Free At Last

"Free At Last"

Galatians 5:1

What do you hear when you hear the word, “freedom”?  I would guess what we hear is along the lines of either, “freedom from…” or, “freedom to…”.  We think of situations, or people that we have been freed from, so that we can live without terror or guilt or oppression.  Or, we think of situations, that because we are free, we get to do.

Freedom is a huge value for us as individuals.  Many of the advertising cliches trying to hook us are based on freedom, or our yearning to express our freedom.  Phrases like:

“Do your own thing.”

“Pull your own strings.”

“If it feels good, do it.”

“You aren’t the boss of me.”

“Just do it.”

Those are all freedom statements, spoken to a people who have a good measure of freedom to choose to do any of those.  Most of us have no personal experience with living a life where we don’t have the freedom to choose something, or do something.

As Americans, freedom is our national right:  “…life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

"Give me liberty, or give me death!" is a quotation attributed to Patrick Henry from a speech he made to the Virginia Convention on March 23, 1775, at St. John's Church in Richmond, Virginia.  He is credited with having swung the balance in convincing the convention to pass a resolution delivering Virginian troops for the Revolutionary War.  The catchy phrase inferred that it would be better to die, than to not be able to live a life of freedom.  And so, freedom, became one of the dominant quality-of-life foundations of our country and the way we live.

The apostle Paul gave us a similar Patrick Henry type of phrase, that has been a rallying statement for Christians down through the ages.  “For freedom, Christ has set us free.”  It is a striking phrase, especially if you have read through the book of Acts, and seen how Paul was most often being either thrown out of town, or thrown into jail, or held in stocks and shackles while being beaten.

How can a person who was in jail so often for preaching the gospel, talk about freedom in such a way?  Paul’s idea of freedom had to be shaped because of and during his jail time.  I’m thinking what he was thinking about freedom was way different than how most modern people think about freedom.

So many people are in a jail cell.  But the jail they are in has no bars.  There are no locks.  And thus, no keys.  But they are in jail cells nonetheless.  So what do those jail cells look like from inside?  Let me describe a couple these jail cells, without walls or bars or locks or door, that I have seen people get themselves into.

First, there is the story of Herman.

One night at a concert, a distinguished pianist suddenly became ill while performing an extremely difficult piece of music.  He had to stop in the middle of the piano piece and be escorted off stage.  Quietly, a man named Herman, got up from his seat in the audience, walked up on stage, sat at the piano.  He flawlessly and masterfully finished playing the piece.  He then went on to play several other pieces, to the amazement of the audience.

Later, when being interviewed, Herman was asked how he was able to perform such a demanding piece so beautifully without notice.  He then related this story:

In 1939, when I was a budding young concert pianist, I was arrested and placed in a Nazi concentration camp.  Putting it mildly, the future looked bleak.  But I knew that in order to keep the flicker of hope alive that I might someday might be free and play again, I needed to practice every day.  So I began fingering a piece from my repertoire on my baseboard bed late one night.  The next night I added a second piece and soon I was running through my entire repertoire, and I did this every night for five years.  It so happens that the pieces I played tonight at the concert hall were part of that repertoire.  That constant practice is what kept my hope alive.  Every night I renewed my hope that I would one day be able to play my music again on a real piano and in freedom.

What Herman understood was that he wasn’t just practicing his piano pieces.  He was playing out his truest and best self, holding on to that self, but knowing that that self couldn’t be known until he was free.

I think the Holy Spirit knows our truest and best self.  The Holy Spirit is trying to give everyone of us a clear sense of that, an accurate picture of who we are at our best.  A sense of our talents.  A sense of our capabilities.  A sense of our own self-worth.  A sense of our direction and dreams.

If you are living out the Holy Spirit’s vision for you, do you not lie on your bed at night, and in your best Godly imagination, play out what it might look like to be totally free and let that truest, best self out?

But, sadly that best self, that Holy Spirit self, may be locked up by our internal gestapo in a cell of insecurity.  Maybe it is locked up in the concentration camp of all the ways we have given others control of our life, with their judgmental and oppressive ways.

Remember the story of Zacchaeus? Others had a vision of Zacchaeus as a sinner.  They grumbled at him.  He was hated.  He was a short man, and people belittled him.  But deep inside him, Zacchaeus had a different vision of himself.  Someone who was generous.  Someone who saw the ways he lived a small and stingy life and wanted the chance to repent.  When Jesus came through Jericho, Zacchaeus knew in his truest heart, this was his chance to become the man the Holy Spirit was showing him he could be.

And, by Jesus, that chance was had.  “Today is salvation day in this home!” Jesus said to Zacchaeus, looking up at Zacchaeus who had climbed a tree to see Jesus.  What does “salvation day” mean in this story’s context other than the fact that Zacchaeus has finally been given the freedom to become the man he knew he could be—the man the Holy Spirit had put as a vision in his heart and mind.  Zacchaeus was released from the cell of his own self-loathing and the judgement of others.

Another way to understand our freedom in Christ is to know about caterpillars.  One biologist did an experiment with processional caterpillars.  First he took a plant he knew the caterpillars loved to eat and planted it in a clay pot.  Then he took a number of processional caterpillars, put them on the rim of the pot, and lined them up so that the leader was head-to-tail with the last caterpillar.  The tiny caterpillars circled the rim of the pot, following each other round and round for over a week.  Not once did any one of them break away to go over to the plant and eat.  Eventually, all the caterpillars died of exhaustion and starvation.

We think we are a much more highly developed species than caterpillars, but are we?  We get ourselves in ruts, doing the same thing day after day.  We end up avoiding and ignoring that which would feed us and nourish us and sustain us; but why?

There are probably lots of reasons.  Everyone else is doing it, it must be right.  Everyone else is circling the pot, round and round.  But if we ask the person ahead of us where they’re going, they don’t know either.  And if that person were to ask the person ahead of them why they’re going the direction they are, they wouldn’t know either.  We aren’t told or taught to ask questions.  We are taught to keep our mouths shut and just keep following the rest.  Round and round.

What everyone is doing is following others who are visionless and fearful to make a shift in their lives.  One of my favorite Farside cartoons showed a posse riding through the woods at night.  Several had torches.  They all had guns.  They were all following a bloodhound, who had his nose to the ground but was thinking to himself, “I don’t smell a darn thing.”

That is so many people’s lives:  locked up in the cells of their going round and round, not knowing where they going, or why they are going round and round.

Think of the story of Jesus and the woman at the well.  Remember her story?  You can find it in John 4.  She’s had had five husbands and she’s working on number six.  She was living the unreflective life of the immoral round and round.  Instead of trying something new, jumping out of the jail cell of her round and round, she just kept doing the same thing over and over, trying to find a new life by making the same mistakes she had made before.  Thinking that the more she did the same, just maybe there would be a different outcome.  But not so.

Jesus came and gave her the chance to quit living a processional caterpillar life.  To quit following the parade of her useless same old-same old solutions.  To step out of the circle.  To step towards the one who gives us the courage to step aside from the procession of thoughtless, unreflective living.

And what does she do in response, once she’s jumped off the merry-go-round of her former life?  She ran into town and said to everyone she met, “Come and see a man who…knows me inside and out.  Do you think this could be the Savior?”  The Savior.  The one who releases us from the invisible jail cell of the round-and-round.

Another way to understand our freedom in Christ is to be released from the jail cell of our fears.  There’s a dramatic scene in a play about a farm family that had been taken hostage by an escaped convict.  They were being held in the family’s living room.  Somehow, while the convict was waving his gun around, the father recognized there were no bullets in the chambers.  The man was holding the gun to the head of the young son in the family.

The father began to calmly talk to his son.  He tried to get the boy to come to him and away from the escaped convict.  All the other family members were crying out to the father, pleading with him to stop trying to get the boy to come.  All the while the convict was yelling that he’d kill the boy if he tried to move.  The boy was crying and shaking his head “no.”

Still the father reassuringly beckoned the son to come to him.  “Come on,” he’d say.  “It’s OK; it’s gonna be OK.  Just come to me, son.  Trust me.”  Finally, after what seemed like forever, the boy, crying out, “Daddy,” broke free and ran to his father’s arms as the convict pulled the trigger of his unloaded gun.

The fear that has kept your truest and best self captive is an unloaded gun.  All the while, the Father God is calling to you, “Just come to me; it will be all right.  That fear is empty and has no power over you.  Come to me.”  Once in the Father God’s arms will you see and know what an empty gun fear is, and how free it is to be out from under the barrel of fear that may be pressed to your head.

A final way to understand our freedom in Christ is to feel the bands of guilt, in which we are so tightly bound, finally released.

In the book, God’s Smuggler, by Brother Andrew, the early chapters tell the story of Andrew’s time serving in the Dutch Army in Indonesia.  He bought a young monkey, a gibbon, as a pet for the barracks.  He noticed, though, that when he touched the monkey on certain places of his body that the gibbon would let out a squeal.  He examined the gibbon more closely and found a raised welt that went all the way around its waist.  What Andrew surmised was that when the monkey had just been a baby, someone had tied a piece of wire around the monkey’s middle and never removed it.  As the monkey grew larger, the wire became embedded in his flesh.  And now was very painful.

That evening, Andrew began his operation.  Using his razor, he shaved off all the monkey’s hair in a two inch wide swath around its middle.  Gently, he cut into the tender flesh until he exposed the wire.  The gibbon lay there with the most amazing patience.  Even when he was obviously hurting the monkey, it looked up with eyes that seemed to say, “I understand.”  Once down to the wire, Andrew cut it and pulled it slowly out of the monkey’s skin.

Instantly, as soon as the operation was over, the monkey jumped up, did a backflip, danced around Andrew’s shoulders, and pulled Andrew’s hair in sheer happiness.  Andrew wrote:

After that, my gibbon and I were inseparable.  I think I identified with him as strongly as he with me.  I think I saw in the wire that had bound him a kind of parallel to the chain of guilt still so tight around myself—and in his release, I saw a symbol for the thing I also longed for.

Guilt is probably one of the hardest things to be free from.  Guilt is an internal reaction to an external action that we did that was bad, wrong, hurtful, or sinful.  And the problem is, we can either feel overly guilty, which is its own kind of jail cell.  Or we can feel too little guilt, and thus don’t take responsibility for our actions.

Just like the gibbon couldn’t get rid of the wire that had become lodged under his skin, neither can we remove the guilt that cuts into our spirits, and keeps us locked up.

Think of the apostle Peter who denied knowing Jesus three times, during the arrest and trial of Jesus.  Peter could have carried that guilt the rest of his life.  But the risen Lord came to Peter, asking Peter if he loved Jesus three times—one for each of the denials.  And Peter had to speak that love to Jesus’ face.  Freed of that guilt-like wire that dug into Peter’s spirit, Peter was then empowered to lead the church, which he couldn’t have done still strapped by his guilt.

“For freedom, Christ has set us free.”  Now what do you think of when you hear the word freedom?  Hopefully you are thinking of Jesus, and how he has come to you, either in the past, or maybe now in this moment, to release you from some kind of jail cell, that you have fashioned.  It is time to come out.  To be free.  To be released from your guilt, your fear, your round-and-round life, or your insecurity that keeps you from living your best life in Christ.  Whatever it is that holds you back and holds you in.  Come out.  Christ has broken down your jail cell door.  It can never lock you in again.

The Now And Future Self

"The Now And Future Self"

Genesis 4:1-10

Most of you remember Bre Buentello, who attended our church, while a teacher here and a year ago took a teaching job in Colorado.  I've been keeping in touch with her over Facebook.  This past week she put up a picture of Florida, with the words, "Love Conquers Hate" (hashtag Orlando).

I wrote back:

That may be true in the long run as love will envelope and absorb this act; but still, a hater with a gun can can cause immense amounts of pain and anguish not only for the dead and wounded and their families/friends, but also the increase of paranoia in a population already looking into others faces trying to assess whether they are a friend or foe.

That may be one of the oldest traits we share with our caveman ancestors, and really, with all animals.  One of our first instincts, when meeting a stranger, is to assess if this person is a friend or a foe, a good person or an evil person, someone with good intentions or someone with malice.

Evidently, after centuries of being human, we haven't gotten very good at it.  People let Adolph Hitler take over Germany and then the European continent, eventually killing millions of people, not just the Jews, but all those killed by German forces during the war.  A night club in Orlando let a young man in the front door who quickly killed 49 people and injured 54 more.  103 people.  Wasn't there anyone watching the door, some huge bouncer, looking into people's faces to see if they were a friend or foe?

Many are quick to link this atrocity to radical Islamists.  But the shooter told his mother that it disgusted him to see same sex people kissing each other.  Now it has been found out that the shooter frequently visited a number of gay clubs in the Orlando area and was probably gay himself.  I’ll say more about this in a minute.  I think the complexity of the shooters motives will never be known, whether it be ISIS or homophobia or a cocktail of all sorts of evil spirits.

What I am more interested in, what I am more disgusted by is the senseless death.  49 people are dead because someone mindlessly took their lives--felt like he had the power and the authority and the mission to end lives.  To make people dead.

At the last Presbytery meeting, Tom Sutter said to me, "I'm thinking you should have a law enforcement person talk to your congregation about what they should do in case a terrorist of some sort came in and took over worship and started shooting people.  He said, "You have a law enforcement person in your congregation," and he was talking about Jason Harrold.  I gave his suggestion a stupid smile and a light chortle.  Now I'm not so sure he's right.

But that's what I was trying to say responding to Bre's post on Facebook.  The shooting in Orlando certainly affects Orlando and the families and friends of those people now dead or wounded.  It also affects us, over 1500 miles away, because are we not now looking over our shoulders a bit more fearfully and studiously?  Is not our level of paranoia cranked up a few notches?  Are we not more afraid today, than we were last Saturday?

The truth is, you never know.  You never know anymore where the next tragedy of senseless killing will happen.  At a Miss Kansas pageant?  Think how easy that would have been, to come into Lesch Arena, and from the rail at the top, start taking out people down on the floor and in the stands--people who only have a couple of options for trying to get out of that place when all hell breaks loose.  At a Walmart during a big sale (which is what happened this week).  At the Olympic Games this summer in Rio?  At a worship service, where something like that is the furthest from our minds.  These kinds of atrocities tempt us to all become agoraphobics--just stay home and have Amazon deliver whatever it is we need, so we can stay indoors and "safe."

But the story of the first killing in the Bible let's us know we aren't even safe in our own homes with our own families.  Brothers kill brothers, for what?  Whose offering was better?  The story of Cain and Abel let's us know how quickly things went from the Garden of Eden to family murder.  Just one generation.  One, stinking generation.  That's all it took for senseless murder to enter the human storyline.

While most of the news since Sunday was about the night club shooting in Orlando, that story overshadowed another about a father in Roswell, New Mexico who shot and killed his wife and four daughters on Saturday, then fled into Mexico.  The children ranged in age from 3 to 14.  Why does a baby girl get born into the world only so she can be shot and killed as a 3 year old by her own father?  Why does she only get to live three years?  And why does an ass like her father get to decide when his family's lives will be over?

We are aghast at the killings in Orlando of 49 people, but the family killed ​in Roswell ​are a reminder that roughly 11,000 annual gun homicides happen within people's homes.  So we can't even hide out in our homes with our families and feel safe.  Like I said, fear and paranoia get ramped up considerably when we find out about these kinds of stories.  That ancient instinct of trying to decide who really is a friend and who is a foe becomes fueled by that paranoia; and we can't even be sure about our family.

We end up making errors of judgement on both ends of that instinctual assessment:  either we make everyone out to be the enemy, which is a horrible way to live; or, we decide to err on the side of being trusting in the goodness of human nature and end up murdered by someone close to us, which is a horrible way to die.

I want to spend some time thinking out loud about what the killings in Orlando are NOT about.

The killings in Orlando are not about gun control.  That isn’t the main issue behind this atrocity.  It is what most politicians are running towards right now, but they are wrong.  Joseph Loomis put on his Facebook page this week, a picture of wrecked cars with the caption, “We don’t blame cars for drunk drivers. Why blame guns for violent people?”

Gun control is not going to solve the main problem.  If not an assault rifle, then a hunting rifle, or some kind of semi-automatic pistol.  If not a pistol a sword.  If not a sword a hunting knife.  And on and on.  It’s not about the weapon.  If you take all the weapons away from a demented human being, you’ve still got a demented human being.  It’s about something else.

The killings in Orlando are not about the gay-homophobic issue.  A bunch of Facebook posts are all over that, asking everyone to claim solidarity with the hurting gay community.    The fact that the nightclub was a hangout for LGBT people is not the main issue here.

Nor is the issue about homophobia or Christian teachings, as one article in the Washington Times wrote about.  The headline was, “LGBT Activists Blame Christians For Orlando Attack.” In the article there was this paragraph:

Several prominent gay-rights activists took to social media to blame Christians for Sunday’s massacre at a gay nightclub in Orlando.  Chase Strangio, a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union, on Sunday said the “Christian Right” is implicated in the slaughter by passing “anti-LGBT bills.”  “The Christian Right has introduced 200 anti-LGBT bills in the last six months, and people are blaming Islam for this!?  No!?,” Mr. Strangio said in a Twitter post.

Sorry, Mr. Strangio, but you are way off, too, in taking aim to blame Christians.  The main issue, the main problem, isn’t a LGBT one, nor a Christian one.

The killings in Orlando are not about “radical Islamic terrorism” as both presidential candidates are stumbling over themselves trying to make us believe.  According to reports, the shooter had pledged himself to at least four Islamic fundamentalist groups.  (But here’s my paranoia leaking out—how do we know we are being told the truth about that by our government law officials?  How do we know that the FBI isn’t just trying to play on this tragedy to ramp up our fear of radical Islamic terrorism.).  But two of the Islamic groups the young man mentioned are at fierce odds with each other; and so are the other two.  So did the young man even know who he was pledging himself to?

Bill Keller sent me a link to an article this week asking the question, “How is it that these homegrown people are allying themselves with and becoming terrorists?”  What is it that’s missing in our culture that makes a person try to find personal meaning and purpose, not in something our culture offers, but that a terrorist culture does?

Those are intriguing questions, and they are getting a little closer to the main problem, but ultimately, the Orlando shootings are not about Islamic fundamentalistic terrorism.

And since this issue isn’t about terrorism, it is therefore not an immigration issue, as one of the presidential candidates keeps saying.  It isn’t a “build a wall” issue.  It isn’t about limiting the amount of Islamic people to immigrate to our country.  It isn’t about deporting a bunch of Mexican people or Islamic people back to their countries of origin.  Thinking that if we limit the number of “those kinds of people” in our country we will somehow take care of this murderous problem is magical thinking.  All of the school shootings that we’ve had to deal with were not done by “those kinds of people.”

So what is the main issue behind the Orlando shootings, and the school shootings, and the 11,000 family gun deaths, and all the rest?

The main issue is that we are all human beings.  As human beings we have the capability within each of us to do atrocious things.  Human beings have been doing atrocious things through out human history—from Cain and Abel until today.

Paul wrote to the Christians in Rome:

For we have already charged that all…are under sin, as it is written:

“None is righteous, no, not one;

no one understands;

    no one seeks for God.

All have turned aside; together they have become worthless;

    no one does good,

    not even one.”

“Their throat is an open grave;

    they use their tongues to deceive.”

“The venom of asps is under their lips.”

“Their mouth is full of curses and bitterness.”

“Their feet are swift to shed blood;

     in their paths are ruin and misery,

     and the way of peace they have not known.”

“There is no fear of God before their eyes.”

What we have to take seriously is human sin.  Human sin is the main and underlying problem to all human atrocities.  Human sin is, as I just said, the capability to do Godless violence against each other.  We also have the capability to do amazing acts of compassion—to be a Mother Teresa or Gandhi.  But we have to acknowledge, that as humans, we have BOTH capabilities within us.  We can just as easily become an Orlando shooter, or a murderer of our families as we could become a Mother Teresa.  We have to acknowledge that fact.

Gun control, building walls, deportation, LGBT civil rights, whatever!  None of those are going to solve the underlying problem of our human nature and it’s inclination and proclivity toward violence.  Ultimately it is an issue of our hearts and spirits.  None of the solutions being chased after this latest shooting are going to make us safe or better human beings.  That also is magical thinking.  The truth is, I’m sorry to say, is that none of us are safe, not even from ourselves, because of our basic humanity and what we might call sin.

One article I read this week talked about the Orlando shooter using the term, “self-radicalization.”  That the shooter was basically a loner, and not part of any radical group.  That he had worked himself into this state of violence through a process of "self-radicalization".  Maybe that’s an apt term to describe a person’s basic humanity out of control, or in the control of sin.  In the control of a tainted and misguided heart.  The answer is not to take the guns out of the “self-radicalized” person’s hands, but to change the person’s heart.

It’s not the before-and-after picture I was talking about a couple of weeks ago when I told the story of my conversion.  I talked about how I wished I had a before-and-after story like the apostle Paul, or some Christians I knew at that time I became a Christian.  But I came to realize it isn’t the before-and-after picture that’s important.  It’s the now-and-future picture that is.  It is not just what Jesus saved me from in the past.  It is more what Jesus has saved me from becoming in the future.  It is what Christ is changing my heart to become—His person—so that my baser human inclinations will not take over, so that I don’t become self-radicalized, so that I don’t become an Orlando shooter, or a guy who murders his wife and four daughters and runs to Mexico.

Christ is the only one we believe who has that kind of power to save us from ourselves.  To save us from our future selves.  To change our hearts from within, today,  so that we might be molded after his humanity, and not our inhumanity, for our future.

A Woman In A Room Full Of Men

"A Woman In A Room Full Of Men"

Luke 7:36-47

A woman in a room full of men.  Not just a regular kind of woman.  A woman who had lived a sinful life.  "A woman of the village.  The town harlot." A woman talked about but not talked to.  A woman, who when those in the village saw her, pulled their children close--especially their daughters.  A woman most of the men knew--maybe many of them in the biblical sense.

A woman in a room full of men.  A woman who had a face, but no one knew what her face looked like because she was always looking at the ground and her face was always covered by her long and wild and unbrushed hair.  Hair that was always let down because why keep it up tight and covered for a husband she would never have.  A woman, who when you looked up immorality in the dictionary, you would find her picture beside the definition.  A woman of bad character, whose string of self-destructive decisions eroded away every bit of who she was as a person.

A woman in a room full of men.  A woman who had no reason to live and no reasonable life.  A woman who was useful for only one purpose, and that purpose had only to do with one small area of her physiology.  A woman whom others couldn't decide if she deserved disgust, judgement, abuse, pity, or grace.  A woman whose story was never known, never told, and never cared about.  "A woman of the village" but was invisible to and discarded by that village.

A woman in a room full of men.  A woman who is never named in this story's telling.  A woman whose name may not have even been known.  No name, no identity, no story, no person.

A woman in a room full of men.  But not just your garden variety of men.  Pharisees.  Religious leaders.  Studious.  Respected.  Pious.  The righteous and the self-righteous.  The kinds of men you don't argue with, because they know all the answers.

A woman in a room full of men.  Men who were Bible Study leaders.  Sunday School teachers.  Elders and Deacons in their churches.  They were so full of the Bible, they even carried their Bibles with them wherever they went--not just little pocket Testaments, but large, heavy, leather bound, gold embossed Bibles.  They were men of the Book.

A woman in a room full of men.  Men whose bodies were as squeaky clean as their Bible-studied souls.  Kosher, through and through.  Not a blemish on them.  Each one a pure and sanctified offering to Almighty God.  Where never is heard a discouraging word, except for women like her.

A woman in a room full of men.  Reclining on their fine couches, angling off from the edge of the dinner table.  The host at the head of the table.  The most honored guests nearest the host.  Jesus at the foot of the table, as far away from the host as was possible at that table.

A woman in a room full of men.  She had run into the room, brazenly pushing past the onlookers standing at the doorway.  She slowly circled the table.  One deliberate step after another.  All the men's eyes are upon her.  Oddly, very oddly, none of the men spoke.   None of the men demanded she leave that room.  All the men's eyes were upon her, undressing her with their eyes.  Her eyes were upon Him.  Behind her veil of ragged hair, the closer she got to Him, the more the springs of those eyes behind her hair bubbled up and spilled over.

A woman in a room full of men.  She was now standing behind him.  Then, suddenly, she collapsed like a rag doll upon his feet.  The air in that room suddenly sucked out by the *gasp* of all who were there, all who were hanging in the windows watching the show.  The flood gates of her soul fully open, she drenched His feet in a thunderstorm of tears.  And with them a waterfall of dark curls splash upon His tear drenched feet.  Almost provocatively, she began to dry her fallen tears from His feet with her hair.  The musky scent of her tear sopped hair became stained with the road dust from Jesus' feet.

A woman in a room full of men.  All the while, Jesus never looked at the woman.  He was gazing into the faces of the men around the table.  Their eyes were locked on the woman and what she was doing.  Jesus was the one who suddenly became invisible to them.  Looking at their faces it was as if Jesus were reading each of their minds by the leering expressions he saw.  Lust.  He knew they were wishing it was their feet the woman was caressing.  When she started kissing Jesus' feet, the heat from those men's faces could be felt across the table.

But there was no heat from the host's face.  Simon's face was cold with judgement.  His repugnance of the whole scene sent a chill from his frozen heart up to his frozen face.

In a stroke of storytelling magic, we get to find out what's in Simon's thoughts and what's in Jesus' mind.  Simon is thinking Jesus is a dolt.  Simon is thinking Jesus doesn't know anything.  Simon is thinking that if Jesus really were somebody, he'd certainly know what kind of woman it was who was playing with his feet.  Everybody knew what kind of woman she was.  If Jesus knew, if he really was a somebody, he would have, he should have, sent her away with the back of his hand across her insolent and tear stained face.  Simon was thinking he was really, really disappointed in who Jesus was.  That's what Simon was thinking.

What the storytelling magic lets us know is that what was in Jesus' mind was that he knew exactly what Simon was thinking.  We get let in on a huge secret, going on in this scene, that Simon is totally oblivious too.  Jesus can hear what people are thinking.  That's the only way we find out what Simon is thinking--because Jesus read Simon's mind.

What we find out from Jesus' mind is that Simon, who thinks he knows exactly who this woman is and what she's doing, really has no idea who she is and what's behind her evocative and emotional display.  And Jesus knows the reason why Simon doesn't have a clue about anything that's going on.

In response to what Jesus heard in Simon's thoughts, Jesus told him a parable.  The parable is only addressed to Simon:  "Simon, I have something to tell you." With Simon's full attention ("Oh?  Tell me."), and, I'm sure everyone else's, Jesus tells the parable.

Two men own money to a loan shark.  One of them is in debt up to his eyeballs.  The other only owes 50 bucks.  Neither of the men can pay up when the debt is due.  They're both afraid they're going to get their faces rearranged, or their legs broken, by the loan shark's goons.  Surprisingly, the loan shark let's both men not only go unharmed, but even cancels their debt.  (That's Wing's modern version of the parable.)

In the original version of the parable, if you'd look at your Bibles, I want you to notice one word in particular.  It comes up three times.  Which word do you think it is?  It's in the question Jesus asked at the end of the parable.

Love.  Which one of the debtors will love the banker more.  Not, which one will be more appreciative of the banker.  Not, which one will be most thankful.  Not, which one will be the most relieved.  But, which one will LOVE the banker more.

Simon can only answer the obvious:  "I suppose the one who was forgiven the most." "I suppose..." You can hear Simon's tone can't you.  "I suppose..." shows he hesitated, or felt exasperated that Jesus had forced him into the small corner of his small thoughts.  "I suppose..." let's us know that Simon saw the clamp of Jesus' parable-trap coming down upon him.

And I rather like to think that Simon was totally caught off guard by Jesus using the L word in his parable's question.  Love seemed like an awfully strong word to be used in such a question at the conclusion of such a parable.  Especially to Simon, who's iced over heart had lost touch with such a word.

That's Simon's deepest problem.  He wouldn't know love even if it came up and cried itself all over his feet.  Jesus didn't let up on Simon.  After Simon's, "I suppose..." Jesus told Simon what love is by contrasting Simon's inaction with the woman's action.

You:  no water for my feet (and that's assuming Simon washed the other guests feet and then visibly omitted washing Jesus' feet.)

She:  washed my feet with her tears.

You:  no kiss.

She:  has not stopped kissing my feet.

You:  no scented oil.

She:  poured expensive perfume on my feet.

A woman in a room full of men.  Then Jesus aimed his final blow at Simon's heart, maybe in hopes of shattering that ice encased thing.  "Do you see this woman?" Jesus asked him.  You Simon.  You.  The others may be listening, but Jesus is looking at you, Simon.  "This woman has shown great love." There's that L word again.  "The great love she has shown is because she knows she is forgiven.  She knows.  She can't help but show her love because she knows!"

Jesus concludes, "But (and you have to watch out for those times Jesus uses the word, "but" because they are usually followed by a hammer), "But, whoever doesn't know forgiveness only shows a little love." There's the third and final use of the word love.  It's very clear it's a word Jesus wanted Simon to hear.  Probably any Simon-kind-of-person for that matter.

Do you love Jesus?  "I suppose..." you might answer.  Do you feel yourself catching on the word love in regard to how you feel about Jesus?  You may like him.  You may admire him.  You may respect him.  You may even be amazed by or in awe of him.  But do you love him?

Do you fully understand the height and depth and breadth of His forgiveness of you?  And because of that, are you full of love for Jesus?  Out of the fullness of that love, do you demonstrate it to Jesus?  How?  How do you fall at his feet?  How do you cry out the tears of your confession upon those feet?  How do you pour out the expensive perfume of your love upon him?

She was a woman in a room full of men.  A room full of men whose thoughts were hostile toward her and cold toward Jesus.  But Jesus knew her.  Jesus knew why she had come into Simon's home that day.  She was a forgiven woman with a need to show "great love."

The Only Story We Have To Tell Is Our Own

"The Only Story We Have To Tell Is Our Own"

Galatians 1:11-24

What's your story?

Life is about stories.  Life is about living out our story.  Sharing that story with others.  Our story is not just for us--even though it is our story.  Stories are meant to be told.

I subscribe to a journal called, "Creative NonFiction." Each story in this journal reads like an intriguing fictional story.  But not so.  The stories in "Creative Non-Fiction" are all true.  These stories actually happened to those who wrote them.  Each issue has a topic or a theme.  I am in awe as I read through each issue, at the stories people have lived and are now sharing through this magazine.

In one issue the theme is food.  In an article titled, “The Intimacy of Forks” by Liesl Schwabe, she writes about the joy of being a chef, and the simple pleasures of just setting a table for guests.  In her personal essay she wrote, “I like the way kitchens inherently promise possibility but also remind us of the measured, modest steps necessary to take one thing and make something else.”  Reading her article made me daydream about what it would be like to be a chef, and my own love of cooking that has gone latent these past years.

In another issue, J.D. Lewis wrote an essay about his work traveling around the world studying what are called “Lazarus Species.”  These species are ones thought extinct, but miraculously rise from extinction.  I daydreamed about what a life would be like traveling the world, and getting to tell the story of different plants and animals that we once thought were gone forever, but somehow rise again.

As I said, I am in awe.  But I am also (what would be the best word here), beleaguered.  No, that's not right.  A bit depressed.  More at feeling inconspicuous.  Low-key.  Low-profile.  Plain.  Ordinary.  Uneventful.  I am a bit jealous, not only that these people whose stories I read in "Creative Non-Fiction" are not only adventurous, out-going, and boarder line amazing, but they are written so well also.

That's the tag line of this magazine:  "True Stories, Well Told." I read those and I think, why don't I have some amazing stories to tell, that have happened in my life?  Why don't I have some great adventure to share?  Do these people have lots of stories--adventures that have happened?  Or, do they just have this one adventure and happened to get it published?  And why can't I write as well as some of these stories are written?

I have enough of an ego to think I could write as well as most of them I read.  I just don't think I have any interesting adventures to write about.  I think to myself that I have to get out there and live the adventure, to make up for my otherwise pedestrian kind of life I've lived so far.

I know my life has counted for something.  I know I have helped, and shepherded, and mentored and pastored a lot of people along the way.  I feel really good about that.  But there's been this marked lack of adventure, except for a mission trip to Guatemala where I came down with an awful case of dysentery.  And a month after returning, came down with Hepatitis A, that almost landed me on a liver transplant list.  I guess that's a story.

Paul had a story to tell.  And a pretty amazing story it was.  Unknown to him, his story would become his main witness.  That's how it goes with our stories.  They can be such a great form of witness.  Paul writes, here at the beginning of his letter to the Galatians, “Look, I’m not making this stuff up.  Jesus got a hold of me; turned my life upside down; sent me all over the world to preach the gospel.  Here’s what happened.  Here’s a few of the details.  It’s my story.  Not anyone else’s story.  It’s the best way I know how to get this message of Jesus across.”

For Paul, his story involved an early life of plowing along a set course.  He grew up in a privileged Jewish family.  They must have been wealthy, because Paul studied under Gamaliel, one of the most respected rabbi's in Jerusalem.  That kind of education, at Gamaliel’s school, wouldn't have been cheap.

It wasn’t just his education, though.  A large part of Paul’s education would have been from the 50 volumes of laws that were based on the 10 Commandments.  It wasn’t that Paul just studied those 50 volumes frontwards and backwards.  It was, as he wrote to the Galatians, “…I obeyed every law that our ancestors had given us” (vs. 14).  Paul meticulously studied and obeyed 50 volumes of laws.  And he tried to make everyone else do the same.  Including and especially the Christians who had no respect for any of it.

Then, BOOM! a blinding light from heaven, the Voice of God, Paul knocked to the ground off his horse, he goes blind for a few days, and his life is changed forever.  Then he spends the rest of his life traveling all over Asia Minor preaching the gospel and getting congregations started.  It’s an amazing story!

My coming-to-Jesus story is so much less so.  I was in 7th grade.  I was at a Snow Conference our presbytery put on in the Cascade mountains, east of Seattle.  My mom told me I had to go.  I didn’t ski.  I don’t ski.  I’ve skied once in my life, when I was an adult.  (That really is a story worth telling.)  I just didn’t see any point in going to this snow conference with a bunch of kids I didn’t know.  I had very few friends and none of them were going.

When most of the others went to ski for the day, I stayed back at the conference lodge.  And hung around.  And hung around.  And after I got done hanging around, I hung around some more.  At one point, believe it or not, I got bored.  So I bundled myself up like Charlie Brown in Winter, and walked down to a small village near the lodge.  I had some money my mom had given me, and I bought a box of chocolate covered cherries.  I think there were 20 in the box.  I ate them all.  In one sitting.

Early in the evening when the skiers were returning, I was hurling chocolate covered cherries in the boys bathroom.  You get the picture.  Do you think that was the beginning of my distaste for chocolate?

After dinner, which I didn’t eat, we were all sitting in the conference room, me much more pale and wrung out than when I started the day.  The speaker for the weekend was a guy who had a drum strapped to his back that he played with a wire hooked to his ankle.  He had a harmonica on a holder around his neck.  And he played the guitar.  All three at the same time.  (Mike can play the guitar and harmonica at the same time.  Now you just need to add the drum.) 

         Not only had I made myself sick, but I had gotten so negative about being there, I had made myself snarky as well.  “Oh, look,” I said to a small group of kids next to me.  “The circus has come to town.”  I was told to shut up.  And I think the word loser was thrown in there as well, from that group of kids.

So I did.  Shut up, that is.  When the guy stopped his singing circus act, he started talking.  And I started listening.  I’d never heard anything like it.  I’d never heard any one like him.  I don’t remember what he said.  I know he told us about Jesus.  Something about Jesus caring about us no matter what.

What I did hear was authenticity.  This guy was real.  It was the speaker’s genuineness that convinced me about Jesus.  I say, “telling me” because it was like he was talking to me and there was no one else in the room.  The other 50 or so junior high kids that were in the room became invisible, and the sincerity of his character was mine to soak up.

When he gave the altar call, which was just a suggestion we bow our heads, right where we were sitting, everyone in prayer, that if we wanted Jesus to be in our hearts, to just do that right then.  With my stomach still rumbling from heaving up a box of chocolate covered cherries, and my snarky attitude, I asked Jesus into my life.

No bright light knocking me off a horse.  No pedigree like Paul.  No life of leadership, as a rising star.  No voices out of the sky.  No temporary blindness.  Just a stupid 7th grader with a bad attitude and a majorly upset stomach.  Bowing my head, and saying, “Yes,” to Jesus.

That night when we boys were in our bunkbed section of the lodge, the speaker came in to say good night to us all.  I remember he knelt by my bunk and said a prayer for us all.  Beside my bunk and prayed.  It was the most true prayer I heard prayed, from the most authentic man I had ever met, whose words and demeanor were lined up by God himself.

When I got home from the Snow Conference, I’m sure my mom must have asked me how it went, and I’m sure I said something like most kids say to questions like that:  “It was OK.”  But I was different from that time on.  I could feel it.  Something had changed.

Paul knew something had changed as well.  But for him it was a stark change.  His before picture was one of a cruel persecutor of Christians.  He called himself a destroyer.  He was so misguidedly on fire for his religion that he hated everyone who wasn’t like him.  Which were mostly Christians.  So he set about to destroy Christian’s lives.  He ripped apart Christian families and had them thrown into prison.  Men, women, children.  He had believers killed in awful ways.

I had no before picture like that.  I was, and for the most part have been, a straight arrow kind of person.  I’ve never really acted out.  I was never a partier in high school or college or after.  I’ve never taken or used any kind of illicit drug.  I’ve never been drunk.  (When you grow up with a drunk, you see it isn’t an enviable kind of life.)  I was one of those boringly good kids.  So, at my acceptance of Jesus, I went from being a good kid, to being a good kid with Jesus in my life.

So why did I feel so bad when I was in high school and college?  Why did I feel like I should have had a dramatic conversion like Paul, and many of the other believers I had met at that time—the late 1960’s and early 1970’s?  I never had a story like some of them had, about coming down from a three year drug addicted high, gave their lives to Jesus, and Jesus healed their fried brains.  How come I didn’t have a story like that?  I almost felt like I had to make one up, just to fit in.  I was jealous of those who did have a Paul styled, knock-you-off-your-horse story that everyone oooed and awed at.

People would turn to me and ask me to share my coming to Jesus story.  I had no Voices from the sky.  No bright lights.  No gargantuan before and after picture.  All I had was, “I got sick on a box of chocolates and turned my life over to Christ.”

I finally had to come to realize, the only story we have to tell is our own, no matter what it is.  And be OK with that.

What Paul doesn’t tell us in this short snippet of his conversion story is that, once he went out on all his journeys, telling people about Jesus, starting churches, almost everyplace Paul went he was beat up.  Just for telling people about Jesus, just for following his sense of calling after he gave his life to Christ, Paul was stoned, beaten, imprisoned, left for dead, shipwrecked, bit by a viper.  Even though he had great adventures as an evangelist for Jesus, those great adventures led to his near death several times.

I guess I should be grateful.  In all my travels, and pastoring from church to church during my ministry, people haven’t tried to kill me.  Instead I get invited over for dinner!  I must be doing something wrong!

I could describe my life as a Christian, from the time of that Snow Conference, as extraordinarily ordinary.  I would guess most Christians might describe their coming-to-Jesus story in the same way.  No big splash.  Just an ordinary day, in an ordinary life, trying to live into an extraordinary event of inviting Jesus into your life.  And that’s OK.

Just Say The Word

"Just Say The Word"

Luke 7:1-10

How many of you think you have the power to heal another person?

(Assuming none raise their hands). Why is that?  You'd think at least one or two might say they had such a power, such an ability.

What I want to try and do this morning is convince you that all of you have the power to heal.  You all underestimate yourselves and what you think you can do, under God's leading and power.  So, are you ready for this?

First, let's look at the Centurion in this story.  Here is a person of power and authority.  Because he's been in the circles of power so long, he's also skilled in recognizing other forms of power and authority.  He knows it when he sees it.

So what does the Centurion recognize in terms of Jesus' power?  What he perceives in Jesus is the power of his spoken words.  Or maybe, more accurately, the power behind Jesus' spoken words.  Words can be spoken, but they may be lacking the power behind them that has the ability to heal.

Proverbs 16:24 states, "Kind words are like honey--they cheer you up and make you feel strong." Another version says that kind words are "sweet to the soul and healing to the bones."  There's a Japanese saying, "One kind word can warm up three months of Winter."

Here's the pivotal phrase spoken by the Centurion:  "Just say the word, and my servant will get well."  All's you have to do is say the word, Jesus, and the power of that word--the power behind that word--will do the rest.  But, what's the word?  What's the word the Centurion wants to hear from Jesus?  "Yes, your servant is healed.". Or, "Go; it is done." Or, "Yes, so be it".  "Just say the word."

Are you able to speak such words?  Maybe not on your own.  That is, not without the Power that was also behind Jesus' words.  With the power of God--which is ultimately the love of God--we can speak a word that will have impact, and believe it or not, can heal.  There may be people who are sending us the message, maybe from a distance (or we to them), "Just say the word."

I want to share some words with you, that if you speak them with the Power of the Lord behind them, have the ability to heal others.

Here's the first word:  "I'm sorry."  How hard it is to say this word some times.  It is the truth that it is only the power of God that makes this word heal.  Spoken insincerely, spoken flippantly, spoken without God in it, there is no healing.  It is only a word.  But when it is spoken with God in it, what healing can take place.

Saying you are sorry is a leveler.  What has happened is some kind of awful imbalance in your relationship with another.  There's a power game going on in which one is trying to, in a sick or hurtful way, exert power over another.

At one time, J. Paul Getty was one of the richest men in the world.  He went into a Neiman-Marcus store and bought some clothes, but refused to pay the delivery charges.  "So," reported one of the stores founders, Stanley Marcus, "when I was in California, some time later, I bought gas at a Getty oil company station, but refused to pay the tax.  Instead, I gave the attendant my business card and told him to bill Getty personally.  'Tell Getty that Stanley Marcus has gotten even,' I said."

As this example shows, most of the power plays in relationships are really petty and small.  All's it would take would be the good word of, "I'm sorry" and everything would be taken care of before escalation happens.

When instances of hurt happen, the outcome can be much sadder.  A father and his son had had an argument, that escalated out of control.  In the heat of the moment, the father told his son to get his clothes and leave home.  The son gathered some of his stuff together and walked out the door.  In the years that followed, the family often wondered what happened to their son.  They hoped that one day he might come back, but he never did.

One night the pastor was visiting in the home and the mother asked if he would participate in a ritual they performed every night.  Then she stepped out the front door and put the door key under the mat.  She explained that when the boy was living at home, they always left the key under the mat so he could get in.  "Now," she said, "if he should come back some night wondering whether we want him back, all he would have to do would be to look under the mat and see the key and know he was welcome."

The pastor wanted to say, "How much more healing and powerful it would have been, if the father could have just said, "I'm sorry," brought restoration to the relationship, and the son would have never left in the first place."

Like I said, saying "I'm sorry" levels the the imbalance that's been created by the petty power play or the hurt.  When "I'm sorry" is said, each can regain equal footing.  Restoration of the relationship can happen.

But the power behind the "I'm sorry" must be a God-infused sincerity.   Some say, "I'm sorry" so often, it's not taken seriously.   They keep being power petty, or keep being hurtful, keep saying, "I'm sorry" but nothing ever changes.  Or someone pushes another to say, "I'm sorry," so that when it comes, it feels forced rather than sincere. God's power, in God's good words, are about change, and creating deep change in a person's heart.

Spoken in God's way, from a heart changed by God, the word, "I'm sorry" can bring so much healing to hurt and pettiness.  "Just say the word."

The second word that you can say, that will be able to heal, is, "I love you".  You probably guessed this one when you saw where I was going with this message.  This is probably the most powerfully healing word that can be spoken, but is done so seldom.  Singer Lena Horne, in an interview one time said, "My mother was either cold as ice or she couldn't do without me.  I couldn't stand her.  I wanted very much for her to love me.  But to the day she died she never told me."

We may think that the opposite of love is hate.  That when we tell someone we love them, that we are curing the disease of hatred.  But in the Lena Horne quote I just shared, her mother probably didn't hate her.  Instead, it may have been a cold indifference that caused Horne to say about her mother, "I couldn't stand her".  As playwright George Bernard Shaw once said, "The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them; that's the essence of inhumanity".

To be indifferent is to treat someone you know as if they were of no importance.  None.  That their existence is not going to effect you one bit.  It's to treat someone you know as if you have no concern about them at all.  That is the opposite of love.  It's making others invisible to you.

One of the biggest sicknesses of American society right now is it is a society where people are used but not loved.  A strong, self-reliant kind of man, who didn't very often express his emotions, had to rush his wife to the hospital with a ruptured appendix.  The operation was a success, but the woman's condition deteriorated from the fairly simple procedure.  Despite a blood transfusion and intensive care, she continued to lose strength.  The doctors were puzzled because by all medical standards she should have been recovering.

They finally were convinced of the reason for her deterioration:  she was not trying to get well.  The surgeon, a long time family friend, went to her and said, "I would think you would want to be strong for John."

She replied, weakly, "John is so strong, he doesn't need anybody."

When the doctor told the husband what she had said, he immediately went into his wife's room, took her hand and said, "You've got to get well!"

Without opening her eyes, she asked, "Why?"

He said, "Because I couldn't live without you."

The nurse who had come in to check vitals on the monitor, noticed an immediate change in pulse and blood pressure.  The wife opened her eyes and said, "John, that's the first time you ever said that to me".  A couple of days later she was home.

When someone is in the grips of the sickness of feeling used for what they do, rather than loved for who they are, then there is the need to hear the healing word, "I love you".  To be able to say, "I love you," heals the feelings of living in a void, of feeling like you live in a society of relationships where everyone takes, but no one gives, to live feeling faceless--until someone needs something from you.

In one of the most profound fortune cookies, I got a fortune that read, "'Tis wisely put--exchange the love of power for the power of love".  The truth behind this fortune cookie quip is that the love of power makes people things.  The power of love makes people human beings.

The power of this kind of love is the power of God--who is, as the letter of John tells us in the Bible, love.  God is love.  To share the power of love with someone is to share the very person of God with that person.  This kind of love has the power to create personal dignity and identity, rather than creating puppets as our slaves or playthings.

How many people in your life need to be healed by this word, "I love you"?  Or maybe for your own healing, to hear this word from someone else.  Just say the word.

Here is the third and last word that you can say that will heal another:  "Way to go!"   Think of all the negative messages we receive that all carry the theme that some how we just don't measure up.  But most of all, how many of those negative messages get flipped off our tongues to or about others?

Christian author Joyce Landorf has written a book titled, Irregular People.  In the introduction to the book, Landorf highlighted some of the irregular people she has known.  She wrote about one:

There were the irregular parents who never attended any of their daughter's swim meets while she was in competition.  They were blind to the fact that she broke all the swimming records, in every event, her first year of high school.  Later, as a senior, she became the secretary of both her class and the student body, but at no time would either parent acknowledge her accomplishments.

She said of that time, "I tried so hard to make my parents see that I was good".  Then, when she had won the title of homecoming queen her senior year, she recalled thinking, Now they'll be proud of me!  But again, out of blindness, her mother's only cryptic comment was, "I guess it pays to be cheap with the boys".  Receiving no affirmation or approval from her parents wreaked havoc in this young girl's heart.  She eventually worked through this, but as a teenager she could not understand the blindness of her irregular parents.

The trouble is, there are varying shades of affirmation.  Sometimes it looks like affirmation, but is just a transfigured slap.  Negative statements may not be so blatant.  They may be along the lines of, "You're OK, but..." Or there are plastic complements.  Those are the kinds of complements that start out feeling good but end up making us feel fake and hollow.  Such as saying something like, "That looks nice considering you made it". 

We all want to do well in other people's eyes and be affirmed for doing something well, or for some admirable quality in us.  We want that so badly, at times, we are more hard on ourselves than others are on us.

Walt Disney seldom surveyed his animator's work while they were creating.  He understood the fragile nature of the creative process, and he wouldn't intrude.  But there was nothing to stop him after his animators left for the day.  Walt's nighttime visits to the offices became legendary, and animators often left their best work on the drawing table overnight, anticipating that Walt would inspect it.  But sometimes they arrived in the morning to find crumpled sheets of paper rescued from wastebaskets and pinned on a story board with the notation in Walt Disney's unmistakable handwriting, "Quit throwing the good stuff away."

There is a great sickness in our society that can be healed with a word that contains the message, "Way to go!". There is such a need for sincere affirmation, encouragement and compliments.  In a world that can be a place of pummeling degradation and negative messages, imagine the power the words of positive affirmation can have.  Just say the word.

I have mentioned just three words you can say that hold within them the power of healing.  I'm sorry.  I love you.  Way to go.  There is this wonderful symbiotic relationship that God has created between the ones who need to hear such words, and the ones who can utter them.  Luciano De Crescenzo put it best, I think:  "We are each of us angels with only one wing.  And we can only fly embracing each other".

The power of God is the ability to make each other fly through encouragement, love and being sorry for things we've done.  Imagine all of us walking around, still half winged angels, heads hanging low.  God is looking down on such a scene hoping and desiring that two of us would just get together and say one of these great words to each other, and then watch the embrace and flight that then happens.

I'll close with this poem:

Oh, that my tongue might so possess

The accent of His tenderness

That every word I breathe should bless.

For those who mourn, a word of cheer;

A word of hope for those who fear;

And love to all both far or near.

Oh, that it might be said of me,

"Surely thy speech betrayeth thee

As friend of Christ of Galilee!"

"One Thing Leads To Another"

"One Thing Leads To Another"

Romans 5:1-5

Everyone wants to grow to their fullest human potential.  At least I think they do.  I may be making a false assumption about that statement.  I just think, deep down, people want to know how to grow into the best person they can.

There’s all kinds of self-help books out there to help you achieve that.  There’s a book titled, The Path: What Chinese Philosophers Can Teach Us About the Good Life.  Such as, Confucius say, “A bird in each hand make it hard to blow your nose.”  Or, there’s a book titled, Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself: How to Lose Your Mind and Create a New One.  If you’re into using a psychological model that was popular 35 years ago, you could read, Rethinking Everything: Personal Growth through Transactional Analysis.  Transactional Analysis is that model that says we act out of three different personas:  parent, adult, or child.  I’m sure this book has lots of information about helping you out when you’re acting like a child and you should be living like an adult.  But, if you don’t like that one, there’s, The Other 90%: How to Unlock Your Vast Untapped Potential for Leadership and Life.

I could go on and on.  All’s you need to do is go to amazon.com and click on their book section, find the list of categories of books on the lefthand side of the screen, click on self-help, and Bam! you have 125,300 of such books to choose from.  That’s a lot of advice.

The thing is, of all the books I took a cursory look at in preparation for this message, none of those books said that one of the sure ways to grow as a human being is to suffer.

See, you have to start somewhere, if you are going to grow as a human being.  Once you’ve determined you are stagnating, or have plateaued as a person, and you’re ready for a change, the first thing you have to do is start.  Where do you start when you want to grow?

Paul has some very odd advice for us about this.  Paul wrote in this letter to the Romans, that the best place to start, if you want to embark on a path of human growth, is with your sufferings.  No self-help, human potential book I looked at said such a thing.

Suffering, Paul says, puts you on the path of human growth, faith growth.  It’s not a starting place that we would likely choose.  In fact, Paul wrote that we should not only start with our sufferings, we should “rejoice” in those sufferings.  The word Paul used could also mean, “boast.”  We not only start with our sufferings on a path to growth, we rejoice that we can start with our sufferings.  We can boast about the fact that our sufferings have been the best place from which to launch into a time of growth as a person and in our faith.  Odd.   Very odd.

The word Paul used for suffering literally means feeling the pressure, being squeezed into a ball, being squashed and flattened out, being hemmed in into a smaller and smaller space, finding yourself on a very narrow path with little to give you a foothold—like being on the narrow ledge of a cliff.  Rejoice when you find yourself in those kinds of places.  Boast about it, even.  You could be on the road to tremendous growth in your faith and as a person.

This kind of suffering could be caused by a number of life experiences.  Certainly persecution.  That may be the situation that Paul is addressing in this letter.  Christians, especially in Rome, were facing persecution on several fronts.

But this suffering could also develop from inner distress or sorrow.  It certainly is a part of anxiety and fear.  And most assuredly and ultimately, if you are staring death in the face.  Your questions may be on a very basic and intense level, along the lines of, “Am I even going to make it out of this situation intact as a person?”  You may not be thinking about human growth and potential.  You’re just worrying about survival when these levels of suffering hit.

To be told by Paul to rejoice or boast about this level of suffering, because they are great opportunities for growth, may elicit a response from us, such as, “I’d like to grow, just not in this way.”

What happens when we are suffering, is that our “flight-or-fight” mechanism is triggered in our brains.  It’s a normal response to any anxiety producing situation.  When your body or your psyche experiences some kind of major threat, you are also faced with a decision:  fight the threat, or flee the threat.  Either take on the suffering situation or attempt to put as much space between you and it as possible.

When this kind of suffering (making you feel limited, small, squeezed, flattened, with narrower and narrower options) when that kind of suffering hits, it feels like we are being chased down by some kind of predator:  cancer, psychological abuse, debilitating illness, being bullied, even old tapes that run in our heads from our past.  Our first impulse is to find a place of safety from those kinds of predatory situations.  We do that by either fighting or fleeing.

Here’s where Paul says we can start on the road to growth as human beings, with our sufferings as the initial springboard.  Suffering can lead to endurance.  Endurance can become our place of safety, if we so choose.

The word Paul used that we translate endurance, is a great word.  The root word means to stay in one place, to stand fast, to hold out, to remain calm, to stay in force—even if you are a force of one.  The whole word means to stay behind, when all others have cut and run.  It means to stand firm, but not just stand firm—stand firm with positive expectation.  It means standing with energy that leads to successful resistance.  It means, ultimately, to be heroic.  To be the hero of your own story, and just maybe a hero for others as well.

In the fight-or-flight spectrum, endurance as Paul is describing it, is not a flight word.  It is a fight word.

If you choose to fight rather than flee your suffering, and if you choose the way of endurance, Paul says that endurance will lead to the next level of human growth, which is character.

The word that Paul used for character basically means watching.  But here’s how it plays out.  The full word means to be tested by watching.  That is, understanding that as we endure our sufferings, we are being watched.  We are being tested by those who watch to see if we are reliable, valuable, and genuine.  We are under the scrutiny of others who are watching how we handle ourselves when life is hard and we are suffering.  That’s what determines our character, according to Paul.  Endurance, as Paul described it, has a way of demonstrating our character, or failing in character.

What is it that others are watching for?  What are some of the characteristics of character?

First, who you are is driven by the fuel you choose to run on.  So what others are looking at to determine our character is the kind of fuel we are choosing to run on.  Faith is a fuel you can run on.  That’s part of what God is watching to see if your endurance is leading to character.  Is faith in the Lord your fuel, or are you trying to run only on faith in yourself?

Faith, hope and love are the three main fuels of the Christian that Paul brings up time and time again.  I will say more about hope in a couple of minutes.  I think others are looking at this same “fuel” question to determine our strength of character.  What’s your fuel, and how are you, with your character, showing others how to fuel up?

Secondly, I think people are watching the choices we make to determine the depth of our character.  Life is about choices.  Our lives end up being the sum of all the choices we have made throughout that life.  Thus, our character is also summed up in all the choices we have made.

Like the Indiana Jones movie where Indiana and friends, as well as the Nazi’s are looking for the Holy Grail—the cup Jesus used at the Last Supper.  They have found the cup’s hiding place, but it is hiding amongst maybe 50 other cups of different styles.  One of the Nazi soldiers takes a cup from the many that are on the table, drinks from it, and immediately shrivels up, horribly, and turns to dust.  The Knight that has been guarding the grail for hundreds of years says, dryly, “He chose unwisely.”

That’s what people are looking at us to determine the depth of our character.  Are they having to say about us, “He chose unwisely, as he made his way through life.”  Choosing wisely throughout one’s life is a mark of positive character.  That’s what people are looking at.  Are the choices we are making, especially in the face of suffering, shriveling us up even more, and turning our lives to dust?  Or are our choices, made wisely, increasing our wisdom, and thus our character?  People are watching.

And thirdly, I think people are watching we Christians to see how much we lean on Jesus with our lives.  If we don’t lean on Jesus, why should they?  If we aren’t drawing on the strength of the Savior, but only trying to go at life on our own, why should they?

In all these three, catch the vision that character isn’t just a one time event.  Character is a course we travel, a current that we flow with, a singular direction that we constantly follow.  Character is a consistency and constancy of behavior.  That’s what people are watching for, as they look at us and try to gauge our character.

Then Paul writes that if we have started with suffering, and chosen to fight with endurance, and in that fight, built our character, that character will lead to hope.  Hope is ultimately where we want to end up when we are in the middle of some kind of pressure cooker of suffering.  It's the expectation that we will come to some good outcome, even though we can't see what that is at the moment.  We're counting on it.  We trust it will happen.

That's why I think hope and conviction are linked together.  Conviction is your driving force.  Conviction is why you do what you do.  When you are in the middle of some kind of suffering, your conviction and hope is what drives your endurance.  Once you have decided to endure—that is fight instead of flee in the face of your suffering—it is your conviction and hope that builds the character of a genuine person.  It's what makes you the hero of your own story--the hero that others are watching, and gaining strength from their watching your handling of your suffering.

All that leads to hope, because, really, one of the best ways to find hope is to give hope, or provide hope to others.  As others are watching you, and your depth of character is providing them hope for their own lives, that in turn gives you hope.

Here's an example.  While reading about hope this week, I found an article, I think on the Psychology Today site, about the Chilean coal miners.  Remember all those men trapped in the coal mine for several days, and the whole world watched to see if they would get rescued.

There was this tent city that was build all around the collapsed mine site.  Remember the name of that tent city, filled with reporters and workers?  I had forgotten it.  That tent city was named, Camp Hope.  Not, Happy Village, or Think Good Thoughts Town.  It was Camp Hope.  Hope is such a powerful word.

The Chilean coal miners (or any miners for that matter) descend into the dark of the mine every day, and hope to come back out into the light of day.  There is never that full assurance that that will happen.  But it is a great picture for all the "coal mines" that we may find ourselves descending into, the darkness of suffering with all its dangers and twisting and turning tunnels where you can easily get lost, once that suffering is upon you.  Once down in that mine of suffering, isn't your only and driving conviction your hope that you will get out of it and see the light of day again?

"Seeing the light of day" is a great term for the journey of human growth that we go through when we start out with suffering.  "Seeing the light of day" is another way of saying "hope."  After the miners were reached and rescued, there were so many stories of how different ones followed that path of endurance, leading to the kind of character that was shown when the whole world was watching.  And out of that character, hope was built--the good expectation that they would see the light of day again.  Which they did.

I hope you don't think me flip to say that you can grow greatly when you're suffering.  That you can start with your suffering experience, fight instead of flee with endurance, let that fighting endurance build your character as others have their eyes on you, and move from the strength of that character to a hope that has conviction behind it.

I know that some of you are suffering.  When you are suffering you think the opposite of what I'm trying to say--what I think Paul is trying to say.  When you're suffering you think you are being demeaned, or decreased as a person.   That everything about you is being squashed or flattened, and there is no hope for finding the light of day again.

But I'm convinced Paul is right about how one thing leads to another.   I have taken his advice in a couple of my lowest lows.  I am living testimony that suffering is not the end of you, but just the beginning of what God can do, to bring you out into the light of day, as a whole new you.  And it all started with suffering.

More Than A Prairie Chicken

"More Than A Prairie Chicken"

Acts 2:1-15, 22-24, 32-33, 36-41

This description of the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost is like something out of a Steven Spielberg movie.  It is mysterious.  It is surreal.  It borders on the bizarre.

First, there is the noisy wind from heaven that blows only through the house where the disciples are gathered.  No wind outside, just inside.  Then there is a fire that descends and splits into many little fires, coming to rest on each disciples head with no hair being burnt.  And the little fires are in the shape of tongues.  Then everyone starts talking at once, but in a different language.

There was a Steven Spielberg type of character who lived back in the 16th century named Lorenzo D’Medici.  They called him “Lorenzo the Magnificent” because he really knew how to create a pageant and public spectacle at religious festival times.  All the people in the city of Florence, where he lived, would become involved in the celebration.

On one occasion, D’Medici decided to stage the pageant of Pentecost in one of the city’s great churches.  He liked realism in his drama, so he arranged for a system of wires and pulleys to make it look like the fire was swooshing down from above.  And he used real fire.

On the Day of Pentecost, as the great pageant unfolded, the fire came flitting down right on cue.  But some of it brushed against some flimsy stage hangings, igniting them.  The church burned to the ground.

Sometimes it’s best to just leave the miraculous to God.

The real Pentecost, the unusual, almost weird occurrence, when the Holy Spirit was given to the disciples, giving birth to the church, is evidently an unreproducible event.  But shouldn’t it be so with God’s amazing acts?

Even though the spectacle makes us scratch our heads, we can’t let the bizarre side of it cloud our vision from what God was doing.  There was something even more amazing than the wind, fire, and different languages going on there.  All those elements were just the means God used—but they were not the end God was trying to achieve.

William Sloan Coffin, the one time minister at the Riverside Presbyterian Church in New York City, once said, “As is often the case in the Bible, it is the invisible event that counts most.”  If we look beyond the out-of-the-ordinary way in which the Holy Spirit was given by God, I think we see that “invisible event”:  a group of people become the church—the new community of God—the new Chosen People.  What we see is a number of disheveled disciples becoming the Spirit empowered church of Jesus Christ.

Think of what kind of people were gathered in that house on Pentecost.  Those whom Jesus had chosen were everyday people—hard working laborers and professional people.  They, at the time of Pentecost, 40 days after the Crucifixion and Resurrection, were a lost bunch, without vision, without courage, feeling powerless.  Even some of the 12 disciples were abandoning the cause and going back to fishing, including Peter, James and John.

Ted Engstrom started his bestselling book, The Pursuit of Excellence, with the following story:

There was a native American who found an eagle’s egg.  He put it into the nest of a prairie chicken.  The eaglet hatched with the brood of chicks and grew up with them. 

All his life, the changeling eagle, thinking he was a prairie chicken, did what the prairie chickens did.  He scratched in the dirt for seeds and insects to eat.  He clucked and cackled as best he could.  He would fly in a brief thrashing of wings and flurry of feathers, no more than a few feet off the ground.  After all, that’s how prairie chickens were supposed to fly.

In time, the changeling eagle grew up.  One day, he saw a magnificent bird far above him in the cloudless sky.  Hanging with graceful majesty on the powerful wind currents, it soared with scarcely a beat of its strong golden wings.

“What a beautiful bird!” said the changeling eagle to his fellow chickens.  “What is it?”

“That’s an eagle, the chief of birds,” one of the prairie chickens clucked.  “But don’t give it a second thought.  You could never be like him.”

So the changeling eagle never did give it another thought.  It went on thinking and living as if it was a prairie chicken.

The coming of the Holy Spirit was like seeing the eagle in the sky for those disciples.  But, unlike Engstrom’s story, instead of taking the advice of the other prairie chickens, the disciples became inspired.  They inhaled the breath of God.  They became invigorated.  They found a new strength in their wings to fly the coup and see what the sky was like with the power of the wind to lift them.

God had inflamed them with a passion to be something they had no idea they could become—to become what they were meant to become all along—transformed from timidity to boldness.

The Holy Spirit came upon Christ’s followers and, in effect, told them, “You aren’t just a bunch of prairie chickens.  You are eagles, and you were meant to fly to great heights for God.  Recognize who you are!  Recognize what you have now been empowered by the Holy Spirit to become and to do!  Spread those mighty wings and fly!”

They were an ordinary group of people, whose lives had been touched by Jesus Christ, but, before the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, had somehow lost any idea or vision of what they were supposed to do beyond their time with Jesus.  They were not in touch with their gifts, nor did they recognize how they were endowed by God with eagle-like qualities.  All they needed was the second touch—the second empowering—by the Holy Spirit, and the world has never been the same since.

This is what we celebrate at Pentecost—the time when God’s Spirit empowered the church to do great things.  But, we don’t worship the past.  We, as the church today, don’t look back and think, “Wow, that was cool for them, and we celebrate that once a year on Pentecost Sunday, and leave the sanctuary after worship, ho hum.”  Instead, we look for the ways that God’s Spirit continues to come to us in order to empower us as individual Christians and together as the church.

There is the story about the man who always seemed to bring home a stringer load of fish.  It was uncanny, and people wondered how he could be so successful.  A stranger asked to go with him in order to check out the fisherman’s reputation.

They started early and boated across the lake to a secluded area.  The stranger noticed that the fisherman didn’t have a fishing pole.  Just a rusty old tackle box.  They got to the man’s fishing spot.  The fisherman opened the box and pulled out a small stick of dynamite, lit it, and tossed it into the water.  There was thumping explosion underwater, and the stunned fish rose to the surface.  The fisherman began dipping his net into the water and pulling the fish into the boat.

At that point the stranger reached back and revealed from his back pocket the credentials of a game warden.  Calmly, the fisherman opened the tackle box again, got out another small stick of dynamite, lit the fuse and handed it to the game warden.  As the fuse burned down, he said to the game warden, “Well, are you going to fish or are you just going to sit there?”

I think the Holy Spirit, at Pentecost, and at several points in the life of the church, has handed the church a lit stick of empowerment.  It’s ready to go off and we are being asked if we are ready to get to work and take advantage of that dynamite potency we’ve been handed and the effective capabilities that are now in our grasp.

One woman wrote, “I long to accomplish a great and noble task, but it is my chief duty and joy to accomplish humble tasks as though they were great and noble…For the world is moved along, not only by the mighty shoves of its heroes, but also by the combination of tiny pushes of each worker.”  You know who wrote that?  Helen Keller, and I think she of all people would know what she was talking about.

Let us be empowered by the Holy Spirit.  Let us be heroes of the faith, and let us be the ones who add the tiny pushes that combine for heroic spiritual change in our community.  But most of all, let us, like eagles, soar to the heights of where we were meant to be, rather than be content in a Spirit-less prairie chicken existence.