"Do-Gooders"

       Question:  Is a Christian’s behavior any different from anyone else’s behavior?  What, if anything, makes behavior either Christian or not?  Is there any such thing as “Christian conduct?”  Or, is there just behavior, either good or bad, moral or immoral, acted out of high values or low values, no matter who the person is who’s acting out?

       To further clarify our questions, let’s make a more detailed distinction.  If there is such a thing as Christian behavior (and for the sake of argument, at this point, let’s say there is), it should be easy to contrast that to immoral and valueless, non-Christian behavior.  I think even non-Christians can recognize the negative and detrimental side of excessively bad behavior.  If there is a harder distinction to make, it would probably be the comparison of a Christian’s behavior with that of a morally, well-behaved non-Christian.  Is there a difference between the two?  And if there’s not, then what’s so special about being a Christian?

       An interesting poll has been taken by the Gallup people.  They have done this particular poll over several decades.  It’s a poll comparing people’s opinions on a wide variety of moral and ethical issues.  When comparing the responses between people who called themselves “regular church attenders,” with those who say they seldom, if ever attended church, guess what?  The difference of opinions of the two groups of people is basically nil.  I don’t know about you, but I find that startling and thought-provoking.  I would have expected a larger gap between the two groups.

       You may remember that I started out on the first Sunday of this month saying that I wanted us to think about the difference the Resurrection makes.  Why is the Resurrection so important to our daily beliefs and life?  I said that I thought we needed to get in touch with someone who was there, who saw the Resurrection of our Lord first hand.  We needed to listen to someone who was impacted by the reality of the Resurrection, and then tried to put down into words what it meant to him and his life.  That person, is Peter.  So, let’s turn to Peter and see what he has to say about living the Resurrection life, vs. just being a good person.

       One of the first assumptions that Peter makes is that there is supposed to be a difference between a person's former actions and their new behavior once they have embarked on their Christian pilgrimage, once they have believed in the Resurrection of Jesus.

       Two brothers, convicted of stealing sheep, were branded on the forehead with the letters ST for "sheep thief."  One brother, unable to bear the stigma, moved to a foreign country.  But people asked him about the strange letters.  He wandered restlessly.  Finally, full of bitterness, he died and was buried, to be forgotten.

       The other brother became a Christian.  He determined that he could not run away from the fact that he had stolen sheep.  So he decided to stay where he was and win back the respect of his neighbors.  As the years passed, he built a reputation for integrity.  One day, a stranger saw the old man with the letters branded on his forehead.  He asked a person in town what those letters meant.  "It happened a long time ago," said the townsperson.  "I've forgotten the particulars.  But I think the letters are an abbreviation for 'saint.'"

       A person can't help but go through a process of change once their lives have been touched by the resurrected Savior.  At least that is the expectation of Peter.  A Christian's character and behavior should be different from that of their pre-Christian days.

       Now, if it is true that there is such a difference, can we not also take that a step further and say that there should also be a difference between how Christians and non-Christians behave and think?  It's not a matter of having good morals.  There has to be some qualitative difference between the Christian and non-Christian.

       Take, for example, a baseball player.  Someone may be a fairly good baseball player.  They may make a few good plays.  They may hit the ball every now and then.  But what we mean by a good baseball player is the one whose eye for the pitch is exact.  They say good hitters can even see the seams of the pitched baseball and can tell how it's spinning.  These kinds of players get hit after hit.

       When I was up at Seattle I went to a Mariners game with a couple of friends.  The left fielder was getting booed all the time.  He wouldn't run up on the ball to make a catch but let it bounce in front of him.  Evidently, last season, at the end of an inning, in the middle of a game, he walked out of the stadium without telling anyone, got in his car, and drove away.  That's the difference between an OK player and a really good player.  There's a certain tone or quality about the person which shows through even when they aren't playing.  Every thing about them is about being the best that they can be.  Three days after the game I went to, the Mariners put that left fielder on waivers.

       In the same way, some people can be good people.  But isn't there another level of personhood that comes with being a Christian?  Is there a certain quality of character that's different in a Christian?  We would like to think that it is that quality, rather than the particular actions that makes the difference between a non-Christian and a Christian's behavior and character.

       Peter calls that quality of character being holy.  I talked some about this a couple of weeks ago.  Usually if someone is described as holy, it's with a negative connotation:  being a "holy Joe," or being, "holier than thou."  I can't remember hearing anyone described as being holy, and it being meant to be a positive thing.  It's probably one of the devil's tricks that terms like saintly, pious, angelic, Godly and holy have become negatively charged in our day.  At one time it was not so.  Especially with bozo's like Harold Camping saying he absolutely knows when the end of the world is going to happen.  Doesn't that guy read the Bible, where Jesus said even he doesn't know about God's plans for the end?  People like Camping give all of us believers a bad name when we are trying to be holy and faithful people.

       The reality, though, is that we can't escape those characteristics of holiness.  Holiness, in the Bible, is often contrasted with impurity and immorality.  There is a moral content of holiness that can't be avoided or watered down by a pagan and indifferent society.

       But there is a meaning of holiness that is not often emphasized.  I shared it in my sermon two weeks ago.  A good deal of the meaning of the character of being holy describes something, or someone, who has been dedicated, who has been set apart, who is single-minded in his or her purpose.

       People certainly can be holy in this respect.  In Leviticus, God tells the people, "Live holy lives before me because I, God, am holy.  I have distinguished you from the nations to be my very own" (20:26).  Notice, the reason the people are holy is not because of their behavior or stellar quality.  It's because God has set them apart for God's own special purposes.

       So, holiness of this kind is really a marker of identity.  Christians should not have any kind of identity crisis as to who they are, or whose they are.  One day, Charlie Brown was talking to his friend, Linus, about his low sense of self esteem; how he feels inadequate all the time.  Charlie Brown moans, "You see, Linus, it goes all the way back to the beginning.  The moment I was born and set foot onto the stage of life they took one look at me and said, 'Not right for the part.'"

       We are a holy people.  We don't call ourselves holy.  God does.  Because it is a distinction that God is making, then we know we can never say we are "not right for the part."  To be called holy by God means that God has set us apart for a special relationship with God and with each other.  God is the one who has cast us into this part on the stage of life.

       Some might tell you that all God wants is obedience to a set of rules.  That being good, that being right for the part, means following a bunch of do's and dont's.  Whereas, what it appears God really wants is that we be a people of a particular character, who are willing to display a certain kind of behavior because God has called us holy.  It is out of our relationship of holiness, given us by God, that makes our behavior distinctly different from a morally, good person.

       Let's get back to our original questions.  I hope you are beginning to see that a Christian's behavior is different from a highly moral non-Christian's mainly because our motivational source is different.  The Christian's behavior and character is good, or just, or whatever, simply and only because it is within the will and purposes of our relationship with God.  The Christian, and therefore the Christian's behavior, has been set apart by God.  Thus it takes on a different depth and quality.

       Philip Crosby in his book, The Art of Getting Your Own Sweet Way, wrote:  "Much of the wasted effort in human activity is a result of a lack of clear definition of the real or total reason for doing something.  If you cannot determine why you are doing something, you probably won't do it very well."

       If we are, as the Santa Claus tune says, "being good for goodness sake," then we have made "being good" our god.  Thus, C.S. Lewis made a whole lot of sense when he wrote, "...that right actions done for the wrong reason do not help to build the internal quality or character called 'virtue,' and it is this quality or character that really matters."  (Mere Christianity, pg. 77)

       Just being good for goodness sake is not enough.  We have to be good for the right reasons.  Maybe on the day of our salvation, we not only need to be forgiven for our sins, but also we might need forgiveness for our goodness.  Even that, prior to our relationship with Christ, was done for the wrong reasons and out of misguided motivations.

       One of my favorite short stories is titled "Revelation," by Flannery O'Connor.  In this story there is Mrs. Turpin.  She's a self-righteous kind of person who is always judging others.  Someone who's been good her whole life, but defining goodness in her own way.

       Towards the end of the story, Mrs. Turpin falls in her pig pen.  She is covered in muck.  The hogs are milling and rooting around her fallen body.  She can't get up.  She thinks she's going to die.  In the midst of her frantic hog pen experience she sees a vision of people parading into heaven.  Some are singing.  Some are shouting.  A whole long line of people she has disrespected and judged her whole life, all of them going into heaven.  As all these people got to a certain place, all their sins were being burned away by a powerful light.

       Then she sees a different kind of folks, at the end of the procession.  This is how Flannery O'Connor writes the scene:

And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those who, like herself, had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right...They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior.  They alone were singing on key.  Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away.

       Being a good person isn't what it's all about.  I like the way O'Connor has it, that even our goodness is burned away in the end.  Because all that matters is our holiness--that is our being set apart in an amazing relationship with God.  And then letting all of our actions and behaviors be motivated by that relationship, rather than a sense of our own pridefulness.

       As believers in Christ, you are a holy people.  A special people.  You have been set apart by him, dedicated by Christ for a special relationship, purpose and behavior.  You are to be different, because of that relationship that God has set us in, from the non-believing world, even the highly moralistic non-believers.  You are a holy people, made holy by God's own gracious choosing, through the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.  Live according to that holiness.  Live like resurrection people.

"Chosen"

"Chosen"
1 Peter 2:9-10

Most of us have sad stories about not being chosen.  Remember those days in elementary school?  During recess a group of us would line up against the wall so that teams could be chosen for dodge ball.  The same two boys always ended up being the captains.  They were the ones who did the choosing.  I don’t know how it was that they were always the captains.  I don’t remember anyone choosing them to be captains.  I think they chose themselves.  The rest of us evidently allowed them to do that, because no one ever complained or put themselves forward as a captain.

I was always chosen near the end or at the end.  You know, with the rest of the kids that were hurriedly divided up as the extras that were either not cool enough, or good enough to even be chosen.  We were just separated like cattle.  Bodies to be cast to one side or the other.

Then something amazing happened.  I started growing.  Between 8th and 9th grade I grew 12 inches.  One whole foot!  That’s what I used to tell people, that I grew a foot in one year.  But then some wise guy replied, “That’s funny; when did you grow the other one?”  I went from 5’5” to 6’5.”  I didn’t have any problem getting chosen after that.

In fact, the basketball coach said he wanted to choose me to play basketball.  I had never played before.  So I know I wasn’t being chosen for my skill.  I was simply being chosen because I was really tall.  When I played, in those early years, I was like a Picasso painting: a kid with arms and legs in odd places and at odd angles, running down the court, trying to keep from tripping over my big feet, or the lines painted on the court.

Even though I had no idea what I was doing, it was an overpowering feeling of affirmation to be chosen.  Not only chosen to be on the team, but chosen to play as well.  Actually, the only reason I got to play was because the starting center broke his ankle two games into the season, and I was suddenly pushed off the bench and into a playing role.  The coach kind of had to choose me after losing his starter.  Or it was like the basketball gods had chosen me, and my destiny had been set.  I would be a player, not a gangly bench sitter, after that.  My life was never the same.

There certainly are times when we are chosen, and we know in our heart of hearts that there was nothing we did that affected that choosing.  Some call it destiny, or fate, or chance.  I prefer to think of it as something that God is up to behind the scenes.  For God’s own reasons, He chooses, and lives are forever changed.  God selects someone out of a group of others, like David chosen out of all the rest of his older brothers, and that choosing creates ripple effects usually not just in their life, but in a lot of lives surrounding the chosen one.

In the Old Testament, the Jews defined themselves as God’s chosen people.  Chosen for a special destiny.  Chosen for a special mission.  Chosen to be a witness to the nations.  In the musical, “Fiddler On The Roof,” the old town Rabbi says, “We know, O God, we are your chosen people; but isn’t it time you chose someone else.”

God eventually did choose some others, or at least expanded His circle of who was chosen.  Through Jesus Christ, from New Testament times on, God includes the church as part of those who are the chosen.  Let’s find out what that means, according to Peter.

You’ll notice Peter addresses his letter to Christians who are “...exiles, scattered to the four winds.”  They weren’t scattered because they decided to move to a new town.  They were scattered because people who followed Jesus, who were chosen to be the church, were being searched out and killed in gruesome ways by the Roman government.  Some were crucified, covered with tar, and lit on fire so Emperor Nero could stroll his gardens at night time by the light of flaming Christians.  Some were sawn in half.  Some were dealt with sarcasm.  Sarcasm is a word for torture involving slicing a person down the middle of their torso, and slowly pealing the flesh back.  That’s what sarcasm literally means.  It comes from two Greek words:  “sarx” meaning flesh, and “chamsa” which means to cut or gouge.  If you tend towards being sarcastic, you might keep the word’s meaning in mind.

And still some of the chosen, good church people, were pulled apart by teams of horses; others were thrown to the lions in the arena simply for the sport of the demented crowds.  These are the terrified, hiding, running, scattered believers that Peter is addressing his letter to.  These are the people he writes the words Glen read earlier.  Imagine you are a group of those terrified believers, you open up this letter from Peter and you read:

But you are the ones chosen by God, chosen for the high calling of priestly work, chosen to be a holy people, God’s instruments to do his work and speak out for him, to tell others of the night-and-day difference he made for you--from nothing to something, from rejected to accepted.

The Christians reading Peter’s letter might be thinking along the lines of the Jewish Rabbi’s prayer, “Dear God, If this is what it means to be chosen, it’s maybe time you chose some other people.”  If life is getting really awful and scary and just down right crappy, you might be reassessing what it means to be chosen, to be and remain faithful.  You might be wondering what kind of “night-and-day” difference God has really affected in your life.  Have you been chosen to go from nothing to something, only to be torched in Nero’s gardens?  Have you been chosen to go from rejected to accepted, only to become lion fodder in the arena?  Have you been chosen to be priestly, only to become a human sacrifice, not on an altar, but on the torture table of some Roman sadist with a saw?

So, being chosen by God doesn’t spare you from the chaos and craziness in the world.  Fortunately we don’t live with those same kinds of circumstances that Peter’s letter readers had to live with.  We get to come here to worship, and not worry that the police are going to bust down the door and haul us all away to do unspeakably awful things to our bodies.  Even if we did, it wouldn’t change the fact that we’ve been given an identity by God as people He has chosen.  What’s important is that we’ve been given an identity and we must be a people who are constantly living into that identity, as God’s chosen people.

As we examine that identity, let’s ask some simple questions that Peter answers in this single sentence of his letter.  The first question is, Who’s chosen?  “You” are, Peter writes.  But not you, individually.  This isn’t about you, personally.  It’s about you, plural.  All of you.

Or, as I found when I was in seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, “Y’all.”  But, I found out, even that isn’t right.  “Y’all,” I came to find out is singular.  I met a guy in seminary from Georgia, who became one of my close friends while we were there.  He came up to me one day and said, “What y’all doin’?”  I was by myself so I looked around me to see who “all” he was talking to.  I thought a bunch of people must have snuck up behind me.  Or, maybe he thought I had developed multiple personalities.  But it was just me, so I discovered, “y’all” is singular.  If you wanted to address a group of people it was, “All, y’all.”  That’s what Peter was saying in his letter (if he lived in the south):  “You, all y’all, are the ones chosen by God.”

We all got chosen by God in one fell swoop.  We’re all in this together.  This isn’t about individuals.  It’s about us.  It’s about making a stronger, more profound impact on God’s team as “all y’all” rather than just a bunch of individual “y’alls.”

Which leads us to another question Peter tries to answer, “What have we been chosen by God for?”  It’s clear that for Peter being chosen doesn’t have anything to do with getting status or notoriety.   When I was a kid, and we were all up against the wall at recess, like I explained earlier, there was usually one of the captains who was cooler than the other.  Like Ken Montgomery.  Just being chosen by him was the best.  It elevated everyone’s status just because we were on his team, and he chose us.

But that’s not what’s going on when we get chosen by God.  It doesn’t mean we are cooler or better than anyone else.  It doesn’t mean that our status is suddenly elevated, that our stock as a human being just went through the roof.  To be chosen by God, as Peter describes it means being chosen for responsibility.  Being chosen doesn’t mean we get to sit back and do nothing; thinking that being chosen was all it was about.  And just because the world may be chaotic and scary, and we may be in survival mode, doesn’t mean we get to run and hide.  We have to, as the chosen ones, live out of our new identities as the chosen.

For Peter, that new identity is best described as the “high calling of priestly work.”  All y’all have been chosen to be priests.  Isn’t that a kick?  Now does that mean that you have to wear those black shirts with the uncomfortable tight white collars, and say words in Latin that no one understands?  Does that mean that you have to all of a sudden become celibate and give up your marriages?  Thankfully, a big NO to all of that.

But Peter describes what it means to be chosen for priestly work in the rest of the sentence.  First it means to be chosen to be a holy people.  The word “holy” literally means something or someone who has been set apart for a special purpose.  So to be chosen for priestly work means that each of you is to help everyone else to see how each of you is special.  As a congregation you are to do the work of understanding how God has set all of you apart, in a together kind of way, for a special purpose.  God has chosen this congregation, and set them in this community, for a special purpose.  Do you have an understanding of what that is?  Do you know what that purpose might be?  That’s why we worship and study and pray and fellowship together, not just for our own fun, but to discern how God has set all y’all aside for a special purpose in this place.

Next Peter says that the high calling of priestly work is to tell others about the night-and-day difference God has made in your life.  Individually, and as a congregation, the expectation is that you don’t get to ever stay the same.  We are, all of us, moving from something to something else.  You aren’t the same person you were 5 years ago.  Nor, hopefully, are you the same congregation you were 5 years ago.  You have made some changes yourself, or changes have been thrust upon you.

The great thing with God is that these changes are of an upward nature; they are positive rather than negative, in God’s way of doing things.  The movement of change as Peter describes it is from “nothing to something, from rejected to accepted.”  These kinds of changes are going on continually in our lives, which means that God is continually active in those changes in our lives.  So, it is our priestly work to tell each other, to tell others the nature of those movements in our lives.  They encourage all of us as you are willing to share what’s different in your life, and how God has helped shape those differences.

In my mind, this kind of story-telling has to be done with a lot of grace-full listening.  The changes and identity shaping circumstances may have been a result of stupid things we did, or bad choices, or hurtful actions by others.  Like I said, just because we are chosen doesn’t mean that we stop being human beings and start acting like angels.  Or that life magically gets easier.  Life together means giving each other a lot of grace, helping each other find the forgiveness, acceptance and embrace that we need to go on.  And then tell each other those stories of how that happened, for our mutual encouragement.  If God really makes a difference in our individual lives and in our life together, that’s where the story has to begin and be told.

Peter calls being chosen by God a “high calling.”  I’ve talked to so many people who feel like their lives aren’t counting for much of anything; that they aren’t participating in anything that they would describe as a high calling.  They feel they don’t have purpose.  They don’t feel like they are doing anything that has the conviction of God behind it.  They don’t feel like they are in the grip of doing anything that resembles some profound motivation.  I hear the same from congregations as well.

How much of what all y’all does flows out of this kind of motivation?  Isn’t that something that we all desire, either as individual believers or as a congregation?  We want to do something that gives us the sense of being God-connected.  We want to know that we are doing something worthwhile in a meaningful sense.  That what we are doing is somehow making a difference and having a worthy impact.

This kind of identity can only come through doing the priestly work Peter has described that God has chosen all y’all for.  Only in our identity as chosen by God will we find that sense of calling and satisfaction that we may have lost along the way.  It means being a part of a community that knows it is chosen to courageously share the subtle and profound movements in their life together, and help God and help each other make it come out right, make it a positive shift rather than negative.  That’s meaningful and priestly work.

It also means keeping a sense of holiness about what all y’all are doing.  That you, together, have been set aside by God, chosen by him, for a special purpose.  You can only find that out together.  You can only celebrate that together.  You can only keep at that kind of holiness together.  That’s who you are.  That’s who God chose you to be and to do.

Easter: "Written In Red"

Narration One
Every story needs a beginning.
The trouble is,
no one knows when that is.
Because this story begins with God:
“In the beginning, God...”
Before any action took place,
there was God.
First God,
then the world.
First God,
then God’s creative love
fashioned into the world.
First God,
then God’s love affair
with what God made.
First God,
then the world
now inseparably intertwined;
God can exist without the world,
but who is God
without the world?
So, when the world went bad
when the world went off
without God
God started a new story,
a story in which God would not make a new world
but woo the world back
to that relationship of love
that God
nor the world
can exist without.
God’s wooing
called for a Messiah--
and that’s where we start our story:
when God woos
when the Messiah arrives.

Narration Two
Everyone has to have a name.
A name describes
who you are
where you came from
from whom you came
your history
your heritage
your uniqueness.
Our names.
They carry so much.
Our names carry us.
You can make a “good name” for yourself.
Or you can disgrace your family name.
You can make fun of a person
by making fun of their name.
Jesus Christ.
Jesus,
a name that means:
“God is help.”
To speak of Jesus
is to, at the same time,
recognize
and affirm
the help of God.
To say the name of Jesus
is to recognize
and affirm
that God is in Jesus.
Sad,
that this name is used by many
so flip,
so casually,
so cruelly,
as a cuss word.
What if your name became a cuss word?
Jesus Christ.
Christ, of course,
is not Jesus’ last name.
It is a title.
It means:  “the anointed one.”
The chosen one.
Chosen by God.
It means, Messiah.
That’s what we call him:
Jesus Christ,
God’s help,
the Messiah of God.
We call him, Messiah.


Narration Three
Extra!  Extra!
Read all about it!
Back in the good old days,
the news boys would stand on the street corners
shouting the headlines
holding up the newspapers
displaying the banner
trying to get your attention
so you’d spend a dime
and buy a paper.
The news boys are gone.
The newspaper,
is now tossed silently
from the window of a passing car
in the wee hours of the morning
while you are still sleeping,
on to your lawn
or driveway;
wrapped in a plastic bag
so you can’t even see the banner headlines.
No more,
are the headlines shouted out to us
as if it is crucial
that everyone know.
It is amazing how calmly
the anchors on the evening news
can tell us what's happening in the world.
Is nothing worth shouting about anymore?
Extra! Extra!
Read all about it!
Jesus has Risen from the dead!
Jesus has conquered death!
There’s a banner
that needs to be shouted across our land!

Narration Four
There are a lot of people
who don’t like to be told what to do.
They would like to be their own boss
the captain of their own ship
the master of their own domain.
But how many really are?
Everyone takes orders
from somebody.
So, let’s not fool ourselves.
All of us come to the point
of succumbing to the wishes
of someone else.
If everyone got their own way,
no one would get their way.
Life would be hell.
There would be no peace.
So, if we are going to kneel to another’s will
whose will
will that be?
That is our only free choice:
whose will
will be done?
Even Jesus comes to that point
on his knees
in the Garden of Gethsemane
when he says to God:
“Not my will, but Thine be done.”
In that statement
is the only hope for us all.

Narration Five
Isn’t it amazing
that the Cross
has become a piece of jewelry?
The cross is a form of execution.
It is an execution
of immeasurable pain
and humiliation.
The one who is pinned to the cross
is first stripped naked.
Put on degrading display
for anyone to stand and stare.
All the paintings
of this awful event
choose modesty
over reality
draping Jesus with a loin cloth.
A person,
dies on the cross
by suffocation.
Chest muscles give out
trying to hold themselves up;
the lungs collapse;
they can’t breathe anymore,
gasping for air;
they die.
On a cross.
A form of horrible
and humiliating execution.
A cross.
That we wear around our necks,
transformed by one such execution
of Jesus
into a symbol
not of death,
but of love.
Because it wasn’t the nails that held Jesus to the Cross,
it was his love for us all.

Narration Six
Peter Marshall,
the once Chaplain of the Senate
said
that the stone was not rolled away from the tomb
to let the Savior out,
but to let the disciples in.
Someone had to see.
Someone had to find out
that Jesus’ body was not there.
Someone had to see,
that the burial cloths
were not pulled off
and rumpled on the floor,
but still lay
as if Jesus had just vaporized
through them.
Someone had to see
that this was no prank
nor trick.
Someone had to see
that a dead man
a dead man
had been brought
not back to life,
not had death reversed
only to die again.
Someone had to see
that Jesus had been brought forward
to a new life
a different form of life
a life that only has to do with God
and only what God can do.
Someone had to go in and see,
that even death
can be transformed.
Someone had to go in and see,
Resurrection!

Narration Seven
How do you say,
“I love you?”
So many articles
and so many books
written about love
and what it is:
The Five Love Languages
Lessons in Love
Love Yourself and Let the Other Person Have It Your Way
Eat, Pray, Love
Love and Respect
Getting the Love You Want
The Four Loves
How to Make Anyone Fall in Love with You
to name a few
of the current bestsellers
on the subject.
But Jesus said,
“This is the best way to love.
Put your life on the line for your friends.”  (John 15:13)
And that’s what Jesus did.
Jesus put his life on the line
sacrificed it
so that we could live.
Forever.
Love,
written in red.

Narration Eight
Christ the Lord is risen today
All creation join to say,
Raise your joys and triumphs high,
Sing, ye heavens, and earth reply.

Lives again our glorious King,
Where, O death, is now thy sting?
Once he died our souls to save,
Where thy victory, O grave?

Alleluia!  Christ is Risen!

"What If You Could Start Over?"

"What If You Could Start Over?"
1 Peter 1:3-5

       I read an article this week that was a sort-of rebuttal to the atheists that Easter doesn't matter.  That it couldn't have happened.  That it's not verifiable.  The article was trying to make the point that even the invisible forces in the world, like love, or honor, are no less so just because you can't see them.  So it is with God.  And the Resurrection.

       It got me thinking about how do you "see" the Resurrection?  This is the first Sunday after Easter.  We had a great string of Holy Week services, building to the crescendo of the Easter Sunday cantata.  But what does the Resurrection mean for everyday living?  What does it mean to live the Resurrection life?

       I think we need to find out from an eye-witness.  Someone who was there.  Someone who was one of the first to be there.  Someone who stuck his head in the empty tomb.  Someone who had a couple of intimate conversations with the Risen Jesus.  Someone like Peter.  For Peter, the Resurrection was everything.  It formed the basis of everything he came to believe.  It was what empowered him to become the leader of the early Christian church.

       So, we're going to turn to Peter's first letter this month, and look at what Peter wrote about the Resurrection, and why the Resurrection is so important for the Christian life.

       In the novel, The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, one of the main characters is Nick Carraway.  Nick thinks about what he calls, "the last and greatest of all human desires.  The last and greatest of all human desires is also one of the foremost and primary human dreams.  Those who study the mythology of different peoples have found this desire weaving its way throughout each culture's history.

       In the Bible, this greatest of all human desires is traced from the time when Adam and Eve are kicked out of the Garden of Eden, all the way to a midnight conversation between Nicodemus the Pharisee and Jesus.

       What is this "last and greatest of all human desires," this first and foremost of all human aspirations?  It is the dream of starting over.  It's what I call the resurrection desire.

       In "Decision Magazine," published by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, there is story after story of people who have ached for this dream.  There is a medical intern who saw ads for a crusade in Columbia, South Carolina.  The intern attended and responded to the invitation to bring Jesus Christ into her life.  She said, "I'm tired of the life I've been living.  I need a fresh start.  I need to get things right with God."

       And there was the story of an attorney who said he and his wife were both alcoholics.  Their home-life was breaking apart.  He said they both needed a drastic change--a totally new lease on life.  Like the gospel story of the woman who had a hemorrhage of blood for 12 years, and spent every penny she had on every possible remedy, the attorney and his wife said, "We've tried everything else; Jesus is our last chance."  With that desire in their hearts they both attended and came forward at a crusade.

       What if you could start over?  How has this greatest of all human desires, this longing to begin again, this hunger for resurrection, been like a seed planted in your heart?  How would your life be different if you could let that seed grow and you began again?

       You know how you hear about people who just disappear?  Their faces may be on milk cartons or on fliers stapled to telephone poles, or stuck on laundromat bulletin boards.  My guess is, a number of those lost people don't want to be found.  When you run away, you run away from something or someone; but you are also running toward something else.  That's why I think some runaways, particularly adults, are running toward the dream of starting over.  Starting over somewhere, with a new name.  To become the kind of person they were never allowed to be in their past.

       Such is the story of Jean Valjean in the famous novel, Les Miserables by Victor Hugo.  Jean Valjean runs from his convict past.  He was arrested for stealing bread to feed his starving family.  After an escape from prison, he finds refuge in the house of a priest.  The next morning, Valjean has disappeared and some silverware is missing from the priests home.

       The next day, the police bang on the priest's door.  They have captured Valjean with the missing silver.  The priest looks at Valjean and says to him, "But you forgot the silver candlesticks I gave you as well.  Here, take them."  Valjean is stunned.  He's been shown unbelievable grace.  He takes the silver pieces and sells them.  He uses the money to start a small business that turns into a large business that saves a village.  He becomes mayor of the village.

       But then there is Inspector Jabert.  Jabert is hunting Valjean.  He doesn't want Jean Valjean to have another chance, to live a new life.  Both men in this great novel symbolize the two ways people approach life:  the Jabert way, which says you are chained to your past.  That nobody can change who they are.  And the Jean Valjean way, that pursues the great human aspiration of being freed from your past, of starting totally over.  It is about living life in a brand new way, and toward an ever new future.

       Which of the two character's approach to life most describes how you view life?  Do you feel people, especially yourself, are fated to always be a prisoner of your past?  Locked in a tomb of your past with a huge stone rolled into place so you can't get out?  Is there no hope for you to become someone radically different than who you have been?  Is your only choice to be resigned to the fact of who you are, to sadly accept that you can never be changed?  That you will always live this tomb-encased life?  Have you succumbed to the thought that, "It's too late for me.  It's over."

       Here is what I believe.  I believe that God is the one who sows the seeds of starting over in every human heart.  You know how there are certain kinds of seeds that lay dormant in the soil until just the right conditions bring them to germination?  Sometimes there has to be a prairie fire, and there are particular seeds that are activated by the intense heat of the fire.  They need the disaster of that fire to germinate and begin life.

       So it is with this seeded yearning that God plants in each person.  When the prairie fire of human failure races across a person's life, that seed is activated.  The desire, the deep implanted need to start over begins to grow.  When the shoot, and the stem, and the first leaves appear, we begin the sometimes frantic search for that which will fertilize and water that precious new growth.

       I believe God hopes that in our search, we will turn to him to find the only authentic nurture that will bring that budding plant--that desire to start over--to come to fruit. Since it is God's seed, it is only by God that it grows.  All the other ways we try to make that desire unfold will only result in the frustration of watching the it whither and die.  That's when we get lost in resignation.  We become Jabert, thinking people can only be chained to their past, and never have a new future.

       Right at the start of his letter, the apostle Peter wants Christians everywhere to realize and hear again what God has done to give us this chance at new birth and new life.  As Peter personally understands, it is by God's act of raising Jesus Christ from the dead that we gain the new life we dream about.  That's why the Resurrection of Jesus Christ is so important.  It is the way that God fulfills the deep yearning in each of us to start fresh.

       To give you another metaphor, the Resurrection of Christ is a door that God places before us.  If we accept what God has done for us in Christ, we open the door, step through, and shut the door behind us.  What we find when we walk through that resurrection door is that the door shut behind us has no door knob on our side.  We don't have a way of opening it again and going back.  We can only go forward into a brand new future with God, through Christ.

       Or think of it in terms of the birth process.  That's what Peter calls it in his letter.  We are given a rebirth through the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.  Imagine yourself in the womb.  This is what Jesus was trying to get the Pharisee Nicodemus to picture, but Nicodemus' imagination was too limited.  Open up your imagination and picture yourself in the womb.  It's warm in there.  You tell yourself you are comfortable in a very cramped sort of way.

       You hear muffled sounds of another existence.  But you convince yourself it's not for you.  You tell yourself that this is the only place where you fit.  You feel fated to stay wrapped up in a little, tight ball of cramped existence.

       Then you hear a Voice.  The Voice is calling you out of that confined life.  "Come out, little one.  Come out and see this new world I have for you.  Come out and live a new life.  Grow and become.  Come out, child, into your new life."

       But you resist.  The Voice comes again.  That Voice describes in detail the kind of life you can have if you would only be born anew.  The Voice describes the sights and smells and tastes and wonders of a brand new existence.

       You are afraid.  It might hurt.  You're going to have to make a change.  Live differently.  The Voice speaks softly, "I have taken the pain of your new birth in my own body.  Don't be afraid.  Be born anew."  You touch the uterine walls of your confined life, not sure you can, or want to leave that space.  But hearing of the new life outside the womb, you long to see if the promises are true.  There's only one way to find out:  leave the womb of that previous life and be born anew.  Be born into the promises the Voice told you about.  Take the chance.

       You close your eyes.  You let God's resurrecting contractions begin.  When you open your eyes again you find yourself in a world beyond your imagining.  You are totally different.  You have been refit by God for the new world and new life you have just been born into.  Your heart is beating with hope.  Your lungs are filled with life.  Your existence has been radically and decisively changed.  The memory of your previous reality fades as quickly as a dream when you are waking.  It is unbelievable.  And it is all real.

       Isn't that what you desire?  Deep down you have wished to God that things could be different.  The Voice of God speaks and says, "Things can be different; they are different.  I have done all that for you in the raising of Jesus Christ from death.  Come out.  Come out of the womb.  See all the blessings that are yours in the new life I have made available to you.  Now is the time for your new birth.  Come out of your old life.  Be born anew.  See the resurrection life!"

"Last Words from the Cross" (part 6)

I have been gifted with two wonderful children.  I treasure the memories of watching Ryan and Kristin being born.  There were a couple of problems with Ryan’s birth and they had to whisk him away.  But after a few minutes, the nurses brought him back, all wrapped up like a mummy in warm cloths, and placed him in my arms.  That was 27 years ago, this past March 27th.  I can still remember every detail of that day.

Kristin’s birth was more routine, being born by caesarian.  We set an appointment and had a baby.  Ryan’s birth ended up being a caesarian as well, but Kristin’s was without any problems.  As the doctors worked at stitching her mother up, I got to have some immediate one-on-one time with our daughter.  The instantaneous affection and love for each of my children, when they were placed into my arms, was overwhelming.

A large part of what I felt was that I had just witnessed a holy moment.  I had been entrusted with each of my children, in a holy work.  These two infant lives had been “commended” into mine by God.  To commend means giving something or someone into the care of another.  You are entrusting something or someone to someone else, believing they will treat what is given with the same preciousness you would.

That’s what having a child, or adopting a child, feels like.  It feels like God is taking this child and saying, “He or she was mine.  I was taking care of this little one with all my love and tenderness.  But now I am commending this child into your hands and into your care.  I am trusting you to take care of this child just as I did.”  And then God lays this child into your arms, and the sacred trust is overwhelming.

The act of commending is not easy.  I don’t know what it was or is like for God.  I know what it has been like for me.  Commending my children into the care of a day care worker, a teacher, someone I didn’t know that well, someone I wasn’t sure I could trust, was hard.  There have been awful times when a child care worker, and a coach betrayed the commending trust I gave them when I allowed my children to sit under their influence in their home, or later, on the basketball court.

When Ryan and Kristin learned to drive, commending them to themselves and a coffin-on-wheels was hard for me.  Accidents are capricious, and they can happen so quickly, and be so deadly.  But even if I refused to let them drive, and I relegated myself to being their chauffeur, that still wouldn’t keep someone from running into us.  Or me into someone else.

Part of what I have discovered is that the act of commending is not one big step.  It’s a series of many steps.  In little ways throughout our lives, I have been commending my precious children to others, and, ultimately, to themselves; and finally to their destiny or fate.

Each act of commending is risky.  My natural inclination is to hold on for dear life, to be untrusting, to not commend anything or anyone I value to anyone else.  So, in little and large ways, throughout our lives, we are challenged to be commending with that which is precious to us.  Sometimes the challenge is more of a struggle than we could have imagined.

One Easter season, I arranged to purchase some caterpillars that would spin a chrysalis and turn into butterflies--hopefully right around Easter.  At each children’s message, during worship, all the children and I would look at the progress of the caterpillars and their transformation.

What we discovered--and this became a huge teaching moment for children and adults--is that caterpillars don’t yield themselves to the cocoon at the same time.  When the moment to spin the chrysalis arrives, some of the caterpillars actually resist.  They cling to life as a caterpillar, rather than “commend” themselves to the transformational process.  They put off entering the cocoon until the following Spring, postponing their change to a butterfly a year or more.

In pondering this resistance, this clinging, Sue Monk Kidd, in her wonderful book, When the Heart Waits, wrote:
It seems that at the moment of our greatest possibility, a desperate clinging rises up in us.  Then I ask myself, “What’s behind all my clinging?”

That’s the main question when we think about all the times we are challenged to commend one of our treasures to another, whatever or whoever that treasure might be.  Ultimately, with my children, as I mentioned, I had to be willing to commend them over to themselves.  They have had plans and dreams for themselves that I may not have chosen for them.  But they are theirs.  I had to trust them and their judgment.  I had to commend them to their own choices, wishes, and dreams.

Trust seems to be at the heart of all acts of commending.  Can we trust the person into whose hands we are commending this precious one or thing to?  Can we let go?  Can we stop clinging? Can we trust?

Most importantly, can we do that with our lives and God?

There was a man who was a master at walking the high wire.  To prove how great he was, he had a long wire stretched above a water fall.  The day of his fete came.  He got up on the wire, with a wheelbarrow.  He proceeded to walk from one side over the falls to the other.  When he got to the other side, the crowd erupted into applause that was almost louder than the falls itself.

Looking down at the crowd, he shouted, “Am I the greatest high wire walker ever?”
“You are the greatest!” the crowd shouted back.
Then pointing to a woman in the crowd, he said, “Do you, ma’am, believe I am the greatest high wire walker ever?”
The woman shouted back up at him, “I believe you are the greatest.”
The wire walker then asked the woman another question:  “Do you believe, my dear woman, that I can walk back over to the other side with this wheelbarrow, as I have just done?”
“I believe you can!” she shouted back.
“If you believe,” called the wire walker, “then climb up here and get in the wheelbarrow.”

Believing is not commending.  Believing is simply believing.  Getting in the wheelbarrow is commending.  It is the act of putting your trust on the line.  It is the act of putting that which is precious to you--even your own life, or the life of a loved one--in the wheelbarrow someone else is pushing.

Jesus said, as he died, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.”  In little and large ways, throughout his life, through acts of commending, Jesus discovered that God could be trusted.  Commending was not this one, big act Jesus did at the end of his life.  It was the way Jesus lived his whole life, in relation to the Father God.

Jesus discovered he didn’t have to cling.  He was trusting and willing to take the risk and climb into the Father God’s wheelbarrow time after time.  So, as he came to the last breath of his life, with the very last words of his life, he could commend everything he was--his very soul--into his Father God’s arms.  Jesus died the way he lived.

Take the risk.  Commend yourself to God, not just at death, but also in life.  Get in the wheelbarrow.  Live, by commending yourself, and those you love, into God’s hands.

"Last Words from the Cross" (part 5)

When my son, Ryan, was looking at colleges, we took a trip out to California to look at a few schools.  We went to the University of California at Santa Cruz, and that was a bizarre experience.  We were walking around the campus with some other parents and prospective students.  A girl in one of the dorms stuck her head out the window and yelled, “Don’t come here; all the students are on drugs.”  Fortunately, Ryan didn’t go there.

We ate lunch in Capitola, a little town just south of Santa Cruz.  It was a little fish and chips place right on the ocean, called Stella’s.  We sat outside, watching the surf.  The salt air breezes tousled out hair.  The sky was blue.  The seagulls were lifting on the hot air currents billowing up from the warm sand, and then falling back to the beach or the water.

Suddenly a falcon swooped in and struck a seagull out of the air.  The stunned seagull lay on the beach.  The falcon landed on top of it and pinned it to the sand.  The gull tried to fly away.  The falcon kept its huge talons gripped around the seagull’s body.  The falcon pecked at the gull’s neck a few times, keeping a strangle hold until the struggle was over.  Then the falcon lifted into the air and flew away with the dead gull dangling from its scary talons.  In a matter of a couple of minutes it was over.

I felt like getting up from the table and my fish and chips and run out to the beach.  I thought maybe I should chase that predator away.  But there was another part of me that was transfixed, realizing this is the way things are in the world.  The falcon was only doing what it naturally does.  The gull was the hapless prey of the day.  The falcon’s fish and chips, if you will.

As Ryan, Kristin, and I watched I wondered if that’s the way I would have been on the day of Jesus’ Crucifixion.  Would I have looked on, wanting to rush in and do something to help Jesus get out from under the talon hold of the cross and its spikes?  Or would the same transfixion take over, holding my feet to the ground, stunning me into just watching the life and death drama?  After Jesus died, would I have just gone back to my fish and chips?  “It’s all over folks; move along; nothing to see here.”  It is finished.

The scene with the falcon and my thoughts about the dramatic similarities with the scene at the Cross reminded me of the movie, La Dolce Vita.  The opening scene of that movie shows a beautiful panoramic view of Rome’s skyline.  The grand dome of St. Peter’s Cathedral gleams in the center of the postcard-like picture.

Then the sound of a helicopter is heard.  At first it is a speck in the distant skyline.  It is dragging something through the air with guide wires.  As the helicopter flies closer, it becomes clear that what it being towed through the air is a huge stone statue of Christ.

As the helicopter flies over a beach filled with people sunning themselves, they look up and point.  They are clearly annoyed by the intrusion of sound.  They laugh, mockingly as the statue is flown overhead.

Then the helicopter is shown hovering over a slag heap at a rock quarry.  The cables release their cargo and the statue of Christ plummets in slow motion until it hits the rubble below, breaking into thousands of pieces.

The message of that movie’s opening scene is clear:  modern society has relegated Christ to the trash heap.  Christ is no more than a piece of old stone--some historic relic, but no longer fitting in with the world’s current scheme of things.  Christ is only worth mocking as the world of technology and modernity carries him away to be jettisoned with the rest of what we deem worthless and are ready to get rid of.  The world, falcon-like, has pounced.  It has carried away its prey.  We go on with our meal and our lives.  It is finished.  And the world thinks it’s finished with him.

Is that what Christ meant when he uttered this anguished cry:  “It is finished!”  Is he simply saying, “I’m a dead man.  I’m being carried away.  The world has won and I have lost.”  Is that what Christ is saying?

I don’t believe so.  I hear these last words of Christ more as a statement of faith.  A three word sermon.  A proclamation.  A shout of acclimation.  It is not as much, “It is finished,” as much as it is, “It is accomplished.”  The word Jesus uses means more than, “It’s over.”  (That’s why the Savior wasn’t a woman.  Because, as the saying goes, “A woman’s work is never done.”)  Jesus is not just saying, “My time in this world is up.  And the world has won.”

If something is finished, as in accomplished, that logically means it had to first be started.  Something can’t be finished that hasn’t been begun at some time.  If something was started and then accomplished, that means there was a plan.  That plan would have certain steps that headed toward a set-forth conclusion.  If something is finished or accomplished, then there has to be intention.  There is a will involved--a will with desires and expectations.

When Jesus said that everything was done, he meant the plan had been accomplished.  He meant that the intentions of God, that had been going on for all of history, were now culminated.  God’s intentions to save the world from sin and from itself had been carried out.  Each step of the way had been taken.  Christ was that final and ultimate part of the plan.

Do we ever feel like we totally accomplish anything?  Aren’t there always loose ends?  For example, artists who seldom feel a painting is totally finished.  A couple of weeks ago I drove to Wichita on my day off to go to the Wichita Art Museum.  There was a couple of special displays that I wanted to see.  Looking at a painting up close is always a kind of tingly experience for me.  This is what the artist was actually working on.  It’s not just some kind of print.  Those are the artists knife and brush marks.

Several of the paintings were done with bold and broad strokes.  But other paintings I looked at used thousands upon thousands of brush strokes.  Van Gogh painted that way.  I wonder, as I gaze at that kind of artwork, if the artist still wondered, “What if I just put a few more brush strokes of color over here, or over there.”  When are they, if ever, fully satisfied, feeling the piece is “accomplished?”

Or authors who work on a poem or a short story for possibly years, still tweaking a word here or a phrase there.  Do they ever get to the point where they feel their work just can’t be edited anymore, and it’s done?

The same holds true for that moment when we know our lives are over.  In a flash, in an instant, we wonder, “Have I put all the brush strokes on my life?”  “Have I written all the story that I wanted to write?”  This is the only chance I will get to live my earthly life.  Can I come to the end of it satisfied, and with a final sense of accomplishment?

A popular movie of a few years back was, “The Bucket List.”  It starred Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson.  It was about a couple of older guys who were oddly thrown together in a hospital room as patients.  After they had gotten to know each other a little bit, they decided they needed to each make a “bucket list.”  That is, a list of things they wanted to do in life before they “kicked the bucket.”  It’s a fairly funny movie, and certainly thought-provoking.  I’m sure there were a lot of bucket lists written down after people saw that movie.

A bucket list has a way of helping you evaluate your life.  What have you done with your life so far?  What are you proud of?  What aren’t you so proud of?  What would you do if you could make a change?  What’s keeping you from making those changes before you die?  What do you have to look forward to?  Those are all huge questions that just this one kind of list forces you to take a long look at.

What happens when time is up?  You have more lists than you have time to accomplish what you’ve written on your lists.  How can you come to the end of life and feel like you have done what’s been on your list--whether it be a list on paper or a list in your mind?

Jesus is on the Cross.  He’s at the end of his life.  Death is but a matter of moments away.  One of the last things he says from that dreadful Cross, and that dreadful death is, “It is finished.”  In another gospel, it says Jesus shouts this out.  It’s a triumphant, shouting statement; not a statement of agonizing woe.  He’s making a bold statement of faith:  “Everything I set out to do, is now accomplished!  It feels so good to be able to affirm this as I die!”

Wouldn’t it be great to feel the same when that moment arrives for us?  Maybe that’s what we call “dying a good death.”  We can say, as our Lord did, “It is accomplished.”  All my lists are taken care of.  I haven’t left anything unresolved or undone that I was meant to do.  I have used my life well, and accomplished all that I hoped for with this life.  I wouldn’t ever wish to have another life, because my lists are done.  The time has come when I don’t get to have any more choices--but I’m good with that, because I have taken care of all my choices.  And all is well.

The British Parliament abolished slavery in the West Indies on August 1, 1836.  The decree, though, was not valid until the following year.  So, on June 30, 1837, twenty thousand slaves united in Jamaica.  At 11:00 p.m. of that day, all were dressed in white gowns.  They knelt down.  Faces were turned up in anticipation as the clock ticked towards midnight, and the beginning of the new day of July 1, 1837, the day of their emancipation.  As the clock struck one second after midnight, those twenty thousand people rose to their feet as one, and joyously shouted together, “We are free!  We are free! We are free!”

In the same way, but on a global and historic level, God established a decree thousands of years prior to the Cross.  At a certain time, on a certain day, the arms of the Cross, not of a clock, would set the world free.  The power of that old slave owner sin would be no more.  At the same time Christ shouted out in triumph his last words, “It is finished,” a responding cry goes up from millions of people--past, present, and future:  “We are free!  We are free!  We are free!”

What a great acclimation of faith.  That which ultimately and most importantly needs to be accomplished, is done so by Christ on the Cross.  It’s not something we can do for ourselves.  We can’t include it on our bucket list, because we can’t accomplish it.  Only Christ can do that for us.  And if it’s not done, we are still lost, we are still slaves to sin.

If something is finished, that means there is nothing else that can or needs to be done.  What was set out to be done, has been accomplished.  No further acts of salvation are needed.  No further saviors need to be sent.  No other words need to be spoken.  Everything God intended to be done, in order to free the world from sin, has been accomplished in Christ.  There was an evangelist who was asked by a young man, “What must I do to be saved?”
To which the evangelist replied, “To late--it’s already be done.”

It is finished!  We are free!



Prayer
O God,
Thank you, thank you, thank you,
that, in Christ,
our salvation is finished--
it is complete
it is accomplished and fulfilled.
We need that same sense of accomplishment.
We want to come to the end of our lives
knowing that we have done
all we were meant to do.
Give us the faith,
by your Holy Spirit
to do that.
We know that unfaith builds no cathedrals,
unfaith sings no songs,
unfaith never reaches,
never hopes,
never dares.
Unfaith walks alone,
weeps alone,
dies alone,
and leaves a life unfinished.
Give us the accomplishing kind of faith of the Savior:
a faith that stares into the shadows
and sees the form and shape of hope;
the kind of faith that peers into the unknown
and sees the promise of meaning in accomplishment.
We want the kind of faith that can only come from the Savior,
that liberates and sets us free to live,
fully
and abundantly.
In Jesus name,
Amen.

Last Words from the Cross (part 4)

"Last Words from the Cross" (part 4)
Matthew 27:45-46


Abandonment.  We're looking at some pretty tough words from Jesus on the Cross.  But then, I guess we need to remember that he was nailed to a Cross.  We usually don't know how we will feel about some horrible situation until we're in the middle of it.  We think about it.  We imagine how we would react.  We fantasize about what we might feel.  But we never do, really, do we.  Until such a time arrives.

As close as Jesus is to God, you might think abandonment would not be something that Jesus would feel.  In those Cross kinds of situations, I guess you are allowed to feel what you are feeling.  Nothing is more grating than to be hurting, deeply, and then have some well-meaning person tell you, "You shouldn't be feeling that way."  When you're on the Cross, you get to feel however you're feeling.  As well as any other critical experience in life.

In a sermon by the Scottish preacher, Frederick Robertson, he said this:
There is a world of untold sensations prodded into that moment when a man realizes his hour is come.  It is all over--his chance is passed, and his eternity is settled.  None of us know, except by guess, what that sensation is.  And to every individual, that sensation, in its fulness, can come but once.
We don't know, do we.  We don't know exactly how we will feel when we get to that point when we realize our one chance is passed.  Certainly Jesus must have felt the flood of human emotion that we feel when we blew a chance:  I could have done better; I could have done more; I could have done different.  Maybe not for Jesus.  I'm not sure.  If the Bible is accurate, and he was like us in every way, maybe he had those thoughts.

In his masterpiece work, Imitation of Christ, Thomas a'Kempis wrote:
I never yet found any religious person so perfect that he did not experience at some times the absence of grace or some diminishing fervor.
I guess that holds true for the most perfect religious person in the history of the world, Jesus Christ.

Abandonment.  Feeling abandoned.  Being onlookers at the Cross, we're having to look at some tough stuff.  Russell Baker was a New York Times columnist.  He wrote an autobiography titled, The Good Times.  I read it a long time ago.  One of the most gut-wrenching pieces in his book was when he told about his mother giving him away.  This was during the Great Depression.  She couldn't afford to feed her children.  So she gave a couple of her children away to shirttail relatives.  Russell was one of her children she gave away.

Baker told how he was sobbing as he was hauled away by his arm.  His mother standing silently on the porch, watching him go and doing nothing.  Baker wrote of that moment:  "I never cried again with any real conviction, nor expected much of anyone's God except indifference, nor loved deeply without fear that it would cost dearly in pain."

I have, sadly, heard a number of stories of similar abandonment.  Adults, who as children, were left behind.  One of my dearest friends, as a child, came home one day after school, and her mother had moved from the house.  Gone.  Didn't tell her grade school daughter where she had moved to.  Never saw her again for years.

My friend talked to me about having little trust for/in others, especially those who tried to get close to her.  She became a loner, because it was safer that way.  She was self-reliant and (on the surface) self-confident.  But inside she was so afraid.

One of the main emotions that drives people who have been abandoned is self-doubt.  Or self-punishment.  The nagging question that rips at their spirit is, "There must have been something about me."  Certainly Russell Baker asked that question.  Why was he given up, but other siblings got to stay with their mother?  What was it about him that his own mother was comfortable giving him away to someone she barely knew?

Psychologists have found that we are born with only a couple of innate fears.  One of them is the fear of abandonment.  It is as if we are born knowing how hopeless we are.  How utterly dependent.  It's like we know, as infants, what would happen, if those into whose hands we've been entrusted, would suddenly abandon us.  What it would be like to have our life-line totally cut off and leave us to ourselves.

Jesus, being fully human, got to come to a personal, and terrifying understanding of that basic, human fear of abandonment.  Certainly, part of what lays behind that fear is an expectation.  It's the expectation that the one who is supposed to take care of us, will.  That the one we have been entrusted to, or entrusted ourselves to, will always be there for us.  A lot of the anguish of being abandoned, is not just the abandonment itself, but the anguish over having a pivotal expectation dashed.

Jesus' words on the Cross may have been a recital of something he remembered from Psalm 22.  There the psalmist cries out:
My God, my God, why have you deserted me?
Why are you so far away?
Won't you listen to my groans
and come to my rescue?
I cry out day and night,
but you don't answer,
and I can never rest.

And then the psalmist expresses the expectation he has for why God should listen to him:
Our ancestors trusted you,
and you rescued them.
When they cried out for help,
you saved them,
and you did not let them down
when they depended on you.

That's the expectation the psalmist, and Jesus, voice behind their sense of abandonment:  You did it before, God; you took care of me before; you were close before; why are you being inconsistent and leaving ME alone?  That's the expectation:  that God has consistently watched over, and taken care of his people.  So why, now?  Why has God become so suddenly inconsistent?  Why has God chosen not to act for me?

Corrie ten Boom, survivor of a Nazi concentration camp, wrote that she learned to hold everything loosely in her hands.  When she grasped things too tightly, it would hurt when God would have to pry her fingers loose.  Maybe one of the things we grasp so tightly onto is our expectations about how we think things should be.

Like the little girl with the polka dot dress.  The expectation is that polka dots are supposed to stay on your dress.  They are supposed to be permanent.  They are supposed to always be there.  The polka dots were always there to share life with the little girl in the past.  Why, now, are the polka dots going against their apparent nature, jumping off the dress, rolling away, and leaving the little girl alone?  It's so much harder when those expectations are about God, and how we think God should be.  Especially if you're hanging on a Cross.

Chaim Potok, in his novel, In The Beginning, tells about a Jewish family living in New York City.  Everything is going wrong with them, and seemingly with the world.  Listening to all the bad news one night on the radio, the father blurts out, "It is God doing his usual bad job."  Maybe when things are going so wrong, and you start out with low expectations, you aren't disappointed when it seems God is messing up.

When is faith and trust in God hardest?  When are we tempted to blurt out, "It's God doing his usual bad job?"  Maybe when a person is under excruciating physical pain.  Chronic pain that doesn't let up.  Pain, that looks like it's not going to go away, has a way of getting us to ask God some tough questions.

Or maybe when life turns dark.  There just seems to be a total absence of light in any corner of your world.  I remember a Frank and Ernest cartoon.  They are standing in front of three mail boxes.  One mail box is labeled "Local."  The second is labeled, "Out Of Town."  The third is labeled, "Forget It!"  That's when life is the darkest: when you feel like just saying, "Forget it!  Nothing's going to work anyway.  Nothing matters.  Whatever I do, it's not going to work."

I was a double major in college, and one of my majors was philosophy.  I remember reading one modern philosopher who said that our feverish activity is without meaning or purpose; that all the great empires and all the great human ideals count for no more than an anthill crushed by a heedless traveler's foot.  Now that's fatalism.  That's the kind of thinking that takes over when life turns dark and there seems to be a total absence of light or meaning.  That's the time when a person begins to wonder where God is.

Or maybe faith and trust in God is hardest when death is close, and it doesn't seem timely or fair.  There was another cartoon that showed a deep-sea diver who was walking around on the ocean floor investigating a shipwreck.  Above him was the mother ship to which he was connected by a life-line and an air hose.  He looks up and sees the mother ship he is connected to sinking towards him.  Imagine the questions that race through the mind in an instant:  I'm doomed.  It's not fair!  Why me?  How could this happen?  etc. etc.

If these are the kinds of situations where faith and trust in God are hardest, maybe we also need to ask the opposite question, which is:  What creates trust and faith in God?

Certainly, as I have already mentioned, predictability has to be a part of trust.  It's the anticipation that life should go a certain way based on past experience.  That can be either negative or positive.  If life has been a bugger all along, than you might predictably expect that life is going to continue to be that way.  But if life has been good, and God has been good, then you would expect life and God should continue to be trustworthy.

Dependability also must be a characteristic of trust.  You trust, and have faith in those who have been the most dependable.  If someone has been reliable when it counts--and even when it doesn't--then you certainly grow to trust those people.  Conversely, people who are chronically undependable are people we have the least faith in.

And, thirdly, part of building trust is faith itself.  Faith, as the writer of Hebrews tried to describe is finding a sense of security beyond any available evidence, history, or experience.  When writer, Katherine Mansfield was battling tuberculosis at age 34, she wrote in her journal:
I should like this to be accepted as my confession.  There is no limit to human suffering.  When you think, "Now I have touched the bottom of the sea--I can go no deeper," you go deeper.  But I do not want to die without leaving a record of my belief that suffering can be overcome.  For I do believe it.

That's the kind of faith that builds trust:  believing even when believing doesn't make sense.  Seeing what cannot ultimately be seen.  Knowing for sure, even though you can't prove it, logically.  That kind of faith has to be a part of what it means to trust.

So, where does Jesus' statement come from?  In all that predictability, dependability and faith that we've been looking at--where does it break down for Jesus in that one awful moment:

"My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?"
"My God, my God, can I trust you anymore?"
"My God, my God, why have you left me in such a pitiful and painful condition?"
"My God, my God, don't you care about me at all?"
"My God, my God, why have you left me so utterly alone?"
"My God, my God, can't you just be with me when I am most dejected?"
"My God, my God, I thought I was your beloved Son?"
"My God, my God, how can you treat me as if I don't even exist?"
"My God, my God, why have you become so unpredictable, so undependable, and so faithless?"

Did you notice God didn't answer Jesus' question?  So much has been written in defense of God, and what God was up to at that moment, and why God couldn't respond to his beloved Son.  I'm not going to do that.  Jesus agonized that question out there as one of the last things he said.  God let it come, and let that agonizing question be carried about, to and fro, on the wind.  But no one can really answer that question, save God alone.

And that's where I'm going to leave it this morning.  A question.  No answer.  That's part of the experience of the Cross.  We must force ourselves to gaze upon it, to ask our own questions.  Only by being willing to ask God those questions will what is to come make sense.