Monday, September 25, 2017

What Is Life?

"What Is Life?"
Philippians 1:18-26




How many have played the board game, Life?

Right at the start you have to decide between two different pathways.  Either you start out going the career path or the college path.  Taking the career path gets you on the main road of life faster.  Even though the college path will slow you down and get you behind, it offers you the possibility of making more money.

After that you are confronted with all kinds of decisions and circumstances:  Get married or remain single?  Fill up you little plastic car with little plastic children pegs (pink for girls, blue for boys), or not; pay expenses (some huge), and get paydays along the way.  It is just like life, right?

At the end, you cash everything in (including your children!) and see who has the most cash.

That is what life is all about.  At least in American society.  It is a very Western culture styled game.  I'm sure the squares would be very different if the game was styled for people who live in the Sudan, North Korea, or Afghanistan.  You wouldn't start out with choosing college or career in those countries.  You would start out with one track that would read, "I eat today," and the other which would read, "I do not eat today."  That is what life is like in many countries around the world.  It is very simple.  Eating or not eating.  That is about it.  Move on to the next day, that has the same identical choice as the day before.

If you grew up as a kid in the USA, playing the game, Life, you were getting indoctrinated about the answer to an age-old philosophical question:  "What is life?"  The game was teaching you life is about acquiring things and having as much as you can at the end.

If that is true, then why do so many people get to the end of life and are so terribly dissatisfied?  Why do so many get to the end of life angry because they believed the game, and found out it was a lie?  Sadly, you can not go back and play the game over.  You can play the Milton Bradley game over and over and have different outcomes each time.  But not in real life.  You only get to play/live once.



That's the question, is it not?  The most important word in that question is "one."

The game, Life, is one answer to that question.  For many people, what they do with their one, precious life is the pursuit of accumulation.  The one with the most stuff at the end wins.  But do you know what is strange about that?  I have never heard read at a funeral a list of what all the person accumulated.  No obituary I have read had such a list of all the person accumulated.  So, why is that?

J.M. Barrie is the author of the book, Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Never Grew Up.  In one of his short stories he wrote,
The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story but writes another, and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it."

I think that is why the life of accumulation, and the list of what is accumulated, never makes it into the obituary.  Because people, at the end, suddenly realize they wrote their story totally different than what they really hoped it would be.  And it is too late to write the life story of what you had, at one time, "vowed to make it."

Another answer to the question, What is Life? has simply to do with biology.




Even though this is a list of what needs to happen biologically for there to be life, I like some of these categories as metaphors.  For example, "growth" is on the list.  It is easy to see how growth fits in with what life is biologically.  But it is also true for a business or organization, like a church.  It is one of the main driving forces behind our Vivid Vision at church.  Those who put the Vivid Vision together, and you all who voted on adopting it, recognized that if you are not growing, you are dying.  There is no in-between, no middle ground.

The same is true in your life of faith.  If your faith is not growing, your faith is dying.

There are so many other qualities on this list that are fun to think about, such as "adaptation" and "organization" that have to do with how you are alive.  I would encourage you to think about them, as you think about your own viability and life, not just biologically, but spiritually.

Here is another way to look at what life is:




"Living well," according to this pithy saying has to do with making the right choices.  There are some things you do not have a choice about:  Your family; where you grew up as a child; your genetics.  Those kinds of things are fate, or a given you just have to accept.  But accepting them is a choice, too, is it not?

How you react to your family and the role you take on in your family is a choice.  How you decide to deal with certain geography you find yourself in (which could involve a country, a state, a neighborhood) is a choice.  And once you become an adult, all your choices are your own.  Sorry, no one else to blame.  That's part of adulting.

So a good case could be made that the answer to our question, "What is life?" is choices.  Life is the choices we make that will lead to future choices, and on and on.

Here is another answer to, "What is life?"





I like this slide.  To me, this slide says life is about risk.  Life is not about comfort.  Even though that is what most people are trying hard to make it.  Life is not about plateaus.  Life is not about resting on your laurels.

I was talking with Alan the other night at dinner.  One of Alan's big questions has been, "If you knew you could not fail, what would you do?"  But of course, failure is part of life—it has to do with how we learn and grow.  But even then, a case could be made that there are no failures—just opportunities to learn.  When a reporter asked Thomas Edison about inventing the lightbulb, "How did it feel to fail 1,000 times?" Edison replied, "I didn’t fail 1,000 times. The light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps." So, in a way there is no failure—just steps toward finally succeeding.

I reframed the question:  "If you knew that God was with you and in you and behind you, what would you do?"

Each of our questions have to do with risk and trust.  Just how far and how much are you willing to risk to really be alive?  And with my question, how much are you willing to risk trusting God in all things as you live your life?

There are so many images life has been compared to.




These are all great analogies and images.  But at some point, each of us has to personalize what we think life is.  What is life FOR YOU?  You, me, each of us has to personally answer the question, "What is life?"

Paul shared with us his personal answer to this part of his Philippian letter:





Remember the other slide that said, "Life is between B and D" when I was talking about choice?  Well, here's another version of that slide:




"What is life?  To me, it is Christ."  Notice, Paul uses the title, "Christ," not the name of Jesus.  Christ is a title.  It literally means, "anointed," or, "Savior."

A person who was anointed (with oil) in biblical times was a king.  Being anointed with olive oil was the way a person was inaugurated as the king.  The anointing was usually done by a prophet or a priest for God.  Thus, for Paul, life is following the anointed one—Jesus—who was anointed by God.  For Paul, life is submitting to King Jesus, and letting him rule over his life; that Jesus has sole authority over his living.

The other part of the Christ title is being the Savior.  If you are going to have a Savior, you have to recognize you need saving.  You have to humbly submit to an understanding of self that there is something very basically wrong with your self that you can not fix.  You have to submit to the truth that life is a struggle/battle, but one you can not win on your own.  You need someone to have your back, to stand beside you, to stand over you and protect you when you have fallen, to keep you from receiving a mortal wound from the enemy.  In a word, you need a Savior.

In other words, to live is not to live alone.  It is to live in companionship and comradeship with the Savior, the Christ.

One day, the great artist Michelangelo came into the studio of the equally great Raphael.  Michelangelo looked at one of Raphael's drawings.  Then Michelangelo took a piece of chalk and wrote across the drawing the word "amplius."  It means, "greater" or "larger."  He felt Raphael's drawing was too cramped, too narrow.

Basically, that is what Paul meant in his answer to, "What is life?"  He wanted to live large.  He wanted to be a part of something bigger than himself.  He wanted to have a greater purpose than that which he could only come up with on his own.

There are a lot of good answers to the question, "What is life?"  But Paul wanted not a good answer, he wanted a great answer that would throw his life into a larger and more expansive mode of being.  There were no other answers to that question for Paul that got at what he most desired.  Only the answer of "Christ" put him where he wanted to be in life.

Monday, September 18, 2017

Who Are You In Charge Of, Anyway?

"Who Are You In Charge Of, Anyway?"
Romans 14:1-12 (The Message)

Quick.  Think of one person, right now, you want to change or are trying to change.

My guess is that a majority of you thought of your spouse.  If there is anyone people are most likely to make a project out of, it's a spouse.  "I know he or she is not perfect," people think to themselves (or say out loud to a friend), "but I know I can change him or her."  And usually that's when the resistance sets in.  Anytime anyone feels like someone is making them their pet project, they begin building walls of self-protection.  Which then ramps up the activity of the one who is working the project.

In the Calvin and Hobbes cartoon, Calvin is continually trying to change his father into the father of his own image.  Here are a couple of cartoons of how Calvin is working his "Dad Project:"



Why are we always trying to turn someone else into our project?  Why do we think we should be in charge of someone else's life—or maybe a lot of someone else's—that we think we know better how they should be living their lives?  It's a bit arrogant, isn't it?  And usually a waste of time.

In these words from Paul towards the end of his letter to the Romans, he gives us four reasons why we should not be wasting our time trying to make someone else our pet project.

First, Paul says in verse one, "…they have their own history to deal with."

Here's what that means to me.  Life is about stories.  We each have our own.  We are not living another person's story, nor is anyone living ours.  Other people might be characters in our stories, and we can allow that to happen or not to happen.  But others, who are characters in our story, should not become our own story.  That is how we build and hold on to our individuality—by writing our own story.

History is the past.  History is the story we have already written in our lives that we can not go back and rewrite.  It has been lived.  It is done.

But with the past, it is not just the events of our past that influence us and make up our history.  It is also the meanings we have placed on those events.  What they mean to us and for us.  Someone else may look at our past and the meanings we put on those events and say, "That's not what that experience meant; instead it should mean this."  Or they may try to tell us, "This event really has more, or different, meanings than you put on it."  Others may try to force us rewrite, reshape, or "remean" our past, but ultimately it is our past, our history, our meanings.

And the little word "own" in this verse intrigued me.  "…they have their own history to deal with."  There are two meanings for the word own.  The first is like when we want to get across the sense of our own individuality—our singularity.

And the other sense of the word own has to do with letting others know this is mine.  "I own this."  So when you think of it, everyone owns their singular history.  No one else owns it, or gets to take it over for their own purposes.  You own it.  Or, because you own it, you can choose to get rid of your history.  What does that mean?

You can try to cut yourself off from your past.
You can try to rewrite your past.  That is, choose new meanings for the events of your past.
Or, you can start a new future that is not a part of the stream of your past.

But the point is, as Paul wrote, everyone has a history, and it is their own history, and we are not in charge of anyone's history but our own.

Secondly, Paul wrote in verse five, "…each person is free to follow the convictions of conscience…"

The context here has to do with holy days.  There seemed to be two streams of thought amongst the Christians here.  One, there are holy days, special days set apart for specific celebrations.  The other camp was that all days are holy.

Take our celebrations of Christmas and Easter, for example.  Christmas is based on the solar calendar and the Winter Solstice.  So it is the same day every year.  Easter is based on the lunar calendar and thus moves around to different dates.  Why isn't Easter like Christmas in that it's the same date every year?  And based on some of the details in the Christmas story, Jesus' birth probably happened in the Springtime.  Neither are the authentic dates of Jesus' birth or Resurrection.  So they are holy days to Christians because of what we celebrate, not because of an actual date.

But to others, every day should be a celebration of the Resurrection.  Every day is a new day to be alive, to celebrate the new life we have in Christ, to take each day as a day to be reborn and renewed.  Every new morning is to remember that first Easter morning and what Christ did for us in walking out of that tomb reborn.  Alive from death.

Who’s to say which of these perspectives is the right one?  Is it not a matter of conscience, as Paul wrote?  Is it not a privilege of personal perspective?  Who are we to judge what a person is supposed to believe in these kinds of matters?  What if it is not a matter of either/or but both/and?

Thirdly, Paul wrote in verse seven, "It is God we are answerable to."  We are not each other's master.  Only God gets to do that.  The context has to do with coming to the Lord's Table.  Paul accuses the Roman Christians of interfering with God's welcome to the table.

One of our beliefs that I cherish the most is that we celebrate what's called the open table.  That is, we do not say you have to have certain qualifications to come to the Table and take Communion.  This is the Lord's Table.  How can we refuse anyone who feels the urge and prompting of God to come to this table and accept the bread and the cup?  The invitation is for God to make, not ours.  If you sense God's invitation to come, come!  You are not answerable to the church at this table—or for anything for that matter.  We are only answerable to God in all things.

To make that point even further, Paul wrote that there will come the day when all of us will be "…kneeling side-by-side..facing God."  Notice Paul says we will all be kneeling.  It is not that some will be standing, as if they are better than.

Kneeling has to do with humility.  Humility is the only way to come into God's presence.  Remember Jesus' parable of the praying Pharisee and the praying tax collector?  The Pharisee stood and prayed to himself.  The tax collector knelt in the corner, beat his chest in abject humility while he prayed to God.  All those listening to Jesus' parable would have thought to themselves the Pharisee's prayer, both the words and the posture, were magnificent.  But Jesus said it was the tax collector, kneeling in the corner who went home accepted and embraced by God, not the Pharisee.

God is the one we are answerable to and God alone.  We do not get to have that kind of sway over another person's life either through judgement or praise.

And lastly, Paul says we should not make another person our project because, "You've got your hands full just taking care of your own life before God" (verse 12).  Ain't that the truth!

Notice, Paul wrote, "…your own life before God."  Not just your life, but how your life is "before God."  We need to realize taking care of our own life before God is a full-time, 24/7, everyday job.  So, if you have any time free from that task, you are not living correctly.  If you are not dealing with yourself before God, all the time, and using up your time trying to run other people's lives, you are doing it wrong.

It is not just about trying to manage other people's lives all the time.  It is also making the false assumption you know what is best for others and running their lives accordingly.  Which always ends up not working out very well.  The only one you are in charge of is yourself.  And as Paul wrote, that should be your full time project, making sure your life is completely before God.

If you allow others to live their lives before God, in God's ways, and taking care of your own life before God, then living becomes about celebrating—celebrating what God is doing in and with each of our lives, because that is what is more important.  Life is not about making someone else your project, molding them into your image, but instead giving that task over to God, trusting God to work as God wills, and then celebrating what God does in each of us, for each of us.

Sunday, September 10, 2017

Getting Along

"Getting Along"
Matthew 18:12-20

Probably my all time favorite cartoon is Calvin and Hobbes.  One of Calvin’s main antagonists is the bully Moe.









Frame 1:  Calvin is swinging on the playground swing; Moe comes up to him and says, “Get off the swing, Twinky;”
Calvin replies, “Forget it, Moe.  Wait your turn.”
Frame 2:  Moe punches Calvin clear off the swing, and out of his shoes.
Frame 3:  Calvin is laying in a dazed heap, and says to himself, “It’s hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightening.”

It is hard to get along with some people, isn’t it.  It seems conflict and fractured relationships are the norm.  Isn’t it interesting that Jesus assumes that people, including his followers, will hurt each other.  And Jesus assumes that the road back towards friendship between those who hurt each other may not be easy.  He assumes that even wave upon wave of attempts still may not bring healing to the broken relationship.

Jesus knows us so well.  He knows we are divisive, over-sensitive, bickering, petty, angry, contentious, broken people who act way below our God given humanity.  But by giving a way to reconcile and move toward friendship he also knows we have such a great potential to be healers, empathetic and sympathetic, forgiving, grace-full and understanding people who can act according to our God given humanity.  What makes us Christian is not whether or not we fight, disagree, or wound each other, but how we go about addressing and resolving that hurt.

The famous pop artist Andy Warhol decided to spend most of his time watching TV instead of developing relationships.  He equated relationships with pain, so he reasoned that if he had very few relationships, he’d have little pain.  “You can only be hurt if you care a lot,” he said.  Which is a sad way to live.

So, in Jesus’ words, “If a fellow believer (brother, RSV) hurts you...” assumes that the reason you are hurting is because you care a lot about that person.  We don’t get hurt, as Andy Warhol discovered, as deeply by those we don’t care about.  If the used car salesman lies to you about the engine of the car you bought, you may get angry but you’re not likely to be personally hurt.  But if your spouse comes home at 3 a.m. and lies to you about where they have been and what they have been up to, that’s another matter.

In Jesus’ statement the other person is a fellow follower of Christ.  Do we make the assumption in the church that other believers won’t hurt us?  Are we shocked more when another Christian does us harm?  Yet, by saying this, what does Jesus assume will happen in Christian communities?  Jesus doesn’t assume we will all magically (or in a Christ-like way) get along in the church.  We are people, and whenever people get together, Christian or not, there is the possibility that feelings will get hurt.

The reason I included the verses about the lost sheep, is because I think they help create the context of what Jesus is telling us.  That context is about a broken community.  The middle eastern interpretation of the parable of the lost sheep, and why the shepherd goes after the one leaving the 99 is different from ours.  We concentrate on the worth and value of the individual.  That is the American way—the emphasis being on the individual rather than the value of community.  The middle eastern people look at this parable and see the importance of keeping the 100 whole and together.  When one breaks away, for whatever reason, all suffer a lack of wholeness, until that lost one is restored to the whole.

So it is with the fellow believer who hurts you.  It is not just about you and the other person.  The whole community of believers is affected.  To restore relationship and friendship of the hurt individuals is to restore the relationship of all.  Conflict between two people in a congregation or community not only affects the individuals involved but infects the entire community.  If we are the body of Christ, as Paul taught, any disunity between a few, in reality, is the disunity of all.

Often, it comes down to a matter of deciding what’s more important:  winning and being right; or, the health of the relationship.  And just as often, that may be a process not of looking out and pointing the finger at someone else, but looking inside yourself.

Eugene Peterson, translator of The Message Bible, has written a number of books.  One of those is Under The Unpredictable Plant.  In that book he writes about Jonah, and how the book of Jonah is descriptive of our times and our lives.  Do you remember the place at the end of the Jonah story where Jonah is sitting on the hillside waiting for God to incinerate Nineveh (just like Calvin waited for Moe to get incinerated).  But it doesn’t happen because God showed mercy.  This is what Peterson says about Jonah, who went ballistic at God:
What anger fails to do, though, is tell us whether the wrong is outside us or inside us.  We usually begin by assuming that the wrong is outside us--our spouse, or our child, or our neighbor, or our God has done something wrong and we are angry...But when we track the anger carefully, we often find it leads to a wrong within us--wrong information, inadequate understanding, underdeveloped heart.  (page 157)

If Peterson is right, maybe our major, and most important work is not resolving the conflict and tension with someone else, but resolving all the conflict within ourselves.

For example, Henri Nouwen, another of my favorite Christian spiritual writers talks a lot about loneliness and how it is at the heart of a lot of our broken relationships.  His sense is that we all have this inner loneliness, and we carry with that loneliness an expectation that some other person is supposed to make us happy and take that loneliness away.  That expectation puts too much weight on the relationship, especially when the other doesn’t fully take our loneliness away.  Or worse, makes us feel more lonely than before.  We then spin off all kinds of anxiety, creating fractures in our relationships, and the problem isn’t other people.  It’s our own inner loneliness and the expectations it creates that is driving our anxiety and the divisions that anxiety creates.  Ironically, the very thing we desire--closeness and an end to loneliness--gets tragically broken and pushed away.


So, let’s look at Jesus’ way of handling those times when relationships get fractured and how he suggests we handle it.

First, he says go one on one.  I think it’s interesting that Jesus says that the one who is hurt, not the one who did the hurting, should make the first move.  We, if we are hurt, are more comfortable just sitting and sulking, letting our hurt simmer.  Letting it stew.  Maybe that’s the very reason Jesus said that the one hurt should make the first move.  So they don’t let their wounds grow bigger than they really are.

“If he listens...” Jesus says.  What is he listening to?  Your hurt.  Your pain.  How you are feeling.  Your sense of what happened.  The main objective is not blaming, but listening.  It’s not about forming your next rebuttal while the other is talking.  The offending one is the one who is supposed to listen.  It is the offended one who is the one who gets to talk.  The main goal, in Jesus’ words, of this listening is “making a friend” (“gained your brother,” RSV).

For Jesus, mending brokenness, becoming friends, is a deep part of the Christian spiritual life.  Remember when he said, in the “Sermon on the Mount,” if you are at the altar, ready to offer your gift, and you realize that someone has something against you, what are you supposed to do?  You’re supposed to leave your gift there, go make things right with that person, then come back and offer your gift.  For Jesus, mending broken relationships is just as important (maybe more important) than worship.  Or that mending broken relationships is part of your act of worship.  Because how can you worship fully with anxiety and hurt in your heart?  How can you approach worship with a heart loaded down with bitterness?

So, a primary step in creating depth and health in one’s soul, and life in worship, is measured by our willingness and ability to approach someone we are at odds with, one-on-one, and create friendship.

This is not an easy thing to do.  I was reading an article on the Psychology Today website recently.  The name of the article was, “Words That Wound.”  The article outlined some of the ingredients necessary when you are talking to someone else about your sense of being hurt, and coming to understanding and friendship.

The first ingredient in working towards understanding is how accurately you interpret what the other person is saying.  Emphasis is on the word interpret.  It’s not about what you say, but about how closely you interpret what the other means when they are talking.  Often it isn’t what the other person is saying that gets our knickers in a twist, but our interpretation of what they are saying.  What we think they are meaning.  In order for there to be understanding, we need to check out our interpretations with the other person.  “Is this what you mean when you say that?”

Secondly, understanding grows when each person has the ability to be able to predict the impact of your own words.  Again, it’s not about what you say, but knowing as accurately as possible how what YOU say will impact the listener.  How well are you tracking with THEIR feelings, and how much do you care about their feelings?

The final ingredient in communicating with someone after being hurt is called “interpersonal cognitive complexity.”  That’s a mouthful.  What that is about is your ability to be able to express your feelings while at the same time having the ability to be able to process social cues (body language, tone, etc.) accurately.  If I’m talking to (someone in the congregation) and while talking to her, I touch her shoulder, she has to interpret my touch accurately.  She has to decide, “Is Steve being caring or is he coming on to me?”  Some people don’t interpret those kinds of social cues well, and it causes fractures in their relationships.

But when you look at those three ingredients, they are very complex pieces of how healing can happen and relationships restored to a level of friendship.  That’s why the one-on-one piece of Jesus’ advice is so difficult and probably why he suggested the next strategy:  “If he won’t listen, take one or two others...keep things honest and try again.”

Jesus understands if you just put two people in a room and think they can reconcile their hurt, may be unrealistic for every case.  Too often we are either unwilling or unable to heal our situations.  Thus all the “judge” shows on TV these days.  Isn’t it weird that we have turned our broken friendship pain into entertainment?

At this point, things have either hit an impasse, or they have escalated.  There is no detail given by Jesus about what these others, who are dragged into the conflict are supposed to do.  Maybe there were some traditionally Jewish rules of being a go-between amongst people in conflict.  But nothing like that is detailed here by Jesus.

There’s a certain wisdom about NOT putting yourself in the middle of other people’s conflicts.  You have to watch out not to get triangled with you at one point, and the other parties at the other points of the triangle.  The one in the middle always gets squashed by the other two sides.  If you find yourself in the middle, trying to be a go-between, it’s best to promote straight line communication.  No bank shot communication off of someone but directed towards someone else.  That only creates more layers of misinterpretations and misguided meanings.

Get the two conflicting sides together, rather than relay ping pong messages back and forth.    It’s important that they be together and talk to each other.  The go-between doesn’t take sides, but instead uses the tools I mentioned in the one-on-one strategy to help create understanding that can lead to friendship.  As Jesus said, keep things honest and keep trying rather than throwing your hands up and giving up.

Lastly, Jesus says, if listening still doesn’t happen, “tell the church.”  Bring the whole community in on it.  By “the church” Jesus means the congregation.  It’s interesting, and telling to me, that in speaking about moving two people from hostility to friendship, Jesus didn’t go any further than the local congregation.  It tells me that Jesus trusted the more immediate people involved, rather than taking the conflict to a group or a committee, or a level outside (above) the local congregation.

So, the question is, how would you feel about listening to and helping resolve a squabble between people as a congregation, if it came to that?


Jesus closes out his comments with an oft quoted statement:  “For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them.”  That comment of Jesus is usually quoted when talking about praying or worshipping.  But do you see what he was really getting at in the context of his teaching about reconciling friends?  “When two or three come together (that is come together out of hostility and back into friendship) I am there.”  When people get together and resolve their issues, that’s an indication of the presence of the Lord.

Conflict resolution isn’t about a contest of wills or posturing.  It should be about taking responsibility, making sure we are listening as well as we can, elevating the value of the relationship to a place of higher importance than winning or even pushing what we think is the truth.  It isn’t about judging and disciplining.  It’s about reconciliation.  It’s about coming together, healing our broken relationships with ourselves and others, and then celebrating the presence of Christ when that happens.

Tuesday, September 5, 2017

Why Must God Be Shouted At?

"Why Must God Be Shouted At?
Exodus 3:1-10


Why does God wait so long?

The Hebrew people were slaves in Egypt for nearly 430 years.  How many of those years had they been wailing to God under the weight of cruel taskmasters?  We look back at the marks of Egyptian civilization:  the Pyramids of Egypt; the Sphinx; great aqueducts; temples and tombs; all of which we now gaze upon, trying to piece together the mystery of how such feats of architecture and engineering could have been accomplished.  Little do we think of the human cost behind the "edifice complex" of those architects and Pharaohs.  People who were pressed into cruel servitude, paying the price with their own blood, under conditions in which even animals were treated better.

We may not be as bothered by that thought if those pressed into slavery were hardened criminals, or the dregs of society, non-productive types who were wasting their lives anyway.  But these were God's own people—God's Chosen.  These were God's Elect, subjected to an ancient gulag that could rival any of those in our day.  For over 400 years, their one, unison cry was for rescue and justice.  400 years is a long time.

Terrance De Pres has written a book titled, The Survivor: An Anatomy Of Life In The Death Camps.  It is an extremely graphic examination of the concentration camps of Nazi Germany, weaving the memories of survivors together, trying to find common threads.  In the introduction of his book, Des Pres wrote:
My subject is survival, the capacity of men and women to live beneath the pressure of protracted crisis, to sustain terrible damage in mind and body and yet in those circumstances, remain sane, alive, still human. … Unavoidably, a spectacle of death and mutilation opens upon us, and an endless silent scream rising to a sky forever heedless of (people's) anguish (page v).

In the first Holocaust, in Pharaoh's Egypt, how many of God's people raised their voices to God, and only found "…a sky forever heedless of (people's) anguish."  It is a question that I have heard asked time and time again, by people who may not be slaves to Pharaoh, but they are under severe stress and oppression none the less.

But our question here must be asked a shade differently.  Because our question, arising from Moses' call and the Exodus, is not, "Why does God refuse to act?"  Which is Des Pres' question.  God eventually does act.  God calls Moses from tending his father-in-laws sheep, to herding a people through the wilderness of Sinai, away from oppression, toward freedom.

Instead, our question has to do with the "eventually" of God's actions.  Why does God delay, when it is already too late for some?  How many lives were lost in Egypt?  How many backs were scared?  How many bodies were permanently crippled?  How many spirits were broken?  How many, before God rescued God's people?  In the Nazi version of the Holocaust, over 6 million died before rescue came.

In the parable of the corrupt judge and the widow, even Jesus recognizes God's justice will come, but there is a delay—people still "…cry to God day and night."  In the final book of the Bible, describing the final days of God's recreation of the world, the souls of the believers who had been martyred sit in heaven waiting for God to mete out justice, and exterminate those who had cruelly killed them.  They literally shout at God, from the foot of God's altar in heaven, demanding to know when the persecutors will get theirs.

Why must God be shouted at?  Why must we be plagued with the question of, "How will I know if God will come to my rescue in time?"  How long must I endure?  How loud and long must I shout, before God will pay attention to my situation and "come down and rescue"?

I ask these questions delicately, not to disturb your faith, but only to face a hard reality that many people have shed tears about and lost lives over.  They are not easy questions to ask, nor are they easy to answer.  In my mind, I have run through all the trite answers that people give to such questions, and I have found them wanting.  There are two possible—I don't wish to call them answers—let us just call them "ponderings" that might be of help here.


The first is, to our modern day oppressions, whatever they may be for us individually, we do not fully realize what strength we have, what resources we have at our disposal, apart from God—qualities God has given us by which we might endure.

When I was playing basketball in college, our coach had his doctorate in kinesiology.  He knew everything there was to know about muscles.  All we knew was they ached after every practice.  The coach would push us and push us to levels of development we had no idea existed; but he did.  He knew the resources of the muscle system, and what kind of athlete they could produce.  There was a great amount of aches and pains in the production of those abilities.  We could not argue with the guy, or whine and complain because he was the one with the Ph.D.  The point is, we didn't realize the resourcefulness and possibility for strength that we had until we were pushed.

For some, who are enduring hardships on many levels, God may be slow in coming because God knows we have resources we have not even tapped yet.  Or we are willing to try.  We are not willing to push ourselves to a limit of endurance we do not know exists.

I counseled a young man one time whose main quality of life was despair.  Nothing was going right and his life was circling the drain.  At least in his own eyes.  From my perspective, he had great potential for success, and many things to his advantage.  I tried to point that out to him.  I gave him several specific suggestions about what he could do to pull himself out of his swirling problems.  But each time he came back at me with some lame excuse as to why this or that suggestion would not work.  Yet, in the midst of his struggle, he demanded to know what God was doing all this time—if God had taken a vacation from watching over him.  This young man's final solution to some of his financial woes was to bet on the dog races and hope for the big payoff.  I'm sure you can surmise how well that went.

I think one part of the reason God appears slow in coming to the rescue is that, for many of us, we have not begun to exhaust our options.  We have not exerted enough of our own God given energy.  As John Paul Jones' infamous battle cry goes, "We have not yet begun to fight!"  There are some people who are derailed by the smallest of woes, and to them God might be saying, "You are not to the point of needing Me yet."


My other pondering about the apparent lateness of God's rescue is a thought that dovetails with the one I just offered.  God took the initiative to rescue the people from Egyptian servitude.  But how does God do it?  Through the man, Moses.  "Now I am sending YOU to the king of Egypt so that YOU can lead my people out of that country."  God works through willing (and sometimes, unwilling) people.

I suppose God could have beamed the Hebrew slaves out of Egypt, a la Star Trek, and then beamed them down into the promised land.  But that is not how God chose to work.  Instead, God has consistently chosen people to carry out the details of God's plans of salvation, all the way to the Cross and beyond.

I ask myself, How many people walked past the burning bush before Moses came along, noticed, and approached?  How many saw the bush, approached, heard the details of God's mission, and refused?  Because Moses could have refused.  We have to understand that he had that power to say "No" to God.  He tried.  But he went anyway.

The truth is, most forms of people's oppressions can be dealt with through others who are willing to respond to God's initiatives, are willing to get involved, take risks—some of them great—and be part of God's rescue  operation.

The issue, then, is not God's slowness in responding.  Instead, in terms of the people of Israel, God may have been trying to bring about a rescue for 400+ years, but no one was willing to cooperate with God's plans.  It is not so much God's problem, then, as it is ours.

How many people do you know who are really hurting?  Maybe you think they are hurting in some way, but you are not sure, and have not checked your assumptions out.  Think of those people for a moment.  Bring them to a conscious picture in your mind.  What kind of oppression are they under?  What kind of rescue are they crying out for?  What is the level of their suffering?  What kind of slave drivers are lashing their whips across their backs?  Most importantly, though, what are you doing about it?  How are you responding to God, allowing God to rescue them through you?

"I just do not want to get involved."
"I don't know what one person can do."
"It is too risky."
"They do not want my help."
"There is so much pain there; I know that if I get involved, I might end up hurting, too."
And so go many other such rationalizations rattled off in Moses-like fashion.  As we speak our rationalizations, good people continue to be oppressed.

But is not that the real question here—the real issue?  By our inaction, we allow human suffering and injustice not only locally, but on a global scale.  Instead of taking action against others injustice and cruelty, we simply get used to it, fooling ourselves into thinking it is all just a part of life.  And, if it is ever to go away, then God needs to wave God's magic wand and make it disappear.  And where is that God, anyway?  It's all up to God.

Gordon Stofer and I chat every other week or so.  He watches the news.  I read the news on the internet.  We are both upset and frustrated with the world.  Alan Luttrell does not even watch the news anymore, it gets so upsetting.  After about an hour of this, Gordon and I come to the conclusion the world/our culture is totally screwed up and fatally broken.  In the end, we try to think of something funny, so we can laugh and go our way.  But it is messed up out there.  Every level of government has totally lost its way.  People continue to commit heinous crimes against innocents.  In too many countries there are no-brain demagogues with their finger on the button of mutually assured destruction.

It is more than we can take, and we throw our hands up and give up.  How little we think that we are God's agents of change in this world we find ourselves—that we are never to get used to the world the way it is, but to be willing to get our hands dirty in the work of relieving people's oppression.  We may not be called to free the Israelites, but we might be called to take a risk and relieve the suffering of a neighbor, to fight injustice and prejudice in some small way, so that someone might say, "God has come to rescue me, and God has done it through you."

It must be terribly frustrating for God to work rescue in this way.  For in so doing, there is the waiting.  The waiting that someone will come along and see the bush that is burning, someone who is willing to respond to God's bidding.  Certainly we have heard it said, or maybe said it ourselves, "Why doesn't somebody do something!?"  How many times a day must God utter those same words, as cruelties mount up, and we allow them to do so.

Why must God be shouted at?  Why does God delay?  God is probably wondering the same thing about us.

Monday, September 4, 2017

Why Must God Be Shouted At?

"Why Must God Be Shouted At?"
Exodus 3:1-10

Why does God wait so long?

The Hebrew people were slaves in Egypt for nearly 430 years.  How many of those years had they been wailing to God under the weight of cruel taskmasters?  We look back at the marks of Egyptian civilization:  the Pyramids of Egypt; the Sphinx; great aqueducts; temples and tombs; all of which we now gaze upon, trying to piece together the mystery of how such feats of architecture and engineering could have been accomplished.  Little do we think of the human cost behind the "edifice complex" of those architects and Pharaohs.  People who were pressed into cruel servitude, paying the price with their own blood, under conditions in which even animals were treated better.

We may not be as bothered by that thought if those pressed into slavery were hardened criminals, or the dregs of society, non-productive types who were wasting their lives anyway.  But these were God's own people—God's Chosen.  These were God's Elect, subjected to an ancient gulag that could rival any of those in our day.  For over 400 years, their one, unison cry was for rescue and justice.  400 years is a long time.

Terrance De Pres has written a book titled, The Survivor: An Anatomy Of Life In The Death Camps.  It is an extremely graphic examination of the concentration camps of Nazi Germany, weaving the memories of survivors together, trying to find common threads.  In the introduction of his book, Des Pres wrote:
My subject is survival, the capacity of men and women to live beneath the pressure of protracted crisis, to sustain terrible damage in mind and body and yet in those circumstances, remain sane, alive, still human. … Unavoidably, a spectacle of death and mutilation opens upon us, and an endless silent scream rising to a sky forever heedless of (people's) anguish (page v).

In the first Holocaust, in Pharaoh's Egypt, how many of God's people raised their voices to God, and only found "…a sky forever heedless of (people's) anguish."  It is a question that I have heard asked time and time again, by people who may not be slaves to Pharaoh, but they are under severe stress and oppression none the less.

But our question here must be asked a shade differently.  Because our question, arising from Moses' call and the Exodus, is not, "Why does God refuse to act?"  Which is Des Pres' question.  God eventually does act.  God calls Moses from tending his father-in-laws sheep, to herding a people through the wilderness of Sinai, away from oppression, toward freedom.

Instead, our question has to do with the "eventually" of God's actions.  Why does God delay, when it is already too late for some?  How many lives were lost in Egypt?  How many backs were scared?  How many bodies were permanently crippled?  How many spirits were broken?  How many, before God rescued God's people?  In the Nazi version of the Holocaust, over 6 million died before rescue came.

In the parable of the corrupt judge and the widow, even Jesus recognizes God's justice will come, but there is a delay—people still "…cry to God day and night."  In the final book of the Bible, describing the final days of God's recreation of the world, the souls of the believers who had been martyred sit in heaven waiting for God to mete out justice, and exterminate those who had cruelly killed them.  They literally shout at God, from the foot of God's altar in heaven, demanding to know when the persecutors will get theirs.

Why must God be shouted at?  Why must we be plagued with the question of, "How will I know if God will come to my rescue in time?"  How long must I endure?  How loud and long must I shout, before God will pay attention to my situation and "come down and rescue"?

I ask these questions delicately, not to disturb your faith, but only to face a hard reality that many people have shed tears about and lost lives over.  They are not easy questions to ask, nor are they easy to answer.  In my mind, I have run through all the trite answers that people give to such questions, and I have found them wanting.  There are two possible—I don't wish to call them answers—let us just call them "ponderings" that might be of help here.


The first is, to our modern day oppressions, whatever they may be for us individually, we do not fully realize what strength we have, what resources we have at our disposal, apart from God—qualities God has given us by which we might endure.

When I was playing basketball in college, our coach had his doctorate in kinesiology.  He knew everything there was to know about muscles.  All we knew was they ached after every practice.  The coach would push us and push us to levels of development we had no idea existed; but he did.  He knew the resources of the muscle system, and what kind of athlete they could produce.  There was a great amount of aches and pains in the production of those abilities.  We could not argue with the guy, or whine and complain because he was the one with the Ph.D.  The point is, we didn't realize the resourcefulness and possibility for strength that we had until we were pushed.

For some, who are enduring hardships on many levels, God may be slow in coming because God knows we have resources we have not even tapped yet.  Or we are willing to try.  We are not willing to push ourselves to a limit of endurance we do not know exists.

I counseled a young man one time whose main quality of life was despair.  Nothing was going right and his life was circling the drain.  At least in his own eyes.  From my perspective, he had great potential for success, and many things to his advantage.  I tried to point that out to him.  I gave him several specific suggestions about what he could do to pull himself out of his swirling problems.  But each time he came back at me with some lame excuse as to why this or that suggestion would not work.  Yet, in the midst of his struggle, he demanded to know what God was doing all this time—if God had taken a vacation from watching over him.  This young man's final solution to some of his financial woes was to bet on the dog races and hope for the big payoff.  I'm sure you can surmise how well that went.

I think one part of the reason God appears slow in coming to the rescue is that, for many of us, we have not begun to exhaust our options.  We have not exerted enough of our own God given energy.  As John Paul Jones' infamous battle cry goes, "We have not yet begun to fight!"  There are some people who are derailed by the smallest of woes, and to them God might be saying, "You are not to the point of needing Me yet."


My other pondering about the apparent lateness of God's rescue is a thought that dovetails with the one I just offered.  God took the initiative to rescue the people from Egyptian servitude.  But how does God do it?  Through the man, Moses.  "Now I am sending YOU to the king of Egypt so that YOU can lead my people out of that country."  God works through willing (and sometimes, unwilling) people.

I suppose God could have beamed the Hebrew slaves out of Egypt, a la Star Trek, and then beamed them down into the promised land.  But that is not how God chose to work.  Instead, God has consistently chosen people to carry out the details of God's plans of salvation, all the way to the Cross and beyond.

I ask myself, How many people walked past the burning bush before Moses came along, noticed, and approached?  How many saw the bush, approached, heard the details of God's mission, and refused?  Because Moses could have refused.  We have to understand that he had that power to say "No" to God.  He tried.  But he went anyway.

The truth is, most forms of people's oppressions can be dealt with through others who are willing to respond to God's initiatives, are willing to get involved, take risks—some of them great—and be part of God's rescue  operation.

The issue, then, is not God's slowness in responding.  Instead, in terms of the people of Israel, God may have been trying to bring about a rescue for 400+ years, but no one was willing to cooperate with God's plans.  It is not so much God's problem, then, as it is ours.

How many people do you know who are really hurting?  Maybe you think they are hurting in some way, but you are not sure, and have not checked your assumptions out.  Think of those people for a moment.  Bring them to a conscious picture in your mind.  What kind of oppression are they under?  What kind of rescue are they crying out for?  What is the level of their suffering?  What kind of slave drivers are lashing their whips across their backs?  Most importantly, though, what are you doing about it?  How are you responding to God, allowing God to rescue them through you?

"I just do not want to get involved."
"I don't know what one person can do."
"It is too risky."
"They do not want my help."
"There is so much pain there; I know that if I get involved, I might end up hurting, too."
And so go many other such rationalizations rattled off in Moses-like fashion.  As we speak our rationalizations, good people continue to be oppressed.

But is not that the real question here—the real issue?  By our inaction, we allow human suffering and injustice not only locally, but on a global scale.  Instead of taking action against others injustice and cruelty, we simply get used to it, fooling ourselves into thinking it is all just a part of life.  And, if it is ever to go away, then God needs to wave God's magic wand and make it disappear.  And where is that God, anyway?  It's all up to God.

Gordon Stofer and I chat every other week or so.  He watches the news.  I read the news on the internet.  We are both upset and frustrated with the world.  Alan Luttrell does not even watch the news anymore, it gets so upsetting.  After about an hour of this, Gordon and I come to the conclusion the world/our culture is totally screwed up and fatally broken.  In the end, we try to think of something funny, so we can laugh and go our way.  But it is messed up out there.  Every level of government has totally lost its way.  People continue to commit heinous crimes against innocents.  In too many countries there are no-brain demagogues with their finger on the button of mutually assured destruction.

It is more than we can take, and we throw our hands up and give up.  How little we think that we are God's agents of change in this world we find ourselves—that we are never to get used to the world the way it is, but to be willing to get our hands dirty in the work of relieving people's oppression.  We may not be called to free the Israelites, but we might be called to take a risk and relieve the suffering of a neighbor, to fight injustice and prejudice in some small way, so that someone might say, "God has come to rescue me, and God has done it through you."

It must be terribly frustrating for God to work rescue in this way.  For in so doing, there is the waiting.  The waiting that someone will come along and see the bush that is burning, someone who is willing to respond to God's bidding.  Certainly we have heard it said, or maybe said it ourselves, "Why doesn't somebody do something!?"  How many times a day must God utter those same words, as cruelties mount up, and we allow them to do so.

Why must God be shouted at?  Why does God delay?  God is probably wondering the same thing about us.


(If you want to talk back to me about this sermon, join our adult class at CREW, Wednesday night.)