"Working Up An Appetite"
Romans 8:18-28
"Working Up An Appetite"
Romans 8:18-28
Frederick Buechner, Presbyterian minister and author, once wrote about the time he was visiting Rome during Christmas. He went to St. Peter's Cathedral on Christmas Eve to see Pope Pius XII celebrate mass. Buechner described the huge crowd of pilgrims who were there, and the great anticipation that charged the air with holy electricity. Then the Pope was carried in on his golden throne.
This is how Buechner describes his experience:
Through the thick lenses of his glasses his eyes were larger than life, and he peered into my face and into all the faces around me and behind me with a look so keen and so charged that I could not escape the feeling that he must be looking for someone in particular. He was not a potentate nodding and smiling to acknowledge the enthusiasm of the multitudes. He was a man whose face seemed gray with waiting, whose eyes seemed huge and exhausted with searching, for someone, some one, who he thought might be there that night or any night, anywhere, but whom he had never found, and yet he kept looking. Face after face he searched for the face that he knew he would know--was it this one? was it this one? or this one?--and then he passed on out of my sight. It was a powerful moment for me..and I felt that I knew whom he was looking for...that in the teeming mystery of that place he was looking not just for the Christ in our faces but for the Christ himself... (The Hungering Dark, page 115, 118)
I have known people whose gaze was equally intense, whose eyes were also large and worn with their looking. There was a guy in my college dorm like that. John something-or-other; I can't remember his last name. He was a Jesus Freak of the first order. It was the early 1970's. John had been strung out so far on drugs, probably not too many people would have been surprised or concerned when the last thread broke.
But then John saw The Lord. A meeting so powerful, so real, that it almost instantly, and miraculously, regenerated John's brain and his life. He yearned to see The Lord again. Everyday he yearned with deep moans. One day he came up to me and with a mournful ache in his voice, said, "Steve, when's Jesus coming back; I want to see him so badly."
I said, "I don't know, John. I just don't know." He clapped me on the shoulder, nodding his head, and went on, looking--searching--like the Pope was searching for Jesus, for some visible sign of the Lord's presence.
I sometimes wonder what happened to John, and the few people I know like him who have been so anxious to see The Lord. I wonder if they are still looking, if their eyes are still larger than life in their search for the holy.
There aren't too many people who I know, like John, who are so overt in their search. Most people I know live as if there is nothing really holy in life. Most are trying to avoid a face-to-face with Jesus. Most people don't look for Christ himself as they pass their days.
Dwight L. Moody was once asked, "Why are you always talking about your need to be filled with the Holy Spirit?"
Moody replied, "Because I leak."
Most people, I know, leak. They slowly--or quickly--lose their attentiveness to God and to the things of God. There is so much that pokes holes in our attentiveness to God, that obscures our vision to God and to what God is doing. Or there are those who try to redefine God's activity as something else: politics, fate, social reform, psychology.
But the key is our attention--our appetite--for God and for what God is doing in the world. It is in that driving urge to keep our eyes large in search of God and God's activity. God and God's work is all around us. It's happening in spite of us, whether we're paying attention or not.
There was a farmer who was visiting a friend in New York City. As they were walking down one of the avenues, the farmer suddenly turned to his friend and said, "I hear a cricket."
"Oh, you're crazy," his friend replied.
"No; I hear a cricket. I do! I'm sure of it."
"It's the noon hour," his friend replied. "There are wall-to-wall people, cars honking, taxi's squealing around corners, noises all over the place. How can you say you hear a cricket in the midst of all this noise?"
"I'm sure I do." He listened attentively and then walked to the corner, and listened a little more. Finally, near by, he saw a shrub planted in a concrete planter. He brushed at the leaves that had fallen, and there was a cricket.
His friend was astonished. But the farmer said, "My ears are no different than yours. It simply depends on what you are listening for. Here, let me show you what I mean." The farmer reached into his pocket and pulled out a handful of change--and dropped the coins on the sidewalk. Nearly every head turned within a block. "You see what I mean?" he said picking up his coins. "It all depends on what you're listening for."
How do we listen for God? How do we keep our attention for God from leaking out? How do we keep from being distracted by so many other things? How do we keep our eyes large with anticipation, looking for the face of Christ in the many people we see each day? How do we keep our eyesight clear so we know what we are seeing when we see it: the face of Christ at work in our lives and in our world? How do we keep looking and not give up?
The apostle Paul wrote to the Roman Christians that the answer to those kinds of questions was the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit, according to Paul, arouses our appetite for God. The Holy Spirit makes our souls growl with deep hunger for the things of God. When that appetite becomes distracted, or we try to satisfy it with other things, the Holy Spirit keeps the hunger alive.
Have you ever been really thirsty, and it seems you are drinking every kind of liquid refreshment you can think of, but still your thirst persists? Or, when hungry, you stuff yourself with a lot of junk food, and then feel bloated, but you still feel hungry? In fact, if you kept eating the empty calories you'd literally starve to death.
Spiritually, we stuff or drown our God-appetite with that which is not God. We misread the source of our deep hunger. That's why the Holy Spirit is so important--the Holy Spirit keeps us in touch with where our hunger really lies, that it is a hunger for God. It is the role of the Holy Spirit to make us feel our hunger pains for God over and over, until that pain drives us to true satisfaction. The Holy Spirit makes us realize how starved we are, driving us back to the pantry of God's presence.
Hunger pains can hurt when you are really starving. We ache for deliverance from such pains. But we can't be delivered until we realize the folly of our predicament. We can't take care of the cause of the pains until we gain the knowledge of how we wittingly or unwittingly have been starving ourselves of God. The Holy Spirit not only creates the hunger pains, but then gives the knowledge of our folly and then the direction for how to satisfy our hunger for God.
There is one more role that the Holy Spirit takes on, as mentioned by Paul in this chapter of his letter to the Roman Christians. It is the flip side of what I have just been saying. This role of the Holy Spirit has to do with prayer. Paul says that the Holy Spirit interprets our prayers to God, and even when we don't exactly know what to say, the Holy Spirit prays for us.
Probably one of the most troubling disciplines of being a Christian is prayer. How am I supposed to pray? How long should I pray? What should I say? When should I pray? What is prayer, anyway? These kinds of questions seem to have arisen ever since people discovered communication with God was possible--even expected. Paul certainly must have heard such questions from converts in the churches he was establishing.
His response to those questions? "Don't worry about it." Paul saw that that was one of the great roles of the Holy Spirit.
The Holy Spirit does our praying in and for us, making prayer out of our wordless sighs, our aching groans.
A grandfather was passing his granddaughter's room one night and overheard her repeating the alphabet in a very reverent way. "What on earth are you doing?" he asked her.
"I'm saying my prayers," explained the little girl. "But I can't think of exactly the right words tonight, so I'm just saying all the letters. God will put them together for me, because God knows what I'm trying to say."
That little girl, whether she knew it or not, was taking Paul's teaching to heart. "Don't worry about it; the Holy Spirit puts all the letters together and makes it come out just right before God."
Even our groans and sighs are turned into prayer by the Holy Spirit. Did you ever imagine how holy those noises are: **nasal sigh**; **deep breath**; **sigh**; **groan**. All those are prayers! Noises (or individual letters) transformed into prayers by the Holy Spirit.
In this way, the Holy Spirit is keeping us present to God. Our prayers, fashioned by the Holy Spirit to reflect our true selves and needs, are made known to God--brought into the very presence of God.
Now remember I said that this activity of the Holy Spirit is the flip side of the first role? In the first activity of the Holy Spirit, we are having out attention--our appetite--for God, heightened and directed to God. The Holy Spirit is keeping us looking for God and attentive to God.
In the second role, the Holy Spirit is keeping God attentive to us. God is being made to pay attention to us through our prayers that are being brought into God's presence by the Holy Spirit. It's a two way street, and the Holy Spirit is in charge of keeping the traffic of that communication going both ways.
Monday, July 21, 2014
Monday, July 14, 2014
Quit Acting Like A Grown-Up
"Quit Acting Like A Grown-Up!"
Romans 8:12-17
In the 17th century, children were regarded as little adults. Children were made to dress like their parents, were given heavy responsibilities, and were forbidden anything that resembled a plaything.
A historian who has studied 330 portraits of children between the years of 1670 and 1810 discovered that the pictures "contain no distinctive childish artifacts such as toys, children's furniture, or school books. The poses show no signs of play or playfulness. The faces of the children are as solemn as the faces of other adults."
Until the 1800's children weren't even given books at their own reading levels. Juvenile literature hadn't been invented.
Parents in the 17th and 18th centuries often kept their children at a long arms length, in order to keep from creating close relations with their children. Puritan ministers specifically urged parents not to become too close to their children. Many children were sent away to live with other families.
What is wrong with us? What has happened to us? What happens between childhood and adulthood that forces us to grow up too fast? Maybe we've bought into a lie. The lie says, This is an adult world for adults. If that's so, look around you at the world. Look around and see what the grown-ups have done with the world.
A little boy whispered to his father during church, "I have to go potty." So the father took him by the hand and quietly led his boy down the aisle. When they were almost to the back of the church, the little boy turned and shouted, "I'll be right back, God; I just have to go to the potty!"
Now we all laugh. Isn't that cute. How many of you adults would feel uninhibited enough to do that? Why isn't it just as cute for an adult to do such a thing? Well, an adult should know better. It's just not proper. Why is it proper, even cute, for a child to do such a thing? Well, they don't know any better. They haven't learned yet, so it's excusable.
Listen to those words: "...haven't learned yet..." Learned from who? And, learned what? Who gets to decide what's childish and what's adultish? Who gets to decide what's proper and improper for how a grown-up is supposed to act? Think about that. There is no rule book out there that says, This is childish, and, This is not childish. There is no person out there, whom we as society have given the power to decide what it is to act like a child and what it is to act like an adult.
Those messages are hammered into us by grown-ups when we were children. Those grown-ups got those messages from their grown-ups when they were children. And on and on down the line. Apparently at least as far back as the 16th and 17th centuries.
When I was a child, my father would say, repeatedly, "Act like an adult!" "Quit being so childish!" I didn't have the wherewithal to say back to him, "Gee whiz, dad, I'm only 7 years old; can't acting like an adult wait for a few years?"
And when I was being punished, spanked with his belt, he'd say, "Suck it up. Don't cry. Take it like a man." And if I cried I got more of it. (I hope if any of you fathers did that, said that, to your sons, that you--if you haven't already--will go to them and apologize for doing and saying such a thing.) Because I didn't, and your sons didn't have the wherewithal to say back, "Gee whiz, dad, I'm only 7 years old and this hurts like hell; why can't I cry?"
I was so busy trying to live up to my father's adultisms, I never really got to be a kid. So now you can stop wondering why I act like a kid so much. I'm making up for lost time.
When I was at the church up in Hickman, Nebraska, some kids were playing in the church. Their moms were getting things set up for Vacation Bible School. The kids were in and out of my office, grabbing root beer candies, drawing on my whiteboard, typing stuff on my computer while I was trying to write my sermon (I just left the stuff on there that they typed, so it would remind me of that day and what it means to be a kid).
They asked if I'd turn on the microphones in the sanctuary so they could sing. I said, "Sure." I didn't think twice. After a few minutes of their singing, the secretary came storming into my office, and said with a smile on her face, "Why are you letting them do that!? You know why? Because you're just a kid like they are!"
It was one of the best compliments I've ever received. I'm hoping she meant it as such. I am a big kid. I wanna be a big kid. I wanna play and have fun in life. Walt Disney said that he took it as a compliment that people said he had "not quite grown up." So I'm in good company.
A store clerk in a department store saw a young boy standing by the escalator. He seemed fascinated by it. The clerk asked the boy, "Is anything the matter?"
"No," said the boy. "I'm just waiting for my gum to come back."
That's the boy I want to be. I want to see the world as wondrous, where a hand hold on an escalator isn't a hand hold, but an amazing transportation device for my gum. Uninhibited. Unafraid to try something, or do something that others would say is childish.
Look up inhibited in the dictionary. Its definitions could double for the word, adult: restrain, forbid, hinder, suppress, arrest. I don't want to live an inhibited life where I've got to worry about restraining my wonder, forbidding myself from actions that supposedly don't match my age, suppressing myself from taking risks because I'm afraid like an adult, arresting my emotions that God designed into me because someone else says that's the way an adult behaves.
I wanna mess with that adult world. Like the two boys on an airline flight. The two boys were sitting next to each other. This was back in the days when they served meals on the flights, and the tickets were $200 cheaper. The boys got soup for their meal. One of them got an idea. He poured his soup in the airline barf bag. Then he started making noises like he was throwing up. When the stewardess got to him, he was sitting there happily eating the contents of the barf bag with a spoon.
I want to mess with the adult world, and remind others God designed us to play and enjoy the world God gave us. To remind others that we are children.
Alice Miller, a Swiss psychiatrist, who writes extensively about children, wrote in her book, Prisoners of Childhood:
As soon as the child is regarded as a possession for which one has a particular goal, as soon as one exerts control over (the child), his vital growth will be violently interrupted. It is a child's legitimate need to be regarded and respected as the person he really is at any given time, and as the center--the central actor--in his own activity.
I would go on to say that not only do children need to be treated as the central actor in their own story, I think they need to be shown how they can be the hero of their own story. But one of the things we do as adults is knock the heroic out of children, making them into the mediocre adults the rest of us have become. It's what most adults need to reclaim--how to become the hero's of their own stories.
I wonder how old Adam and Eve were in the Garden. Have you ever wondered that? All the artwork shows them as full grown adults. That God created a full grown man and woman. But what if they were kids? How does that change the story? The temptation of the serpent then becomes, "You can grow up faster; become adults; know stuff like adults; you will be adults." And in that moment, childhood was lost. Entrance was gained into the adult world, and we weren't children of God anymore. We were adults. We were our own man, our own woman, and look what's happened ever since.
That's not what God intended. I have scriptural proof. It's right there in Paul's letter to the Romans, that was read a few moments ago: "God's Spirit joins to our spirits to declare that we are God's children. Since we are his children, we will possess the blessings he keeps for his people..." Notice that word, children. Not adults. God wants us to be his children, not his adults. Our relationship with God is one of child to parent. That's part of the Holy Spirit's job--to keep us child-like, not adult-like. If you want to become a truly spiritual person, in tune with God through the Holy Spirit, then you better hang around with children. That's where the Holy Spirit is.
One time George Washington was invited to a special dinner at a home in a large northern city. The meal was prepared and ready to be served, but there was no Mr. Washington. The host had not seen him because he had been away from home and didn't arrive until the time when the guests were gathering.
One of the servants told their master that the general had arrived some time before and had been shown up to his room. The master and servant went to the room that had been assigned to the general but he wasn't there.
As they were about to return downstairs to inform the guests, they heard a man's voice singing, "Ride a horse to Bambury Cross." The sound was coming from the nursery. They opened the door and found the general, still in his dust-covered uniform, sitting and playing with the children. They were around him and over him and on him. When the host saw this he was very confused, but waited until the song was over.
General Washington laughed when he was told the guests were waiting, saying that it had probably done them good to wait for a change. He said that he would be down immediately, as soon as he had tucked the children into bed.
That's a man who knows what it means to be God's child in an adult world. Not ruled by inhibitions. Those kinds of people are peacefully and playfully free. In their freedom from inhibitions--all the restraints and hindrances, and prohibitions, and forbiddances--of grown-ups, they know what life is all about. What life is supposed to be like: enjoyment; wonder; simple trust; intuitive knowing; fearless play; disarming openness; unafraid to let your emotions be seen; to speak freely.
"I sure am glad to see you," the little girl said to her grandmother on her mother's side. "Now maybe Daddy will do the trick he's promising us."
The grandmother was curious. "What trick is that?" she asked.
"I heard him tell mommy," the little girl answered, "that if you came to visit he'd climb the walls."
As children, we get to say stuff like that. Be openly honest.
Why does God want us to be his children, and not his adults? Roy Wilbur once said, "The potential of a child is the most intriguing thing in all creation." That's what God sees in children--their amazing potential. By the time we're adults we've had a lot of the potential beaten out of us by the adult world. Somehow we buy into one of the other lies that it's all over for us. Too late. What potential we had as children has been dried up and disappeared once we became adults, with no second chances to get it back.
But then there's the story of the old teacher in Germany, long ago. He used to take his hat off and bow to his class every time he came into the classroom in the morning. When he was asked why, his answer was, "You never know what one of these children may become." And he was right. One little boy in the class was named Martin Luther.
That's the way God looks at all of us. At the start of every day, God takes his hat off and bows to us wondering what all of us will become, endowed with all the childlike potential he has given us.
Here's one of the saddest stories I've read. A man who was condemned to die in the electric chair was asked if he wished to make a final statement. He looked at all the reporters, photographers, officials and observers who stood outside the glass staring at him and then said bitterly, "If I had been shown this much attention when I was a boy, I would not be here today." So sad. But happens so often.
I was having a conversation with some other parents in a different church. We got to sharing stories about how children like to come into their parents room at night and cuddle and fall asleep.
One mother said her little daughter came into their bedroom in the middle of the night. She woke them up and said, "In my room there aren't any good dreams. May I sleep in bed with you and daddy?"
I've never forgotten that line. What a wonderfully simple and yet profound thing for a child to say. Somewhere along the line the man who was condemned to die in the electric chair had lost his place where he could dream some good dreams. To be a child. To be a child of God. To snuggle with God and continue, all life long, to dream the good dreams of a child. To dream about what we can become, no matter how old we are, because we are God's children.
Monday, July 7, 2014
Playing With Cards Face Up
"Playing With Cards Face Up"
Romans 7:15-25
When my son Ryan was a boy, I taught him how to play cribbage. How I did that was by first playing with all our cards laid out on the table, face up. We went through each of our hands, looking at the reasons why we should keep certain cards, and why we should put others into the crib.
For learning purposes, I’m not sure of a better way to teach a person, especially a young boy, how to play the game. (I must have taught Ryan pretty well; he beat me every game for the first year we played cribbage together. He was about 8 or 9.) It is odd, though, playing with cards face up on the table. There are no secrets. There is no mental juggling trying to figure out what he might have in his hand, or what card he might play next. I know what he’s got, and he knows the same about my hand.
At first, I had this feeling of vulnerability with all my cards out there. I wasn’t sure how Ryan felt about it, since he was just learning how to play. It’s so easy to be taken advantage of when all your cards are laying out there on the table for your “opponent” to see.
It occurred to me that that way of learning how to play a card game is a metaphor for the way we learn how to live. We start out, as soon as we are old enough to figure out what’s going on around us, with all of who we are laid out there for everyone to see. Everything is face up, so to speak. Emotions. Personality. Identity. While we’re learning how to play this game of life, we are open and vulnerable to attack by those who have played a lot longer than we.
As we discover more and more of the rules, and more and more of the pain that goes along with being taken advantage of, we start picking up a card here and a card there. We keep them hidden. We don’t trust others to know what we’ve got, who we are, what we are feeling. We start hiding all that from the other players in this game of life. We find out quickly that we have to protect what we are holding in our hands. Others know we have cards, we let people see the backs of them, but we don’t let anyone else know what they are, the value of them, what they mean to us.
There are at least a couple reasons why we hide our cards. One is, if they are all really good ones, we don’t want others to know exactly how good they are. And the other reason is that if we have a hand full of losers, again we don’t want others to know exactly how bad they are. We develop poker faces to mask any authentic emotions or personality. As we play, we decide how we will play out our hands; that is, reveal who we are, what we may be feeling, etc. Even, and maybe especially so, if we have a bunch of losers in our hand, if that’s what it seems like our lives have become, we want to play those cards to our best advantage.
I read, a while back, the novel, Gilead. (Has anyone read it?) It won the Pulitzer Prize. It’s a novel about an elderly Kansas Congregationalist Pastor named John Ames. Pastor Ames is writing a journal type memoir for his young son about his past, his everyday life, and things he is thinking about. He feels his life is fading away, and there’s some things he wants his son to know.
Pastor Ames best friend is a similarly elderly, retired Presbyterian minister named Boughton. Boughton has a son named Jack who is kind of a stereotypical preacher’s kid: a little wild, never amounted to much, has skeletons in his closet that no one knows about. In other words, Jack is holding a hand of loser cards in life.
Jack came back to town for a while to stay with his aging father, and sister. Jack is trying to decide if he wants to reveal a couple of the cards out of the hand of his lousy life to his father. It’s the reason he’s come home. So Jack first comes to Pastor Ames, his father’s best friend, to take a chance with him first--to tell him the part of his sad life that he wants to tell his own father. It takes all the trust and courage Jack can muster just to tell his father’s friend his story; to reveal just a couple of the awful cards in his hand, so to speak.
That’s the image I want to concentrate on. What happens when we have a hand full of losers? Not in cards, but in life. And let’s say the reason, as it was in Jack’s case, that we have ended up with a hand of losers is not because of the deal, but because of the way we have played the game so far. In the game of trying to live in this world, we have made some bad decisions. They have cost us dearly. So what do we do now?
One of our options is of course to keep playing life close to the chest. Don’t let anyone know. Don’t disclose yourself. Keep trying to work things out by yourself. The other option is to play by different rules with the cards you are holding. Rules laid out by the apostle Paul here in the seventh chapter of Romans.
Paul’s no different than us. We have this misconception that he’s some kind of super-Christian. But he’s been playing cards with life. What he’s found is that the more he plays the worse it gets. He gets a good card in the deal now and then, but for the most part, whenever he makes a decision about what to do with his life, it ends up being a bad decision. Life gets more bitter than sweet.
We’ve been following his life in Men’s Bible Study, and it’s been a great journey. But everywhere he goes he gets beat up by some angry mob. Or stoned. Or left for dead.
He wants to do the right thing, be a good man, make healthy decisions. It appears he has done that. But, by his own self-assessment here in this part of Romans, what he finds is that even though that’s what he wants, what he ends up doing is the wrong thing, not being the kind of man he wants to be, and making choices that end in some kind of disaster.
Paul is speaking as the archetype, the mold, the pattern that fits us all. His words are the experience of us all. We are all people of conflicting natures. We have good intentions but bad behaviors. We seem to be neither all bad, but neither are we all that good. We vacillate between the two natures of a greedy Donald Trump and the Good Samaritan; the snideness of a self-righteous politician to the humility of Mother Teresa. We run the gamut between the surface flipness of a Facebook caption to the depth of the novel I mentioned earlier, Gilead. Most of the time it feels like we are leaning a lot more to the negative sides of those characteristics than we do to the positive.
I think that’s a large part of what grace is. It’s cutting each other a lot of slack, because if we saw all of each other’s cards, if we all laid it all out on the table, we’d quickly find out we’re all holding empty, pointless hands, one way or another. Let’s be honest. That’s all Paul is asking us to do. That’s all he’s doing himself.
What we discover is that this battle going on within all of us is part of us. Yet at the same time, it’s bigger than us--bigger than what we are usually able to cope with. Finally we, like Paul, get frustrated and tired of it all, and the Lord shows us a different way to play the game.
The main new rule that Paul employs for playing cards with life is this: confess. Put your cards back on the table, face up. Disclose your hand. Reveal yourself.
But, and I want us to be clear here, but, it’s important to take a look at what Paul is confessing. He is not confessing particular, individual screw-ups in his life.
What Paul is doing is confessing to the basic inclinations, the motivational forces that are creating the negative behaviors he hates in himself. What he is confessing to is that there is this basic wrongness about himself. That basic wrongness is what’s keeping him holding on to a bunch of worthless cards in life, which leads to deceit, emptiness, loneliness, and self-hatred. And, the attempt to keep those cards close to his chest, all the effort he is expending to hide that from others, trying to dupe others into believing all is well in life, is killing him emotionally, spiritually, even physically.
So instead of going on and holding his hand pressed against his chest, he’s laying it down. “Look at it,” he cries out. “This is the way my life is really going.” He admits it.
I decide one way, but then I act another.
I do things I absolutely despise.
I can’t be trusted to figure out what’s best.
The power of sin within me keeps sabotaging my best intentions.
I obviously need help.
I decide to do good, but I don’t really do it.
I decide not to do bad, but then I do it anyway.
Something has gone wrong deep within me and gets the better of me every time.
These are not specifics. They are general, yet basic truths about ourselves and our human condition. It’s something along these lines: “Don’t trust me completely, because I AM THE KIND OF PERSON who will ultimately prove untrustworthy.” Or, “I want to be known as good, but I AM THE KIND OF PERSON who doesn’t have the will power to always act on my good intentions.” Or, “I love you, but I AM THE KIND OF PERSON who won’t act loving all the time and will hurt you some times.”
The most important words in those statements are, I AM THE KIND OF PERSON WHO. What Paul is asking us to confess and get out on the table is a certain kind of honesty about ourselves. It’s a kind of honesty that we don’t always like to admit openly. (And that, in itself, is another example of our problem: “I’m willing to face up to things, but I AM THE KIND OF PERSON who doesn’t like to admit that I have some basic flaws in my nature that hurt other people.”)
See how we slough off the kind of confession that Paul is asking us to make about ourselves, to ourselves and to others? We say things like, “Well, I know I’m not perfect; nobody’s perfect,” followed up with a little nervous laugh. What we are really saying, if we are honest with ourselves is that, though we’re not perfect, we still see ourselves right up there. Maybe an 8 on a scale of 1-10. At least a 7.
But Paul is saying, “Get real. Admit it to yourself. Lay your cards on the table and take a good look at them. All your cards. Not just the best ones. Let everyone see them. Let everyone see THE KIND OF PERSON you are. Now what happens to that self-rating?” That’s what Paul is saying is the new rule for playing cards with life.
There are at least a couple of things that happen when we follow Paul’s example of playing with our cards face up. First, like I said before, we certainly find out what grace really means. We feel a deep empathetic sadness in our hearts for ourselves and all the rest sitting at the table with us, as we come to the understanding of how we have all been playing hands with very few points. And we may even all start laughing at the realization of the silliness of trying to play such hands. We experience the laughter of grace and freedom in the company of others who now have laid down such hands, and we don’t have to work so hard anymore at holding on to them.
There's a line in the Simon and Garfunkle song, "Kathy's Song," that I've always liked. It's a rewording of the oft quoted phrase, "There but by the grace of God go I." In "Kathy's Song" it is, "There but for the grace of you go I." That line came to me while I was in the midst of a major screw up in my life. There were others who were making sure my face was constantly being rubbed in it all. But there were others whose grace and forgiveness literally saved me. It wasn't just God's grace--it was "the grace of others," the people who saw all my cards face up, and let me know in one way or another, that despite the cards I had played, I was still worthwhile.
And the other important realization is that we don’t have the wherewithal to change THE KIND OF PERSON we are. It doesn’t matter how many trips we make to the self-help bookshelf, and how many of those kinds of books we actually read even after we buy them or check them out. They can’t change our basic flaws that make us act the way we do.
As Paul says toward the end of his confessional agony, “I’ve tried everything and nothing helps. I’m at the end of my rope. Is there no one who can do anything for me? Isn’t that the real question?” It’s quite a situation, isn’t it? We know what’s wrong with us. We can finally admit it. We can lay our cards on the table. We can proclaim, honestly, the duplicity of our basic natures. But even that does not change us. That is, nullify our duplicity. As I said earlier, that is where the sudden realization comes that this whole “problem” is a lot bigger than just us. The cure will have to come from somewhere, or someone, else.
Of course, the one who can set all this right is clear. In Paul’s words: “The answer, thank God, is that Jesus Christ can and does. He acted to set things right in this life of contradictions where I want to serve God with all my heart and mind...” Then he goes on in the whole 8th chapter of Romans and talks about how Christ makes us whole, single-minded, God ordered people. We may feel like we have been THE KIND OF PERSON WHO sold our soul, but Christ has made us into THE KIND OF PERSON who is now entirely owned by God. We may feel like we have been THE KIND OF PERSON who lived a life unable to really have any kind of control over our desires, but God through Christ has made us into THE KIND OF PERSON who has a new kind of desire--a desire to do what is God’s and our best. We may have been THE KIND OF PERSON who might be just any kind of person, but God through Christ who has made us into THE KIND OF PERSON who is His kind of person.
In the game of Cribbage, there is the up card, the draw card. The deck is cut and the dealer chooses at random, a card that gets to be added in with the other cards for extra points. So, even if you have little or no points in the cards you are holding on to, that one card, the up card, can make all the difference in what you are holding. It can be the one gut shot card that makes your hand into a run, or creates combinations that gives you an amazing hand. Jesus is that “up card” who makes our sorry hands, our sorry lives, into one with all kinds of value.
Wouldn’t it be great, then, in an act of honesty, knowing what kind of hand we are trying to play in life, to just go ahead and lay down the terrible cards we have collected, knowing they are of very little value, or may indeed add up to nothing with no hope of any points among them. But then, when we lay them down, in that simple act of confession for all to see, they are transformed into an amazing hand, a winner in God’s eyes.
“The answer, thank God, is that Jesus Christ...set things right in this life of contradictions” so we can serve God with all our heart and mind.
Romans 7:15-25
When my son Ryan was a boy, I taught him how to play cribbage. How I did that was by first playing with all our cards laid out on the table, face up. We went through each of our hands, looking at the reasons why we should keep certain cards, and why we should put others into the crib.
For learning purposes, I’m not sure of a better way to teach a person, especially a young boy, how to play the game. (I must have taught Ryan pretty well; he beat me every game for the first year we played cribbage together. He was about 8 or 9.) It is odd, though, playing with cards face up on the table. There are no secrets. There is no mental juggling trying to figure out what he might have in his hand, or what card he might play next. I know what he’s got, and he knows the same about my hand.
At first, I had this feeling of vulnerability with all my cards out there. I wasn’t sure how Ryan felt about it, since he was just learning how to play. It’s so easy to be taken advantage of when all your cards are laying out there on the table for your “opponent” to see.
It occurred to me that that way of learning how to play a card game is a metaphor for the way we learn how to live. We start out, as soon as we are old enough to figure out what’s going on around us, with all of who we are laid out there for everyone to see. Everything is face up, so to speak. Emotions. Personality. Identity. While we’re learning how to play this game of life, we are open and vulnerable to attack by those who have played a lot longer than we.
As we discover more and more of the rules, and more and more of the pain that goes along with being taken advantage of, we start picking up a card here and a card there. We keep them hidden. We don’t trust others to know what we’ve got, who we are, what we are feeling. We start hiding all that from the other players in this game of life. We find out quickly that we have to protect what we are holding in our hands. Others know we have cards, we let people see the backs of them, but we don’t let anyone else know what they are, the value of them, what they mean to us.
There are at least a couple reasons why we hide our cards. One is, if they are all really good ones, we don’t want others to know exactly how good they are. And the other reason is that if we have a hand full of losers, again we don’t want others to know exactly how bad they are. We develop poker faces to mask any authentic emotions or personality. As we play, we decide how we will play out our hands; that is, reveal who we are, what we may be feeling, etc. Even, and maybe especially so, if we have a bunch of losers in our hand, if that’s what it seems like our lives have become, we want to play those cards to our best advantage.
I read, a while back, the novel, Gilead. (Has anyone read it?) It won the Pulitzer Prize. It’s a novel about an elderly Kansas Congregationalist Pastor named John Ames. Pastor Ames is writing a journal type memoir for his young son about his past, his everyday life, and things he is thinking about. He feels his life is fading away, and there’s some things he wants his son to know.
Pastor Ames best friend is a similarly elderly, retired Presbyterian minister named Boughton. Boughton has a son named Jack who is kind of a stereotypical preacher’s kid: a little wild, never amounted to much, has skeletons in his closet that no one knows about. In other words, Jack is holding a hand of loser cards in life.
Jack came back to town for a while to stay with his aging father, and sister. Jack is trying to decide if he wants to reveal a couple of the cards out of the hand of his lousy life to his father. It’s the reason he’s come home. So Jack first comes to Pastor Ames, his father’s best friend, to take a chance with him first--to tell him the part of his sad life that he wants to tell his own father. It takes all the trust and courage Jack can muster just to tell his father’s friend his story; to reveal just a couple of the awful cards in his hand, so to speak.
That’s the image I want to concentrate on. What happens when we have a hand full of losers? Not in cards, but in life. And let’s say the reason, as it was in Jack’s case, that we have ended up with a hand of losers is not because of the deal, but because of the way we have played the game so far. In the game of trying to live in this world, we have made some bad decisions. They have cost us dearly. So what do we do now?
One of our options is of course to keep playing life close to the chest. Don’t let anyone know. Don’t disclose yourself. Keep trying to work things out by yourself. The other option is to play by different rules with the cards you are holding. Rules laid out by the apostle Paul here in the seventh chapter of Romans.
Paul’s no different than us. We have this misconception that he’s some kind of super-Christian. But he’s been playing cards with life. What he’s found is that the more he plays the worse it gets. He gets a good card in the deal now and then, but for the most part, whenever he makes a decision about what to do with his life, it ends up being a bad decision. Life gets more bitter than sweet.
We’ve been following his life in Men’s Bible Study, and it’s been a great journey. But everywhere he goes he gets beat up by some angry mob. Or stoned. Or left for dead.
He wants to do the right thing, be a good man, make healthy decisions. It appears he has done that. But, by his own self-assessment here in this part of Romans, what he finds is that even though that’s what he wants, what he ends up doing is the wrong thing, not being the kind of man he wants to be, and making choices that end in some kind of disaster.
Paul is speaking as the archetype, the mold, the pattern that fits us all. His words are the experience of us all. We are all people of conflicting natures. We have good intentions but bad behaviors. We seem to be neither all bad, but neither are we all that good. We vacillate between the two natures of a greedy Donald Trump and the Good Samaritan; the snideness of a self-righteous politician to the humility of Mother Teresa. We run the gamut between the surface flipness of a Facebook caption to the depth of the novel I mentioned earlier, Gilead. Most of the time it feels like we are leaning a lot more to the negative sides of those characteristics than we do to the positive.
I think that’s a large part of what grace is. It’s cutting each other a lot of slack, because if we saw all of each other’s cards, if we all laid it all out on the table, we’d quickly find out we’re all holding empty, pointless hands, one way or another. Let’s be honest. That’s all Paul is asking us to do. That’s all he’s doing himself.
What we discover is that this battle going on within all of us is part of us. Yet at the same time, it’s bigger than us--bigger than what we are usually able to cope with. Finally we, like Paul, get frustrated and tired of it all, and the Lord shows us a different way to play the game.
The main new rule that Paul employs for playing cards with life is this: confess. Put your cards back on the table, face up. Disclose your hand. Reveal yourself.
But, and I want us to be clear here, but, it’s important to take a look at what Paul is confessing. He is not confessing particular, individual screw-ups in his life.
What Paul is doing is confessing to the basic inclinations, the motivational forces that are creating the negative behaviors he hates in himself. What he is confessing to is that there is this basic wrongness about himself. That basic wrongness is what’s keeping him holding on to a bunch of worthless cards in life, which leads to deceit, emptiness, loneliness, and self-hatred. And, the attempt to keep those cards close to his chest, all the effort he is expending to hide that from others, trying to dupe others into believing all is well in life, is killing him emotionally, spiritually, even physically.
So instead of going on and holding his hand pressed against his chest, he’s laying it down. “Look at it,” he cries out. “This is the way my life is really going.” He admits it.
I decide one way, but then I act another.
I do things I absolutely despise.
I can’t be trusted to figure out what’s best.
The power of sin within me keeps sabotaging my best intentions.
I obviously need help.
I decide to do good, but I don’t really do it.
I decide not to do bad, but then I do it anyway.
Something has gone wrong deep within me and gets the better of me every time.
These are not specifics. They are general, yet basic truths about ourselves and our human condition. It’s something along these lines: “Don’t trust me completely, because I AM THE KIND OF PERSON who will ultimately prove untrustworthy.” Or, “I want to be known as good, but I AM THE KIND OF PERSON who doesn’t have the will power to always act on my good intentions.” Or, “I love you, but I AM THE KIND OF PERSON who won’t act loving all the time and will hurt you some times.”
The most important words in those statements are, I AM THE KIND OF PERSON WHO. What Paul is asking us to confess and get out on the table is a certain kind of honesty about ourselves. It’s a kind of honesty that we don’t always like to admit openly. (And that, in itself, is another example of our problem: “I’m willing to face up to things, but I AM THE KIND OF PERSON who doesn’t like to admit that I have some basic flaws in my nature that hurt other people.”)
See how we slough off the kind of confession that Paul is asking us to make about ourselves, to ourselves and to others? We say things like, “Well, I know I’m not perfect; nobody’s perfect,” followed up with a little nervous laugh. What we are really saying, if we are honest with ourselves is that, though we’re not perfect, we still see ourselves right up there. Maybe an 8 on a scale of 1-10. At least a 7.
But Paul is saying, “Get real. Admit it to yourself. Lay your cards on the table and take a good look at them. All your cards. Not just the best ones. Let everyone see them. Let everyone see THE KIND OF PERSON you are. Now what happens to that self-rating?” That’s what Paul is saying is the new rule for playing cards with life.
There are at least a couple of things that happen when we follow Paul’s example of playing with our cards face up. First, like I said before, we certainly find out what grace really means. We feel a deep empathetic sadness in our hearts for ourselves and all the rest sitting at the table with us, as we come to the understanding of how we have all been playing hands with very few points. And we may even all start laughing at the realization of the silliness of trying to play such hands. We experience the laughter of grace and freedom in the company of others who now have laid down such hands, and we don’t have to work so hard anymore at holding on to them.
There's a line in the Simon and Garfunkle song, "Kathy's Song," that I've always liked. It's a rewording of the oft quoted phrase, "There but by the grace of God go I." In "Kathy's Song" it is, "There but for the grace of you go I." That line came to me while I was in the midst of a major screw up in my life. There were others who were making sure my face was constantly being rubbed in it all. But there were others whose grace and forgiveness literally saved me. It wasn't just God's grace--it was "the grace of others," the people who saw all my cards face up, and let me know in one way or another, that despite the cards I had played, I was still worthwhile.
And the other important realization is that we don’t have the wherewithal to change THE KIND OF PERSON we are. It doesn’t matter how many trips we make to the self-help bookshelf, and how many of those kinds of books we actually read even after we buy them or check them out. They can’t change our basic flaws that make us act the way we do.
As Paul says toward the end of his confessional agony, “I’ve tried everything and nothing helps. I’m at the end of my rope. Is there no one who can do anything for me? Isn’t that the real question?” It’s quite a situation, isn’t it? We know what’s wrong with us. We can finally admit it. We can lay our cards on the table. We can proclaim, honestly, the duplicity of our basic natures. But even that does not change us. That is, nullify our duplicity. As I said earlier, that is where the sudden realization comes that this whole “problem” is a lot bigger than just us. The cure will have to come from somewhere, or someone, else.
Of course, the one who can set all this right is clear. In Paul’s words: “The answer, thank God, is that Jesus Christ can and does. He acted to set things right in this life of contradictions where I want to serve God with all my heart and mind...” Then he goes on in the whole 8th chapter of Romans and talks about how Christ makes us whole, single-minded, God ordered people. We may feel like we have been THE KIND OF PERSON WHO sold our soul, but Christ has made us into THE KIND OF PERSON who is now entirely owned by God. We may feel like we have been THE KIND OF PERSON who lived a life unable to really have any kind of control over our desires, but God through Christ has made us into THE KIND OF PERSON who has a new kind of desire--a desire to do what is God’s and our best. We may have been THE KIND OF PERSON who might be just any kind of person, but God through Christ who has made us into THE KIND OF PERSON who is His kind of person.
In the game of Cribbage, there is the up card, the draw card. The deck is cut and the dealer chooses at random, a card that gets to be added in with the other cards for extra points. So, even if you have little or no points in the cards you are holding on to, that one card, the up card, can make all the difference in what you are holding. It can be the one gut shot card that makes your hand into a run, or creates combinations that gives you an amazing hand. Jesus is that “up card” who makes our sorry hands, our sorry lives, into one with all kinds of value.
Wouldn’t it be great, then, in an act of honesty, knowing what kind of hand we are trying to play in life, to just go ahead and lay down the terrible cards we have collected, knowing they are of very little value, or may indeed add up to nothing with no hope of any points among them. But then, when we lay them down, in that simple act of confession for all to see, they are transformed into an amazing hand, a winner in God’s eyes.
“The answer, thank God, is that Jesus Christ...set things right in this life of contradictions” so we can serve God with all our heart and mind.
Monday, June 30, 2014
Experiencing God In His Kingdom
"Experiencing God In His Kingdom"
Luke 9:10-17
This is the last sermon in the long “Experiencing God” series. I have appreciated how many of you have read the book, have been a part of one of the small groups, and how you stuck with this long, seven month study. Although we are done reading the book and you will have your final small group sessions this week, it doesn’t end here. As Alan said in the Minute for Mission, we have been listening to God and because of that we are starting to THINK BIGGER. With God, we are challenged to THINK BIGGER.
That’s what this last message is about, as we look at the story of the feeding of the 5000. We want to be a part of something that is way bigger than we ever thought was possible.
There's a certain progression, or factors, that make up this feeding of the 5000 incident. Let's go through them, in order, so we can pick out the differences between "thinking small" vs "thinking bigger".
First is the lateness of the day. Luke tells us that it was "late in the afternoon." Time is a resource. Sometimes it feels like time is going so slowly. While at others it feels like time is racing by. But the way we have divided up time, it goes by at the same rate, 24/7: one tick of the second hand at a time. Click, click, click, click. Every day it's the same.
As the day goes by, we have this sense in the back of our minds that time is a limited resource. Not for the history of all things. Time has been "marching on" for possibly millions of years. But for us, time is a limited resource. Each of us only has so much. How much that is, none of us knows. As we get older we begin to sense that there is less of it ahead of us, than there is behind us. Time, for us, is running out.
We can feel that same way with each day. We only have 24 hours in a day. The later into the day we get, the more we realize we just might not have enough hours in this day to get done what we wanted or needed to get done. When you're getting to the end of your day, do you look back and see how much you did or didn't get done? Or do you look ahead to the time you have left and what you can do with that amount of time, no matter how small it seems?
Time has slipped away from the disciples in their dealing with this large crowd of people. They didn't know how much time Jesus was going to spend with the people, or how long Jesus was going to teach them about how to deal with all their concerns. Jesus had been talking about God's Kingdom for most of the day. The resource of time was almost used up. The day had gotten away from them. Now it was nearing the end of the afternoon. Evening was upon them. What do they do now, thinking they had so little time left?
The next factor is the location. The disciples told Jesus, "There is nothing in this place. It is like a desert." The place itself, apparently had no resources. It wasn't that there were meager resources in which to take care of the crowd's needs. There were NO resources. "Nothing." They were all in a place where there was nothing available for the people, at a time in the day where the shadows on the sundial were getting long.
I've had people ask me why I'm living in a small town. "There's nothing to do there!" is the exclamation that I've heard a number of times. So I reply, "OK, I've lived in several big cities. You live in a big city. You have all these resources for entertainment and self-fulfillment. So what do you do with your free time? What, of all those resources the city has to offer, have you accessed? Have you gone to a play? A concert? A book signing? Listened to a lecture or speaker? Gone to a museum? A professional sporting event? What all have you done, of all the things you have available?" Their response: "Hardly anything. We just sit home and watch TV." Then I say, "There you have it."
The next factor in this story of the feeding of the 5000 is the need. This is what drives the tension in the story. The disciples recognize that people need to eat, and they are a long ways from nowhere. The place "like a desert" will provide no food, nor any kind of lodging.
At least the disciples recognize the people have needs. But evidently the people hadn't planned ahead. They didn't bring any resources for the things they needed. None brought a tent or some kind of make-shift shelter for the night. None had apparently planned ahead and brought some food with them. The attitude behind the disciples statement is that these people just weren't thinking and didn't come prepared. It's not the disciples fault--according to them--that the people came so ill-prepared. Nor is it the disciples responsibility to make up for the people's unpreparedness.
So send them back to some place where there were resources they could access. It's their own fault, the disciples were saying, for not having anything. Turn them over, Jesus, to the natural consequences of their meager supplies.
Next comes the retort to the disciples attitude expressed in what they were telling Jesus. Jesus' reply? "You give them something to eat." Evidently the disciples came prepared. They had food. They had something.
Rather than agreeing with the disciples and saying the problem was the people's because they didn't have anything to eat, Jesus was telling the disciples, the problem is yours because you have something but aren't willing to share. The disciples had food. The resource they were low on was compassion. Let someone else take care of it. Or, let them take care of themselves. They got themselves into this situation; let them get themselves out of it.
The fifth factor in this feeding of the 5000 story is the meager resources. Jesus quickly throws the responsibility for feeding all these people back on the disciples. "You give them something to eat." OK. Now they start scrounging in their bags. According to the story they only come up with five small flat loaves of bread and two salt dried fish.
The disciples tell Jesus what they came up with. Notice their wording to Jesus, "We have only five small loaves of bread and two fish." Notice the word, "only" in the disciples statement. They haven't just told Jesus what they have. They have made a judgement about how much they have: "only."
We were teasing Rod at breakfast a couple of weeks ago about his poor farmer talk. We asked him how the wheat was up north around his parents place. He gave us the characteristic poor farmer talk: "Oh, I don't know if we'll get much of anything out of this years crop. Probably just a few bushels here and there. It's going to be a bad year."
So we questioned further. "Not much rain up there, then?"
Rod says, "Oh they got a lot of rain. It's been good that way."
We say, "So even though they got a lot of rain, the crop's not looking good."
"You just don't know," Rod said. "All the heads could be empty; not much grain."
"'Could be,' you say," we ask. "So it could be good, too?"
"I suppose," Rod says. "You just never know. If it's like last year, we just may get nothing at all."
We shook our heads and teased him, saying even if he got 100 bushels an acre, it would still be a bad crop. I've sat in enough small town coffee shops, shooting the breeze with farmers to know they hold their truths pretty close to the chest, and won't admit to any abundance, or good fortune. I was told one time that farmers don't like bragging about an abundant crop, so they all just talk the "poor farmer" talk, so no one feels bad. I don't know if that's true or not. I do know the disciples were talking the poor farmer talk: All we have here are five small loaves, and two old dried fish.
The next factor in this story, after telling us about their meager resources, is the size of the need: 5000 men. 5000! And that's just the men. If there were women and children along, they weren't significant enough to add to the count. There could have been upwards of 10,000 people there. And the women may have not been counted, nor gotten anything to eat because of their low status. So there were probably more there than 5000. But at least the men were counted.
So the story's tension is set with those two opposing facts: five loaves and two fish vs. 5000 men to feed. Low resources. Big need. Little available. Huge possibility.
Between those two opposing facts are the disciples. The disciples who are feeling inadequate. It's not just that they don't think they have enough to meet the great need in terms of feeding all those people. The disciples were feeling another kind of inadequacy. An inadequacy of faith. Jesus was challenging them to exercise their faith. To have confidence in their faith. To think bigger than themselves and their assessment of their meager resources. The disciples were not only saying, "We just don't have enough stuff here to take care of all the people." They were also saying, "We don't have enough faith to make something amazing happen. We're just a bunch of guys trying to get by with what little we have."
My friend Alan Luttrell has asked me, and himself, the question, "If you knew you couldn't fail, what would you do?" It's an intriguing question about confidence and assurances. I want to turn that question into a faith question: "If you had such a strong faith, what would you do?" What would you accomplish? Looking at the, possibly, meager resources you are holding in your hands--at least by your evaluation--in the hands of a faith-full person, what would you be able to do? What would be your limits?
You see, when Jesus gave the disciples his challenge (You give them something to eat.) he was, in my mind, going against a lot of what Blackaby has been saying in this book. Blackaby has been saying you sit back and wait for God to act, for God to do something and then you get on board with that. But Jesus is saying here, "You do something. Don't look at me. You've got food. Supposedly you've got faith. Take care of it. Feed these people. Take care of their need. Take the initiative. See what happens."
The disciples stood there stuttering and stammering, "But, but, but, but..." All those buts were a result of thinking too small. Or small thinking. Small faith. Low evaluation not only of God but of themselves. But, but, but... "But what?" Jesus is challenging. "Give me the dang bread and fish," he finally tells them. "Tell everyone to sit down; groups would work good," Jesus says. At least the disciples can do that. Jesus shakes his head in frustration at them--at us.
Jesus "looked up toward heaven..." That's the next factor in this story. God. Looking to God as the one who thinks big, and sees big opportunities for witness about our big God. God--the one who can multiply something meager into something massive. All God needs are people with the kind of resources of faith, so that our big God can do big things through people who have big faith.
How does that happen in this story? Jesus breaks the bread and fish and hands it to the disciples. That's what most of the translations say happens. That Jesus broke the bread and fish and handed it to the disciples. But what the Greek says is that Jesus "...broke the bread and fish and kept handing them to his disciples..." In other words, Jesus kept breaking off pieces of bread and fish, and kept breaking and kept breaking, and kept handing and kept handing the pieces off to the disciples. The more he broke off, the more he kept having to break off. The more he had to give.
And that's the final factor in this story--the surprising abundance of 5 small loaves of bread and 2 dried fish. So much so, that everyone was filled, and there was some left over--12 small baskets full of leftovers. These would have been small baskets, about the size of a large grapefruit. But still. And not just 5 loaves and two fish, but 5 loaves and 2 fish in the hands of Jesus. Who just told the disciples--you feed the people. Which means they could have done what he did: breaking bread and giving bread until all were filled with extra to spare.
So here's the point, I think, of this story. It's only two words, so it's easy to remember. Here they are. Ready? Think Bigger. Jesus was talking to the people most of the day about God's Kingdom. And by the sign of this miracle, the main motto of the Kingdom of God is, Think Bigger.
The disciples were victims of their own small thinking. Small resources. Limited possibilities. Too little for too much need. Too many rationalizations that avoid taking compassionate action and responsibility: it's too late in the day; we're out in the middle of no where. You can't expect so much of us. We've got faith, to a certain point.
But Jesus is demonstrating that there is so much more. If only we would Think Bigger, or maybe, Faith Bigger. Jesus says, in the Gospel of John, "I tell you for certain that if you have faith in me, you will do the same things that I am doing. You will do even greater things..." (John 14:12). Whoa!! It's amazing that Jesus just says we will do the same things he does, if we have faith. That is mind blowing enough. But then to hear him say that we will do even greater things than he has done, is enough to knock us off our feet.
The only qualification is, "...if you have faith in me..." In other words, if we would only Faith Bigger. If only we wouldn't succumb so easily to small faith thinking, as the disciples did in this story. If only we wouldn't just look at what we think are meager resources, and think it's just too late, and think our situation is like being in a desert. If only we would take Jesus at his word, and Faith Bigger, and do unbelievably amazing things that Jesus says we can do.
That, I think, is the main point of this book, that we've been reading for seven months. If Experiencing God is about anything, it is about Faith Bigger. It's about giving ourselves over to God fully in faith, and Think Bigger. Paul wrote to the Corinthian church:
What God has planned,
for people who love him
is more than eyes have seen
or ears have heard.
It has never even
entered our minds. (1 Corinthians 2:9)
In other words, we cannot even begin to comprehend what we are capable of if we Faith Bigger. God is ready to make it happen with us. God, as Jesus did with the disciples, is simply saying, "You do it. Take charge. DO your faith; just don't sit around and think about your faith. Find out what God and you can do, when you abandon yourself into Faith Bigger. Don't think small. Think Bigger. Make it happen. Faith Bigger.
Luke 9:10-17
This is the last sermon in the long “Experiencing God” series. I have appreciated how many of you have read the book, have been a part of one of the small groups, and how you stuck with this long, seven month study. Although we are done reading the book and you will have your final small group sessions this week, it doesn’t end here. As Alan said in the Minute for Mission, we have been listening to God and because of that we are starting to THINK BIGGER. With God, we are challenged to THINK BIGGER.
That’s what this last message is about, as we look at the story of the feeding of the 5000. We want to be a part of something that is way bigger than we ever thought was possible.
There's a certain progression, or factors, that make up this feeding of the 5000 incident. Let's go through them, in order, so we can pick out the differences between "thinking small" vs "thinking bigger".
First is the lateness of the day. Luke tells us that it was "late in the afternoon." Time is a resource. Sometimes it feels like time is going so slowly. While at others it feels like time is racing by. But the way we have divided up time, it goes by at the same rate, 24/7: one tick of the second hand at a time. Click, click, click, click. Every day it's the same.
As the day goes by, we have this sense in the back of our minds that time is a limited resource. Not for the history of all things. Time has been "marching on" for possibly millions of years. But for us, time is a limited resource. Each of us only has so much. How much that is, none of us knows. As we get older we begin to sense that there is less of it ahead of us, than there is behind us. Time, for us, is running out.
We can feel that same way with each day. We only have 24 hours in a day. The later into the day we get, the more we realize we just might not have enough hours in this day to get done what we wanted or needed to get done. When you're getting to the end of your day, do you look back and see how much you did or didn't get done? Or do you look ahead to the time you have left and what you can do with that amount of time, no matter how small it seems?
Time has slipped away from the disciples in their dealing with this large crowd of people. They didn't know how much time Jesus was going to spend with the people, or how long Jesus was going to teach them about how to deal with all their concerns. Jesus had been talking about God's Kingdom for most of the day. The resource of time was almost used up. The day had gotten away from them. Now it was nearing the end of the afternoon. Evening was upon them. What do they do now, thinking they had so little time left?
The next factor is the location. The disciples told Jesus, "There is nothing in this place. It is like a desert." The place itself, apparently had no resources. It wasn't that there were meager resources in which to take care of the crowd's needs. There were NO resources. "Nothing." They were all in a place where there was nothing available for the people, at a time in the day where the shadows on the sundial were getting long.
I've had people ask me why I'm living in a small town. "There's nothing to do there!" is the exclamation that I've heard a number of times. So I reply, "OK, I've lived in several big cities. You live in a big city. You have all these resources for entertainment and self-fulfillment. So what do you do with your free time? What, of all those resources the city has to offer, have you accessed? Have you gone to a play? A concert? A book signing? Listened to a lecture or speaker? Gone to a museum? A professional sporting event? What all have you done, of all the things you have available?" Their response: "Hardly anything. We just sit home and watch TV." Then I say, "There you have it."
The next factor in this story of the feeding of the 5000 is the need. This is what drives the tension in the story. The disciples recognize that people need to eat, and they are a long ways from nowhere. The place "like a desert" will provide no food, nor any kind of lodging.
At least the disciples recognize the people have needs. But evidently the people hadn't planned ahead. They didn't bring any resources for the things they needed. None brought a tent or some kind of make-shift shelter for the night. None had apparently planned ahead and brought some food with them. The attitude behind the disciples statement is that these people just weren't thinking and didn't come prepared. It's not the disciples fault--according to them--that the people came so ill-prepared. Nor is it the disciples responsibility to make up for the people's unpreparedness.
So send them back to some place where there were resources they could access. It's their own fault, the disciples were saying, for not having anything. Turn them over, Jesus, to the natural consequences of their meager supplies.
Next comes the retort to the disciples attitude expressed in what they were telling Jesus. Jesus' reply? "You give them something to eat." Evidently the disciples came prepared. They had food. They had something.
Rather than agreeing with the disciples and saying the problem was the people's because they didn't have anything to eat, Jesus was telling the disciples, the problem is yours because you have something but aren't willing to share. The disciples had food. The resource they were low on was compassion. Let someone else take care of it. Or, let them take care of themselves. They got themselves into this situation; let them get themselves out of it.
The fifth factor in this feeding of the 5000 story is the meager resources. Jesus quickly throws the responsibility for feeding all these people back on the disciples. "You give them something to eat." OK. Now they start scrounging in their bags. According to the story they only come up with five small flat loaves of bread and two salt dried fish.
The disciples tell Jesus what they came up with. Notice their wording to Jesus, "We have only five small loaves of bread and two fish." Notice the word, "only" in the disciples statement. They haven't just told Jesus what they have. They have made a judgement about how much they have: "only."
We were teasing Rod at breakfast a couple of weeks ago about his poor farmer talk. We asked him how the wheat was up north around his parents place. He gave us the characteristic poor farmer talk: "Oh, I don't know if we'll get much of anything out of this years crop. Probably just a few bushels here and there. It's going to be a bad year."
So we questioned further. "Not much rain up there, then?"
Rod says, "Oh they got a lot of rain. It's been good that way."
We say, "So even though they got a lot of rain, the crop's not looking good."
"You just don't know," Rod said. "All the heads could be empty; not much grain."
"'Could be,' you say," we ask. "So it could be good, too?"
"I suppose," Rod says. "You just never know. If it's like last year, we just may get nothing at all."
We shook our heads and teased him, saying even if he got 100 bushels an acre, it would still be a bad crop. I've sat in enough small town coffee shops, shooting the breeze with farmers to know they hold their truths pretty close to the chest, and won't admit to any abundance, or good fortune. I was told one time that farmers don't like bragging about an abundant crop, so they all just talk the "poor farmer" talk, so no one feels bad. I don't know if that's true or not. I do know the disciples were talking the poor farmer talk: All we have here are five small loaves, and two old dried fish.
The next factor in this story, after telling us about their meager resources, is the size of the need: 5000 men. 5000! And that's just the men. If there were women and children along, they weren't significant enough to add to the count. There could have been upwards of 10,000 people there. And the women may have not been counted, nor gotten anything to eat because of their low status. So there were probably more there than 5000. But at least the men were counted.
So the story's tension is set with those two opposing facts: five loaves and two fish vs. 5000 men to feed. Low resources. Big need. Little available. Huge possibility.
Between those two opposing facts are the disciples. The disciples who are feeling inadequate. It's not just that they don't think they have enough to meet the great need in terms of feeding all those people. The disciples were feeling another kind of inadequacy. An inadequacy of faith. Jesus was challenging them to exercise their faith. To have confidence in their faith. To think bigger than themselves and their assessment of their meager resources. The disciples were not only saying, "We just don't have enough stuff here to take care of all the people." They were also saying, "We don't have enough faith to make something amazing happen. We're just a bunch of guys trying to get by with what little we have."
My friend Alan Luttrell has asked me, and himself, the question, "If you knew you couldn't fail, what would you do?" It's an intriguing question about confidence and assurances. I want to turn that question into a faith question: "If you had such a strong faith, what would you do?" What would you accomplish? Looking at the, possibly, meager resources you are holding in your hands--at least by your evaluation--in the hands of a faith-full person, what would you be able to do? What would be your limits?
You see, when Jesus gave the disciples his challenge (You give them something to eat.) he was, in my mind, going against a lot of what Blackaby has been saying in this book. Blackaby has been saying you sit back and wait for God to act, for God to do something and then you get on board with that. But Jesus is saying here, "You do something. Don't look at me. You've got food. Supposedly you've got faith. Take care of it. Feed these people. Take care of their need. Take the initiative. See what happens."
The disciples stood there stuttering and stammering, "But, but, but, but..." All those buts were a result of thinking too small. Or small thinking. Small faith. Low evaluation not only of God but of themselves. But, but, but... "But what?" Jesus is challenging. "Give me the dang bread and fish," he finally tells them. "Tell everyone to sit down; groups would work good," Jesus says. At least the disciples can do that. Jesus shakes his head in frustration at them--at us.
Jesus "looked up toward heaven..." That's the next factor in this story. God. Looking to God as the one who thinks big, and sees big opportunities for witness about our big God. God--the one who can multiply something meager into something massive. All God needs are people with the kind of resources of faith, so that our big God can do big things through people who have big faith.
How does that happen in this story? Jesus breaks the bread and fish and hands it to the disciples. That's what most of the translations say happens. That Jesus broke the bread and fish and handed it to the disciples. But what the Greek says is that Jesus "...broke the bread and fish and kept handing them to his disciples..." In other words, Jesus kept breaking off pieces of bread and fish, and kept breaking and kept breaking, and kept handing and kept handing the pieces off to the disciples. The more he broke off, the more he kept having to break off. The more he had to give.
And that's the final factor in this story--the surprising abundance of 5 small loaves of bread and 2 dried fish. So much so, that everyone was filled, and there was some left over--12 small baskets full of leftovers. These would have been small baskets, about the size of a large grapefruit. But still. And not just 5 loaves and two fish, but 5 loaves and 2 fish in the hands of Jesus. Who just told the disciples--you feed the people. Which means they could have done what he did: breaking bread and giving bread until all were filled with extra to spare.
So here's the point, I think, of this story. It's only two words, so it's easy to remember. Here they are. Ready? Think Bigger. Jesus was talking to the people most of the day about God's Kingdom. And by the sign of this miracle, the main motto of the Kingdom of God is, Think Bigger.
The disciples were victims of their own small thinking. Small resources. Limited possibilities. Too little for too much need. Too many rationalizations that avoid taking compassionate action and responsibility: it's too late in the day; we're out in the middle of no where. You can't expect so much of us. We've got faith, to a certain point.
But Jesus is demonstrating that there is so much more. If only we would Think Bigger, or maybe, Faith Bigger. Jesus says, in the Gospel of John, "I tell you for certain that if you have faith in me, you will do the same things that I am doing. You will do even greater things..." (John 14:12). Whoa!! It's amazing that Jesus just says we will do the same things he does, if we have faith. That is mind blowing enough. But then to hear him say that we will do even greater things than he has done, is enough to knock us off our feet.
The only qualification is, "...if you have faith in me..." In other words, if we would only Faith Bigger. If only we wouldn't succumb so easily to small faith thinking, as the disciples did in this story. If only we wouldn't just look at what we think are meager resources, and think it's just too late, and think our situation is like being in a desert. If only we would take Jesus at his word, and Faith Bigger, and do unbelievably amazing things that Jesus says we can do.
That, I think, is the main point of this book, that we've been reading for seven months. If Experiencing God is about anything, it is about Faith Bigger. It's about giving ourselves over to God fully in faith, and Think Bigger. Paul wrote to the Corinthian church:
What God has planned,
for people who love him
is more than eyes have seen
or ears have heard.
It has never even
entered our minds. (1 Corinthians 2:9)
In other words, we cannot even begin to comprehend what we are capable of if we Faith Bigger. God is ready to make it happen with us. God, as Jesus did with the disciples, is simply saying, "You do it. Take charge. DO your faith; just don't sit around and think about your faith. Find out what God and you can do, when you abandon yourself into Faith Bigger. Don't think small. Think Bigger. Make it happen. Faith Bigger.
Sunday, June 22, 2014
Experiencing God In The Marketplace
"Experiencing God In The Marketplace"
Matthew 9:36--10:4
I wondered about something this week that I've never wondered about before in all my years of ministry. What I wondered about was why Jesus chose the disciples he did. Jesus chose the earlier disciples: Peter, James, John, Andrew. Andrew brought a couple of the others. But the rest of the 12 we don't know if Jesus chose them or if they were just tag-alongs.
Most of the time, if a Rabbi became popular, young men would follow the Rabbi around hoping he would choose them to be a disciple. And most of those who hung around a Rabbi, in order to become a disciple, did so because they, themselves, wanted to become a Rabbi some day. But Jesus was proactive, by going out and purposively looking for specific kinds of men.
Most of the 12 were fishermen: Peter, Andrew, James, John, Phillip. Matthew was a customs tax officer, working for the Romans. Simon was a Zealot, who was trying to overthrow the Romans. Conversations between Simon and Matthew must have been interesting. I would have liked to have heard some of those.
But the others in the group of disciples--it's just not known what their backgrounds were in terms of their occupation. Or if Jesus sought them specifically, like the others. Or if they just came up to Jesus and asked if they could sign up.
Maybe this isn't that interesting of a question for you, why Jesus chose the 12 men he did. But I wonder about what Jesus' choices of disciples means in terms of the kind of things he wanted to accomplish during his time on this earth. Why these 12 in light of Jesus' ministry goals? What was Jesus going to be able to accomplish with these 12 particular men that he wouldn't be able to do with 12 other kinds of men?
I'm going to do some surmising here. I'm not sure why Jesus chose the disciples he chose. I don't think anyone else knows either. So I'm going to make some guesses. Just wanted you to know they are my conjectures, and nothing else.
It appears that Jesus wanted working people rather than people who were on some religious fast track. Because Jesus chose people who were very familiar with the marketplace, there was something about these down-to-earth people that was strategic to Jesus' ministry.
Jesus didn't chose priests sons, or church acolytes. Jesus didn't choose choir boys. It's not even known if the men he did choose had a good church background, or went to Sunday School. It's clear by all the instruction Jesus had to give the disciples, and the constant inability of the disciples to "get it", that they weren't religiously indoctrinated as kids very well. But Jesus chose them nonetheless.
I want to tie in here a parable that Jesus told his disciples that has always bothered me. It's about the shrewd manager, in Luke 16. A rich man finds out that one of his managers has been running up huge personal debts on the company credit card, and has been mismanaging the master's accounts. The manager needs to find a way, so that when he's finally out on his ear, he'll have a place to stay. So he tries to get in good with those who owe his master, by lowering each of their debts significantly.
It sounds crooked and self-serving of the manager. And it is. But here's the surprise and the part that has always bothered me. Jesus then says to the disciples,
The master praised the crooked manager! And why? Because he knew how to look after himself. Streetwise people are smarter in this regard than law-abiding citizens. They are on constant alert, looking for angles, surviving by their wits. I want you to be smart in the same way... (Luke 16:8)
Doesn't that sound kind of un-Jesusy to you? But remember who Jesus' audience is for this parable--the disciples. These fishermen, tax collecting, rebel disciples. These non-religious types who work hard and play hard.
Based on the parable, and Jesus' choice of these 12, is that why he chose these men? He wanted "streetwise people," men who knew how to look after themselves, who knew how to fly by the seat of their pants, and survive by their wits. Jesus wanted people who were comfortable in the marketplace. These fishermen disciples, for example, not only knew how to catch fish, sail a boat, and mend nets. They knew how to market their fish, haggle the prices with people, talk the lingo, how to be shrewd and when to be soft. How to deal with everyday people as everyday people. To be an "average Joe."
That's what it appears Jesus is looking for in a disciple. Not an overly religious person who is socially awkward and unable to carry on a common conversation with regular people unless it had to do with theology. Jesus wants marketplace men and women, not holy temple types.
I think there are at least four qualities of marketplace disciples. Again, I'm not sure if these are the qualities that Jesus was, and is, looking for in disciples. But try them on and see how they feel.
First, a marketplace disciple is willing to keep their eyes open in order to see a connection between their daily work and it's place in a wider sense of purpose. If your vision is only allowing you to see a part of the horizon of your work--like blinders on a horse that only allows the animal to see a small piece of straight ahead--you will miss the larger picture of how what you are doing fits in with a larger picture.
With blinders on, and not seeing a larger view of what your work is in the whole of God's marketplace, you can quickly succumb to a feeling of bitterness, a sense of futility, and if nothing else, sheer boredom about what you are doing. When the bigger picture is missing, we tend to resent work a lot more than we enjoy it. If we allow God to open up our blinders and see more of God's horizon--more of God's larger picture--we will see how our part of that horizon fits with the larger wonder of God's panoramic work.
I wonder, if you see your place in the marketplace as futile and boring, causing an inner bitterness, that maybe God isn't behind those feelings, trying to urge you on to get you to find a better way to fit what you're doing with God's larger purposes. When we are able to fit our work, out there, in the marketplace within God's larger purposes, that work feels productive, creative, stimulating.
So, being a marketplace disciple means seeing what you are doing out there in that marketplace and how it fits in with God's wider purpose.
The second characteristic of a marketplace disciple is to understand the inner effort that being in the marketplace for God will take.
What I mean by that is understanding that there is an inner and outer dimension to everything we do in life. The outer dimension is what people see of us--how we work, how we act, what we say, our behavior, the way we exhibit our habits--those kinds of things.
The inner dimension is the spirit of a person, their core beliefs, their perspective on life, their emotional selves, their inner thought processes, their passions.
In order to find not just satisfaction, but a deep inner happiness as a marketplace disciple, there has to be an alignment of these inner and outer dimensions. There has to be a congruity between your deep inner self and the work and behaviors you exhibit to the outer world.
If these two don't line up, then you get what you call dissonance. It's a musical term that describes how notes in a chord don't match up. Or a song that has discordant notes that are at odds with each other and don't create a harmony or pleasing music.
So think of that kind of dissonance between your inner and outer self. The bigger the gap, the more discord there is, the harsher and more grating your life becomes. The more frustrating your work becomes, as your core beliefs about your self and your work don't match up with what you're actually doing. Without that connection between your inner and outer dimensions, there will be no song in your work and place in the marketplace.
The poet Walt Whitman has written a poem titled, "I Hear America Singing":
I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,
Those of mechanics
each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong,
The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam,
The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work,
The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deckhand
singing on the steamboat deck,
The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench,
the hatter singing as he stands,
The wood-cutter’s song, the ploughboy’s on his way in the morning, or
at noon intermission or at sundown,
The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of
the girl sewing or washing,
Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else,
The day what belongs to the day—at night the party of young fellows,
robust, friendly,
Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.
I think Whitman has caught some of the flavor of what life is like when the inner and outer dimensions are as close to synch as possible. There is little or no detectible dissonance. Life is a song, and we aren't just hearing someone else sing it--it is our voice that is heard in the marketplace, singing the song of witnessing life to our place in God's wider purpose.
Thirdly, to be a marketplace disciple means to value the people-making more than the product making or the bottom line. The real marketplace is driven by the bottom line. By the amount of product you make or sell. Your usefulness to the marketplace is gauged by how much you contribute to the productivity of that marketplace. Your value is determined not by who you are but by how much you contribute to the economy of the system.
But a marketplace DISCIPLE is someone who helps people value not the things they are making, but the ways they are making themselves. Theologian Jean Lacroix wrote that, "to work is to make oneself...producing an achievement, to perfect oneself while perfecting the world." The marketplace disciple helps people truly make themselves, rather than being used as a cog in the bottom line marketplace that doesn't care who you are as long as you are being economically productive.
In her book, Peoplemaking, Virginia Satir writes about the four aspects of what she calls "peoplemaking." The first aspect are the the feelings and ideas a person has about themselves. Another term for this is called self-worth. The second aspect are the ways people create meaning with one another. She calls this, communication. The third aspect are the rules people use for guiding how they should feel and act. And the fourth aspect is the way we relate to other people and institutions outside of ourselves. She calls this the link to society.
When people are having problems, Satir goes on to describe, the way to relieve their pain involves working on one or more of those four peoplemaking factors: self-worth, communication, rules, and link to society. This is what marketplace disciples are all about. We who follow Jesus are not about making people more productive to the economy. We are about helping them work to make themselves better, more faithful human beings. Boiled down, that was Jesus' work.
And lastly, what it means to be a marketplace disciple means overcoming the false duality between the sacred and the secular. We are great compartmentalizers, we human beings. We have a compartment for our work self, another for our family self, another for our spouse self, another for our playful self, and on and on.
And one of the most common compartments we create is the sacred and the secular. We have a compartment for things we think are of God, and a compartment for all the stuff we decide is not of God. But the truth is, God is over all, in all, and in control of all. There is nothing where God is not involved. Therefore there is no division between secular and sacred.
So a marketplace disciple not only sees the holiness in all things, but also helps others see that same holiness. The marketplace disciple keeps others from making the judgements that go along with dividing up what is supposedly sacred and what is supposedly secular. All is God's, and all is of God's. That gives us a whole new perspective on others and things.
OK. So I started out talking about the 12 disciples and why Jesus chose them. I think he chose them because he saw the qualities of men of the marketplace that I've been describing. And then he transformed their marketplace perspectives so that they weren't just men of the marketplace, but marketplace disciples. Men who were out there in the real world and new how to deal with that world as marketplace disciples: constantly alert, looking for angles, surviving by their wits. Helping Jesus in the work of peoplemaking.
Matthew 9:36--10:4
I wondered about something this week that I've never wondered about before in all my years of ministry. What I wondered about was why Jesus chose the disciples he did. Jesus chose the earlier disciples: Peter, James, John, Andrew. Andrew brought a couple of the others. But the rest of the 12 we don't know if Jesus chose them or if they were just tag-alongs.
Most of the time, if a Rabbi became popular, young men would follow the Rabbi around hoping he would choose them to be a disciple. And most of those who hung around a Rabbi, in order to become a disciple, did so because they, themselves, wanted to become a Rabbi some day. But Jesus was proactive, by going out and purposively looking for specific kinds of men.
Most of the 12 were fishermen: Peter, Andrew, James, John, Phillip. Matthew was a customs tax officer, working for the Romans. Simon was a Zealot, who was trying to overthrow the Romans. Conversations between Simon and Matthew must have been interesting. I would have liked to have heard some of those.
But the others in the group of disciples--it's just not known what their backgrounds were in terms of their occupation. Or if Jesus sought them specifically, like the others. Or if they just came up to Jesus and asked if they could sign up.
Maybe this isn't that interesting of a question for you, why Jesus chose the 12 men he did. But I wonder about what Jesus' choices of disciples means in terms of the kind of things he wanted to accomplish during his time on this earth. Why these 12 in light of Jesus' ministry goals? What was Jesus going to be able to accomplish with these 12 particular men that he wouldn't be able to do with 12 other kinds of men?
I'm going to do some surmising here. I'm not sure why Jesus chose the disciples he chose. I don't think anyone else knows either. So I'm going to make some guesses. Just wanted you to know they are my conjectures, and nothing else.
It appears that Jesus wanted working people rather than people who were on some religious fast track. Because Jesus chose people who were very familiar with the marketplace, there was something about these down-to-earth people that was strategic to Jesus' ministry.
Jesus didn't chose priests sons, or church acolytes. Jesus didn't choose choir boys. It's not even known if the men he did choose had a good church background, or went to Sunday School. It's clear by all the instruction Jesus had to give the disciples, and the constant inability of the disciples to "get it", that they weren't religiously indoctrinated as kids very well. But Jesus chose them nonetheless.
I want to tie in here a parable that Jesus told his disciples that has always bothered me. It's about the shrewd manager, in Luke 16. A rich man finds out that one of his managers has been running up huge personal debts on the company credit card, and has been mismanaging the master's accounts. The manager needs to find a way, so that when he's finally out on his ear, he'll have a place to stay. So he tries to get in good with those who owe his master, by lowering each of their debts significantly.
It sounds crooked and self-serving of the manager. And it is. But here's the surprise and the part that has always bothered me. Jesus then says to the disciples,
The master praised the crooked manager! And why? Because he knew how to look after himself. Streetwise people are smarter in this regard than law-abiding citizens. They are on constant alert, looking for angles, surviving by their wits. I want you to be smart in the same way... (Luke 16:8)
Doesn't that sound kind of un-Jesusy to you? But remember who Jesus' audience is for this parable--the disciples. These fishermen, tax collecting, rebel disciples. These non-religious types who work hard and play hard.
Based on the parable, and Jesus' choice of these 12, is that why he chose these men? He wanted "streetwise people," men who knew how to look after themselves, who knew how to fly by the seat of their pants, and survive by their wits. Jesus wanted people who were comfortable in the marketplace. These fishermen disciples, for example, not only knew how to catch fish, sail a boat, and mend nets. They knew how to market their fish, haggle the prices with people, talk the lingo, how to be shrewd and when to be soft. How to deal with everyday people as everyday people. To be an "average Joe."
That's what it appears Jesus is looking for in a disciple. Not an overly religious person who is socially awkward and unable to carry on a common conversation with regular people unless it had to do with theology. Jesus wants marketplace men and women, not holy temple types.
I think there are at least four qualities of marketplace disciples. Again, I'm not sure if these are the qualities that Jesus was, and is, looking for in disciples. But try them on and see how they feel.
First, a marketplace disciple is willing to keep their eyes open in order to see a connection between their daily work and it's place in a wider sense of purpose. If your vision is only allowing you to see a part of the horizon of your work--like blinders on a horse that only allows the animal to see a small piece of straight ahead--you will miss the larger picture of how what you are doing fits in with a larger picture.
With blinders on, and not seeing a larger view of what your work is in the whole of God's marketplace, you can quickly succumb to a feeling of bitterness, a sense of futility, and if nothing else, sheer boredom about what you are doing. When the bigger picture is missing, we tend to resent work a lot more than we enjoy it. If we allow God to open up our blinders and see more of God's horizon--more of God's larger picture--we will see how our part of that horizon fits with the larger wonder of God's panoramic work.
I wonder, if you see your place in the marketplace as futile and boring, causing an inner bitterness, that maybe God isn't behind those feelings, trying to urge you on to get you to find a better way to fit what you're doing with God's larger purposes. When we are able to fit our work, out there, in the marketplace within God's larger purposes, that work feels productive, creative, stimulating.
So, being a marketplace disciple means seeing what you are doing out there in that marketplace and how it fits in with God's wider purpose.
The second characteristic of a marketplace disciple is to understand the inner effort that being in the marketplace for God will take.
What I mean by that is understanding that there is an inner and outer dimension to everything we do in life. The outer dimension is what people see of us--how we work, how we act, what we say, our behavior, the way we exhibit our habits--those kinds of things.
The inner dimension is the spirit of a person, their core beliefs, their perspective on life, their emotional selves, their inner thought processes, their passions.
In order to find not just satisfaction, but a deep inner happiness as a marketplace disciple, there has to be an alignment of these inner and outer dimensions. There has to be a congruity between your deep inner self and the work and behaviors you exhibit to the outer world.
If these two don't line up, then you get what you call dissonance. It's a musical term that describes how notes in a chord don't match up. Or a song that has discordant notes that are at odds with each other and don't create a harmony or pleasing music.
So think of that kind of dissonance between your inner and outer self. The bigger the gap, the more discord there is, the harsher and more grating your life becomes. The more frustrating your work becomes, as your core beliefs about your self and your work don't match up with what you're actually doing. Without that connection between your inner and outer dimensions, there will be no song in your work and place in the marketplace.
The poet Walt Whitman has written a poem titled, "I Hear America Singing":
I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,
Those of mechanics
each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong,
The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam,
The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work,
The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deckhand
singing on the steamboat deck,
The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench,
the hatter singing as he stands,
The wood-cutter’s song, the ploughboy’s on his way in the morning, or
at noon intermission or at sundown,
The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of
the girl sewing or washing,
Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else,
The day what belongs to the day—at night the party of young fellows,
robust, friendly,
Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.
I think Whitman has caught some of the flavor of what life is like when the inner and outer dimensions are as close to synch as possible. There is little or no detectible dissonance. Life is a song, and we aren't just hearing someone else sing it--it is our voice that is heard in the marketplace, singing the song of witnessing life to our place in God's wider purpose.
Thirdly, to be a marketplace disciple means to value the people-making more than the product making or the bottom line. The real marketplace is driven by the bottom line. By the amount of product you make or sell. Your usefulness to the marketplace is gauged by how much you contribute to the productivity of that marketplace. Your value is determined not by who you are but by how much you contribute to the economy of the system.
But a marketplace DISCIPLE is someone who helps people value not the things they are making, but the ways they are making themselves. Theologian Jean Lacroix wrote that, "to work is to make oneself...producing an achievement, to perfect oneself while perfecting the world." The marketplace disciple helps people truly make themselves, rather than being used as a cog in the bottom line marketplace that doesn't care who you are as long as you are being economically productive.
In her book, Peoplemaking, Virginia Satir writes about the four aspects of what she calls "peoplemaking." The first aspect are the the feelings and ideas a person has about themselves. Another term for this is called self-worth. The second aspect are the ways people create meaning with one another. She calls this, communication. The third aspect are the rules people use for guiding how they should feel and act. And the fourth aspect is the way we relate to other people and institutions outside of ourselves. She calls this the link to society.
When people are having problems, Satir goes on to describe, the way to relieve their pain involves working on one or more of those four peoplemaking factors: self-worth, communication, rules, and link to society. This is what marketplace disciples are all about. We who follow Jesus are not about making people more productive to the economy. We are about helping them work to make themselves better, more faithful human beings. Boiled down, that was Jesus' work.
And lastly, what it means to be a marketplace disciple means overcoming the false duality between the sacred and the secular. We are great compartmentalizers, we human beings. We have a compartment for our work self, another for our family self, another for our spouse self, another for our playful self, and on and on.
And one of the most common compartments we create is the sacred and the secular. We have a compartment for things we think are of God, and a compartment for all the stuff we decide is not of God. But the truth is, God is over all, in all, and in control of all. There is nothing where God is not involved. Therefore there is no division between secular and sacred.
So a marketplace disciple not only sees the holiness in all things, but also helps others see that same holiness. The marketplace disciple keeps others from making the judgements that go along with dividing up what is supposedly sacred and what is supposedly secular. All is God's, and all is of God's. That gives us a whole new perspective on others and things.
OK. So I started out talking about the 12 disciples and why Jesus chose them. I think he chose them because he saw the qualities of men of the marketplace that I've been describing. And then he transformed their marketplace perspectives so that they weren't just men of the marketplace, but marketplace disciples. Men who were out there in the real world and new how to deal with that world as marketplace disciples: constantly alert, looking for angles, surviving by their wits. Helping Jesus in the work of peoplemaking.
Monday, June 16, 2014
Experiencing God In The Church
"Experiencing God In The Church"
Acts 4:32-35
I read about a man who owned a variety store. The store had been, at one time, a successful business. But during the owners later years, he spent all of his time arranging and rearranging the goods in his store. He never unlocked the doors so that customers could come in to buy things. Making sure that the merchandise was well organized and attractively presented became more important than selling it.
I thought, what a striking parable about the church. At some point in the life of any organization like the church, that organization is tempted to veer from its intended purpose. The bait and hook of the temptation are usually swallowed and the organization begins to forget its original direction and main aspirations. It becomes something it did not set out to be. It forgets its roots, and makes the attempt at growing some sort of trunk and branches without any form of nourishment or support.
You would think the church would be above that sort of aimlessness--that the church would always have a clear idea of what its purpose and direction should be. But the church, more so than any other organization I know, is probably the biggest offender of trying to be something that it never set out to be. The church of Jesus Christ is probably the most gullible, the most side-tracked institution on the face of the earth. I have never known another organization that is so unclear about what its identity should be, and what purpose that identity should serve.
The presbytery of Southern Kansas, that body of Presbyterian churches located and bound together within the length of the southern half of our state, has reorganized its internal committee and governance structure twice in the three and a half years I've been here. Jan Luttrell got to be part of the reorganization that was happening when I got here. It was an innovative and exciting plan. Slowly, that plan has been cast aside, and we are currently reorganizing back to what it was before the new plan was voted in. I say, "voted in" because the new plan, even though it was voted on and accepted by the presbytery, it was never fully enacted.
It's no different than any other presbytery I've served in. When I was in Colby, in the Northern Kansas Presbytery, in my 11 years there, that presbytery was reorganized from top to bottom three times. We are like the store keeper who gets side-tracked on his display and forgets how to do business. Or maybe forgets what business he's in. The more we are reorganizing, the less we end up actually doing ministry, because we are always preparing to do ministry, but never doing it.
That's why we constantly need to listen to the verses read from the Acts of the Apostles. These verses are not only about an idyllic community where everything is shared. There are deeper truths here. There are guiding, foundational principles that the church has to constantly hear and hear again.
Management expert, Peter Drucker, says that no non-profit, volunteer organization will last long if there isn't a clear idea amongst all those involved of what the mission of that organization is. Every organization has to have a mission--a clear and distinct purpose. I think in these verses from Acts we are given that mission and purpose for the church. It is what captivated the believers from the beginning, solidified them into a church, and then mobilized them for action.
The first purpose has to do with the Resurrection. We are told that, "In a powerful way the apostles told everyone that The Lord Jesus was now alive. God greatly blessed his followers..." (Acts 4:33, CEV). Our first and primary purpose must be this: to tell people, in a powerful way, Jesus is alive! Without that mission we are not the church. We may be something else, but we will not be the church.
In the 18th century, the U.S. Congress once issued a special edition of Thomas Jefferson's Bible. It was a simple copy of a New Testament, but it had any and all references to the miraculous eliminated. Jefferson, in doing this cutting and pasting, had confined himself solely to the moral teachings of Jesus. The closing words in Jefferson's condensed version of the New Testament were: "There they laid Jesus and rolled a great stone at the mouth of the sepulcher and departed."
If that's where the story ends, then we are faced with a big question: what caused the change in the disciples? The Crucifixion certainly didn't enliven the depressed followers of Jesus. Imagine going to the place where the disciples congregated the day after the Crucifixion. Compare that with what you would have seen with the mood in that same place the day after the Resurrection.
The greatest testimony to the reality of the Resurrection is the change that overcame and mobilized the disciples. They went from being cowering wimps into powerful witnesses. The Resurrection is the centerpiece of every sermon by the apostles in the book of Acts.
Without the Resurrection we can not be the church, because the church is at its most basic level a collection of people who are witnesses to the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. We are the ones who are here to tell the world that God has raised Jesus to life. That is our primary and fundamental belief as the church. And it is our primary reason for being. All of the church's organization and structure should be founded upon that belief.
President Carter was a faithful churchman, not only attending worship as often as he could while President, but he also taught Sunday School. One woman called the Pastor of the Baptist church in Washington, D.C. where President Carter attended. She asked, "Do you expect the President to be in church this Sunday?"
"I cannot promise you that," replied the minister. "But I expect the Risen Christ to be there, and I believe that should be sufficient incentive for your attendance."
The reason we come to church every Sunday morning, the first day of the week, the day Christ was made alive, is because we are Resurrection people. And we are resurrected people. We not only come to celebrate Christ's Resurrection, we also come to celebrate the ways God has also brought us back to life. Without the Resurrection we become a people without hope who have a message without hope. And the reason we go out from our worship each Sunday morning, out into the world, is to be witnesses of what we have seen and heard.
But there is more to the Christian community than celebrating this foundational belief that Jesus is Risen. One of the ways we witness to the Resurrection is by the way we treat each other. That's the other point of this story in Acts: "And the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and of one soul...neither was there any among them that lacked."
What seemed to be happening at this point in the growth of the early church was a kind of circular pattern that fed itself. What I mean is, when the primary task of the church--witnessing to the Resurrection--was being done, the church was growing. As the church kept to its primary purpose, "...great grace was upon them all." Those blessings motivated the people to, in turn, be givers to each other, caring for each other's needs. That community of caring then encouraged the apostles go out and witness to the Resurrection all the more; and on and on the cycle continued.
The caring of this early Christian community was full of loving, active support. It wasn't just a pious word spoken here or there; or, the speaking of some religious sounding platitudes. It wasn't high sounding morals that appear to have no substance behind them. The caring of the early Christian community was defined by actual, hands on involvement of people with others. They formed their identity, not with a capital "I", but through a sense of unity--a unity that begins with Y-O-U: you-nity. The first believers, mobilized by the power of the Resurrection, said "you" before they said, "I."
When I was pastoring up in Colby, I got to teach a college class titled, "Christian Morality." I used the book, Money, Sex, and Power, by Richard Foster who used to teach at Friends University. If that isn't a provocative title to a book, I don't know what is. In one of the chapters about money, Foster told about how one man involved himself, similar to the involvement of the early Christians:
Someone I know who always has given of his resources generously is attempting now to give more of himself. He decided that he needed a closer personal tie to the poor, so instead of just writing checks to organizations that work among the poor, he decided to make a commitment to one family. This family has known little stability over the years, because of drugs and related problems. But with this man's help, the husband has secured a job and the family has learned to live by a monthly budget and weekly food menu. My friend meets with the family every week to review their budget with them and evaluate their goals. He also has had to invest some of his own resources in the family (none of which is tax deductible). This kind of giving is much more costly than writing a check, yet giving oneself along with money can produce dramatic results.
Imagine a whole church of people like Richard Foster's friend. As in the early days of the Christian church, it wasn't just one or two people, but "...they all shared with one another everything they had."
Remember when, back in the book of Genesis, God asked Cain where his brother Abel was. Do you remember what Cain's reply was? "I don't know. Am I supposed to take care of my brother?" Cain took care of his brother all right--murdered and buried him. But what happened in the early days of the church is the other side of care-taking. Yes, we are to take care of our brothers and sisters, in the best and most involved ways we can.
There was a woman who while taking a walk in the city, rounded a corner only to see a victim of a mugging. He was beaten up and bloody, lying on the sidewalk, half conscious. As she was later retelling the incident to her husband she said, "I was so grateful for the first-aid course I had taken at the YWCA. When I saw that poor man lying there I promptly put my head between my knees to keep from fainting."
As Christians, we are not to use our sympathies only to put our heads between our knees when we see some need. When a fellow believer is in a position of urgency, or lonely, or hurting, we are not to look the other way. We are not to hope that someone else will take care of them. We are not to look after ourselves only, but create unity amongst fellow believers by saying "you" not "I".
The church is not a place where something is walled in to be protected from the world. Instead the church exists to pour itself out to others as witnesses of the resurrected Christ. The church is not a fortress which simply defends the troops. It is rather a supply house from which we give of ourselves and our substance, daily and freely, to all those who are in need. If we can keep that purpose clear in our minds, then we will never lose sight of what it means to be the church.
Acts 4:32-35
I read about a man who owned a variety store. The store had been, at one time, a successful business. But during the owners later years, he spent all of his time arranging and rearranging the goods in his store. He never unlocked the doors so that customers could come in to buy things. Making sure that the merchandise was well organized and attractively presented became more important than selling it.
I thought, what a striking parable about the church. At some point in the life of any organization like the church, that organization is tempted to veer from its intended purpose. The bait and hook of the temptation are usually swallowed and the organization begins to forget its original direction and main aspirations. It becomes something it did not set out to be. It forgets its roots, and makes the attempt at growing some sort of trunk and branches without any form of nourishment or support.
You would think the church would be above that sort of aimlessness--that the church would always have a clear idea of what its purpose and direction should be. But the church, more so than any other organization I know, is probably the biggest offender of trying to be something that it never set out to be. The church of Jesus Christ is probably the most gullible, the most side-tracked institution on the face of the earth. I have never known another organization that is so unclear about what its identity should be, and what purpose that identity should serve.
The presbytery of Southern Kansas, that body of Presbyterian churches located and bound together within the length of the southern half of our state, has reorganized its internal committee and governance structure twice in the three and a half years I've been here. Jan Luttrell got to be part of the reorganization that was happening when I got here. It was an innovative and exciting plan. Slowly, that plan has been cast aside, and we are currently reorganizing back to what it was before the new plan was voted in. I say, "voted in" because the new plan, even though it was voted on and accepted by the presbytery, it was never fully enacted.
It's no different than any other presbytery I've served in. When I was in Colby, in the Northern Kansas Presbytery, in my 11 years there, that presbytery was reorganized from top to bottom three times. We are like the store keeper who gets side-tracked on his display and forgets how to do business. Or maybe forgets what business he's in. The more we are reorganizing, the less we end up actually doing ministry, because we are always preparing to do ministry, but never doing it.
That's why we constantly need to listen to the verses read from the Acts of the Apostles. These verses are not only about an idyllic community where everything is shared. There are deeper truths here. There are guiding, foundational principles that the church has to constantly hear and hear again.
Management expert, Peter Drucker, says that no non-profit, volunteer organization will last long if there isn't a clear idea amongst all those involved of what the mission of that organization is. Every organization has to have a mission--a clear and distinct purpose. I think in these verses from Acts we are given that mission and purpose for the church. It is what captivated the believers from the beginning, solidified them into a church, and then mobilized them for action.
The first purpose has to do with the Resurrection. We are told that, "In a powerful way the apostles told everyone that The Lord Jesus was now alive. God greatly blessed his followers..." (Acts 4:33, CEV). Our first and primary purpose must be this: to tell people, in a powerful way, Jesus is alive! Without that mission we are not the church. We may be something else, but we will not be the church.
In the 18th century, the U.S. Congress once issued a special edition of Thomas Jefferson's Bible. It was a simple copy of a New Testament, but it had any and all references to the miraculous eliminated. Jefferson, in doing this cutting and pasting, had confined himself solely to the moral teachings of Jesus. The closing words in Jefferson's condensed version of the New Testament were: "There they laid Jesus and rolled a great stone at the mouth of the sepulcher and departed."
If that's where the story ends, then we are faced with a big question: what caused the change in the disciples? The Crucifixion certainly didn't enliven the depressed followers of Jesus. Imagine going to the place where the disciples congregated the day after the Crucifixion. Compare that with what you would have seen with the mood in that same place the day after the Resurrection.
The greatest testimony to the reality of the Resurrection is the change that overcame and mobilized the disciples. They went from being cowering wimps into powerful witnesses. The Resurrection is the centerpiece of every sermon by the apostles in the book of Acts.
Without the Resurrection we can not be the church, because the church is at its most basic level a collection of people who are witnesses to the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. We are the ones who are here to tell the world that God has raised Jesus to life. That is our primary and fundamental belief as the church. And it is our primary reason for being. All of the church's organization and structure should be founded upon that belief.
President Carter was a faithful churchman, not only attending worship as often as he could while President, but he also taught Sunday School. One woman called the Pastor of the Baptist church in Washington, D.C. where President Carter attended. She asked, "Do you expect the President to be in church this Sunday?"
"I cannot promise you that," replied the minister. "But I expect the Risen Christ to be there, and I believe that should be sufficient incentive for your attendance."
The reason we come to church every Sunday morning, the first day of the week, the day Christ was made alive, is because we are Resurrection people. And we are resurrected people. We not only come to celebrate Christ's Resurrection, we also come to celebrate the ways God has also brought us back to life. Without the Resurrection we become a people without hope who have a message without hope. And the reason we go out from our worship each Sunday morning, out into the world, is to be witnesses of what we have seen and heard.
But there is more to the Christian community than celebrating this foundational belief that Jesus is Risen. One of the ways we witness to the Resurrection is by the way we treat each other. That's the other point of this story in Acts: "And the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and of one soul...neither was there any among them that lacked."
What seemed to be happening at this point in the growth of the early church was a kind of circular pattern that fed itself. What I mean is, when the primary task of the church--witnessing to the Resurrection--was being done, the church was growing. As the church kept to its primary purpose, "...great grace was upon them all." Those blessings motivated the people to, in turn, be givers to each other, caring for each other's needs. That community of caring then encouraged the apostles go out and witness to the Resurrection all the more; and on and on the cycle continued.
The caring of this early Christian community was full of loving, active support. It wasn't just a pious word spoken here or there; or, the speaking of some religious sounding platitudes. It wasn't high sounding morals that appear to have no substance behind them. The caring of the early Christian community was defined by actual, hands on involvement of people with others. They formed their identity, not with a capital "I", but through a sense of unity--a unity that begins with Y-O-U: you-nity. The first believers, mobilized by the power of the Resurrection, said "you" before they said, "I."
When I was pastoring up in Colby, I got to teach a college class titled, "Christian Morality." I used the book, Money, Sex, and Power, by Richard Foster who used to teach at Friends University. If that isn't a provocative title to a book, I don't know what is. In one of the chapters about money, Foster told about how one man involved himself, similar to the involvement of the early Christians:
Someone I know who always has given of his resources generously is attempting now to give more of himself. He decided that he needed a closer personal tie to the poor, so instead of just writing checks to organizations that work among the poor, he decided to make a commitment to one family. This family has known little stability over the years, because of drugs and related problems. But with this man's help, the husband has secured a job and the family has learned to live by a monthly budget and weekly food menu. My friend meets with the family every week to review their budget with them and evaluate their goals. He also has had to invest some of his own resources in the family (none of which is tax deductible). This kind of giving is much more costly than writing a check, yet giving oneself along with money can produce dramatic results.
Imagine a whole church of people like Richard Foster's friend. As in the early days of the Christian church, it wasn't just one or two people, but "...they all shared with one another everything they had."
Remember when, back in the book of Genesis, God asked Cain where his brother Abel was. Do you remember what Cain's reply was? "I don't know. Am I supposed to take care of my brother?" Cain took care of his brother all right--murdered and buried him. But what happened in the early days of the church is the other side of care-taking. Yes, we are to take care of our brothers and sisters, in the best and most involved ways we can.
There was a woman who while taking a walk in the city, rounded a corner only to see a victim of a mugging. He was beaten up and bloody, lying on the sidewalk, half conscious. As she was later retelling the incident to her husband she said, "I was so grateful for the first-aid course I had taken at the YWCA. When I saw that poor man lying there I promptly put my head between my knees to keep from fainting."
As Christians, we are not to use our sympathies only to put our heads between our knees when we see some need. When a fellow believer is in a position of urgency, or lonely, or hurting, we are not to look the other way. We are not to hope that someone else will take care of them. We are not to look after ourselves only, but create unity amongst fellow believers by saying "you" not "I".
The church is not a place where something is walled in to be protected from the world. Instead the church exists to pour itself out to others as witnesses of the resurrected Christ. The church is not a fortress which simply defends the troops. It is rather a supply house from which we give of ourselves and our substance, daily and freely, to all those who are in need. If we can keep that purpose clear in our minds, then we will never lose sight of what it means to be the church.
Monday, June 9, 2014
"Experiencing God: Your Children's Lives
"Experiencing God: Your Children's Lives"
Proverbs 22:6
Point your kids in the right direction--
when they're old they won't be lost.
Train children in the way they should go;
when they grow old, they won't depart from it.
Most of the kids who were "preacher's kids" when I was going through school, were some of the worst kids, behavior-wise. It was like they had to prove they were just "normal" kids to everyone, but went overboard in the "normal" department, and quickly became abnormal. So I was more than a little nervous raising two kids wondering when the wild times would start. But I was fortunate in that neither Ryan or Kristin went through any kind of rebelliousness. They were both great kids and great fun to be with as a father.
Being "preacher's kids", Ryan and Kristin grew up in the church. They went to Sunday School every Sunday. They went to church every Sunday. I decided to wait till they were ready to accept Christ and then be baptized. It was a proud day for me, getting to baptize my own children. I was the one who taught Confirmation Class, and got to teach both Ryan and Kristin's classes. They were two of the rowdiest classes of 7th graders I've ever had. But they were also proud Sunday's when they each joined the church.
Their Christian faith took interesting twists and turns. Kristin took to the faith with a sense of excitement and adventure. When in high school, she got admitted into a select Christian choir and performing group that traveled all over the central states one summer. She had a great time, and wrote me several letters about how her faith was exploding and how she found, in her own way, that God is real.
She went to Azusa Pacific University, the second largest Christian university in the country. She had great Christian friends and grew into the depth of her faith in Christ. She volunteered as a tutor in the slums/Watts district of LA with a Christian mission team. She went to Australia one summer with another mission team. She was challenged more in her beliefs and grew a lot during those college years.
Ryan heard a different drummer. It all started when he was going through Confirmation Class. One of the assignments was to write a statement of faith and read it to the Elders and other parents, and then do the same during a worship service. Instead of writing a statement of faith, Ryan wrote a statement of doubt. He wrote about what he wasn't sure about, and wondered out loud if he believed certain things about the Bible and the church and God. He questioned his faith at an early age. And it wasn't that he was just tossing out different aspects of his belief system randomly. He was thinking deeply about his religious convictions, or lack thereof, and we talked a lot about that together.
I wondered, silently, if either of them was thinking about following their old man into the ministry. Or if they felt any pressure to do so. I tried not to even bring it up, and I think at one point we talked about it together, and I told them both I was not even going to say anything about it. It’s one thing to want to be like your parents and maybe take on their profession/vocation. But when that vocation is the ministry, there may be more guilt about feeling bad that they aren’t even remotely considering that profession. So I didn’t even want to broach that subject with them.
But, in the back of my mind, I felt like if either of them might do so, it would be Kristin.
Then they stopped going to church. I just thought it was that college/post-college aged thing that most kids go through. But it has stuck. Neither of them, and their spouses have returned to church. Kristin's husband, Nic, grew up in a strong Christian family, and I know his mother is constantly on them to go to church. Ryan's wife Amanda grew up in a Methodist church in Wichita.
Now, it's not a matter of just not going to church. Kristin has become interested in exploring Zen Buddhism. And Ryan is not interested in anything that has to do with religion, be it Christian or otherwise.
So, I guess I really don’t have to wonder about either of them going to the ministry.
So I wonder about this proverb in the book of proverbs:
Train children in the way they should go;
when they grow old, they won't depart from it.
There’s a couple of ways to look at this wisdom saying. It’s all in how you interpret the phrase, “…they should go.” If you look at it from a dictatorial, parental view, you are the one who is determining the “way they should go.” You decide how you think your children should end up, and make sure you force them in that direction. If you do your job well, according to the proverb, your children will keep going on the path you set for them.
But the proverb could be interpreted differently. “Train children in the way they should go…” In other words, know and understand your children so well, their inclinations, their gifts, their talents, their ideals, their wishes and dreams, that you help them grow in those directions—“the way they should go”—because it just makes sense. It fits, for them. You, as parents, help them become what they are individually inclined to be. That you take them into account, not just your own agenda for them.
I, of course, like the second interpretation of the proverb, and that form of parenting over the first by far. And in that way, I think I have been a good parent. Even though, at this point, neither Ryan and Kristin have decided to make the Christian faith a part of their lives, I feel like I brought them up to know what the faith is all about. It’s not like they are totally ignorant of Christianity, so they don’t even know what they are missing. They do know what they are missing, and now they get to make that decision, and accept the consequences. It’s not like I gave them the choice, when they were growing up, to decide for themselves about attending Sunday School and church, and youth group. I didn’t give them a choice in that matter. I upheld my part of the proverb: I “trained my children.” And a large part of that training was about the Christian faith.
And I like the rendering of this proverb in The Message Bible:
Point your kids in the right direction--
when they're old they won't be lost.
The important words here are “right direction.” What’s the right direction? As we’ve been reading in Experiencing God, the right direction is toward a relationship with God. The proverb, in this version, says that a parent’s responsibility is to do the pointing. That doesn’t mean your kids will eventually go the direction you’re pointing. But at least you have done your job.
As in the more standard version of this proverb, the parental responsibility is to “train.” When Ryan was really young he loved to hit balls with bats. As soon as he could stand, hitting something with a bat was one of his favorite things to do. So I started “training” him. I got him one of those fat bats. Then I’d pitch a balloon to him. The balloon came in slow enough he could get a good eye on it and whack it.
Then I changed to a beach ball. It came in a bit faster, but was still large enough and slow enough for him to get a good eye on, and whack it. As he became proficient with each type of ball, I just kept getting a smaller and smaller ball, until we were down to a wiffle ball the size of a softball. And I got a skinny plastic bat, so he had to keep a better eye on the ball when I pitched it to him. By the time he was two, he could hit an underhand pitched baseball nearly every time. I had trained him, and he had a natural aptitude for it.
When he got old enough for T-ball, they called him “Boomer” because he could hit a ball over the outfield fence into the cemetery on the other side. But when he got old enough to play little league, as good as he was, he decided he just didn’t like baseball. We had spent hours together, him pitching to me, and him hitting his booming home runs. But despite all that “training” he chucked it. It was a bit hard for me, but I had to listen and pay attention to what his passion was and the way he wanted to go. Baseball wasn’t going to be it.
And he did the same thing with the Christian faith. Something that he had an “aptitude” for ended up being put aside. Again, it was, and has been, really hard for me. It isn’t a pride thing, or an ego thing for me. I had to prayerfully ponder that one for a long time. Did Ryan and Kristin's choice for setting aside the faith hurt because it somehow made ME look bad? That here I was, a pastor, and my own son and daughter have left the faith? That it somehow reflects bad on me, so I should be all embarrassed? No. I wouldn’t go there.
Blackaby is understandably proud of his children and now some grandchildren, who have followed him into the ministry. And that they are strong in their Christian faith. But I am just as proud of Ryan and Kristin for all they are doing with their lives, even though, for now, it is outside the faith.
I have done my part. I have trained. And I have pointed. And I think I did my part well, in that respect. But at this point in their lives, this choice as to what they believe or not believe is up to them. What God has asked of me, as their father, is to train and point towards God every chance I got. That’s what God asks of any parent.
The other part of this proverb is also a great comfort. As The Message Bible has it, “…they won’t be lost.” One of the great things about being a Christian parent is understanding that it’s not all up to you. First, when a child is baptized, the congregation takes a vow to help the parent bring up the child in the Christian faith, to be a real part of their Christian nurture. All of you who have said "yes" to that question numerous times when a child is baptized, are promising to have a part in that child's Christian journey. Every one of you who has had a child baptized, also has the whole congregation to lean on in raising your children in the faith. I take YOUR promise very seriously--and hopefully you do too when it comes to the training and pointing for the children of this congregation.
But, even though you do your Christian training, and your God-pointing, if your kids choose otherwise, you still have hope.
“They won’t be lost.” What that says to me is that God is promising he has other resources. That to God, our kids will not be lost. God will not let our kids be lost, if we have done our job as parents.
I see this time and time again in Ryan’s life. God keeps putting people in Ryan’s life that are also part of God’s God-pointing work. One of Ryan’s best friends while he was a student at KU was also a PK—preacher’s kid. His father was a Lutheran pastor. When Ryan and Amanda got married, this friend was Best Man. I had a conversation with him at the wedding, and I found out he and Ryan talked a lot about God and what they believed or didn’t believe. I smiled to myself because I knew what God was up to in my son’s life. And it was a further affirmation for me that “…they won’t be lost.”
I’ve kind of realized, I probably won’t be the one who tips the balance when and if Ryan or Kristin choose to open themselves back up to a relationship with God. But I have been a large part of Ryan and Kristin's journey in the faith. I’ve done my part as their father. And I have faith that God is continuing that work.
Proverbs 22:6
Point your kids in the right direction--
when they're old they won't be lost.
Train children in the way they should go;
when they grow old, they won't depart from it.
Most of the kids who were "preacher's kids" when I was going through school, were some of the worst kids, behavior-wise. It was like they had to prove they were just "normal" kids to everyone, but went overboard in the "normal" department, and quickly became abnormal. So I was more than a little nervous raising two kids wondering when the wild times would start. But I was fortunate in that neither Ryan or Kristin went through any kind of rebelliousness. They were both great kids and great fun to be with as a father.
Being "preacher's kids", Ryan and Kristin grew up in the church. They went to Sunday School every Sunday. They went to church every Sunday. I decided to wait till they were ready to accept Christ and then be baptized. It was a proud day for me, getting to baptize my own children. I was the one who taught Confirmation Class, and got to teach both Ryan and Kristin's classes. They were two of the rowdiest classes of 7th graders I've ever had. But they were also proud Sunday's when they each joined the church.
Their Christian faith took interesting twists and turns. Kristin took to the faith with a sense of excitement and adventure. When in high school, she got admitted into a select Christian choir and performing group that traveled all over the central states one summer. She had a great time, and wrote me several letters about how her faith was exploding and how she found, in her own way, that God is real.
She went to Azusa Pacific University, the second largest Christian university in the country. She had great Christian friends and grew into the depth of her faith in Christ. She volunteered as a tutor in the slums/Watts district of LA with a Christian mission team. She went to Australia one summer with another mission team. She was challenged more in her beliefs and grew a lot during those college years.
Ryan heard a different drummer. It all started when he was going through Confirmation Class. One of the assignments was to write a statement of faith and read it to the Elders and other parents, and then do the same during a worship service. Instead of writing a statement of faith, Ryan wrote a statement of doubt. He wrote about what he wasn't sure about, and wondered out loud if he believed certain things about the Bible and the church and God. He questioned his faith at an early age. And it wasn't that he was just tossing out different aspects of his belief system randomly. He was thinking deeply about his religious convictions, or lack thereof, and we talked a lot about that together.
I wondered, silently, if either of them was thinking about following their old man into the ministry. Or if they felt any pressure to do so. I tried not to even bring it up, and I think at one point we talked about it together, and I told them both I was not even going to say anything about it. It’s one thing to want to be like your parents and maybe take on their profession/vocation. But when that vocation is the ministry, there may be more guilt about feeling bad that they aren’t even remotely considering that profession. So I didn’t even want to broach that subject with them.
But, in the back of my mind, I felt like if either of them might do so, it would be Kristin.
Then they stopped going to church. I just thought it was that college/post-college aged thing that most kids go through. But it has stuck. Neither of them, and their spouses have returned to church. Kristin's husband, Nic, grew up in a strong Christian family, and I know his mother is constantly on them to go to church. Ryan's wife Amanda grew up in a Methodist church in Wichita.
Now, it's not a matter of just not going to church. Kristin has become interested in exploring Zen Buddhism. And Ryan is not interested in anything that has to do with religion, be it Christian or otherwise.
So, I guess I really don’t have to wonder about either of them going to the ministry.
So I wonder about this proverb in the book of proverbs:
Train children in the way they should go;
when they grow old, they won't depart from it.
There’s a couple of ways to look at this wisdom saying. It’s all in how you interpret the phrase, “…they should go.” If you look at it from a dictatorial, parental view, you are the one who is determining the “way they should go.” You decide how you think your children should end up, and make sure you force them in that direction. If you do your job well, according to the proverb, your children will keep going on the path you set for them.
But the proverb could be interpreted differently. “Train children in the way they should go…” In other words, know and understand your children so well, their inclinations, their gifts, their talents, their ideals, their wishes and dreams, that you help them grow in those directions—“the way they should go”—because it just makes sense. It fits, for them. You, as parents, help them become what they are individually inclined to be. That you take them into account, not just your own agenda for them.
I, of course, like the second interpretation of the proverb, and that form of parenting over the first by far. And in that way, I think I have been a good parent. Even though, at this point, neither Ryan and Kristin have decided to make the Christian faith a part of their lives, I feel like I brought them up to know what the faith is all about. It’s not like they are totally ignorant of Christianity, so they don’t even know what they are missing. They do know what they are missing, and now they get to make that decision, and accept the consequences. It’s not like I gave them the choice, when they were growing up, to decide for themselves about attending Sunday School and church, and youth group. I didn’t give them a choice in that matter. I upheld my part of the proverb: I “trained my children.” And a large part of that training was about the Christian faith.
And I like the rendering of this proverb in The Message Bible:
Point your kids in the right direction--
when they're old they won't be lost.
The important words here are “right direction.” What’s the right direction? As we’ve been reading in Experiencing God, the right direction is toward a relationship with God. The proverb, in this version, says that a parent’s responsibility is to do the pointing. That doesn’t mean your kids will eventually go the direction you’re pointing. But at least you have done your job.
As in the more standard version of this proverb, the parental responsibility is to “train.” When Ryan was really young he loved to hit balls with bats. As soon as he could stand, hitting something with a bat was one of his favorite things to do. So I started “training” him. I got him one of those fat bats. Then I’d pitch a balloon to him. The balloon came in slow enough he could get a good eye on it and whack it.
Then I changed to a beach ball. It came in a bit faster, but was still large enough and slow enough for him to get a good eye on, and whack it. As he became proficient with each type of ball, I just kept getting a smaller and smaller ball, until we were down to a wiffle ball the size of a softball. And I got a skinny plastic bat, so he had to keep a better eye on the ball when I pitched it to him. By the time he was two, he could hit an underhand pitched baseball nearly every time. I had trained him, and he had a natural aptitude for it.
When he got old enough for T-ball, they called him “Boomer” because he could hit a ball over the outfield fence into the cemetery on the other side. But when he got old enough to play little league, as good as he was, he decided he just didn’t like baseball. We had spent hours together, him pitching to me, and him hitting his booming home runs. But despite all that “training” he chucked it. It was a bit hard for me, but I had to listen and pay attention to what his passion was and the way he wanted to go. Baseball wasn’t going to be it.
And he did the same thing with the Christian faith. Something that he had an “aptitude” for ended up being put aside. Again, it was, and has been, really hard for me. It isn’t a pride thing, or an ego thing for me. I had to prayerfully ponder that one for a long time. Did Ryan and Kristin's choice for setting aside the faith hurt because it somehow made ME look bad? That here I was, a pastor, and my own son and daughter have left the faith? That it somehow reflects bad on me, so I should be all embarrassed? No. I wouldn’t go there.
Blackaby is understandably proud of his children and now some grandchildren, who have followed him into the ministry. And that they are strong in their Christian faith. But I am just as proud of Ryan and Kristin for all they are doing with their lives, even though, for now, it is outside the faith.
I have done my part. I have trained. And I have pointed. And I think I did my part well, in that respect. But at this point in their lives, this choice as to what they believe or not believe is up to them. What God has asked of me, as their father, is to train and point towards God every chance I got. That’s what God asks of any parent.
The other part of this proverb is also a great comfort. As The Message Bible has it, “…they won’t be lost.” One of the great things about being a Christian parent is understanding that it’s not all up to you. First, when a child is baptized, the congregation takes a vow to help the parent bring up the child in the Christian faith, to be a real part of their Christian nurture. All of you who have said "yes" to that question numerous times when a child is baptized, are promising to have a part in that child's Christian journey. Every one of you who has had a child baptized, also has the whole congregation to lean on in raising your children in the faith. I take YOUR promise very seriously--and hopefully you do too when it comes to the training and pointing for the children of this congregation.
But, even though you do your Christian training, and your God-pointing, if your kids choose otherwise, you still have hope.
“They won’t be lost.” What that says to me is that God is promising he has other resources. That to God, our kids will not be lost. God will not let our kids be lost, if we have done our job as parents.
I see this time and time again in Ryan’s life. God keeps putting people in Ryan’s life that are also part of God’s God-pointing work. One of Ryan’s best friends while he was a student at KU was also a PK—preacher’s kid. His father was a Lutheran pastor. When Ryan and Amanda got married, this friend was Best Man. I had a conversation with him at the wedding, and I found out he and Ryan talked a lot about God and what they believed or didn’t believe. I smiled to myself because I knew what God was up to in my son’s life. And it was a further affirmation for me that “…they won’t be lost.”
I’ve kind of realized, I probably won’t be the one who tips the balance when and if Ryan or Kristin choose to open themselves back up to a relationship with God. But I have been a large part of Ryan and Kristin's journey in the faith. I’ve done my part as their father. And I have faith that God is continuing that work.
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