"Stepping Out (On A Sea Of Uncertainty)
Matthew 14:22-33
A man was producing a film titled, “Circus.” One of the acrobat members of the cast pointed to the high trapeze and said to the producer, “Why don’t you try it?”
The other performers heard the challenge and joined the chant, “Try it! Try it! Try it!”
Eyeing the large safety net under the swinging bars, the producer cautiously replied, “Well...why not?”
Very slowly he began to climb the small rope ladder. Twenty feet...thirty feet..forty feet...until he crawled onto a minuscule platform. He looked down. Something I would have never done. He felt like he was miles above the assembled cast below. The once, large safety net had shrunk to an unbelievably small size.
“Go ahead, you can do it!” the performers shouted up to him. Taking the trapeze bar in his perspiring hands and steadying his shaking knees, he prepared to jump. Across from his platform, a young man was ready to swing out the empty trapeze. Mustering up all his courage, he cried, “Go!” and went swinging out into space.
“Jump! Go ahead! Jump!” On the third arc he did. Flying through the air, he reached out and grasped the empty bar with his fingertips, went swinging to the other side, and was pulled safely to the platform, amid the applause and cheers of the cast below.
The producer, once safely back on the ground, made three observations. First, you can’t hold on to one bar while grasping for the other. You must let both hands go and leap. Second, it is frightening and threatening to let go of your security. And, thirdly, you don’t have forever to make up your mind. It is a leap of faith and courage.
Not many get the chance to fly on the high trapeze. I confess, I don’t know if I would have had the courage to do it. But I think most of us can easily identify with the three observations the producer made following his experience. We know his learnings are true because of the way life situations challenge us to take a great risk from time-to-time. With that risk comes the possibility of upsetting the relative security of our lives.
The producers experience, and Peter’s brief walk on the water, are great examples of what is involved in the life of courage and faith with Christ.
The first thing we must deal with is the relative safety that is symbolized by the boat in the story of Peter and the trapeze bar in the story of the producer. What we must always keep in mind is that in the boat, Peter is still in danger. There was a storm raging, don’t forget. That storm was pushing their little boat here and there, up and down, upon the waves. Water was spilling over the sides. The boat may have been floating, but the danger was real. For the producer, there was danger just hanging on to the one trapeze, swinging back and forth, with the possibility of a long fall beneath him.
Both places, the boat and the trapeze are not safe. There are many situations we get into where we think we are, or would like to be, safe. But safety is a matter of degrees. There is often a fine line between safety and tragedy. Boats can be fine on a relatively calm sea. But caught in the juggling waves of a sudden storm at sea, and you can feel like you’re only sitting on a cork.
Life is not a safe proposition. Safety is one of our ultimate concerns as human beings. A case could be made that the striving after safety is one of our biggest idolatries. Think about how much we do in life trying to insure our safety and security. We make the assumption that we can create for ourselves, for the most part, a life of safety.
But then something comes along that totally disrupts that assumption. A car accident. A house fire. A tornado. A life-threatening diagnosis. Someone at a school with a gun opening fire. Three boys in Oklahoma who killed a girl just for the fun of it while she was jogging. Much of our anger in those kinds of life circumstances, really comes from that assumption that we thought we were safe. All of a sudden we have to reassess our expectation that life should be safe, and that we have done a really good job to keep it so.
I remember an old “Frank & Ernest” cartoon that showed the two men in a fancy restaurant. They are looking at the menu, while the waiter stood with pencil and order pad in hand waiting for their order. Ernest says to the waiter, “I’ll have a plate of escargot and a blindfold.”
That’s often how we sit at the table of life. We are actually being served something dangerous, and we think we can make it less so, if we just put on a blindfold. We’re safe, we think, as long as we don’t look around at the storm, or down at the net. We climb onto the platform, or out of the boat, and close our eyes tightly thinking that will somehow lessen the danger of flying out into mid-air, or walking on water in a storm on a lake.
All of this goes to say that life itself is not a safe proposition. The multitude of little safety nets we carefully build under ourselves, and the ones we love, belie the fact that we need a lot of security to go on with what we do. There is fear and there are misgivings in every minute of living every day.
I really like something Helen Keller once said. This is what she said: “Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.”
Hold that thought as we turn back to our stories. Peter decides to take a walk out of the rattled safety of the boat and on to the darkened and raging lake. The producer decides to let go completely of his trapeze bar and suspend his body totally free in mid-air, high above a “safety net.” You might wonder why these two men would take such a risk.
There are a number of aspects of our Peter story that arouse our sense of danger and a feeling of a lack of safety. For one thing, it was late at night--the fourth watch. The fourth watch was between 3 a.m. and 6 a.m. It was the last watch of the night. If you’ve ever been out during that time period, think what the world looks like at 3 a.m. Think how it feels to be up at 3 a.m., tired but unable to sleep, looking out the front window of your home at a world that is dark, lonely and inactive.
Next, into that 3 a.m. world, a fierce wind blows in. Being out on the lake, it’s not just the wind that’s the problem. It’s the waves that are being blown and frothed by that wind as well. The word that Matthew used to describe the lake surface literally means “tormented.” These waves are not just semi-mild white caps. This was a scary, foamy mess.
When I was on my trip in Israel, we took a boat trip out on Galilee lake. It was a beautiful day when we started out. But then, just as suddenly as that night with the disciples, a wind storm blew across the surface of the lake. Everything changed, and it was scary. And we were in a big tour boat, not a little fishing boat.
It was so severe, that the dock at Capernaum where we were to land, was sunk by the waves and the wind. Our tour guide, Joseph, got on the boats intercom and announced what happened. Then he said, “Well, folks, we are in the middle of a storm out in the middle of the lake. We will all have to get out of the boat and walk from here.”
Everyone laughed.
Then he got back on and said, “What? You have no faith?” We had to go back to where we started and take a bus up to Capernaum.
Because Matthew tells us what time the disciple left, and then tells us what watch of the night it was, we know the disciples had been rowing six to nine hours. Galilee isn’t that big of a lake. Six to nine hours of rowing on a calm day would have taken you across the lake and back, and maybe back again. But rowing that long during the storm had only gotten them to the middle of the lake.
All these factors put together create one scary scene. Any sense of safety went overboard hours ago. But all of that wasn’t what put the disciples over the top, in terms of dealing with the fear factor. It was when they saw Jesus walking on the water and thought he was a ghost. Matthew tells us, “When they saw him walking on the water, they were terrified. “It’s a ghost!” they said, and screamed with fear. It’s kind of fun to think of a little boat full of disciples screaming like 10 year old girls. But there was nothing they could cling to that was going to make them feel safe at that point.
So what does it take to do so? The first word Jesus speaks to his disciples from atop the frothy lake was, “Courage!” That’s what Jesus assessed the disciples needed. Courage.
Peter hears that word, and decides to take a risk or courage. “Lord, if it is really you…” Peter isn’t sure. “Lord, if it is really you…” If it truly is Jesus standing upon the aggressive waves, then what must Peter, or any of the others do? The answer is simple. If you want to see if it’s Jesus, and you have the courage to do so, you must go to where Jesus is. Out on the chaos of the waves. You have to go out on the deep and storm-tossed lake, in a 3 a.m. darkened night. You have to go out into the chaotic world, not stay in the assumed safety of the boat.
The question we must ask ourselves, as individuals and as a congregation, is, “Would we take such a step out of the boat?” Would we climb from the safety of having our feet on something solid, and climb out on the liquid surface of the water? Would we take the trapeze bar in hand and swing out away from the platform? Would we show that kind of courage? Because courage is going places with Jesus, and toward Jesus that are totally unsafe.
Most people can stay within the relative safety of their ordered lives. Most people can keep their feet on the ground and watch others take daring risks. Most people can marvel, while watching the TV news from their couch, at how others are so courageous.
A few decades ago, a wealthy woman from New York city was touring the west. She arrived one day in Santa Fe. She noticed an old Native American with a necklace made of curious looking teeth. “What are those?” she asked.
“Those are grizzly bear teeth, madam,” the man replied.
“Ah, yes,” she nodded. “And I suppose they have the same value for your people that pearls have for us,” she said snootily.
“Not exactly, madam,” the man replied calmly. “Anyone can open an oyster.”
When an extraordinary opportunity presents itself--like seeing and meeting the Lord out in the chaos--which involves facing grizzly sized problems and danger--getting out of the boats of our false security so that we can come face-to-face with Christ, how many step overboard? And how many stay in the boat opening oysters?
What gives a person the ability to walk not through seemingly impossible challenges to go out and meet Jesus where he’s at, but to walk over and on top of those challenges in courage and faith. That’s the point Jesus was trying to get across, not just to Peter, but the others in the boat.
Two guys were riding a tandem bike when they came to a long, steep hill. It took a great deal of struggle for them to complete what proved to be a stiff climb. When they got to the top, the guy in front turned to the other and said, “Boy, that sure was a hard climb!”
The guy on the back seat said, “Yeah, and if I hadn’t kept the brakes on all the way, we would certainly have rolled down backwards!”
I think that’s what Jesus was trying to tell Peter and the disciples once they got back in the boat, after Peter lost courage and sunk. Jesus called him “Faintheart” asking him why he lost courage and faith, why he put the breaks of doubt on when he was in the midst of an adventurous challenge.
The challenge is going out to meet Jesus where Jesus is at. It’s not waiting for Jesus to come to us, to show up for us. Jesus is out there. On the waves. In the chaos. It’s interesting that the boat was an early Christian symbol for the church. Many wonder, in telling this story, if Matthew was encouraging early Christians to get outside the safety of the church, and get out into the scary world where Christ really is, and is at work. It’s an important question for the church at any time.
Why climb to the platform of the high trapeze, but then just stand there and never swing out? Or, at least, as Peter did, taking a few courageous and faithful steps toward Jesus out on the stormy lake. We are to be bold and courageous in taking steps that will eventually lead us to a greater and deeper faith in what Christ can do in us. We, as individuals or as a congregation, must be willing to take courageous risks, in which we step from the relative safety of the boat. Only then will we discover what is possible. That is our challenge.
Monday, August 26, 2013
Monday, August 19, 2013
Decisions, Decisions
"Decisions, Decisions"
Genesis 3:1-6
How many decisions do you think we make each day? Take a guess.
According to several articles I read this week, the average adult in the USA today makes about 35,000 decisions each day. Most of them rather simple ones. Where will I sit, what will I have to eat, which spoon to take out of the drawer, what shirt will I wear (even though it may or may not go with my pants), which morning show to watch, should I call to let them know I'm late. Or while driving a car, what lane to be in, looking for other drivers, music or talk show on the radio, putting on makeup while driving or not. And there are sub-decisions within those decisions as well.
Most of those decisions are seemingly inconsequential. Until you rear end a driver because you were concentrating on putting your mascara on instead of watching what was happening on the road. But, I would guess a lot of our decisions out of that 35,000 are basically not the kind that rock your world.
There are those kinds of decisions. What to major in in college, what career path to follow, whom to marry, what kinds of friends to hang around with, move to the United States from Germany to spend a year with a family in Pratt, KS.
Those are all huge, life altering, decisions. The inconsequential decisions we make in seconds or less, assuming there will be few if any life-shattering consequences. The big decisions, we may mull over for weeks or months trying to decide. And there are some people, who when faced with even small decisions are like the comedian, who said, “I’ve been having trouble with decision making. Last week I was at a four-way stop and ended up spending the night.”
And not making a decision is a decision in itself, with it’s own ramifications. As in the following cartoon:
A case could be made that life is about decisions. That life is basically about the decisions we make and how things shake out after those decisions, and what we decide after the consequences of prior decisions are experienced. Maybe even, at the end of life, as you look back, who you are and what you’ve become is the sum total of all the decisions you have made throughout your life.
C.S. Lewis, in his book, Mere Christianity, wrote:
...every time you make a choice, you are turning the central part of you, the part that chooses, into something a little different than what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, you are slowing turning this central thing either into a Heaven creature or into a hellish creature…
So our decisions also have eternal consequences.
And, our decisions don’t effect just ourselves--they will have ramifications for many others as well. With the scripture story we’re looking at this morning, we find out some decisions effect the rest of humanity and all of human history.
John Gardner once said,
We cannot evade the necessity to make decisions. I was discussing these matters with a young man recently and he said, “I don’t mind making decisions that involve myself alone, but I object to making decisions that affect other people.
I had to tell him that would make it impossible for him to be a second-grade teacher, a corporation president, a husband, a politician, a parent, a policeman, a chef, a doctor, or a horse-race bookie--in fact, it would force him to live a hermit’s life.
So let’s look back at where it all began--with the first decision makers, Adam and Eve. If this story teaches us nothing else, it teaches us that making bad decisions has been with human beings from the beginning. Even living in an ideal place like Eden does not help the first humans from making flawed decisions. So the question is, why have we not evolved into better decision makers after eons of bad decisions? Evidently making decisions has nothing to do with heredity.
Part of the answer to that question has to do with the truth that we have yet to gain mastery over our primal urges or our unconscious needs or our basic human insecurities. Those are the primary drivers of our history of poor decision making. We will see them in operation in Eve’s first and fatal beg decision to eat the fruit from the forbidden tree.
Combine these with a whole bunch of mental biases, such as selective attention, or rationalization, and it seems we are mentally and psychologically fated to make flawed decisions. In other words, we are fated to be human beings.
So let’s look at the first human beings and see how they made those first bad decisions which has been called “original sin.”
The first thing we learn from this story is, when making a big decision, pay attention to who you’re talking to. Consider the source. Right off in this chapter it says, “Now the snake was the most cunning animal that the LORD God had made.” The serpent was the king of subtleties. The serpent could make black and white look so gray with just a few words. As the saying goes, “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.”
Certainly Eve must have known this about the serpent. You would think God warned her about the snake. “See that slithering thing over there? (shake head no) Listen with both ears with that one.” Or maybe God didn’t warn Eve, and God was just letting Eve find out for herself. She certainly got a lesson about who to listen to and who not to listen to, didn’t she? She listened to the snake, but she didn’t talk to God about what the snake was saying. And we have been paying the price ever since.
Secondly, in making decisions know where your “hooks” or weaknesses are. Eve told the serpent that God instructed her to not even touch the tree. But that wasn’t in God’s original prohibition. Eve added to it. She must have known that, for her, if she even touched the tree or it’s fruit, that was enough of a hook for her to make an ill-fated decision. Eve had a sense of her own vulnerability, growing out of a character weakness, that would lead Eve down the wrong path.
God’s boundaries apparently offered some latitude--possibly even touch, but not taking. But Eve knew in herself, in order to make a good decision about following what God said, she had to take a step further back, and not even touch the tree or anything on the tree.
These hooks, fashioned by our vulnerabilities and character weaknesses, are different for each of us. Two of the key hooks for many of us are limited information and self-interest. Recall, for a minute, a couple of decisions you’ve made lately. How much information did you really gather to make as well an informed choice as possible? Usually we find that out after the decision has been made. Darn, I should have looked into that a little more deeply, we think to ourselves. Uh, yeah!
Or how much of those recent decisions were made simply out of your own desire? When you get down to it, most of the time we decide for or against things because that’s what we want. Our self-interest is what wins the day in our decision making process.
So one the keys, in making important decisions, is having enough self-knowledge about where your weak spots are, and giving those to the Lord so a better decision can be made. Notice, Eve, even after adding an additional level of protection--not even touching the tree--still succumbs, still crosses her self-made boundary. And she never said anything like, “I better talk with God first.” She allows her weaknesses and vulnerabilities to have the day, rather than seeking God’s help. Only after touching, and eating the fruit does she have that conversation with God, but then it’s too late.
Thirdly, when facing decision making dilemmas, don’t give in to mis-information. God’s rule about the tree was simple and straightforward and clear. But in conversation with the serpent, Eve was dished both mis-information and mis-interpretation of that simple, clear rule.
When making decisions, err on the side of simple directness rather than on complex mis-information. Mis-information and mis-interpretation of the simple aspects of the decision redirects our attention away from the simple guidelines. The serpent was a master at making the simple into the complex, the clear into the cloudy, the ordered into the muddled, meaning into mis-interpretation.
Jesus said, “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life” (John 14:6). That statement is simple and direct. It is the way that God has designed things from the start. If Eve had abided by that, had checked out what the serpent was telling her, had Eve first gone to God who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and said, “This is what the serpent is telling me; I’m confused; what’s the truth,” she would not have been sucked in by the serpent’s misinformation and misinterpretation. She allowed the serpent to interpret God. Why not just go to the source and get the truth. Eve failed that, and because of that made a fatal decision.
Fourthly, when making decisions, avoid rationalizations. Rationalizations are the bugaboo of all good decision making. Rationalization has to do with how we try to justify ourselves or our decisions with plausible sounding reasons, even though those reasons aren’t true or appropriate.
Eve was staring at the fruit. The story says, as she stared at the fruit, she was thinking: The tree does look beautiful and the fruit does appear tasty. Those are rationalizations she’s using to justify her bad decision. Those have nothing to do with God’s rule, which was simply, “Don’t eat the fruit from this one tree!” It doesn’t matter if it looks beautiful or tasty, or if eating fruit would or wouldn’t make her wise. Those are three rationalizations that seem to Eve to be reasonable and valid, but they are empty and hollow, having nothing to do with making this decision about eating the forbidden fruit.
Eve makes her decision. We all know what it was. It was the wrong one. And where was Adam when all this decision making was going on? Standing there like a doofus. “Gosh Eve, you’re so beautiful and naked and all, I guess you must be doing the right thing. Here, let me have a bite.”
That’s the last part of decision making--don’t get sucked into others bad decisions. Eve may have handed Adam his own fruit so that now he was just as culpable, and now she doesn’t have to feel so bad if everything goes wrong because she got someone else involved. Simply put, if you know what is right, and what the right decision is, man up. It was Adam’s responsibility to not just stand there, but to say, “For all kinds of reasons, that would be a bad decision. Just back away from the tree. Just back away.”
As I said at the start, we are the sum total of our decisions. For good or for ill, our lives will go the way of the decisions we make throughout life. Each decision determines what you can decide next.
T.S. Eliot in the play, The Cocktail Party, the guests are discussing if people are free. One of the guests says, “You are not free. Your moment of decision was yesterday. You made a decision. You set in motion Forces in your life and in the lives of others which cannot be reversed…
So it was for Eve and Adam. So it is for us. The only recourse is to make great decisions based on what we learn from Eve’s life changing decision making.
Genesis 3:1-6
How many decisions do you think we make each day? Take a guess.
According to several articles I read this week, the average adult in the USA today makes about 35,000 decisions each day. Most of them rather simple ones. Where will I sit, what will I have to eat, which spoon to take out of the drawer, what shirt will I wear (even though it may or may not go with my pants), which morning show to watch, should I call to let them know I'm late. Or while driving a car, what lane to be in, looking for other drivers, music or talk show on the radio, putting on makeup while driving or not. And there are sub-decisions within those decisions as well.
Most of those decisions are seemingly inconsequential. Until you rear end a driver because you were concentrating on putting your mascara on instead of watching what was happening on the road. But, I would guess a lot of our decisions out of that 35,000 are basically not the kind that rock your world.
There are those kinds of decisions. What to major in in college, what career path to follow, whom to marry, what kinds of friends to hang around with, move to the United States from Germany to spend a year with a family in Pratt, KS.
Those are all huge, life altering, decisions. The inconsequential decisions we make in seconds or less, assuming there will be few if any life-shattering consequences. The big decisions, we may mull over for weeks or months trying to decide. And there are some people, who when faced with even small decisions are like the comedian, who said, “I’ve been having trouble with decision making. Last week I was at a four-way stop and ended up spending the night.”
And not making a decision is a decision in itself, with it’s own ramifications. As in the following cartoon:
A case could be made that life is about decisions. That life is basically about the decisions we make and how things shake out after those decisions, and what we decide after the consequences of prior decisions are experienced. Maybe even, at the end of life, as you look back, who you are and what you’ve become is the sum total of all the decisions you have made throughout your life.
C.S. Lewis, in his book, Mere Christianity, wrote:
...every time you make a choice, you are turning the central part of you, the part that chooses, into something a little different than what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, you are slowing turning this central thing either into a Heaven creature or into a hellish creature…
So our decisions also have eternal consequences.
And, our decisions don’t effect just ourselves--they will have ramifications for many others as well. With the scripture story we’re looking at this morning, we find out some decisions effect the rest of humanity and all of human history.
John Gardner once said,
We cannot evade the necessity to make decisions. I was discussing these matters with a young man recently and he said, “I don’t mind making decisions that involve myself alone, but I object to making decisions that affect other people.
I had to tell him that would make it impossible for him to be a second-grade teacher, a corporation president, a husband, a politician, a parent, a policeman, a chef, a doctor, or a horse-race bookie--in fact, it would force him to live a hermit’s life.
So let’s look back at where it all began--with the first decision makers, Adam and Eve. If this story teaches us nothing else, it teaches us that making bad decisions has been with human beings from the beginning. Even living in an ideal place like Eden does not help the first humans from making flawed decisions. So the question is, why have we not evolved into better decision makers after eons of bad decisions? Evidently making decisions has nothing to do with heredity.
Part of the answer to that question has to do with the truth that we have yet to gain mastery over our primal urges or our unconscious needs or our basic human insecurities. Those are the primary drivers of our history of poor decision making. We will see them in operation in Eve’s first and fatal beg decision to eat the fruit from the forbidden tree.
Combine these with a whole bunch of mental biases, such as selective attention, or rationalization, and it seems we are mentally and psychologically fated to make flawed decisions. In other words, we are fated to be human beings.
So let’s look at the first human beings and see how they made those first bad decisions which has been called “original sin.”
The first thing we learn from this story is, when making a big decision, pay attention to who you’re talking to. Consider the source. Right off in this chapter it says, “Now the snake was the most cunning animal that the LORD God had made.” The serpent was the king of subtleties. The serpent could make black and white look so gray with just a few words. As the saying goes, “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.”
Certainly Eve must have known this about the serpent. You would think God warned her about the snake. “See that slithering thing over there? (shake head no) Listen with both ears with that one.” Or maybe God didn’t warn Eve, and God was just letting Eve find out for herself. She certainly got a lesson about who to listen to and who not to listen to, didn’t she? She listened to the snake, but she didn’t talk to God about what the snake was saying. And we have been paying the price ever since.
Secondly, in making decisions know where your “hooks” or weaknesses are. Eve told the serpent that God instructed her to not even touch the tree. But that wasn’t in God’s original prohibition. Eve added to it. She must have known that, for her, if she even touched the tree or it’s fruit, that was enough of a hook for her to make an ill-fated decision. Eve had a sense of her own vulnerability, growing out of a character weakness, that would lead Eve down the wrong path.
God’s boundaries apparently offered some latitude--possibly even touch, but not taking. But Eve knew in herself, in order to make a good decision about following what God said, she had to take a step further back, and not even touch the tree or anything on the tree.
These hooks, fashioned by our vulnerabilities and character weaknesses, are different for each of us. Two of the key hooks for many of us are limited information and self-interest. Recall, for a minute, a couple of decisions you’ve made lately. How much information did you really gather to make as well an informed choice as possible? Usually we find that out after the decision has been made. Darn, I should have looked into that a little more deeply, we think to ourselves. Uh, yeah!
Or how much of those recent decisions were made simply out of your own desire? When you get down to it, most of the time we decide for or against things because that’s what we want. Our self-interest is what wins the day in our decision making process.
So one the keys, in making important decisions, is having enough self-knowledge about where your weak spots are, and giving those to the Lord so a better decision can be made. Notice, Eve, even after adding an additional level of protection--not even touching the tree--still succumbs, still crosses her self-made boundary. And she never said anything like, “I better talk with God first.” She allows her weaknesses and vulnerabilities to have the day, rather than seeking God’s help. Only after touching, and eating the fruit does she have that conversation with God, but then it’s too late.
Thirdly, when facing decision making dilemmas, don’t give in to mis-information. God’s rule about the tree was simple and straightforward and clear. But in conversation with the serpent, Eve was dished both mis-information and mis-interpretation of that simple, clear rule.
When making decisions, err on the side of simple directness rather than on complex mis-information. Mis-information and mis-interpretation of the simple aspects of the decision redirects our attention away from the simple guidelines. The serpent was a master at making the simple into the complex, the clear into the cloudy, the ordered into the muddled, meaning into mis-interpretation.
Jesus said, “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life” (John 14:6). That statement is simple and direct. It is the way that God has designed things from the start. If Eve had abided by that, had checked out what the serpent was telling her, had Eve first gone to God who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and said, “This is what the serpent is telling me; I’m confused; what’s the truth,” she would not have been sucked in by the serpent’s misinformation and misinterpretation. She allowed the serpent to interpret God. Why not just go to the source and get the truth. Eve failed that, and because of that made a fatal decision.
Fourthly, when making decisions, avoid rationalizations. Rationalizations are the bugaboo of all good decision making. Rationalization has to do with how we try to justify ourselves or our decisions with plausible sounding reasons, even though those reasons aren’t true or appropriate.
Eve was staring at the fruit. The story says, as she stared at the fruit, she was thinking: The tree does look beautiful and the fruit does appear tasty. Those are rationalizations she’s using to justify her bad decision. Those have nothing to do with God’s rule, which was simply, “Don’t eat the fruit from this one tree!” It doesn’t matter if it looks beautiful or tasty, or if eating fruit would or wouldn’t make her wise. Those are three rationalizations that seem to Eve to be reasonable and valid, but they are empty and hollow, having nothing to do with making this decision about eating the forbidden fruit.
Eve makes her decision. We all know what it was. It was the wrong one. And where was Adam when all this decision making was going on? Standing there like a doofus. “Gosh Eve, you’re so beautiful and naked and all, I guess you must be doing the right thing. Here, let me have a bite.”
That’s the last part of decision making--don’t get sucked into others bad decisions. Eve may have handed Adam his own fruit so that now he was just as culpable, and now she doesn’t have to feel so bad if everything goes wrong because she got someone else involved. Simply put, if you know what is right, and what the right decision is, man up. It was Adam’s responsibility to not just stand there, but to say, “For all kinds of reasons, that would be a bad decision. Just back away from the tree. Just back away.”
As I said at the start, we are the sum total of our decisions. For good or for ill, our lives will go the way of the decisions we make throughout life. Each decision determines what you can decide next.
T.S. Eliot in the play, The Cocktail Party, the guests are discussing if people are free. One of the guests says, “You are not free. Your moment of decision was yesterday. You made a decision. You set in motion Forces in your life and in the lives of others which cannot be reversed…
So it was for Eve and Adam. So it is for us. The only recourse is to make great decisions based on what we learn from Eve’s life changing decision making.
Monday, August 12, 2013
The New Peter Principle
"The New Peter Principle"
Luke 22:54-62
Acts 4:13-14
In the early 1970's there was a book written titled The Peter Principle. One of the main ideas of the book had to do with the observation that in many large companies (I'm sure companies of all sizes) people get promoted to a level they are unable to handle. They just aren't adequately trained for that level of expertise. They've been elevated to a position for which they have no passion nor desire to excel. They ultimately fail, and the company suffers under the mismanagement of this inadequate person.
From the verses read a moment ago, coming from Luke's gospel, it appears we have found the forerunner and namesake of "The Peter Principle." Here we see the disciple, Peter, promoted up the ladder by Christ from fisherman, to disciple, to leader of the disciples. But he couldn't handle it. He blew it royally.
How would you feel if you were Peter standing there in the courtyard, after the third denial, and have Jesus turn and look at you. I don't know about you, but I would have crawled out of there feeling like worm. How could he live with the fact of such a visible act of falling on his face? One professional ice hockey goalie said, “You think you have a tough job. Try mine. Mess up and a red light goes off with sirens, and thousands of people watching boo you.”
If we were to look only at these verses in Luke's gospel, we would all agree, Peter is the embodiment of the Peter Principle. But another verse was read from Acts of the Apostles that makes us stand up and take notice. Here we see a Peter who has been arrested for simply preaching the Good News about Jesus. Here we see a Peter arrested for restoring a lame man back to walking health. Here we see the arresting council amazed at the boldness of this "uneducated man."
Because we see the two stories together, we realize that something happened to Peter between the time he buried his face in his big fisherman's hands, weeping, and the time when he emerged as the bold and fearless leader of the infant church. You might say, he got an education. I believe his education came, not through his great success as a disciple, but by his failure as a disciple. He learned from his mistake. He was willing to get up and try again.
That's what makes the difference between Judas and Peter. In their own ways they both failed their Lord. Under the weight of their failures, they reacted the opposite. Judas went out and took his failure to the nth degree, hanging himself. Peter learned something about himself, and went on living, in a stronger and more vital way.
On New Years Day, 1929, Georgia Tech played the University of California in the Rose Bowl. In the first half of that game, a California player, Roy Riegels, recovered a fumble, but started running in the wrong direction. One of his teammates, Benny Lom, overtook Reigels and tackled him 65 yards down the field, just before he scored for Georgia Tech. California, with their backs against the goal line, ended up having to punt after 3 downs. The punt was blocked and Georgia Tech scored a safety, which was the ultimate margin of victory.
As I mentioned, that happened in the first half. After Coach Nibbs Price gave his halftime talk, all the players got up and started out back to the field. All but Riegels. Coach Price went and sat by Riegels. "Roy, get back out there; you'll be starting the second half."
"Coach," said Riegles, "I can't do it to save my life. I've ruined you. I've ruined the University of California. I've ruined myself. I couldn't face that crowd in the stadium now."
Coach Price reached out and grabbed Riegels by the shoulder and said, "Roy, get up and go back out there; the game is only half over!"
Riegels went back out. Those Georgia Tech players would tell you they never saw anyone play football as hard and as well as Roy Riegels did in the second half.
We take the ball God's given us and we run the wrong direction. We stumble and fall and are so ashamed of ourselves that we never want to try again. Then The Lord comes to us and puts his hand on our shoulders in the person of Jesus Christ and says, "Get up and go on back; the game is only half over." That's the gospel of the grace of God. It's the gospel of the second chance, of the third chance, of the hundredth chance. It's the New Peter Principle: The game is only half over!
Let's take a moment to examine some of the qualities a person needs to participate in the New Peter Principle--the kind of characteristics needed to play in the second half after a first half failure.
Probably the first characteristic is the willingness to admit we make mistakes, that we do fail sometimes, and that as human beings we mess up. The saying is certainly trite, but nonetheless true: no one is perfect.
Part of our willingness to pick ourselves up and get back into the second half after falling on our faces means abandoning any attitudes or notions of perfection. No matter how we try and avoid it, we can't help but having our failures brought up before us. The only way out is to admit them and move on.
I read that there's a new computer coming out that is so human that when it makes a mistake it blames another computer. Not being able to admit the fact that we are human, and that we do make mistakes, is the real and larger problem.
A guy became disenchanted with city life. He decided to move to the country and start a chicken farm. He bought a farmhouse with some land around it. After he moved in he bought 200 baby chicks. But they all quickly died. He bought 200 more baby chicks but, again, they all died a short time later.
Puzzled and distressed he called up the county ag agent and described what was happening. "I want to be a successful chicken farmer," he told the agent, "so can you tell me have I been planting the chicks too close together or too deep."
The agent replied, "I can't help you until I get a soil sample."
We don't help another person who has failed, by not helping them recognize real shortcomings. We must courageously tell the truth, and face the truth. Unrecognized and covered up, those mistakes will never be amended and we will continue messing up in life.
Secondly, getting back up and going out for the second half involves a certain amount of risk. Risk that you just might fail again. Certainly Peter had to risk that. Faced with a similar situation, would he deny his Lord again? Certainly Roy Riegels risked going out on the football field and making another error in front of thousands of people.
The truth of the matter is that we WILL make other mistakes. Peter did. But the paradox of that truth is that we often learn best by making mistakes and coming up short now and then.
A young man had been appointed Vice President of the bank. He'd never dreamed he'd be Vice President at such a young age. So he approached the venerable Chairman of the Board and said, "I was wondering if you could give me advice."
The old man came back with just two words: "Right decisions."
The young man had hoped for a bit more than that, so he said, "That's really helpful, but can you be more specific? How do I make right decisions?"
The wise Chairman simply responded, "Experience."
The young man said, "Well, that's just the point. I don't have the kind of experience I need. How do I get it?"
The Chairman's terse reply, "Wrong decisions."
That's the risk we take. Making wrong and bad or hurtful life decisions, and then suffering the consequences. But the other level of risk we then face is moving on after a bad decision and risk making more wrong decisions.
There was a landscape contractor who had his first full-fledged job. One of the first tasks he had to tackle was blasting out some stumps with dynamite for a farmer. Since the farmer was watching the landscape guy went to some length to measure out the fuse and set the dynamite just as if he really knew what he was doing. The problem was he didn't really know how much dynamite would be just right to do the job.
When the landscape guy was all set up he breathed a prayer that he had enough dynamite packed under the stump, yet not too much to blow them both to kingdom come. The moment of truth came. The landscape guy looked at the farmer and gave him the thumbs up, and pushed down the plunger. With a resounding boom the stump rose up in the air and arched magnificently over towards his pickup truck. The stump landed right on the roof of the cab, demolishing it.
The farmer turned to the landscape guy and said, "Son, you didn't miss it by much. Just a few feet. With a bit more practice you'll be able to land those suckers in the truck bed every time."
Sounds like a Mark Graber story. But that landscaper wouldn't be able to go on to the next stump or the next task if he wasn't ready to risk it again. Peter could have said, "I've had enough. I've done enough damage. Enough with this bold experiment of a new gospel. The risk is too great. I'm going fishing." Which is what he did for just one evening. Then something happened to him that got him on his feet and ready to risk again.
And that's the third and final point of the New Peter Principle. Getting back up and trying again after a failure means reaching out to God and allowing the Lord to pull us back into the game. Without The Lord, we will never quite get all the way up, nor will our steps be quite as steady, nor will our foundation for the future be quite as sure.
Getting back up means letting someone else--that is, the Holy Spirit--help us up. How many times had Peter seen Jesus do that for someone else. Why did Peter ever think that couldn't happen for him? In all aspects of life we must admit that without our Lord Jesus we fall hard. But also without Him we can't get up either.
That's what the New Peter Principle is all about. Here we see the difference between Judas and Peter: Judas' hands were too tightly grasped around himself and his failure. Each time he tried to get himself up he fell harder. Until he fell to his death.
Peter fell, but during the fall reached out and grasped for forgiveness. Like someone rolling down a hillside in a tumbled fall, grasping at shrubs and rocks, anything that you can hold on to to stop the momentum.
This third attitude encompasses the other two. If we hold on to the misguided idea that we never make mistakes, that we are perfect and it's always someone else's fault, we will never know what God's forgiveness is all about. We will never allow God, really, to be God--to allow God to do what God does best. If we are unwilling to take a risk, we will never discover the blessings that come with the adventurous promises made by Christ. We will never know how strong and limitless we can be if we don't take those risks with the promises of God.
This is the New Peter Principle. May it be our guide as we move into the new ministries and goals we are setting for this church.
Luke 22:54-62
Acts 4:13-14
In the early 1970's there was a book written titled The Peter Principle. One of the main ideas of the book had to do with the observation that in many large companies (I'm sure companies of all sizes) people get promoted to a level they are unable to handle. They just aren't adequately trained for that level of expertise. They've been elevated to a position for which they have no passion nor desire to excel. They ultimately fail, and the company suffers under the mismanagement of this inadequate person.
From the verses read a moment ago, coming from Luke's gospel, it appears we have found the forerunner and namesake of "The Peter Principle." Here we see the disciple, Peter, promoted up the ladder by Christ from fisherman, to disciple, to leader of the disciples. But he couldn't handle it. He blew it royally.
How would you feel if you were Peter standing there in the courtyard, after the third denial, and have Jesus turn and look at you. I don't know about you, but I would have crawled out of there feeling like worm. How could he live with the fact of such a visible act of falling on his face? One professional ice hockey goalie said, “You think you have a tough job. Try mine. Mess up and a red light goes off with sirens, and thousands of people watching boo you.”
If we were to look only at these verses in Luke's gospel, we would all agree, Peter is the embodiment of the Peter Principle. But another verse was read from Acts of the Apostles that makes us stand up and take notice. Here we see a Peter who has been arrested for simply preaching the Good News about Jesus. Here we see a Peter arrested for restoring a lame man back to walking health. Here we see the arresting council amazed at the boldness of this "uneducated man."
Because we see the two stories together, we realize that something happened to Peter between the time he buried his face in his big fisherman's hands, weeping, and the time when he emerged as the bold and fearless leader of the infant church. You might say, he got an education. I believe his education came, not through his great success as a disciple, but by his failure as a disciple. He learned from his mistake. He was willing to get up and try again.
That's what makes the difference between Judas and Peter. In their own ways they both failed their Lord. Under the weight of their failures, they reacted the opposite. Judas went out and took his failure to the nth degree, hanging himself. Peter learned something about himself, and went on living, in a stronger and more vital way.
On New Years Day, 1929, Georgia Tech played the University of California in the Rose Bowl. In the first half of that game, a California player, Roy Riegels, recovered a fumble, but started running in the wrong direction. One of his teammates, Benny Lom, overtook Reigels and tackled him 65 yards down the field, just before he scored for Georgia Tech. California, with their backs against the goal line, ended up having to punt after 3 downs. The punt was blocked and Georgia Tech scored a safety, which was the ultimate margin of victory.
As I mentioned, that happened in the first half. After Coach Nibbs Price gave his halftime talk, all the players got up and started out back to the field. All but Riegels. Coach Price went and sat by Riegels. "Roy, get back out there; you'll be starting the second half."
"Coach," said Riegles, "I can't do it to save my life. I've ruined you. I've ruined the University of California. I've ruined myself. I couldn't face that crowd in the stadium now."
Coach Price reached out and grabbed Riegels by the shoulder and said, "Roy, get up and go back out there; the game is only half over!"
Riegels went back out. Those Georgia Tech players would tell you they never saw anyone play football as hard and as well as Roy Riegels did in the second half.
We take the ball God's given us and we run the wrong direction. We stumble and fall and are so ashamed of ourselves that we never want to try again. Then The Lord comes to us and puts his hand on our shoulders in the person of Jesus Christ and says, "Get up and go on back; the game is only half over." That's the gospel of the grace of God. It's the gospel of the second chance, of the third chance, of the hundredth chance. It's the New Peter Principle: The game is only half over!
Let's take a moment to examine some of the qualities a person needs to participate in the New Peter Principle--the kind of characteristics needed to play in the second half after a first half failure.
Probably the first characteristic is the willingness to admit we make mistakes, that we do fail sometimes, and that as human beings we mess up. The saying is certainly trite, but nonetheless true: no one is perfect.
Part of our willingness to pick ourselves up and get back into the second half after falling on our faces means abandoning any attitudes or notions of perfection. No matter how we try and avoid it, we can't help but having our failures brought up before us. The only way out is to admit them and move on.
I read that there's a new computer coming out that is so human that when it makes a mistake it blames another computer. Not being able to admit the fact that we are human, and that we do make mistakes, is the real and larger problem.
A guy became disenchanted with city life. He decided to move to the country and start a chicken farm. He bought a farmhouse with some land around it. After he moved in he bought 200 baby chicks. But they all quickly died. He bought 200 more baby chicks but, again, they all died a short time later.
Puzzled and distressed he called up the county ag agent and described what was happening. "I want to be a successful chicken farmer," he told the agent, "so can you tell me have I been planting the chicks too close together or too deep."
The agent replied, "I can't help you until I get a soil sample."
We don't help another person who has failed, by not helping them recognize real shortcomings. We must courageously tell the truth, and face the truth. Unrecognized and covered up, those mistakes will never be amended and we will continue messing up in life.
Secondly, getting back up and going out for the second half involves a certain amount of risk. Risk that you just might fail again. Certainly Peter had to risk that. Faced with a similar situation, would he deny his Lord again? Certainly Roy Riegels risked going out on the football field and making another error in front of thousands of people.
The truth of the matter is that we WILL make other mistakes. Peter did. But the paradox of that truth is that we often learn best by making mistakes and coming up short now and then.
A young man had been appointed Vice President of the bank. He'd never dreamed he'd be Vice President at such a young age. So he approached the venerable Chairman of the Board and said, "I was wondering if you could give me advice."
The old man came back with just two words: "Right decisions."
The young man had hoped for a bit more than that, so he said, "That's really helpful, but can you be more specific? How do I make right decisions?"
The wise Chairman simply responded, "Experience."
The young man said, "Well, that's just the point. I don't have the kind of experience I need. How do I get it?"
The Chairman's terse reply, "Wrong decisions."
That's the risk we take. Making wrong and bad or hurtful life decisions, and then suffering the consequences. But the other level of risk we then face is moving on after a bad decision and risk making more wrong decisions.
There was a landscape contractor who had his first full-fledged job. One of the first tasks he had to tackle was blasting out some stumps with dynamite for a farmer. Since the farmer was watching the landscape guy went to some length to measure out the fuse and set the dynamite just as if he really knew what he was doing. The problem was he didn't really know how much dynamite would be just right to do the job.
When the landscape guy was all set up he breathed a prayer that he had enough dynamite packed under the stump, yet not too much to blow them both to kingdom come. The moment of truth came. The landscape guy looked at the farmer and gave him the thumbs up, and pushed down the plunger. With a resounding boom the stump rose up in the air and arched magnificently over towards his pickup truck. The stump landed right on the roof of the cab, demolishing it.
The farmer turned to the landscape guy and said, "Son, you didn't miss it by much. Just a few feet. With a bit more practice you'll be able to land those suckers in the truck bed every time."
Sounds like a Mark Graber story. But that landscaper wouldn't be able to go on to the next stump or the next task if he wasn't ready to risk it again. Peter could have said, "I've had enough. I've done enough damage. Enough with this bold experiment of a new gospel. The risk is too great. I'm going fishing." Which is what he did for just one evening. Then something happened to him that got him on his feet and ready to risk again.
And that's the third and final point of the New Peter Principle. Getting back up and trying again after a failure means reaching out to God and allowing the Lord to pull us back into the game. Without The Lord, we will never quite get all the way up, nor will our steps be quite as steady, nor will our foundation for the future be quite as sure.
Getting back up means letting someone else--that is, the Holy Spirit--help us up. How many times had Peter seen Jesus do that for someone else. Why did Peter ever think that couldn't happen for him? In all aspects of life we must admit that without our Lord Jesus we fall hard. But also without Him we can't get up either.
That's what the New Peter Principle is all about. Here we see the difference between Judas and Peter: Judas' hands were too tightly grasped around himself and his failure. Each time he tried to get himself up he fell harder. Until he fell to his death.
Peter fell, but during the fall reached out and grasped for forgiveness. Like someone rolling down a hillside in a tumbled fall, grasping at shrubs and rocks, anything that you can hold on to to stop the momentum.
This third attitude encompasses the other two. If we hold on to the misguided idea that we never make mistakes, that we are perfect and it's always someone else's fault, we will never know what God's forgiveness is all about. We will never allow God, really, to be God--to allow God to do what God does best. If we are unwilling to take a risk, we will never discover the blessings that come with the adventurous promises made by Christ. We will never know how strong and limitless we can be if we don't take those risks with the promises of God.
This is the New Peter Principle. May it be our guide as we move into the new ministries and goals we are setting for this church.
Wednesday, August 7, 2013
Sex, Sex, Sex!
"Sex, Sex, Sex!"
Genesis 2:20-25
Song of Solomon 4:1-7
I was going through confirmation class as a junior high kid. The Associate Pastor who was leading the class was boring and dry. As socially awkward as he was around adults, he was even more so around kids. I’m not sure why he was put in charge of the youth program.
We had just finished up one of the chapters in the book he was running us through. The next chapter was about human sexuality. My friends and I, 12 and 13 years old, were anxious to get to that chapter ever since we thumbed through the table of contents and saw it. But the youth pastor said, “Just read through the next chapter, talk about it with your parents this week, and for next week we’ll do the chapter after that.”
An audible groan went up from the boys in the class. The girls just smiled. My mother asked what we were studying in Confirmation Class and I told her about the chapter about sex. She said, “Well if you ever have any questions about that, you can come and ask me anything. We’ll talk about it.” I took that as she meaning the opposite--she didn’t want to talk at all about it. And what 13 year old boy is going to go ask his mom anything having to do with sex?
The message clearly was, “We don’t talk about this in church, and good luck getting anything useful out of your parents.”
Fast forward a bit to when I was a sophomore in high school. We had a new Youth Pastor at the church, up from California. He was cool. He set up a couple of youth group sessions on the topic of sex, got all our parents permission, and we couldn’t wait. The boys were split off from the girls and we had the sex talk. But it was mostly about body parts and what they did. We didn’t get into the morality of it, what’s appropriate and what’s not, and especially not the spirituality of sexuality, which believe-it-or-not, is what I wanted to talk about. Again, the message was, “We’ve gone a step forward in talking about sexuality in church, but we’re still not comfortable talking about everything about sexuality.”
Fast forward again to the late 1980’s. I’m a pastor up in Colby. I was asked by the middle school principal to be on a select team that would write sex education curriculum for the middle school. At that time, the state of Kansas mandated sex education be a part of all middle school curriculum, but it was up to the school how they decided to do that.
Our team worked for several weeks putting the sex education curriculum together. During that time my fellow ministers, all left off the team, were badgering me constantly about what I was supposed to make sure got into the sex education curriculum. Most of what they were bringing up were sexual morality issues they wanted to make sure the school was going to include--and these other pastors felt it was my personal mission to see to that happening. I finally got sick of all their weaseling, and at a ministerial association meeting said, rather forcefully, “I’m done listening to you all. Why are you demanding the school teach all this stuff!? That’s your job as pastors and spiritual leaders. Why don’t you include it in your youth group teaching at church? That’s where it belongs, not in school curriculum!”
They got all huffy and puffy, but the comments they made back to me were along the lines of, “We can’t do that in church; we’d rather not do that in church; etc. etc.” Again, the message, starting all the way back to when I was in Confirmation class hadn’t changed much over the years. Clearly it was, “The church isn’t the place to talk about sex.”
So here I am today, confessing to you, that even though in all my youth groups we have talked about sex, talked about the sanctity and spiritual link with our sexuality, I have never preached about sex. This is the first time. I’ve never taken my own advice, at least during a sermon, and tried to explain some of the biblical and spiritual teachings about how God has designed us as sexual beings and what that means.
So, let’s jump in. I want to start out by offering a prize. Here’s a $20 bill. I will give it to the first person who can tell me what the picture is on the back of this bill. (Guesses.) Well, the answer is a bit tricky. Because I asked about the picture on the back of this bill. If this were an authentic $20 bill, the picture would be the White House. But since this is not a real $20 bill, there is white on the back, but not a house. It’s a counterfeit. Printed it on our own church copier in living color.
Most of what our culture displays, teaches, and inundates us with about our sexuality is just as counterfeit as this $20 bill. If you’re getting your information about human sexuality from TV, the movies, magazines, books, and God-forbid--porn, then you are getting a counterfeit, you’ve been misled, and the sexual side of who you are as God’s human being will be tainted and skewed.
Most of what we see or read in popular media, displays sexuality as a tool or a weapon. Sexuality in the media is used to sell, to seduce, to titillate, to entertain, to empower, and to disempower (especially through the violence of rape or sexual misconduct). In popular media, sex is pretty much defined by our female and male body parts and what they do, and how vividly they can be displayed.
A family got together for a bit of a reunion. There was lots of food and conversation. Some of the conversation gravitated towards politics. One side of the family was staunchly Republican and the other side was staunchly Democrat. The conversation was spirited, but fortunately didn’t get too much out of hand. As the day came to a close it was bath time for the kids. A couple of young cousins were thrown into the bathtub together, a little boy and little girl. The little girl looked the little boy over and said, “Boy, you Republicans are different aren’t you!”
There certainly are differences in how males and females bodies are created and how they operate. But our sexuality, as God designed it in our humanness permeates or influences much of who we are--in the way we think, in the way we act, in the way we handle our relationships, and who we are physically. Sexuality has everything to do with how we fully live out our lives as women and as men. It’s this all-encompassing view of our human sexuality that is totally missing in what’s thrown at us everyday in the general media.
A psychologist was in a session with one of her patients. The psychologist was leading the patient through the Rorschach Test--the one with those weirdly shaped ink blots. The psychologist showed the patient the first picture and asked, “What is this?”
The patient replied, “That’s sex.”
The next picture was shown, and she asked, “What is this?”
The patient replied, “That’s sex.”
The psychologist went through all the pictures with the patient and each time he had the same answer: “That’s sex.”
After the test was over, the psychologist said, “Well, sir, you seem to have an obsession with sex.”
To which the patient replied, “Me!? You’re the one with all the dirty pictures!”
That’s what sex is in our culture: dirty pictures, revealing as much skin as possible, only about our bodies, and the sex act itself. But sexuality is so much more, and the spiritual dimensions of sexuality are totally irrelevant and unheard of in general culture.
There are at least two ways that Christian spirituality and sexuality are in relation to each other. First, sexuality is a symbol of our call by God to have deeper communication with each other. The problem with strip joints and sex in the media and pornography is not that they emphasize sexuality too much but that they don’t emphasize it enough--to its fullest extent. They totally eliminate relationship and thereby narrow sexuality to the confines of body parts. They have made sexuality trivial.
How much richer and fuller is the biblical perspective of sexuality as relationship. To chat over a cup of tea, to discuss a book together, to view a sunset together--that is sexuality at its best because it is about relationship.
There are so many great themes in the book, Song of Solomon. One of which is the true mutuality of a loving relationship. Nowhere in the book is there the dull story of a man simply sexually acting out and the woman being acted upon. Both are intensely involved; both initiate; both receive.
The emphasis is upon the loving relationship. The man speaks. The woman speaks. The choir heightens the joy of the relationship. Both are giving and receiving in the act of love and love’s mutual relationship.
Lust produces bad sex, because it denies relationship. Lust turns the other person into an object--a thing, a nonperson--to satisfy your desire. Both Jesus and Paul condemned lust because it made sex less than it was created to be. Lust--sex without relationship--creates a counterfeit. For Jesus, sex is too good, too high, too holy, to be thrown away by cheap and lusting thoughts.
The second way that Christian spirituality and sexuality form a union is that sexuality is a symbol of our call by God into communion with him and each other. Sexuality and communion are intimately related.
I like the word “intimacy.” It’s a word that is rooted in the Latin word, intimus, which means innermost. Intimacy is that connection between two people in the innermost parts of themselves. It’s deeper than relationship. The only word that suffices is communion.
Because, what is the innermost part of us? From Genesis we learn it is the image of God. In intimacy, especially sexual intimacy, between two people there is the deep connection with the image of God in each of those people. It is two people, opening up the deepest part of themselves, “naked and unashamed,” giving each other access to the very image of God within them.
The mystery of our human sexuality is the mystery of communion where the holy and the physical come together in the image of God and is united between those two people. When Genesis describes Adam and Eve coming together sexually, it says, “Now Adam knew his wife Eve…” We may run over that statement, saying to ourselves, “Well of course he knew her; she was his wife.” But the word “knew” in Hebrew means to know someone intimately, deeply, to the very soul of a person, to the depth of the person’s image of God within them.
The same word is used to describe our relationship with God. That our communion with God is described in sexual terms, of “deep calling out to deep.” It gives a whole new meaning to that part of the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus is describing people who said they did all kinds of great things for God. But those people are turned away at the judgement, because, as Jesus said, “I never knew you!” In other words, I never had communion with you, you never really connected with me in the depth of God’s image. It was all surface and no depth. No communion. No intimacy.
Sexuality’s intensity, sexuality’s restraint, sexuality’s mutuality, sexuality’s permanence--all of these are amazing windows onto the communion and intimacy God intended not just for man-woman relationships, but also our relationship with God.
Christian ethics writer, Lewis Smedes wrote, “There are two situations in which people feel no shame. The first is in a state of wholeness. The other is in a state of illusion.” Wholeness in sexuality has to do with communication and communion as I’ve described them. But illusion in sexuality has to do with the counterfeit of communication and communion, which only create lust, pornography, sadism and sexism. The counterfeits only dehumanize and destroy. But the real thing, the wholeness of human sexuality takes us directly into the heart and image God.
Genesis 2:20-25
Song of Solomon 4:1-7
I was going through confirmation class as a junior high kid. The Associate Pastor who was leading the class was boring and dry. As socially awkward as he was around adults, he was even more so around kids. I’m not sure why he was put in charge of the youth program.
We had just finished up one of the chapters in the book he was running us through. The next chapter was about human sexuality. My friends and I, 12 and 13 years old, were anxious to get to that chapter ever since we thumbed through the table of contents and saw it. But the youth pastor said, “Just read through the next chapter, talk about it with your parents this week, and for next week we’ll do the chapter after that.”
An audible groan went up from the boys in the class. The girls just smiled. My mother asked what we were studying in Confirmation Class and I told her about the chapter about sex. She said, “Well if you ever have any questions about that, you can come and ask me anything. We’ll talk about it.” I took that as she meaning the opposite--she didn’t want to talk at all about it. And what 13 year old boy is going to go ask his mom anything having to do with sex?
The message clearly was, “We don’t talk about this in church, and good luck getting anything useful out of your parents.”
Fast forward a bit to when I was a sophomore in high school. We had a new Youth Pastor at the church, up from California. He was cool. He set up a couple of youth group sessions on the topic of sex, got all our parents permission, and we couldn’t wait. The boys were split off from the girls and we had the sex talk. But it was mostly about body parts and what they did. We didn’t get into the morality of it, what’s appropriate and what’s not, and especially not the spirituality of sexuality, which believe-it-or-not, is what I wanted to talk about. Again, the message was, “We’ve gone a step forward in talking about sexuality in church, but we’re still not comfortable talking about everything about sexuality.”
Fast forward again to the late 1980’s. I’m a pastor up in Colby. I was asked by the middle school principal to be on a select team that would write sex education curriculum for the middle school. At that time, the state of Kansas mandated sex education be a part of all middle school curriculum, but it was up to the school how they decided to do that.
Our team worked for several weeks putting the sex education curriculum together. During that time my fellow ministers, all left off the team, were badgering me constantly about what I was supposed to make sure got into the sex education curriculum. Most of what they were bringing up were sexual morality issues they wanted to make sure the school was going to include--and these other pastors felt it was my personal mission to see to that happening. I finally got sick of all their weaseling, and at a ministerial association meeting said, rather forcefully, “I’m done listening to you all. Why are you demanding the school teach all this stuff!? That’s your job as pastors and spiritual leaders. Why don’t you include it in your youth group teaching at church? That’s where it belongs, not in school curriculum!”
They got all huffy and puffy, but the comments they made back to me were along the lines of, “We can’t do that in church; we’d rather not do that in church; etc. etc.” Again, the message, starting all the way back to when I was in Confirmation class hadn’t changed much over the years. Clearly it was, “The church isn’t the place to talk about sex.”
So here I am today, confessing to you, that even though in all my youth groups we have talked about sex, talked about the sanctity and spiritual link with our sexuality, I have never preached about sex. This is the first time. I’ve never taken my own advice, at least during a sermon, and tried to explain some of the biblical and spiritual teachings about how God has designed us as sexual beings and what that means.
So, let’s jump in. I want to start out by offering a prize. Here’s a $20 bill. I will give it to the first person who can tell me what the picture is on the back of this bill. (Guesses.) Well, the answer is a bit tricky. Because I asked about the picture on the back of this bill. If this were an authentic $20 bill, the picture would be the White House. But since this is not a real $20 bill, there is white on the back, but not a house. It’s a counterfeit. Printed it on our own church copier in living color.
Most of what our culture displays, teaches, and inundates us with about our sexuality is just as counterfeit as this $20 bill. If you’re getting your information about human sexuality from TV, the movies, magazines, books, and God-forbid--porn, then you are getting a counterfeit, you’ve been misled, and the sexual side of who you are as God’s human being will be tainted and skewed.
Most of what we see or read in popular media, displays sexuality as a tool or a weapon. Sexuality in the media is used to sell, to seduce, to titillate, to entertain, to empower, and to disempower (especially through the violence of rape or sexual misconduct). In popular media, sex is pretty much defined by our female and male body parts and what they do, and how vividly they can be displayed.
A family got together for a bit of a reunion. There was lots of food and conversation. Some of the conversation gravitated towards politics. One side of the family was staunchly Republican and the other side was staunchly Democrat. The conversation was spirited, but fortunately didn’t get too much out of hand. As the day came to a close it was bath time for the kids. A couple of young cousins were thrown into the bathtub together, a little boy and little girl. The little girl looked the little boy over and said, “Boy, you Republicans are different aren’t you!”
There certainly are differences in how males and females bodies are created and how they operate. But our sexuality, as God designed it in our humanness permeates or influences much of who we are--in the way we think, in the way we act, in the way we handle our relationships, and who we are physically. Sexuality has everything to do with how we fully live out our lives as women and as men. It’s this all-encompassing view of our human sexuality that is totally missing in what’s thrown at us everyday in the general media.
A psychologist was in a session with one of her patients. The psychologist was leading the patient through the Rorschach Test--the one with those weirdly shaped ink blots. The psychologist showed the patient the first picture and asked, “What is this?”
The patient replied, “That’s sex.”
The next picture was shown, and she asked, “What is this?”
The patient replied, “That’s sex.”
The psychologist went through all the pictures with the patient and each time he had the same answer: “That’s sex.”
After the test was over, the psychologist said, “Well, sir, you seem to have an obsession with sex.”
To which the patient replied, “Me!? You’re the one with all the dirty pictures!”
That’s what sex is in our culture: dirty pictures, revealing as much skin as possible, only about our bodies, and the sex act itself. But sexuality is so much more, and the spiritual dimensions of sexuality are totally irrelevant and unheard of in general culture.
There are at least two ways that Christian spirituality and sexuality are in relation to each other. First, sexuality is a symbol of our call by God to have deeper communication with each other. The problem with strip joints and sex in the media and pornography is not that they emphasize sexuality too much but that they don’t emphasize it enough--to its fullest extent. They totally eliminate relationship and thereby narrow sexuality to the confines of body parts. They have made sexuality trivial.
How much richer and fuller is the biblical perspective of sexuality as relationship. To chat over a cup of tea, to discuss a book together, to view a sunset together--that is sexuality at its best because it is about relationship.
There are so many great themes in the book, Song of Solomon. One of which is the true mutuality of a loving relationship. Nowhere in the book is there the dull story of a man simply sexually acting out and the woman being acted upon. Both are intensely involved; both initiate; both receive.
The emphasis is upon the loving relationship. The man speaks. The woman speaks. The choir heightens the joy of the relationship. Both are giving and receiving in the act of love and love’s mutual relationship.
Lust produces bad sex, because it denies relationship. Lust turns the other person into an object--a thing, a nonperson--to satisfy your desire. Both Jesus and Paul condemned lust because it made sex less than it was created to be. Lust--sex without relationship--creates a counterfeit. For Jesus, sex is too good, too high, too holy, to be thrown away by cheap and lusting thoughts.
The second way that Christian spirituality and sexuality form a union is that sexuality is a symbol of our call by God into communion with him and each other. Sexuality and communion are intimately related.
I like the word “intimacy.” It’s a word that is rooted in the Latin word, intimus, which means innermost. Intimacy is that connection between two people in the innermost parts of themselves. It’s deeper than relationship. The only word that suffices is communion.
Because, what is the innermost part of us? From Genesis we learn it is the image of God. In intimacy, especially sexual intimacy, between two people there is the deep connection with the image of God in each of those people. It is two people, opening up the deepest part of themselves, “naked and unashamed,” giving each other access to the very image of God within them.
The mystery of our human sexuality is the mystery of communion where the holy and the physical come together in the image of God and is united between those two people. When Genesis describes Adam and Eve coming together sexually, it says, “Now Adam knew his wife Eve…” We may run over that statement, saying to ourselves, “Well of course he knew her; she was his wife.” But the word “knew” in Hebrew means to know someone intimately, deeply, to the very soul of a person, to the depth of the person’s image of God within them.
The same word is used to describe our relationship with God. That our communion with God is described in sexual terms, of “deep calling out to deep.” It gives a whole new meaning to that part of the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus is describing people who said they did all kinds of great things for God. But those people are turned away at the judgement, because, as Jesus said, “I never knew you!” In other words, I never had communion with you, you never really connected with me in the depth of God’s image. It was all surface and no depth. No communion. No intimacy.
Sexuality’s intensity, sexuality’s restraint, sexuality’s mutuality, sexuality’s permanence--all of these are amazing windows onto the communion and intimacy God intended not just for man-woman relationships, but also our relationship with God.
Christian ethics writer, Lewis Smedes wrote, “There are two situations in which people feel no shame. The first is in a state of wholeness. The other is in a state of illusion.” Wholeness in sexuality has to do with communication and communion as I’ve described them. But illusion in sexuality has to do with the counterfeit of communication and communion, which only create lust, pornography, sadism and sexism. The counterfeits only dehumanize and destroy. But the real thing, the wholeness of human sexuality takes us directly into the heart and image God.
Monday, July 22, 2013
Learning The Clutch
"Learning The Clutch"
Ecclesiastes 3:5-6
Ever had to teach someone how to drive a stick shift? Like a family member? It's one of those things you should never do for a family member. It's similar to wallpapering with your spouse. You just don't do it. It does not enhance marital bliss. Teaching your child how to drive a stick shift does not create a fun bonding time.
Nobody taught me how to drive a stick shift. In our white bread, suburban neighborhood there was one little grocery store. My next door neighbor owned it. Medina Grocery. I started working there when I was 12 or 13. I continued working there through my first year of college.
I started out as a stock boy and a bag boy, carrying groceries out for all the characters that came into that little, oil wood floor store. People didn't come in just to get groceries. They came in for the experience. For the conversations around the produce section, or a cup of eggnog in the back room. Eggnog that had extra ingredients.
Medina Grocery also had a home delivery service. People would call in their orders. I'd get a grocery cart and get all their list of stuff off the shelves, and put it in a box on the back table. Write their name on the outside of the box. Organize the table filled with boxes for the delivery guy, in the order he'd be delivering them.
The delivery truck was an old Dodge panel job. Fire engine red. Medina Grocery printed on the side with a picture of a cartoonish guy running with a bag of groceries, some of which were flying out of the top of the bag.
By the end of my working tenure there, I was the delivery guy. The first time I was the delivery guy, I wasn't the delivery guy. The regular guy was sick, and John Frost, the owner, asked me if I knew how to drive a stick shift. I said, "Sure." I didn't. That's what I mean when I said no one ever taught me to drive a stick shift. I taught myself on that maiden delivery run. I taught myself out of my own teenaged arrogance and fearlessness.
It was a three-on-the-tree. If you don't know what that is, don't learn. Just stay away from it. You'll be fine.
How many of you have been to Seattle? I'm not sure if you noticed, but it's a rather hilly place. So on my first ever delivery run, driving a three-on-the-tree stick shift, I was going up this hill. There's a stop light a fourth of the way up the hill. I got stopped by the red light.
When the light turned green, I put it in gear, let out the clutch and killed the engine. Did it again. And again. And again, about six or seven times. The light turned yellow, then red. I'm still there. About 10 cars are lined up behind me. I did that through three cycles of green to red lights. The line of cars behind me was a quarter of a mile long.
I'm in a red panel truck with Medina Grocery painted on the sides. Everyone knows where it's from. Finally, at the next green, I gave that thing all the gas, popped the clutch and squealed the tires of the Medina Grocery truck for about a block up the hill. I was now an expert stick shift driver.
I didn't know anything about stick shifts and clutches and how they worked. I'm not even sure if I understand them now, and I drive a six speed stick shift in my truck. The nice thing is, I don't have to be worried about being trapped at a light on a hill in Kansas.
But the way I understand it is, when the clutch peddle is pushed in, it releases the transmission's effect on the drive train. Think of the drive train as a spinning plate. The clutch pads are on both sides of that spinning plate. When you push in the clutch peddle, the two clutch pads get pushed away from the spinning plate. Put the drive train in gear, or change gears. Then let your foot up slowly on the clutch peddle, easing the two pads back on to that spinning plate.
If you let up quickly on the clutch peddle, the pads grab too quickly and violently on the drive plate and the engine dies. That's what I was doing in the Medina Grocery truck.
So it's a two step process with the clutch. It's letting go. And then easing back on. Letting go. And easing on. In learning to drive a stick shift using a clutch, (and I'm not teaching anybody, so don't get any ideas) the hardest part is the easing back on. Letting go is easy. You just push on the clutch peddle. Simple. It's the easing back on to the source of power that's the toughest part to learn.
It's the opposite in life. In life, the letting go is the hardest part. The releasing. The pushing back from. The changing. The divorcing. The teenager driving on their own for the first time. Or, the child going off to college. The retiring. The misheld expectations or assumptions. The dying. It's that hand opening release on the power that drives our life that is the hardest.
Ranier Marie Rilke has the poem:
We need, in love, to practice only this:
letting go.
For holding on
comes easily: we do not need to learn it.
Animals have it easy. They run on instincts. They gather food. They find a mate. They make babies and take care of those babies. They defend their turf, nests and territory as best they can. The live, they die. They eat or get eaten. Certainly they deal with resistance, pain, and struggle. But they do all that on an unthinking, instinctual level.
But humans. We do most of the same things. But along with all that comes self-reflection. Self-awareness. Along with that comes blame, guilt, self-pity, worry, and resentment. Both animals and humans have memory, but memory works different for us. Our memory can be used to inflict emotional pain on ourselves. Our memory serves to hold on to certain recollections that do nothing more than make us feel bad about ourselves. We just can't or won't push the clutch peddle in and release those things, so we can change gears and move forward differently.
That's why I like these verses in Ecclesiastes, made popular in the song, "Turn, Turn, Turn" by the Byrds back in the '60's.
For everything there is a season,
a time for every matter under heaven:
...a time to gather stones together,
and a time to cast away stones;
a time to embrace,
and a time to refrain from embracing;
a time to seek,
and a time to lose;
a time to keep,
and a time to cast away...
I like the back and forth in this poetry. It's like the motion of working the clutch. There is the pushing in of the clutch--the releasing, the freeing, the letting go. And there is the easing back out the clutch, the easing into new ways to grab hold of, to live and move through this life. There's a rhythm to this letting go, and easing back into a hand hold.
The problem is that we humans want to grab and hold on as much as we can. We don't like having to do the other: the letting go. Think of all the grasping and grabbing that happens: Our country as number one in the world and the force that needs to be exerted with which we uphold that status. Holding on to our standard of living which, in order to do so, creates economic exploitation, greed and over-consumption.
When suffering or sick, the fear that comes with illness causes us to hold on to health or life--and certainly that is a good thing to do. We don't want to give up and let go every time we have a cold, or face some kind of illness (or heart condition).
When facing death our cultures whole stance is death-denying, in an attempt to hold on to that last breath. Everyone around the dying person plays a part in that conspiracy of denial, which makes it all the more difficult for the dying person to let go.
We want, as the poem in Ecclesiastes states, the gathering, the embracing, the seeking, the keeping. It's much harder to open up and allow the casting away, the refraining from embracing, the losing, and the casting away.
There are some paradox's to the act of letting go. One woman I dealt with a number of years ago just couldn't relax. We talked about different relaxation techniques, but try as she may, she couldn't get there. What I discovered, in dealing with her, is that trying doesn't produce relaxation. Trying is just another form of the energy of control. If she controlled all the facets of her relaxation techniques, then it should work, right? But just the opposite happened. The more she tried to relax, the less relaxed she became. Especially when what she tried didn't work.
The paradox was that in order to relax she had to let go of trying to relax. She had to let go of her sense of control over her relaxation. Relaxation was only going to come by just letting go.
The more controlling we are, the more grasping we are, the more we become unyielding and unopen. In one of the monasteries I was in, there was a beautiful chant the monks recited. It was in Latin, and is much more beautiful in Latin, but the English translation is:
Come Holy Spirit
Bend what is rigid in us,
Melt what is frozen.
I really loved that chant, because it reminded me that the more rigid and frozen we are, the less yielding we are to God's Spirit, and God's work in our lives. The more we are unwilling to open ourselves up and let go, the more we try to be in control, the less we will simply relax into the Spirit of God.
Yielding and opening up to God has the element of allowing in it. As we let go, and yield ourselves to God and God's Spirit, that means we are allowing that to happen. We have an attitude of receptivity, rather than grasping. You can only receive something, if your hands were already full, by opening your hands up and letting go of what we are holding on to so tightly.
Yielding to God means allowing ourselves to take God as God presents God's self to us, and to take life as God presents life to us, rather than trying to control our experiences with God, and everything else about our lives. Yielding and allowing means embracing God as God is, not as we think God and life should go.
And then a huge part of this yielding and relaxing into God means trusting that God is at work in the letting go. If we are experiencing too much stress and strain in life, it may be a sign or signal that, when we should be yielding, it has degenerated into control.
In one of the silent retreats I was on, the monk instructed us to think about this question: "How do you practice with the Cross?" I thought, That's a really weird question. But of course I couldn't say that because it was a silent retreat.
But the more I thought about it, I realized it's an awesome question. The Cross is the prime instance of yielding, letting go, and total relaxing into God. It is the trusting and confident abandonment of self into God. Without the Cross, we lose touch with our understanding, capacity, and need to yield before God.
And in that yielding is an expression of the deepest love. Love is precisely a yielding--a letting go of a space we have filled with self, and once emptied, we can then invite and receive the beloved into that space. That is the kind of self-emptying, letting-go-love of Christ on the Cross.
One woman, whose young child had died, said, "My heart is broken, but it is broken open..." That's a beautiful expression of allowing God, when we have been hurt deeply, and our empty places are filled with pain, to break that space open, so the pain can go, and the love of God can fill that emptiness. To clutch the pain, to grasp for it, to hold it in, will never allow us to be open and yielding to the loving God who wants to come to us with compassion.
That Medina Grocery delivery truck and I became friends after a while. I learned the rhythm of totally releasing, and then easing into the grabbing hold of the power drive. But I had to release first, totally let go, before I could then reaccess the power. As I said, that's the hard part for us--releasing, yielding, and letting go. Releasing is the only first step in going forward, and going smoother.
Ecclesiastes 3:5-6
Ever had to teach someone how to drive a stick shift? Like a family member? It's one of those things you should never do for a family member. It's similar to wallpapering with your spouse. You just don't do it. It does not enhance marital bliss. Teaching your child how to drive a stick shift does not create a fun bonding time.
Nobody taught me how to drive a stick shift. In our white bread, suburban neighborhood there was one little grocery store. My next door neighbor owned it. Medina Grocery. I started working there when I was 12 or 13. I continued working there through my first year of college.
I started out as a stock boy and a bag boy, carrying groceries out for all the characters that came into that little, oil wood floor store. People didn't come in just to get groceries. They came in for the experience. For the conversations around the produce section, or a cup of eggnog in the back room. Eggnog that had extra ingredients.
Medina Grocery also had a home delivery service. People would call in their orders. I'd get a grocery cart and get all their list of stuff off the shelves, and put it in a box on the back table. Write their name on the outside of the box. Organize the table filled with boxes for the delivery guy, in the order he'd be delivering them.
The delivery truck was an old Dodge panel job. Fire engine red. Medina Grocery printed on the side with a picture of a cartoonish guy running with a bag of groceries, some of which were flying out of the top of the bag.
By the end of my working tenure there, I was the delivery guy. The first time I was the delivery guy, I wasn't the delivery guy. The regular guy was sick, and John Frost, the owner, asked me if I knew how to drive a stick shift. I said, "Sure." I didn't. That's what I mean when I said no one ever taught me to drive a stick shift. I taught myself on that maiden delivery run. I taught myself out of my own teenaged arrogance and fearlessness.
It was a three-on-the-tree. If you don't know what that is, don't learn. Just stay away from it. You'll be fine.
How many of you have been to Seattle? I'm not sure if you noticed, but it's a rather hilly place. So on my first ever delivery run, driving a three-on-the-tree stick shift, I was going up this hill. There's a stop light a fourth of the way up the hill. I got stopped by the red light.
When the light turned green, I put it in gear, let out the clutch and killed the engine. Did it again. And again. And again, about six or seven times. The light turned yellow, then red. I'm still there. About 10 cars are lined up behind me. I did that through three cycles of green to red lights. The line of cars behind me was a quarter of a mile long.
I'm in a red panel truck with Medina Grocery painted on the sides. Everyone knows where it's from. Finally, at the next green, I gave that thing all the gas, popped the clutch and squealed the tires of the Medina Grocery truck for about a block up the hill. I was now an expert stick shift driver.
I didn't know anything about stick shifts and clutches and how they worked. I'm not even sure if I understand them now, and I drive a six speed stick shift in my truck. The nice thing is, I don't have to be worried about being trapped at a light on a hill in Kansas.
But the way I understand it is, when the clutch peddle is pushed in, it releases the transmission's effect on the drive train. Think of the drive train as a spinning plate. The clutch pads are on both sides of that spinning plate. When you push in the clutch peddle, the two clutch pads get pushed away from the spinning plate. Put the drive train in gear, or change gears. Then let your foot up slowly on the clutch peddle, easing the two pads back on to that spinning plate.
If you let up quickly on the clutch peddle, the pads grab too quickly and violently on the drive plate and the engine dies. That's what I was doing in the Medina Grocery truck.
So it's a two step process with the clutch. It's letting go. And then easing back on. Letting go. And easing on. In learning to drive a stick shift using a clutch, (and I'm not teaching anybody, so don't get any ideas) the hardest part is the easing back on. Letting go is easy. You just push on the clutch peddle. Simple. It's the easing back on to the source of power that's the toughest part to learn.
It's the opposite in life. In life, the letting go is the hardest part. The releasing. The pushing back from. The changing. The divorcing. The teenager driving on their own for the first time. Or, the child going off to college. The retiring. The misheld expectations or assumptions. The dying. It's that hand opening release on the power that drives our life that is the hardest.
Ranier Marie Rilke has the poem:
We need, in love, to practice only this:
letting go.
For holding on
comes easily: we do not need to learn it.
Animals have it easy. They run on instincts. They gather food. They find a mate. They make babies and take care of those babies. They defend their turf, nests and territory as best they can. The live, they die. They eat or get eaten. Certainly they deal with resistance, pain, and struggle. But they do all that on an unthinking, instinctual level.
But humans. We do most of the same things. But along with all that comes self-reflection. Self-awareness. Along with that comes blame, guilt, self-pity, worry, and resentment. Both animals and humans have memory, but memory works different for us. Our memory can be used to inflict emotional pain on ourselves. Our memory serves to hold on to certain recollections that do nothing more than make us feel bad about ourselves. We just can't or won't push the clutch peddle in and release those things, so we can change gears and move forward differently.
That's why I like these verses in Ecclesiastes, made popular in the song, "Turn, Turn, Turn" by the Byrds back in the '60's.
For everything there is a season,
a time for every matter under heaven:
...a time to gather stones together,
and a time to cast away stones;
a time to embrace,
and a time to refrain from embracing;
a time to seek,
and a time to lose;
a time to keep,
and a time to cast away...
I like the back and forth in this poetry. It's like the motion of working the clutch. There is the pushing in of the clutch--the releasing, the freeing, the letting go. And there is the easing back out the clutch, the easing into new ways to grab hold of, to live and move through this life. There's a rhythm to this letting go, and easing back into a hand hold.
The problem is that we humans want to grab and hold on as much as we can. We don't like having to do the other: the letting go. Think of all the grasping and grabbing that happens: Our country as number one in the world and the force that needs to be exerted with which we uphold that status. Holding on to our standard of living which, in order to do so, creates economic exploitation, greed and over-consumption.
When suffering or sick, the fear that comes with illness causes us to hold on to health or life--and certainly that is a good thing to do. We don't want to give up and let go every time we have a cold, or face some kind of illness (or heart condition).
When facing death our cultures whole stance is death-denying, in an attempt to hold on to that last breath. Everyone around the dying person plays a part in that conspiracy of denial, which makes it all the more difficult for the dying person to let go.
We want, as the poem in Ecclesiastes states, the gathering, the embracing, the seeking, the keeping. It's much harder to open up and allow the casting away, the refraining from embracing, the losing, and the casting away.
There are some paradox's to the act of letting go. One woman I dealt with a number of years ago just couldn't relax. We talked about different relaxation techniques, but try as she may, she couldn't get there. What I discovered, in dealing with her, is that trying doesn't produce relaxation. Trying is just another form of the energy of control. If she controlled all the facets of her relaxation techniques, then it should work, right? But just the opposite happened. The more she tried to relax, the less relaxed she became. Especially when what she tried didn't work.
The paradox was that in order to relax she had to let go of trying to relax. She had to let go of her sense of control over her relaxation. Relaxation was only going to come by just letting go.
The more controlling we are, the more grasping we are, the more we become unyielding and unopen. In one of the monasteries I was in, there was a beautiful chant the monks recited. It was in Latin, and is much more beautiful in Latin, but the English translation is:
Come Holy Spirit
Bend what is rigid in us,
Melt what is frozen.
I really loved that chant, because it reminded me that the more rigid and frozen we are, the less yielding we are to God's Spirit, and God's work in our lives. The more we are unwilling to open ourselves up and let go, the more we try to be in control, the less we will simply relax into the Spirit of God.
Yielding and opening up to God has the element of allowing in it. As we let go, and yield ourselves to God and God's Spirit, that means we are allowing that to happen. We have an attitude of receptivity, rather than grasping. You can only receive something, if your hands were already full, by opening your hands up and letting go of what we are holding on to so tightly.
Yielding to God means allowing ourselves to take God as God presents God's self to us, and to take life as God presents life to us, rather than trying to control our experiences with God, and everything else about our lives. Yielding and allowing means embracing God as God is, not as we think God and life should go.
And then a huge part of this yielding and relaxing into God means trusting that God is at work in the letting go. If we are experiencing too much stress and strain in life, it may be a sign or signal that, when we should be yielding, it has degenerated into control.
In one of the silent retreats I was on, the monk instructed us to think about this question: "How do you practice with the Cross?" I thought, That's a really weird question. But of course I couldn't say that because it was a silent retreat.
But the more I thought about it, I realized it's an awesome question. The Cross is the prime instance of yielding, letting go, and total relaxing into God. It is the trusting and confident abandonment of self into God. Without the Cross, we lose touch with our understanding, capacity, and need to yield before God.
And in that yielding is an expression of the deepest love. Love is precisely a yielding--a letting go of a space we have filled with self, and once emptied, we can then invite and receive the beloved into that space. That is the kind of self-emptying, letting-go-love of Christ on the Cross.
One woman, whose young child had died, said, "My heart is broken, but it is broken open..." That's a beautiful expression of allowing God, when we have been hurt deeply, and our empty places are filled with pain, to break that space open, so the pain can go, and the love of God can fill that emptiness. To clutch the pain, to grasp for it, to hold it in, will never allow us to be open and yielding to the loving God who wants to come to us with compassion.
That Medina Grocery delivery truck and I became friends after a while. I learned the rhythm of totally releasing, and then easing into the grabbing hold of the power drive. But I had to release first, totally let go, before I could then reaccess the power. As I said, that's the hard part for us--releasing, yielding, and letting go. Releasing is the only first step in going forward, and going smoother.
Sunday, July 14, 2013
Two Important Questions
"Two Important Questions"
Genesis 1:1, 31-2:1
Psalm 24:1-2
Genesis 1:1, 31-2:1
Psalm 24:1-2
The earth is in disaster mode. It isn’t because the earth itself is a disaster. It is because humans are making it so. Global warming, caused by our industrialization, driven by burning fossil fuels, is resulting in dramatic climate change, the destruction of the ozone, the near total melting of polar ice caps, and more, has pretty much put us past the tipping point.
My son, whose specialization is sustainability, who has a brain that sees the big picture of all the interrelatedness of what’s going on, who researches a huge number of reports from disparate sources, summed up our state of affairs in a conversation I had with him recently with the statement, “We’re screwed.”
From floating islands of garbage the size of Delaware out on the Atlantic Ocean, to deforestation in South America, to China and the United States gobbling up a huge majority of the worlds natural resources, to the internal combustion engine that propels all of our vehicles, to the coal fired plants that provide our electricity, and more, all adds up to a catastrophic mess.
Sustainability experts talk about the “tipping point”. It’s like when it snows, and the tiny, individual snowflakes begin to pile up on a branch. Thicker and thicker they accumulate. Until finally, one too many alights on the pile, and the branch breaks. That’s the tipping point. Too many negative effects pile up on the earth, until one too many begins the process of a broken world, and it’s too late to make it right. The world, like Humpty Dumpty is having a great fall, and all the kings men and all the kings horses can’t put Humpty Dumpty together again.
In the book, Limits To Growth, about the world over-population problem--that feeds into all the other problems I’ve listed so far--the authors use the illustration of a farm pond. The farm pond has lily pad plants growing on it. The lily pads double their coverage of the pond every day. So, on what day does the farmer need to clear the lily pads if she doesn’t want her pond totally covered? The answer is the day the pond is half covered. But if the farmer looks at her pond, without thinking about the doubling rate of growth, she will think, “Oh, half the pond is still clear; I have plenty of time.”
It’s called, the exponential growth of disaster. Or, as I have mentioned, the tipping point. We’ve gotten our selves and our world in an inescapable mess. The pond has already been half covered and we are in the next 24 hour period, so-to-speak, when the ecological disasters will fully take over our earth.
How did we get to this point? A large part of it, for me, has to do with the answer to a couple of questions. They are primary questions that arise out of the first verses of the Bible. They are questions that form the foundation of one of the most important themes in scripture. We can’t avoid these questions. These two questions are asked of us continually by scripture. The problem is, if we answer these questions wrong, everything else in our lives--including our relationship to the world--will end up in a mess. So the answers to these questions will determine the wellness or disaster of our personal and global life.
The first question is (drum roll, please): To whom does all this belong? “All this” includes you. To whom does the earth and all in it belong? It’s a question of ownership. Like I mentioned, if you answer this question wrong, everything else will go wrong. Not only ourselves, but the earth will suffer. And suffer it has, which lets you know humanity has been getting the answer to this question wrong for a long time.
The right answer is that humans do not own the world, or any part of it--especially ourselves. As the opening to Psalm 24 states (as in the rest of the Bible):
The earth and everything on it
belong to the Lord.
The world and its people
belong to God. (CEV)
There are a couple of words in both Hebrew and Greek for our word “everything” or “all.” There is a separate word if I was talking about all of you in this sanctuary. But there’s another word that is used as a universal all, meaning all people everywhere and at every time. That is the word used here--the universal “everything” that encompasses literally everything. Everything belongs to the Lord.
So, it comes down to what I call theological math. If everything in the world, including every person in the world, belongs to God, what else can belong to us? It’s pretty simple math. God has ownership over EVERYTHING. That leaves NOTHING for our ownership.
Ownership implies power and control. That’s why we like ownership. When you think about it, a great deal of our human laws hold up the concept and rights of ownership, especially land ownership. But in the law of the Bible, the 25th chapter of Leviticus, for example, underscores what God thinks about land ownership: “The land is mine; with me you are but sojourners and tenants” (vs. 23).
If there is nothing in this world that is ours, but everything is God’s, then that changes us from owners to tenants. We have been given everything we have, by God the owner, to take care of it for God and on God’s behalf. If we thought we were owners, then we also mistakenly thought we only have to answer to ourselves about what we think we own. But if we own nothing, and we are only caretakers for God, the real owner, we have to answer to God for what we do with what is Gods.
This correct, Biblical perspective changes everything in terms of how we interact with the world--that is not ours. Think of what that means. If God owns everything, and everything is God’s, how we treat everything is making a statement of what we think about God and God’s ownership. To abuse the world, to fill it with toxicity, to lay it waste, to trash it, to erase it’s protective abilities to sustain all life, is to say to God, “I don’t care a twit about your ownership of this planet, and therefore I don’t care a twit about you.”
The other danger is to claim ownership, which gives people the false sense of power and control over what they think they own, and therefore do as they please with it. That attitude sends the same message to God: “You, God, don’t factor in at all with what I’m doing and the decisions I’m making with what I think is mine.” You have no say, God, because I own it!”
So the destruction we have wrought upon nature and the world and each other and ourselves is not just bad stewardship. It isn’t just stupid economics. It is the most horrid of blasphemies. It is flinging God’s gifts, owned by God, into God’s face, as if they were of no worth beyond our own self-acclaimed power to destroy them. Dante and other Christian thinkers have been unanimous that “despising Nature and her goodness was a violence against God.”
The awful question then becomes, how can modern Christians have so solemnly folded their hands while so much of the work of God was and is being destroyed? And further, not only how have we just sat by with folded hands, but how have our hands been complicit in claiming ownership, and by that claim, do what we want with God’s world?
All this leads to our second big question. Remember I said there were two important questions--it’s in the title of this message anyway. It’s a very similar question to the first. It is: Whose story are we really living? If we can yank ourselves from the mistaken notion that we own anything in this world, and give in to the truth that total ownership belongs to God, then what does that say about how we live? What does that say about the decisions we make about our lives? What does that say about the story we are living? Is it our story, or does even our story belong to God?
It becomes just as huge a question as the first (To whom does the world belong?) If that first question shocks us awake, then the second tandem question should do the same: What sort of life story would be the most responsible in a world that is totally God’s? What is, then, the life of a tenant and not an owner in this world?
I hope you’re beginning to get a glimpse of how radically different life would be, in answer to these two questions, not only in your individual life story, but in how we treat God’s world. Can you get a glimpse of how messed up we are, and how far we have strayed from anything God intended and designed?
How are we going to stand before God and give any kind of plausible answer to his two questions, when we, and all those others in the world are living by destroying God’s world, and who see the murder of Creation as an OK way to live? How can we even lift our heads to God’s gaze, as God looks at a world that God, at creation, called entirely good, but we have taken that goodness, by our own sinful grasping at ownership, in order to pollute it entirely and destroy it piecemeal?
The creation destroying machinery of the industrial economy has been instrumental in making legitimate this form of blasphemy before God and God’s good world. In it’s stance before the world, this creation destroying machinery, fueled by our misguided sense of ownership, and the lostness of our personal story, has treated neither God nor God’s world with the respect the true Owner deserves. There is no awe, reverence or cherishing in such machinery leveled at God and God’s world. There is only a sinful show of contempt.
I confess, I’m more cynical than I used to be, in relation to a few things. One of those is hope about the world. That is, my hope in people to turn around and quit raping God’s creation. On a macro level, it’s never going to happen. That is, unless God turns his world loose on humanity, wiping most of us away and starting again.
My hope still remains, though, on a micro level. On a personal level. I think we can make major turn-arounds in terms of our individual life story, to live in a way that honors God’s ownership of all we have; to live into a story that is God’s story and not our own; to live responsibly as stewards and tenants in God’s world, in the location we find ourselves. That would give honor to God, and end the life of blasphemy. It would give us the confidence to stand before God both now and in the end, and be able to say: “Here is what you gave me, Lord; I give it all back to you cared for, cherished, and whole.”
Monday, July 8, 2013
The Laughing Donkey
"The Laughing Donkey"
Genesis 21:5-7
Psalm 126
I wanted to put last week's sermon and this week's sermon together as bookends. Last Sunday's sermon was about revenge, and turning our desire for sweet vengeance over to God. It's an immensely difficult task to let God handle our lip smacking revenge. We pray for vengeance, but then we want God to allow us to be the answer to our own prayer, and exact those just desserts upon those who have hurt us, humiliated us, or taken advantage of us. We're even unsure we want to turn our retribution over to the "justice system" and the courts, lest they not do what really needs to be done--in our eyes.
So, today, we will look at another Psalm that is the result of doing what God wants in terms of our vengeance--letting God handle it. If we can do that. If we can, with trembling hands and bitten lips, turn our ideas and desire for retribution over to God, Psalm 126 is what will happen--what God will do.
Psalm 126 is in a cluster of Psalms, called "songs of ascent." They range from Psalm 120 to Psalm 134. Each of these Psalms is a processional Psalm: that is, it's sung or shouted as a group of people walk along in parade fashion.
From the title, "song of ascent" you can figure out that the people are parading up. They are ascending. The place the people are ascending to is the temple on the hill upon which Jerusalem is built. The people, on high festival days, would start at the bottom of the hill, down near the garbage dump of Jerusalem. They would start marching up the hill, singing or shouting Psalm 120. As they ascended, they would take each of these 15 Psalms in order, and sing them as they paraded up to the temple.
Once they arrived at the Temple, the doors would be closed, and the High Priest would be standing in front of the doors. The people would sing Psalm 134, and the Priest would swing the doors open and the people would process in. It was all quite dramatic.
Eugene Peterson calls these Psalms, "Pilgrim Psalms," because they are about movement. The Psalms of Ascent are about people going someplace--towards God, towards the presence of God. These Psalms are about a faith journey, enacted by a long processional, uphill, with singing, all by a large group of fellow worshippers.
William Faulkner, in writing about these Psalms, wrote: "They are not monuments but footprints. A monument only says, 'At least I got this far.' While a footprint says, 'This is where I was when I moved again.'"
Psalm 126, the Psalm we're looking at this morning, served as a pause. At this point the people would have been almost half way up the hill in their parade. They would be able to see from whence they came, and how far they yet had to go.
A number of years ago, I went to something called, "Pause For A Purpose," out at Azusa Pacific University in Southern California. It was the year before Ryan, Kristin and I ended up moving out to California. And Azusa Pacific ended up being where Kristin went to College.
We were living in Nebraska at the time, and The Lord was preparing the three of us for a move. Ryan and Kristin were going to be going out to California to college. What was I going to do? Where was I going? What shape would the ministry take for me in the future? I had a desire to do something entirely different than what I had been doing.
So, during this three day conference, "Pause For A Purpose," I did just that. I removed myself from my ministry in Hickman, Nebraska and paused for a purpose. Just a short pause, in the company of many other Christians who were doing the same thing, simply stopping from their everyday life, and taking some intentional time to reflect about past, present and future. To stop, if just for a short time, to still all other voices, and listen intently for God's voice. It was a Psalm 126 time for me.
In just those three days I was able to do some assessment. I pondered the scenery of where I've come from--the places where I've been, and what happened in each of those places. I was able to gain perspective of how far I've actually come.
And in that Pause For A Purpose, I was able to celebrate in worship with other believers, not my own progress, but what God has done to get us all where we were at the time. To look back, from this present moment, and see God--celebrate God's acts of salvation and grace. All of that looking back, gave fresh energy to where I felt God was leading, based on where I had been. I returned to Nebraska, ready to make new decisions, and move forward, simply because of my Psalm 126 pause in the middle of my journey.
Much of the message of Psalm 126 is in the details. For example, pay attention to the verb tenses in this Psalm. This Psalm is not just one of many creating movement, but there is movement within the Psalm itself from past to present to future.
Verses 1-3 are in the past tense: God returned Zion's exiles...we laughed, we sang. This is a Psalm that is the flip side of last weeks Psalm. In last weeks Psalm, we heard the depression and anger of a people who had been taken away as captives to the Babylonians. Children and old people were ruthlessly slaughtered. Past and future of a culture seemed gone. Revenge seemed the only response.
But 70 years later, Cyrus the Persian, with his steam-rolling armies flattened the Babylonians. Cyrus issued an edict freeing all Babylonian slaves. The Israelites who were still alive, and still remembered Jerusalem, were allowed to go home. God had indeed, through Cyrus and his armies, inflicted the revenge the Israelites prayed for through last weeks Psalm.
So Psalm 126, sung during the processional up the hill, is a symbolic looking back at a terrible time in a history of a people, when they experienced total disruption and destruction. Trusting God with their desire for retribution, God came through. And it is to God that the processing people give the glory: "God returned the exiles," "the LORD has done great things for us."
At the end of verse three, the tense shifts to the present tense: "we are glad." Looking back during this pause, halfway up the hill, remembering the past, makes the people feel gladness right now.
Present joy and laughter can't be separated from a past full of exile, drought, tears, even Crucifixion. The present tense, the present moment, acts as a scenic overlook, that creates awe and wonder and most of all joy, in the present. Joy and laughter lives in the present, but that present is bordered on one side by memory of God's saving action in the past; and on the other by hope in the future--God's future, just as the past had been God's past.
Then verses 4-6 make the shift into the future tense: will shout hurrahs...will come home with laughing. The midway pause has served to create anticipation for what God is going to do. If this is the way God acted in the past, do we have any reason to believe the Lord will change his way of acting in the future? NO! As in the Message translation, the future tense is signaled by laughing phrase, "And now, GOD, do it again!..."
The metaphors used to describe God's future are powerful. Rain and streams in the Negeb, a southern desert in Israel. A sudden, unexpected outpouring of rain that is able to transform the landscape. I read this week that Death Valley has had record high temperatures: 129 degrees! Idiots are driving out there to get their picture by the large digital thermometer they have there. But I remember a few years ago when record rainfalls were recorded in Death Valley in the Spring. Wildflowers that hadn't bloomed in decades were like explosions of color on the hillsides and floor of Death Valley. People were traveling from all over the world to witness this exceptionally rare event.
That's the powerful image Psalm 126 is picturing about God's future activity--God's grace and life, suddenly, beautifully, powerfully transforming the landscape of beaten down people's lives.
The other image of God's future in Psalm 126, is that of farming. It seems to me, now that I've lived around farming operations most of my ministry, that cropland is a place of intention and expectation. All the farmers I know plant in hope. Whether they are planting into dust or mud, whether they are planting after a harvest of tears, either from hail or drought, even though they may plant with tears in their eyes, there is still the expectation that this year will be different. The hope of a good harvest.
The Hebrew term that is translated, "he that goes forth weeping" literally means to go to-and-fro. With a sense of aimlessness. Of not knowing exactly what you're doing, or why you're doing it, but you're doing it anyway. Even then, says Psalm 126, we plant in God's future, under God's sight, in God's story.
Notice the emphasis on the swing of the people's disposition in God's future: from sowing in tears to reaping with joy; from weeping to laughing; from being heavily laden to singing for joy while carrying a different kind of load in God's abundant harvest.
The future of God is filled with laughter. Frederick Buechner wrote a new beatitude that has to do with living into God future, of recognizing and laughing about the power of God to break the chains that imprison us. Buechner wrote, "Blessed are they who get the joke."
God's hilarity delights in life, and freedom, and grace. God delights in making us laugh about life, even after we've just cried. When we least expect it, especially in the face of difficulty and despair. God's hilarity confronts and confounds the powers that be. God's hilarious grace is God's favorite modus operendi for breaking through the barriers that have either been constructed around us, or that we ourselves construct around ourselves.
We never know, either, when God's hilarious future will infect us with laughter. We never know exactly where to look. In a Bill Moyers TV special called, "The Urge To Create," Moyers was told by one of the artists, "If you know what you're looking for, you will never see what you do not expect to find." I think it's a great statement of how God's laughter comes in our dry and desperate lives. If we "know" how God will appear in our lives, we will never see or experience God in unexpected times, places, or guises.
One of the best illustrations of this is a painting by Renaissance painter, Piero della Francesca, titled, "The Nativity."
The infant Jesus is laying on the ground, cushioned by a part of Mary's long dress. She is dressed elegantly, with every hair in place as if she's come not just from childbirth, but the beauty salon.
Five angels dressed in Renaissance garb are standing over the babe, carefully grouped together, singing quietly accompanied by lutes. They are standing in perfect choral formation.
In the background are the men, solemn and removed. Joseph is seated, turned away from Mary and the Christ-child, staring off in the distance. Two shepherds are at his side, one with fingers pointing to heaven, just in case we don't quite get what's going on here.
The terrain is bleak and austere--desert-like. The little shelter looks like it has holes in the roof, and why are Mary and the newborn baby Jesus outside of the shelter, exposed to the elements?
All the elements in the painting are tightly controlled. That is, all except one. In the very back, peeking out over the shoulder of an angel is a donkey. With its head thrown back, mouth wide open, teeth gleaming, it brays in laughter, freely, gloriously.
In all this order, Piero, has for me, painted a great picture of the unexpected incursion of the laughter of God, depicted by the laughing donkey. It is the hilarity of God, that pushes its way into our seemingly mundane, orderly (or disordered) and serious lives.
It is only at the points in our lives when we pause, and take a look around us, how everything seems to be so serious, so solemn, trying to bring order out of disorder, looking back at an aimless, wandering past, and looking forward to an unknown future, only in those times of pause--a Psalm 126 time--do we see the laughing donkey of God. Over and over, God breaks through with a glorious bray and a grace-filled laugh.
If we can pause, catch a glimpse of and the sound of God's laughter, and most importantly, join God in that belly laugh, we will be able to move into the future--God's future--much lighter for the remainder of the journey, until we meet The Lord of laughter at last.
Genesis 21:5-7
Psalm 126
I wanted to put last week's sermon and this week's sermon together as bookends. Last Sunday's sermon was about revenge, and turning our desire for sweet vengeance over to God. It's an immensely difficult task to let God handle our lip smacking revenge. We pray for vengeance, but then we want God to allow us to be the answer to our own prayer, and exact those just desserts upon those who have hurt us, humiliated us, or taken advantage of us. We're even unsure we want to turn our retribution over to the "justice system" and the courts, lest they not do what really needs to be done--in our eyes.
So, today, we will look at another Psalm that is the result of doing what God wants in terms of our vengeance--letting God handle it. If we can do that. If we can, with trembling hands and bitten lips, turn our ideas and desire for retribution over to God, Psalm 126 is what will happen--what God will do.
Psalm 126 is in a cluster of Psalms, called "songs of ascent." They range from Psalm 120 to Psalm 134. Each of these Psalms is a processional Psalm: that is, it's sung or shouted as a group of people walk along in parade fashion.
From the title, "song of ascent" you can figure out that the people are parading up. They are ascending. The place the people are ascending to is the temple on the hill upon which Jerusalem is built. The people, on high festival days, would start at the bottom of the hill, down near the garbage dump of Jerusalem. They would start marching up the hill, singing or shouting Psalm 120. As they ascended, they would take each of these 15 Psalms in order, and sing them as they paraded up to the temple.
Once they arrived at the Temple, the doors would be closed, and the High Priest would be standing in front of the doors. The people would sing Psalm 134, and the Priest would swing the doors open and the people would process in. It was all quite dramatic.
Eugene Peterson calls these Psalms, "Pilgrim Psalms," because they are about movement. The Psalms of Ascent are about people going someplace--towards God, towards the presence of God. These Psalms are about a faith journey, enacted by a long processional, uphill, with singing, all by a large group of fellow worshippers.
William Faulkner, in writing about these Psalms, wrote: "They are not monuments but footprints. A monument only says, 'At least I got this far.' While a footprint says, 'This is where I was when I moved again.'"
Psalm 126, the Psalm we're looking at this morning, served as a pause. At this point the people would have been almost half way up the hill in their parade. They would be able to see from whence they came, and how far they yet had to go.
A number of years ago, I went to something called, "Pause For A Purpose," out at Azusa Pacific University in Southern California. It was the year before Ryan, Kristin and I ended up moving out to California. And Azusa Pacific ended up being where Kristin went to College.
We were living in Nebraska at the time, and The Lord was preparing the three of us for a move. Ryan and Kristin were going to be going out to California to college. What was I going to do? Where was I going? What shape would the ministry take for me in the future? I had a desire to do something entirely different than what I had been doing.
So, during this three day conference, "Pause For A Purpose," I did just that. I removed myself from my ministry in Hickman, Nebraska and paused for a purpose. Just a short pause, in the company of many other Christians who were doing the same thing, simply stopping from their everyday life, and taking some intentional time to reflect about past, present and future. To stop, if just for a short time, to still all other voices, and listen intently for God's voice. It was a Psalm 126 time for me.
In just those three days I was able to do some assessment. I pondered the scenery of where I've come from--the places where I've been, and what happened in each of those places. I was able to gain perspective of how far I've actually come.
And in that Pause For A Purpose, I was able to celebrate in worship with other believers, not my own progress, but what God has done to get us all where we were at the time. To look back, from this present moment, and see God--celebrate God's acts of salvation and grace. All of that looking back, gave fresh energy to where I felt God was leading, based on where I had been. I returned to Nebraska, ready to make new decisions, and move forward, simply because of my Psalm 126 pause in the middle of my journey.
Much of the message of Psalm 126 is in the details. For example, pay attention to the verb tenses in this Psalm. This Psalm is not just one of many creating movement, but there is movement within the Psalm itself from past to present to future.
Verses 1-3 are in the past tense: God returned Zion's exiles...we laughed, we sang. This is a Psalm that is the flip side of last weeks Psalm. In last weeks Psalm, we heard the depression and anger of a people who had been taken away as captives to the Babylonians. Children and old people were ruthlessly slaughtered. Past and future of a culture seemed gone. Revenge seemed the only response.
But 70 years later, Cyrus the Persian, with his steam-rolling armies flattened the Babylonians. Cyrus issued an edict freeing all Babylonian slaves. The Israelites who were still alive, and still remembered Jerusalem, were allowed to go home. God had indeed, through Cyrus and his armies, inflicted the revenge the Israelites prayed for through last weeks Psalm.
So Psalm 126, sung during the processional up the hill, is a symbolic looking back at a terrible time in a history of a people, when they experienced total disruption and destruction. Trusting God with their desire for retribution, God came through. And it is to God that the processing people give the glory: "God returned the exiles," "the LORD has done great things for us."
At the end of verse three, the tense shifts to the present tense: "we are glad." Looking back during this pause, halfway up the hill, remembering the past, makes the people feel gladness right now.
Present joy and laughter can't be separated from a past full of exile, drought, tears, even Crucifixion. The present tense, the present moment, acts as a scenic overlook, that creates awe and wonder and most of all joy, in the present. Joy and laughter lives in the present, but that present is bordered on one side by memory of God's saving action in the past; and on the other by hope in the future--God's future, just as the past had been God's past.
Then verses 4-6 make the shift into the future tense: will shout hurrahs...will come home with laughing. The midway pause has served to create anticipation for what God is going to do. If this is the way God acted in the past, do we have any reason to believe the Lord will change his way of acting in the future? NO! As in the Message translation, the future tense is signaled by laughing phrase, "And now, GOD, do it again!..."
The metaphors used to describe God's future are powerful. Rain and streams in the Negeb, a southern desert in Israel. A sudden, unexpected outpouring of rain that is able to transform the landscape. I read this week that Death Valley has had record high temperatures: 129 degrees! Idiots are driving out there to get their picture by the large digital thermometer they have there. But I remember a few years ago when record rainfalls were recorded in Death Valley in the Spring. Wildflowers that hadn't bloomed in decades were like explosions of color on the hillsides and floor of Death Valley. People were traveling from all over the world to witness this exceptionally rare event.
That's the powerful image Psalm 126 is picturing about God's future activity--God's grace and life, suddenly, beautifully, powerfully transforming the landscape of beaten down people's lives.
The other image of God's future in Psalm 126, is that of farming. It seems to me, now that I've lived around farming operations most of my ministry, that cropland is a place of intention and expectation. All the farmers I know plant in hope. Whether they are planting into dust or mud, whether they are planting after a harvest of tears, either from hail or drought, even though they may plant with tears in their eyes, there is still the expectation that this year will be different. The hope of a good harvest.
The Hebrew term that is translated, "he that goes forth weeping" literally means to go to-and-fro. With a sense of aimlessness. Of not knowing exactly what you're doing, or why you're doing it, but you're doing it anyway. Even then, says Psalm 126, we plant in God's future, under God's sight, in God's story.
Notice the emphasis on the swing of the people's disposition in God's future: from sowing in tears to reaping with joy; from weeping to laughing; from being heavily laden to singing for joy while carrying a different kind of load in God's abundant harvest.
The future of God is filled with laughter. Frederick Buechner wrote a new beatitude that has to do with living into God future, of recognizing and laughing about the power of God to break the chains that imprison us. Buechner wrote, "Blessed are they who get the joke."
God's hilarity delights in life, and freedom, and grace. God delights in making us laugh about life, even after we've just cried. When we least expect it, especially in the face of difficulty and despair. God's hilarity confronts and confounds the powers that be. God's hilarious grace is God's favorite modus operendi for breaking through the barriers that have either been constructed around us, or that we ourselves construct around ourselves.
We never know, either, when God's hilarious future will infect us with laughter. We never know exactly where to look. In a Bill Moyers TV special called, "The Urge To Create," Moyers was told by one of the artists, "If you know what you're looking for, you will never see what you do not expect to find." I think it's a great statement of how God's laughter comes in our dry and desperate lives. If we "know" how God will appear in our lives, we will never see or experience God in unexpected times, places, or guises.
One of the best illustrations of this is a painting by Renaissance painter, Piero della Francesca, titled, "The Nativity."
The infant Jesus is laying on the ground, cushioned by a part of Mary's long dress. She is dressed elegantly, with every hair in place as if she's come not just from childbirth, but the beauty salon.
Five angels dressed in Renaissance garb are standing over the babe, carefully grouped together, singing quietly accompanied by lutes. They are standing in perfect choral formation.
In the background are the men, solemn and removed. Joseph is seated, turned away from Mary and the Christ-child, staring off in the distance. Two shepherds are at his side, one with fingers pointing to heaven, just in case we don't quite get what's going on here.
The terrain is bleak and austere--desert-like. The little shelter looks like it has holes in the roof, and why are Mary and the newborn baby Jesus outside of the shelter, exposed to the elements?
All the elements in the painting are tightly controlled. That is, all except one. In the very back, peeking out over the shoulder of an angel is a donkey. With its head thrown back, mouth wide open, teeth gleaming, it brays in laughter, freely, gloriously.
In all this order, Piero, has for me, painted a great picture of the unexpected incursion of the laughter of God, depicted by the laughing donkey. It is the hilarity of God, that pushes its way into our seemingly mundane, orderly (or disordered) and serious lives.
It is only at the points in our lives when we pause, and take a look around us, how everything seems to be so serious, so solemn, trying to bring order out of disorder, looking back at an aimless, wandering past, and looking forward to an unknown future, only in those times of pause--a Psalm 126 time--do we see the laughing donkey of God. Over and over, God breaks through with a glorious bray and a grace-filled laugh.
If we can pause, catch a glimpse of and the sound of God's laughter, and most importantly, join God in that belly laugh, we will be able to move into the future--God's future--much lighter for the remainder of the journey, until we meet The Lord of laughter at last.
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