Free to Be Transformed

Romans 12:1-8          I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect. For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of yourself more highly than you ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned. For as in one body we have many members, and not all the members have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another. We have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us: prophecy, in proportion to faith; ministry, in ministering; the teacher, in teaching; the exhorter, in exhortation; the giver, in generosity; the leader, in diligence; the compassionate, in cheerfulness.

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In most apocalyptic, end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it kind of films you have one person or a few people who are the heroes.  The world has been destroyed – by nuclear holocaust or plague or some other great catastrophe. Most of the population has been destroyed.  But among the remnant, in the midst of chaos, there are a few individuals who are, in a sense, pure; they still have their ethics intact, and they will have the task of working together to re-create the world. 

Before they get to that point, though, these heroes have to fight the evil people because evil has taken control of the world.  It’s the classic cosmic battle of good versus evil; in these stories, good always wins the war, which is great.  But the important question that is not often asked is –

What then?

What will the good people do once they have taken back control of their own lives, when they have created a space where people can be freed from the tyranny of evil?  What will be their next step?  And the step after that?  I guess it’s not the stuff that blockbuster movies are made of, but I would like to know.

What will they do?  Will they fall prey to the same temptations that the evil rulers did before them?  Will they once again enslave people, only under a different name?  Or will they create a new society in which people are free to live in peace?

The last of the Hunger Games films is coming out this month.  I am sure it will include some really impressive special effects in the final battle between the forces of freedom and the evil, decadent Capital.  And at the end of the day, the good guys will win (I hope that doesn’t spoil it for anyone).  But there will not be a satisfactory answer to the question:  What will they do next?

It simply isn’t that exciting.  And in the movies, it hardly matters what they do next.  But in real life it does.

It’s the kind of stuff that fills much of the New Testament.  The epistles to the churches are there to help Christians figure out what comes next.  After they have turned away from a former way of life, which may have included home and job and family; after having turned their backs on the Roman Empire in a subtle but daring way; after they have turned their backs on idol worship and cultic rituals that all their friends and neighbors are participating in, what do they do next?

The Apostle Paul wrote letters to churches all over the Empire, encouraging and instructing them as they tried to live this new life, a life transformed by Christ.  It’s a serious matter, because you don’t become a Christian and then just continue to do everything the same as you did before. 

If you take seriously the work that God did in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, you can’t just go on with business as usual. 

The letters Paul wrote, which were usually addressed to a particular church about their particular needs, show that these new Christians were having some problems figuring what comes next.  We only have one side of the conversation, but the one side reveals a lot.

They were having trouble letting go of old ideas about socioeconomic status, the belief that those who have more money also, by rights, have more privileges.  They were having trouble letting go of judgmentalism.  They were having trouble letting go of old ideas about fairness, that you should return insult with insult, injury with injury.  They were having trouble letting go of the idea that you should care for your own but arm yourself against everyone else because you are all in competition with one another for scarce resources.  As Paul would say to the church, these were the ways of the world; these beliefs and habits were the former ways.

The former ways include everything before Christ.  They include all the stuff that Christ came to free us from – sinfulness born out of fear.  The former ways, which are so similar to the ways people are always behaving in the post-apocalyptic films –competing for scarce resources, killing or enslaving one another – these ways, are all born from fear.  Fear is what gets in the way of freedom.

The people in the Roman church, as well as the Corinthian church and the Galatian church, and all the other churches of the time, were having to figure out how to live in a way that was not determined by fear – fear of the powerful empire, fear of hunger, sickness, death, fear of others who might want to take something away from them.  Learning to live a life in which fear has no power.  That is a very hard thing.

We know, because there are many things that make us afraid.  At the top of the list this week is terrorism, which once again feels very urgent.  Terrorism is the great fear of this age – but it’s not alone.  We are afraid of nuclear war, plane crashes, car crashes, and weather events.  We are afraid of disease. We are afraid of the price of gas going up and the value of our investment portfolios going down.  We are afraid of losing a job or losing our friends.  We are afraid of not having enough to survive, and of not being enough for the people we love to love us in return.

The people Paul was addressing in his letters also had fears, probably very similar to ours – including the fear of being afraid.  And the worst thing about fear is that it prevents change.  Fear clings tightly to the way things are – which makes fear the enemy of faith.

Faith says, “Change!”  The invitation to faith is an invitation into a life transformed, step by step.

The first step is recognizing that something truly valuable is being offered.  It’s seeing that the life you have been living, a life ruled by fear and suspicion, and even vengeance, is no real life at all.  The first step is turning and seeing that there is this new possibility – and stepping into it.

The first step is the biggest, but it needs to be followed by more steps, into the life of discipleship.  To really know the freedom of Christ, we need to follow the path of discipleship, taking to heart all that Jesus taught, all that Paul reinforced in his letters. 

And we dare not miss one important thing in all this:  It’s God’s grace, and only God's grace, that makes it possible.  Rest assured, you don’t do this by yourself.  You don’t become a person of faith by your own bravery, cleverness, strength, or goodness. In fact, God’s grace has already done the work; all you need to do is step into it – present yourself, wholly and completely, body and soul, as a living sacrifice.

A living sacrifice – let us take care to understand this.  This is like the flaming candle that never wanes, the bush that burns but is not consumed.  As living sacrifices we give ourselves to God, for God’s purposes, but instead of losing ourselves we get life in return.  It’s like Jesus said: Those who want to save their life will lose it, but those who lose their life for my sake will find it.  To the world, this may sound like nonsense.  But what is nonsensical to the former ways is seen as truth to the new way.

Frederick Buechner offers us an eloquent definition of grace in his book Wishful Thinking.  There is one part of it that has been speaking to me these last few days, which is this: Grace is like God saying, “Here is the world.  Beautiful and terrible things will happen.  Don’t be afraid.  I am with you.”

Let you minds be renewed, your spirit freed, your life transformed. 

Free to Be Rich

1 Timothy 6:17-19    As for those who in the present age are rich, command them not to be haughty, or to set their hopes on the uncertainty of riches, but rather on God who richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment. They are to do good, to be rich in good works, generous, and ready to share, thus storing up for themselves the treasure of a good foundation for the future, so that they may take hold of the life that really is life.

Luke 12:13-21           Someone in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me.” But he said to him, “Friend, who set me to be a judge or arbitrator over you?” And he said to them, “Take care! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.” Then he told them a parable: “The land of a rich man produced abundantly. And he thought to himself, ‘What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops?’ Then he said, ‘I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, ‘Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.’ But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’ So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God.”

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How much is enough can be a hard thing to figure out.

Years ago, I worked as a server at a place called Hyde Park Bar & Grill.  It was the kind of place where servers would often sit down at the bar after they finished their shift and have a drink before leaving.  There was one young woman, Sue, who had a tendency to sit there a little longer than she should.  One evening while I was working Sue was sitting on a bar stool, as usual; and she asked the man next to her what I assumed was a rhetorical question: “What is my limit?  How much is enough?”  To which another server walking past replied, “Just before you get to too much.”

It was a very truthful and a very useless answer.  Because if that’s the question you are asking, you are never going to know the answer until you get to “too much.”

That question crossed my mind about the rich man in Jesus’ parable – whether he had crossed over from enough to too much.

The story comes on the heels of a conflict.  As he was teaching a great crowd of people, some random person calls out to Jesus, “Make my brother divide the inheritance with me.”  Perhaps he thought this could be classified as a miracle.  I know nothing about his brother; maybe he was such a Scrooge it would take a miracle to get his wallet opened.  Even so, it wasn’t the kind of miracle Jesus usually practiced.  And furthermore, Jesus knew that this was a problem the Law of Moses could handle just fine.  “Who set me to be a judge over you,” is his unsympathetic response.  Then he turns back to the crowd.

But he doesn’t seem to have dismissed the subject.  He says to them all, “Be on your guard against greed.  There was once a rich man …” and he’s off on a parable. 

There once was a rich man who had a problem – so much stuff he had run out of space to store it.  Such difficulties.  These days, we call that sort of thing a “first world problem” – the kind of problem that you are fortunate to have.  Poor Rich Man, his biggest problem was that he needed some bigger storage units.  This is me playing my imaginary violin. 

But this is where we have to be careful.  It’s easy for us to poke fun of the problem of having too much stuff.  Some of us have too much stuff and we know it.

I have friends who raised five children and built a nice big comfortable house for their big family. Then all their children grew up and left their house.  Then these children sent some of their stuff back to their parents’ house because there was room enough for it. You could say my friends are empty nesters, but their nest is not empty – it’s filled with their stuff, and their children’s stuff. 

Some of us have decided that this is how we will solve the problem:  We will just close the door on all the stuff and decline to acknowledge the problem.  And when we die, it will be our children’s problem.  Or, you might say, their inheritance.

We can laugh about the “too much stuff” problem.  But we have to be careful with this story.  Because it might not just about stuff.

The rich man might be thinking about his old age and the need of having enough to see him through what he hopes will be a long life.  This may be a story that speaks to our need to have something put away for the golden years.  And that is a more serious matter.

We all have to think about having enough laid up for the years of retirement.  It’s a worthy pursuit; none of us wants to be a burden on society or a burden on our children and grandchildren.  We want to be able to take care of ourselves for as long as we will be here.  We don’t have barns for grain storage, we have 401k’s.  And we think about how much will be enough.

Money managers and financial advisors like to talk about how much is enough.  There used to be a commercial that showed people walking around with giant numbers over their heads – the message was the importance of knowing how much you were going to need in your retirement account, and the greater sense of security you can have by knowing what that number is – and apparently carrying it around with you 24/7.

Sounds simple, I guess.  But I don’t think it really is so simple.  What do people do when they reach the point they have decided is enough?  Sometimes they change the number, move the goal post, because they don’t really believe there is such a thing as too much when it comes to savings.  Do they stop putting away, like they had planned to do?  That would be like Sue figuring out how much was enough and walking away from the bar before it became too much.  It would be nice, but it didn’t often happen.

The Rich Man might have had the same problem.  He might have recognized that he had enough, but what would he do next? 

He looks at his barns full of grain and says to himself, you have ample goods.  Relax.  Eat, drink, and be merry – not a bad response to the good generosity of God.  The land had produced abundantly; and the land is likely to continue to produce for him.  Clearly, Jesus is saying this man’s wealth is a gift from God.  It is certainly appropriate to appreciate God’s blessings, eat drink and be merry.  But there is something missing in this rich man’s response.

Is it enough to be rich toward oneself if one is not rich toward others?  That seems to be the message in Jesus’ story – that this man, in his concern for setting up enough provisions for himself, has failed to be generous with others.  And according to Jesus, that failure is essentially a failure to live richly toward God.

This is a story about greed – one of the Seven Deadly Sins.  We know greed is bad, in spite of what Gordon Gekko said.  We know it’s bad but we don’t always recognize it.  It disguises itself as something good, for a while, but one day you may notice you have this inexplicable sickness.  The Avett Brothers sing about it in a song called Ill With Want.

I am sick with wanting

And it’s evil how it’s got me,

Every day is worse than the one before.

The more I have the more I think:

I'm almost where I need to be

If only I could get a little more.

You see the trickiness of it?  It is wonderful to work and reap the fruit of one’s labor, to enjoy the goodness of God’s gifts.  But at a certain point it crosses a line; it stops being a force for good and starts being a cause of harm. People will differ in their opinions about where the line should be drawn.  Jesus draws the line at the place where you fail to live richly toward others, because that is the same as failing to live richly toward God.

The letter to Timothy holds a warning to rich people against putting their hopes in the uncertainty of riches, but instead in the certainty of God’s provision.  To store up the treasure of a good foundation not by building bigger barns, but by generosity toward others.  This is how one takes hold of the life that really is life.

We have a choice.  It’s a choice between being enslaved to greed, to our fears about having enough, and being free to live richly in generosity and good works, in love toward others.  We have a choice between the false freedom that material riches offer us and the real freedom Jesus offers us.

Maybe you can think of someone you have known who lived this kind of freedom.  Someone who lived simply, with gratitude.  Someone who took pleasure in giving to others without expecting something back.  Someone who just seemed to be on to something, some secret about peace and contentment and fulfillment.  These are the people to watch, and go and do likewise.

Last week we focused on remembering who is the Lord of our life, an awareness that frees us to live.  Today we think about how the concept of “enough” can free us to live richly in the ways that really matter – free us from worry, free us for blessing.  Next week we will turn our attention to the possibility of being free to make choices that will truly bring us joy and contentment – a transformative freedom.

Until then, in your daily prayers let this question guide you:  who are the people in our world who are living rich toward God? 

Free to Know the Lord

There is a new biopic about Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple.  It’s not the first, and may not be the last.  He was a fascinating person; a bit of an enigma.  Jobs was not especially kind or likeable, from all the reports I have heard.  He was not a gifted programmer, like his partner Wozniak.  He was not a businessman.  What was he? What was his particular genius?  He was a creator.

In one part of the movie, he obsesses about the dimensions of his new computer, the Next.  It was a black cube, but apparently the dimensions had to be off just a fraction of an inch for the human eye to perceive it as a cube.  The production staff got it wrong, and Steve was not satisfied with the results.  He actually had a million other problems more urgent than this, but this was the one he obsessed about.

It had something to do with his vision about what people want.  He knew that if he created things that were good for something – that is, useful – and a delight to the eyes – that is, beautiful – people would desire them.  Covet them.  Lust after them.  He was right, wasn’t he?

The trick was just to get the price at a manageable level.  If Apple computers were a lot more expensive than other computers, it was just too great a hurdle for most people, as badly as they might want it.  But when they found the sweet spot, that price which was a little higher than the others, but justifiable to the consumer, the sales would come rolling in. 

We are irrational beings, but we are rational too.  We want what we want, and then we want to justify our wants.

That’s the story of Adam and Eve and the fruit. 

Here they are in this beautiful, perfect garden.  They have everything they need to be content.  They have all the food they need, they have every variety of plant and animal, and they have each other.  I assume they also have the perfect climate, because they have no need of clothes.  They are free to eat, sleep, play, work – whatever they want whenever they want.  And they have a close, intimate relationship with God, their creator.  What more could they want?

Well, it turns out there is something more, and it’s right in the middle of the garden.

They didn’t seem to pay it much attention in the beginning.  They had what they needed; they were content.  The tree of the knowledge of good and evil was there, but it was not to be touched.  End of story. 

But then here comes the serpent with that nasty thought.  Here is something nice that you don’t have.  You want it, don’t you?   It’s tasty, it’s beautiful, and it will make you smart.  Trust me.  This fruit from “the tree of knowledge of good and evil” is pretty great stuff.  Why shouldn’t you have it? 

It took a minimal amount of arm-twisting for Eve and Adam to find justification for taking something that had been forbidden.  Unfortunately for us all, it was kind of a deal-breaker. 

We turn to the story of Adam and Eve in the garden again and again to try to understand what went wrong and why.  Granted, it’s not a factual account of creation.  It’s not history.  It’s a story – one that has much to teach, but today I want to look at what it says to us about freedom. 

The story of Adam and Eve is a story of two people created for freedom – within the bounds of the garden.  The garden, where God has dominion and provides for all their needs.  In this context, Adam and Eve are free of want, free of fear, free of pain.  They are free to love and free to enjoy. 

But the moment they shift their focus from what they have to what they do not have, their freedom doesn’t seem like enough.  Suddenly, they are bored with every other fruit in the garden.  Suddenly, life is unfair because there is something they need, something they have to have, something everyone else has so why can’t they have it too.  Well, maybe not that last part, since there didn’t seem to be anybody else around back then.  But I think we all know what this feels like – to covet something.

It’s very hard for us to distinguish our wants from our needs; this is something we learn at a very young age.  Last summer during vacation Bible school I had a little boy explain to me the difference between a want and a need; all the while I was imagining his mother teaching him that very lesson in the supermarket check out line, the valley of temptation for all boys and girls.

Because we can’t make this distinction very well, we spend a lot of time fretting about what we have and what we don’t have, being anxious about having enough.  And when we are anxious about what we have or don’t have, we have lost our sense of gratitude.

When we have lost our sense of gratitude, when we have succumbed to the belief in scarcity, that we don’t have enough, it is because of one thing: we have forgotten who is the Lord of our lives. 

To whom does this all belong?  To God.  To quote Madeleine L’Engle, “Time is God’s.  We are God’s.  Creation is God’s.” Everything we have is a gift from God.  From that perspective, why ever not be grateful?

I’m not a doctor, but I can tell you this: Gratitude is an antidote to anxiety.  Last fall we practiced a month of gratitude, and we kept daily gratitude journals, where we practiced writing down three things every day for which we were grateful.  Before we started, I heard from some that they were doubtful they could come up with even one thing every day, let alone three things.  Soon they discovered how easy it was.  For many of us, this one little thing improved our lives: the daily practice of gratitude.

Perhaps Adam and Eve simply forgot that the garden of creation was God’s.  That they were part of God’s creation, and as such, cared for and loved by their creator.  What they definitely were not, were the masters of the garden.  If they only could have remembered this important truth, they would have danced through the garden day after day, enjoying the colors, the scents, the tastes and the music surrounding them.  This would have been their worship.

A wise man, Abraham Joshua Heschel, said that you are sure to lose your ability to truly worship when you start to take things for granted.  He said,  “Indifference to the sublime wonder of being is the root of sin.”   

The sin that enslaves us – this is what Jesus told us.  But Jesus also told us that he came to set us free again.  God made this good creation – and that includes us.  God made us free for love and joy; for the peace that passes understanding, for contentment.

We will always do battle with sin.  We will always be susceptible to the fear of scarcity, over the trust in God’s providence.  We will always, again and again, find it hard to remember that we are not the Lord.  These fears and false beliefs will hold us captive.  But the truth will make us free, once again, free.

We are free to know the Lord.  And knowing the Lord makes us free.  Next week we will look at how this makes us free to be rich – in the ways that truly matter.  But throughout this week, let this question guide your prayer:  What are the impediments, the fears, in your life that keep you from living free? 

Give these to Jesus, the one who makes us free … again.