Jeremiah 13:1-11
Thus said the Lord to me, ‘Go and buy yourself a linen loincloth, and put it on your loins, but do not dip it in water.’ So I bought a loincloth according to the word of the Lord, and put it on my loins. And the word of the Lord came to me a second time, saying, ‘Take the loincloth that you bought and are wearing, and go now to the Euphrates, and hide it there in a cleft of the rock.’ So I went, and hid it by the Euphrates, as the Lord commanded me. And after many days the Lord said to me, ‘Go now to the Euphrates, and take from there the loincloth that I commanded you to hide there.’ Then I went to the Euphrates, and dug, and I took the loincloth from the place where I had hidden it. But now the loincloth was ruined; it was good for nothing.
Then the word of the Lord came to me: Thus says the Lord: Just so I will ruin the pride of Judah and the great pride of Jerusalem. This evil people, who refuse to hear my words, who stubbornly follow their own will and have gone after other gods to serve them and worship them, shall be like this loincloth, which is good for nothing. For as the loincloth clings to one’s loins, so I made the whole house of Israel and the whole house of Judah cling to me, says the Lord, in order that they might be for me a people, a name, a praise, and a glory. But they would not listen.
Welcome to perhaps the strangest man in the Bible. That’s saying a lot because Jeremiah has to contend with other strange people like John the Baptist, who was a fairly strange man himself. But Jeremiah stands out as one of the strangest. What made him strange were his characteristics. He not only preached God’s message, but he did weird things to get his point across. Jeremiah was so odd, and so unique, that we’ve even coined a term in English to describe any kind of speech that resembles Jeremiah. We call it a “jeremiad.” A jeremiad is a speech combining criticism and lamentation.
The book of Jeremiah resembles the man himself. It is confusing and disorganized. It starts with the story of Jeremiah as a child. He begins to preach. Then suddenly we are shifted forty years into the future. Then we’re taken back to his young adulthood. Toward the end of the book we are suddenly taken back to the middle of his life. Jeremiah is a confusing book to read because it doesn’t necessarily follow a logical sequence.
This morning I want to introduce you to the prophet Jeremiah in all his oddities, so that you can gain an appreciation for how this prophet of old still resonates with us today. At the outset I’ll say that it is hard to capture the depth of Jeremiah’s life and ministry because it spanned forty years, and so much happened during those forty years that capturing it all in twenty minutes is near impossible.
Jeremiah began his prophesying very early in his life. We are told that when he was a teen or child God spoke to him and told him to go out and speak God’s word. Jeremiah protests, saying that he is just a boy and that no one would take him seriously. God responds by telling him that this doesn’t matter. Jeremiah further protests, saying that people will attack him if he says the things God wants him to say. God tells him that he has two choices. He can decide not to do God’s will, in which case people will attack him anyway and God will not help him; or he can do God’s will and be attacked, but God will be there to help him no matter what happens. Jeremiah agrees to be God’s prophet.
God often speaks to Jeremiah through objects. More specifically, God shows Jeremiah certain objects and Jeremiah learns metaphorical lessons from them about God’s will. For instance, at the outset of his prophetic ministry, God gave him two visions. One was the branch of an almond tree. The other was a boiling pot in the north, tilting toward Judea (as an aside, hundreds of years before the nation of Israel had been split in two—into Israel in the north and Judea in the south, which is where Jerusalem was—and sixty years earlier Israel was conquered by the Assyrians and the population was basically dispersed so that now it was not really Jewish anymore). What do you think God was saying to Jeremiah through the almond branch? To understand we’d really have to see how people of the Middle East view almond trees in the spring. Throughout the winter people would keep a watch on the almond trees because they were always the first trees to bloom. When it bloomed, they knew it was time to prepare to plant. God was saying to Jeremiah that just as people watch the almond tree for signs of spring, God was watching the people for signs of their return to God. Also, God was telling Jeremiah through the boiling pot that trouble was boiling in the north, and if people didn’t turn back to God, it would eventually pour out on the people, leading to their destruction.
As Jeremiah began his ministry, major changes were taking place in Judea. King Manasseh had died, and his son Josiah was now king. Manasseh had been a corrupt king who had managed to keep Judea intact in face of the Assyrians by paying a ransom for their independence. As part of the agreement with the Assyrians, the Jews had to worship the Assyrian gods as well as God (or Yahweh, as the Jews called God). In addition, they had been worshiping the Canaanite god Ba’al along with Jahweh. Many prophets had criticized Manasseh for this, but to no avail. After he died, Josiah eventually began a reform in Judea, outlawing the worship of gods other than Yahweh.
At first, Jeremiah’s message was encouraged the people to quit worshiping other gods, and to devote themselves completely to Yahweh. He told the people that they had been like adulterers and prostitutes, giving themselves over to other spouses, only to return when they were in need. He said that God refused to be a wronged spouse, and that they had to make their decision whether to be committed to God or not. In keeping with this message Jeremiah was led to do what we are told in our passage for this morning. God tells him to take a linen belt to a place near a great river and to bury it. Our passage says he took it to the Euphrates, but I doubt very much that this was the river, since it was over 700 miles away. I think that it is more likely that he did this near the Jordan River. The actual name of the river in Hebrew is not the Euphrates, but simply “the great river.” Anyway, who cares about that? Jeremiah then returns several days later and pulls it out of the dirt. It is ragged and decayed. The point God was making to Jeremiah was that the chosen people had been given a wonderful gift (linen belts were a sign of wealth), and in their dalliance with other religions they had wasted and corrupted God’s love and grace.
Jeremiah also used another metaphor to teach this same lesson. He went to a potter’s house to watch the potter make a pot. Potters were important craftsmen in the ancient world, and watching the potter work would have been a delightful event for families, and especially children. Potters smash the wet clay to get all the air bubbles out, and, placing the clay on their wheels, they form and shape the pots. At times the clay isn’t centered on the wheel, and the forming pot wobbles. It then must be smashed down and recentered, and a new pot formed. This is the metaphor God gives to Jeremiah, saying that because the people have gone over to worshiping other gods, they must now be recentered and reshaped, which will be a painful process.
Under Josiah’s reign, the people quit worshiping other gods and return to a devotion of Yahweh, but then Jeremiah notices a new problem. They are now confusing their faith with a nationalistic fervor, assuming that because they are centered in a worship of Yahweh, anything the nation does must be God’s will. Jeremiah now preaches a message that is even more unpopular than his original message. He tells the people, and the king, that God is displeased because they are confusing the nation of Judea with God, and that nationalism and their alliances with the Egyptians are displeasing to God, especially because they are saying that whatever they do is God’s will. Before they complained that Jeremiah was a pest. Now they call him a traitor and unpatriotic. This is what happens when people speak against nations that confuse nationalism and religion.
Eventually Josiah died, and his sons became kings. They encouraged the worship of other gods, and again Jeremiah preached that God was angry. He told the people that they had become like “Shiloh.” Now I’m pretty sure you don’t know what that means because I didn’t either. It took me a long time to research it and discover the meaning. We don’t get what it means, but the people of Jeremiah’s time knew exactly what he was saying, and they hated him for saying it. Shiloh was the place where the Ark of the Covenant was kept in ancient Israel 500 years prior to Jeremiah. The Philistines had defeated the Israelites in a battle that they had been warned that God was against. When they were defeated, they ran back to Shiloh and grabbed the Ark of the Covenant, assured that it would lead them to victory. It didn’t, and the Ark was taken by the Philistines and held for seven months. It was a travesty. For Jeremiah to say that the people were like Shiloh was him saying that they had taken what is of God for their own purposes, and that they were going to lose it all. Not a message designed to make people happy.
Jeremiah continued to speak out, and especially to the king. Under Jehioakim, he dictated his sayings to his secretary Baruch, and had Baruch read them to Jehoiakim’s counselors and generals. When they heard all that was written, they were afraid and told Baruch to take Jeremiah and hide because they would surely be killed. They gave the scroll to the king, who read each part, cut it up with a knife, and threw it into the fire. After it was all burned, he sought to imprison and kill Jeremiah. So what did Jeremiah do? He dictated another scroll, and put even more negative stuff in it, and read it before the king. Eventually he was imprisoned. Several times after that he was imprisoned and released, and under Jehoiachin, Jehioakim’s brother and successor, Jeremiah was thrown into a cistern to die. A cistern is a large tank or cave that holds water, and when it is low there is not much else in it but deep, deep mud. Jeremiah was thrown in the cistern to waste away, trapped in the mud. People sent by God eventually rescued him.
Eventually, Jeremiah’s prophesies came true. Under Zedekiah, Jehoiachin’s successor, the Babylonians attacked the city. Jeremiah told Zedekiah that this was God’s punishment, and that if Zedekiah surrendered he would be safe, and the people would be treated well. Zedekiah was cocky and believed that he was strong enough to withstand the Babylonians, especially since he assumed the Egyptians would come to his aid. They never did. The Babylonian King, Nebuchadnezzar, laid siege to Jerusalem for seven months, and when he finally took the city he destroyed it. He took all the artisans, craftsmen, and intellectuals back to Babylon to serve as slaves in what has come to be known as the Babylonian Exile. He captured Zedekiah, put his eyes out, marched him back to Babylon, and had him publicly executed.
Along with thousands of others, Jeremiah was placed in chains to be marched to Babylon, but along the way he was spotted by a Babylonian general who knew that Jeremiah had prophesied for the king to surrender. Jeremiah was released and told that he could go anywhere in the world a free man, including Babylon. Jeremiah said he was called by God to become a prophet to the Jews living in Egypt. And that’s what he did. Of course, you know what his message was to those Jews. He told them that they were like adulterers and prostitutes who had committed affairs with the gods of Egypt. Again, he gave God’s message to those who didn’t appreciate it. Eventually, Jeremiah disappears and we don’t know what happened to him.
When I look at the prophet Jeremiah, I recognize that what he said 2600 years ago is still relevant for today. Specifically I see three messages that still speak to us today.
First, we must be really careful about mixing Christian faith and patriotism. So many Christians today have done just that, not only when it came to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, but to other things such as school prayer and the Ten Commandments in courthouses. I have to tell you that, following Jeremiah’s example, I don’t get hot and bothered over these issues. Why? Because I think that when people get up in arms about them they start to confuse the nation and devotion to God. I feel the same way when people argue about whether or not we are a Christian nation. I believe that calling us a Christian nation means confusing our national interests with God’s interests. So many who proclaim us to be a Christian nation use that designation to justify anything the U.S. does. Much of what we do is not what God is calling us to do, but we can’t tell if we confuse ourselves with God’s chosen people.
Again, I don’t get hot and bothered about school prayer and the Ten Commandments in courthouses because they distract us. Like Jeremiah I care much more about the quality of our devotion to God than I do about where that devotion takes place. I believe that if Jeremiah were here today he would tell us to quit worrying about those things, and to start worrying about the extent to which we are grounded in God, and we are letting that grounding lead us to acts of love, charity, compassion for the poor, and devotion to God’s ways. I’m not against school prayer or the Ten Commandments in courthouses. I just don’t think the issue is big enough to cause us to become so angry that, ironically, we act in un-Christian ways in order to promote this supposedly Christian cause. The point is not to confuse our nation with our religion. That’s straight out of Jeremiah.
A second message for today from Jeremiah is that life is always better when we are grounded fully in God. It’s so easy in this age to become grounded in everything but God. We just have too many other options. But Jeremiah’s point is that if we become grounded in God, our lives actually become easier and more blessed. I think you can look at your own lives and discover this. I’m reminded of this all the time from people who appear in and disappear from church. No matter what church I’ve been in, there has always been a portion of the church whom I only see when their lives are going poorly. They start to come to church, and over time their lives get better. Something about church makes people feel better about their lives. Then they disappear again, only to reappear when life gets worse. They are living testimony to what Jeremiah taught, which is that when we’re grounded in God, life gets better and easier, when we’re not it gets worse.
Finally, I think Jeremiah teaches us to have the courage to keep our faith in the face of all opposition. He is living proof that if you care passionately about God, people will question you, diminish you, and possibly even attack you. All of us have been with people, at times, who criticize or ridicule us for our faith. They will tell us that there is no God, and that religion is a bad thing. Have the courage to stand up in the face of them. We will always face these kinds of people, but Jeremiah reminds us that we can’t let their doubts and criticisms rule our lives.
The whole point is that Jeremiah not only spoke 2600 years ago, but he is still speaking today. The question is whether we are still listening.
Amen.
What the Heck Is That?
Luke 9:28-36
February 14, 2010
Now about eight days after these sayings Jesus took with him Peter and John and James, and went up on the mountain to pray. And while he was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became dazzling white. Suddenly they saw two men, Moses and Elijah, talking to him. They appeared in glory and were speaking of his departure, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem. Now Peter and his companions were weighed down with sleep; but since they had stayed awake, they saw his glory and the two men who stood with him. Just as they were leaving him, Peter said to Jesus, ‘Master, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah’—not knowing what he said. While he was saying this, a cloud came and overshadowed them; and they were terrified as they entered the cloud. Then from the cloud came a voice that said, ‘This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!’ When the voice had spoken, Jesus was found alone. And they kept silent and in those days told no one any of the things they had seen.
I was reading this passage this past week, and clip from my memory suddenly shot out. I remembered a clip from Saturday Night Live from back in 1979. You can see the clip if you go to
http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=50236871
That’s a lot of stuff to type into your browser, but it’s worth it. In the skit, the comedian Steve Martin walks out on stage dressed like a tourist with high black socks, shorts, and a Hawaiian shirt, while goofy piano music plays in the background. He stands in front of the camera looking beyond it at something we can’t see. He stares a bit and then yells out, “What the heck is that?” (although he doesn’t use the word “heck”) SHe yells out again, “What the heck IS that?... What’s that dang thing doing here? How’d that get here? What the heck IS that? What the HECK IS that? How did that dang thing deal get here?” Then, looking offstage to his right he yells to someone, “Hey! Come over here and look at this deal!”
At that point Bill Murray, looking much like the goofy groundskeeper from the movie Caddyshack walks over and says, “What the heck is that?” The dialogue ensues:
SM: “I don’t know what the HECK that is!”
BM: “What in the heck is THAT?”
SM: “Hey you kids! Get away from there!”
BM: “Uh,... I would not mess with that thing.”
SM: “Don’t put your lips on it!”
BM: “What the heck IS that?”
SM: (handing a camera to Bill Murray) “Well, get a photo of me with it anyway.”
BM: (bringing the camera to position) “Careful of that thing… (clicking the camera and then handing the it back to Steve Martin) Oh, I know what that thing is.”
SM: “Well what the HECK IS IT?”
BM: “What the heck is that thing?”
SM: “I don’t even care WHAT it is,… WHAT THE HECK IS IT?”
BM: “I don’t know what the heck that thing is.”
SM: “Oh, I know what it is.”
BM: “Oh yeah…” (and they both start walking off camera and there’s a pause)
SM: (both leaning back into the camera view) “What the HECK was that?!”
I’m reminded of this skit when I read our passage for this morning because I’m convinced that Peter, James, and John must have had a similar reaction. I can imagine the three of them standing together, rubbing sleepy eyes, looking at Jesus, and saying, “What the HECK is that? What the HECK IS THAT?” They were looking at Jesus, and suddenly his face is shining, and he is standing next to Moses and Elijah. Then a mist surrounds them and they hear a voice saying, “This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!” What were they supposed to make of this? What are we supposed to make of this?
Today we’re just as mystified by the transfiguration as they were in Jesus’ day. One of the things that I like about the Bible is that often it describes experiences without explaining them, which, to me, gives it authenticity. In fact, one of the things I’ve learned to respect about the Bible is how it offers things without explanation, including putting contradictory stories together without saying which one is true. For instance, did you know that there are two creation stories in the Bible? There’s the story of the 1st chapter of Genesis, in which God creates the world in six days, and then rests on the seventh. Then in the second chapter we learn about the creation of the world in a completely different order. For example, humans are created on the 6th day in the Chapter 1 after everything else is created. In Chapter 2 God creates humans before creating plants and animals. The Bible doesn’t explain the discrepancy. It just puts both stories there. Also, if you look at the Noah story you find the well-known story in Genesis 6 of Noah taking the animals into the ark two-by-two. Yet in chapter 7 it is retold with Noah taking in seven pairs of every ritually clean animal, and two pairs of every ritually unclean animal. The Bible doesn’t try to explain the discrepancy. It just puts the stories there side-by-side.
Because we Presbyterians aren’t listeralists, we accept the discrepancy and recognize that the Bible isn’t just trying to tell us history. It’s trying to tell us about who and how God is. To me, the discrepancies lend a sense of authenticity because everything isn’t wrapped into a nice, neat package. Literalists are always trying smush everything together to make it all fit. The Bible doesn’t do that, and it doesn’t do that with our story for this morning. The transfiguration takes place, but there’s no real explanation about what was really happening, or what it really means. It leaves us a bit confused, wondering, what message are we supposed to get from it?
I believe that one the messages (there are always many messages to any biblical passage) of the transfiguration is that it gave the disciples and us a glimpse—just a glimpse—of eternal life. It gave a glimpse of what happens when we open to eternity and the divine, a glimpse of both the afterlife and eternity in this life. Jesus’ face shone with a light that radiated out from within him. I believe that this passage is saying that when we are truly open to God, to the divine, our lives can shine with this kind of light. The eternal life is filled not only with light, but also with love and joy. And in this moment Peter, James, and John fully see Jesus as he really is, not as they’ve been seeing him.
Of course, being human like us, they also do what most humans do when they are faced with things they don’t understand. They couldn’t just stand in awe. They had to do something. They looked at Jesus, Moses, and Elijah, and say to Jesus, “Master, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” This is the common human affliction: “Don’t just stand there, do something.” Yet in the face of the transfiguration they were really being called to a different message: “Don’t just do something, stand there.” They were called to simply be with Christ, Moses, and Elijah and stand in awe. There was nothing else for them to do.
This is really great guidance for us. There are times in life where we are simply called to be open to God’s grace and to be willing to look for light and joy in the world.
I believe that the real spiritual life isn’t always so much a life of doing all the right Christian things. It’s not always about having to be perfectly moral or morally perfect. I believe the real spiritual life is about finding joy and light in life, especially in the small things. As many of the spiritual masters of Christianity have taught, God is found in the mundane, not the spectacular.
Unfortunately, a lot of us get caught up in the problems of life, and we can’t see the joy and the light that is already always there. And there is joy and light. If we are willing to look for joy and light, we can catch glimpses of the eternal and see life transfigured. But we have to be willing to be open to life in awe and joy.
Let me close by asking you to go to a computer and watch an internet video, which to me is a very spiritual video even though there’s no mention of God in it. It’s a video found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlfKdbWwruY&feature=user. Or you can go to the original website, which is http://www.wherethehellismatt.com. I’m not going to explain the video, other than to say that it’s a video of taking joy in simple things. And in that it is very profound. So go now and look at the video….
We are called to live transfigured lives—lives that live not only here on earth, but also in eternity.
Amen.
February 14, 2010
Now about eight days after these sayings Jesus took with him Peter and John and James, and went up on the mountain to pray. And while he was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became dazzling white. Suddenly they saw two men, Moses and Elijah, talking to him. They appeared in glory and were speaking of his departure, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem. Now Peter and his companions were weighed down with sleep; but since they had stayed awake, they saw his glory and the two men who stood with him. Just as they were leaving him, Peter said to Jesus, ‘Master, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah’—not knowing what he said. While he was saying this, a cloud came and overshadowed them; and they were terrified as they entered the cloud. Then from the cloud came a voice that said, ‘This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!’ When the voice had spoken, Jesus was found alone. And they kept silent and in those days told no one any of the things they had seen.
I was reading this passage this past week, and clip from my memory suddenly shot out. I remembered a clip from Saturday Night Live from back in 1979. You can see the clip if you go to
http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=50236871
That’s a lot of stuff to type into your browser, but it’s worth it. In the skit, the comedian Steve Martin walks out on stage dressed like a tourist with high black socks, shorts, and a Hawaiian shirt, while goofy piano music plays in the background. He stands in front of the camera looking beyond it at something we can’t see. He stares a bit and then yells out, “What the heck is that?” (although he doesn’t use the word “heck”) SHe yells out again, “What the heck IS that?... What’s that dang thing doing here? How’d that get here? What the heck IS that? What the HECK IS that? How did that dang thing deal get here?” Then, looking offstage to his right he yells to someone, “Hey! Come over here and look at this deal!”
At that point Bill Murray, looking much like the goofy groundskeeper from the movie Caddyshack walks over and says, “What the heck is that?” The dialogue ensues:
SM: “I don’t know what the HECK that is!”
BM: “What in the heck is THAT?”
SM: “Hey you kids! Get away from there!”
BM: “Uh,... I would not mess with that thing.”
SM: “Don’t put your lips on it!”
BM: “What the heck IS that?”
SM: (handing a camera to Bill Murray) “Well, get a photo of me with it anyway.”
BM: (bringing the camera to position) “Careful of that thing… (clicking the camera and then handing the it back to Steve Martin) Oh, I know what that thing is.”
SM: “Well what the HECK IS IT?”
BM: “What the heck is that thing?”
SM: “I don’t even care WHAT it is,… WHAT THE HECK IS IT?”
BM: “I don’t know what the heck that thing is.”
SM: “Oh, I know what it is.”
BM: “Oh yeah…” (and they both start walking off camera and there’s a pause)
SM: (both leaning back into the camera view) “What the HECK was that?!”
I’m reminded of this skit when I read our passage for this morning because I’m convinced that Peter, James, and John must have had a similar reaction. I can imagine the three of them standing together, rubbing sleepy eyes, looking at Jesus, and saying, “What the HECK is that? What the HECK IS THAT?” They were looking at Jesus, and suddenly his face is shining, and he is standing next to Moses and Elijah. Then a mist surrounds them and they hear a voice saying, “This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!” What were they supposed to make of this? What are we supposed to make of this?
Today we’re just as mystified by the transfiguration as they were in Jesus’ day. One of the things that I like about the Bible is that often it describes experiences without explaining them, which, to me, gives it authenticity. In fact, one of the things I’ve learned to respect about the Bible is how it offers things without explanation, including putting contradictory stories together without saying which one is true. For instance, did you know that there are two creation stories in the Bible? There’s the story of the 1st chapter of Genesis, in which God creates the world in six days, and then rests on the seventh. Then in the second chapter we learn about the creation of the world in a completely different order. For example, humans are created on the 6th day in the Chapter 1 after everything else is created. In Chapter 2 God creates humans before creating plants and animals. The Bible doesn’t explain the discrepancy. It just puts both stories there. Also, if you look at the Noah story you find the well-known story in Genesis 6 of Noah taking the animals into the ark two-by-two. Yet in chapter 7 it is retold with Noah taking in seven pairs of every ritually clean animal, and two pairs of every ritually unclean animal. The Bible doesn’t try to explain the discrepancy. It just puts the stories there side-by-side.
Because we Presbyterians aren’t listeralists, we accept the discrepancy and recognize that the Bible isn’t just trying to tell us history. It’s trying to tell us about who and how God is. To me, the discrepancies lend a sense of authenticity because everything isn’t wrapped into a nice, neat package. Literalists are always trying smush everything together to make it all fit. The Bible doesn’t do that, and it doesn’t do that with our story for this morning. The transfiguration takes place, but there’s no real explanation about what was really happening, or what it really means. It leaves us a bit confused, wondering, what message are we supposed to get from it?
I believe that one the messages (there are always many messages to any biblical passage) of the transfiguration is that it gave the disciples and us a glimpse—just a glimpse—of eternal life. It gave a glimpse of what happens when we open to eternity and the divine, a glimpse of both the afterlife and eternity in this life. Jesus’ face shone with a light that radiated out from within him. I believe that this passage is saying that when we are truly open to God, to the divine, our lives can shine with this kind of light. The eternal life is filled not only with light, but also with love and joy. And in this moment Peter, James, and John fully see Jesus as he really is, not as they’ve been seeing him.
Of course, being human like us, they also do what most humans do when they are faced with things they don’t understand. They couldn’t just stand in awe. They had to do something. They looked at Jesus, Moses, and Elijah, and say to Jesus, “Master, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” This is the common human affliction: “Don’t just stand there, do something.” Yet in the face of the transfiguration they were really being called to a different message: “Don’t just do something, stand there.” They were called to simply be with Christ, Moses, and Elijah and stand in awe. There was nothing else for them to do.
This is really great guidance for us. There are times in life where we are simply called to be open to God’s grace and to be willing to look for light and joy in the world.
I believe that the real spiritual life isn’t always so much a life of doing all the right Christian things. It’s not always about having to be perfectly moral or morally perfect. I believe the real spiritual life is about finding joy and light in life, especially in the small things. As many of the spiritual masters of Christianity have taught, God is found in the mundane, not the spectacular.
Unfortunately, a lot of us get caught up in the problems of life, and we can’t see the joy and the light that is already always there. And there is joy and light. If we are willing to look for joy and light, we can catch glimpses of the eternal and see life transfigured. But we have to be willing to be open to life in awe and joy.
Let me close by asking you to go to a computer and watch an internet video, which to me is a very spiritual video even though there’s no mention of God in it. It’s a video found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlfKdbWwruY&feature=user. Or you can go to the original website, which is http://www.wherethehellismatt.com. I’m not going to explain the video, other than to say that it’s a video of taking joy in simple things. And in that it is very profound. So go now and look at the video….
We are called to live transfigured lives—lives that live not only here on earth, but also in eternity.
Amen.
The Power of Belief
Luke 5:1-11
February 7, 2009
Once while Jesus was standing beside the lake of Gennesaret, and the crowd was pressing in on him to hear the word of God, he saw two boats there at the shore of the lake; the fishermen had gone out of them and were washing their nets. He got into one of the boats, the one belonging to Simon, and asked him to put out a little way from the shore. Then he sat down and taught the crowds from the boat. When he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, ‘Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch.’ Simon answered, ‘Master, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing. Yet if you say so, I will let down the nets.’ When they had done this, they caught so many fish that their nets were beginning to break. So they signaled to their partners in the other boat to come and help them. And they came and filled both boats, so that they began to sink. But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus’ knees, saying, ‘Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!’ For he and all who were with him were amazed at the catch of fish that they had taken; and so also were James and John, sons of Zebedee, who were partners with Simon. Then Jesus said to Simon, ‘Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people.’ When they had brought their boats to shore, they left everything and followed him.
At some point during my senior year in high school I became a big believer in the power of belief. My girlfriend’s mother, for some reason, thought that I would be interested in the writings of a pastor named Norman Vincent Peale, who had written the book, The Power of Positive Thinking. She was right. This book, and the spiritual attitude it advocated, dramatically changed my life.
The most dramatic change came when I went to college. Most of you would probably be surprised that I was a terrible student in school. I finished 12th to the bottom of my high school class, and for me a C was a good grade. Ds were okay because they weren’t Fs. I managed to mostly avoid Fs by shooting for Ds. For most of my life I had felt trapped in the identity of being a class clown and poor student. I was trapped not only by my history but by others’ expectations. People thought I was a bad student and a cut-up, and so they treated me that way. I was criticized a lot, which only served to keep me in that identity. I remember several times during junior and senior high thinking, “It doesn’t matter what I do, people are always down on me and just don’t like me. So why bother trying to change. I’m going to be criticized anyway because I won’t be able to change the way they want me to. So I might as well be what I want, not what they want.” My whole attitude was that I was a failure, so why try changing.
That all changed when I read parts of Peale’s book. I realized that I could change, and that I could change especially if I learned to ignore people’s criticisms. When I went to college I decided that I was going to change. So I slowly became transformed. I had to teach myself how to study, and I had to learn how to learn. My grades were mediocre at the beginning, but by the time I graduated I was on the Dean’s List. I went onto graduate school and my grades got increasingly better, to the point that when I graduated with my Ph.D., I graduated with a cumulative 4.0 gpa.
My change as a student happened because I changed my belief. By believing I could be better, I became better. This also had an impact on me in sports. When I graduated from high school I was a pretty good lacrosse player—at least good enough to be recruited by Dennison University and Ohio State University. But when it came to a college choice I let the weather determine it. I wanted to go south so that I could get away from grey skies and snow. So I went to Roanoke College in Virginia. They had a lacrosse team and I figured I could try out for it. What I didn’t know was how good they were. I didn’t know much about college lacrosse, but what I found out very quickly upon going to Roanoke was that at the time they were one of the best college teams in the country.
Back then there was not much difference between Division 1 and Division 3 schools. They all played each other, so that our little school of 1200 students had a lacrosse schedule that included schools such as the University of North Carolina, Duke University, North Carolina State University, the University of Virginia, Ohio State University, as well as many smaller colleges. And Roanoke beat most of those schools at the time.
In the fall of my freshman year I tried out for the team, and quickly discovered that the other players were really good, and I wasn’t. I played defense, and was told by one of the offensive players that fall that in practice everyone wanted to go against me because they knew that they would score. I was terrible, but the power of positive thinking had taken hold. I believed that I could become a good player. So I kept working at it. I didn’t make the team initially, but halfway through the spring season I made it, which was really fun because we won a Division 2/3 national championship that year.
Over the next three years I kept improving. There were players who were better than me at the time, but I kept trying. Many of them eventually quit the team for a lack of playing time, but I kept at it. By the time I graduated as a senior I was a starter on one of the better teams in the country, and I was the defenseman who covered the best offensive player on the other team. I had gone from being the player everyone wanted to play against to one who was able to shut down the All-American offensive players. And it was all because of the positive attitude that I had shifted to four years before.
It was out of those two experiences that I began, spiritually, to really understand our passage. Our passage is one of belief, not only in oneself, but in God’s power. Jesus is with some of the disciples, specifically Peter, who work as fishermen. They are fishing in the Sea of Galilee for a small type of fish, a lake variety of tilapia, with very little meat on them. For a fisherman to be even moderately successful, the nets need to be full because to make a meal out of these fish requires at least three or four per person. Unfortunately, Peter and his crew are catching nothing. Jesus tells them to put their nets on the other side of the boat, and that they will catch a boatload, but they are skeptical. They haven’t caught anything all day. Why would switching to the other side of the boat work? They are full of doubt, but they do it anyway. And to their surprise their nets come up bursting with fish. They catch enough to fill two boats. It is an incredible catch. And all it took was a little belief in God’s power.
It’s amazing what a change of belief can do. So often if we believe something isn’t possible, it becomes impossible. If we believe something can happen, often it will happen. This is a foundation of much of Christian belief. Too many people today are skeptical and cynical, thinking, “I won’t believe it till I see it. I won’t believe it can be done until it is done.” In contrast, Jesus often emphasized a very simple idea: If we believe, then we’ll see. If we believe, then we’ll achieve.
The thing about Christian belief is that it isn’t belief like what our culture teaches, which is that we have to believe in ourselves. There’s nothing wrong with believing in ourselves. Certainly that is part of Norman Vincent Peale’s message. But Christian belief is in something greater. It’s a belief in the power of God not only to be in the world, but a belief that if we are open to God’s grace, it can work miracles big and small in our lives. It’s a belief that even though we may go through really tough times, if we are open to God’s power, our lives can be better. Our lives can be blessed.
What I’ve learned over the years is that so many people struggle in life because they don’t believe. It’s not just that they don’t believe in Christ or in God. They just don’t believe that their lives can be better. There are so many people whose lives are stuck in ruts, stuck in a cycle of disappointment, stuck in a belief that good isn’t possible for them, and it breaks my heart. It breaks my heart because I know from experience that if we are willing just to change the way we look at life and at God, it changes everything.
I’ve recently seen, in a book that we are presently reading and discussing in our men’s group that meets on Thursday mornings, how changing perceptions can change life. The book is Soul Survivor by Philip Yancey, in which he writes about thirteen people who have changed his life. Some are well-known, such at Martin Luther King, Jr., G. K. Chesterton, and Leo Tolstoy, but others are not known, such as Dr. Paul Brand.
Brand is a medical doctor who has specialized in treating lepers, or, more specifically, people with Hansen’s disease, which is the form of leprosy that often causes severe disfigurement. People with this disease often lose their fingers, toes, and other extremities. Brand has served as a doctor specializing in this disease in England, India, and Mississippi. He is considered one of the foremost experts of the disease, having developed surgical techniques to restore the use of the hand to people’s who’s hands have been crippled by this disease.
One of Brand’s most important discoveries was that people with this disease don’t lose their extremities because of the disease itself. He discovered that instead the disease kills the nerve endings in fingers, toes, and other extremities. Thus, people get infections from blisters, cuts, or splinters, and because they can’t feel the pain they let them fester. They lose their extremities because of unfelt infections. As a result of this discovery, he also began to think about pain in a different way.
We see pain as bad, whether it is physical or emotional pain. We tend to complain that when we are in pain, God must be absent. Brand says that our pain shows that God is present. For example, he says, “I thank God for pain,… I cannot think of a greater gift I could give my leprosy patients…. Most people view pain as an enemy. Yet, as my leprosy patients prove, it forces us to pay attention to threats against our bodies. Without it, heart attacks, strokes, ruptured appendixes, and stomach ulcers would all occur without any warning. Who would ever visit a doctor apart from pain’s warnings?
“I notice that the symptoms of illness my patients complained about were actually a display of bodily healing at work. Virtually every response of our bodies that we view with irritation or disgust—blister, callus, swelling, fever, sneeze, cough, vomiting, and especially pain—demonstrates a reflex toward health. In all these things normally considered enemies, we can find a reason to be grateful.”
So often we see our pain as a sign that God doesn’t care. The truth is that pain is evidence that God does care. God gives us pain to keep us safe. We think that a good God would keep us from pain, but think about the causes of our pain. Why do we feel such grief at the death of a loved one? The answer is that the pain we feel is from the love we are able to have shared with the loved one? The pain we feel at being unemployed or having a difficult life is the pain of something inside of us seeking something better. To fully comprehend this means shifting our perspective so that we can see life and God in different ways.
What we believe about God and life determines what we experience about God and life. If we are able to believe it’s amazing what we can see and achieve.
So, where’s your life in terms of belief? Do you believe in God’s goodness and power in your life? If not, perhaps that’s why your life is the way it is? If so, maybe that’s why your life is the way it is.
Amen.
February 7, 2009
Once while Jesus was standing beside the lake of Gennesaret, and the crowd was pressing in on him to hear the word of God, he saw two boats there at the shore of the lake; the fishermen had gone out of them and were washing their nets. He got into one of the boats, the one belonging to Simon, and asked him to put out a little way from the shore. Then he sat down and taught the crowds from the boat. When he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, ‘Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch.’ Simon answered, ‘Master, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing. Yet if you say so, I will let down the nets.’ When they had done this, they caught so many fish that their nets were beginning to break. So they signaled to their partners in the other boat to come and help them. And they came and filled both boats, so that they began to sink. But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus’ knees, saying, ‘Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!’ For he and all who were with him were amazed at the catch of fish that they had taken; and so also were James and John, sons of Zebedee, who were partners with Simon. Then Jesus said to Simon, ‘Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people.’ When they had brought their boats to shore, they left everything and followed him.
At some point during my senior year in high school I became a big believer in the power of belief. My girlfriend’s mother, for some reason, thought that I would be interested in the writings of a pastor named Norman Vincent Peale, who had written the book, The Power of Positive Thinking. She was right. This book, and the spiritual attitude it advocated, dramatically changed my life.
The most dramatic change came when I went to college. Most of you would probably be surprised that I was a terrible student in school. I finished 12th to the bottom of my high school class, and for me a C was a good grade. Ds were okay because they weren’t Fs. I managed to mostly avoid Fs by shooting for Ds. For most of my life I had felt trapped in the identity of being a class clown and poor student. I was trapped not only by my history but by others’ expectations. People thought I was a bad student and a cut-up, and so they treated me that way. I was criticized a lot, which only served to keep me in that identity. I remember several times during junior and senior high thinking, “It doesn’t matter what I do, people are always down on me and just don’t like me. So why bother trying to change. I’m going to be criticized anyway because I won’t be able to change the way they want me to. So I might as well be what I want, not what they want.” My whole attitude was that I was a failure, so why try changing.
That all changed when I read parts of Peale’s book. I realized that I could change, and that I could change especially if I learned to ignore people’s criticisms. When I went to college I decided that I was going to change. So I slowly became transformed. I had to teach myself how to study, and I had to learn how to learn. My grades were mediocre at the beginning, but by the time I graduated I was on the Dean’s List. I went onto graduate school and my grades got increasingly better, to the point that when I graduated with my Ph.D., I graduated with a cumulative 4.0 gpa.
My change as a student happened because I changed my belief. By believing I could be better, I became better. This also had an impact on me in sports. When I graduated from high school I was a pretty good lacrosse player—at least good enough to be recruited by Dennison University and Ohio State University. But when it came to a college choice I let the weather determine it. I wanted to go south so that I could get away from grey skies and snow. So I went to Roanoke College in Virginia. They had a lacrosse team and I figured I could try out for it. What I didn’t know was how good they were. I didn’t know much about college lacrosse, but what I found out very quickly upon going to Roanoke was that at the time they were one of the best college teams in the country.
Back then there was not much difference between Division 1 and Division 3 schools. They all played each other, so that our little school of 1200 students had a lacrosse schedule that included schools such as the University of North Carolina, Duke University, North Carolina State University, the University of Virginia, Ohio State University, as well as many smaller colleges. And Roanoke beat most of those schools at the time.
In the fall of my freshman year I tried out for the team, and quickly discovered that the other players were really good, and I wasn’t. I played defense, and was told by one of the offensive players that fall that in practice everyone wanted to go against me because they knew that they would score. I was terrible, but the power of positive thinking had taken hold. I believed that I could become a good player. So I kept working at it. I didn’t make the team initially, but halfway through the spring season I made it, which was really fun because we won a Division 2/3 national championship that year.
Over the next three years I kept improving. There were players who were better than me at the time, but I kept trying. Many of them eventually quit the team for a lack of playing time, but I kept at it. By the time I graduated as a senior I was a starter on one of the better teams in the country, and I was the defenseman who covered the best offensive player on the other team. I had gone from being the player everyone wanted to play against to one who was able to shut down the All-American offensive players. And it was all because of the positive attitude that I had shifted to four years before.
It was out of those two experiences that I began, spiritually, to really understand our passage. Our passage is one of belief, not only in oneself, but in God’s power. Jesus is with some of the disciples, specifically Peter, who work as fishermen. They are fishing in the Sea of Galilee for a small type of fish, a lake variety of tilapia, with very little meat on them. For a fisherman to be even moderately successful, the nets need to be full because to make a meal out of these fish requires at least three or four per person. Unfortunately, Peter and his crew are catching nothing. Jesus tells them to put their nets on the other side of the boat, and that they will catch a boatload, but they are skeptical. They haven’t caught anything all day. Why would switching to the other side of the boat work? They are full of doubt, but they do it anyway. And to their surprise their nets come up bursting with fish. They catch enough to fill two boats. It is an incredible catch. And all it took was a little belief in God’s power.
It’s amazing what a change of belief can do. So often if we believe something isn’t possible, it becomes impossible. If we believe something can happen, often it will happen. This is a foundation of much of Christian belief. Too many people today are skeptical and cynical, thinking, “I won’t believe it till I see it. I won’t believe it can be done until it is done.” In contrast, Jesus often emphasized a very simple idea: If we believe, then we’ll see. If we believe, then we’ll achieve.
The thing about Christian belief is that it isn’t belief like what our culture teaches, which is that we have to believe in ourselves. There’s nothing wrong with believing in ourselves. Certainly that is part of Norman Vincent Peale’s message. But Christian belief is in something greater. It’s a belief in the power of God not only to be in the world, but a belief that if we are open to God’s grace, it can work miracles big and small in our lives. It’s a belief that even though we may go through really tough times, if we are open to God’s power, our lives can be better. Our lives can be blessed.
What I’ve learned over the years is that so many people struggle in life because they don’t believe. It’s not just that they don’t believe in Christ or in God. They just don’t believe that their lives can be better. There are so many people whose lives are stuck in ruts, stuck in a cycle of disappointment, stuck in a belief that good isn’t possible for them, and it breaks my heart. It breaks my heart because I know from experience that if we are willing just to change the way we look at life and at God, it changes everything.
I’ve recently seen, in a book that we are presently reading and discussing in our men’s group that meets on Thursday mornings, how changing perceptions can change life. The book is Soul Survivor by Philip Yancey, in which he writes about thirteen people who have changed his life. Some are well-known, such at Martin Luther King, Jr., G. K. Chesterton, and Leo Tolstoy, but others are not known, such as Dr. Paul Brand.
Brand is a medical doctor who has specialized in treating lepers, or, more specifically, people with Hansen’s disease, which is the form of leprosy that often causes severe disfigurement. People with this disease often lose their fingers, toes, and other extremities. Brand has served as a doctor specializing in this disease in England, India, and Mississippi. He is considered one of the foremost experts of the disease, having developed surgical techniques to restore the use of the hand to people’s who’s hands have been crippled by this disease.
One of Brand’s most important discoveries was that people with this disease don’t lose their extremities because of the disease itself. He discovered that instead the disease kills the nerve endings in fingers, toes, and other extremities. Thus, people get infections from blisters, cuts, or splinters, and because they can’t feel the pain they let them fester. They lose their extremities because of unfelt infections. As a result of this discovery, he also began to think about pain in a different way.
We see pain as bad, whether it is physical or emotional pain. We tend to complain that when we are in pain, God must be absent. Brand says that our pain shows that God is present. For example, he says, “I thank God for pain,… I cannot think of a greater gift I could give my leprosy patients…. Most people view pain as an enemy. Yet, as my leprosy patients prove, it forces us to pay attention to threats against our bodies. Without it, heart attacks, strokes, ruptured appendixes, and stomach ulcers would all occur without any warning. Who would ever visit a doctor apart from pain’s warnings?
“I notice that the symptoms of illness my patients complained about were actually a display of bodily healing at work. Virtually every response of our bodies that we view with irritation or disgust—blister, callus, swelling, fever, sneeze, cough, vomiting, and especially pain—demonstrates a reflex toward health. In all these things normally considered enemies, we can find a reason to be grateful.”
So often we see our pain as a sign that God doesn’t care. The truth is that pain is evidence that God does care. God gives us pain to keep us safe. We think that a good God would keep us from pain, but think about the causes of our pain. Why do we feel such grief at the death of a loved one? The answer is that the pain we feel is from the love we are able to have shared with the loved one? The pain we feel at being unemployed or having a difficult life is the pain of something inside of us seeking something better. To fully comprehend this means shifting our perspective so that we can see life and God in different ways.
What we believe about God and life determines what we experience about God and life. If we are able to believe it’s amazing what we can see and achieve.
So, where’s your life in terms of belief? Do you believe in God’s goodness and power in your life? If not, perhaps that’s why your life is the way it is? If so, maybe that’s why your life is the way it is.
Amen.
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