Perfect Submission

James 3:13-4:3, 7-8    

Mark 9:30-37     

Sometimes, when I read certain gospel passages, I think about a young Chinese woman I knew several years ago. She was a student where I was serving as campus minister. She started coming to me because she was interested in Christianity. So we began getting together to read the gospels. One day as we were working our way through a passage, she stopped reading and looked at me with this perplexed expression on her face and asked, “Why did he say that?”

I felt kind of stupid then, because I didn’t know. In fact, I was surprised at her surprise, because I had never thought about why he said what he said. I am embarrassed to say that I didn’t have anything like a good answer for her. But she got me thinking about how profoundly strange the gospel is.

It is strange – and we have to realize that the disciples must have looked as perplexed as my Chinese friend did when Jesus said to them, “The Son of Man is to be betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him, and three days after being killed, he will rise again.” Yet, although they didn’t understand, they were afraid to ask.

Why were they afraid to ask?

I have been asking this question this past week. I have heard two likely reasons. One is that they were afraid because they didn’t want to admit their ignorance. They would be ashamed to admit they didn’t understand. Because then someone might call them stupid, and who wants to be called stupid? No one. We are more offended by being called stupid than if we were charged with any of the seven deadly sins, so it is quite likely that the disciples wished to avoid appearing dull or ignorant. But there might have been another reason, too.

Perhaps they were afraid that what he was saying was true. Perhaps they didn’t fully understand it but they understood enough to know that what he was saying didn’t sound good to them. or easy. Or fun. Perhaps they were afraid of knowing more.

Now, that is very human, isn’t it? They understood enough to know that this was not something they wanted to understand.

But as they continued on their walk, they lagged behind Jesus. Probably by intent. It wouldn’t be all that surprising if they wanted, at this moment, to put some distance between themselves and him. After all, he has just said something very off-putting.

And while they walked, they talked among themselves. About what? Were they talking about the things Jesus had been teaching them? Were they talking about these strange things he had said and what they could possibly mean? Nope. They were talking about their comparative greatness.

I could spend a lot of time marveling at how the disciples went, in a matter of minutes, from being afraid to ask him what he meant to arguing about which of them was the greatest. It’s laughable, isn’t it? How do you go from being an ignorant fool who is afraid to acknowledge his ignorance to asserting you are the greatest?

I’ll tell you what I think. It is fear that does it. Fear can make us grasping, selfish, avaricious people.

There is a character that captures this phenomenon well in Jane Smiley’s novel, The Greenlanders. This is a story about the men and women who lived in Greenland in the 14^th century.

This was a cold and inhospitable place, far away from the rest of the inhabited world. I have read that the early Viking settlers named the place Greenland in the hopes that it would attract many more settlers, settlers who would discover when they got there that, in reality, it was not very green.

The winters in Greenland were long and harsh, such that the primary concern for these settlers was having enough food to survive until spring. When the snow began to fall, they led the cows and sheep indoors. When the spring arrived, they carried the animals back outside, because they were too weak to walk.

There are stories of the stronger, healthier men making the rounds of the settlements in the late winter to check on the others. They sometimes found whole households had taken to their beds, even lying on top of one another to stay warm. These families had run out of food and fuel, and merely hoped to sleep until spring – and then, hopefully, awaken.

During one terrible winter, the priest was making the rounds. He came to the home of a woman named Vigdis. He opened her door without knocking and was stunned by what he saw. Vigdis was standing at a table cutting meat and stuffing food into her mouth. She was, in fact, surrounded by food – cheeses, hanging birds, sealmeat and blubber, vats of sourmilk. She was enormously fat, fatter than he had ever seen her before. Smiley wrote that the priest “saw at once that she had responded to the hunger of the settlement by consuming and consuming without cease.”

She had been hoarding food ­– probably for ten years. As the people around her were starving to death she was growing ever more gluttonous. As men and women were vanishing to skin and bones, as parents were burying their children who died of starvation, Vigdis was growing fatter and fatter. She was killing her neighbors with her greed. The men who worked for her were willing to turn a blind eye because she gave them enough food for their families to survive.

The title of this chapter of the book is “The Devil.”

Fear can make us grasp in some unbecoming ways. And it was very likely fear at work among the disciples – fear that the one who was leading them, Jesus, was walking into a deadly trap – which drew them into a boasting contest about who was the greatest. They had already heard him say that, to be his followers, they would need to deny themselves. They had heard him say that they would need to take up their cross and follow him.

They had also seen him in all his transfigured glory, earlier in this same chapter, when he ascended the mountain and was lit by a brightness that was almost blinding, when Moses and Elijah appeared at his side. They had seen the power and the glory, and they had been told about the suffering and submission. They did not care to see how these things would be reconciled with each other.

The disciples did not like the idea of suffering and obedience unto death any more than we like this idea. We prefer the easy path, although we admire Jesus for taking the harder path. In contrast to these first disciples, we have actually grown quite comfortable with the notion of Jesus’ suffering. But we are still no different from them when it comes to comprehending what it means to follow him.

“Who is wise and understanding among you?” This is the question James asks us in his epistle. Or, as the disciples might ask, “Who is the greatest?”

It is not the ones who are most boastful. Nor is it the ones who are grasping, selfish, greedy. This is, James says, earthly, unspiritual, even devilish wisdom.

When we are confronted with the invitation to submit our wills and our bodies to God’s will, we are more likely to display some of that devilish wisdom and grasp for whatever we can get our hands on – like Vigdis hoarding food, like the disciples jostling for the position on top. The more we feel threatened, the more we will grasp. Fear and insecurity never drive good leadership or lead to greatness.

On the contrary, James would say, submission to God is born of that pure wisdom from above, which yields gentleness, mercy, and peace. In this paradox of strength and submission, suffering and glory, we find salvation. Or, as Fanny Crosby put it in her beloved hymn,

Perfect submission, all is at rest,

I in my Savior am happy and blest,

Watching and waiting, looking above,

Filled with his goodness, lost in his love.[i]

May you be a follower of Jesus, wherever he leads you. May you seek not to be the first, but to submit to God’s wisdom, may you find your rest in him.

Photo: Gluttony knows no limits. Portrayal of the Seven Deadly Sins on the Palazzo Ducale in Venice. By Giovanni Dall'Orto - Own work, Attribution, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4787886

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[i] Blessed Assurance, Jesus Is Mine!

How to Follow Jesus

Mark 8:27-38     

I have a small collection of crosses in my office, made of a variety of different kinds of material – wire, ceramic, clay, wood, glass. There is one that is a souvenir from Sacre Coeur Basilica in Paris; one is a souvenir from Mo-Ranch, the Presbyterian conference center in the Texas Hill Country. One was given to me by a man I met at a youth workcamp; he carved them out of purple heart wood and gave one to each of the chaperones. I have one that I made out of pieces of cut glass fused together. They are all beautiful.

To say the cross is beautiful – this is something no one would have said back in the first century. We have mostly forgotten that the cross was an instrument of torture, a gruesome form of capital punishment. The cross doesn’t have the same impact today as it used to. We wear crosses made of beautiful gold and silver, some with precious gems mounted on them. In our homes and in the church, we display crosses of smoothed, stained, and polished wood and shiny brass. They are beautiful; they are works of art.

The singer Madonna made the cross into a fashion craze back in the eighties. Every teenage girl of any faith, or no faith, wanted one. Someone told me, back then, about some girls shopping for crosses who asked the store clerk, “Do you have any of those kind with the little man on them?”

Well, we roll our eyes at these foolish girls who don’t know what a crucifix is, who don’t even know who that little man is or what he’s doing on the cross. How can they be so ignorant? In fact, we roll our eyes impatiently at Peter and the other disciples, too. What is the matter with them? How could they not understand what Jesus is saying to them? Take up your cross and follow me – don’t they know what he is all about?

About twenty years ago Ben Affleck and Matt Damon made a film called Dogma, a satire about the church. The Catholic League didn’t think it was funny; they declared it blasphemous. Affleck and Damon play two fallen angels who are trying to get back into heaven by exploiting a loophole in church law, or, dogma. 

George Carlin plays a cardinal in New Jersey who decides the crucifix – you know, the cross with the little man on it – is just too much of a downer. So he decides to rebrand his church to create a more uplifting, feel-good message: he takes Jesus down off the cross and creates this new icon, a brand new Jesus, for his church – a cartoony-looking guy with a big toothy grin giving a thumbs up and a wink. Really. It’s called Buddy Christ. 

The cardinal turns the entire message of the gospel upside down, because, you know, it’s depressing. Now it’s a message of good times, prosperity, living your best life now. 

No more “take up your cross and follow me.” Replace that with “God just wants you to be happy.” It’s tempting, is it not? 

I have to admit, it’s tempting. Because taking up my cross sounds like hard work, possibly quite painful.

I know it shouldn’t be such a problem, the idea of pain, because millions of people go to the gym every day to willingly inflict pain on themselves. But somehow it is a problem. Not too many people want to take up their crosses and follow him.

And I daresay that Peter and the other disciples felt that way too. None of them wanted to follow Jesus this way! Take up your cross? No one in their right mind would willingly submit to the cross of the Romans. It was ugly, it was brutal, it was the worst kind of death imaginable. 

Can we blame Peter for taking Jesus aside to speak with him privately, not wanting to be seen as disrespectful toward him, but sincerely worried that Jesus was sending the wrong message? The cross! This would be seriously discouraging to any potential followers.

The message of the cross is a tough message. I don’t need to tell you that.

And they struggled with it, as we struggle with it; because we know, and they knew, the beautiful things that Jesus preached and taught and did. He healed. He demonstrated compassion. It was beautiful. And he did it not just for his friends, not just for people who were in his group, people who were like him. He had compassion for even the outcasts, even the “sinners.” His inclusivity was beautiful. 

His disciples should have known this better than most, because among them were some of those “sinners.” Matthew, a tax collector, considered unclean and borderline acceptable by his own people due to the nature of his work. Yet Jesus called him, saying “follow me.” He was included; he was loved. It was great, wasn’t it?

Yes, they were bewildered; yes, they were continually surprised by the turns Jesus would take, the answers he would give to the Pharisees. They were surprised, no doubt, by the company he would keep. At every turn, they were surprised by him. But it was beautiful, wasn’t it? The things he did? So beautiful, in fact, they couldn’t see the inevitable path it would take toward the cross.

They chose to follow Jesus, I suppose, because they could do no other. Even now, at this moment when he draws a line in the sand saying, “On this side, the cross. If you want to follow me, come over here. Make up your minds.” And they still followed him.

I’m not sure they yet understood what he meant by that. Don’t we still struggle to understand what it means to take up our cross? What is your cross? What is my cross?

It isn’t just the sufferings of daily life, which we all have. We all know the sufferings of living in these mortal bodies with aches and pains and fatigue. And we know the emotional suffering that seems to be part and parcel of being in relationships with other people. These are just in the nature of human life on earth.

I think there is more meaning in the notion of taking up your cross and following Jesus. For his suffering, his sacrifice, was not without meaning or purpose.

Jesus drew a line in the sand that day when he told the disciples what it would be like to follow him. But there were, perhaps, other times when Jesus crossed over the lines that others had drawn, which tell us something more about what this means – to take up your cross. 

He broke rules. He crossed lines that religion had drawn and went over to stand beside the lepers, the tax collectors, the gentiles. He crossed lines that the world had drawn when he spoke of overturning the order of things – the last shall be first and the first shall be last. 

The world still draws these lines. And here is something that is as true today as it was then: the world does not smile on those who cross the lines.

To stand with the poor, the drug-addicted, the homeless, the refugees, the prisoners. To show compassion for the downtrodden, the least of these who are Jesus’ brothers and sisters. 

To stand where Jesus stands. Take up your cross and follow him.

“If any want to become my followers,” Jesus says. This is the way you will go. You might not be in the popular crowd. You won’t join the others in scoffing at the dirty guy who lives under the bridge. You won’t remain silent while the others are condemning whole races or ethnic groups as criminals or condemning anyone because of their skin color or gender or religion or sexual orientation. You won't , because you will recognize the humanity they share with you.

You, like Jesus, will be scorned for your actions, for doing the unpopular thing.

If any want to become my followers, Jesus says. You will separate yourself, stand apart, from those who are in it for self-gain – whether it be material profit or just being well-liked. You will push back against those who would put stumbling blocks before the least of God’s children – the weakest, the neediest, the most vulnerable. 

This is your cross: to do justice, love mercy, walk humbly with your God.

It is beautiful, isn’t it?

Photo: A cross at Faith Presbyterian Church, Huber Heights, OH. It's made out of our broken things. 

Learning Compassion

Mark 7:24-37     

So Jesus is on his way to Tyre, but he is coming from Galilee where he has been trolled, you might say, by Pharisees. They have been following him around, apparently looking for opportunities to criticize him. Of course, they found one: uncouth table habits. Apparently, they didn’t wash their hands before eating. No doubt, they ate with their hands, so it is a little bit gross. But it was not so much hygiene that the Pharisees are worried about, it’s protocol. Their chief complaint is that Jesus and his disciples don’t follow the tradition of the elders, a ritual hand washing.

I don’t know if Jesus had a beef with this particular tradition. But what bugs him is their hypocrisy. The way they abandon the commandment of God and hold on to human tradition. God did not say, “wash your hands.” That was your mother.

So, while washing your hands is a nice thing, Jesus feels that it is being used as a stand-in for the more important, more challenging things that God actually does command. It’s easy to wash your hands; it’s a lot harder, say, to love your enemies, forgive those who harm you, heal broken spirits, welcome the sinner. If all it took to be a Christian was to wash your hands, sermons would be a lot shorter.

I suspect that Jesus neglected to wash his hands on-purpose, just so he could have this conversation.

He takes the opportunity to tell the Pharisees, and everyone else listening in, nothing outside of you can defile you. It doesn’t matter how you eat or what you eat. It is what comes out of you that defiles you. Particularly, what comes from your heart.

So, just like that, he declares all foods kosher. No problem. Eat whatever you want. God doesn’t care what goes in your mouth; it is what is in your heart that really matters.

Then he takes off, leaving them with this new idea to chew on. And he goes to the region of Tyre. Tyre is in Syria. This is a non-Jewish area, so the people Jesus will encounter here are gentiles.

Right away, a gentile woman approaches him. She is Syrophoenician, meaning she is Greek culturally, of Syrian ethnicity. She is not at all Jewish.

And she approaches him because her daughter is suffering. She has an unclean spirit, a demon. This child is possessed by evil.

Now, we don’t usually talk about being possessed by spirits, or demons, or evil. But even though we don’t use these terms, we ought to be able to understand these problems. When you hear that she was possessed by an unclean spirit you may suppose she is suffering from a severe mental or physical illness. It doesn’t really matter what it is. A sickness that has no known cure or treatment, that causes nothing but unrelenting suffering, can certainly seem evil.

And the suffering is equally intense for Jews and gentiles alike.

But this is a gentile woman. In a gentile land. Jesus is out of his area code. Why he went there, I don’t know. Mark offers no explanation. But he does, and word about him and the amazing things he does has spread this far. And this mother doesn’t let tradition or custom stop her from approaching him because her daughter’s life is at stake. She bowed before him – stopping him in his tracks – and she begged him to heal her daughter.

She has cast off her dignity, she has put her body on the line, taking the chance that she will be brutally thrown aside. And she begs him for mercy.

And the Jesus we know and love – what do we think he would do? He would look at her with kindness. He would go down on one knee to get at eye level with her and tell her she matters, her daughter matters. And he would follow her back to her house, lay hands on this girl and bring peace to her body and soul. This is the Jesus we know and worship and love.

But that is not what he did.

He looked at her and said, “I’m not gonna throw the children’s food to the dogs.”

There is so much packed in that response. It says I am here for the children of Israel, God’s chosen ones. I am not here for you. It says they are special and you are the opposite of special. It says you are lower than a human being – you are a dog, and I don’t mean a pet chihuahua.  I mean a dirty dog.

And we just can’t believe he said it. We can’t believe he would be so cruel.

Everything about this exchange says that he just wants her to go away. You would expect her to skulk off quietly, begging forgiveness for the trouble.

Yet, she surprises us – about as much as Jesus surprised us with his words – when she says –

Yes, but even the dogs get to eat the children’s crumbs.

This woman knows what she needs. She musters up the courage to push for it. She bets that even though she won’t be first in line, she might be second. She takes a chance that there is more than enough mercy for even the dogs that sit under the table waiting for crumbs to fall.

She is amazing in her boldness, her persistence in asking for what she needs. And Jesus is amazing in his response.

When we say about Jesus that he was human in every way, we should believe that he was human in this way too – that he might make a mistake. And when we say that he was without sin, we might mean that he was willing and able to correct his mistakes. That alone is quite enough, and it is much more than you could say about many of us much of the time. Jesus, holding at the same time both human and divine natures, was on a learning curve.

Having just schooled the Pharisees about God’s law versus human tradition on the matter of food, he now gets schooled by a Syrophoenician woman about God’s law versus human tradition on the matter of people. Yes, Jesus was sent to the children of Israel, but God’s grace doesn’t end there. And confronted with this truth, Jesus says Yes.

After leaving Tyre, he journeys in the region of the Decapolis, another gentile area, and he is presented with a man who is deaf and unable to speak. Again, a gentile. This time, he says nothing about dogs, nothing about who is worth his time, but he simply takes this man in hand and heals him.

Later on, in the next chapter, Jesus is teaching great crowds of people, still in the gentile regions. And he turns to his disciples and says to them, I have compassion for them. All of them.

Compassion is something that we have to learn. Even Jesus learned it, and quite possibly he learned it from a Syrophoenician woman who wasn’t wiser than he was – she just needed her daughter to be made well.

We learn by experience, through our encounters with others, if we allow ourselves to learn, just as Jesus did.

We learn that our shared humanity makes us one family, even if our languages and customs and religious practices are different.

We learn that loving others in the manner God loves us involves giving much more than demanding. And in giving, we become the model of Christlike love. In giving, the way Jesus gave, we show the world the love God has for them.

Compassion is the good news. Compassion is the mission. And here is the message for you and me:

Be like the Syrophoenician woman and stand up courageously for what is good and right. Stand up for yourself and stand up for others who need you to.

Be like Jesus who changes course when he sees that his initial response was wrong. Believe me, if Jesus is not too proud to correct himself, neither should you and I be.

Be compassionate, as Jesus is compassionate. Putting yourself in someone else’s shoes. Asking yourself how you would want to be treated in that same situation. Pushing aside preconceptions about “these kind of people” for the sake of better understanding the flesh and blood person before you.

Learn compassion. Now is a good day to begin.

Sermon: No Longer Strangers, Part 6: Suiting Up

Joshua 24:1-2, 14-18  

Ephesians 6:10-20

Anyone know what Charlie Sheen is up to these days? Some years ago, you might recall, he had a spectacularly public breakdown. Although, not if you asked him. If you asked Charlie he would have said, “Winning!” because that became his mantra.

When asked about his diagnosis of bipolar disorder, he said, “Not bipolar. It’s bi-winning! Winning here, winning there…” His conversations were colored with staccato bursts of “winning!” It appeared to be a kind of game – a mind game, where the object is saying it enough times in the hope that will make it true, talking oneself into believing it despite the clear reality. Winning!

He started something, didn’t he?

Winning is big. Winning is huge. #winning. Winning at life. Winning so much we get bored with winning. So. Much. Winning.

It might get boring, but it has to be about winning, because this is a zero-sum game – if you’re not winning you’re losing. And who wants to be a loser?

No one wants to be a loser. I don’t. I like winning. I like winners.

Most people do. Winning at games, winning at politics, winning at business, winning at friendship – winning at friendship? Yes, when life is a zero-sum game, there are winners and losers in everything.

The people of Israel were just like everybody. They liked winning. On this fine day when they stood before the threshold of the Promised Land. After 40 years in the wilderness, homeless, property-less, they were finally on the verge of winning.

And their leader, Joshua stood up before them and reminded them of all the trials they had faced, of all that they had overcome, and of the great opportunity that lay before them now, so close they could almost taste the milk and honey. And he offered them these words: Choose this day whom you will serve. Whether it be the gods your ancestors served back in the land they came from, or the gods these other people serve in the region we are in now. Choose. As for me and my household, Joshua declared, we will serve the Lord.

And the people all cried out in answer, Yes, yes, we too will serve the Lord. He has done great things, he has brought us through the wilderness, he has protected us and he has brought us to this place where we are winners. We are winning. We will serve the God of winning.

Perhaps they didn’t say it quite that way. But I imagine they felt like the Bad News Bears when they turn their losing streak around, the Hoosiers when they win the championship game, Rudy when the coach finally puts him into the game and he makes the winning play for Notre Dame, Rocky Balboa when he beats Apollo Creed. Winning.

They liked the feeling of winning as much as we like the feeling of winning. And they said yes, we will serve the Lord who has brought us so far. We will remember his deeds, his faithfulness to us. We will.

But then they didn’t – not always. The promise they made was at times forgotten. Because life got complicated, offering too many options – in this new land they took there were the remnants of other gods and forms of worship, interesting things they had not seen before, perhaps. Opportunities to hedge their bets. You know, if the Lord doesn’t seem to be helping you quite as much as you want, you can try this other god over here – what can it hurt?

Have you ever said that – what can it hurt?

And these temptations, these other gods, come in all forms, we’re not just talking about stone figures. There are endless forms of idols that offer us opportunities to be winners. They seem harmless; they usually appear as something good. These “spiritual forces of evil,” as the letter to Ephesians phrases it, look like winning. And winning feels so good, it just makes you feel like you ought to keep on winning and winning and winning – at any cost.

The struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, the letter says, but against the cosmic powers of this present darkness. It is no wonder we get confused.

But we reach for the armor to fight the battle, to keep on winning. Breastplate, the shield, the helmet to protect us from losing, to keep us fighting another day. Suit up! Game on!

The problem is we forget what battle we are fighting. We forget what winning is and what losing is. We forget what kind of armor we really need.

It’s the risk of living in this world – as the letter says, “this present darkness” – that we can become habituated to just about anything. We can become so well adjusted to the darkness it seems like light. and when confronted with dishonesty and theft, say things like, “anybody would have done the same.”

And because anybody would have done it, we will excuse it, overlook it. We might even draw the conclusion that we, too, need to do it – cheat and lie and steal, because it looks like the kind of armor we will need to survive. To thrive. To win.

Then when we stand up before Joshua, full of enthusiasm, and say, “Far be it that we should forsake the Lord to serve other gods … we also will serve the Lord, for he is our God” how truthful is our proclamation?

I remember a church I did some preaching at years ago. The church was about 40 years old, and had been about the same size for those 40 years. Then suddenly they started to get an influx of people. A couple would come visit, express an interest in joining the church. Another couple would come. In a period of a few months they received about 25 new members. They were all coming from the same place. The Methodist church in town had a new pastor and things were not going well. People were leaving the church and going across town to the Presbyterian Church. And the Presbyterian congregation was overjoyed. Winning!

This is what happens when it becomes a zero-sum game. Sheep-stealing feels like winning.

I met a new-church pastor last week, and he told me that when someone comes to them from another church, feeling wounded by that other church, they send them back. They encourage them to reconcile; so far as they are able, to make peace; to not spread ill-will by their actions, but to seek the good of all. Because we are interconnected; our loss is their loss and our gain is their gain. This is not zero-sum. It’s either win-win or lose-lose.

The truth, which we might forget, is that we are the church wherever we go and whoever we are with. To take satisfaction in our neighbor’s loss, even if everybody else is doing it, is to become alienated from the way of Christ. The words of our Confession of 1967 affirm that the church is both gathered and dispersed to do the will of God. And as the church is dispersed, “the quality of their relations with other persons is the measure of the church’s fidelity.”

Winning. This is winning. Not just what we do in here and with one another, but the quality of our relations with others wherever we go.

So we must suit up with the armor of God. Not to be confused with steel and iron outfits that allow us to make war on each other. I am always a little bit bothered by this imagery of armor. Ever since the time I went to a birthday party where the child was given a “whole armor of God” playsuit. So this child could have play dates with his Christian friends and they could put on their whole armor of God suits and beat up on each other. The message seems to get lost in the application.

The truth is this: there is no way to win when we lose the ability to distinguish the dark from the light. There is no human-made armor that can protect us from the weapons that will pierce our hearts and destroy our souls. There will always be a better weapon to match and beat our armor and shields and helmets.

True winning is putting on the armor of God, clothing ourselves in truth and righteousness, faith and peace; taking these with us out into the world; seeking reconciliation with all God’s children. In this way we draw ourselves closer to God.

So, suit up. March on in the light of God.

Photo credit: By john - armorUploaded by Urbourbo, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14951910

No Longer Strangers, Part 5: Overflowing Life

Ephesians 5:15-20

Time is something we think about often enough. We have a popular saying: Life is too short.

Too short for what?

Life is too short to be sad, to hold grudges, to not celebrate. Life is too short to worry. Life is too short to be on a diet, to live on low-fat everything, to forgo cake and champagne or any of the good stuff! Life is too short to stay in a bad job, a bad relationship, or to live a lie. Life is too short for a long story, life is too short to talk slowly, life is too short to waste a minute of it.

In the immortal words of Ferris Bueller, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

Clearly, there is a wide range of ideas about what life ought to be used for. No doubt there is a wide range of ideas about what wise living should look like. What do the scriptures say wise living should look like?

We know from the context, the entirety of this letter, that the life God has intended for us is to seek reconciliation with God and with others. To know ourselves as God’s beloved and seek to imitate God’s love in our lives and relationships with the world. To let that love be reflected in all we do, making the most of the time we have.

The key to making the most of the time is to feel the urgency of it but avoid becoming anxious about it. A sense of urgency will motivate you to do what needs to be done, to take the risks that ought to be taken. We need that sense of urgency. But anxiety is another thing; anxiety will paralyze you, making you afraid to do anything at all.

I could easily become anxious when I think about the minutes ticking by, the sand sifting through the hourglass, knowing that as each day passes I have one day less ahead of me. And yet, when I allow this anxiety to overcome me, I am failing to do the very thing I intend to be doing, the thing I ought to be doing – seizing the moment, making the most of the time. I am failing to live in this precious moment that is given to me.

Make the most of the time, the letter says to us.

A textual tidbit I learned this past week about this phrase, making the most of the time – it is a Greek word, exagorazomenoi. Within it we see the Greek word for marketplace – agora. And it literally means to snap up all chances of a bargain at the marketplace. If you see a great deal on a bag of apples, take it – it will be worth it. And if you see a great deal on a blanket, take it. Take the opportunities that are presented to you when they are worthwhile, without stewing too much over whether there might be a better one somewhere or if this is the appropriate type of apple or blanket. Let go of whatever is getting in your way of taking the good opportunity that is before you.

That is an enlightening way of hearing the phrase, making the most of the time. Seizing the opportunity to do something good. And to be looking for those opportunities to do something good. This is life abundant and overflowing.

How can we as the church, the body of Christ, do that?

How can we pay attention to the incredible bargains that are offered to us and seize them?

Take church meetings, for example.

I think of church meetings, because I have spent a lot of time in church meetings and thinking about church meetings. And I know there is a lot of time wasted in meeting. I have sat in some meetings where we let hours go down the drain as we rehash things that have gone before, things that are really of no consequence today, or things we dislike but have no power to change. Sadly, neglecting what we might be doing now, how we might be making the most of the time.

I have been in meetings that are the equivalent of pushing the food around on our plates. An hour passes by and no active steps have been taken, no concrete decisions made. Nothing is changed.

And mostly, I have been in meetings where there are too few present. Most people don’t come to the meetings. Maybe because they don’t like meetings – they have been in too many of the kind of meetings I have just described. But maybe because they don’t know they are needed. They assume that they are neither needed nor wanted, because others are already doing it.

Of course, we must realize that this business of meeting, discussing, planning – the good, the bad, and the meh – this is all part of the business of being church. Could we do it better? No doubt. But we start where we are and go from there. What are the possibilities you can see?

Even as you read this there are incredible opportunities for us to be church all around us. In our city, there is the National Folk Festival coming up in a few weeks, an event that will draw thousands of people here. How can we be a part of helping this beautiful thing happen? How can we welcome the strangers in our midst? There will be a lot of them.

There is the event called Third Friday every month downtown where citizens of Salisbury come out to be a part of the community – how might we be a part of that?

And there is so much more. How might we be a part of the many efforts in our midst to make our community more beautiful, more joyful, more loving?

Exagorazomenoi! There are a ton of bargains out there – don’t think there are not. Let us go out and snap them up! Let us fill ourselves with the Spirit, with songs of praise and thankfulness for everything, and make the most of all we have been given. We have been given life – adoption into the family of God, a new identity as God’s beloved children. And we have been given a purpose – to nurture and strengthen the body of Christ.

To live this life overflowing – it is not something in the past that we look back on. It is not something in the future that we look toward. It is now and here, on offer to us.

Let us make the most of it.

photo credit: Jerusalem Old City Market. By  Ester Inbar, available from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:ST., Attribution,https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1637899

No Longer Strangers, Part 4: Making Peace

Ephesians 4:25-5:2     

On a Saturday afternoon recently, Kim and I were listening to Harry Chapin’s music while we were working around the house. When the song, Cat’s in the Cradle, came on we both stopped what we were doing and just listened.

It’s one of his most famous songs. It tells the story of a father who has a son. It starts out:

A child was born just the other day,

He came to the world in the usual way,

But there were planes to catch and bills to pay,

He learned to walk while I was away.

He was talking before I knew it, and as he grew he said, “I’m gonna be like you, dad. You know I’m gonna be like you.

And the song goes on like that; in each verse, a different stage in the child’s development presents opportunities that are missed by this father, to be a part of his son’s life. Until, finally, the son is grown, the father is retired. And now when the father has time and wants to be with his son, the boy has grown into a man who is too busy for his father. And in the last line, the father realizes his son was just like him. He’d grown up just like him.

Kim remarked that it was such a sad song. A song of opportunities missed and relationships that drift apart, or just never happen.

A song about how we learn who we are … and how we should live … and what to value.

As we have been working through this letter to the Ephesians, we have been paying attention to what it is trying to teach us. So far, we have learned that God has drawn us into God’s family. That we are all, in a sense, adopted children of the Lord. We have learned that it is God’s divine plan to gather up all of his children into one big family. And that it is hard for us to be brought together, because we resist this lumping together of disparate parts. We don’t necessarily want to be in the same family as SOME PEOPLE. But, nonetheless, God has called us to put aside labels and judgments that divide us.

And we have learned that what it will take for us to be brought together, the thing that will finally be our common ground, is our brokenness. We are all, every one of us, broken – broken, but loved.

It is the power of God’s love that brings us together and makes us whole again, in the communion of God’s love. That’s the first three chapters:  We are a beloved community of God’s children.

And we, the beloved children of God, may seek to be like our heavenly parent, if we remember who we are, whose we are.

But we don’t always remember who we are.

In our Tuesday Bible study a couple of weeks ago we talked about a recent poll that was taken in England in which almost half of the respondents thought the world would be a better place without religion. They were inclined to believe most of the wars that are fought are caused by religion. And even though they tended to acknowledge that these problems are largely caused by religious extremists, they seemed to feel that it would be best to just get rid of religion altogether.

As a community of people who gather around the table each week to study the word of God, to strengthen our faith, this was disheartening to hear. But I think we have to acknowledge that religion, particularly Christianity, has gotten a bad reputation in our society. Those who are on the outside of it, too often see us on the inside as being narrow-minded, judgmental, and failing to practice what we preach. In a word, hypocrites.

That feels like unfair criticism. We just aren’t perfect and we never will be perfect. But rather than be offended by it, perhaps we should be prompted to ask ourselves how well we are living into the calling to be a community of God’s grace.

If we are, indeed, the beloved children of God, how do we live in the world?

Some would say that the way to do it is to separate ourselves from the rest of the world – the pagan world. That to retain our identity as Christians, we must avoid contamination from non-Christian influences. However, I would say to them: show me where Jesus practiced that kind of lifestyle, because I cannot find it in any of the gospels. I’ve looked, and that’s not what I’ve found. Here’s what I’ve found: Jesus hanging around the fringes of Jewish society – the sick, the downtrodden, the homeless – and listening, healing, feeding, loving. Accepting.

And he said to his followers, Go and Do likewise.

We must go back to these scriptures to find and claim our identity as God’s beloved children. It tells us the kinds of things we should put away, or cast off – lying, bearing grudges, taking from others what is not yours to take; and the kinds of things we should put on – kindness, tenderheartedness, forgiveness. We get so far away from the gospel truth, and we must continually go back to the scriptures and seek to know how we shall live as God’s beloved children. To know what to cast off and what to put on.

It is as though we are children who are trying to dress just like their parents. We want to be just like them. When my son Joe was four, he had carefully observed how daddy dressed every day when he went to work: wool gabardine pants, a button-down shirt, and a tie. He wanted to be just like him. I had to search hard to find some nice gray dress pants for this little boy, to go with his oxford shirt and his clip-on tie, because he made it very clear that khakis just wouldn’t do. He felt that rough cotton fabric, looked at that wide elastic waistband, and looked at me. He said, “that’s not what daddy wears.” He wanted the real thing. He wanted to be just like dad.

How, then, shall we dress like our father or mother in heaven? How can we be most like our God of love?

The good news, you might say, is that it is the little things to which we should attend, the day-to-day behaviors that matter.

It is to be kind to others, even the strangers. It is to speak honestly, so as not to let lies become barriers between us. it is to avoid letting anger fester, but seek reconciliation with others. To be peacemakers.

And lest we should think that to make peace is to smooth over and tamp down differences and troubles –

That’s not peace. Not really.

True peacemaking, my friends, involves working through those disagreements, seeking better understanding, striving for compassion. This is, indeed, the only way we can be the one family God desires for us to be.

Seek to be imitators of God, beloved children, living in love. These are the words of the scripture. This is just what all the words that come before, from Genesis on, are leading us to.

Be kind, be honest, be forgiving. Let go of anger, seek reconciliation, share with those in need. Offer encouragement, give grace as you have received grace. The more we are doing these things, the more we are living into the likeness of God; the more we are representing the beloved children of God.

Know who you are: children of the living God. And seek to be just like him. Just like him. And when we live this way, imagine what the world would think of us then?

Photo Credit: By State Library of Queensland, Australia - https://www.flickr.com/photos/statelibraryqueensland/6504265771/, No restrictions, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=53526373