cowbell and three garbage bags of possessions.
Who are the people you don’t notice? Who are the people you may not care to notice--people you try to avoid? Who are the people whose faces you glance into and then turn away, avoiding eye contact? Who are the people who aren’t worth your time? Who are the people you’d rather not have to deal with on a face-to-face encounter? (For me, right now they are all on COM.) Who are the people you are missing seeing what love and God can do, through you, if you’d only be willing to extend yourself to them, even if the encounter is messy and time consuming?
We’ve been challenged, through this $100,000 gift to make a difference in some of those kinds of people--children, 3rd through 6th grade, and maybe their families. It’s going to be hard and messy work.
People ask, “How come we don’t see miracles anymore, like Jesus did?” Maybe it’s because we walk past so many opportunities to make those miracles happen through us. I hope and pray to God, that we will see some of those miracles in the little faces of children whom we will touch in the coming years.
Monday, September 3, 2012
Gunfighters Dodging Bullets
"Gunfighters Dodging Bullets"
Ephesians 5:15-17
Ephesians 5:15-17
When Queen Elizabeth the First died in 1603, with her last, dying breath, she said, “All my possessions for a moment of time.”
That kind of statement may not be hard to understand coming from a person’s deathbed. What has happened to us of late is that that statement is being muttered more often from the evening bed--when we lay down after the day is over and have time to reflect over our days activities. There are times when we are amazed (and pleased with ourselves) about how much we’ve gotten done. But from what I am hearing of late, from many people, is how fast the days go by, and how little people feel like they’re accomplishing. How much they wish they had more time.
In the work place, computers, robotics, and other innovations that seemed straight out of science fiction, promise to make efficiency go up and actual work time go down. In 1967, there was testimony given before a Senate subcommittee that estimated by 1985 people could be working just 22 hours a week, or just 27 weeks out of the year, or have the option of retiring at age 38. That gave rise to the whole push of the leisure market, since we would be having so much unencumbered time on our hands.
Well, sure enough, the computers have been clicking, the satellites have been spinning, the email has been zipping along cyberspace, the Cuisinarts have been whizzing, and the microwaves have been beeping, just as planned. So why are we so out of breath? So tired? Feeling so short on time? So incredibly busy--or at least we say we are? How did that Senate Sub-committee get it so wrong back in 1967?
Social analyst Jeremy Rifkin wrote in his book, Time Wars, “It is ironic that in a culture so committed to saving time we feel increasingly deprived of the very thing we (are trying to save and) value.” Or, as poll taker Louis Harris concluded, “Time may have become the most precious commodity in the land.”
One little girl was showing her friend her mother’s egg timer. They watched the salt flow through, and when it was finished, the girl said, “See? You just turn it upside down now and you get your three minutes back.” So many of us would wish that it were so. But there is no reverse gear on time. It continues ever forward, irrespective of anyone’s position, power, or wealth.
The pace of change and the explosion of the amount of information it takes to keep up with the pack has escalated greatly over the past 20-30 years. One person quoted in an article I read recently stated that, “Technology is increasing the heartbeat. We are inundated with information. The mind can’t handle it all. The pace is so fast now, I sometimes feel like a gunfighter dodging bullets.”
It’s estimated that if you read one article a day on the internet, in your specific field, at the end of a year you would be seven years behind in everything you could have read.
Many working people feel like they are swamped with too many new facts to absorb in order to stay competitive in their business. But yet most keep trying. Part of what has happened is that many, if not most people, have linked a good portion of their sense of self-esteem with their careers. Sociologist Selwyn Enzer, in the article I just mentioned, stated that, “Sometime in the early ’80’s, Americans came to worship career status as a measure of individual worth, and many were willing to sacrifice any amount of leisure time to get ahead.”
We don’t even allow ourselves time to mourn any more. In 1922, Emily Post instructed widows that the proper mourning period was three years. Fifty years later, in her book on proper etiquette, Amy Vanderbilt urged that the bereaved be about their normal activities within a week or so. I was out at Jim and Lori Want’s for dinner a couple of weeks ago, and a young man came to their home who had just lost his grandma. He said he was given three days for Bereavement Leave from work, so he had to make the most of those three days. If he had broken a leg, he would have gotten more time off than three days.
And I resonate with the comment of James Smith, an economist with the Rand Corporation, when he said it’s easy to “start losing touch with things. My work is research, which at its best (means taking time for contemplation). If you get into this mode of running around, you don’t have time to reflect.”
The risk is that the running around life, the unexamined life, becomes one that is self-sustaining. How many people take the time to examine their lives? To ask ourselves some important questions, such as:
Why do we work so hard?
Why do we have so little time to spare?
What does this kind of lifestyle do to our primary relationships?
And, what would we be willing to give up in order to live a little more directed and focused lives?
Those are the kinds of questions I want to address this morning. They are questions that Paul was begging his Ephesian friends to reflect on. They are no less important for us.
Live life, then, with a due sense of responsibility,
not as those who do not know the meaning of life
but as those who do.
Make the best use of your time,
despite all the evils of these days.
Don’t be vague
but grasp firmly what you know to be the will of the Lord.
(Ephesians 5:15-17, PME)
“Make the best use of your time…” or as the King James Version has it, “Redeem the time.” How do you do that? How do you see the value of time, and therefore use it as wisely as possible? According to Paul, we must “live life...not as those who do not know the meaning of life but as those who do.”
As the economist I quoted earlier stated, that means taking time to reflect--thinking about and coming to an understanding of what the meaning of life could be. Tony Compolo, in his book, Who Switched the Price Tags? wrote about a study that was done with 50 people over the age of 95. These ninety year olds were asked one question: What would you do different if you had life to live over again?” Three answers were given more often than others. One of those top three was, “I would reflect more.” They would spend more time thinking about the meaning of things rather than just end up doing things. They would have spent time reflecting on what was most important in life, living out their lives according to those important things, rather than just living out a random jumble of experiences.
The great Japanese Christian Toyohiko Kagawa once said it this way: “I read in a book where a man named Jesus went about doing good. It is very disconcerting to me that I am so easily satisfied with just going about.” How many are in his shoes--just going about in life taking no time to reflect, thus with no meaning of life to guide your way?
Time management, and management specialists have a grasp on this point that Paul is making. I have fat files in my filing cabinet and similarly long files on my computer with articles on management. They all are basically saying the same thing that Paul was saying nearly 2000 years ago.
In one podcast I listened to on management in non-profit organizations by Peter Druker, the first question that needs to be asked is, “What is the mission of this organization?” If the mission of the organization is not clear, then there will only be helter-skelter, disjointed, and undirected activity in that organization. Druker talked about how each organization should first sit down and write a simple, focused, short and directed mission statement. It has to be clear to all within the organization what it is that will direct everyones activity. Some management specialists use different terms for this mission statement--one calls it the “unifying principle.” No matter what you call it, it’s vitally important to have one.
Now move that strategy of creating a mission statement into your personal life. I’ve talked about this before in worship and within different groups. How often do you use your time to reflect about what your mission in life is? What would you like it to be? What is the one unifying principle of your life? What is the sun, around which all else in your life orbits? If you don’t have a mission statement, or don’t take the time to reflect about things like this, you’re probably feeling like your life is riding on square wheels--up to the top and then down, thud.
Some people are like that. They let their lives ride on square wheels. They have no semblance of a personal, or couple, or family life mission. Or if they do, often they forget about it, and let the everyday minutia run their lives. If you do have one, you need to keep it in front of you all the time: put it on your refrigerator, your bathroom mirror, the dashboard of your car.
If you don’t have a personal mission statement by which you use the time you have in life, let me suggest one to you. It’s one-size-fits-all. It’s what Paul was getting at when he told the Ephesians to, “...know the meaning of life…” Another person, in conversation with Jesus, asked the same kind of question: “Which two commandments are the most important?” Jesus’ answer? “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind. And, the second is like it--love your neighbor as yourself.”
In those two commandments you’ll find the meaning of life. A mission for life. THE unifying principle. Chose this one. Not many do. Most look for something else. And there are lots of “something else’s” out there.
But when you start choosing, remember this. When you choose your mission, your centering principle for how you will use your time, when you choose that, you are at the same time excluding other choices. You can’t have more than one. “No one can serve two masters,” Jesus wisely stated.
For most people, this is a grief-filled process. We hate to let go. We want to do it all. The point of realization that we can’t, is an important, and clarifying place to reach.
A concert violinist was asked the secret of her success. “Planned neglect,” she replied. Then she explained.
When I was in school, there were many things that demanded my time. When I went to my room after breakfast, I made my bed, straightened my room, dusted the floor, and did whatever else came to my attention. Then I turned to violin practice. I found I wasn’t progressing as I thought I should, so I reversed things. Until my practice period was completed, I deliberately neglected everything else. That program of planned neglect, I believe, accounts for my success.
So it is with choosing your life mission and the subsequent use of your time. Some things need to be neglected if striving toward your mission is to be successful.
Peter Druker, whom I mentioned earlier, told this story in his book, The Effective Executive:
Harry Hopkins, President Roosevelt’s confidential adviser in World War II, was a dying, almost dead man (because of cancer) during much of his time with FDR. Every step was torment for him. He could work only a few hours every other day or so. Many wondered aloud why Roosevelt kept him on his staff. But Roosevelt felt Hopkins was his most valuable asset--even when he was nearly dead. Why? Because Hopkins was forced--as most of us are not--to focus only on the truly important matters. All the rest had to be cut out. He was so effective at choosing what absolutely had to be done and discarding the rest, Churchill called Hopkins, “Lord Heart Of The Matter.”
How much more effective we would be with our time if we forced ourselves to be a Lord Heart Of The Matter--if we focused ourselves around a central mission, and then let all of our use of the time we have flow out of that mission. Only in that way will be be able to, as Paul wrote, “...grasp firmly what you know to be the will of God.”
Monday, August 27, 2012
This Is Not A Drill
"This Is Not A Drill"
Ephesians 6:10-12, 18
Are there evil forces in the world that are real and powerful beyond our comprehension? Is there a cosmic battle going on? I don’t know about you, but seeing these words from Paul about “...the wicked spiritual forces in the heavenly world, the rulers, authorities, and cosmic powers of this dark age” with which we are contending, always kind of scares me.
I kind of poo-pooed all this “wicked spiritual forces” stuff until college. I was a sociology/philosophy major in college. I took a class for sociology called “Deviant Behavior.” My semester paper was on Satan worshipers. I interviewed a couple of witches, who had become Christians. In their past life, they were witches who were in charge of a coven of 13 witches each. Some of the stories they told me about conjuring up spirits and stuff made the hair all over my body stand on end.
If we’re in a battle, as Paul says we are, we have to understand exactly what we’re up against. This is not a drill. We aren’t just practicing or rehearsing. The battle has been joined.
People in most cultures formed mythic tales about evil and evil’s existence. Especially the Greeks. Homer told the legend of when Ulysses came to the island of Circe, the daughter of the sun. Ulysses climbed the hill and saw in the center of the island a palace surrounded by trees. He sent half his men and a commander to see if he could find any hospitality there.
When the men approached the palace they found it was surrounded by wild animals. They had no idea the animals were really men, now changed into beasts by Circe’s spells. Hearing the soft sound of music within the castle, Ulysses’ men made their way in--except the commander Eurylochus, who suspected danger.
Once in the castle, Circe served the men with wine and other delicacies. When they had eaten and drunk their fill, she waved her hands over them and they were immediately turned into pigs.
Hearing what happened to his men, Ulysses went down to rescue them. As he was going, he was met by Mercury, who warned him of the dangers of Circe. When Ulysses would not be persuaded to turn back, Mercury gave him a flower, the fragrance of which he was to inhale. By doing that, Ulysses would gain the power to resist all of Circe’s sorcery.
Armed with the flower, Ulysses entered the palace. Circe entertained him as she had his crew. When he had eaten and drunk, she waved her hand over him saying, “From now on, seek the sty and wallow with your friends!” But, protected from the spell by the flower, Ulysses drew his sword and forced her to release his companions and restore the others around the castle to their human form.
To think there are evil forces waving their hands over individual Christians, and over congregations is a disconcerting thought, to say the least. Looking at all that’s going on in main-line denominations across our country, there certainly does seem to be some Circe type spirit that is creating confusion, division and distortion. Even in our own Presbytery of Southern Kansas, there are congregations imploding, and a systemic dysfunction in handling it all. It does make you wonder about “...powers...of this present darkness and spiritual hosts of wickedness…” as Paul termed them.
As we have been given this great opportunity for ministry with the $100,000 gift by God and the amazing generosity of the giver, we, in our excitement, must be on the lookout for evil forces that will be used to disrupt, weaken, or water down the ministry we will create focusing on 3rd to 6th grade children.
How do we do that? Mercury gave Ulysses a flower to undo Circe’s spells. Paul, in these verses, says we have something much more potent than the aroma of some magical flower. We have an awesome resource that will not only protect us from the evil forces in the world, but also do battle with that evil; not just resist, but take the battle right in the evil power’s face. That gift is prayer.
Paul uses three related words that let us know how amazing prayer is. Paul wrote, “Finally, be strong in the Lord, and in the strength of his might.” Let’s look at those three words and see what they mean for our praying power and our fight with evil.
First, “Be strong…” Find your strength in the Lord. This word that Paul uses describes how a believer, or a congregation, is made strong, or given power in the Lord. It’s not a way you strengthen yourself, as if by doing a bunch of spiritual push-ups you will get strong. This is an endowed strength, Paul says. So instead of just saying, be strong,” what Paul is literally saying is, “Be made strong in the Lord.”
Whether you realize it or not, when you gave your life to Christ, you were made strong in him--he gave you a strength that is only his to give. You have had it all this time. Isn’t that amazing! You’ve been made strong in Christ, and you realize that strength and use that endowed strength every time you pray.
Secondly, Paul wrote about being in the strength of the Lord. This word Paul used describes not just strength as power, but supreme, superior, overarching power. It is real, Godly strength that can utterly destroy any other power. It is a strength of such magnitude that victory is assured every single time.
It’s the kind of strength that the boy David talked about when facing Goliath with a sling and a handful of smooth stones. David said, “The Lord who saved me from the lion and the bear will save me from this Philistine” (1 Samuel 17:37)
Do you hear it in David’s voice? It isn’t a cocksureness in his own ability. It’s the personal knowledge of the undefeatable power of God. In fact, the word Paul used for strength can also actually mean “victory.” Let’s put that in the verse, so it would read, “Be strong in the Lord, in the VICTORY of his might.”
Our strength in prayer is not our own cocksure way. It’s based in God’s victorious superiority over all powers. When we pray, we aren’t praying in the spirit of anxiety about these woeful powers, principalities, and unearthly forces. We are praying in the already won victory of our cosmically supreme God. That makes all the difference in our praying.
The third word is might. When we think of might we think of prowess and sheer force of strength. But this word that Paul used literally talks about a kind of might that is shown in ability or capacity. Not our ability and capacity, but God’s. God’s capacity becomes our capacity. God’s ability becomes our ability, as we immerse ourselves in prayer. Think of the ways capacity is used: capacity crowd--so many people a place is filled up; a cup filled to capacity--you can’t pour one more drop in there. Capacity is the point at which you can’t fill a container any more it is so full.
Alan and I have breakfast together out at Ricks every Thursday morning. Our waitress is alway Lori. Before Lori, it was Lori’s daughter Chelsea. Alan drinks coffee. I don’t. But every Thursday morning, Lori becomes a picture of God for Alan, because she keeps coming by filling up his cup. He drinks some down. She comes by and fills it back up. No matter how much he drinks, she puts more in.
So Paul is asking us to imagine the capacity of God. Imagine the overwhelming immensity that makes up the capacity of God. Imagine the innumerable abilities that make up God’s abilities. That is God’s might. Now imagine God’s might in you, in our congregation! The fulness of God’s capacity and ability is, through Christ, in you, in us. When we pray we are being refilled to capacity with the capacity and ability of God! We use some of God’s capacity and ability, our cup starts getting a little low; God comes by and fills it back up with his immense capacity. Doesn’t matter how much you use, God fills you back up. Means you don’t have to worry about getting too low, or using it up, or protecting what you’ve got.
Be strong in the Lord, in the strength of his capacity and ability. Can you imagine it? It blows my mind just trying.
Three amazing power words. But not just words. They are power qualities that everyone here has, in Christ, as you pray. “...be STRONG in the Lord, in the STRENGTH/VICTORY of his MIGHT.”
Against these three amazing God words, the devil only has one word. The one devil word is “stratagem.” The sad thing about we Christians is that we end up concentrating too much on the one devil word and not on God’s three prayer words. The stratagems of the devil. Other translations use words like wiles, craftiness, devices, tactics, schemes, and tricks. I like the word stratagem because it describes an intentional plan used to deceive an enemy in war. It’s all the devil’s hocus pocus, waving his hand over us, thinking he can turn us all into pigs, and overpower God’s praying people.
Stratagem is a word that at one time meant a way, a path, or a road. In the first verse of the first Psalm, David sets the agenda for all praying that will follow in the Psalms:
How blessed is the one who does not take the counsel of the wicked for a guide,
or follow the path that sinners tread…
That word "path" is the same word from which stratagem comes. The devil is trying to deceive us into following his path, not Gods. The devil is trying to get us slowly and gradually off the straight and narrow, and onto his path that leads to destruction. The devil is trying to lure us off of God’s three power worded path.
I keep coming back to the book, Pilgrim’s Progress. The main character, Christian, is making his way from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City. At one point, he’s traveling along and the path became difficult, rocky, making walking hard. He sees there’s another path not too far away. It’s pleasant looking and smooth. It’s running parallel to the path he is on. He decides to take the smooth path, since it’s close to the one he’s on. But gradually, the new smooth path veers farther and farther away from the original road to the Celestial City. Christian ends up coming to a castle named Doubting Castle. There lives a giant named Despair. Christian becomes a prisoner until he is freed.
That’s the stratagem of the devil. Trying to shift your feet, lure us away from the right path onto his path leading only to doubt and despair. The devil is trying to shift our attitudes and conduct through the power of his deception. He’s trying to lure us into his stratagem rather than claim God’s power, might and strength through prayer. Without God’s power words there are only rationalizations for falling into the trap of the devil’s stratagems.
Like the overweight business executive who decided to shed some extra pounds. He took his new diet seriously, even to the point of changing his driving route to avoid his favorite bakery. One morning, however, he arrived to work carrying a gigantic piece of coffee cake. His staff scolded him, but his smile remained almost angelic. “This is a very special coffee cake,” he explained. “I accidentally drove by the bakery this morning. There in the window were a host of goodies. I felt it was no accident, so I said a little prayer: ‘Lord, if you want me to have a piece of one of those delicious coffee cakes, let there be a parking place right in front of the bakery.‘ And sure enough,” he continued, “the eighth time around the block, there it was.”
When we are faced with some challenge we think we ought to pray. Usually somebody says something like, “Let’s say a little prayer.” As if praying is some little thing, some kind of formality or good luck charm to cover our bases before the battle. “I guess we better say something to God,” we think to ourselves, “just in case.” But there are no little prayers, when we realize, as Paul did, that prayer takes you into the strong, strength, and might of the presence of God.
Before a great battle, Napoleon would stand alone in his tent. One by one the marshals and commanders of his armies would enter, grasp his arm in silence, and go out again. Doing so fired them with fresh courage and renewed willingness to do battle for France. I think now is the time for us to slip into God’s tent in prayer, grasp God’s hand, just touching the awesome presence of God for the challenge that lays before us.
I would like you all to go into that prayer tent often in the coming weeks. Pray for our congregation as we seek to discern God’s will about this opportunity for ministry we’ve been given to touch the lives of children in our community--children whose lives could turn out very differently because of the ways they will be touched by our church and our ministry.
This kind of vision and strength can only be gained through our amazing inner fellowship of prayer with God. Only through the strength and the might of God in prayer will we be able to change the devil course that may also be exerted against these children.
Wouldn’t we all desire the day when the devil’s scouts came back to him and reported, in complete frustration, that we--both individually and as a congregation--were found to be a hopeless cause; to hear the demons come before the devil and say with long faces, “I’m sorry, O evil one, but that Pratt Presbyterian Church is a hopeless case.” Because a hopeless case in the eyes of the enemy means the prayerful victory has been won--we have been made strong in the Lord, in the strength of his might!
Ephesians 6:10-12, 18
Are there evil forces in the world that are real and powerful beyond our comprehension? Is there a cosmic battle going on? I don’t know about you, but seeing these words from Paul about “...the wicked spiritual forces in the heavenly world, the rulers, authorities, and cosmic powers of this dark age” with which we are contending, always kind of scares me.
I kind of poo-pooed all this “wicked spiritual forces” stuff until college. I was a sociology/philosophy major in college. I took a class for sociology called “Deviant Behavior.” My semester paper was on Satan worshipers. I interviewed a couple of witches, who had become Christians. In their past life, they were witches who were in charge of a coven of 13 witches each. Some of the stories they told me about conjuring up spirits and stuff made the hair all over my body stand on end.
If we’re in a battle, as Paul says we are, we have to understand exactly what we’re up against. This is not a drill. We aren’t just practicing or rehearsing. The battle has been joined.
People in most cultures formed mythic tales about evil and evil’s existence. Especially the Greeks. Homer told the legend of when Ulysses came to the island of Circe, the daughter of the sun. Ulysses climbed the hill and saw in the center of the island a palace surrounded by trees. He sent half his men and a commander to see if he could find any hospitality there.
When the men approached the palace they found it was surrounded by wild animals. They had no idea the animals were really men, now changed into beasts by Circe’s spells. Hearing the soft sound of music within the castle, Ulysses’ men made their way in--except the commander Eurylochus, who suspected danger.
Once in the castle, Circe served the men with wine and other delicacies. When they had eaten and drunk their fill, she waved her hands over them and they were immediately turned into pigs.
Hearing what happened to his men, Ulysses went down to rescue them. As he was going, he was met by Mercury, who warned him of the dangers of Circe. When Ulysses would not be persuaded to turn back, Mercury gave him a flower, the fragrance of which he was to inhale. By doing that, Ulysses would gain the power to resist all of Circe’s sorcery.
Armed with the flower, Ulysses entered the palace. Circe entertained him as she had his crew. When he had eaten and drunk, she waved her hand over him saying, “From now on, seek the sty and wallow with your friends!” But, protected from the spell by the flower, Ulysses drew his sword and forced her to release his companions and restore the others around the castle to their human form.
To think there are evil forces waving their hands over individual Christians, and over congregations is a disconcerting thought, to say the least. Looking at all that’s going on in main-line denominations across our country, there certainly does seem to be some Circe type spirit that is creating confusion, division and distortion. Even in our own Presbytery of Southern Kansas, there are congregations imploding, and a systemic dysfunction in handling it all. It does make you wonder about “...powers...of this present darkness and spiritual hosts of wickedness…” as Paul termed them.
As we have been given this great opportunity for ministry with the $100,000 gift by God and the amazing generosity of the giver, we, in our excitement, must be on the lookout for evil forces that will be used to disrupt, weaken, or water down the ministry we will create focusing on 3rd to 6th grade children.
How do we do that? Mercury gave Ulysses a flower to undo Circe’s spells. Paul, in these verses, says we have something much more potent than the aroma of some magical flower. We have an awesome resource that will not only protect us from the evil forces in the world, but also do battle with that evil; not just resist, but take the battle right in the evil power’s face. That gift is prayer.
Paul uses three related words that let us know how amazing prayer is. Paul wrote, “Finally, be strong in the Lord, and in the strength of his might.” Let’s look at those three words and see what they mean for our praying power and our fight with evil.
First, “Be strong…” Find your strength in the Lord. This word that Paul uses describes how a believer, or a congregation, is made strong, or given power in the Lord. It’s not a way you strengthen yourself, as if by doing a bunch of spiritual push-ups you will get strong. This is an endowed strength, Paul says. So instead of just saying, be strong,” what Paul is literally saying is, “Be made strong in the Lord.”
Whether you realize it or not, when you gave your life to Christ, you were made strong in him--he gave you a strength that is only his to give. You have had it all this time. Isn’t that amazing! You’ve been made strong in Christ, and you realize that strength and use that endowed strength every time you pray.
Secondly, Paul wrote about being in the strength of the Lord. This word Paul used describes not just strength as power, but supreme, superior, overarching power. It is real, Godly strength that can utterly destroy any other power. It is a strength of such magnitude that victory is assured every single time.
It’s the kind of strength that the boy David talked about when facing Goliath with a sling and a handful of smooth stones. David said, “The Lord who saved me from the lion and the bear will save me from this Philistine” (1 Samuel 17:37)
Do you hear it in David’s voice? It isn’t a cocksureness in his own ability. It’s the personal knowledge of the undefeatable power of God. In fact, the word Paul used for strength can also actually mean “victory.” Let’s put that in the verse, so it would read, “Be strong in the Lord, in the VICTORY of his might.”
Our strength in prayer is not our own cocksure way. It’s based in God’s victorious superiority over all powers. When we pray, we aren’t praying in the spirit of anxiety about these woeful powers, principalities, and unearthly forces. We are praying in the already won victory of our cosmically supreme God. That makes all the difference in our praying.
The third word is might. When we think of might we think of prowess and sheer force of strength. But this word that Paul used literally talks about a kind of might that is shown in ability or capacity. Not our ability and capacity, but God’s. God’s capacity becomes our capacity. God’s ability becomes our ability, as we immerse ourselves in prayer. Think of the ways capacity is used: capacity crowd--so many people a place is filled up; a cup filled to capacity--you can’t pour one more drop in there. Capacity is the point at which you can’t fill a container any more it is so full.
Alan and I have breakfast together out at Ricks every Thursday morning. Our waitress is alway Lori. Before Lori, it was Lori’s daughter Chelsea. Alan drinks coffee. I don’t. But every Thursday morning, Lori becomes a picture of God for Alan, because she keeps coming by filling up his cup. He drinks some down. She comes by and fills it back up. No matter how much he drinks, she puts more in.
So Paul is asking us to imagine the capacity of God. Imagine the overwhelming immensity that makes up the capacity of God. Imagine the innumerable abilities that make up God’s abilities. That is God’s might. Now imagine God’s might in you, in our congregation! The fulness of God’s capacity and ability is, through Christ, in you, in us. When we pray we are being refilled to capacity with the capacity and ability of God! We use some of God’s capacity and ability, our cup starts getting a little low; God comes by and fills it back up with his immense capacity. Doesn’t matter how much you use, God fills you back up. Means you don’t have to worry about getting too low, or using it up, or protecting what you’ve got.
Be strong in the Lord, in the strength of his capacity and ability. Can you imagine it? It blows my mind just trying.
Three amazing power words. But not just words. They are power qualities that everyone here has, in Christ, as you pray. “...be STRONG in the Lord, in the STRENGTH/VICTORY of his MIGHT.”
Against these three amazing God words, the devil only has one word. The one devil word is “stratagem.” The sad thing about we Christians is that we end up concentrating too much on the one devil word and not on God’s three prayer words. The stratagems of the devil. Other translations use words like wiles, craftiness, devices, tactics, schemes, and tricks. I like the word stratagem because it describes an intentional plan used to deceive an enemy in war. It’s all the devil’s hocus pocus, waving his hand over us, thinking he can turn us all into pigs, and overpower God’s praying people.
Stratagem is a word that at one time meant a way, a path, or a road. In the first verse of the first Psalm, David sets the agenda for all praying that will follow in the Psalms:
How blessed is the one who does not take the counsel of the wicked for a guide,
or follow the path that sinners tread…
That word "path" is the same word from which stratagem comes. The devil is trying to deceive us into following his path, not Gods. The devil is trying to get us slowly and gradually off the straight and narrow, and onto his path that leads to destruction. The devil is trying to lure us off of God’s three power worded path.
I keep coming back to the book, Pilgrim’s Progress. The main character, Christian, is making his way from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City. At one point, he’s traveling along and the path became difficult, rocky, making walking hard. He sees there’s another path not too far away. It’s pleasant looking and smooth. It’s running parallel to the path he is on. He decides to take the smooth path, since it’s close to the one he’s on. But gradually, the new smooth path veers farther and farther away from the original road to the Celestial City. Christian ends up coming to a castle named Doubting Castle. There lives a giant named Despair. Christian becomes a prisoner until he is freed.
That’s the stratagem of the devil. Trying to shift your feet, lure us away from the right path onto his path leading only to doubt and despair. The devil is trying to shift our attitudes and conduct through the power of his deception. He’s trying to lure us into his stratagem rather than claim God’s power, might and strength through prayer. Without God’s power words there are only rationalizations for falling into the trap of the devil’s stratagems.
Like the overweight business executive who decided to shed some extra pounds. He took his new diet seriously, even to the point of changing his driving route to avoid his favorite bakery. One morning, however, he arrived to work carrying a gigantic piece of coffee cake. His staff scolded him, but his smile remained almost angelic. “This is a very special coffee cake,” he explained. “I accidentally drove by the bakery this morning. There in the window were a host of goodies. I felt it was no accident, so I said a little prayer: ‘Lord, if you want me to have a piece of one of those delicious coffee cakes, let there be a parking place right in front of the bakery.‘ And sure enough,” he continued, “the eighth time around the block, there it was.”
When we are faced with some challenge we think we ought to pray. Usually somebody says something like, “Let’s say a little prayer.” As if praying is some little thing, some kind of formality or good luck charm to cover our bases before the battle. “I guess we better say something to God,” we think to ourselves, “just in case.” But there are no little prayers, when we realize, as Paul did, that prayer takes you into the strong, strength, and might of the presence of God.
Before a great battle, Napoleon would stand alone in his tent. One by one the marshals and commanders of his armies would enter, grasp his arm in silence, and go out again. Doing so fired them with fresh courage and renewed willingness to do battle for France. I think now is the time for us to slip into God’s tent in prayer, grasp God’s hand, just touching the awesome presence of God for the challenge that lays before us.
I would like you all to go into that prayer tent often in the coming weeks. Pray for our congregation as we seek to discern God’s will about this opportunity for ministry we’ve been given to touch the lives of children in our community--children whose lives could turn out very differently because of the ways they will be touched by our church and our ministry.
This kind of vision and strength can only be gained through our amazing inner fellowship of prayer with God. Only through the strength and the might of God in prayer will we be able to change the devil course that may also be exerted against these children.
Wouldn’t we all desire the day when the devil’s scouts came back to him and reported, in complete frustration, that we--both individually and as a congregation--were found to be a hopeless cause; to hear the demons come before the devil and say with long faces, “I’m sorry, O evil one, but that Pratt Presbyterian Church is a hopeless case.” Because a hopeless case in the eyes of the enemy means the prayerful victory has been won--we have been made strong in the Lord, in the strength of his might!
Monday, August 20, 2012
Closing The Loopholes, part 2
"Closing The Loopholes" (part 2)
Ephesians 4:25-32
Last week, the message was about the first part of these verses. I talked about how Paul is instructing us to close up the loopholes through which evil tries to get in and disrupt our faith in Christ.
If we allow evil through these loopholes, says Paul, we are giving it a destructive foothold, from which can be launched an all out campaign to bring our faith in Christ down. Paul gives us a list of six loopholes that need to be closed in a believers life. The first three, that I spoke about last week, are lying, anger, and greed. This morning I want to finish up with comments about the final three in Paul’s list: foul and dirty talk, grieving God, and being unforgiving.
Popular artist, Norman Rockwell, once explained why he painted the kinds of upbeat scenes that he did. “When I grew up,” he said, “I found the world wasn’t always the pleasant place I had thought it would be. So I unconsciously decided that if it wasn’t an ideal world, it should be. And so I painted it that way.”
This is the way to look at the loopholes here in Ephesians 4. Paul is saying we aren’t perfect people. The world isn’t a perfect place. But God wants to paint us how we should be. If we allow God to paint us in His own brush strokes, we (and hopefully the world around us) will end up looking more according to God’s ideal. That’s Paul’s purpose in bringing his list to our attention.
So let’s turn to the last three of these loopholes that need closing. The fourth loophole Paul speaks to has to do with the way we talk to each other. He wrote:
Watch the way you talk. Let nothing foul or dirty come out of your mouth. Say only what helps, each word a gift...Make a clean break with all cutting, backbiting, profane talk.
We need to know what Paul is describing in his own Greek language. He is actually using a lot of building, construction type terms that don’t translate well.
When he writes about foul and dirty talk, the words he is using literally describe something that has gone bad because it is rotten. It’s a kind of rottenness, like deteriorated wood in an old house. It’s gone bad with dry rot or termites, or it has become so weak as to be dangerous.
I love to go rummaging through old, abandoned, broken down farm houses. These decaying structures are hidden behind aging shelter belts of trees, themselves old and weary looking. The houses are sad visages with caved in wooden floors and collapsed wooden stairs. Lath and plaster walls are crumbled away, looking like open and raw sores. Layers and layers of once distinctive wall paper peels away like thin skin. Rafters, like graying compound-fractured bones, hang down from above. Sometimes I try to find a safe place to just sit and imagine the stories of the people who had lived in each of these crumbling homes.
There is no way to fix these kinds of houses. They are absolutely unreclaimable. You wont find any of these kinds of home on one of those "Flip This House" kinds of shows. They are structures that have become totally useless, except for maybe being bulldozed, or just allowed to finally fall down.
That’s what Paul is describing as foul and dirty talk. It’s using words that turn lives that were once proud structures of human living into sad ruins. They are words that infect a person’s bones with dry rot. They are words that scratch open sores on the walls of people’s spirits. They are termite words that infest and eat away the inner strength of a person’s soul. And there’s usually no way to fix the harm that’s been done.
“You’re an idiot.”
“You make me sick.”
“You’re ugly.”
“I’m through with you; how could anyone love you?”
“You’ll never get it, will you.”
“How could you be so stupid.”
“You’re a nobody, and you’ll always be a nobody.”
“I wish you were never born.”
“When are you ever going to amount to anything?”
“I hate you.”
“You’re a total waste of skin.”
“Can’t you ever do anything right?”
“You’re such a retard.”
“I give up; you’re hopeless.”
I read another one of those famous conversations between Sir Winston Churchill and Lady Astor, similar to the one I mentioned in the sermon last week. At this occasion, Lady Astor marched up to Winston Churchill at a party and snapped, “Sir, you are drunk!”
To which Churchill retorted, “And Madam, you are ugly; but tomorrow morning I shall be sober.”
Life decaying words are spoken with voices that become so persistently loud in our heads, it becomes easy to believe them. We end up living our lives under the spell of their poison. Once that kind of destructive talk is out of our mouths, it’s impossible to stuff them back in and pretend we didn’t just say them. What’s worse, foul and dirty talk may be permanently implanted in the listeners minds. The people we speak them to will forever after hear those exact words over and over and over again, creating the kind of slow destruction and self-rejection Paul is describing.
One of psychiatrist, Scott Peck’s, books is titled, People Of The Lie. One of his main points is that it’s not often the people who do some awful actions who are evil. Instead, it’s the evil others in a person’s life who, with degenerate messages, have turned the person, who has to receive those words, into awful and terribly disturbed human beings.
In one story, Peck told about a patient who was constantly wrestling with psychological demons. Peeling back the layers of the man’s pathology, Peck found out part of the beginnings of this patients disturbed life.
When the man was a boy, his father had committed suicide. The boy was the one who found his father’s blood spattered body--the father had shot himself in the head with a handgun.
The next Christmas, the boy unwrapped one of the gifts from his mother. There in the box was the handgun his father had used to kill himself. “I just felt like you would be the one who could use it,” was the mother’s ghastly comment, as the boy stared at the unwrapped gift. The boy didn’t know if by what his mother said, she meant he would also be just like his father; or, that she was telling him he should also commit suicide. From there after, the boy was sent into a tail spin of psychological disintegration.
That’s why Paul says we should “say only what helps.” Other Bibles translate this phrase with the word, “edifying.” This also is a construction word. It comes from the Greek word that means house, home, or family. Except the form of the word used here means the act of building a house, building a home, building a family. It can also mean bringing a building to completion.
Thus, the kind of talk that Paul says we as Christians should speak is only that which builds, as if you were building a home, building a family, bringing a person to a healthy and whole completeness. We should be speaking to people with words that will help them move toward maturity and the completion that God intends.
Carol Channing, after having performed in almost 1800 productions of the Broadway musical, “Hello, Dolly,” was asked how she kept her performances fresh. “If I start getting down,” she said, “I play the role to my father...I know he’s really not out in the audience. He died 20 years ago. It’s just the thought of his presence, of someone who knows and loves and encourages me, and who always had nothing but the best words for me.”
The challenge is that, with our words, we can help God close up this loophole in both ourselves and others. Or, the scary flip side of this is that we can assist evil in opening up this loophole wider in ourselves or others, simply by the way we choose to talk.
The fifth loophole Paul says needs closing is the one that would cause grief to God. The kind of grief Paul is describing is that which comes from pain, sorrow, or mental anguish. It’s hard to think that God can experience these kinds of sad emotions. But that’s the kind of pain described in Genesis, where it says:
God saw that human evil was out of control. People thought evil, imagined evil--evil, evil, evil, from morning to night. God was sorry that he had made the human race in the first place; it broke his heart. God said, “I’ll get rid of my ruined creation, make a clean sweep: people, animals, snakes and bugs, birds--the works. I’m sorry I made them.”
As you can tell, it’s a sad kind of grief of God. It should make us feel really small that God ever felt that way because of us. It’s the kind of grief that God feels when human beings have thrown insult on top of insult at God, growing God’s pain into a total frustration--frustration that makes God feel like giving up on us.
Former heavyweight boxing champion, Joe Louis, wrote in his autobiography that Rocky Marciano thrashed him soundly in 1951. In fact, when a doctor from the state athletic commission said, “Joe, you can’t fight for at least 3 months,” Joe replied, “Do you mind if I don’t fight no more at all?”
God also seems to get tired of being beaten up by the humans he created: Beaten up by the uppercut of indifference; being sucker punched by two-faced hypocrisy; or, being round-housed by atrocities that human’s do to each other and then use God in support of their actions. It’s a pained sadness that makes God not want to fight for us humans “no more at all.”
If the messages of foul and dirty talk have to do with people-to-people rejection, so I think this sadness of God has also to do with rejection: our rejection of God.
Here’s another way of understanding this pain of God. First, recall Jesus’ baptism. What did the voice of God say when Jesus came up out of the water? “You are my Son, chosen and marked by my love, pride of my life” (Mark 1:11). And then, in the gospel of John, Jesus tells the disciples that whatever he saw the Father God do towards him, he does towards us. Every person Jesus talked to, every person Jesus touched, Jesus was trying to tell them the same thing God told him: “You are my chosen, marked by my love, pride of my life.”
How many times, in how many ways did he say that? “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son...” And how often was that love, that wooing of people, of we the beloved, spurned? Jesus looked across at Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives and said:
People, people...how often I’ve longed to gather your children, gather your children like a hen, her brood safe under her wings--but you refused and turned away! (Luke 13:34)
Those are some of the saddest words in the entire New Testament.
This rejection is a two-edged sword, cutting at God’s heart. One edge of the sword is the sad self-evaluation that we deserve no place in God's family. That’s the self-rejection. It’s the feeling that we are not worthwhile, or worthless in God’s eyes. This feeling could come from all the messages I talked about in my point earlier about rotten talk. It certainly doesn’t come from God.
The other edge of this cutting blade is that arrogance or self-rejection contradicts the wooing Voice that describes us as marked by God’s love and the pride of his life. Being marked by God’s love expresses the core truth about who we are in God’s eyes. But in so many ways we try to rebuff God, saying, “No we aren’t; we can’t be such an object of love or source of pride.”
What drives the knife home in God’s heart is that even though we refuse to claim the core truth that we are loved by God, claiming that we are somehow, and for some reason unlovable, what do we do? We keep running around looking for someone or something that will convince us we are loved. We go running helter-skelter, always anxious, always restless, always lustful, never fully satisfied, looking for a voice that will tell us we are the pride of their life. God, through Jesus Christ, all along has been saying in so many ways, “You are loved, you are loved, you are loved.” But we reply, “Nah, that can’t be true; it’s gotta be somewhere else from someone else.” At that point, God is grieved.
The loophole and foothold evil is trying to create is the temptation to get us stuck in self-rejection or arrogance so that you never hear the Voice that tells you, you are loved and you are the pride of Jesus’ life. Evil is trying to keep you from fully recognizing that the core truth of your life is you are Christ’s pride, joy and love. It’s time to close this loophole, and celebrate that fact and put an end to the grief and sadness of God.
The sixth and final loophole is being unforgiving. You have all heard numerous sermons on forgiveness, and most of you have read Jesus’ teachings and Paul’s letters describing the height and depth and width and breadth of forgiveness.
In this final loophole that needs our closing, Paul says, “Be gentle with one another, sensitive. Forgive one another as quickly and thoroughly as God in Christ forgave you.” What more can I say than that? Paul’s statement tells us that forgiveness comes from gentleness and sensitivity. Paul is telling us that forgiveness is not something you sit around and study, but you get up and do it. We are being told to think personally not only about all for which we have been forgiven, but also HOW we have been forgiven by God through Christ: quickly and completely. Once we’re done thinking about that, we are to turn and forgive others exactly in the same measure, and in the same way. Fairly simple and straightforward.
But I know there is a person in your life you have the most trouble forgiving. This person may be an obstinate, pigheaded ogre. This person may be demanding, and can be very insensitive to you. This person may have said, or keeps saying things that hurt you deeply. In fact, you may keep hearing this person’s voice and their demeaning messages going round and round in your head.
And talk about unforgiving; this person may be totally unforgiving of you. They are, in fact, your harshest critic, and they may be on your case all the time without respite. They won’t let you forget your blunders from the past, and keep throwing them up in your face. You wish this person would just go away, but whenever you try to put some distance between yourself and them, there they are. This person may make you feel angry and depressed; and they make you feel about an inch tall. In your darkest times, you may even wish this person would just die. How can you forgive a person like that?
You know who that person is? Besides hurtful others, this person I’m describing is the same for everyone. It is your self. I’ll bet you all a dollar that the person you may have the hardest time forgiving is yourself. Let’s take another look at Paul’s words, but let’s tweak them a bit: “Be gentle with yourself, sensitive. Forgive yourself as quickly and thoroughly as God in Christ forgave everyone else.”
To forgive others, to forgive ourselves means to participate in the amazing grace of God’s love. If we can’t forgive ourselves, it may mean we haven’t fully understood God’s embrace of us. If you leave this loophole open, evil will use it to slowly and totally immobilize your gifts, your ministry, and your purpose. All that will be lost in the goo of self-criticism, self-hatred, and self-punishment. You will never become the person God created you to be unless this loophole is closed for good and for God.
Little loopholes. Little gaps in our spirits. Small fissures in our faith. They either let evil in, or maybe we use them to get out of what we know is the right thing, by God. Either way, the result is giving evil a sure and certain foothold from which to operate. With any loophole, evil will exert all the leverage it can against our spiritual life and Christian commitment. Let’s take Paul’s words to heart and help each other, by God, close them up.
Ephesians 4:25-32
Last week, the message was about the first part of these verses. I talked about how Paul is instructing us to close up the loopholes through which evil tries to get in and disrupt our faith in Christ.
If we allow evil through these loopholes, says Paul, we are giving it a destructive foothold, from which can be launched an all out campaign to bring our faith in Christ down. Paul gives us a list of six loopholes that need to be closed in a believers life. The first three, that I spoke about last week, are lying, anger, and greed. This morning I want to finish up with comments about the final three in Paul’s list: foul and dirty talk, grieving God, and being unforgiving.
Popular artist, Norman Rockwell, once explained why he painted the kinds of upbeat scenes that he did. “When I grew up,” he said, “I found the world wasn’t always the pleasant place I had thought it would be. So I unconsciously decided that if it wasn’t an ideal world, it should be. And so I painted it that way.”
This is the way to look at the loopholes here in Ephesians 4. Paul is saying we aren’t perfect people. The world isn’t a perfect place. But God wants to paint us how we should be. If we allow God to paint us in His own brush strokes, we (and hopefully the world around us) will end up looking more according to God’s ideal. That’s Paul’s purpose in bringing his list to our attention.
So let’s turn to the last three of these loopholes that need closing. The fourth loophole Paul speaks to has to do with the way we talk to each other. He wrote:
Watch the way you talk. Let nothing foul or dirty come out of your mouth. Say only what helps, each word a gift...Make a clean break with all cutting, backbiting, profane talk.
We need to know what Paul is describing in his own Greek language. He is actually using a lot of building, construction type terms that don’t translate well.
When he writes about foul and dirty talk, the words he is using literally describe something that has gone bad because it is rotten. It’s a kind of rottenness, like deteriorated wood in an old house. It’s gone bad with dry rot or termites, or it has become so weak as to be dangerous.
I love to go rummaging through old, abandoned, broken down farm houses. These decaying structures are hidden behind aging shelter belts of trees, themselves old and weary looking. The houses are sad visages with caved in wooden floors and collapsed wooden stairs. Lath and plaster walls are crumbled away, looking like open and raw sores. Layers and layers of once distinctive wall paper peels away like thin skin. Rafters, like graying compound-fractured bones, hang down from above. Sometimes I try to find a safe place to just sit and imagine the stories of the people who had lived in each of these crumbling homes.
There is no way to fix these kinds of houses. They are absolutely unreclaimable. You wont find any of these kinds of home on one of those "Flip This House" kinds of shows. They are structures that have become totally useless, except for maybe being bulldozed, or just allowed to finally fall down.
That’s what Paul is describing as foul and dirty talk. It’s using words that turn lives that were once proud structures of human living into sad ruins. They are words that infect a person’s bones with dry rot. They are words that scratch open sores on the walls of people’s spirits. They are termite words that infest and eat away the inner strength of a person’s soul. And there’s usually no way to fix the harm that’s been done.
“You’re an idiot.”
“You make me sick.”
“You’re ugly.”
“I’m through with you; how could anyone love you?”
“You’ll never get it, will you.”
“How could you be so stupid.”
“You’re a nobody, and you’ll always be a nobody.”
“I wish you were never born.”
“When are you ever going to amount to anything?”
“I hate you.”
“You’re a total waste of skin.”
“Can’t you ever do anything right?”
“You’re such a retard.”
“I give up; you’re hopeless.”
I read another one of those famous conversations between Sir Winston Churchill and Lady Astor, similar to the one I mentioned in the sermon last week. At this occasion, Lady Astor marched up to Winston Churchill at a party and snapped, “Sir, you are drunk!”
To which Churchill retorted, “And Madam, you are ugly; but tomorrow morning I shall be sober.”
Life decaying words are spoken with voices that become so persistently loud in our heads, it becomes easy to believe them. We end up living our lives under the spell of their poison. Once that kind of destructive talk is out of our mouths, it’s impossible to stuff them back in and pretend we didn’t just say them. What’s worse, foul and dirty talk may be permanently implanted in the listeners minds. The people we speak them to will forever after hear those exact words over and over and over again, creating the kind of slow destruction and self-rejection Paul is describing.
One of psychiatrist, Scott Peck’s, books is titled, People Of The Lie. One of his main points is that it’s not often the people who do some awful actions who are evil. Instead, it’s the evil others in a person’s life who, with degenerate messages, have turned the person, who has to receive those words, into awful and terribly disturbed human beings.
In one story, Peck told about a patient who was constantly wrestling with psychological demons. Peeling back the layers of the man’s pathology, Peck found out part of the beginnings of this patients disturbed life.
When the man was a boy, his father had committed suicide. The boy was the one who found his father’s blood spattered body--the father had shot himself in the head with a handgun.
The next Christmas, the boy unwrapped one of the gifts from his mother. There in the box was the handgun his father had used to kill himself. “I just felt like you would be the one who could use it,” was the mother’s ghastly comment, as the boy stared at the unwrapped gift. The boy didn’t know if by what his mother said, she meant he would also be just like his father; or, that she was telling him he should also commit suicide. From there after, the boy was sent into a tail spin of psychological disintegration.
That’s why Paul says we should “say only what helps.” Other Bibles translate this phrase with the word, “edifying.” This also is a construction word. It comes from the Greek word that means house, home, or family. Except the form of the word used here means the act of building a house, building a home, building a family. It can also mean bringing a building to completion.
Thus, the kind of talk that Paul says we as Christians should speak is only that which builds, as if you were building a home, building a family, bringing a person to a healthy and whole completeness. We should be speaking to people with words that will help them move toward maturity and the completion that God intends.
Carol Channing, after having performed in almost 1800 productions of the Broadway musical, “Hello, Dolly,” was asked how she kept her performances fresh. “If I start getting down,” she said, “I play the role to my father...I know he’s really not out in the audience. He died 20 years ago. It’s just the thought of his presence, of someone who knows and loves and encourages me, and who always had nothing but the best words for me.”
The challenge is that, with our words, we can help God close up this loophole in both ourselves and others. Or, the scary flip side of this is that we can assist evil in opening up this loophole wider in ourselves or others, simply by the way we choose to talk.
The fifth loophole Paul says needs closing is the one that would cause grief to God. The kind of grief Paul is describing is that which comes from pain, sorrow, or mental anguish. It’s hard to think that God can experience these kinds of sad emotions. But that’s the kind of pain described in Genesis, where it says:
God saw that human evil was out of control. People thought evil, imagined evil--evil, evil, evil, from morning to night. God was sorry that he had made the human race in the first place; it broke his heart. God said, “I’ll get rid of my ruined creation, make a clean sweep: people, animals, snakes and bugs, birds--the works. I’m sorry I made them.”
As you can tell, it’s a sad kind of grief of God. It should make us feel really small that God ever felt that way because of us. It’s the kind of grief that God feels when human beings have thrown insult on top of insult at God, growing God’s pain into a total frustration--frustration that makes God feel like giving up on us.
Former heavyweight boxing champion, Joe Louis, wrote in his autobiography that Rocky Marciano thrashed him soundly in 1951. In fact, when a doctor from the state athletic commission said, “Joe, you can’t fight for at least 3 months,” Joe replied, “Do you mind if I don’t fight no more at all?”
God also seems to get tired of being beaten up by the humans he created: Beaten up by the uppercut of indifference; being sucker punched by two-faced hypocrisy; or, being round-housed by atrocities that human’s do to each other and then use God in support of their actions. It’s a pained sadness that makes God not want to fight for us humans “no more at all.”
If the messages of foul and dirty talk have to do with people-to-people rejection, so I think this sadness of God has also to do with rejection: our rejection of God.
Here’s another way of understanding this pain of God. First, recall Jesus’ baptism. What did the voice of God say when Jesus came up out of the water? “You are my Son, chosen and marked by my love, pride of my life” (Mark 1:11). And then, in the gospel of John, Jesus tells the disciples that whatever he saw the Father God do towards him, he does towards us. Every person Jesus talked to, every person Jesus touched, Jesus was trying to tell them the same thing God told him: “You are my chosen, marked by my love, pride of my life.”
How many times, in how many ways did he say that? “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son...” And how often was that love, that wooing of people, of we the beloved, spurned? Jesus looked across at Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives and said:
People, people...how often I’ve longed to gather your children, gather your children like a hen, her brood safe under her wings--but you refused and turned away! (Luke 13:34)
Those are some of the saddest words in the entire New Testament.
This rejection is a two-edged sword, cutting at God’s heart. One edge of the sword is the sad self-evaluation that we deserve no place in God's family. That’s the self-rejection. It’s the feeling that we are not worthwhile, or worthless in God’s eyes. This feeling could come from all the messages I talked about in my point earlier about rotten talk. It certainly doesn’t come from God.
The other edge of this cutting blade is that arrogance or self-rejection contradicts the wooing Voice that describes us as marked by God’s love and the pride of his life. Being marked by God’s love expresses the core truth about who we are in God’s eyes. But in so many ways we try to rebuff God, saying, “No we aren’t; we can’t be such an object of love or source of pride.”
What drives the knife home in God’s heart is that even though we refuse to claim the core truth that we are loved by God, claiming that we are somehow, and for some reason unlovable, what do we do? We keep running around looking for someone or something that will convince us we are loved. We go running helter-skelter, always anxious, always restless, always lustful, never fully satisfied, looking for a voice that will tell us we are the pride of their life. God, through Jesus Christ, all along has been saying in so many ways, “You are loved, you are loved, you are loved.” But we reply, “Nah, that can’t be true; it’s gotta be somewhere else from someone else.” At that point, God is grieved.
The loophole and foothold evil is trying to create is the temptation to get us stuck in self-rejection or arrogance so that you never hear the Voice that tells you, you are loved and you are the pride of Jesus’ life. Evil is trying to keep you from fully recognizing that the core truth of your life is you are Christ’s pride, joy and love. It’s time to close this loophole, and celebrate that fact and put an end to the grief and sadness of God.
The sixth and final loophole is being unforgiving. You have all heard numerous sermons on forgiveness, and most of you have read Jesus’ teachings and Paul’s letters describing the height and depth and width and breadth of forgiveness.
In this final loophole that needs our closing, Paul says, “Be gentle with one another, sensitive. Forgive one another as quickly and thoroughly as God in Christ forgave you.” What more can I say than that? Paul’s statement tells us that forgiveness comes from gentleness and sensitivity. Paul is telling us that forgiveness is not something you sit around and study, but you get up and do it. We are being told to think personally not only about all for which we have been forgiven, but also HOW we have been forgiven by God through Christ: quickly and completely. Once we’re done thinking about that, we are to turn and forgive others exactly in the same measure, and in the same way. Fairly simple and straightforward.
But I know there is a person in your life you have the most trouble forgiving. This person may be an obstinate, pigheaded ogre. This person may be demanding, and can be very insensitive to you. This person may have said, or keeps saying things that hurt you deeply. In fact, you may keep hearing this person’s voice and their demeaning messages going round and round in your head.
And talk about unforgiving; this person may be totally unforgiving of you. They are, in fact, your harshest critic, and they may be on your case all the time without respite. They won’t let you forget your blunders from the past, and keep throwing them up in your face. You wish this person would just go away, but whenever you try to put some distance between yourself and them, there they are. This person may make you feel angry and depressed; and they make you feel about an inch tall. In your darkest times, you may even wish this person would just die. How can you forgive a person like that?
You know who that person is? Besides hurtful others, this person I’m describing is the same for everyone. It is your self. I’ll bet you all a dollar that the person you may have the hardest time forgiving is yourself. Let’s take another look at Paul’s words, but let’s tweak them a bit: “Be gentle with yourself, sensitive. Forgive yourself as quickly and thoroughly as God in Christ forgave everyone else.”
To forgive others, to forgive ourselves means to participate in the amazing grace of God’s love. If we can’t forgive ourselves, it may mean we haven’t fully understood God’s embrace of us. If you leave this loophole open, evil will use it to slowly and totally immobilize your gifts, your ministry, and your purpose. All that will be lost in the goo of self-criticism, self-hatred, and self-punishment. You will never become the person God created you to be unless this loophole is closed for good and for God.
Little loopholes. Little gaps in our spirits. Small fissures in our faith. They either let evil in, or maybe we use them to get out of what we know is the right thing, by God. Either way, the result is giving evil a sure and certain foothold from which to operate. With any loophole, evil will exert all the leverage it can against our spiritual life and Christian commitment. Let’s take Paul’s words to heart and help each other, by God, close them up.
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