Monday, July 21, 2014

Working Up An Appetite

"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 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.