The Bread of Life
John 6:35-51
August 16, 2009
Jesus said to them, ‘I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty. But I said to you that you have seen me and yet do not believe. Everything that the Father gives me will come to me, and anyone who comes to me I will never drive away; for I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me. And this is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day. This is indeed the will of my Father, that all who see the Son and believe in him may have eternal life; and I will raise them up on the last day.’
Then the Jews began to complain about him because he said, ‘I am the bread that came down from heaven.’ They were saying, ‘Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, “I have come down from heaven”?’ Jesus answered them, ‘Do not complain among yourselves. No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father who sent me; and I will raise that person up on the last day. It is written in the prophets, “And they shall all be taught by God.” Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me. Not that anyone has seen the Father except the one who is from God; he has seen the Father. Very truly, I tell you, whoever believes has eternal life. I am the bread of life. Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live for ever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.’
Back in December of 1946, a businessman named Stuart Luhan checked into the Winecoff Hotel in Atlanta, Georgia. Luhan regularly made trips there, and his custom was to get a room on the 10th floor so that he could be away from the street noises. Settling in for the night he looked forward to a good night’s rest before doing business the next day. So off he went to sleep.
Sometime in the early morning hours he woke up and saw a red glow out the window. Something was wrong. He heard a commotion outside his door and opened it to find the hallway thick with black smoke. Shutting the door he began to panic. He opened the window to see if there was a way down, but looking down from ten stories only increased his panic. What should he do? He couldn’t go into the hallway, and he couldn’t jump. Not knowing what else to do he retreated to the center of his room and tried to practice something he had been doing every morning for years, which is to calm himself and pray.
Seeking God’s help he said, “God, I put myself into your care and keeping. Let your presence be my fortress. I await your instructions on how to get out of this crisis.” He felt calm, despite the fact that the other voices in the hotel were becoming more frantic. Soon, he sensed a voice, a presence, telling him to calmly get dressed. Then he was to make a rope out of the sheets, blanket, and bedspread. He was getting ready to tie it to the center post on the window and throw the rope down, but from the same presence he sensed, “No. Not yet. Trust me.” He waited. Panic clutched at him, trying to get him to give in, but he stayed calm. After what seemed like forever he sensed the voice saying, “Now! Put the rope out the window and climb out.” As he did, Luhan recited words from the psalms: “God is my life and my salvation. I shall not fear. God is my life and salvation. I shall not fear.”
Climbing down he only reached the eighth floor. There was nowhere to go. Then he saw a fireman extending his ladder to the eighth floor, but it was too far away. Climbing up the ladder, the fireman saw Luhan, signaled him, and swung a rope hanging from the window above. He swung it once, and Luhan missed. Again he swung it, but it was just out of his reach. Finally a third time he swung it, and Luhan caught it. Twisting it around his right hand, he let go of his homemade rope and swung to the fireman, who caught him. Looking back he noticed that his homemade rope had caught fire and was now falling toward the earth. Luhan realized that if he had gone out too soon, he would have hung there to the point at which he couldn’t hold on any longer. He would have died. If he had waited, his own rope would have burned, causing him to fall and die. The timing was absolutely perfect.
I don’t know what you make of a story like this, but I think it explains a lot about what Jesus tried to say in our passage. When you hear him refer to himself as the “bread of life,” what does that term mean to you? Is it just something that you hear me say when I’m doing the words of institution during communion? Does it mean something more? To me it means that when we let Christ into our lives, he comes alive within us.
Jesus was trying to teach the people of the time an insight that they weren’t ready for. He was teaching that he could come alive in each and every one of us, if we choose to let him. He got into a lot of trouble for saying that he was the bread of life. He got into trouble because the Jews didn’t understand what he meant, and because they knew that he was somehow saying that God was in him and working through him. That was blasphemy. Also, they knew Mary and Joseph. They wondered how Jesus could say that he was from God if it was apparent who his parents were.
What they failed to understand, and what many modern Christians and non-Christians fail to comprehend, is that both in our passage and throughout all of John’s Gospel, Jesus was trying to teach people a whole new way of seeing our relationship with God. I didn’t understand this new way of seeing God and Christ until I read a book by the Quaker mystic, Thomas Kelly, in 1990. Reading this quote opened my eyes to a whole new way of seeing Christ. Until then I had always seen God as distant and in heaven, and Jesus as distant and in the past. But Kelly opened me to the possibility that I could find Jesus somewhere else. He said, “Deep within us all there is an amazing inner sanctuary of the soul, a holy place, a Divine Center, a speaking Voice, to which we may continuously return. Eternity is at our hearts, pressing upon our time-torn lives, warming us with intimations of an astounding destiny, calling us home unto Itself. Yielding to these persuasions, gladly committing ourselves in body and soul, utterly and completely, to the Light Within, is the beginning of true life. It is a dynamic center, a creative Life that presses to birth within us. It is a Light Within which illumines the face of God and casts new shadows and new glories upon the face of men. It is a seed stirring to life if we do not choke it. It is the Shekinah of the soul, the Presence in the midst. Here is the Slumbering Christ, stirring to be awakened, to become the soul we clothe in earthly form and action. And He is within us all.”
What he is saying is that we don’t find Christ merely in the past and in scripture. We find Christ in our hearts, in our souls, and that we can live a life that allows that life of Christ, that presence, to grow within us. He is saying that Christ is within us, but that we have to take the initiative to let him come alive.
Stuart Luhan experience that bread of life within. I’ve also experienced how openness to Jesus can be like the bread of life within us. I think I’ve told this story before, but I truly experienced Christ within when it came to writing and publishing my book, Becoming a Blessed Church. I had a dramatic experience of Christ at work. The book has to do with my whole vision for how to do church, a vision based on creating a church grounded in prayer that teaches members how to learn to rely on God’s guidance both in the church and in our personal lives. I felt called to write this book before I came to Calvin Church—for over nine years—but I always sensed that the timing wasn’t right.
Even though I had the vision for writing the book, I also knew that I wasn’t ready to do so until I had been here at Calvin Church for a while. So every year for five years I would pray and ask God if was time. At least three times a year I prayed, and each time I sensed God saying, “not yet.” So I wrote other books on the spiritual life, books such as Paradoxes for Living and Discovering the Narrow Path.
Then in January of 2003 I prayed, and I was surprised to I sense that God was saying “yes.” It was a strange moment because for all those previous years I had kept hearing in my heart, “not yet.” When I finally sensed God saying “yes” I had to keep coming back to God over the next few weeks to make sure that it wasn’t just me saying yes. By the way, I often hear God speaking to me, but not in a loud, audible voice. Generally I sense God speaking to me deep in my soul, through gentle tuggings or impressions. I’ve also learned to test that voice over time because I’m very aware of how easy it is to substitute my own desires for what God wants. Anyway, over the course of the next year I wrote the book, and throughout the writing actively sensed God’s hand on my shoulder, and almost, at times, God’s voice whispering in my ear. I wrote the book, having no idea who would publish it. I finished writing the book in late January of 2004.
A week after finishing it, I received a telephone call in my office at the church. On the line was an editor, Beth Gaede, from The Alban Institute, an organization devoted to helping congregations become healthier. Beth had heard from someone else that I had some interesting ideas about another topic, and wanted to know if I was interested in turning those ideas into a book. I told her that those ideas were more suitable for an article, not a whole book. Pausing, I figured that I might as well as tell her about the book I had just written. I told her that I had just written another book on another topic, a book titled Becoming the Blessed Church. I asked her if she was interested in hearing about it. She said yes, so I described the book.
When I finished describing the book to Beth, I heard nothing but silence on the other end. After almost ten seconds of silence, ten seconds during which I was wondering, “Wow, she must hate the idea,” she said, “Sorry for the silence. I just had chills go up my spine and I’m shaking a little bit. I just got out of a meeting with our director of publishing an hour ago. We had been talking about how we needed to change the direction of our books and move away from books on church growth and conflict management, and into books on bringing spirituality in to the church. We then outlined a particular book that we felt we needed to find someone to write. The problem is that we didn’t know who to ask. For the last fifteen minutes you’ve been describing the very book that we had outlined. And you’ve already written it!”
We are told that we are what we eat. If we eat crap we’ll feel like crap. If we eat what’s good, we’ll feel good. What Jesus teaches is similar. If our spiritual life is crap, our life will be crap. But if we are open to Christ in our hearts, Christ’s life will work through us to make a difference in the world. What he’s talking about is a life where wonderful things happen simply because we are open to them. He’s talking about a life full of coincidences, of providences.
I see this stuff happening all over the place in this church. Let me give you an example of this kind of providential grace here at Calvin Church. A number of years ago we were in the process of trying to put together a church website. The problem was that we really didn’t have anyone in the congregation who could do it, and we also didn’t have much money to spend on it. So we decided to wait and trust that God would provide.
A few months after deciding this, a new member of Calvin Church, Kathy Yaeger, approached me and said, “Graham, for the first time in twenty years I’m not working. And I noticed that you do not have a website for the church. Would you mind if I started one?” Of course I said an immediate and enthusiastic, “Yes, please. I’ll get you whatever you need.”
A year later, Kathy got a job and said to me, “I think I need to step down from managing the website. I seem to have less and less time with my new job.” Again, we decided to pray and see what God would do. About two days later, Jack Haubach approached me. He had joined the church in the previous year. He said, “Graham, I was wondering if it would be possible for me help out on the website. I just finished a class on website design, and I’d love to tinker with our website. I don’t want to get in Kathy’s way or step on her toes, but I’d love to at least share some of my ideas with her.” I laughed and said to Jack, ‘Well, as God would have it, Kathy can’t do the website any longer. How would you like to just take over the whole thing?” And Jack did.
About a year-and-a-half ago Jack moved to South Carolina, but before he did David Sloat came forward and said that he would like to help with the website. Today Jack still helps from South Carolina, even though he’s involved in another church now, but David runs most of the site.
The point is that when we are open to Christ at work within us, whether within us as individuals or as a church, wonderful things happen. And this is true not just for people in regards to the church, but for every walk of life. It all starts with wanting Christ to awaken in us, and then wanting to do Christ’s will in whatever we do. For example, I think this applies to work. Very few of us work in careers that don’t serve God in one way or another. The question is whether we can turn what we do into service to God, and let Christ become incarnated in our work. I don’t mean that we should proselytize. I’m talking about taking a prayerful approach to work where we simply ask Christ to guide us, bless us, and take care of us in whatever we do.
There’s a wonderful life ready to grow in us, but to let it grow we have to make a choice by asking, will I awaken the slumbering Christ within me? Will I let that Divine light within shine through me? Will I let a peace live in my soul by letting Christ live in my soul?
Amen.
The Perils of Anger
Ephesians 4:25-5:2
August 9, 2009
So then, putting away falsehood, let all of us speak the truth to our neighbours, for we are members of one another. Be angry but do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and do not make room for the devil. Thieves must give up stealing; rather let them labour and work honestly with their own hands, so as to have something to share with the needy. Let no evil talk come out of your mouths, but only what is useful for building up, as there is need, so that your words may give grace to those who hear. And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with which you were marked with a seal for the day of redemption. Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, and be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you. Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.
Do you remember how Andy Warhol once said that everyone gets 15 minutes of fame? How are you doing on your 15 minutes? I had part of mine back in 1981 when I was televised on ESPN. I was a senior in college, and was playing on my college’s varsity lacrosse team. We were playing the North Carolina State University in a game that was being televised across the country by ESPN.
We were so excited about playing on national television, even if national television meant that only three people in Arizona, two in Montana, ten in California, and six in Massachusetts were watching. Hey, it was still nationally televised, and I even had some classmates from high school tell me that they saw the game on television the next day in Arizona. Over the years a few others told me that they saw me, too.
In the game, we were playing a North Carolina State team that we had beaten the previous two years, so we were pretty confident that we could beat them. We came out pumped up, ready to show a national audience what we could do. We were playing so well that,… well,… at halftime we were losing something like 10 to 3. In other words, we were terrible. We weren’t playing as a team, but as a bunch of individuals running around without purpose. What would you expect the coach to do in situation like this one? When the Steelers are playing poorly, what do you hope the coach will do to get them playing better? Most of us want the coach to get angry and yell at the players, hoping to motivate them to play better. That’s exactly what our coach did.
He came into the locker room at halftime and, gesturing wildly, yelled at us. He threw a water bottle. He overturned a table. He blistered us up and down, telling us that we were playing like a bunch of high schoolers. We were stunned. The real question is what did his tantrum do to us. Did it motivate us to play better? I can tell you this: we stormed out of that locker room, onto the field, and promptly managed to play even worse in the second half, eventually losing 23 to 11. The game wasn’t that close. By the fourth quarter the other team was putting in the second team. My one chance on a national stage, and it was completely embarrassing.
I learned a lot about anger in that game. I learned that sometimes anger gets you what you want, but if you’re not careful it also kills what you cherish. Looking back at that game, what we really needed was for the coach to come in at halftime and to calmly point to the three things we could do to improve. He needed to tell us that we weren’t out of it, but that we could overcome the deficit by doing this, this, and this. The funny thing is that normally that’s what the coach would have done. He rarely yelled us like that in a game. Practices? Now that’s a different thing, but in games he mainly stayed calm. The point, though, is that his anger and tantrum didn’t help. In fact, I think they stripped us of all of our confidence. We were worse after his tirade that we were before.
We all get angry at times, and we all act out of anger at times, but does that make our anger helpful? The apostle Paul realized that anger can be helpful, but often at a high cost. Anger is very much like vinegar. In small doses is can add flavor and spice things up. Think about an angry comedian or an angry song. They can be fun, but only in small doses. Think about how a small dose of anger can give us a bit more focus and help us accomplish a task. A small amount of anger can help us, but the more anger we pour into our lives, the more it makes life bitter, acidic, and corrosive, just as too much vinegar does.
A little bit of anger can motivate us to solve problems, but over time too much anger corrodes relationships, workplaces, families, and eventually the soul. If you want to understand why anger makes people bitter and corrodes relationships, you have to start with what really causes anger. When you get angry about something, do you know why? Anger is a biological, emotional reaction to threats. We’re built biologically to get angry when something or someone threatens us. We get angry when someone threatens to, or does, steal something from us. We get angry when someone tells us something that we don’t want to hear. We get angry when someone denigrates, diminishes, or dismisses us. We are built to get angry whenever someone hurts us. We are built to lash out when someone says or does something to upset us. The reaction of anger is biological, built on all sorts of hormones that kick in whenever we feel threatened.
This gets to the heart of why anger can be helpful, and why it can also cause people to become bitter and corrosive when they act too often on their anger. The more we give in to anger, the more we live as subjects of our bodies, rather than of our minds or spirits. You see, the goal of Christian spirituality is to free us from becoming slaves to our bodies by allowing us instead to be guided by our spirits and by God. Too often we live as slaves to our bodies, rather than letting our bodies be guided by our spirits.
C.S. Lewis was right. We are amphibians who live simultaneously in the physical and spiritual realms. And like amphibians who begin life underwater, but are eventually meant to live in the world of open air, we are born as physical beings, as animals, who are meant to rise above our physicality to live as embodied spirits. Over the course of life we are called to mature in a way that lets the spiritual guide the physical.
Now, I am not saying that you should never get angry. It isn’t a question of whether or not you get angry. It’s all a question of what you do with your anger. Paul says, “Be angry but do not sin.” He’s saying that there are times when anger is appropriate. It’s normal, for instance, to get angry with children when they do something wrong, or refuse to follow our guidance. We are charged with helping them to grow up, to learn responsibility, and to guide them on how to live. Flashes of anger tell them that what we are saying is important. The problem is that too much anger with our kids can become oppressive. We shut them down. And it can lead us to become abusive.
Also, anger in the workplace can be good in very, very small flashes, as long as the anger is focused on how to get people to work better together. The problem is that too often we have bosses, co-workers, or others in the workplace for whom anger is a permanent condition. People like that kill initiative and creativity. They kill productivity. They kill people’s spirits.
There are also times when the Spirit guides us to be angry. There are times when it is appropriate to be angry for God when we see injustice. It is appropriate to be angry when we see someone being mistreated. It is appropriate to be angry when we see the poor and hungry ignored. It is appropriate to be angry when we see abuse. Jesus modeled this anger when he went into the Temple, overturned tables, and shouted that we shall not turn God’s Temple into a marketplace.
The problem is that too often anger can control us, and when it does it ends up tearing life down rather than building it up. That’s what happened when our coach yelled at us. I see the same thing happening right now regarding the healthcare debate. Everyone on both sides of the debate are so angry that they are no longer building up a system, but tearing each other down to the extent that they very well could stop the efforts at both health care reform and universal health care. I see the same kind of anger tearing apart marriages and families. When couples become permanently angry at each other, it corrodes the marriage, sometimes to the point at which it can’t be saved.
Paul’s whole point is that we need to focus our lives on what builds up, not what tears down. Over time uncontrolled anger tears down. So what do we do to overcome anger? Well, I have three basic rules to letting go of anger:
1. Build a peaceful center: too often we have a tumultuous center. We aren’t centered in our lives because we let everything around us control us—our schedules, our tasks, our expectations, our demands,… everything. Part of letting go of anger means becoming more centered, mentally and spiritually, in a way that enables us to let things go. We do this by simply slowing down and creating space for God in our lives. In fact, that’s part of what Sunday worship is meant to do. It is meant to slow us down for at least one hour a week so that we can have a center. Of course, too often we feel we are too busy for this.
2. Put things into perspective: Another reason we get so angry is that we blow things out of proportion. We turn things that are relatively minor into major mountains that overwhelm us. If we are getting angry a lot, are we are guilty of taking things out of perspective.
3. Pray: Regular prayer overcomes anger, both by putting us into a more spiritual state before we get angry, and by helping us when we get angry. Regular prayer centers us, but praying when we are angry short-circuits anger. Try it. Next time you find yourself getting overly angry, take a breath, slow down, and pray. It makes a difference.
Let me close with a story that captures all of this. A number of years ago there was a young woman named Julie who was just plain angry. I’m not sure why. It might have had something to do with her parents’ messy divorce when she was twelve, and her father’s aloofness. Whatever the reason, she tended to get angry at people very quickly and easily.
She seemed to lack a sense of focus throughout her life, which eventually caused her to drop out of high school. With no diploma and an angry attitude, it was hard for her to both get and hold a job. She struggled. Eventually her father managed to get her a job at a local hardware store with an old classmate of his, a man named Frank. It was a match made in Hell. Frank was an angry man who tended to treat his workers terribly, which was why he always seemed to be looking for new clerks. He and Julie clashed from the moment she came into the hardware store.
The very first day she asked him what time he wanted her to come to work. He held up one hand, spreading his fingers out. The problem is that he had lost his pinky and ring finger many years before. So she didn’t know whether he meant be at work at 3 p.m. or 5 p.m. for an evening shift. With an irritated voice, she asked, “What does that mean? 3 or 5?” Frank lashed back: “It’s obvious!” Then he walked away. Julie visibly rolled her eyes and cursed Frank under her breath.
Still, they worked together for over a year. She stayed because she didn’t know if she could find another job. He kept her because he didn’t want to look once again for a new worker. Both were miserable. In fact, Julie noticed that whenever she drove to work her stomach would swish and swirl around, intensifying as she got closer to the store. It was becoming unbearable. She also felt that she had no one to talk with about it. Her father and mother wouldn’t understand her quitting a good job. Her friends were mostly away at college. She felt trapped.
Everything began to change one day as she was driving to work. Her stomach was flittering around as normal, but a thought came to her mind: Pray for Frank. The thought wouldn’t go away. So turning off the radio she started to pray for Frank. It was uncomfortable because she was not a churchgoer, nor had been since she was a little child. But she prayed for him the whole way to work. She noticed her stomach calmed a bit as she did so.
Frank was as miserable as normal that day, but whenever Julie started to curse him under her breath, she stopped said a short prayer: “God, if you are there, be with Frank.” For a week she prayed for Frank every morning on the way to work. Eventually she started praying for him on the way home. Every morning and evening she would pray for him. Slowly she noticed a difference. Frank seemed to be getting nicer, even if was only in small ways.
One day Frank stopped Julie in one of the aisles and said, “Julie, I need to say something to you. I know I’m not the nicest man in the world, and I haven’t treated you very well. I wish I were different. I had to start working at age twelve, and while everyone else was playing with friends, I was always working to help support my family. I never really learned how to get along with people. And I resented never getting to play, to have fun, and to be normal. So I started taking it out on others. I’ve done that to you, and I’m sorry.” Julie was stunned. What just happened?
Over then ensuing months, Frank changed toward her. She changed toward him. Slowly they became something like friends, teasing and kidding each other, acting almost like father and daughter. As this happened, Julie noticed that that the reservoir of rage within her was evaporating. She was actually becoming something that looked like,… I don’t know,… happy. And she kept praying, even joining a church.
A few years later Frank died. He had never been married or had children. When his will was read, Julie was shocked. He had left everything, the store and his house, to her with a note saying that she was his family. And it all happened because Julie made a decision to pray.
So, what do you do with your anger?
Amen.
Unity in Humility
Ephesians 4:1-16
August 2, 2009
I therefore, the prisoner in the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all.
But each of us was given grace according to the measure of Christ’s gift. Therefore it is said, ‘When he ascended on high he made captivity itself a captive; he gave gifts to his people.’ (When it says, ‘He ascended’, what does it mean but that he had also descended into the lower parts of the earth? He who descended is the same one who ascended far above all the heavens, so that he might fill all things.) The gifts he gave were that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ. We must no longer be children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine, by people’s trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming. But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knitted together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body’s growth in building itself up in love.
I’ve been fascinated and irritated this week by an incident that took place last week. It’s captured the attention of all the news media, so if you’ve missed it, it probably means that you just haven’t been paying attention to the news—which may be a good thing. The incident I’m talking about is something I’m calling Gates-gate. Of course no one else is calling it that, but I’m hoping that it catches on ☺.
Basically, here’s what happened. Upon coming home from a long trip overseas, Professor Henry Louis Gates of Harvard University, an African-American, found that he could not open the front door of his house. He asked the driver of the airport car to help him, but neither could get it open. Gates went around to the back, entered the back door, and came to the front. With him pulling from the inside, and the driver pushing from the outside, they finally managed to get the door open.
Meanwhile, a neighbor called the police to say that two men looked like they were breaking into the house. The Cambridge police dispatched a patrol car. The story gets muddled after this, but from what I can piece together, Sgt. Crowley, the responding officer, asked Gates what he was doing. Gates said that he was the owner of the house, and then explained what happened. Crowley asked for his identification. Gates became upset, explaining that it was his house. Crowley asked him to step onto the porch, which Gates refused to do, asserting again that it was his house and that he didn’t have to step outside. Eventually, Gates did get his identification, but he was irate and accusatory toward the officer. According to him, he believed that he was being racially profiled, and that if he were white he would not have been treated that way. Eventually, Sgt. Crowley arrested him for disorderly conduct.
The incident sparked opinions from people supporting either Gates or Crowley. Many considered Gates to have been treated fairly, and saw the incidence not as a case of racism, but as a case of a man acting irrationally and uncooperatively. Others saw this as a clear case of racism.
Unfortunately, President Obama inserted himself into the issue by saying that Sgt. Crowley had acted “stupidly,” thus magnifying the incident greatly. He tried to apologize, but by then many supporting Crowley were sniping at Obama. Eventually, he decided to have what has since been called a “Beer Summit,” bringing Crowley, Gates, and himself together at the White House to talk about the incident.
My focus here isn’t on whether or not the incident was a case of racism. I have another agenda that I’ll get to in a bit. Still, the first thing everyone latches onto is issue of racism because of the nature of the event. Personally, I don’t think the officer was racist. I think he was doing his job, and from everything I’ve read it appears that he was acting fairly professionally. Now, I can’t say the same thing for another police officer, a Boston police office named Justin Barrett. In response to a Boston Globe opinion piece that said the incident was a racist incident, Barrett sent an e-mail to the paper and to friends stating, among other things, that had he "been the officer he verbally assaulted like a banana-eating jungle monkey, I would have sprayed him in the face with OC [oleoresin capsicum, or pepper spray] deserving of his belligerent noncompliance." He referred to Gates several times as a jungle monkey. When confronted with his comments, he vehemently defended himself, saying that he wasn’t racist. Yeah, right!
As I mentioned before, I don’t think Crowley was racist, but when an African-American says that she or he has been the victim of racism or racial profiling, we need to be sensitive to it. What many of us whites don’t appreciate enough is that when you experiences racism your whole life, you become overly sensitive to it, to the point where non-racist events feel racist. I learned this through my best friend from high school.
His name is Ty, and he is African-American. Even though he has always had an ability to let bigoted comments and acts roll off his back, I’ve been with him a number of times when he experience active racism. To his credit, he always dealt with it better than me. He has always been incredibly dignified. I remember in high school that occasionally other students would tell him inappropriate black jokes, almost as a way of being cool, that they could say a black joke to someone who is black. Ty would always smile, but not react much other than that. The first overt racist incident I experienced with him came in 1984. I had been living in Roanoke, Virginia, and I needed help moving my stuff from Roanoke back to this area. So we drove down to Roanoke to rent a U-Haul and drive back. I had made reservations for our night there in a small, mom-and-pop mote that I had stayed in before. When I made the reservations, I had asked if I could stay in a room I had stayed in before. The owner said, “Why sure. We have almost nobody staying here this weekend. You can have whatever room you want.”
Late in the afternoon of that day we pulled in, Ty in the passenger seat and me driving. The owner came to our car window, and I said, “I’m Graham Standish, and I have a reservation.” She said, “I’m afraid you’ve come to the wrong place.” I told her that I had a reservation, and she said, “We are all booked up.” I was stunned. How could she mess up the reservation? I argued with her a bit, and then it dawned on me. The reason she had no room was because of Ty. So I decided to explore this a bit. “What about next week, do you have an opening then?” “I’m sorry, we are all booked up,” she replied. “What about next month?” “We are all booked up.” Finally, I turned to Ty and said, “Sorry, Sweetie, looks like we have to go somewhere else.” I figured that as long as she was being a bigot and a racist, I should double her bigotry by letting her think that we were gay. It helped that I had long hair, an earring in my ear, and cut off sleeves on my t-shirt. We found a Holiday Inn and stayed there, but the incident has always bothered me. Ty and I used to kid about it, saying to each other, “I’m afraid you’ve come to the wrong place.” But the fact is that what she did was plain wrong.
Now, perhaps you think these kinds of things only happen in the South. Back in 1987, I helped Ty move into an apartment in Penn Hills. As we were moving stuff into the house, a group of about six or seven white men stared at us from across the street with their arms crossed. I said to Ty, “This isn’t good.” He said, “It’s okay. You get used to it.” A few days after moving in, the landlord called him and told him that a mistake had been made, and that he had to move out. This wasn’t the only time. Over the years it happened two more times when Ty, who by then had a family, had to move out of apartments after moving in. Once was in Coraopolis. I don’t remember where the other place was. Eventually after one of them he actually sued the landlord. What would it be like for us if we were told to move out of places once we moved in because of the color of our skin?
Ty works for USAirways, and he has said that over the years he has received nasty, racist notes in his box at work. They are always anonymous. I learned from him that we whites are often ignorant of what it is like to grow up African-American. When you grow up experiencing racism and bigotry, it becomes hard to tell what is and isn’t racist. As I said before, I don’t think that Sgt. Crowley was acting in a racist way, but I am also sensitive to Professor Gates. Just as a child of abuse will recoil anytime a hand is raised, even when someone is just brushing aside a hair, to grow up experiencing racism means to grow up not knowing when whites are acting normally or racially. To be gentle and humble, as Paul teaches in our passage, is to be sensitive to the experiences of others.
Even though I’ve just talked about racism, that isn’t really the aspect of the incident that intrigued me. What intrigued me was how the controversy progressed so that every step created more controversy. As the Beer Summit was being prepared, Congressman Richard Neal of Massachusetts complained about the beer choices. President Obama was going to drink Bud Light. Sgt. Crowley wanted a Beck’s beer. Gates wanted Red Stripe. Neal was outraged. Since the incident took place outside of Boston, they should be drinking a Boston beer such as Samuel Adams, not beers owned by European corporations.
Then the Republican National Committee Co-Chairman, Jan Larimer, complained that the beer summit was taking place at all. She said that with all the problems with the economy, health-care, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Obama shouldn’t be drinking beer with anyone. Now, you’re free to think what you want about the issue, but one thing is certain: it reveals how easy it is for Christians to ignore Paul.
Go back to our passage for this morning. Paul offers a completely different vision for dealing with controversies like this one. Here’s what he says: “I therefore, the prisoner in the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.” Wow! What an alternative vision. Instead of being offended, sure that the other is wrong and we are right, Paul calls on us to respond to others with humility, gentleness, patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. What a difference.
What if everyone in the incident had acted that way from the start? What if Crowley had acted that way, not just acting professionally, but lovingly understanding the outrage of Gates? What if Gates had acted with humility and patience to Crowley, understanding that he was doing a difficult, and often terrifying. job of keeping people like him safe? What if Obama had acted with humility and patience, bearing with both Gates (a friend of his) and Crowley? What if all the critics from one side or the other had responded with humility, gentleness, and unity, recognizing both sides, rather than jumping in on one side or the other? What if Congressman Neal had reacted by saying that he was just glad there was an act of humility, gentleness, and unity on the part of everyone in the Beer Summit, regardless of the beer? What if Jan Larimer, a Presbyterian elder in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, had responded with gentleness and humility, praising any effort to “maintain unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace?” What if we reacted to all controversies in the way Paul calls on us to act?
Paul has a challenge for us in life. Basically Paul is inviting us to respond to controversy with humility, a humility that leads to unity. Ironically, the person who taught me the true meaning of humility wasn’t a Christian, although he wanted to become one. Mahatma Gandhi, who lived a life of humility, patience, gentleness, seeking to maintain unity of the Spirit, lived what Paul taught. Gandhi wasn’t a Christian, although he tried to become one. He was very much influenced by the New Testament, especially the Sermon on the Mount. When he started his career as a lawyer in South Africa in the early years of the 20th century, he decided to go to a Christian church. He entered, sat down in a back pew, and waited to experience Christ. Soon a firm hand was placed on his shoulder, and he was escorted to the door. The white ushers told him that there were other churches for his kind, and that he wasn’t welcome there. That did it for Gandhi. He couldn’t reconcile the message of unity he found in the New Testament with the bigotry he experienced in that church.
Still, Gandhi lived as Paul taught. There was one particular incident, recreated in the 1982 film, Gandhi, that brought home what Paul taught. It was in the middle stages of the Indian struggle for independence from the British Empire. Gandhi had just been released from prison for leading a non-violent movement to stymie the British. He had become something of a national hero for standing up to the British. He had been invited to a meeting of members of the Indian National Congress at the home of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, who eventually would become the first president of Pakistan. Also in attendance was Jawaharlal Nehru, who would eventually become the first prime minister of India. Other powerful Indian figures were in attendance. They were gathered to talk about what the next step toward Indian independence would be.
Each of these men, having grown up in wealthy families, were atop the Indian caste system, a rigid system in which everyone belonged to a certain strata of society, never to move up or down. Servants were among the lowest in the system. Surprisingly, Gandhi came to the meeting wearing a sarong and a loincloth, the clothing of outcasts and servants. As they talked about what to do next, Jinnah proposed stepping up violent, terrorist acts. Others weren’t so sure. Gandhi offered his view. They should engage in active, non-violent resistance in a way that would paralyze the British. His way, though, would be a spiritual resistance. They would call on all Indian people to engage in a day of prayer and fasting, praying for Indian independence. Of course, with everyone praying and fasting, there would be no police, postal service, transportation, or manufacturing. For one day the British Empire in India would be paralyzed.
Gandhi was calling on everyone to act in a humble, gentle, and unifying way. As if to underscore his idea, he walked up to a servant with coffee and tea, took the tray from him, and began to serve the others. This was shocking! Men of power and wealth did not serve. But Gandhi was giving them an example of humility. He was showing them literally what would be required of them. That they become humble, gentle, and patient as leaders, and in that way unifying India. He was embodying our passage. And it worked. India shut down for a day, and the British were petrified. Eventually, this non-violent way led to Indian independence.
Paul offers a radical vision of how to live life. It is the way of humility. Do you want to know the quickest way to find unity with others? It comes from humility. It comes from refusing to see ourselves as better than others, and by refusing to act as thought we are better than others. It comes through a willingness to serve others. It comes through humility, gentleness, and patience. And it leads to God.
Amen.
Food for All
John 6:1-14
July 26, 2009
After this Jesus went to the other side of the Sea of Galilee, also called the Sea of Tiberias. A large crowd kept following him, because they saw the signs that he was doing for the sick. Jesus went up the mountain and sat down there with his disciples. Now the Passover, the festival of the Jews, was near. When he looked up and saw a large crowd coming towards him, Jesus said to Philip, ‘Where are we to buy bread for these people to eat?’ He said this to test him, for he himself knew what he was going to do. Philip answered him, ‘Six months’ wages would not buy enough bread for each of them to get a little.’ One of his disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, said to him, ‘There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish. But what are they among so many people?’ Jesus said, ‘Make the people sit down.’ Now there was a great deal of grass in the place; so they sat down, about five thousand in all. Then Jesus took the loaves, and when he had given thanks, he distributed them to those who were seated; so also the fish, as much as they wanted. When they were satisfied, he told his disciples, ‘Gather up the fragments left over, so that nothing may be lost.’ So they gathered them up, and from the fragments of the five barley loaves, left by those who had eaten, they filled twelve baskets. When the people saw the sign that he had done, they began to say, ‘This is indeed the prophet who is to come into the world.’
I recently read a very good book that I probably won’t recommend to too many people. The book is titled, Jesus Interrupted, by Bart Ehrman, a New Testament scholar at the University of North Carolina. It is a very, very good book in terms of talking about a topic that many Christians shy away from. It’s a book about the contradictions of the Bible, about dealing with passages, parables, and stories that contradict each other. For people who really understand the Bible, it’s a very good book. The problem is that for people who don’t know the Bible very well, nor how to understand these contradictions, the book can diminish faith. The reason is that Ehrman is an atheist. Imagine that, an atheist biblical scholar. Being an atheist, he interprets these contradictions in a way that causes those inexperienced with the Bible to lose faith in the Bible.
What makes the book good is that it is sophisticated in its arguments, but simple in its writing. Being an atheist allows him to look at the Bible in an honest way that many Christians won’t. He bases his writings on what is called the historical-critical method. This method of understanding the Bible is nothing new. It arose out of German biblical scholarship in the nineteenth century, and it has grown in its use ever since. Most credible biblical scholars are experts in this method. It is a way of looking at scripture in a way similar to how historians research history, and how literary scholars research literature. The point of this method is to get away from reading scripture to hear only what we want to hear, and to read it more in light of what it actually says.
So, to read scripture in this way means letting go of the focus most of us have when we read the Bible, which is to ask, “What is God saying to me through this passage?” Instead, we read it and ask, “What was going on when this passage was written? What was going on nationally, socially, culturally, and historically? Who wrote the passage and what was he or she hoping to say—what was his or her agenda? Who was the author writing to, and what problems were they facing?” The method is a wonderful for getting to the heart of what the passage is saying, but it has a darker side. It is an ultra-rationalist way of reading scripture, and in the process of being moved to a more rational perspective, people can lose their sense of awe and reverence.
I know this happens to a lot of people when they go to seminary, where the historical-critical method is taught. A common complaint among many seminary students is that they lose their faith because of it, and then have to try to reconstruct it afterwards.
Now, why am I mentioning this book? I’m mentioning it because our passage for today is one that perplexes scholars like Ehrman, and those who use the historical-critical method. The fact is that it doesn’t fit easily into historical-critical formulas for deciding whether or not a biblical event really happened. Determining whether or not an event occurred is a concern for many of these scholars. They believe that some biblical events may be fabrications created to sway people to a particular point of view. As a result, they develop semi-scientific formulas for deciding whether or not an event really took place.
One of those formulas is a simple one that determines the probability of that a gospel event occurred. For example, if an event appears in only one gospel, then there is only a 25% chance that it occurred. If it appears in two, 50%. Three, 75%. Four, 100%. So, for example, according to these scholars the virgin birth only has a 50% probability of having occurred because it appears in only two gospels—Matthew and Luke.
What I find to be a problem with this way of deciding the veracity of biblical events is that it discounts the possibility that a writer of a particular gospel has to pick and choose what to include based on the audience. Think about this for yourself. If you are telling the story of someone’s life, with the hope that it will inspire your audience, what events will you include and leave out? You only have so much room. A fantastic story might inspire one group, but not another. So, you would tend to cite those events that resonate in your audience. I think that this may have taken place with the gospel writers.
For instance, Matthew was writing to Jews who care about the fulfillment of prophecy, and the virgin birth is a fulfillment of prophecy. Luke was writing to Gentile Christians who had previously been part of religions, such as the Greek or Persian ones, that had myths about great kings being born of virgins. For their audiences, the virgin birth was important. Mark was writing to Roman Jews who probably didn’t care so much about a virgin birth. So he left it out. John bypassed the virgin birth in favor of a deeper understanding of Jesus, which is that he already was at the beginning of creation. I believe in the virgin birth, but I also believe that it wasn‘t then, nor now, a crucial belief for belief in Christ. I don’t need the virgin birth for my faith, but some people do. I can still believe it happened, even if it isn’t as influential. Apparently Mark and John agree with me.
The other formula has to do with rational likelihood. Ehrman has another term for it, but let’s leave it at this term here. Basically, this formula registers the likelihood of something happening according to how well it corresponds with rational conclusions. So, for Ehrman, many miracles aren’t rationally likely. He would say that if a miracle appears in only one gospel and isn’t rationally likely, then it probably didn’t happen.
So, here’s the issue: this passage confuses scholars today. It also confuses pastors and laity, and it even confused people back in the early church. Did it really happen, and if it did, why would Jesus waste a miracle on feeding people when they probably could have gotten food on their own?
It’s hard to understand this miracle until you do something that Ehrman says we should do. Don’t focus so much on the actual event, but on what the writer is trying to say through writing about the event. Ehrman’s absolutely right about that. You see, the author of John’s Gospel wants to teach us about Jesus through the telling of the event, and to do so he uses lots of symbols in the passage.
Let me start by giving you some background to the passage. First, the event took place in the northwest corner of the Sea of Galilee. Jesus had been teaching in the city of Capernaum, and was now tired and retreating to the north-central part of the lake where the Jordan River empties into it. Capernaum is surrounded by arid land, but the area where Jesus went to, Bethsaida Julius, was off of a delta of the river, and so it was lush and green. He went by boat, a four-mile trip, but those following him walked, which was a nine-mile trip. By the time they got to Jesus, they were very tired. Also, most of those gathered around him had been on a pilgrimage south to Jerusalem, so to follow Jesus meant that they were backtracking nine miles. What does that say about them? That they were passionate about hearing what Jesus had to say.
John tells us the story, but in doing so he loads the story full of numerical symbols that the readers of his gospel would have gotten immediately, but that we don’t get today. Let me take you through the symbols. First, there were 5000 people gathered. Was that the exact number of people? Probably not. I don’t think any of the disciples went around counting. Instead, there were probably somewhere between 3000 and 7000. But the number given matters because it says something about the nature of the miracle and of Jesus.
First, we have to start with the number 5 in the 5000. The number 5 always symbolizes sacrifice that leads to receiving God’s grace. For example, how many wounds did Jesus suffer on the cross? Five—two on the hands, two on the feet, and one in the side. So what the number 5 tells us is that the people gathering around Jesus were making a sacrifice by being there. Five is then multiplied by 1000, which is 10x10x10, or 103. Why is that significant of 1000? The number 10 symbolizes God’s complete work on earth, hence the Ten Commandments. The fact that it is ten to the third power means that God is involved. The number three always stands for God, as in the Trinity. Thus, 1000 indicates that God is actively doing something complete in this place. So, reading the numerical symbology of the passage, the people heard 5000, and they immediately thought, “Wow! These people made a sacrifice because of their passion, and as a result they received God’s grace and became God’s people.
Next, we move to the two fish and the five barley loaves. That equals seven pieces of food to start with. The number 7 always stands for God’s perfection being accomplished on earth. It is the addition of two other significant numbers: 3 and 4. As mentioned above, three always stands for God, but four stands for the earth—the four corners of the earth (people back then believed there were literally four corners) and the four seasons. Thus, we’ve learned that earth was created in seven days, which means that God (3) was shaping the earth (4). When the people heard that there were seven pieces of food, they understood immediately that Jesus was about to create something amazing with that food. But there was more there than just the numbers. The fact that he started with two fish caught from the Sea of Galilee and five barley loaves said that he was with the common people. This was common food, not the food of the wealthy. It said that Jesus is one with the common folk. That was really important to John because he was most likely writing to Gentile Christians living in the areas north of the Sea of Galilee. He was saying that Jesus was one among them.
Then we move onto the scraps that were left over. How many were there? Twelve. What’s the significance of twelve? It’s the multiplication of 3x4, which symbolizes God’s influence and the multiplication of God’s work on earth. Thus, you have 12 tribes of Israel and 12 disciples. When they read that twelve baskets of scraps were left over, they knew that this meant that God’s grace was so abundant that God’s grace overflows when it works in the world.
So, summing all this up, what lessons do we have to learn from it? First, the passage teaches us that God wants to feed us not only spiritually, but also physically and mentally, but we have to have the passion to seek God out and receive it. Second, there is grace in abundance for anyone who wants it and is ready for it. It won’t run out. Third, if we are willing to sacrifice for our faith great things happen. Finally, and I don’t want to lost this in this concept, miracles do happen to those who have faith. They really do, but to experience them we have to first be open to them.
Let me close with a story that captures the last point. You’ve heard me talk before about Corrie ten Boom, a woman who brought a deep faith and prayerfulness into her experiences in a German concentration camp during World War II. She had been captured as a member of the Dutch resistance in 1944 after being caught hiding Jews. At first she was put into a prison camp, but then she was eventually transferred to Ravensbrück concentration camp.
Conditions in the camp were horrendous. Not only did they sleep on hard palates, stacked against each other, but the straw they slept on was full of filth and fleas. Their food was barely enough to keep them alive. Somehow, though, they had managed to smuggle into the barracks a small vial of davitamon, or a daily vitamin supplement. Corrie and her sister first used the vial for themselves, but as people learned of it, they shared it. Each morning a crowd would gather around them. One-by-one they came forward, put out their tongue, and one drop of the davitamon would be dropped on their tongue. This went on for weeks. The vial never ran out. How many drops in a small vial do you think there would be? 100? 200? They should have run out after several days, but each morning the same people came forward, and drops were placed on their tongues. Corrie expected each drop to be the last, but every time she tipped the bottle the applicator would let out one drop.
At one point Corrie tried to figure out how much liquid was left in the bottle. She held it up to the light, but the bottle was too dark. Her sister, Betsie, told her to quit trying to figure out the miracle and to just accept it.
Several weeks later, one of the fellow prisoners in their barracks walked in carrying a large sack. She said, “Look what I managed to get out of the infirmary!” They looked into the sack and saw a thousands of vitamin pills. They agreed that they would begin taking them as soon as the vial of davitamon ran out. The next morning they tipped the bottle for the first person, and it was dry. The vial had finally run out. But the next miracle was being given other vitamins.
The point of our passage is both simple and complex. The complex message has to do with numbers and the rest, but the simple message is this: miracles do happen, they can happen to you, and all you have to do is to have a passionate faith that opens you to grace.
Amen.
Abolishing the Law
So then, remember that at one time you Gentiles by birth, called ‘the uncircumcised’ by those who are called ‘the circumcised’—a physical circumcision made in the flesh by human hands— remember that you were at that time without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us.
He has abolished the law with its commandments and ordinances, so that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace, and might reconcile both groups to God in one body through the cross, thus putting to death that hostility through it. So he came and proclaimed peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near; for through him both of us have access in one Spirit to the Father. So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. In him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are built together spiritually into a dwelling-place for God.
I’m going to divulge a long-kept secret this morning—one that I’m not even sure my wife knows. Back in January of 1986, for one evening, I had a modeling career. It only lasted that one night, but for that night I was a model. I modeled bright green and pink Benneton sweaters and scarves.
I had been asked by a friend of my sister-in-law to be part of a fashion show at Schenley Park ice rink in Pittsburgh. I don’t think I was asked so much for my looks as I was for my skating ability. So on that cold evening I went to the ice rink, put on my Benneton clothes, and proceeded to do a skating dance routine in which I skated around with eight girls, ranging from 11 to 14 years old, as we danced to a song called “Crush on You,” by the disco group The Jets. It was a completely embarrassing evening, especially since none of those girls had anything remotely like a crush on me. You could read their embarrassment on their faces as they skated around me. That’s probably why I’ve kept this my little secret until now.
I think that the woman who put me in the show was a bit embarrassed for me, so to make it up to me she invited me out one evening to meet a friend of hers, an artist, who was very, very pretty. So, we met that evening at a restaurant in Shadyside, and were having a good time until somehow the conversation turned to the problem of gangs and whether people naturally know right from wrong and good from evil. She was adamant: “People know right from wrong from birth. So anyone caught doing wrong should be severely punished because its their fault.” Having been trained as a counselor, I took a different tack, telling her that I thought concepts like right and wrong, and good and evil, had to be taught—that how we are raised often determines the extent to which we know the difference. She got very angry with me: “No! We are born knowing right from wrong. Criminals and gang members all know that what they are doing is wrong.” I responded, “But what about the kid who is born to a drug dealer who is taught from childhood that dealing drugs is right?” She hit her hand against the table, BLAM, and said, “No, they know the difference.” Suffice to say that we never really clicked after that.
So what do you think? Do people automatically know right from wrong, good from evil, God’s way from our way? Do we know by birth, or do we have to be taught? I think the answer may be that both are true. We may have a natural ability to tell right from wrong, good from evil, God’s way from our way, but it also needs to shaped and brought out of us. In fact, teaching right from wrong, good from evil, God’s way from our way is a large part of both parenting and churching.
If you are, or have been, a parent, think about what a significant part of your parenting consists of: “No, you can’t do that. It’s wrong! No! You can’t push your brother down the stairs! Stop that! It’s not right to steal toys from your sister. You need to behave when we go to Grandma’s house. Stop fighting! Stop hitting! Stop yelling!” Do you recognize these sentences? Have you uttered them yourselves? They are part of our parental task of teaching children right from wrong, good from evil, God’s way from our way. Our churches have a similar task. A lot of what we do is to teach the differences between right and wrong, good and evil, God’s way from our way.
One of Paul’s points from this morning’s passage is that we have to learn to cultivate this ability to distinguish between how God wants us to live and how we want to live. And his main point in our passage is that in the process of learning to distinguish between the two, the old ways of following the law had failed
Listen again to what Paul said: “[Christ] has abolished the law with its commandments and ordinances, so that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two.” Do you recognize how radical a statement that is? What Paul said goes completely against what many, many Christians believe. Think about it for a moment. What do many Christians say that we base our faith on, other than faith in Christ? What are the rules of our faith? The Ten Commandments? If you said that, you’d be right. Many Christians say that following the law is one of our major duties in obeying Christ. Why else do these Christians care so much about the issue of whether or not the Ten Commandments should be posted in courthouses? To them Christianity is based on the law. So, what do you make of the fact of Paul saying that Jesus had abolished the law? What does he mean that Jesus has abolished the law?
Now, if you are a particularly astute Bible reader, you also are now forming another question: “Isn’t what Paul said in direct contrast to what Jesus said in Matthew 5:17?” Jesus said, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished.”
We’ve got a biblical problem here. Paul and Jesus seem to be at odds. In this corner is Paul, saying that Jesus has gotten rid of the law. In the other corner we have Jesus, who tells us that he has come not to abolish, but to fulfill, the law. Do we just assume that because Jesus is a greater authority that he wins this fight?
Actually, I think both Jesus and Paul were trying to get across the same message, but they were speaking from different sides of the same coin. Both were saying that when left to our own devices, we do not live the way God wants us to live. We do not follow the law properly, and as a result we do not live the way God wants us to live. Jesus is saying that the law was meant to unite us with God in a way that God’s life flows through us, but that the people’s following the law had failed to do that. He had come to fulfill the purpose of the law, which was to unite humans and God. Paul went further. He was saying that the law had actually become an impediment to this union because through the law the Jews had lost their connection with God. They had become so obsessed with figuring out how to apply the law to the minutiae of life that they had forgotten God. Modern Christians do this, too. We can become so obsessed with running to the Bible for guidance that we forget to look to God for guidance. We can become so biblically focused that we lose sight of God. Both Paul and Jesus were trying to say that there was another way, a way modeled by Jesus and taught by Paul.
This way is the way of listening to the voice of Christ within us, and to the guidance of the Holy Spirit all around us. Think about how Jesus lived. Although he periodically quoted scripture, he most often acted after having discerned the Father’s will in prayer. He even said that the law was made for humans, not humans for the law. What he meant is that too many Jews were turning the law into a false god, and as a result were no longer allowing the law to guide them to the real God. He wanted us to have a direct connection with God so that this living relationship could guide us. He was guiding people to prayer, and to listen to God’s voice within, which always acts in accordance with the ultimate purposes of the law.
The Quaker writer, Thomas Kelly, wrote about following the voice of God when he said, “Deep within us all there is an amazing inner sanctuary of the soul, a holy place, a Divine Center, a speaking Voice, to which we may continuously return. Eternity is at our hearts, pressing upon our time-torn lives, warming us with intimations of an astounding destiny, calling us home unto Itself. Yielding to these persuasions, gladly committing ourselves in body and soul, utterly and completely, to the Light Within, is the beginning of true life. It is a dynamic center, a creative Life that presses to birth within us. It is a Light Within which illumines the face of God and casts new shadows and new glories upon the face of men. It is a seed stirring to life if we do not choke it. It is the Shekinah of the soul, the Presence in the midst. Here is the Slumbering Christ, stirring to be awakened, to become the soul we clothe in earthly form and action. And He is within us all.” What he is saying here is very close to what I believe Paul was getting at. We no longer need the law because through Christ’s incarnation in our hearts the law becomes written on our hearts. The law isn’t done away with. The law is fulfilled even more deeply as we connect with God.
That does not mean that we get rid of the law or don’t need to learn it. What it means is that we are now able to pay attention to Christ speaking within us, and the Spirit speaking around us, to gain a sense of what is right and wrong, good and evil, God’s way versus our way.
Today many people see religion as being just a collection of moral dos and don’ts, all with the purpose of getting us into heaven. They like rules and law, as well as the clarity that they bring, so they try to turn Christianity into a religion of either following the law of scripture or the rules of the church. But that’s not the faith that Paul or Jesus taught. They taught a faith in which we attune ourselves to God, much like a radio, in which our task is to tune ourselves in to God’s frequency, and live out of that. Under this idea, our main task is to allow our lives to be filled with God’s Spirit so that we can live according to God’s will in everything.
Let me close by giving you an example of what I mean. During the week after the invasion of Normandy on D-Day, a small unit of American soldiers pushed through the French countryside. They were an advance team tasked with discovering the whereabouts of the German lines, as well as their strengths and weaknesses. As they pushed forward, they got into a small skirmish, and one of their members was killed.
Knowing that they had to push forward quickly, they looked for somewhere to bury him. Eventually they found a church with a graveyard, and asked the priest if they could bury their comrade there. The priest said yes, but then asked whether the soldier had been baptized a Roman Catholic. The soldiers didn’t know. The priest then said, “I’m sorry, but unless he was Catholic, we can’t bury him in our graveyard.”
Not knowing what else to do, the dejected soldiers asked if they could bury him on the other side of the fence surrounding the graveyard. The priest told them that they could. So they spent the evening burying their friend, leaving a small dirt mound on top. They then walked a short ways away to find a safe place to sleep.
The next morning they got up early in order to push forward, but before doing so they walked to the graveyard to say good-bye to their fallen comrade. When they got there, they couldn’t find the grave. As hard as they looked all they could see was smooth grass. It was as though no grave had never even been dug. What happened to their friend’s grave? Was this some sort of miracle? Were they in the wrong place?
As they stood perplexed, the priest walked out to join them. They asked the priest what had happened to their friend’s grave. He said, “I struggled all night with my decision to keep him out of our cemetery. It bothered me, and I couldn’t sleep. How could I keep out a man who had given his life to release all of us from the German evil? I knew that I didn’t have the strength to uncover his body, move it, and then dig a new grave, so I did the next best thing. I spent the night digging out and moving the fence so that your friend could now be in the cemetery.
This is a priest who was tuned into God. He had at first followed the rules—good rules if you are a Catholic. But he recognized that these were not God’s rules. So, he fulfilled the rules by changing the them. He listened to God, to the voice of Christ within, and that made all the difference.
To abolish the law doesn’t mean we can’t or shouldn’t learn it. What it means is that there is another way to access what the law was intended to do, but couldn’t. We discover the meaning of the law when we become people of prayer who seek and follow the voice of Christ in our hearts, minds, and souls.
Amen.
Would You Rather Lose Your Head or Your Faith?
Mark 6:14-29
King Herod heard of it, for Jesus’ name had become known. Some were saying, ‘John the baptizer has been raised from the dead; and for this reason these powers are at work in him.’ But others said, ‘It is Elijah.’ And others said, ‘It is a prophet, like one of the prophets of old.’ But when Herod heard of it, he said, ‘John, whom I beheaded, has been raised.’
For Herod himself had sent men who arrested John, bound him, and put him in prison on account of Herodias, his brother Philip’s wife, because Herod had married her. For John had been telling Herod, ‘It is not lawful for you to have your brother’s wife.’ And Herodias had a grudge against him, and wanted to kill him. But she could not, for Herod feared John, knowing that he was a righteous and holy man, and he protected him. When he heard him, he was greatly perplexed; and yet he liked to listen to him. But an opportunity came when Herod on his birthday gave a banquet for his courtiers and officers and for the leaders of Galilee.
When his daughter Herodias came in and danced, she pleased Herod and his guests; and the king said to the girl, ‘Ask me for whatever you wish, and I will give it.’ And he solemnly swore to her, ‘Whatever you ask me, I will give you, even half of my kingdom.’ She went out and said to her mother, ‘What should I ask for?’ She replied, ‘The head of John the baptizer.’ Immediately she rushed back to the king and requested, ‘I want you to give me at once the head of John the Baptist on a platter.’ The king was deeply grieved; yet out of regard for his oaths and for the guests, he did not want to refuse her. Immediately the king sent a soldier of the guard with orders to bring John’s head. He went and beheaded him in the prison, brought his head on a platter, and gave it to the girl. Then the girl gave it to her mother. When his disciples heard about it, they came and took his body, and laid it in a tomb.
What would you be willing to die for? Would you be willing to die for your country? A lot of people today say they would. How about for family—your children, your parents, your brothers and sisters? What about for your friends? In thinking about what you’d be willing to die for, how high would your faith rank? Would you be willing to die for your faith?
Compared to the tests of faith that the original Christians faced, our faith doesn’t get tested that much anymore—at least not to the point of death. There have been periods throughout history where people had to make a severe choice—give up their lives or give up their faith. In fact, the early Christians often had to make that choice. The fact is that for the first 300 years of the Christian faith, the faithful constantly faced a choice between their livelihoods, or their lives, and their faith.
The persecution of Christians wasn’t consistent for all 300 years. There were periods in which the worst persecution Christians faced was the ridicule of others, but there were other periods in which they were killed out of prejudice and for pleasure. What seemed to determine the level of persecution was the degree to which the reigning emperor of the time wanted the people of the Roman Empire to worship them as gods. Those who wanted to be worshiped tended to persecute Christians heavily, while those who didn’t care tended to let the Christians be. Why? Because the one thing that marked the Christians is that many (not all, but many) refused to worship the emperor. Often emperor worship consisted of going to the local temple or magistrate office once a year, and either bowing down before an image of the emperor or paying a monetary tribute. Out of all the religions, Christians gained a reputation for refusing to bow or pay. The Jews normally would have gained a similar reputation, but they were actually given dispensation by most emperors to not have to fulfill the requirement. When Christians refused to worship, they were persecuted.
The worst of all the persecutors was the emperor Nero, who was pretty much of a nut-job in general. Nero had grand designs to rebuild Rome in his own image, including tearing down many popular sites in order to build a magnificent palace to himself. When much of Rome burned, which Nero probably ordered to pave the way for his building projects, he blamed the Christians.
The most popular excuse for persecuting Christians was that Christians were cannibals. That sound ridiculous to us today, but you can easily understand how they could misrepresent Christian faith. What they would say is that the Christians had saved the body of this Jesus fellow, and that on Sundays they would break off pieces of his body and eat it, and then drink his saved blood. For the Romans this rumor justified their persecution of Christians, which included letting them be eaten by lions for sport in the coliseums.
One Christian, who experienced this kind of persecution, was a man named Genesius. He is remembered today in the Catholic Church as St. Genesius. He is the patron saint of actors, comedians, lawyers, stenographers, and torture victims. Genesius had gained a reputation as a comedic actor in the court of the Roman emperor Diocletian. Whenever Diocletian was feeling particularly bored or melancholy, he would call for Genesius and ask him to act out the emperor’s favorite play. It was a comedic take on the Christian sacrament of baptism. Genesius would start by looking very sad and despondent. Another actor, dressed as a priest, would invite him to be baptized. Then several actors would throw Genesius into a large vat of water and dunk him. Genesius would emerge sputtering and making all sorts of noises, at which the emperor would howl in laughter. He would be dunked over and over again, much to the emperor’s delight.
What the emperor didn’t know was that for some time Genesius had been learning more about the Christian faith, and he was becoming sympathetic to it. One particular day, when Diocletian asked for the play, Genesius started out with his mopey act, and then was thrown into the vat. But as he emerged he refused to sputter. He stood there, looking straight ahead. The emperor told him to do his act, but Genesius refused. He declared himself to be a Christian, at which the emperor told him that if he did not do the act, he would have Genesius’ legs broken. Genesius refused again. He was taken away and put in dungeon, where his legs were broken. Still Genesius refused to comply. This, by the way, is where we get the phrase in the theater, “break a leg,” before performances. It means that actors should be true to themselves when they act, just as Genesius had been. Eventually Genesius faced a choice: act or be killed. He refused to do the act, and he was beheaded. He faced the choice between his faith and his life, and he chose his faith.
John the Baptist faced the same kind of choice as Genesius. Why did John get beheaded? For a very simple reason: he ticked off king Herod. You know of Herod. He’s the guy who sings, “So if you are the Christ, oh the great Jesus Christ, prove to me that you’re divine. Change my water into wine” in the play, Jesus Christ, Superstar. Herod was the king of the region around Galilee and Judea, the area surrounding Jerusalem. The Roman Empire had a very weird arrangement in which while they had governors of provinces and regions, yet within some of them they still had kings, who were part figurehead, part ruler. These kings could raise armies and invoke laws, but they had to stay submissive to the Roman Caesar and the governor.
Herod was an incredibly self-indulgent man who was known for his lavish parties and bizarre behavior. John made him angry by criticizing him for his lifestyle, especially his marriage. What was wrong with Herod’s marriage? This is a bit complicated, but bear with me. To understand it helps to start with Herod’s father, Herod the Great who was descended from the generals who divvied up the Greek empire after Alexander the Great’s death. Herod was called “the Great” because of all the building projects he did, but he was anything but great. In fact, he was petty and paranoid. To get an appreciation of the complexities of Herod’s family life, it helps to look at the chart below of Herod’s marriages and sons:
Herod the Great was married five times, and had seven sons. Three of them, Antipater, Alexander, and Aristobulous, he had killed because he was paranoid that they wanted to take power from him. The Herod from our passage was Herod Antipas, his son from his fourth wife. Here’s where it all gets confusing.
Herod Antipas’ half-brother, Herod Philip, lived in Rome and had a wife named Herodius. Herodius was the daughter of Herod Philip’s other half-brother, Aristoblus. Therefore, Herod Philip had married his niece. The two of them had a daughter, who in our passage is also called Herodius, but elsewhere in the Bible is called Salome. As if marrying a niece wasn’t bad enough, Herod Antipas lusted after Herodius. He schemed and plotted to wrest her away from his brother. To do so, he divorced his own wife. He then convinced Herodius to divorce Herod Philip and marry him. This is what John criticized. In effect, Herod Antipas not only was divorced for no reason, which was against Jewish law, and married his brother’s wife, which was against Jewish law, but he also married his niece, which was against Jewish law, and became stepfather to his niece. And John the Baptist had the temerity to criticize Herod for it. So Herod imprisoned John and eventually had him killed because of the scheme between Herodius and Salome in our passgae. As a side note, Herod’s other brother, Philip the Tetrarch, married Salome, thus becoming her grand-uncle, step-uncle, and husband all at the same time. The Herod family definitely put the “fun” in dysfunctional.
The point of the passage is that John looked at this situation and criticized Herod and his family. He wantd Herod to be a better ruler, and to be one who lived more according to the biblical law that Herod said that he followed, as a Jew. Herodius, who felt pangs of triple-guilt, couldn’t handle the criticism, and demanded that John be killed. John could easily have saved his life by going back on his criticism, but he chose his faith over his life. He was speaking God’s judgment against Herod, Herodius, and their family, and he would not go back.
Herod did get his comeuppance in the end, though. His divorced wife’s father, Aristus the king of the Nabateans, decided to attack Herod to get his revenge. Herod raised an army to defend himself, was defeated, and had to get Rome to bail him out. Later, when Agrippa was made a king, Herod complained to the Roman emperor about it, at the insistence of Herodius, hoping to gain more power. Instead, the emperor Caligula stripped him of title, property, and wealth, and Herod ended up dying a poor man in southern France.
Getting back to our passage, what is it that allowed John to choose faith over life? For John it was very simple: He saw the world as filled with God. He didn’t separate life like we do, seeing sacred and secular worlds. He only saw the sacred, and wanted to serve God in all of life. As a result, he lived life in a way that filled it with God.
How do you see the world? How do you live in the world? What would you be willing to give up your life for? Where would God rank in that list?
Amen.
Are We Healed Yet?
Mark 5.21-43
When Jesus had crossed again in the boat to the other side, a great crowd gathered round him; and he was by the lake. Then one of the leaders of the synagogue named Jairus came and, when he saw him, fell at his feet and begged him repeatedly, ‘My little daughter is at the point of death. Come and lay your hands on her, so that she may be made well, and live.’ So he went with him.
And a large crowd followed him and pressed in on him. Now there was a woman who had been suffering from haemorrhages for twelve years. She had endured much under many physicians, and had spent all that she had; and she was no better, but rather grew worse. She had heard about Jesus, and came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, for she said, ‘If I but touch his clothes, I will be made well.’ Immediately her haemorrhage stopped; and she felt in her body that she was healed of her disease. Immediately aware that power had gone forth from him, Jesus turned about in the crowd and said, ‘Who touched my clothes?’ And his disciples said to him, ‘You see the crowd pressing in on you; how can you say, “Who touched me?” ’ He looked all round to see who had done it. But the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came in fear and trembling, fell down before him, and told him the whole truth. He said to her, ‘Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.’
While he was still speaking, some people came from the leader’s house to say, ‘Your daughter is dead. Why trouble the teacher any further?’ But overhearing what they said, Jesus said to the leader of the synagogue, ‘Do not fear, only believe.’ He allowed no one to follow him except Peter, James, and John, the brother of James. When they came to the house of the leader of the synagogue, he saw a commotion, people weeping and wailing loudly. When he had entered, he said to them, ‘Why do you make a commotion and weep? The child is not dead but sleeping.’ And they laughed at him. Then he put them all outside, and took the child’s father and mother and those who were with him, and went in where the child was. He took her by the hand and said to her, ‘Talitha cum’, which means, ‘Little girl, get up!’ And immediately the girl got up and began to walk about (she was twelve years of age). At this they were overcome with amazement. He strictly ordered them that no one should know this, and told them to give her something to eat.
What do you make of stories like this one in the Bible? Do you believe they are true? Do you think they’re false? These are two of the more unbelievable stories of the gospels. In fact, they’ve caused Christians, and especially biblical scholars, fits over the years. Some scholars say that because they defy the laws of nature, they can’t possibly be true. Others insist that they are true, and the evidence of their truth is that they defy the laws of nature, showing that Jesus was someone completely different from other great religious figures.
What do you think about these stories and about Jesus’ miracles in general? Did they really occur? Were they lies written by people with a religious agenda? Were they misunderstandings of what really happened? Were they just something of Jesus’ day? What you believe about them actually may determine, to a great extent, what kind of miracles are possible in your life. It’s not that if you don’t believe in the possibility of miracles that God punishes you by withholding miracles from your life. It’s more basic than that. God doesn’t withhold miracles from our lives. We withhold them. The possibility may be all around us, but our lack of belief turns us off to them.
I think it’s much like having a cell phone. Do you own a cell phone? If you do, are you able to receive phone calls on it? Unless there’s a problem with the phone the answer is yes. Now, what if you owned a cell phone and refused to believe it could receive phone calls, and so left it off? And what if others continually told you that you could receive calls, but you disbelieved and never turned on the phone? From your experience you would be convinced that you were right because you’d never receive a call. But that doesn’t make you right. It just makes you closed to possibility. God’s miracles are much like the miracle of the cell phone. Radio waves carrying phone calls move through the air all around us, but if we don’t have phones to receive them, or if we refuse to ever turn them on because we don’t believe in them, we become like people who refuse to believe in the possibility of miracles. What we believe determines what we experience.
The story of our passage, of Jairus’ daughter and the woman with a hemorrhage, shows this. Both stories are stories of people who perhaps shouldn’t have believed, but because they did they had healing experiences. Take the woman with the hemorrhage. We don’t appreciate what this woman went through. She had gone through twelve years of having a constant period. Imagine that today. What would it be like for you as a woman to bleed constantly for twelve years? While this illness would have been terrible for any woman today, for this woman it was many times worse. You see, back in Jesus’ day, women were considered unclean during their period. During that time they were not allowed to prepare food, touch their husbands, children, or anyone else. They were not allowed to be in close contact with others. They were set apart. Imagine being set apart and shunned for twelve straight years. That’s twelve straight years of never hugging touching your husband, child, parents, brothers and sisters, friends, and more. How do you maintain a marriage, raise children, and have friends under those conditions? It meant eating by herself for twelve straight years. It meant never being able to shop in the market place for fear of touching someone else. It meant twelve years of being ostracized for something she couldn’t help.
Imagine what she would have had to do just to touch Jesus’ cloak. She would have had to crawl on the ground so that no one would see her, all the time trying her best not to touch anyone else and make her or him unclean. She would have had to stretch around the feet of the disciples, who were acting like bodyguards, protecting Jesus’ back. There was a tremendous amount of indignity that she would have had to overcome to touch Jesus’ hem as she crawled through the dirt and grimy feet. Yet she believed. She reached out and touched Jesus’ cloak, and Jesus said, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.”
Jairus also had to overcome disbelief. Jairus was the ruler of the synagogue, which means that he had the most important position in the synagogue. He was not the rabbi, who was responsible for teaching and preaching. The synagogue ruler was responsible for organizing everything from picking the rabbi, to choosing the music, to orchestrating the rituals, to leading the congregation in decision-making. Everyone looked to him for leadership. For him to ask Jesus to heal his daughter, despite Jesus’ reputation for being a law-breaker because of his healing on the Sabbath, would have certainly stirred the gossip and threatened Jairus’ leadership. Jairus had every reason to doubt and shun Jesus. But he didn’t. He might have had doubts, but he overcame them and begged Jesus to heal his daughter. According to scripture, Jesus didn’t heal her, but when she died Jesus raised her from the dead. He, his daughter, and the hemorrhaging woman experienced miracles because they believed.
So what gets in the way of our praying for miracles? Even when we believe, what keeps us from praying for healing, for changes in our lives, and great things to take place? I think that a major part of it is that too many of us have a realistic view of life. Wait,… shouldn’t we have a realistic view of life? What I mean is that we have a view of life rooted in what humans see as “realistic.” This view is based on conventional human thinking, perhaps based on science and philosophy, but a kind of thinking that denies the possibility of anything that isn’t humanly “realistic.”
What the Bible teaches us is a spiritual view of life. This is a view that is open to possibility, that’s open to healing, and that’s open to miracles. It’s also my view, and not just because the Bible says so. I tend to be much more skeptical than that. I believe because of my experiences. The Bible opened me to the possibility of having those experiences, but it was my experiences that sealed my belief.
I had some experiences before I came to Calvin Church. My first experience of personal healing came in 1990, when I was an associate pastor. Some members of our youth group and I had been talking about healing, and I kept thinking about the power of healing and whether it was a possibility. Then one very cold, snowy winter night I woke up with a completely stuffed nose. I realized that I had no decongestants or nasal sprays in my apartment, but I didn’t want to get out of my nice, warm bed. What to do? I remembered our conversations about healing and decided to try healing prayer. So I held out my hand and asked God to fill it with healing power. Then I touched my nose and prayed for God to open it. An amazing thing happened. My nasal passages cleared within seconds. If that had happened to you, what would your reaction have been? Mine was that I immediately became afraid. Isn’t that odd? I had a healing experience, and it scared me. I think that sometimes direct experiences of God are scary. It’s one thing to believe in God who seems distant. It’s another to experience God first-hand doing something miraculous. My whole body got the shakes, and pretty soon my nose started to clog up again. I then got out of bed, got into my car, and went to a 7/11 to get some nasal spray. But the experience stayed with me. It’s one of the reasons I really believe in the power of healing prayer.
I have been further convinced of the power of healing prayer through members of this church. For instance, I spoke about Jo Jones several weeks ago in a sermon, talking about how strong her faith was. That faith extended to her prayer life. When I first met her in 1996, she had cancerous tumors in her neck. I had asked her what her treatment was. She said that she was combining alternative medicine, radiation treatments, and prayer. She used to walk around with a jug of green juices—pear, apple, grape, and others—that she would drink at regular intervals. She also prayed diligently every day. She was about to undergo radiation treatments, and was told that if they were successful her tumors would slowly start to shrink within six weeks. She started the treatments, and after two weeks they were discontinued because her tumors had shrunk completely. Over the ensuing years she was diagnosed with brain tumors. She combined prayer with here regular medical treatments, and in all cases her tumors were killed. She ended up dying from the tumors, but only because the dead matter put pressure on her brain, causing her body to slowly atrophy. Still, prayer definitely had an impact on her illness. Perhaps you can look at her death as proof that miracles don’t happen, but I don’t think that would be fair. Eventually we all die, but she managed to eke out extra years through prayer that might not have been otherwise possible.
I’ve also seen the same kind of impact on prayer on other members of our church. LaRue Craig, who died two years ago, told me that whenever she visited the doctor she would chant and pray on the way while driving. She was convinced that the combination dramatically reduced her blood pressure. Betty Alexander, who died this past year, also believed in healing prayer, and it led her to be a cancer survivor from breast and bone cancer for over twenty years.
Also, back in March of 2005 I told the church in a sermon about Judy Kerkovich’s experiences. Here’s what I said, “One of our members, Judy Kerkovich, has experienced God’s healing. Judy was diagnosed with lymphoma six years ago. The doctor had told her that the lymphoma was a slow-moving one, but that it would get progressively worse. The cancer would grow, and in three years she would experience the symptoms of the cancer as it progressed. She had a choice of whether to start chemotherapy right away, in the hopes that it would slow the progression, or wait for three years and have chemotherapy then. Either way it was her choice. Judy decided to wait. But she also decided to make prayer part of her treatment. She prayed for herself, and regularly has met with our prayer ministers. Here we are six years later and Judy still isn’t on chemotherapy. She has met regularly with her doctor, and the doctor has told her that he has no explanation for what is going on, but that she should keep doing what she is doing. At one point he told her, ‘Whatever church you are going to, keep going.’” Judy still prays with one of our prayer ministers once a week, and her lymphoma still hasn’t progressed. It has stumped her doctors, but not me. I know that God is a big part of her health.
Even though I believe in the connection between healing and prayer, I also believe in more than this. I believe that if we are willing to bring prayer into every part of life, we can experience miracles big and small helping us throughout our days. For instance, I believe that in our work lives, family lives, and lives in general God is willing to help us if we are willing to pray.
Let me give you an example of this in an experience my daughter, Shea, and I had last week. It was her birthday, and for a present we got her and her sister, Erin, new bicycles. Erin’s bicycle turned out to be okay, but Shea’s was just too heavy, and when we rode she couldn’t keep up. So we went back to the store to trade it in for another one. The problem was that Shea couldn’t decide between two bikes. One was a boy’s bike in blue, her favorite color, that was light. But it also had skull stickers on it,… not the kind of symbols you want as a girl. The other bike was a girl’s bike, but it was not as light. She couldn’t figure out which bike to get, and was paralyzed by her indecision.
I told her what I often do when I can’t decide. I told her that when I can’t decide I ask God to guide me, and that whenever I do God always seems to answer. I could tell that she wasn’t buying what I said, so I continued: “Shea, you don’t have to say it out loud. All you have to do is to ask God to tell you which bike is the better one for you.” She got very quiet. Then, before she could say a word, the manager came around the corner and said, “The blue bike is much lighter and would probably be a better fit.” Her prayer was answered. But what to do about those skull stickers? We had an answer. We went do Dick’s Sporting Goods and found Steelers stickers, which we stuck over the skulls. Now she has a wonderful blue, Steelers bike.
I believe that if you pray, God answers. You may not always get the answer you want, but with prayer there’s always the possibility of miracles great and small. If you pray for healing, is there a guarantee that you’ll be healed? Nothing is guaranteed. God works as God works. Sometimes when we pray for physical healing, God gives us spiritual, mental, or relational healing. Sometimes God gives us physical healing. What we have to remember is that God has God’s own purposes, and at some point even death fits that purpose.
Ultimately this is the point: miracles do happen, but we have to be open to them to experience them. The question for you to reflect on is this: how open are you?
Amen.
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