"This Is Not A Drill"
Ephesians 6:10-12, 18
Are there evil forces in the world that are real and powerful beyond our comprehension? Is there a cosmic battle going on? I don’t know about you, but seeing these words from Paul about “...the wicked spiritual forces in the heavenly world, the rulers, authorities, and cosmic powers of this dark age” with which we are contending, always kind of scares me.
I kind of poo-pooed all this “wicked spiritual forces” stuff until college. I was a sociology/philosophy major in college. I took a class for sociology called “Deviant Behavior.” My semester paper was on Satan worshipers. I interviewed a couple of witches, who had become Christians. In their past life, they were witches who were in charge of a coven of 13 witches each. Some of the stories they told me about conjuring up spirits and stuff made the hair all over my body stand on end.
If we’re in a battle, as Paul says we are, we have to understand exactly what we’re up against. This is not a drill. We aren’t just practicing or rehearsing. The battle has been joined.
People in most cultures formed mythic tales about evil and evil’s existence. Especially the Greeks. Homer told the legend of when Ulysses came to the island of Circe, the daughter of the sun. Ulysses climbed the hill and saw in the center of the island a palace surrounded by trees. He sent half his men and a commander to see if he could find any hospitality there.
When the men approached the palace they found it was surrounded by wild animals. They had no idea the animals were really men, now changed into beasts by Circe’s spells. Hearing the soft sound of music within the castle, Ulysses’ men made their way in--except the commander Eurylochus, who suspected danger.
Once in the castle, Circe served the men with wine and other delicacies. When they had eaten and drunk their fill, she waved her hands over them and they were immediately turned into pigs.
Hearing what happened to his men, Ulysses went down to rescue them. As he was going, he was met by Mercury, who warned him of the dangers of Circe. When Ulysses would not be persuaded to turn back, Mercury gave him a flower, the fragrance of which he was to inhale. By doing that, Ulysses would gain the power to resist all of Circe’s sorcery.
Armed with the flower, Ulysses entered the palace. Circe entertained him as she had his crew. When he had eaten and drunk, she waved her hand over him saying, “From now on, seek the sty and wallow with your friends!” But, protected from the spell by the flower, Ulysses drew his sword and forced her to release his companions and restore the others around the castle to their human form.
To think there are evil forces waving their hands over individual Christians, and over congregations is a disconcerting thought, to say the least. Looking at all that’s going on in main-line denominations across our country, there certainly does seem to be some Circe type spirit that is creating confusion, division and distortion. Even in our own Presbytery of Southern Kansas, there are congregations imploding, and a systemic dysfunction in handling it all. It does make you wonder about “...powers...of this present darkness and spiritual hosts of wickedness…” as Paul termed them.
As we have been given this great opportunity for ministry with the $100,000 gift by God and the amazing generosity of the giver, we, in our excitement, must be on the lookout for evil forces that will be used to disrupt, weaken, or water down the ministry we will create focusing on 3rd to 6th grade children.
How do we do that? Mercury gave Ulysses a flower to undo Circe’s spells. Paul, in these verses, says we have something much more potent than the aroma of some magical flower. We have an awesome resource that will not only protect us from the evil forces in the world, but also do battle with that evil; not just resist, but take the battle right in the evil power’s face. That gift is prayer.
Paul uses three related words that let us know how amazing prayer is. Paul wrote, “Finally, be strong in the Lord, and in the strength of his might.” Let’s look at those three words and see what they mean for our praying power and our fight with evil.
First, “Be strong…” Find your strength in the Lord. This word that Paul uses describes how a believer, or a congregation, is made strong, or given power in the Lord. It’s not a way you strengthen yourself, as if by doing a bunch of spiritual push-ups you will get strong. This is an endowed strength, Paul says. So instead of just saying, be strong,” what Paul is literally saying is, “Be made strong in the Lord.”
Whether you realize it or not, when you gave your life to Christ, you were made strong in him--he gave you a strength that is only his to give. You have had it all this time. Isn’t that amazing! You’ve been made strong in Christ, and you realize that strength and use that endowed strength every time you pray.
Secondly, Paul wrote about being in the strength of the Lord. This word Paul used describes not just strength as power, but supreme, superior, overarching power. It is real, Godly strength that can utterly destroy any other power. It is a strength of such magnitude that victory is assured every single time.
It’s the kind of strength that the boy David talked about when facing Goliath with a sling and a handful of smooth stones. David said, “The Lord who saved me from the lion and the bear will save me from this Philistine” (1 Samuel 17:37)
Do you hear it in David’s voice? It isn’t a cocksureness in his own ability. It’s the personal knowledge of the undefeatable power of God. In fact, the word Paul used for strength can also actually mean “victory.” Let’s put that in the verse, so it would read, “Be strong in the Lord, in the VICTORY of his might.”
Our strength in prayer is not our own cocksure way. It’s based in God’s victorious superiority over all powers. When we pray, we aren’t praying in the spirit of anxiety about these woeful powers, principalities, and unearthly forces. We are praying in the already won victory of our cosmically supreme God. That makes all the difference in our praying.
The third word is might. When we think of might we think of prowess and sheer force of strength. But this word that Paul used literally talks about a kind of might that is shown in ability or capacity. Not our ability and capacity, but God’s. God’s capacity becomes our capacity. God’s ability becomes our ability, as we immerse ourselves in prayer. Think of the ways capacity is used: capacity crowd--so many people a place is filled up; a cup filled to capacity--you can’t pour one more drop in there. Capacity is the point at which you can’t fill a container any more it is so full.
Alan and I have breakfast together out at Ricks every Thursday morning. Our waitress is alway Lori. Before Lori, it was Lori’s daughter Chelsea. Alan drinks coffee. I don’t. But every Thursday morning, Lori becomes a picture of God for Alan, because she keeps coming by filling up his cup. He drinks some down. She comes by and fills it back up. No matter how much he drinks, she puts more in.
So Paul is asking us to imagine the capacity of God. Imagine the overwhelming immensity that makes up the capacity of God. Imagine the innumerable abilities that make up God’s abilities. That is God’s might. Now imagine God’s might in you, in our congregation! The fulness of God’s capacity and ability is, through Christ, in you, in us. When we pray we are being refilled to capacity with the capacity and ability of God! We use some of God’s capacity and ability, our cup starts getting a little low; God comes by and fills it back up with his immense capacity. Doesn’t matter how much you use, God fills you back up. Means you don’t have to worry about getting too low, or using it up, or protecting what you’ve got.
Be strong in the Lord, in the strength of his capacity and ability. Can you imagine it? It blows my mind just trying.
Three amazing power words. But not just words. They are power qualities that everyone here has, in Christ, as you pray. “...be STRONG in the Lord, in the STRENGTH/VICTORY of his MIGHT.”
Against these three amazing God words, the devil only has one word. The one devil word is “stratagem.” The sad thing about we Christians is that we end up concentrating too much on the one devil word and not on God’s three prayer words. The stratagems of the devil. Other translations use words like wiles, craftiness, devices, tactics, schemes, and tricks. I like the word stratagem because it describes an intentional plan used to deceive an enemy in war. It’s all the devil’s hocus pocus, waving his hand over us, thinking he can turn us all into pigs, and overpower God’s praying people.
Stratagem is a word that at one time meant a way, a path, or a road. In the first verse of the first Psalm, David sets the agenda for all praying that will follow in the Psalms:
How blessed is the one who does not take the counsel of the wicked for a guide,
or follow the path that sinners tread…
That word "path" is the same word from which stratagem comes. The devil is trying to deceive us into following his path, not Gods. The devil is trying to get us slowly and gradually off the straight and narrow, and onto his path that leads to destruction. The devil is trying to lure us off of God’s three power worded path.
I keep coming back to the book, Pilgrim’s Progress. The main character, Christian, is making his way from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City. At one point, he’s traveling along and the path became difficult, rocky, making walking hard. He sees there’s another path not too far away. It’s pleasant looking and smooth. It’s running parallel to the path he is on. He decides to take the smooth path, since it’s close to the one he’s on. But gradually, the new smooth path veers farther and farther away from the original road to the Celestial City. Christian ends up coming to a castle named Doubting Castle. There lives a giant named Despair. Christian becomes a prisoner until he is freed.
That’s the stratagem of the devil. Trying to shift your feet, lure us away from the right path onto his path leading only to doubt and despair. The devil is trying to shift our attitudes and conduct through the power of his deception. He’s trying to lure us into his stratagem rather than claim God’s power, might and strength through prayer. Without God’s power words there are only rationalizations for falling into the trap of the devil’s stratagems.
Like the overweight business executive who decided to shed some extra pounds. He took his new diet seriously, even to the point of changing his driving route to avoid his favorite bakery. One morning, however, he arrived to work carrying a gigantic piece of coffee cake. His staff scolded him, but his smile remained almost angelic. “This is a very special coffee cake,” he explained. “I accidentally drove by the bakery this morning. There in the window were a host of goodies. I felt it was no accident, so I said a little prayer: ‘Lord, if you want me to have a piece of one of those delicious coffee cakes, let there be a parking place right in front of the bakery.‘ And sure enough,” he continued, “the eighth time around the block, there it was.”
When we are faced with some challenge we think we ought to pray. Usually somebody says something like, “Let’s say a little prayer.” As if praying is some little thing, some kind of formality or good luck charm to cover our bases before the battle. “I guess we better say something to God,” we think to ourselves, “just in case.” But there are no little prayers, when we realize, as Paul did, that prayer takes you into the strong, strength, and might of the presence of God.
Before a great battle, Napoleon would stand alone in his tent. One by one the marshals and commanders of his armies would enter, grasp his arm in silence, and go out again. Doing so fired them with fresh courage and renewed willingness to do battle for France. I think now is the time for us to slip into God’s tent in prayer, grasp God’s hand, just touching the awesome presence of God for the challenge that lays before us.
I would like you all to go into that prayer tent often in the coming weeks. Pray for our congregation as we seek to discern God’s will about this opportunity for ministry we’ve been given to touch the lives of children in our community--children whose lives could turn out very differently because of the ways they will be touched by our church and our ministry.
This kind of vision and strength can only be gained through our amazing inner fellowship of prayer with God. Only through the strength and the might of God in prayer will we be able to change the devil course that may also be exerted against these children.
Wouldn’t we all desire the day when the devil’s scouts came back to him and reported, in complete frustration, that we--both individually and as a congregation--were found to be a hopeless cause; to hear the demons come before the devil and say with long faces, “I’m sorry, O evil one, but that Pratt Presbyterian Church is a hopeless case.” Because a hopeless case in the eyes of the enemy means the prayerful victory has been won--we have been made strong in the Lord, in the strength of his might!
Monday, August 27, 2012
Monday, August 20, 2012
Closing The Loopholes, part 2
"Closing The Loopholes" (part 2)
Ephesians 4:25-32
Last week, the message was about the first part of these verses. I talked about how Paul is instructing us to close up the loopholes through which evil tries to get in and disrupt our faith in Christ.
If we allow evil through these loopholes, says Paul, we are giving it a destructive foothold, from which can be launched an all out campaign to bring our faith in Christ down. Paul gives us a list of six loopholes that need to be closed in a believers life. The first three, that I spoke about last week, are lying, anger, and greed. This morning I want to finish up with comments about the final three in Paul’s list: foul and dirty talk, grieving God, and being unforgiving.
Popular artist, Norman Rockwell, once explained why he painted the kinds of upbeat scenes that he did. “When I grew up,” he said, “I found the world wasn’t always the pleasant place I had thought it would be. So I unconsciously decided that if it wasn’t an ideal world, it should be. And so I painted it that way.”
This is the way to look at the loopholes here in Ephesians 4. Paul is saying we aren’t perfect people. The world isn’t a perfect place. But God wants to paint us how we should be. If we allow God to paint us in His own brush strokes, we (and hopefully the world around us) will end up looking more according to God’s ideal. That’s Paul’s purpose in bringing his list to our attention.
So let’s turn to the last three of these loopholes that need closing. The fourth loophole Paul speaks to has to do with the way we talk to each other. He wrote:
Watch the way you talk. Let nothing foul or dirty come out of your mouth. Say only what helps, each word a gift...Make a clean break with all cutting, backbiting, profane talk.
We need to know what Paul is describing in his own Greek language. He is actually using a lot of building, construction type terms that don’t translate well.
When he writes about foul and dirty talk, the words he is using literally describe something that has gone bad because it is rotten. It’s a kind of rottenness, like deteriorated wood in an old house. It’s gone bad with dry rot or termites, or it has become so weak as to be dangerous.
I love to go rummaging through old, abandoned, broken down farm houses. These decaying structures are hidden behind aging shelter belts of trees, themselves old and weary looking. The houses are sad visages with caved in wooden floors and collapsed wooden stairs. Lath and plaster walls are crumbled away, looking like open and raw sores. Layers and layers of once distinctive wall paper peels away like thin skin. Rafters, like graying compound-fractured bones, hang down from above. Sometimes I try to find a safe place to just sit and imagine the stories of the people who had lived in each of these crumbling homes.
There is no way to fix these kinds of houses. They are absolutely unreclaimable. You wont find any of these kinds of home on one of those "Flip This House" kinds of shows. They are structures that have become totally useless, except for maybe being bulldozed, or just allowed to finally fall down.
That’s what Paul is describing as foul and dirty talk. It’s using words that turn lives that were once proud structures of human living into sad ruins. They are words that infect a person’s bones with dry rot. They are words that scratch open sores on the walls of people’s spirits. They are termite words that infest and eat away the inner strength of a person’s soul. And there’s usually no way to fix the harm that’s been done.
“You’re an idiot.”
“You make me sick.”
“You’re ugly.”
“I’m through with you; how could anyone love you?”
“You’ll never get it, will you.”
“How could you be so stupid.”
“You’re a nobody, and you’ll always be a nobody.”
“I wish you were never born.”
“When are you ever going to amount to anything?”
“I hate you.”
“You’re a total waste of skin.”
“Can’t you ever do anything right?”
“You’re such a retard.”
“I give up; you’re hopeless.”
I read another one of those famous conversations between Sir Winston Churchill and Lady Astor, similar to the one I mentioned in the sermon last week. At this occasion, Lady Astor marched up to Winston Churchill at a party and snapped, “Sir, you are drunk!”
To which Churchill retorted, “And Madam, you are ugly; but tomorrow morning I shall be sober.”
Life decaying words are spoken with voices that become so persistently loud in our heads, it becomes easy to believe them. We end up living our lives under the spell of their poison. Once that kind of destructive talk is out of our mouths, it’s impossible to stuff them back in and pretend we didn’t just say them. What’s worse, foul and dirty talk may be permanently implanted in the listeners minds. The people we speak them to will forever after hear those exact words over and over and over again, creating the kind of slow destruction and self-rejection Paul is describing.
One of psychiatrist, Scott Peck’s, books is titled, People Of The Lie. One of his main points is that it’s not often the people who do some awful actions who are evil. Instead, it’s the evil others in a person’s life who, with degenerate messages, have turned the person, who has to receive those words, into awful and terribly disturbed human beings.
In one story, Peck told about a patient who was constantly wrestling with psychological demons. Peeling back the layers of the man’s pathology, Peck found out part of the beginnings of this patients disturbed life.
When the man was a boy, his father had committed suicide. The boy was the one who found his father’s blood spattered body--the father had shot himself in the head with a handgun.
The next Christmas, the boy unwrapped one of the gifts from his mother. There in the box was the handgun his father had used to kill himself. “I just felt like you would be the one who could use it,” was the mother’s ghastly comment, as the boy stared at the unwrapped gift. The boy didn’t know if by what his mother said, she meant he would also be just like his father; or, that she was telling him he should also commit suicide. From there after, the boy was sent into a tail spin of psychological disintegration.
That’s why Paul says we should “say only what helps.” Other Bibles translate this phrase with the word, “edifying.” This also is a construction word. It comes from the Greek word that means house, home, or family. Except the form of the word used here means the act of building a house, building a home, building a family. It can also mean bringing a building to completion.
Thus, the kind of talk that Paul says we as Christians should speak is only that which builds, as if you were building a home, building a family, bringing a person to a healthy and whole completeness. We should be speaking to people with words that will help them move toward maturity and the completion that God intends.
Carol Channing, after having performed in almost 1800 productions of the Broadway musical, “Hello, Dolly,” was asked how she kept her performances fresh. “If I start getting down,” she said, “I play the role to my father...I know he’s really not out in the audience. He died 20 years ago. It’s just the thought of his presence, of someone who knows and loves and encourages me, and who always had nothing but the best words for me.”
The challenge is that, with our words, we can help God close up this loophole in both ourselves and others. Or, the scary flip side of this is that we can assist evil in opening up this loophole wider in ourselves or others, simply by the way we choose to talk.
The fifth loophole Paul says needs closing is the one that would cause grief to God. The kind of grief Paul is describing is that which comes from pain, sorrow, or mental anguish. It’s hard to think that God can experience these kinds of sad emotions. But that’s the kind of pain described in Genesis, where it says:
God saw that human evil was out of control. People thought evil, imagined evil--evil, evil, evil, from morning to night. God was sorry that he had made the human race in the first place; it broke his heart. God said, “I’ll get rid of my ruined creation, make a clean sweep: people, animals, snakes and bugs, birds--the works. I’m sorry I made them.”
As you can tell, it’s a sad kind of grief of God. It should make us feel really small that God ever felt that way because of us. It’s the kind of grief that God feels when human beings have thrown insult on top of insult at God, growing God’s pain into a total frustration--frustration that makes God feel like giving up on us.
Former heavyweight boxing champion, Joe Louis, wrote in his autobiography that Rocky Marciano thrashed him soundly in 1951. In fact, when a doctor from the state athletic commission said, “Joe, you can’t fight for at least 3 months,” Joe replied, “Do you mind if I don’t fight no more at all?”
God also seems to get tired of being beaten up by the humans he created: Beaten up by the uppercut of indifference; being sucker punched by two-faced hypocrisy; or, being round-housed by atrocities that human’s do to each other and then use God in support of their actions. It’s a pained sadness that makes God not want to fight for us humans “no more at all.”
If the messages of foul and dirty talk have to do with people-to-people rejection, so I think this sadness of God has also to do with rejection: our rejection of God.
Here’s another way of understanding this pain of God. First, recall Jesus’ baptism. What did the voice of God say when Jesus came up out of the water? “You are my Son, chosen and marked by my love, pride of my life” (Mark 1:11). And then, in the gospel of John, Jesus tells the disciples that whatever he saw the Father God do towards him, he does towards us. Every person Jesus talked to, every person Jesus touched, Jesus was trying to tell them the same thing God told him: “You are my chosen, marked by my love, pride of my life.”
How many times, in how many ways did he say that? “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son...” And how often was that love, that wooing of people, of we the beloved, spurned? Jesus looked across at Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives and said:
People, people...how often I’ve longed to gather your children, gather your children like a hen, her brood safe under her wings--but you refused and turned away! (Luke 13:34)
Those are some of the saddest words in the entire New Testament.
This rejection is a two-edged sword, cutting at God’s heart. One edge of the sword is the sad self-evaluation that we deserve no place in God's family. That’s the self-rejection. It’s the feeling that we are not worthwhile, or worthless in God’s eyes. This feeling could come from all the messages I talked about in my point earlier about rotten talk. It certainly doesn’t come from God.
The other edge of this cutting blade is that arrogance or self-rejection contradicts the wooing Voice that describes us as marked by God’s love and the pride of his life. Being marked by God’s love expresses the core truth about who we are in God’s eyes. But in so many ways we try to rebuff God, saying, “No we aren’t; we can’t be such an object of love or source of pride.”
What drives the knife home in God’s heart is that even though we refuse to claim the core truth that we are loved by God, claiming that we are somehow, and for some reason unlovable, what do we do? We keep running around looking for someone or something that will convince us we are loved. We go running helter-skelter, always anxious, always restless, always lustful, never fully satisfied, looking for a voice that will tell us we are the pride of their life. God, through Jesus Christ, all along has been saying in so many ways, “You are loved, you are loved, you are loved.” But we reply, “Nah, that can’t be true; it’s gotta be somewhere else from someone else.” At that point, God is grieved.
The loophole and foothold evil is trying to create is the temptation to get us stuck in self-rejection or arrogance so that you never hear the Voice that tells you, you are loved and you are the pride of Jesus’ life. Evil is trying to keep you from fully recognizing that the core truth of your life is you are Christ’s pride, joy and love. It’s time to close this loophole, and celebrate that fact and put an end to the grief and sadness of God.
The sixth and final loophole is being unforgiving. You have all heard numerous sermons on forgiveness, and most of you have read Jesus’ teachings and Paul’s letters describing the height and depth and width and breadth of forgiveness.
In this final loophole that needs our closing, Paul says, “Be gentle with one another, sensitive. Forgive one another as quickly and thoroughly as God in Christ forgave you.” What more can I say than that? Paul’s statement tells us that forgiveness comes from gentleness and sensitivity. Paul is telling us that forgiveness is not something you sit around and study, but you get up and do it. We are being told to think personally not only about all for which we have been forgiven, but also HOW we have been forgiven by God through Christ: quickly and completely. Once we’re done thinking about that, we are to turn and forgive others exactly in the same measure, and in the same way. Fairly simple and straightforward.
But I know there is a person in your life you have the most trouble forgiving. This person may be an obstinate, pigheaded ogre. This person may be demanding, and can be very insensitive to you. This person may have said, or keeps saying things that hurt you deeply. In fact, you may keep hearing this person’s voice and their demeaning messages going round and round in your head.
And talk about unforgiving; this person may be totally unforgiving of you. They are, in fact, your harshest critic, and they may be on your case all the time without respite. They won’t let you forget your blunders from the past, and keep throwing them up in your face. You wish this person would just go away, but whenever you try to put some distance between yourself and them, there they are. This person may make you feel angry and depressed; and they make you feel about an inch tall. In your darkest times, you may even wish this person would just die. How can you forgive a person like that?
You know who that person is? Besides hurtful others, this person I’m describing is the same for everyone. It is your self. I’ll bet you all a dollar that the person you may have the hardest time forgiving is yourself. Let’s take another look at Paul’s words, but let’s tweak them a bit: “Be gentle with yourself, sensitive. Forgive yourself as quickly and thoroughly as God in Christ forgave everyone else.”
To forgive others, to forgive ourselves means to participate in the amazing grace of God’s love. If we can’t forgive ourselves, it may mean we haven’t fully understood God’s embrace of us. If you leave this loophole open, evil will use it to slowly and totally immobilize your gifts, your ministry, and your purpose. All that will be lost in the goo of self-criticism, self-hatred, and self-punishment. You will never become the person God created you to be unless this loophole is closed for good and for God.
Little loopholes. Little gaps in our spirits. Small fissures in our faith. They either let evil in, or maybe we use them to get out of what we know is the right thing, by God. Either way, the result is giving evil a sure and certain foothold from which to operate. With any loophole, evil will exert all the leverage it can against our spiritual life and Christian commitment. Let’s take Paul’s words to heart and help each other, by God, close them up.
Ephesians 4:25-32
Last week, the message was about the first part of these verses. I talked about how Paul is instructing us to close up the loopholes through which evil tries to get in and disrupt our faith in Christ.
If we allow evil through these loopholes, says Paul, we are giving it a destructive foothold, from which can be launched an all out campaign to bring our faith in Christ down. Paul gives us a list of six loopholes that need to be closed in a believers life. The first three, that I spoke about last week, are lying, anger, and greed. This morning I want to finish up with comments about the final three in Paul’s list: foul and dirty talk, grieving God, and being unforgiving.
Popular artist, Norman Rockwell, once explained why he painted the kinds of upbeat scenes that he did. “When I grew up,” he said, “I found the world wasn’t always the pleasant place I had thought it would be. So I unconsciously decided that if it wasn’t an ideal world, it should be. And so I painted it that way.”
This is the way to look at the loopholes here in Ephesians 4. Paul is saying we aren’t perfect people. The world isn’t a perfect place. But God wants to paint us how we should be. If we allow God to paint us in His own brush strokes, we (and hopefully the world around us) will end up looking more according to God’s ideal. That’s Paul’s purpose in bringing his list to our attention.
So let’s turn to the last three of these loopholes that need closing. The fourth loophole Paul speaks to has to do with the way we talk to each other. He wrote:
Watch the way you talk. Let nothing foul or dirty come out of your mouth. Say only what helps, each word a gift...Make a clean break with all cutting, backbiting, profane talk.
We need to know what Paul is describing in his own Greek language. He is actually using a lot of building, construction type terms that don’t translate well.
When he writes about foul and dirty talk, the words he is using literally describe something that has gone bad because it is rotten. It’s a kind of rottenness, like deteriorated wood in an old house. It’s gone bad with dry rot or termites, or it has become so weak as to be dangerous.
I love to go rummaging through old, abandoned, broken down farm houses. These decaying structures are hidden behind aging shelter belts of trees, themselves old and weary looking. The houses are sad visages with caved in wooden floors and collapsed wooden stairs. Lath and plaster walls are crumbled away, looking like open and raw sores. Layers and layers of once distinctive wall paper peels away like thin skin. Rafters, like graying compound-fractured bones, hang down from above. Sometimes I try to find a safe place to just sit and imagine the stories of the people who had lived in each of these crumbling homes.
There is no way to fix these kinds of houses. They are absolutely unreclaimable. You wont find any of these kinds of home on one of those "Flip This House" kinds of shows. They are structures that have become totally useless, except for maybe being bulldozed, or just allowed to finally fall down.
That’s what Paul is describing as foul and dirty talk. It’s using words that turn lives that were once proud structures of human living into sad ruins. They are words that infect a person’s bones with dry rot. They are words that scratch open sores on the walls of people’s spirits. They are termite words that infest and eat away the inner strength of a person’s soul. And there’s usually no way to fix the harm that’s been done.
“You’re an idiot.”
“You make me sick.”
“You’re ugly.”
“I’m through with you; how could anyone love you?”
“You’ll never get it, will you.”
“How could you be so stupid.”
“You’re a nobody, and you’ll always be a nobody.”
“I wish you were never born.”
“When are you ever going to amount to anything?”
“I hate you.”
“You’re a total waste of skin.”
“Can’t you ever do anything right?”
“You’re such a retard.”
“I give up; you’re hopeless.”
I read another one of those famous conversations between Sir Winston Churchill and Lady Astor, similar to the one I mentioned in the sermon last week. At this occasion, Lady Astor marched up to Winston Churchill at a party and snapped, “Sir, you are drunk!”
To which Churchill retorted, “And Madam, you are ugly; but tomorrow morning I shall be sober.”
Life decaying words are spoken with voices that become so persistently loud in our heads, it becomes easy to believe them. We end up living our lives under the spell of their poison. Once that kind of destructive talk is out of our mouths, it’s impossible to stuff them back in and pretend we didn’t just say them. What’s worse, foul and dirty talk may be permanently implanted in the listeners minds. The people we speak them to will forever after hear those exact words over and over and over again, creating the kind of slow destruction and self-rejection Paul is describing.
One of psychiatrist, Scott Peck’s, books is titled, People Of The Lie. One of his main points is that it’s not often the people who do some awful actions who are evil. Instead, it’s the evil others in a person’s life who, with degenerate messages, have turned the person, who has to receive those words, into awful and terribly disturbed human beings.
In one story, Peck told about a patient who was constantly wrestling with psychological demons. Peeling back the layers of the man’s pathology, Peck found out part of the beginnings of this patients disturbed life.
When the man was a boy, his father had committed suicide. The boy was the one who found his father’s blood spattered body--the father had shot himself in the head with a handgun.
The next Christmas, the boy unwrapped one of the gifts from his mother. There in the box was the handgun his father had used to kill himself. “I just felt like you would be the one who could use it,” was the mother’s ghastly comment, as the boy stared at the unwrapped gift. The boy didn’t know if by what his mother said, she meant he would also be just like his father; or, that she was telling him he should also commit suicide. From there after, the boy was sent into a tail spin of psychological disintegration.
That’s why Paul says we should “say only what helps.” Other Bibles translate this phrase with the word, “edifying.” This also is a construction word. It comes from the Greek word that means house, home, or family. Except the form of the word used here means the act of building a house, building a home, building a family. It can also mean bringing a building to completion.
Thus, the kind of talk that Paul says we as Christians should speak is only that which builds, as if you were building a home, building a family, bringing a person to a healthy and whole completeness. We should be speaking to people with words that will help them move toward maturity and the completion that God intends.
Carol Channing, after having performed in almost 1800 productions of the Broadway musical, “Hello, Dolly,” was asked how she kept her performances fresh. “If I start getting down,” she said, “I play the role to my father...I know he’s really not out in the audience. He died 20 years ago. It’s just the thought of his presence, of someone who knows and loves and encourages me, and who always had nothing but the best words for me.”
The challenge is that, with our words, we can help God close up this loophole in both ourselves and others. Or, the scary flip side of this is that we can assist evil in opening up this loophole wider in ourselves or others, simply by the way we choose to talk.
The fifth loophole Paul says needs closing is the one that would cause grief to God. The kind of grief Paul is describing is that which comes from pain, sorrow, or mental anguish. It’s hard to think that God can experience these kinds of sad emotions. But that’s the kind of pain described in Genesis, where it says:
God saw that human evil was out of control. People thought evil, imagined evil--evil, evil, evil, from morning to night. God was sorry that he had made the human race in the first place; it broke his heart. God said, “I’ll get rid of my ruined creation, make a clean sweep: people, animals, snakes and bugs, birds--the works. I’m sorry I made them.”
As you can tell, it’s a sad kind of grief of God. It should make us feel really small that God ever felt that way because of us. It’s the kind of grief that God feels when human beings have thrown insult on top of insult at God, growing God’s pain into a total frustration--frustration that makes God feel like giving up on us.
Former heavyweight boxing champion, Joe Louis, wrote in his autobiography that Rocky Marciano thrashed him soundly in 1951. In fact, when a doctor from the state athletic commission said, “Joe, you can’t fight for at least 3 months,” Joe replied, “Do you mind if I don’t fight no more at all?”
God also seems to get tired of being beaten up by the humans he created: Beaten up by the uppercut of indifference; being sucker punched by two-faced hypocrisy; or, being round-housed by atrocities that human’s do to each other and then use God in support of their actions. It’s a pained sadness that makes God not want to fight for us humans “no more at all.”
If the messages of foul and dirty talk have to do with people-to-people rejection, so I think this sadness of God has also to do with rejection: our rejection of God.
Here’s another way of understanding this pain of God. First, recall Jesus’ baptism. What did the voice of God say when Jesus came up out of the water? “You are my Son, chosen and marked by my love, pride of my life” (Mark 1:11). And then, in the gospel of John, Jesus tells the disciples that whatever he saw the Father God do towards him, he does towards us. Every person Jesus talked to, every person Jesus touched, Jesus was trying to tell them the same thing God told him: “You are my chosen, marked by my love, pride of my life.”
How many times, in how many ways did he say that? “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son...” And how often was that love, that wooing of people, of we the beloved, spurned? Jesus looked across at Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives and said:
People, people...how often I’ve longed to gather your children, gather your children like a hen, her brood safe under her wings--but you refused and turned away! (Luke 13:34)
Those are some of the saddest words in the entire New Testament.
This rejection is a two-edged sword, cutting at God’s heart. One edge of the sword is the sad self-evaluation that we deserve no place in God's family. That’s the self-rejection. It’s the feeling that we are not worthwhile, or worthless in God’s eyes. This feeling could come from all the messages I talked about in my point earlier about rotten talk. It certainly doesn’t come from God.
The other edge of this cutting blade is that arrogance or self-rejection contradicts the wooing Voice that describes us as marked by God’s love and the pride of his life. Being marked by God’s love expresses the core truth about who we are in God’s eyes. But in so many ways we try to rebuff God, saying, “No we aren’t; we can’t be such an object of love or source of pride.”
What drives the knife home in God’s heart is that even though we refuse to claim the core truth that we are loved by God, claiming that we are somehow, and for some reason unlovable, what do we do? We keep running around looking for someone or something that will convince us we are loved. We go running helter-skelter, always anxious, always restless, always lustful, never fully satisfied, looking for a voice that will tell us we are the pride of their life. God, through Jesus Christ, all along has been saying in so many ways, “You are loved, you are loved, you are loved.” But we reply, “Nah, that can’t be true; it’s gotta be somewhere else from someone else.” At that point, God is grieved.
The loophole and foothold evil is trying to create is the temptation to get us stuck in self-rejection or arrogance so that you never hear the Voice that tells you, you are loved and you are the pride of Jesus’ life. Evil is trying to keep you from fully recognizing that the core truth of your life is you are Christ’s pride, joy and love. It’s time to close this loophole, and celebrate that fact and put an end to the grief and sadness of God.
The sixth and final loophole is being unforgiving. You have all heard numerous sermons on forgiveness, and most of you have read Jesus’ teachings and Paul’s letters describing the height and depth and width and breadth of forgiveness.
In this final loophole that needs our closing, Paul says, “Be gentle with one another, sensitive. Forgive one another as quickly and thoroughly as God in Christ forgave you.” What more can I say than that? Paul’s statement tells us that forgiveness comes from gentleness and sensitivity. Paul is telling us that forgiveness is not something you sit around and study, but you get up and do it. We are being told to think personally not only about all for which we have been forgiven, but also HOW we have been forgiven by God through Christ: quickly and completely. Once we’re done thinking about that, we are to turn and forgive others exactly in the same measure, and in the same way. Fairly simple and straightforward.
But I know there is a person in your life you have the most trouble forgiving. This person may be an obstinate, pigheaded ogre. This person may be demanding, and can be very insensitive to you. This person may have said, or keeps saying things that hurt you deeply. In fact, you may keep hearing this person’s voice and their demeaning messages going round and round in your head.
And talk about unforgiving; this person may be totally unforgiving of you. They are, in fact, your harshest critic, and they may be on your case all the time without respite. They won’t let you forget your blunders from the past, and keep throwing them up in your face. You wish this person would just go away, but whenever you try to put some distance between yourself and them, there they are. This person may make you feel angry and depressed; and they make you feel about an inch tall. In your darkest times, you may even wish this person would just die. How can you forgive a person like that?
You know who that person is? Besides hurtful others, this person I’m describing is the same for everyone. It is your self. I’ll bet you all a dollar that the person you may have the hardest time forgiving is yourself. Let’s take another look at Paul’s words, but let’s tweak them a bit: “Be gentle with yourself, sensitive. Forgive yourself as quickly and thoroughly as God in Christ forgave everyone else.”
To forgive others, to forgive ourselves means to participate in the amazing grace of God’s love. If we can’t forgive ourselves, it may mean we haven’t fully understood God’s embrace of us. If you leave this loophole open, evil will use it to slowly and totally immobilize your gifts, your ministry, and your purpose. All that will be lost in the goo of self-criticism, self-hatred, and self-punishment. You will never become the person God created you to be unless this loophole is closed for good and for God.
Little loopholes. Little gaps in our spirits. Small fissures in our faith. They either let evil in, or maybe we use them to get out of what we know is the right thing, by God. Either way, the result is giving evil a sure and certain foothold from which to operate. With any loophole, evil will exert all the leverage it can against our spiritual life and Christian commitment. Let’s take Paul’s words to heart and help each other, by God, close them up.
Monday, August 13, 2012
Closing The Loopholes, part 1
"Closing The Loopholes" (part 1)
Ephesians 4:25-32
Today’s reading from Paul’s letter to the Ephesian Christians warns against “giving opportunity to the devil.” The New English Bible translates this phrase by warning us against allowing “no loophole for the devil.” A loophole can be a small hole in a wall through which an enemy can shoot their weapon. Just one shot from the enemy can bring us down. We certainly don’t want to give the devil aim at our lives in any way, little or large.
And a loophole can also be an excuse or an evasion for not doing something we’re supposed to. One time, a friend of W.C. Fields caught Fields reading the Bible. “Why, Mr. Fields,” the friend protested, “I didn’t know you were a religious man. Are you thinking about becoming a believer?”
“Why, no,” Fields replied. “I’m only looking for loopholes.”
Little loopholes. Little gaps in our spiritual armor. Small fissures in our faith. They either let evil in, or we use them to get out of what we know is the right thing. Either way, the result is giving evil a sure and certain foothold from which to operate. With any loophole, evil will exert all the leverage it can against our spiritual life and Christian commitment.
That’s why Paul sternly cautioned the Ephesian believers to be on guard against six specific loopholes that can allow evil into our lives, undermining their Christian faith.
The first loophole is lying. Lying has been with us from the beginning, when Eve learned from the serpent how to twist the truth into both a bold-faced lie as well as half-truth. One book I read made a convincing case that original sin is not pride or greed but lying--the misuse of language; attempting to make the truth a lie and a lie the truth. Every time we participate in lying and half-truths we are passing the original sin along. Basically, we teach our children how to skim on the truth by doing it in front of them.
So it’s no mystery that this list Paul gives the Ephesians starts off with each believer’s need to close the loophole of lying. It’s not just a matter of closing it. Paul says, “Throw it away; give it a heave as far as you can.”
A defendant took the witness stand. The judge asked him to put up his right hand and answer the following question: “Do you solemnly swear that you will tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?”
The defendant replied, “I’ll try anything once.”
What we find out once we start lying is that we have to remember everything we said to each person. Lies breed like rabbits. You tell a couple of lies, and all of a sudden you have a bunch of baby lies hopping around all over the place. It isn’t long that they are totally out of control. Or, it isn’t long before they are totally in control of you. You start worrying, “What if my lies are discovered?” It’s just not a fun way to live.
That’s why throwing off lying is so important in Paul’s mind. Lying and falsehood have the power to undermine the development and growth of any and all of your relationships. It totally breaks down trust between people. And in a recent study I read this week, we lie on average--one way or another--eleven times a day; and that lying even affects your physical health.
Lying as a loophole not only gives evil a chance to destroy an individual, but also the whole church. Paul says that we are supposed to be “members of one body.” For one person, one member of the body to start lying infects the whole body of Christ, the church.
You think your lies have only to do with you. But not so, says Paul. The only way to keep your lies from infecting you and the body of Christ, says Paul, is to throw lying off; quit, right now, cold turkey; 100%; end it, now. To do that may mean coming clean with the lies already told. It may not be fun or easy at first. But the health and restoration it brings to your relationships will be worth it.
The second loophole that needs to be closed is anger. It’s interesting, isn’t it, that Paul didn’t write, “Never be angry”? Instead, Paul wrote, “Be angry, but do not sin.” I’m assuming that one of the reasons Paul wrote that, being the kind of person he was, was because he got angry a lot. Paul had anger issues. Paul was an intense, in your face kind of person.
Maybe Paul recognized that anger is one of those basic, universal, human emotions. We all get angry. We all deal with it differently. One lady had a fender bender accident with her new car. The neighbor asked her if her husband was upset. “He didn’t say much,” replied the lady, “but all the smoke alarms in our house went off.”
And then there’s the classic story of Winston Churchill and Lady Astor. It was well known that they absolutely hated each other. Their anger at each other was legend. One time they were both invited to the same gala. Lady Astor, rather loudly, said to Churchill, “If you were my husband, I’d put poison in your drink.”
To which Churchill, equally loudly replied, “Madam, if you were my wife, I’d drink it.”
The word that Paul used for anger is the same word we get our English word, “orgy,” from. Anger is an orgy of emotion. It’s wild and unrestrained. It’s the passionate rage that’s out of control, leading to some kind of self-justified revenge or punishment.
One mother was scolding her son, and said, “When that other boy threw rocks at you, why didn’t you come and tell me, instead of throwing rocks back?”
“What good would that do?” asked the son. “You couldn’t hit the broadside of a barn!”
It’s that kind of rage that takes over that wants to get even and make the other person hurt.
An unhealthy anger serves no purpose. It has a tendency to mushroom larger and larger. The old therapeutic strategy was to get people to let out all their anger in ways that hopefully dispelled the explosive cloud. So therapies like primal scream therapy was born. People were to go somewhere and just scream all the violence and anger away.
But what reputable therapists found was that “getting out your anger” in these ways just created more anger. Ventilating anger would throw a person into an irrational and almost evil rage. People who were getting their anger out in huge bursts were having too much fun being angry, and it wasn’t working.
I think in Paul’s mind, that’s the sin of anger--letting it linger too long, letting it grow to a point that it consumes you.
My daughter, Kristin, when she was in junior high and high school, hardly ever cleaned her room. It was a total blast area. The floor was like an archaeological dig. If you wanted to spend long enough in there, you could dig your way down to the 3rd, 4th, or 5th grade era. I’d feel guilty walking in there because I just knew, with each step, I was destroying whole countries of dust mites in the carpet.
Once in a while I would explode, when I couldn’t stand it. We’d go in there and clean it up together, and get it to a point of manageability. And I’d try and lecture her saying, “Now if there’s a little mess, clean it up before it becomes a pile, and the pile turns into a full blown take over of your room.” Guess how many times my lecture worked. But the principle was sound.
That’s the same thing Paul is saying about how Christians should deal with their anger. “Don’t let the sunset find you nursing your anger,” he said. In other words, keep it to manageable levels. Deal with it while it’s small. Don’t even give it two days. Take care of it, completely, by the end of the day. If you don’t, you’ve created a loop hole for evil to get in. Once in, it will grow to a whole pile of anger, and eventually a full blown take over of your life. That’s the sin of anger.
The third loophole Paul mentions is greed, including two of greed’s ugly heads. One ugly head is thievery. “You shall not steal,” is in God’s top ten list. Thievery is a form of greed that takes something of someone else’s because you have to have it for your own.
There’s lots of ways to be a thief. Large corporations cooking their books is a form of robbery. Or Bernie Madoff, who made off with a lot of people’s money in his ponzi scheme. But it wasn’t just Madoff--it was also those who put their money with him who were driven by their own greed to get rich quick.
I had a friend who’s apartment was robbed. Her roommate had an old and shoddy video camera and had been wanting a new one. She said, “Let’s tell your insurance company my video camera was stolen so I can get a new one. They’ll never know. They’re a huge company anyway.” Had my friend added the video camera to the list of stolen items, that would have been robbery as well. I was glad when she told me that she didn’t put it on the list.
The other ugly head of greed that Paul mentions is the reluctance or refusal to give your excess wealth to the needy. Paul said that God’s purpose for giving us the ability to earn an income is not to accumulate as much as we can, but so that we can give to the poor.
If we allow the evil one through this loophole, our lives will become dominated by our consumeristic culture. The evil of consumerism seeks to program us to believe that more is always better. Our inability to distinguish between quality of life and quantity of things will turn us into greedy, grasping, uncharitable people.
Comedian Paul Reiser, who used to star in the sitcom, “Mad About You,” has written a couple of funny books. He admits he’s a consumer sucker. Here’s one story he told on himself in his first book:
I was in the stereo store, looking at this VCR, CD player, laser disc, pants presser combination thing. The salesman comes over. “You know that CD play will hold up to 20 discs at a time.”
“Yeah?”
“Yes-sire e-bob,” he says. “That’s over 18 hours of music.”
“Okey, dokey,” I say, and he wraps it up. Then I got home and realized, Wait a second! I’m not even awake 18 hours. When would I use this thing to its fullest advantage? The last four hours of music will actually be keeping me awake. This is not something I need!
Reiser concluded his thoughts by finally recognizing the truth about compulsive greediness and the never-satisfied attitude that characterizes a culture that has let the evil one through this loophole. Reiser wrote:
The problem is, they keep coming up with technology nobody asks for. They believe we want freeze frame, search, and split screen and clocks that make coffee, and cameras that talk to you. We don’t want that. You know what I want? I just want to lie down. That’s what I really want. If I could just lie down for a half-hour, I’d be happy. It seems like I’ve been reading instruction manuals since 1987. My head is pounding. I want to write a letter, “Dear China. STOP!!! We’re fine. This is plenty of stuff. Why don’t you stop with the VCR’s and work on diseases. Go cure a disease while I go lie down!”
His comments are funny, but it does make you wonder. If we had bought less stuff and used our excess money for the poor, how many diseases could have been cured by now? How many hungry children could have been fed? How many people could have been inoculated with vaccines? Every financial decision we make is ultimately a decision between greed and helping the poor.
The famous preacher and father of the Methodists, John Wesley, once said, “Work all you can, to make all you can, so you can give all you can.” I think that’s good advice for how we can close this particular loophole of greed.
There are three more loopholes to come at the end of this 4th chapter in Ephesians, and we will look at them next week.
Ephesians 4:25-32
Today’s reading from Paul’s letter to the Ephesian Christians warns against “giving opportunity to the devil.” The New English Bible translates this phrase by warning us against allowing “no loophole for the devil.” A loophole can be a small hole in a wall through which an enemy can shoot their weapon. Just one shot from the enemy can bring us down. We certainly don’t want to give the devil aim at our lives in any way, little or large.
And a loophole can also be an excuse or an evasion for not doing something we’re supposed to. One time, a friend of W.C. Fields caught Fields reading the Bible. “Why, Mr. Fields,” the friend protested, “I didn’t know you were a religious man. Are you thinking about becoming a believer?”
“Why, no,” Fields replied. “I’m only looking for loopholes.”
Little loopholes. Little gaps in our spiritual armor. Small fissures in our faith. They either let evil in, or we use them to get out of what we know is the right thing. Either way, the result is giving evil a sure and certain foothold from which to operate. With any loophole, evil will exert all the leverage it can against our spiritual life and Christian commitment.
That’s why Paul sternly cautioned the Ephesian believers to be on guard against six specific loopholes that can allow evil into our lives, undermining their Christian faith.
The first loophole is lying. Lying has been with us from the beginning, when Eve learned from the serpent how to twist the truth into both a bold-faced lie as well as half-truth. One book I read made a convincing case that original sin is not pride or greed but lying--the misuse of language; attempting to make the truth a lie and a lie the truth. Every time we participate in lying and half-truths we are passing the original sin along. Basically, we teach our children how to skim on the truth by doing it in front of them.
So it’s no mystery that this list Paul gives the Ephesians starts off with each believer’s need to close the loophole of lying. It’s not just a matter of closing it. Paul says, “Throw it away; give it a heave as far as you can.”
A defendant took the witness stand. The judge asked him to put up his right hand and answer the following question: “Do you solemnly swear that you will tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?”
The defendant replied, “I’ll try anything once.”
What we find out once we start lying is that we have to remember everything we said to each person. Lies breed like rabbits. You tell a couple of lies, and all of a sudden you have a bunch of baby lies hopping around all over the place. It isn’t long that they are totally out of control. Or, it isn’t long before they are totally in control of you. You start worrying, “What if my lies are discovered?” It’s just not a fun way to live.
That’s why throwing off lying is so important in Paul’s mind. Lying and falsehood have the power to undermine the development and growth of any and all of your relationships. It totally breaks down trust between people. And in a recent study I read this week, we lie on average--one way or another--eleven times a day; and that lying even affects your physical health.
Lying as a loophole not only gives evil a chance to destroy an individual, but also the whole church. Paul says that we are supposed to be “members of one body.” For one person, one member of the body to start lying infects the whole body of Christ, the church.
You think your lies have only to do with you. But not so, says Paul. The only way to keep your lies from infecting you and the body of Christ, says Paul, is to throw lying off; quit, right now, cold turkey; 100%; end it, now. To do that may mean coming clean with the lies already told. It may not be fun or easy at first. But the health and restoration it brings to your relationships will be worth it.
The second loophole that needs to be closed is anger. It’s interesting, isn’t it, that Paul didn’t write, “Never be angry”? Instead, Paul wrote, “Be angry, but do not sin.” I’m assuming that one of the reasons Paul wrote that, being the kind of person he was, was because he got angry a lot. Paul had anger issues. Paul was an intense, in your face kind of person.
Maybe Paul recognized that anger is one of those basic, universal, human emotions. We all get angry. We all deal with it differently. One lady had a fender bender accident with her new car. The neighbor asked her if her husband was upset. “He didn’t say much,” replied the lady, “but all the smoke alarms in our house went off.”
And then there’s the classic story of Winston Churchill and Lady Astor. It was well known that they absolutely hated each other. Their anger at each other was legend. One time they were both invited to the same gala. Lady Astor, rather loudly, said to Churchill, “If you were my husband, I’d put poison in your drink.”
To which Churchill, equally loudly replied, “Madam, if you were my wife, I’d drink it.”
The word that Paul used for anger is the same word we get our English word, “orgy,” from. Anger is an orgy of emotion. It’s wild and unrestrained. It’s the passionate rage that’s out of control, leading to some kind of self-justified revenge or punishment.
One mother was scolding her son, and said, “When that other boy threw rocks at you, why didn’t you come and tell me, instead of throwing rocks back?”
“What good would that do?” asked the son. “You couldn’t hit the broadside of a barn!”
It’s that kind of rage that takes over that wants to get even and make the other person hurt.
An unhealthy anger serves no purpose. It has a tendency to mushroom larger and larger. The old therapeutic strategy was to get people to let out all their anger in ways that hopefully dispelled the explosive cloud. So therapies like primal scream therapy was born. People were to go somewhere and just scream all the violence and anger away.
But what reputable therapists found was that “getting out your anger” in these ways just created more anger. Ventilating anger would throw a person into an irrational and almost evil rage. People who were getting their anger out in huge bursts were having too much fun being angry, and it wasn’t working.
I think in Paul’s mind, that’s the sin of anger--letting it linger too long, letting it grow to a point that it consumes you.
My daughter, Kristin, when she was in junior high and high school, hardly ever cleaned her room. It was a total blast area. The floor was like an archaeological dig. If you wanted to spend long enough in there, you could dig your way down to the 3rd, 4th, or 5th grade era. I’d feel guilty walking in there because I just knew, with each step, I was destroying whole countries of dust mites in the carpet.
Once in a while I would explode, when I couldn’t stand it. We’d go in there and clean it up together, and get it to a point of manageability. And I’d try and lecture her saying, “Now if there’s a little mess, clean it up before it becomes a pile, and the pile turns into a full blown take over of your room.” Guess how many times my lecture worked. But the principle was sound.
That’s the same thing Paul is saying about how Christians should deal with their anger. “Don’t let the sunset find you nursing your anger,” he said. In other words, keep it to manageable levels. Deal with it while it’s small. Don’t even give it two days. Take care of it, completely, by the end of the day. If you don’t, you’ve created a loop hole for evil to get in. Once in, it will grow to a whole pile of anger, and eventually a full blown take over of your life. That’s the sin of anger.
The third loophole Paul mentions is greed, including two of greed’s ugly heads. One ugly head is thievery. “You shall not steal,” is in God’s top ten list. Thievery is a form of greed that takes something of someone else’s because you have to have it for your own.
There’s lots of ways to be a thief. Large corporations cooking their books is a form of robbery. Or Bernie Madoff, who made off with a lot of people’s money in his ponzi scheme. But it wasn’t just Madoff--it was also those who put their money with him who were driven by their own greed to get rich quick.
I had a friend who’s apartment was robbed. Her roommate had an old and shoddy video camera and had been wanting a new one. She said, “Let’s tell your insurance company my video camera was stolen so I can get a new one. They’ll never know. They’re a huge company anyway.” Had my friend added the video camera to the list of stolen items, that would have been robbery as well. I was glad when she told me that she didn’t put it on the list.
The other ugly head of greed that Paul mentions is the reluctance or refusal to give your excess wealth to the needy. Paul said that God’s purpose for giving us the ability to earn an income is not to accumulate as much as we can, but so that we can give to the poor.
If we allow the evil one through this loophole, our lives will become dominated by our consumeristic culture. The evil of consumerism seeks to program us to believe that more is always better. Our inability to distinguish between quality of life and quantity of things will turn us into greedy, grasping, uncharitable people.
Comedian Paul Reiser, who used to star in the sitcom, “Mad About You,” has written a couple of funny books. He admits he’s a consumer sucker. Here’s one story he told on himself in his first book:
I was in the stereo store, looking at this VCR, CD player, laser disc, pants presser combination thing. The salesman comes over. “You know that CD play will hold up to 20 discs at a time.”
“Yeah?”
“Yes-sire e-bob,” he says. “That’s over 18 hours of music.”
“Okey, dokey,” I say, and he wraps it up. Then I got home and realized, Wait a second! I’m not even awake 18 hours. When would I use this thing to its fullest advantage? The last four hours of music will actually be keeping me awake. This is not something I need!
Reiser concluded his thoughts by finally recognizing the truth about compulsive greediness and the never-satisfied attitude that characterizes a culture that has let the evil one through this loophole. Reiser wrote:
The problem is, they keep coming up with technology nobody asks for. They believe we want freeze frame, search, and split screen and clocks that make coffee, and cameras that talk to you. We don’t want that. You know what I want? I just want to lie down. That’s what I really want. If I could just lie down for a half-hour, I’d be happy. It seems like I’ve been reading instruction manuals since 1987. My head is pounding. I want to write a letter, “Dear China. STOP!!! We’re fine. This is plenty of stuff. Why don’t you stop with the VCR’s and work on diseases. Go cure a disease while I go lie down!”
His comments are funny, but it does make you wonder. If we had bought less stuff and used our excess money for the poor, how many diseases could have been cured by now? How many hungry children could have been fed? How many people could have been inoculated with vaccines? Every financial decision we make is ultimately a decision between greed and helping the poor.
The famous preacher and father of the Methodists, John Wesley, once said, “Work all you can, to make all you can, so you can give all you can.” I think that’s good advice for how we can close this particular loophole of greed.
There are three more loopholes to come at the end of this 4th chapter in Ephesians, and we will look at them next week.
Monday, August 6, 2012
Old King Cole
"Old King Cole"
Luke 14:15-24
Old King Cole
Was a merry old soul
And a merry old soul was he;
He called for his pipe,
And he called for his bowl,
And he called for his fiddlers three.
We know from the rest of this nursery rhyme that the King got his pipe and bowl, that the fiddlers came at once, and they all had a jolly time celebrating with their musical instruments. Some of the last lines of the rhyme read:
Oh there’s none so rare
As can compare
With King Cole and his fiddlers three.
What would have happened if the three fiddlers did not show up to make jolly with their King we do not know. It’s not part of the rhyme’s tale. We do know that it put the King in rare form to celebrate a little with a handful of his subjects. We think of kings, regally going about their kingly business. Rarely do we imagine them playing flute solos with a fiddle trio as a back up. But certainly, even kings must get tired of all the hubbub of being king, and just desire to cut loose a little.
When Hirohito was Emperor of Japan, he took crowded working days in stride. On occasion, he even met them with a wry sense of humor. Grand Chamberlain Sukemasa Irie, a long-time adviser of the Emperor, recalled such an incident.
One day was so chaotic that when we brought the Emperor down to the main ceremonial hall to meet some dignitaries, it turned out that we had got the time mixed up, and nobody was there. We, the responsible officials, were terribly embarrassed. But the Emperor simply stood there a moment, bowed politely to the empty hall, and then said to us quietly, “Most interesting and pleasant. It’s a shame we don’t have more ceremonies like it.” And with that he walked spryly back to his office.
There are times when even little interludes like that can be more important than all the hectic push and pull of our everyday lives. We lose our perspective about things of real value if we allow our everyday clamor to work its way into a position of prominence. When we don’t give ourselves enough time out, we miss the opportunity to put some distance between ourselves and what we are doing in our lives. When we lose that distance, we start making bad decisions that have long term effect. We start taking ourselves and what we do too seriously. We forget that an important part of what God styled into the creation is the need for gaining that kind of distance through sabbath times of celebration.
It’s such an important part of God’s intentions, in the parable in Luke 14, as well throughout the Bible, the kingdom of God is described as a feast. It’s like a banquet. The kingdom of God is a big celebration, akin to a marriage dinner. In fact, the version of this parable in Luke starts out a little bit differently in Matthew’s gospel: “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding feast for his son” (Matthew 22:2).
Isn’t it interesting that of all the parables that Jesus told about the kingdom of God, they mostly had to do with celebrations: a woman who celebrated after finding her lost coin; a man who celebrated after his prodigal son returned; a man who celebrated after having found his lost sheep.
Isn’t it also interesting that Jesus did not compare the kingdom of God to all the busy-ness of everyday living. It’s the little surprises, the little interludes, the celebrative events that are separate from the ongoing churning out of our days. These are what the kingdom of God is like.
How easily we get caught up in the river current of daily living so that we, like the three who made excuses in the parable, forego or even refuse such interludes of celebration. In Jesus’ parable, the three excuses used for not coming to the feast sound, on first hearing, like acceptable excuses. But all of them will be found wanting in the end.
The first person said he had bought a field and had to go look at it. How many of you have bought something without looking at it first? Especially a piece of property? This excuse is starting off bad and going down hill from there:
“I just signed a contract and now I have to go read the contract over to see what it says.”
“I just hired an employee, and now I have to go meet her to see if she’s competent.”
“I’m just getting ready to go preach a sermon, but I got it off the internet and I’m need to read it to see if it’s any good.”
Are you getting a sense of how lame these excuses sound for not going to the feast? They just sound lame, and way beyond common sense.
The second guest made the excuse that he had a new cow he had bought and wanted to go look at it. Whenever we have something new, whatever it is, it can be very captivating. Our time and attention easily get sucked away. We let things hold an attraction over our time and lives, but we miss out. The captivation can cause us to lose sight of other more important times of celebration.
Senator Paul Tsongas stunned Washington when he announced he wouldn’t run for reelection because he was suffering from cancer. The disease was caught early and the prognosis was good. He could have run again. But he decided to quit politics after spending a weekend at home in Lowell, Massachusetts. With him were his wife and their three daughters who at that time ranged in ages from three to ten.
“One night my children went to sleep with my arms around them,” recalled Tsongas, “and I realized that for seven years this might rarely happen again. I used to walk my kids to school and think about reelection. Now I walk my kids to school and think about them. My life is richer.” He began to savor and celebrate that which he hardly gave notice to before. He was constantly going out to look at the “cows he bought” so to speak, rather than celebrating life with his family. Tsongas added, “Someone sent me this quote, ‘No one on his deathbed ever says he wished he had spent more time on his business.’”
Yet, all the new cows, mooing for our attention, no matter what they might be for us, can cause us to pass up some invitations of infinitely greater importance.
The third guest used the excuse that he had just gotten married. He wanted to stay home with his new bride. Now this claim seems to be an understandable one. Remember, though, that each of the guests had already accepted the first invitation to the celebration. Why didn’t this guest just turn the invitation down in the first place? That’s the way things happened. A first invitation would have been sent out about the feast. At that invitation you accept or decline. Then the second invitation would go out when the feast was ready, and those who accepted the first invitation would come to the feast.
So all three of these guests had received and accepted the first invitation. Then the excuses at the second invitation. All the excuses have a shred of acceptability to them. But by making them, the guests have reneged on their prior commitment to come. In the end, their excuses were found wanting, no matter how high sounding they may be.
The issue is that by making their excuses, they are all making the fallacious assumption that their trivial business at hand was more important than the celebrative feast to which they had been invited. They were taking their busy-ness and their lives too seriously. By doing so they were totally missing one of the main intentions of God for his people in the point of this parable: life as kingdom people is primarily celebration.
We think of our reformer forerunners in the church as stoic party poopers. But when they were penning such things as the Shorter and Larger Catechism, teaching the young about the basics of the faith, what was the first question in both catechism’s? Anyone know? The question is, “What is the chief end of man?” Anyone know what the young people learned as the answer to that question? “Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and ENJOY Him forever.”
How many of you are enjoying God? Enjoying your relationship with God? Enjoying your time spent with God? And enjoying life because of God? Maybe the claims and excuses of busy-ness, of the new, and of the seemingly good are being allowed to grow too thickly around the simple and pure enjoyment we are to have in playing fiddle with God.
Those who eventually made it into the banquet were the ones who had no worldly obligations to get in the way. They were the outcasts, the dispossessed. It was the property owners who were first invited. It was the ones who owned nothing but their lives who made it into the celebration. They were the ones who so desperately needed something to celebrate. They were the ones who needed some enjoyment in life. The others, who had everything in the world to celebrate about--land, cattle, a good wife--were the ones who refused. Odd isn’t it?
There was a young art student whose teacher put him to the task of painting a sunset. He sat on the brow of a hill, trying to capture on canvas the glory that filled the western horizon. But he spent too much time working on one detail. The teacher came along and said, “Look, the sun is almost down, and you are spending your time putting a roof on a barn.”
We have been given the invitation and the possibility of putting the bright celebration of God into the picture of our lives. But are we too busy concentrating on minor things that ultimately don’t matter in terms of the larger picture? And then it’s too late. The sun’s gone down. The doors to the feast are closed.
God wants us to celebrate. And God will, regardless of whether we accept the invitation or not. God will find someone to celebrate with; someone who wishes to take advantage of and celebrate the opportunities to be with and enjoy God. Someone who would love to fiddle while God piped.
Luke 14:15-24
Old King Cole
Was a merry old soul
And a merry old soul was he;
He called for his pipe,
And he called for his bowl,
And he called for his fiddlers three.
We know from the rest of this nursery rhyme that the King got his pipe and bowl, that the fiddlers came at once, and they all had a jolly time celebrating with their musical instruments. Some of the last lines of the rhyme read:
Oh there’s none so rare
As can compare
With King Cole and his fiddlers three.
What would have happened if the three fiddlers did not show up to make jolly with their King we do not know. It’s not part of the rhyme’s tale. We do know that it put the King in rare form to celebrate a little with a handful of his subjects. We think of kings, regally going about their kingly business. Rarely do we imagine them playing flute solos with a fiddle trio as a back up. But certainly, even kings must get tired of all the hubbub of being king, and just desire to cut loose a little.
When Hirohito was Emperor of Japan, he took crowded working days in stride. On occasion, he even met them with a wry sense of humor. Grand Chamberlain Sukemasa Irie, a long-time adviser of the Emperor, recalled such an incident.
One day was so chaotic that when we brought the Emperor down to the main ceremonial hall to meet some dignitaries, it turned out that we had got the time mixed up, and nobody was there. We, the responsible officials, were terribly embarrassed. But the Emperor simply stood there a moment, bowed politely to the empty hall, and then said to us quietly, “Most interesting and pleasant. It’s a shame we don’t have more ceremonies like it.” And with that he walked spryly back to his office.
There are times when even little interludes like that can be more important than all the hectic push and pull of our everyday lives. We lose our perspective about things of real value if we allow our everyday clamor to work its way into a position of prominence. When we don’t give ourselves enough time out, we miss the opportunity to put some distance between ourselves and what we are doing in our lives. When we lose that distance, we start making bad decisions that have long term effect. We start taking ourselves and what we do too seriously. We forget that an important part of what God styled into the creation is the need for gaining that kind of distance through sabbath times of celebration.
It’s such an important part of God’s intentions, in the parable in Luke 14, as well throughout the Bible, the kingdom of God is described as a feast. It’s like a banquet. The kingdom of God is a big celebration, akin to a marriage dinner. In fact, the version of this parable in Luke starts out a little bit differently in Matthew’s gospel: “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding feast for his son” (Matthew 22:2).
Isn’t it interesting that of all the parables that Jesus told about the kingdom of God, they mostly had to do with celebrations: a woman who celebrated after finding her lost coin; a man who celebrated after his prodigal son returned; a man who celebrated after having found his lost sheep.
Isn’t it also interesting that Jesus did not compare the kingdom of God to all the busy-ness of everyday living. It’s the little surprises, the little interludes, the celebrative events that are separate from the ongoing churning out of our days. These are what the kingdom of God is like.
How easily we get caught up in the river current of daily living so that we, like the three who made excuses in the parable, forego or even refuse such interludes of celebration. In Jesus’ parable, the three excuses used for not coming to the feast sound, on first hearing, like acceptable excuses. But all of them will be found wanting in the end.
The first person said he had bought a field and had to go look at it. How many of you have bought something without looking at it first? Especially a piece of property? This excuse is starting off bad and going down hill from there:
“I just signed a contract and now I have to go read the contract over to see what it says.”
“I just hired an employee, and now I have to go meet her to see if she’s competent.”
“I’m just getting ready to go preach a sermon, but I got it off the internet and I’m need to read it to see if it’s any good.”
Are you getting a sense of how lame these excuses sound for not going to the feast? They just sound lame, and way beyond common sense.
The second guest made the excuse that he had a new cow he had bought and wanted to go look at it. Whenever we have something new, whatever it is, it can be very captivating. Our time and attention easily get sucked away. We let things hold an attraction over our time and lives, but we miss out. The captivation can cause us to lose sight of other more important times of celebration.
Senator Paul Tsongas stunned Washington when he announced he wouldn’t run for reelection because he was suffering from cancer. The disease was caught early and the prognosis was good. He could have run again. But he decided to quit politics after spending a weekend at home in Lowell, Massachusetts. With him were his wife and their three daughters who at that time ranged in ages from three to ten.
“One night my children went to sleep with my arms around them,” recalled Tsongas, “and I realized that for seven years this might rarely happen again. I used to walk my kids to school and think about reelection. Now I walk my kids to school and think about them. My life is richer.” He began to savor and celebrate that which he hardly gave notice to before. He was constantly going out to look at the “cows he bought” so to speak, rather than celebrating life with his family. Tsongas added, “Someone sent me this quote, ‘No one on his deathbed ever says he wished he had spent more time on his business.’”
Yet, all the new cows, mooing for our attention, no matter what they might be for us, can cause us to pass up some invitations of infinitely greater importance.
The third guest used the excuse that he had just gotten married. He wanted to stay home with his new bride. Now this claim seems to be an understandable one. Remember, though, that each of the guests had already accepted the first invitation to the celebration. Why didn’t this guest just turn the invitation down in the first place? That’s the way things happened. A first invitation would have been sent out about the feast. At that invitation you accept or decline. Then the second invitation would go out when the feast was ready, and those who accepted the first invitation would come to the feast.
So all three of these guests had received and accepted the first invitation. Then the excuses at the second invitation. All the excuses have a shred of acceptability to them. But by making them, the guests have reneged on their prior commitment to come. In the end, their excuses were found wanting, no matter how high sounding they may be.
The issue is that by making their excuses, they are all making the fallacious assumption that their trivial business at hand was more important than the celebrative feast to which they had been invited. They were taking their busy-ness and their lives too seriously. By doing so they were totally missing one of the main intentions of God for his people in the point of this parable: life as kingdom people is primarily celebration.
We think of our reformer forerunners in the church as stoic party poopers. But when they were penning such things as the Shorter and Larger Catechism, teaching the young about the basics of the faith, what was the first question in both catechism’s? Anyone know? The question is, “What is the chief end of man?” Anyone know what the young people learned as the answer to that question? “Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and ENJOY Him forever.”
How many of you are enjoying God? Enjoying your relationship with God? Enjoying your time spent with God? And enjoying life because of God? Maybe the claims and excuses of busy-ness, of the new, and of the seemingly good are being allowed to grow too thickly around the simple and pure enjoyment we are to have in playing fiddle with God.
Those who eventually made it into the banquet were the ones who had no worldly obligations to get in the way. They were the outcasts, the dispossessed. It was the property owners who were first invited. It was the ones who owned nothing but their lives who made it into the celebration. They were the ones who so desperately needed something to celebrate. They were the ones who needed some enjoyment in life. The others, who had everything in the world to celebrate about--land, cattle, a good wife--were the ones who refused. Odd isn’t it?
There was a young art student whose teacher put him to the task of painting a sunset. He sat on the brow of a hill, trying to capture on canvas the glory that filled the western horizon. But he spent too much time working on one detail. The teacher came along and said, “Look, the sun is almost down, and you are spending your time putting a roof on a barn.”
We have been given the invitation and the possibility of putting the bright celebration of God into the picture of our lives. But are we too busy concentrating on minor things that ultimately don’t matter in terms of the larger picture? And then it’s too late. The sun’s gone down. The doors to the feast are closed.
God wants us to celebrate. And God will, regardless of whether we accept the invitation or not. God will find someone to celebrate with; someone who wishes to take advantage of and celebrate the opportunities to be with and enjoy God. Someone who would love to fiddle while God piped.
Monday, July 23, 2012
Mary Had A Little Lamb
"Mary Had A Little Lamb"
Acts 9:10-13
Mary had a little lamb,
Its fleece was white as snow;
And everywhere that Mary went
The lamb was sure to go.
As part of the message this morning, I would like to ask one question of you. Take some time to write down a few words in answer to this question. Get out a pencil or pen--or use the one in the pew rack. Jot down your answers on your bulletin. Here’s the question: What is your reputation?
Here’s a way to clarify that question by drawing a few circles around you and your many people contexts. What is your reputation in your family? Go ahead and write a few words down. And, what is your reputation where you work; or, if you are retired, what was your reputation where you worked? If you are in school, what is your reputation at school? And finally, what is your reputation amongst your circle of friends?
Thinking about these questions and quickly writing down some short descriptions was probably hard. I hope that if you didn’t write anything down, you are at least thinking about it. Answering these questions may be hard because you may not know what your reputation is. You might be thinking that only those within the circles of relationships that I drew can answer best for you.
I think we have an idea about what our reputations are. It’s my hope that we have more than one idea what our reputations are. Because ultimately, it is not others who are in charge of shaping a reputation. We are the ones who mold our reputations. We determine the kind of person we want to be known as. We make the hard choices that shape the identity that others hear about or come to know.
When I was choosing nursery rhymes for this sermon series, I came across this familiar one about Mary and her little lamb. When I saw it, and in my mind trying to associate it with developing it into a sermon, I began to think about what kinds of things follow us around like Mary’s lamb. My immediate and lasting thought was our reputations. No matter how we might try and shoo them away, or leave them behind, they have a way of following us wherever we go. Reputations are us. Trying to get away from our reputation is like trying to get away from ourselves. It’s impossible.
There may be some people’s reputations that are like the little lamb’s fleece: white as snow. Some are soiled beyond whiteness. Probably for most of us, our fleeces are spotted at best.
There was a prosperous, young Wall Street broker who met, fell in love with, and was frequently seen escorting a rising actress. He wanted to marry her, but being a cautious man he decided that before proposing marriage, he should have a private investigating agency check her background and activities. After all, he reasoned to himself, I have both a growing fortune and a reputation to protect.
The young man requested that the agency was not to reveal his identity to the investigator doing the report on the actress. In due time the investigator’s report came back. It said the actress had an unblemished past, a spotless reputation, and her friends and associates were of the best repute. The report concluded, “The only shadow is that she is often seen around town in the company of a young broker of dubious business practices and principles.”
There may be a lot of people who would not want anyone prying into their past or present relationships and history. Just run for public office and you’ll find out. No one wants something uncovered and then made public knowledge. And there may be an equally large number of people who wish they could find some way to change or amend their reputations within any of the circles of relationships I had you think about at the start of this message. How, if at all, do you gain or change your reputation--that thing that keeps following at your heels wherever you go?
One of my favorite novels is Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo. It’s the story about Jean Valjean, an escaped convict who was put in prison for stealing bread to feed his hungry family. He escaped, and while on the run, he had an encounter with a priest that changed his life. He changed his name to go with his new identity. Over time he became a very wealthy man--a benefactor to many of the poor in the community where
While all those changes were being made in Jean Valjean’s life, there was an inspector. Javert. Javert became obsessed with finding Valjean and throwing him back in prison. The two are finally brought together in the story through a confrontation that forced Valjean to reveal his previous reputation publicly, surprising the inspector. Despite the powerful and good man Valjean had become, the inspector only sees him for who Valjean was. The inspector Javert orders Valjean arrested.
Though that is not the end of the story for Jean Valjean (or Javert), it points to a crisis with which many people deal. What do you do when you may have created a certain reputation, you change, but others will not allow you to change? You want to begin the process of forming a new reputation. But everyone who knows you will not let the old you go. Or, like the children who ridiculed Mary and her lamb, will make fun of you and the new reputation you are trying to create.
With this in mind, we turn to the life of the Apostle Paul. The part of the scripture story read in Acts picks up Paul’s story at a pivotal point. Paul is trying to totally set aside an old reputation, and letting God put another one in its place.
Paul’s former reputation was that of a Christian basher. He hated the Church and Christians with a vengeful passion. He worked for and earned the reputation as one who, “...kept up his violent threats of murder against the disciples of the Lord.” I like the way the King James Bible has this verse: “And Saul was breathing out threatenings and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord…”
When Ananias was sent by the Lord to Paul, Ananias fearfully hesitated, saying, “Master, you can’t be serious. Everybody’s talking about this man and the terrible things he’s been doing, his reign of terror against your people in Jerusalem” (9:13). Paul was the one person no Christian wanted to meet up with in a dark alley. Or even a lighted alley for that matter.
When looking back, in telling about his life before his conversion to Christianity, Paul would speak about his misguided pride for his reputation of what he called being “...zealous toward God” (Acts 22:3). The name of Paul was so associated with persecution that the two could not be separated.
I grew up watching Jack LaLanne. I don’t know what it was about that guy, dressed in his one-piece stretch suit, leading people through calisthenics on TV every morning. Here was a man who swam from Alcatraz Island to San Francisco, pulling a rowboat full of people, every New Year’s Day. At one time in his life he said, “I may never die. It would wreck my image.” And then he went on to say, “I can’t even afford to have a fat dog.”
People’s names become wedded to their reputations. Living up to your name means the same thing as living up to your reputation. In terms of Paul in the way he treated the early church, that became a hellish marriage of his name with the reputation of persecution. How hard it would be to try and divorce oneself from one’s reputation. Especially when, as I said earlier, we have worked so hard to create and maintain that reputation. We are the ones who choose to live up to our own creations of repute. They aren’t given to us by anyone else. We choose them by what we accept and deny to be true or best for us and about us.
In so many places we turn in Scripture where it talks about the formation of a reputation, we find its basis is in what we DO, not what we THINK.
The Son of Man will soon come in the glory of his Father and with his angles to reward all people for what they have done. (Mt. 16:27)
God will reward each of us for what we have done. (Romans 2:6)
And so, each of us must give an account to God for what we do. (Romans 14:12)
The dead were judged by what those books said they had done. (Revelation 20:12)
What we do, our actions, say much more about the kind of person we are and want to be than what we think. Our reputations then are displayed by our actions, not by our thinking or our words. I may think I’m a nice person. But if I act contrary to that, all my thinking has not gotten me anywhere. My reputation has been established by what I do, not by what I think.
The same was true for Paul. The same is true for individuals as well as congregations. The kind of people we are, and the kind of congregation we are is ultimately portrayed by what we do or don’t do. It’s something visible--as visible as a lamb following us wherever we go. Our integrity, our character, our name, our esteem is built up or destroyed by what we do and how we do it.
So, what if we want to change our reputation? What if we don’t like the name we have made for ourselves? What if we don’t like the reputations by which we allow others to come to know us, even before they meet us?
Maybe there are some like Paul, who really don’t want to change, but need to. Someone else must decide it’s time for a change. In Paul’s case, it was God. I wonder if it’s safe to say that God is behind all reputation changes for the better.
God knocked Paul off his high horse. After that everything started to spin in Paul’s little self-made circus side show. The Lord showed him a reflection of his reputation; let him see what he looked like from the eyes of those who were being done in by his persecution; showed him what his reputation looked like from heaven.
That brief glimpse must have lasted a lifetime for Paul. But in the horror of that glimpse, the Risen Christ also must have shown Paul what his reputation could be if he so desired to make a change.
It’s amazing what can happen to a person when the Lord grabs a hold of you like that. Your whole life can change. Everything that was once important to you loses its luster. Every driving force behind your life can suddenly lose its steam.
And it’s not that everything stops glimmering. Or that everything comes to a screeching halt. It’s more that other things begin to shine--things you never suspected could capture your attention. It’s more that other goals and pursuits fuel the fires of your life and passions--things you had no idea were even flammable.
Paul had no idea that if his life and reputation were ever reoriented, that that reorientation could ever come from Jesus Christ or the church. But he never fully realized what the Lord could do in a person’s life either.
We may think our reputations are beyond amends. Are we selling the Lord short? You, and how you are known, can be changed. Some things seem impossible to us, but not to God.
Ananias was not ready to accept God’s word either--that Paul had changed his ways. But Paul began, almost immediately, to demonstrate by his actions, that he had changed. That he was forming a new identity and reputation. It was by those actions that he was finally accepted into the Christian community and became one of its greatest leaders.
It was not an easy road for Paul. The Lord, in speaking to Ananias about Paul, said, “I will show him how much he must suffer for worshipping in my name” (vs. 16). One of those sufferings was the changing of his reputation. While Paul’s reputation with the Christians steadily grew, it was quickly diminishing with the Jewish colleagues of his past.
Changing your reputation creates a lot of painful growth. It may mean dropping certain friends. It may mean changing the way you talk. It may mean revitalizing the way you relate to your spouse. It may mean redoing certain work habits.
And it should mean a renewal in your relationship with our Lord Jesus Christ. That’s what the Lord was aiming at with Paul. That’s what the Lord’s main intentions will be with us in whitening the fleece of the lambs that follow us around. That is, washing, cleansing, and renewing our reputations.
Monday, July 16, 2012
The Itsy-Bitsy Spider
"The Itsy-Bitsy Spider"
Hosea 2:14--3:1
The itsy bitsy spider
climbed up the water spout;
Down came the rain
and washed the spider out;
Out came the sun
and dried up all the rain;
And the itsy bitsy spider
climbed up the spout again.
Or, as in the poem by Richard Armour:
Shake and shake
The catsup bottle.
None will come out
And then a lot’ll.
It may sound trite, but it is nonetheless true: Life is hard sometimes. It not always brings roses without thorns, weedless lawns, and blue skies (or raincloud-filled skies, whichever you prefer). Instead, there are at least little irritants along the way.
I like those lists of irritants that fall under the heading, “How To Tell It’s A Bad Day.” Some of them go like this:
You know it’s a bad day when you jump out of bed and miss the floor.
You know it’s a bad day when your horn goes off accidentally and gets stuck when you’re following a group of Hell’s Angels down the highway.
You know it’s a bad day when you put both contact lenses in the same eye.
You know it’s a bad day if the bird singing outside your window is a vulture.
You know it’s a bad day when your wife says, “Good morning, Bill,” and your name is George.
You know it’s a bad day when your income tax refund check bounces.
You know it’s a bad day when your four year old says it’s almost impossible to flush a grapefruit down the toilet.
You know it’s a bad day when it costs more to fill up your car than it did to buy it.
You know it’s a bad day when the gypsy fortune teller offers to refund your money.
If all we had to face in life were little annoyances such as these, we might be able to do OK in life. Maybe a lot better than OK. But the problem is that beyond these little ripples there are some good sized waves. They are the breakers that follow a series of smaller waves. They hit us with a size and force great enough to knock us off our feet, pulling us down with its undertow. It’s not the continual dreary shower, but the sudden stormy cloud burst that washes us from our high places of security.
There are those times when we feel like the deep sea diver in the Farside cartoon who was walking around in his heavy diving suit, investigating the ocean floor. Then he looks up and sees the ship above him, to which he was connected by an air hose and lifeline, sinking down towards him.
How do you climb up the lifeline to a sinking ship? The ship you thought was giving you your unfailing security has sunk. Where does that leave you? How do you survive wash-out experiences? And probably more importantly, how do you, like the itsy bitsy spider, climb back up again? And how do you do that knowing that the rain just might, and probably will, come again?
We need to turn our attention to Hosea in order to find some of the answers to these questions. Hosea’s situation was a specific kind of wash-out experience. We should be able to glean some understanding for our own particular situations.
This portion of the story of Hosea’s life begins at the point where God tersely commands him to, “Go get married.” Can’t you just see Hosea fumbling around the marketplace, looking at all the women a little bit differently than he had before. All the time he’s mumbling to himself, “Go get married, go get married…” When he finally finds “the one,” she asks, “Why do you want to marry me?”
To which Hosea replies, “Because God told me to go get married.” Not the most romantic proposal.
Hosea found a young woman who consented to whatever reason he gave her to get married. They had three children--two boys and a girl--in quick succession. Everything seemed rosy for this happy family. Whatever the reason was behind God’s odd demand that he go get married, Hosea seemed to find married life quite to his liking. Hosea was on his way up the waterspout. But off in the distance a storm was brewing for him--one which no weatherman would have ever been able to predict.
When the rain finally began to fall, Hosea and his domestic dream life were severely pelted. Everything crashed to the ground. Hosea went running for cover, a bruised and humiliated man. What happened was that his beautiful wife, the mother of his three children, Gomer, abruptly left him. She turned in her wooden mixing spoons and apron and diapers for the life of a prostitute.
Every day, Hosea would go to the marketplace to buy his daily groceries. He would have to watch his wife display herself for sale to any man who came along. His heart would break as he saw the woman he had come to love, who bore his children, who had pledged herself to him and to him alone, calling out to any man passing by, disappear into a tent with some louse, come out a short time later only to snag another. Our hearts must surely go out to Hosea.
I think there are at least three characteristics of the rain storm that dislodged Hosea, and would probably dislodge a lot of other people as well.
One of the characteristics is 90 degree change. It’s a sharp, opposite direction shift from what was, to what is now. This kind of change could happen in a person’s thinking, feelings, or ways of acting. The change could involve a single individual or the relationship amongst a group of people. Whatever it is, the changes people go through ripple out and affect others who are closest to that person. The changes Gomer made, totally unsettled the life of her husband, Hosea; their three children; families, and ultimately the community. Everyone has to adapt and deal with the stark shift Gomer made.
These kinds of drastic changes appear to happen suddenly, but I have found that lots of things have been going on in the person before the shift was ever noticed. A change may have been going on for a long time. What happens is that those washed out by such change suddenly “wake up” to it. Looking back, they begin to piece together how this happened.
This could have happened in Hosea’s case. He may have been blind to what was going on in Gomer’s life. But he just didn’t want to accept it or believe it. How her feelings and ways of acting were changing. Being suffocated in a life that was not her, she finally made a drastic shift. It woke up a lot of people about the kind of person she evidently was or wanted to be. But by making that change, she washed out a lot of people’s lives with the rain storm of her choices.
Another characteristic of the rain storms of life is loss. It’s hard to separate change from loss. They both flow from the same thunder cloud.
Loss is experienced y most everyone. Catastrophic loss is not. Basically, catastrophic loss is the kind of loss of any major framework that we have built to hold us up. The building material for that framework, that we thought was strong and stable, is what surprisingly and unbelievably crumbles. That framework, that building material that holds up our lives may be something like the acceptance of those we love. It might be the dreams that have beckoned us forward. It might be the future we thought we were going to live into. It might be the roles from which we gain our sense of self-respect. It might be any number of meaningful values upon which our life has been based. It might be the faith in God that we thought was supposed to get us through anything. It total, it is the experience of having our foundations being cut out from under us.
One of the 17th century Swedish kings was Gustavus Aldophus. He had a life long dream of building the mightiest warship. He ordered such a ship to be built. It was a splendid looking vessel that could carry 500 people as well as full armaments. It was called the VASA. King Gustavus swelled with pride as his prize ship was launched for the first time with two-gun salute. A large crowd watched from the pier. The VASA made it only a few yards out into the harbor and promptly sunk.
That’s what loss does to a person who has been washed out. It makes you go back to the drawing board and start all over again. Or throwing out the drawing board altogether. There is so much mourning of the loss of time and plans and people and dreams that were spent in vain. To what end!? A sunken ship. A sunken life. What now?
The third characteristic is the final circle of a downward spiral. It is the sense of hopelessness. It is the debilitating thought that, “I will never make it back up again.” It’s looking up the water spout and thinking, “I can’t do it; the rains are going to come again; and the fall will be worse.”
Like the character, Biff, in Arthur Miller’s play, Death of a Salesman, who said in desperation, “I can’t take hold, Mom; I can’t take hold of some kind of life.” For Hosea, this characteristic may have been formed by such words as, “How can I ever love again? How can I trust again? How will anything ever change for the better with Gomer? With anyone? It can only get worse.”
Which all serves to bring us to the most important part of Hosea’s story. God gives Hosea one further instruction, after the washout has taken place with his now very stray wife, Gomer. God says to Hosea, “Start all over: Love your wife again, your wife who’s in bed with her latest boyfriend, your cheating wife” (EHP).
Hosea has moved through the process of experiencing 90 degree angle change, involving a cutting and catastrophic loss, leading to an understandable hopelessness concerning the choices and actions of his wife Gomer. Now God is asking Hosea to pull himself out of the rain swollen puddle and do it all over again--to go find Gomer and show his love for her.
How do you do that, if you are Hosea? What does it take to risk doing what God is asking Hosea to do? To start over again after love has not just been lost, but run over, backed up, run over again, backed up, run over again… To get back up after life has beaten you down? To climb the spout again?
Part of the answer comes from paying attention to the words God uses in making this request. Notice that God doesn’t request that Hosea take Gomer back as his wife. We may assume that is what’s behind the words of God, but that may be more presumption than assumption. Instead, listen to the words: “Start all over: Love your wife again…”
Think about those words. Think what they mean. Which would be harder for you to do: Take Gomer back as your wife; or, Go and show your love? If I was in that position it would be easier to take her back as my wife, led simply by a sense of duty, but with no love. It would be much harder, if I were Hosea, to show any kind of love after the way Gomer had stepped all over it.
One of the networks put on a documentary about the Kentucky mountain folks. They brought to New York a man who had spent his entire life in the mountains. He was absolutely amazed at all he saw, having no idea something like that kind of a place existed. But one thing he saw really stuck with him. In the RCA building, he watched a little old lady walk up to a door. It slid open and she walked into a box. The doors closed. A minute later the doors opened again, and out stepped a gorgeous brunette. “You just can’t beat science,” he shouted. “If I’d a know’d about that contraption, I’d a brought along my old lady.”
If God had asked us to start over like God did with Hosea, we would probably wish we had a contraption that would change Gomer over before we took her back. Then it would be easy to show love again. But the problem is, Hosea didn’t. And neither do we. We don’t have something that will magically transform our washout experiences into fascinating celebrations.
Again, as we ponder how we are able to climb back up the water spout, let’s pay attention to God’s statement to Hosea: “Start all over: Love your wife again…” Notice that God isn’t requesting that Gomer be the one to change. God isn’t pushing Gomer into any contraption either. The person God is asking to change is Hosea. He is asking Hosea to change is attitude, his feelings, his heart toward Gomer. That’s the only way Hosea will be able to start climbing back up.
I hope you’re seeing something much deeper here, as well. This isn’t just a story about Hosea and Gomer. It’s a story about God and God’s people. We are the Gomers who leave our vows to God behind for the allurements of life without attachments. We are the ones who once climbed to the heights with God. But we made choices that washed us off those heights. And then we chose to live on the ground.
God is the one who continually asks himself to start over, and love us again. God knows we may not change. But God has chosen to. God has chosen not to get lost in his hurt and pain over our faithless ways. Instead God continues to come to us and show his love for us, despite what he may get in return.
So God is not asking Hosea to do something that He (God) is not unwilling to do. It has become a way of life for God in his love for us.
Hosea 2:14--3:1
The itsy bitsy spider
climbed up the water spout;
Down came the rain
and washed the spider out;
Out came the sun
and dried up all the rain;
And the itsy bitsy spider
climbed up the spout again.
Or, as in the poem by Richard Armour:
Shake and shake
The catsup bottle.
None will come out
And then a lot’ll.
It may sound trite, but it is nonetheless true: Life is hard sometimes. It not always brings roses without thorns, weedless lawns, and blue skies (or raincloud-filled skies, whichever you prefer). Instead, there are at least little irritants along the way.
I like those lists of irritants that fall under the heading, “How To Tell It’s A Bad Day.” Some of them go like this:
You know it’s a bad day when you jump out of bed and miss the floor.
You know it’s a bad day when your horn goes off accidentally and gets stuck when you’re following a group of Hell’s Angels down the highway.
You know it’s a bad day when you put both contact lenses in the same eye.
You know it’s a bad day if the bird singing outside your window is a vulture.
You know it’s a bad day when your wife says, “Good morning, Bill,” and your name is George.
You know it’s a bad day when your income tax refund check bounces.
You know it’s a bad day when your four year old says it’s almost impossible to flush a grapefruit down the toilet.
You know it’s a bad day when it costs more to fill up your car than it did to buy it.
You know it’s a bad day when the gypsy fortune teller offers to refund your money.
If all we had to face in life were little annoyances such as these, we might be able to do OK in life. Maybe a lot better than OK. But the problem is that beyond these little ripples there are some good sized waves. They are the breakers that follow a series of smaller waves. They hit us with a size and force great enough to knock us off our feet, pulling us down with its undertow. It’s not the continual dreary shower, but the sudden stormy cloud burst that washes us from our high places of security.
There are those times when we feel like the deep sea diver in the Farside cartoon who was walking around in his heavy diving suit, investigating the ocean floor. Then he looks up and sees the ship above him, to which he was connected by an air hose and lifeline, sinking down towards him.
How do you climb up the lifeline to a sinking ship? The ship you thought was giving you your unfailing security has sunk. Where does that leave you? How do you survive wash-out experiences? And probably more importantly, how do you, like the itsy bitsy spider, climb back up again? And how do you do that knowing that the rain just might, and probably will, come again?
We need to turn our attention to Hosea in order to find some of the answers to these questions. Hosea’s situation was a specific kind of wash-out experience. We should be able to glean some understanding for our own particular situations.
This portion of the story of Hosea’s life begins at the point where God tersely commands him to, “Go get married.” Can’t you just see Hosea fumbling around the marketplace, looking at all the women a little bit differently than he had before. All the time he’s mumbling to himself, “Go get married, go get married…” When he finally finds “the one,” she asks, “Why do you want to marry me?”
To which Hosea replies, “Because God told me to go get married.” Not the most romantic proposal.
Hosea found a young woman who consented to whatever reason he gave her to get married. They had three children--two boys and a girl--in quick succession. Everything seemed rosy for this happy family. Whatever the reason was behind God’s odd demand that he go get married, Hosea seemed to find married life quite to his liking. Hosea was on his way up the waterspout. But off in the distance a storm was brewing for him--one which no weatherman would have ever been able to predict.
When the rain finally began to fall, Hosea and his domestic dream life were severely pelted. Everything crashed to the ground. Hosea went running for cover, a bruised and humiliated man. What happened was that his beautiful wife, the mother of his three children, Gomer, abruptly left him. She turned in her wooden mixing spoons and apron and diapers for the life of a prostitute.
Every day, Hosea would go to the marketplace to buy his daily groceries. He would have to watch his wife display herself for sale to any man who came along. His heart would break as he saw the woman he had come to love, who bore his children, who had pledged herself to him and to him alone, calling out to any man passing by, disappear into a tent with some louse, come out a short time later only to snag another. Our hearts must surely go out to Hosea.
I think there are at least three characteristics of the rain storm that dislodged Hosea, and would probably dislodge a lot of other people as well.
One of the characteristics is 90 degree change. It’s a sharp, opposite direction shift from what was, to what is now. This kind of change could happen in a person’s thinking, feelings, or ways of acting. The change could involve a single individual or the relationship amongst a group of people. Whatever it is, the changes people go through ripple out and affect others who are closest to that person. The changes Gomer made, totally unsettled the life of her husband, Hosea; their three children; families, and ultimately the community. Everyone has to adapt and deal with the stark shift Gomer made.
These kinds of drastic changes appear to happen suddenly, but I have found that lots of things have been going on in the person before the shift was ever noticed. A change may have been going on for a long time. What happens is that those washed out by such change suddenly “wake up” to it. Looking back, they begin to piece together how this happened.
This could have happened in Hosea’s case. He may have been blind to what was going on in Gomer’s life. But he just didn’t want to accept it or believe it. How her feelings and ways of acting were changing. Being suffocated in a life that was not her, she finally made a drastic shift. It woke up a lot of people about the kind of person she evidently was or wanted to be. But by making that change, she washed out a lot of people’s lives with the rain storm of her choices.
Another characteristic of the rain storms of life is loss. It’s hard to separate change from loss. They both flow from the same thunder cloud.
Loss is experienced y most everyone. Catastrophic loss is not. Basically, catastrophic loss is the kind of loss of any major framework that we have built to hold us up. The building material for that framework, that we thought was strong and stable, is what surprisingly and unbelievably crumbles. That framework, that building material that holds up our lives may be something like the acceptance of those we love. It might be the dreams that have beckoned us forward. It might be the future we thought we were going to live into. It might be the roles from which we gain our sense of self-respect. It might be any number of meaningful values upon which our life has been based. It might be the faith in God that we thought was supposed to get us through anything. It total, it is the experience of having our foundations being cut out from under us.
One of the 17th century Swedish kings was Gustavus Aldophus. He had a life long dream of building the mightiest warship. He ordered such a ship to be built. It was a splendid looking vessel that could carry 500 people as well as full armaments. It was called the VASA. King Gustavus swelled with pride as his prize ship was launched for the first time with two-gun salute. A large crowd watched from the pier. The VASA made it only a few yards out into the harbor and promptly sunk.
That’s what loss does to a person who has been washed out. It makes you go back to the drawing board and start all over again. Or throwing out the drawing board altogether. There is so much mourning of the loss of time and plans and people and dreams that were spent in vain. To what end!? A sunken ship. A sunken life. What now?
The third characteristic is the final circle of a downward spiral. It is the sense of hopelessness. It is the debilitating thought that, “I will never make it back up again.” It’s looking up the water spout and thinking, “I can’t do it; the rains are going to come again; and the fall will be worse.”
Like the character, Biff, in Arthur Miller’s play, Death of a Salesman, who said in desperation, “I can’t take hold, Mom; I can’t take hold of some kind of life.” For Hosea, this characteristic may have been formed by such words as, “How can I ever love again? How can I trust again? How will anything ever change for the better with Gomer? With anyone? It can only get worse.”
Which all serves to bring us to the most important part of Hosea’s story. God gives Hosea one further instruction, after the washout has taken place with his now very stray wife, Gomer. God says to Hosea, “Start all over: Love your wife again, your wife who’s in bed with her latest boyfriend, your cheating wife” (EHP).
Hosea has moved through the process of experiencing 90 degree angle change, involving a cutting and catastrophic loss, leading to an understandable hopelessness concerning the choices and actions of his wife Gomer. Now God is asking Hosea to pull himself out of the rain swollen puddle and do it all over again--to go find Gomer and show his love for her.
How do you do that, if you are Hosea? What does it take to risk doing what God is asking Hosea to do? To start over again after love has not just been lost, but run over, backed up, run over again, backed up, run over again… To get back up after life has beaten you down? To climb the spout again?
Part of the answer comes from paying attention to the words God uses in making this request. Notice that God doesn’t request that Hosea take Gomer back as his wife. We may assume that is what’s behind the words of God, but that may be more presumption than assumption. Instead, listen to the words: “Start all over: Love your wife again…”
Think about those words. Think what they mean. Which would be harder for you to do: Take Gomer back as your wife; or, Go and show your love? If I was in that position it would be easier to take her back as my wife, led simply by a sense of duty, but with no love. It would be much harder, if I were Hosea, to show any kind of love after the way Gomer had stepped all over it.
One of the networks put on a documentary about the Kentucky mountain folks. They brought to New York a man who had spent his entire life in the mountains. He was absolutely amazed at all he saw, having no idea something like that kind of a place existed. But one thing he saw really stuck with him. In the RCA building, he watched a little old lady walk up to a door. It slid open and she walked into a box. The doors closed. A minute later the doors opened again, and out stepped a gorgeous brunette. “You just can’t beat science,” he shouted. “If I’d a know’d about that contraption, I’d a brought along my old lady.”
If God had asked us to start over like God did with Hosea, we would probably wish we had a contraption that would change Gomer over before we took her back. Then it would be easy to show love again. But the problem is, Hosea didn’t. And neither do we. We don’t have something that will magically transform our washout experiences into fascinating celebrations.
Again, as we ponder how we are able to climb back up the water spout, let’s pay attention to God’s statement to Hosea: “Start all over: Love your wife again…” Notice that God isn’t requesting that Gomer be the one to change. God isn’t pushing Gomer into any contraption either. The person God is asking to change is Hosea. He is asking Hosea to change is attitude, his feelings, his heart toward Gomer. That’s the only way Hosea will be able to start climbing back up.
I hope you’re seeing something much deeper here, as well. This isn’t just a story about Hosea and Gomer. It’s a story about God and God’s people. We are the Gomers who leave our vows to God behind for the allurements of life without attachments. We are the ones who once climbed to the heights with God. But we made choices that washed us off those heights. And then we chose to live on the ground.
God is the one who continually asks himself to start over, and love us again. God knows we may not change. But God has chosen to. God has chosen not to get lost in his hurt and pain over our faithless ways. Instead God continues to come to us and show his love for us, despite what he may get in return.
So God is not asking Hosea to do something that He (God) is not unwilling to do. It has become a way of life for God in his love for us.
Tuesday, July 10, 2012
Little Miss Muffett
"Little Miss Muffett"
Jeremiah 10:1-5
Family of Israel, listen to what the Lord says to you.
This is what he says:
"Don't live like the people from other nations,
and don't be afraid of special signs in the sky,
even though the other nations are afraid of them.
The customs of other people are worth nothing.
Their idols are just wood cut from the forest,
shaped by a worker with his chisel.
They decorate their idols with silver and gold.
With hammers and nails they fasten them down so they won't fall over.
Their idols are like scarecrows in melon fields;
they cannot talk.
Since they cannot walk, they must be carried.
Do not be afraid of those idols,
because they can't hurt you,
and they can't help you either."
Little Miss Muffet
Sat on her tuffet
Eating her curds and whey.
Along came a spider
Who sat down beside her
And frightened Miss Muffet away.
You know what I realized this week? I realized I didn’t know what a tuffet was. I think I assumed, ever since I first heard this nursery rhyme, that a tuffet was your backside, your derriere, your buns. As in, “Get up off your tuffet and do your chores!” But then I wondered if tuffet was a word at all. So I looked it up. There are two definitions. The first is, a tuft of grass. The second says a low stool. So now you know.
I’d also like to know why a little girl is eating an unappetizing mixture of coagulated milk and watery cheese by-product. Neither of these things has anything to do with the sermon -- just little side-bars of information.
Little Miss Muffet had arachnophobia. That is, the fear of spiders. There was a lame science fiction movie a number of years ago about a bunch of spiders that were killing everyone on this farm. There must be a lot of people who are phobic of spiders.
There was a married couple who had perfected a vaudeville act. They were Olga and Sven. Olga would stand quietly against a wooden background while Sven threw knives, hatchets, etc. into the wood around her. She would even get strapped to a wooden background that spun. Sven would throw his knives at his wife while she was spinning around. One time, when Olga was just standing there, Sven threw a knife and Olga let out a blood curdling scream. She fell and crumpled onto the floor. The audience suspected the worst. They took Olga to the dressing room. When she revived she said, “I suddenly felt something crawling up my leg and discovered a spider. Oh, I’m so afraid of spiders!” I think I would have been more afraid of old Sven and his sharp objects.
Indeed, I could make the case that a good definition for a human being is, “Someone who is afraid of something.” Research by the National Institute of Mental Health shows that phobias (which are now called “anxiety disorders”) are the most common psychological problem in America. It is estimated that over 13 million Americans have one kind of phobia or another. Some people have multiple phobias. There’s all kinds to choose from: fear of heights (which is my favorite; the hotel where I was staying at this past week in Cincinnati was built in a square, the middle of which was wide open, floor to very high ceiling. The elevators were glass cubicles looking out into this open middle area; my room was on the 10th floor; I could not turn around and look out the glass; I faced the elevator doors and couldn’t wait till they opened. One day I was on the elevator with a lady who had it worse than me; their room was on the 14th floor and you needed a special key card to get to that floor, and it wasn’t working; her husband said, “We’ll have to go back down and get a different card,” at which point she got down on all fours on the floor and kept saying, “Just get me off this thing!”). There’s fear of the dark, fear of going outside your home, fear of being in tight or overcrowded places. And there are some less known fears, such as the fear of eating, the fear of writing, or the fear of vomiting. I guess if you had the fear of eating you wouldn’t also have the fear of vomiting.
So what are we to do with all our fears, phobias, and anxiety disorders? How can we eat our curds and whey in peace, without being frightened away? Alan Shepherd, the astronaut wrote about his first space flight. When the Redstone rocket began to gather speed, it began to vibrate more and more. It was as if the whole rocket was about to come apart. He knew what was happening. He had experienced it as a test pilot. He knew that just before you break through the sound barrier, the air resistance is tremendous.
Shepherd’s whole body was shaking. He couldn’t read the instruments. He started to radio back to Cape Canaveral, but then changed his mind. He held on. Within a few seconds all the vibrations were gone. He knew he was going supersonic. No longer any noise. No longer even any sense that he was moving. He was flying in outer space.
So how do we get past those times when our fears are making us shake all over, and we want to call the control tower and scream, or get down on all fours, or give up? How do we hold on so that we can get past the fear and then all the noise and shaking disappears and everything is OK?
The prophet Jeremiah gives us some help here. His words come in the context of a satire about idols. Idol worship was a huge problem for Israel. Part of the attraction, besides the sexual nature of idol worship, was the delusion that because the idol was visible, it must be real. They were as visible as Israel’s God was invisible. It bothers Jeremiah that the people have become “terrified” (vs. 2) of them. Then again in verse 5 Jeremiah emphasizes his point with the statement, “Do not be afraid of them...”
In between these two “do not be afraid” statements Jeremiah preaches a little satire. What exactly were the people afraid of? Was it justified fear or imagined fear? “Don’t you realize what these things are?” Jeremiah laughs. “They’re trees; pieces of wood! Some guy goes and cuts a tree. Another guy carves on it. Somebody else sticks a bunch of ornaments and trinkets on it. You’re afraid of that!?” Jeremiah rants, throwing up his arms.
Jeremiah tells the people they shouldn’t fear because:
1) It would be giving too much credence to a worthless custom carried on by a worthless people;
2) That which they fear is only an inanimate object (a piece of a tree!) that can’t move, can’t speak, and can’t walk. That which they are afraid of has no power to do harm. And, conversely, it can do no good either.
The thing, says Jeremiah, is basically non-functional.
A study was done at the University of Michigan on fears relationship to reality. The study found that 60 percent of our fears are totally groundless. Twenty percent of our fears have already become past activities. That is, they are already done and totally out of our control. Ten percent of our fears are so petty, they don’t make any real difference in our daily lives. Of the remaining 10 percent, only four or five percent are real and justified fears. I think that’s part of what Jeremiah is trying to point out. There are few things that people really need to be afraid of. Idols are not one of them.
Jeremiah makes some points about fear that are worth taking a look at. First, he is saying that our fears are often things that have no life of their own. We are the ones who give our fears their life, their power. Our minds produce or conjure up all the energy that our fears bring.
The father of a four-year-old came into her room at night after hearing her scream that there were bears in her room. After turning on the lights, he said to his daughter, “See, no bears.”
But his daughter was unconvinced. “The kind of bears I see,” she said, “are the kinds that only come out in the dark.”
Fears, according to what Jeremiah is saying, start out as inanimate objects. Then our minds give them a pulse. Then we turn that pulse into a spirit and a power. The power grows until it’s bigger than ourselves--maybe bigger than our individual world. The point is, WE give those fears that kind of life. It isn’t until God comes along and says through someone like Jeremiah, “Wait a minute! Take a good, long look at this. It’s only a log with some trinkets stuck to it!” And then we feel a little silly. Maybe more than just a little.
Secondly, Jeremiah says that the only legs our fears have are our own. The only way our fears get around is if we carry them. We imagine our fears to be so powerful as to be everywhere. Everywhere we turn, there they are. How will we ever escape them? If it’s fear of the dark, the dark is everywhere. If it’s agoraphobia -- fear of venturing outside your home -- the outside is everywhere. If it’s arachnophobia -- fear of spiders -- spiders seem to be everywhere.
But it’s not the “everywhere” that’s causing the fear. It is you and I, who by carrying that fear around in here (heart and mind) that gives our fear the illusion of mobility. The only way our fears are everywhere is if we take them everywhere. What would happen if we just left them somewhere so they wouldn’t bother us everywhere?
One of the great physicians of the past century, Sir William Osler, once gave some good advice on how to end the day. He wrote, “At night, as I lay aside my clothes, I undress my soul too, and lay aside its sin. In the presence of God I lie down to rest, and to awaken a free man, with a new life.” What if we did that with our fears as well? Each night as we remove our clothes, remove our fears and lay them aside. Just don’t put them back on in the morning.
Thirdly, our fears have voices. Sometimes they are little voices that go off in our heads. “Don’t do that.” “You won’t like it.” “That’s going to be a big mistake.” Or the big voice that starts out with two little words, “What if...?” “What if it’s cancer?” “What if it hails on the corn before it gets picked?” “What if I made the wrong decision?”
I was talking to a woman at the storytelling conference. She asked me what I was doing. I told her I was writing the sermon for the following Sunday. She asked what it was about, and I gave her a bit of the run down about our silly fears. She started laughing and then told me the story of one time she had taken a special desert to her sons college graduation party. It was something with sherbet in it. She woke up in the middle of the night and was afraid she had left the sherbet out on the counter and forgot to put it in the freezer at her son’s house. She didn’t want to call and ask him to go check, since it was the middle of the night. But she was up all night fearing the worst: melted sherbet. All these little voices of our fears.
Those little fearful voices are trying to manipulate us into a very controlled, narrow, risk free, confining life. In the church we hear that little voice say things like, “We’ve tried doing that before; it’s not going to work.” Or, “We’ve never done anything like that in this church; I don’t think it will fly.” The voices of our fear creates ruts out of which we are afraid to deviate. The fear, and the voice of fear, tries to keep us from anything that looks like change.
Fear’s voice is allowed to control our lives as individuals, couples, families, and churches. Who allows those voices all that power? Who ultimately are the ones who listen to those voices and obey them? And on a deeper, scarier level, who creates those voices in the first place? If you realize you are the one who creates and maintains most of the voice of fear, at the same instant you realize you can, with God’s help, uncreate them. The only power the voice of fear has is the power you give it by listening to it.
And lastly, Jeremiah says our fears usually start out simple and uncluttered. What happens is, if we hold on to them for any length of time, they accumulate more stuff and become more complex. Like the idol that started out as a simple log of wood. Then the wood carvers gave it a shape and form and rough detail. Usually the form and faces they carved were scary looking, as if they were putting their fears into their art.
Then that carved piece of wood got adorned with silver and gold accessories. Behold! All of a sudden the thing is much more elaborate than when it started out. It has become a composite with so many additions that trying to find the original piece of wood underneath it all seems an impossible task. What started out simple, has become this pretentious and gaudy thing.
One of our most basic fears, according to psychologists, is the fear of abandonment. Imagine how that fear gets carved into us in childhood, and then takes on further shape in teenage years, and then on into adulthood in marriage. Then we pass that fear onto our kids and they start the cycle all over again. The wreckage and devastation caused by that one, ever embellished fear is immense.
The Lord, through Jeremiah, says to to us, “Take a long look at it. See it for what it really is. It’s like a “scarecrow in a melon field.” Or, I like the story about the uncle who wanted to humor his little nephew who had a large balloon shaped like a lion. “I’m scared of that big lion of yours,” said the uncle.
“Don’t be scared,” said the nephew. “You ought to see how small he looks when I let the air out.”
That’s what God wants too. God wants us to allow him to let the air out of our fears. See them in their smallest state. Then we can take care of them.
The only thing our fears do is sap our vitality and our very lives. Jeremiah is telling the people they need a safe place to stand -- a place where fear, like fog, evaporates. A place where we can use our energy to explore the wonders and possibilities that our True God gives us in the world that God has created for us.
To live in fear is to live under the stress of chronic threat. But it’s a threat that isn’t real. We then spend our lives trying to avoid that threat and not end up really living. If the threat and the fear is not real, think how much of our lives we have wasted. To really be alive, to live Jeremiah’s kind of life, God’s kind of life, is to live uncontrolled by our fears.
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