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.