by the Rev. Connie Frierson
I always wonder what people hear out there in the pews. What things do we get across and what gets lost in the shuffle. For instance, without looking down at the bulletin do you know that Graham and I are doing a sermon series that is going to last all through the summer? Raise your hands. Raise you hands if you know what the series is about. Well, if you don’t know, the sermon series is called Real Life Proverbs. Graham’s last three sermons were on some great topics, “Focus on the Fundamentals,” “Find your Balance,” ”See yourself clearly.” They were so good individually that you might not see them as part of the whole. But once you do you can realize how important this is. These Real Life Proverbs are the Bold Face Items of our life.
What do I mean by Bold Face Items? When Al was flying single seat fighters, the Air Force had bold face items. These were the things you needed to know cold. You had to be able to come out of a sound sleep, or pure panic and repeat them. When everything is going to hell in a hand basket, what do you do? Bold face items were the kinds of things that could keep you from dying, like what to do if your hydraulics failed, or there’s a fire in the cockpit or an engine quits. Paramedics and First Responders also have Bold Face Items. They have simple checklists that help in the midst of an emergency. These are simple guidelines. For instance if someone is bleeding, you stop the bleeding, protect the wound, and treat for shock. Well in our spiritual world we are trying to do triage too. We need bold face items. We need real life proverbs.
Thank goodness we have Paul. Paul was the king of pithy lists that work. That is why Graham and I have been preaching from Paul’s letters, Ephesians, Galatians and now Philippians. He is good at this sort of thing. Paul has the street credentials for this job. He has been beaten with 39 strokes of the lash five different times, beaten with rods three times, stoned once, shipwrecked three times, cast a drift a night and a day at sea and faced danger from local potentiates, to regional governors, Jews, gentiles and mobs of every persuasion. Even, Philippians, our passage for today, is written from jail.
Today’s bold face, real life proverb is “You are what you see.” Watch what fills your eyes and thoughts, because those are the things most likely to be translated into what you do and who you are. Paul lists the things that should fill your eyes; whatever is true, honorable, just, pure, pleasing commendable. Find that thing that has excellence and things worthy to be praised. Let these be the kinds of things that fill your mind. Because when something fills your eye and your mind, it spills out of your fingertips and your toes into what you do. Paul is sharing some ancient wisdom here. What fills your eye, fills your being, colors your actions and your views, motivates you or defeats you. What you focus on is important.
This is old, old wisdom. This wisdom is so old it is buried in the earliest part so of the bible. I was turning the phrase, ‘the apple of my eye,’ over and over in my mind. Do you know the origin of this phrase? The phrase the apple of my eye comes from about five different places in the Old Testament of the bible, the King James Translation. In Deuteronomy there is a long poem, Moses last words about how God holds the people as the apple of his eye. A psalm prays to God to always hold us as the apple of God’s eye. A proverb gives good advise to hold God’s law as the apple of your eye. These translations are working with some really old Hebrew idiom. The Hebrew phrase is ‘ishown ayin’. Its literal translation means ‘little man of the eye.’ The ancient Hebrew and the ancient Greek and also ancient Latin, all noticed the same thing. That when you are very close to someone. If you stare eye to eye, in the black of the pupil you will see a tiny image of yourself reflected back, the ‘ishown ayin,’ the tiny man in the eye. The little god reflection in the round black pupil became translated as “the apple of the eye.” Anyone who is so close to be reflected is in a relationship of passion. This thing that you adore fills up your eye and it affects your life. Ancient people knew this. Paul knew this. Why do we forget it?
And we do forget this real life proverb. We are sloppy and cavalier with what we let in our eyes and minds. Or perhaps we just crave new things and new knowledge. We pride ourselves on amassing information so we take in lots of stuff, lots of images, lots of ideas. We don’t always fill our minds with the true, the honorable, the just, the pure, the pleasing the commendable. We take in the silly and the shallow, and the horrific and the sad, the quirky and the mean. We take all this in and that is not bad. But we need to have the right model. If we assume all of this comes into our heads and just gets filed in neutral digital files, I think that is wrong. We need to let that information flow in but guard what becomes enshrined in the apple of the eye. What we reserve for that inner image, that core of who we are determines what flows out of us.
But we don’t always do that. We let a lot of dross into our souls. I will use my self as an example of the chief sinner. I took a walk with my new I-Phone and snapped some pictures. So I will ask, “What do you see?” Here is a picture of my garden. What do you see and is it the same thing I see? Do you see a flowerbed, coreopsis in full bloom, purple coneflowers, and ornamental grasses? Or do you see a bed that needs weeded and watered, some plants that need divided and moved about. But then I look closer. Do you see it? Let’s look even closer. Now do you see it? There is a bee there. In fact the whole flowerbed was crawling with them. You know, the fall before last, I had a run in with a ground nest of yellow jackets. I was weeding around some coneflowers just like this and I when I pulled that weed out of the ground it was like I popped the cork on a bottle of bees. I got stung about 9 times. Couldn’t feel my lips. I was rushed to the hospital. I see what I fear. What do you see? Do you let fear be the little god in the apple of your eye?
What do you see here in this picture? This is one of my old gimmee cats, named Greg. He doesn’t like to have his picture taken. Do you see how intense a character he is? Do you see how rich and buttery yellow his coat is? But do you see the flaw? I have a cat with a crumpled ear. But Greg is still my cat. The things we love have flaws. People don’t do what we want. Kids spill things and ask too many questions. Teens don’t know what’s good for them. Parents are too bossy. Friends disappoint. We are flawed creatures with crumpled ears, trying to love other wounded creatures. But what fills our eyes and thoughts? Do we see only the flaw? I have had the privilege of being loved by a few people who when they looked at me saw what was good, what was true, what was commendable and worthy of praise. That has made all the difference in my life. Paul’s advice is one way to bring God’s love into a relationship in a startling new way. See the good.
Here is another picture. What do you see??
Do you see a beautiful woman in a beauty pageant? Or do you see a woman with out a leg? The woman you are looking at is one of the finalists in the Miss Landmine Contest held in Angola in 2007. During the twenty-year Angola civil war, millions of land minds where strewn across the country. About 80, 000 Angolans have been maimed by them. The top three countries for landmine accidents are Angola, Cambodia and Afghanistan. So in 2007 a Norwegian, Morten Traavik, started a beauty pageant for landmine accident survivors. This woman is one of the beautiful finalists from one of ten provinces in Angola. What do you see, beauty, courage, affirmation and a call to do good? This is an example of the real life proverb from Paul. What do you set in your minds eye?
St Patrick had a prayer that answers this call of Paul to rest our minds and eyes on the good, by putting the best, the highest always in his eye. St. Patrick wrote: “Christ be with me, Christ within me,
Christ behind me, Christ before me,
Christ beside me, Christ to win me,
Christ to comfort and restore me. Christ beneath me, Christ above me, Christ in quiet, and in danger, Christ in hearts of all that love me, Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.” This is the practical spiritual exercise that helps us see with God’s eyes the world God loves. When two lovers gaze into each other’s eyes they should see each other in the apple of the eye. Christians when they look at the world should have the little Christ of the eye always in the center of their vision. Christ in all directions you look, because Christ is the eye that we look at the world through. This is the only way to change the world. To let God come into us, so that we come into the world differently, reborn, healed and renewed.
Now let’s think of how God looks at us. The message of the entire bible is God’s call to the apple of God’s eye. A good portion of the bible shows how we are often rotten apples. The work of the cross, of God’s grace in the world, is for God to see us with an eye for what is true, just, pure, pleasing and commendable. God sees the little Christ that the Holy Spirit has planted in us. Our crumpled ears and maimed limbs become the beauty marks that made us who we are. Our sins are set as far from us as the east is from the west. So God looks deep to see that beautiful person God has created, forgiven and healed, the person God is bringing about in us.
Amen.
Real-Life Proverbs: Take Responsibility and Give Credit
Unfortunately, the print version of this sermon is unavailable, but if you you can listen to the sermon by clicking below
Real-Life Proverbs: See Yourself from Outside Yourself
Colossians 3:5-17
July 10, 2011
Put to death, therefore, whatever in you is earthly: fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed (which is idolatry). On account of these the wrath of God is coming on those who are disobedient. These are the ways you also once followed, when you were living that life.
But now you must get rid of all such things—anger, wrath, malice, slander, and abusive language from your mouth. Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have stripped off the old self with its practices and have clothed yourselves with the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its creator. In that renewal there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all!
As God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other; just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in the one body. And be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly; teach and admonish one another in all wisdom; and with gratitude in your hearts sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs to God. And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.
I don’t know if you were at all like me, but growing up I loved mythology. I loved Greek mythology, Norse mythology, and any other mythology I could find. And of the mythologies out there, I especially loved Greek mythology. I’m not sure what it was about the Greeks. They had a special ability to create stories explaining the human condition. They were Shakespeare before Shakespeare. While most of their myths did give explanations for natural phenomenon, I don’t think that’s what their main purpose was. Greek myths often were more interested in explaining human nature rather than nature and creation in general. That’s what I loved about Greek myths. In fact, many of our current psychological terms originated in Greek mythology.
Among my favorite Greek myths is the story of Narcissus and Echo. Do you know that myth? It’s wonderful in terms of helping us understand the human tendency toward selfishness and self-obsession. There once was a water nymph named Echo. Nymphs were minor deities who inhabited trees, lakes, streams, and all of nature. Like all other nature nymphs, Echo was beautiful. And she was popular. Her one fault was that she loved to talk, gossip, and get in the last word.
One day, Zeus was out cavorting with all the other water nymphs when his wife, Hera (the head of all the goddesses), showed up looking for him. She knew that he was having dalliances with the nymphs, and she wanted to catch him in the act. Zeus asked Echo to distract Hera so he could get away. She complied. Afterwards, Hera was furious with Echo. So she cursed her, telling her that from that moment forward her tongue would only be able to imitate others. She would not be able to speak for herself.
From that time forth Echo was unable to form relationships with others. She retreated to the valleys and canyons, imitating the sounds that drifted her way. Over time, a young man started visiting her particular valley, and he was the most beautiful man ever created. His name was Narcissus. She fell in love with him and wondered how to get him to love her.
One day, she decided to give it her all. As Narcissus walked through the valley, Echo followed. Narcissus wheeled around and said, “Who’s there?” Echo echoed back, “there.” Narcissus said, “Show yourself and come to me.” Echo said, “Come to me.” Narcissus, growing more frustrated, yelled out, “Come and join me.” With that, Echo rushed out of the woods and embraced him, crying, “Join me.” Narcissus recoiled in revulsion, saying, “I can’t join you. Who are you? I have nothing to do with you.” And with that, he walked away. Echo was crushed. The other nymphs, who had been rejected also by Narcissus, prayed that Narcissus could feel the pain of his rejection. A goddess heard this prayer and put a curse on Narcissus that he would fall in love with the next face he saw, longing forever for that person, but being unable to receive love in return.
Walking through the woods he came across a magnificent pond. It was completely still. No animals drank from it, no leaves or branches spoiled its surface. Gazing down into the pool of water as he prepared for a drink, he glimpsed his own face and fell in love with his own reflection. He was mesmerized. He called out in longing for the face in the pool, and reached for it, but the ripples from his hand caused the figure to disappear. Narcissus was devastated. He waited, and as the waters calmed, the face returned. Narcissus tried again to reach out to his love, and the ripples caused the figure to disappear. He sat back, and in tears awaited his love’s return.
From that moment onward, Narcissus never left the pond. Day and night he sat by its side, staring at his own reflection. Eventually he wasted away and died of exposure and from his unrequited love for himself.
The myth of Narcissus is the basis of a psychological disorder called Narcissistic Personality Disorder, which is a condition in which people become obsessed with themselves and their own power. But those with the personality disorder aren’t the only ones affected by self-obsession. We live in a self-obsessed culture. We live in a narcissistic culture. And our collective narcissism makes it hard for us to also be Christians.
It doesn’t take much to prove my case. For example, look at what magazines are the most popular. People and Us magazines are more popular than Time or Newsweek. That’s different from 30 years ago when newsmagazines were among the most popular. These are magazines popular today because they’re narcissistic. And websites like People, TMZ, and others are also among the most popular. We’re obsessed with celebrities—that is to say we’re obsessed with the self-obsessed. And a relatively new phenomenon is celebrities who are celebrities for being celebrities—people like Paris Hilton, the Kardashians, and others. Consistently among the top television shows are those that celebrate narcissistic endeavors. I realize that “Survivor” isn’t necessarily a top show anymore, but it is a show that emphasizes who can get to the top, as does “The Apprentice,” “The Great Race,” “The Bachelorette,” and others. Also, there are many reality shows, such as “American Idol,” “The Voice,” “America’s Got Talent,” and others that are focused on finding that new celebrity that we can idolize. The only thing we like more than celebrating narcissists is seeing narcissists fall. Aren’t we fickle?
We love narcissists because they often are beautiful, charismatic, and gifted, and we want to be like that. The fact is that narcissists permeate every part of our culture, including among churches, and including clergy. Even among clergy, especially among televangelists, there is competition for who is the most popular, the most charismatic, oversees the biggest church, and so forth.
The real problem of narcissism is that the more self-absorbed we become, the harder it is so see ourselves as we really are. And a big part of the Christian life is seeing ourselves with humility, not as we puff ourselves up to be in our imaginations. Too many of us create a mythological self-image, seeing ourselves as we believe we are, and when we do so we live out of our false selves. When I use this term, I’m using a term that is traditional in a field of theology called “mystical theology.” The idea of the false self is that God created us with a “true self,” with an ability to become the person we most truly are, a person created in the image of God. Unfortunately, too many of us cultivate a false self, a person based on a desire for popularity, acceptance, influence, and power. We recognize easily those who deviate the most from their true selves. We call them “fake” people, recognizing that there is something about them that isn’t authentic. But all of us have a falseness in us to some extent. The Christian spiritual life is about letting go of that falseness so that we can become who we truly are. And narcissism leads us away from who we truly are, and into falseness.
One of the keys to growing spiritually in faith is to develop the ability to see ourselves from outside of ourselves; to see ourselves not only as others see us, but (as best we can) to see ourselves as God sees us. To really get out of our narcissistic ways requires us to look more objectively at ourselves from perspectives other than our own. This is not the same as looking at ourselves from others’ points of view so that they’ll accept us. When we pursue popularity, we are look at ourselves from outside of ourselves in order to cover over our fears and insecurities. That’s being false. Seeing ourselves from outside of ourselves in a spiritual, mature way means seeing the faults in us that others may see in us, but also recognizing the good and beauty others may see—and especially that God sees.
So much of Scripture is devoted toward nurturing our true selves. For example, when Jesus says that we should do unto others as we would have them do unto us, he is telling us to step outside of ourselves. Look at what we’re doing from the other person’s perspective and experience. Would we want them to do to us what we are doing to them?
Scripture’s teachings about sin are also a counter to narcissism. And there’s nothing that shows more how narcissistic we are in our modern culture than our aversion to acknowledging sin. Many people who have left the Christian faith have complained about the church’s emphatic belief that we do sin and that we need to be forgiven for our sin. Narcissists don’t want to hear about what’s wrong with them, only about what’s right. Many of the evangelical megachurches have tapped into our culture’s aversion to sin by getting rid of confession during worship. You’ll notice that in most contemporary worship services there is no confession. Why? Because Americans don’t like to think about sin. So they’ve gotten rid of the emphasis on sin in worship. Don’t want to bum people out. The irony is that many of these churches have strong theologies that emphasize how sin is everywhere, but they deemphasize sin in worship. They do so because they are trying to attract non-Christians, whom they know don’t want to think about sin. So publicly they put on a non-sin-emphasizing face, while being sin-emphasizing in private.
Our Scripture for today is also an example of the need to look at ourselves from outside of ourselves. It starts with an honest assessment of the way we often are by telling us to “Put to death, therefore, whatever in you is earthly: fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed (which is idolatry).” It then goes on to tell us to adopt ways of being that require us to be sensitive to how others perceive us: “As God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other; just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in the one body.”
So let’s say you wanted to start looking at yourself more from outside of yourself. How would you go about it? It starts with just listening to yourself, and I don’t mean listening to your voice. I mean that we should pay attention to our inner monologues and what we tell ourselves deep within. For example, if we find ourselves consistently being critical of others, getting angry or frustrated with them, irritated and disgusted, it means we aren’t very self-aware. The reason is that we’re not very aware of our motivations.
This gets into psychology 101. For a long time psychologists have recognized that while our emotions emerge from our bodies and our biology, many of our emotions are responses to cognitive thoughts. The famous psychologist, Albert Ellis, developed a whole therapy based on the idea that emotions are responses to thoughts. He worked with clients to get them to make choices about their emotions, and about what emotions to act upon. To clients who would say to him, “My father made me mad,” or “My wife made me mad,” he would respond, “Nobody can make you mad. You choose to be angry in response to what they’ve done.” He points out that we have emotional choices. You’ve experienced this. For instance, have you noticed (if you’re married) that the behaviors your spouse does now that drive you nuts had much less impact on you when you were dating? Back then you chose to have a different emotion in response to that behavior. Now, you choose to be angry or irritated.
The Christian life is about becoming aware and honest about our motivations. Why do we get angry with others? Why do we choose to be unkind? To understand why, we have to look at ourselves from outside of ourselves, even as we are looking at the deepest part of ourselves.
To become self-aware also means to spend time reflecting on how others see us, and paying attention to others when we’re with them. When we are talking with others, do we pay attention to the clues they give us about how they’re experiencing us? If they lean back, look away, act disinterested, are we picking up on that, or do we keep on going with whatever we’ve been doing?
Finally, there’s also a spiritual part. Part of seeing ourselves from outside ourselves means trying to see ourselves as God sees us. To do this means more than just recognizing our sin and recognizing God’s love, both of which are crucially important. To see ourselves as God sees us means becoming humble. This takes us right back to Genesis. To be humble means to recognize that everything that’s special about us comes from God, not from us. The Genesis story tells us that God created us from dust, and then breathed God’s Spirit into us. Without that Spirit, we are no different from every animal, every plant, every rock, and dirt. We are a collection of carbon molecules constructed in an interesting way. It’s the breath of Spirit that makes us special, that gives us human insight and abilities. Being humble means recognizing our own earthiness, and God’s greatness as expressed in the gift of life we’ve all been given.
Ultimately a key to living a healthy life has to do with learning to look from outside of ourselves to discover who we really are. The question I’d like you to reflect on is simple: Do you have the guts to look?
Amen.
July 10, 2011
Put to death, therefore, whatever in you is earthly: fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed (which is idolatry). On account of these the wrath of God is coming on those who are disobedient. These are the ways you also once followed, when you were living that life.
But now you must get rid of all such things—anger, wrath, malice, slander, and abusive language from your mouth. Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have stripped off the old self with its practices and have clothed yourselves with the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its creator. In that renewal there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all!
As God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other; just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in the one body. And be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly; teach and admonish one another in all wisdom; and with gratitude in your hearts sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs to God. And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.
I don’t know if you were at all like me, but growing up I loved mythology. I loved Greek mythology, Norse mythology, and any other mythology I could find. And of the mythologies out there, I especially loved Greek mythology. I’m not sure what it was about the Greeks. They had a special ability to create stories explaining the human condition. They were Shakespeare before Shakespeare. While most of their myths did give explanations for natural phenomenon, I don’t think that’s what their main purpose was. Greek myths often were more interested in explaining human nature rather than nature and creation in general. That’s what I loved about Greek myths. In fact, many of our current psychological terms originated in Greek mythology.
Among my favorite Greek myths is the story of Narcissus and Echo. Do you know that myth? It’s wonderful in terms of helping us understand the human tendency toward selfishness and self-obsession. There once was a water nymph named Echo. Nymphs were minor deities who inhabited trees, lakes, streams, and all of nature. Like all other nature nymphs, Echo was beautiful. And she was popular. Her one fault was that she loved to talk, gossip, and get in the last word.
One day, Zeus was out cavorting with all the other water nymphs when his wife, Hera (the head of all the goddesses), showed up looking for him. She knew that he was having dalliances with the nymphs, and she wanted to catch him in the act. Zeus asked Echo to distract Hera so he could get away. She complied. Afterwards, Hera was furious with Echo. So she cursed her, telling her that from that moment forward her tongue would only be able to imitate others. She would not be able to speak for herself.
From that time forth Echo was unable to form relationships with others. She retreated to the valleys and canyons, imitating the sounds that drifted her way. Over time, a young man started visiting her particular valley, and he was the most beautiful man ever created. His name was Narcissus. She fell in love with him and wondered how to get him to love her.
One day, she decided to give it her all. As Narcissus walked through the valley, Echo followed. Narcissus wheeled around and said, “Who’s there?” Echo echoed back, “there.” Narcissus said, “Show yourself and come to me.” Echo said, “Come to me.” Narcissus, growing more frustrated, yelled out, “Come and join me.” With that, Echo rushed out of the woods and embraced him, crying, “Join me.” Narcissus recoiled in revulsion, saying, “I can’t join you. Who are you? I have nothing to do with you.” And with that, he walked away. Echo was crushed. The other nymphs, who had been rejected also by Narcissus, prayed that Narcissus could feel the pain of his rejection. A goddess heard this prayer and put a curse on Narcissus that he would fall in love with the next face he saw, longing forever for that person, but being unable to receive love in return.
Walking through the woods he came across a magnificent pond. It was completely still. No animals drank from it, no leaves or branches spoiled its surface. Gazing down into the pool of water as he prepared for a drink, he glimpsed his own face and fell in love with his own reflection. He was mesmerized. He called out in longing for the face in the pool, and reached for it, but the ripples from his hand caused the figure to disappear. Narcissus was devastated. He waited, and as the waters calmed, the face returned. Narcissus tried again to reach out to his love, and the ripples caused the figure to disappear. He sat back, and in tears awaited his love’s return.
From that moment onward, Narcissus never left the pond. Day and night he sat by its side, staring at his own reflection. Eventually he wasted away and died of exposure and from his unrequited love for himself.
The myth of Narcissus is the basis of a psychological disorder called Narcissistic Personality Disorder, which is a condition in which people become obsessed with themselves and their own power. But those with the personality disorder aren’t the only ones affected by self-obsession. We live in a self-obsessed culture. We live in a narcissistic culture. And our collective narcissism makes it hard for us to also be Christians.
It doesn’t take much to prove my case. For example, look at what magazines are the most popular. People and Us magazines are more popular than Time or Newsweek. That’s different from 30 years ago when newsmagazines were among the most popular. These are magazines popular today because they’re narcissistic. And websites like People, TMZ, and others are also among the most popular. We’re obsessed with celebrities—that is to say we’re obsessed with the self-obsessed. And a relatively new phenomenon is celebrities who are celebrities for being celebrities—people like Paris Hilton, the Kardashians, and others. Consistently among the top television shows are those that celebrate narcissistic endeavors. I realize that “Survivor” isn’t necessarily a top show anymore, but it is a show that emphasizes who can get to the top, as does “The Apprentice,” “The Great Race,” “The Bachelorette,” and others. Also, there are many reality shows, such as “American Idol,” “The Voice,” “America’s Got Talent,” and others that are focused on finding that new celebrity that we can idolize. The only thing we like more than celebrating narcissists is seeing narcissists fall. Aren’t we fickle?
We love narcissists because they often are beautiful, charismatic, and gifted, and we want to be like that. The fact is that narcissists permeate every part of our culture, including among churches, and including clergy. Even among clergy, especially among televangelists, there is competition for who is the most popular, the most charismatic, oversees the biggest church, and so forth.
The real problem of narcissism is that the more self-absorbed we become, the harder it is so see ourselves as we really are. And a big part of the Christian life is seeing ourselves with humility, not as we puff ourselves up to be in our imaginations. Too many of us create a mythological self-image, seeing ourselves as we believe we are, and when we do so we live out of our false selves. When I use this term, I’m using a term that is traditional in a field of theology called “mystical theology.” The idea of the false self is that God created us with a “true self,” with an ability to become the person we most truly are, a person created in the image of God. Unfortunately, too many of us cultivate a false self, a person based on a desire for popularity, acceptance, influence, and power. We recognize easily those who deviate the most from their true selves. We call them “fake” people, recognizing that there is something about them that isn’t authentic. But all of us have a falseness in us to some extent. The Christian spiritual life is about letting go of that falseness so that we can become who we truly are. And narcissism leads us away from who we truly are, and into falseness.
One of the keys to growing spiritually in faith is to develop the ability to see ourselves from outside of ourselves; to see ourselves not only as others see us, but (as best we can) to see ourselves as God sees us. To really get out of our narcissistic ways requires us to look more objectively at ourselves from perspectives other than our own. This is not the same as looking at ourselves from others’ points of view so that they’ll accept us. When we pursue popularity, we are look at ourselves from outside of ourselves in order to cover over our fears and insecurities. That’s being false. Seeing ourselves from outside of ourselves in a spiritual, mature way means seeing the faults in us that others may see in us, but also recognizing the good and beauty others may see—and especially that God sees.
So much of Scripture is devoted toward nurturing our true selves. For example, when Jesus says that we should do unto others as we would have them do unto us, he is telling us to step outside of ourselves. Look at what we’re doing from the other person’s perspective and experience. Would we want them to do to us what we are doing to them?
Scripture’s teachings about sin are also a counter to narcissism. And there’s nothing that shows more how narcissistic we are in our modern culture than our aversion to acknowledging sin. Many people who have left the Christian faith have complained about the church’s emphatic belief that we do sin and that we need to be forgiven for our sin. Narcissists don’t want to hear about what’s wrong with them, only about what’s right. Many of the evangelical megachurches have tapped into our culture’s aversion to sin by getting rid of confession during worship. You’ll notice that in most contemporary worship services there is no confession. Why? Because Americans don’t like to think about sin. So they’ve gotten rid of the emphasis on sin in worship. Don’t want to bum people out. The irony is that many of these churches have strong theologies that emphasize how sin is everywhere, but they deemphasize sin in worship. They do so because they are trying to attract non-Christians, whom they know don’t want to think about sin. So publicly they put on a non-sin-emphasizing face, while being sin-emphasizing in private.
Our Scripture for today is also an example of the need to look at ourselves from outside of ourselves. It starts with an honest assessment of the way we often are by telling us to “Put to death, therefore, whatever in you is earthly: fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed (which is idolatry).” It then goes on to tell us to adopt ways of being that require us to be sensitive to how others perceive us: “As God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other; just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in the one body.”
So let’s say you wanted to start looking at yourself more from outside of yourself. How would you go about it? It starts with just listening to yourself, and I don’t mean listening to your voice. I mean that we should pay attention to our inner monologues and what we tell ourselves deep within. For example, if we find ourselves consistently being critical of others, getting angry or frustrated with them, irritated and disgusted, it means we aren’t very self-aware. The reason is that we’re not very aware of our motivations.
This gets into psychology 101. For a long time psychologists have recognized that while our emotions emerge from our bodies and our biology, many of our emotions are responses to cognitive thoughts. The famous psychologist, Albert Ellis, developed a whole therapy based on the idea that emotions are responses to thoughts. He worked with clients to get them to make choices about their emotions, and about what emotions to act upon. To clients who would say to him, “My father made me mad,” or “My wife made me mad,” he would respond, “Nobody can make you mad. You choose to be angry in response to what they’ve done.” He points out that we have emotional choices. You’ve experienced this. For instance, have you noticed (if you’re married) that the behaviors your spouse does now that drive you nuts had much less impact on you when you were dating? Back then you chose to have a different emotion in response to that behavior. Now, you choose to be angry or irritated.
The Christian life is about becoming aware and honest about our motivations. Why do we get angry with others? Why do we choose to be unkind? To understand why, we have to look at ourselves from outside of ourselves, even as we are looking at the deepest part of ourselves.
To become self-aware also means to spend time reflecting on how others see us, and paying attention to others when we’re with them. When we are talking with others, do we pay attention to the clues they give us about how they’re experiencing us? If they lean back, look away, act disinterested, are we picking up on that, or do we keep on going with whatever we’ve been doing?
Finally, there’s also a spiritual part. Part of seeing ourselves from outside ourselves means trying to see ourselves as God sees us. To do this means more than just recognizing our sin and recognizing God’s love, both of which are crucially important. To see ourselves as God sees us means becoming humble. This takes us right back to Genesis. To be humble means to recognize that everything that’s special about us comes from God, not from us. The Genesis story tells us that God created us from dust, and then breathed God’s Spirit into us. Without that Spirit, we are no different from every animal, every plant, every rock, and dirt. We are a collection of carbon molecules constructed in an interesting way. It’s the breath of Spirit that makes us special, that gives us human insight and abilities. Being humble means recognizing our own earthiness, and God’s greatness as expressed in the gift of life we’ve all been given.
Ultimately a key to living a healthy life has to do with learning to look from outside of ourselves to discover who we really are. The question I’d like you to reflect on is simple: Do you have the guts to look?
Amen.
Real-Life Proverbs: Life Is a Tightrope and Balance Is the Key
Matthew 6:25-34
July 3, 2011
“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’ For it is the Gentiles who strive for all these things; and indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. “So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today.
Do you remember the song by Bobby McFerrin, “Don’t worry, be happy?” It came out in 1988, and it made lots of people happy. Bobby McFerrin is a jazz vocalist, meaning that he creates music a cappella and by himself. What’s amazing is that listening to him, he sounds like full jazz band, yet he’s producing all the sounds himself. He’s quite amazing. The song, and especially the video that accompanied it, became a phenomenon. If you want to see it again, or if you never saw it, go to YouTube and see it. It’s wonderful.
The video also is appropriate for this morning because it seems like it captures perfectly the message of our passage for this morning. Who could argue with the idea of “don’t worry be happy?”
The fact is that so many of us worry, and for good reason—there’s lots to worry about. We worry about our finances. We worry about our kids. We worry about our parents. We worry about our bills. We worry about our debt. We worry about the nation’s debt. We worry about terrorism. We worry about crime. We worry about our weight. We worry about our age. We worry about our work. We worry about our health. We worry about our future. We worry about our past. We worry about death. We worry about what happens after death. We worry about our lives and about what’s not happening in our lives. We worry about what people think about us. We worry that people don’t think enough about us. And on and on and on and on and on…..
Worry is our constant companion, and that makes it hard to live a life of “don’t worry, be happy.” Human worrying isn’t a new thing. It was a constant companion in Jesus’ time, too. In fact, they had a lot more to worry about. Well, perhaps not more, but the worries they had were more life-threatening. They didn’t just worry about their health. They worried about things that we take for granted. For many, a broken bone, a prolonged illness, a loss of a job, or a major injury could make the difference between subsistence and poverty. We take for granted much of what they feared. When we get bronchitis, we go to the doctor for treatment. Back then, illnesses like bronchitis could lead easily to death and impoverishment for the grieving family. An infected finger could lead to amputation. Their worries were real worries.
Jesus knew that people had so much to worry about. Yet Jesus’ response to their and our worries hasn’t been “don’t worry be happy.” His response is “don’t worry, be faithful.” He’s saying that the answer to our worries isn’t denial or repression of the real facts of life. A real response to worries means turning to God in the face of them.
What Jesus is really talking about is restoring balance to our lives. He’s recognizing that the reasons we end up with so many worries is that our lives get out of balance. And the fact is that most of our lives are out of balance.
For example, I believe that one of the most evil ideas Americans every created and subscribed to is the idea of 24/7. It is incredibly alluring to show how committed we are to our work by saying that we are available 24/7, but that availability really doesn’t make life better. In fact, it makes life terrible because it creates unbalanced lives. And much of American life has become unbalanced. It doesn’t take long to see examples of how systematic our unbalancing act is. Look at our federal budget. It’s not only unbalanced, but it is persistently unbalanced, and we’re locked in dissonant wrangling over it. Our politics is unbalanced. We don’t work together. Instead, we have a culture that is invested in being Republicans or Democrats over being American. Many of us are unbalanced in our work and home lives. And we have this obsession with thinking that acquiring more wealth can bring more balance. But having grown up in incredibly wealthy areas like Sewickley and the Mainline of Philadelphia, I’ve noticed that greater wealth brings about greater imbalance. Many people with great wealth live lives that lead to great spending. They have the same problems we do, but on a larger scale. They spend their money on bigger things than we do, so their greater wealth becomes consumed with more expensive houses, cars, activities, and baubles.
Jesus preached balance. His life was a testimony to balance. Of course, in the American interpretation of the Gospel, we turn him into an energy dynamo, always doing, doing, doing. We see him teaching here, preaching there, healing everywhere. We think he was a guy on the go with no place to rest his head. But that’s because we read the gospels with a 24/7 mindset. Read it more closely. Jesus taught, and then went off by himself to pray. Jesus preached, and then went off with his disciples on retreat. Jesus healed, and then went to a mountain to spend time with the Father and the Spirit. Whenever Jesus was on the go, he later retreated for a time of recollection, reflection, and relaxation. He was balanced.
I’ve learned from Jesus that life is like a tightrope, and that balance is the key. It is hard for us to walk that fine line of being involved in life and taking time for ourselves, for our families, and for God. It’s hard for us to walk that fine line between work and play, time with others and by ourselves, activity and rest, self-focus and other-focus, world-focus and faith-focus. Most of us would rather gravitate toward ones side and not the other, but when we do that we don’t move forward. We fall off the wire into a safe-feeling net that leads us to become stagnant, causing our lives to become complacent.
To live in balance means to walk that tightrope of life by living life from a center that lets us live calmer, more grounded lives, and more compassionate lives. It means getting enough sleep, trying to eat what’s healthy and not too much, drinking in moderation, balancing work/home/play, exercising, reading, resting, relaxing, and praying and reading scripture—being intentional. Being intentional means making decisions intentionally to live a life of balance, no matter what we face in life. It means “Don’t worry, be faithful.”
The key to all of this balance is not trying to do everything, but trying to let everything come out of God at our center. When we live life by placing God at the center, it makes all the difference in the world. The question that I’d like you to reflect on this morning is this: What kind of balance do you have in your life?
Amen.
July 3, 2011
“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’ For it is the Gentiles who strive for all these things; and indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. “So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today.
Do you remember the song by Bobby McFerrin, “Don’t worry, be happy?” It came out in 1988, and it made lots of people happy. Bobby McFerrin is a jazz vocalist, meaning that he creates music a cappella and by himself. What’s amazing is that listening to him, he sounds like full jazz band, yet he’s producing all the sounds himself. He’s quite amazing. The song, and especially the video that accompanied it, became a phenomenon. If you want to see it again, or if you never saw it, go to YouTube and see it. It’s wonderful.
The video also is appropriate for this morning because it seems like it captures perfectly the message of our passage for this morning. Who could argue with the idea of “don’t worry be happy?”
The fact is that so many of us worry, and for good reason—there’s lots to worry about. We worry about our finances. We worry about our kids. We worry about our parents. We worry about our bills. We worry about our debt. We worry about the nation’s debt. We worry about terrorism. We worry about crime. We worry about our weight. We worry about our age. We worry about our work. We worry about our health. We worry about our future. We worry about our past. We worry about death. We worry about what happens after death. We worry about our lives and about what’s not happening in our lives. We worry about what people think about us. We worry that people don’t think enough about us. And on and on and on and on and on…..
Worry is our constant companion, and that makes it hard to live a life of “don’t worry, be happy.” Human worrying isn’t a new thing. It was a constant companion in Jesus’ time, too. In fact, they had a lot more to worry about. Well, perhaps not more, but the worries they had were more life-threatening. They didn’t just worry about their health. They worried about things that we take for granted. For many, a broken bone, a prolonged illness, a loss of a job, or a major injury could make the difference between subsistence and poverty. We take for granted much of what they feared. When we get bronchitis, we go to the doctor for treatment. Back then, illnesses like bronchitis could lead easily to death and impoverishment for the grieving family. An infected finger could lead to amputation. Their worries were real worries.
Jesus knew that people had so much to worry about. Yet Jesus’ response to their and our worries hasn’t been “don’t worry be happy.” His response is “don’t worry, be faithful.” He’s saying that the answer to our worries isn’t denial or repression of the real facts of life. A real response to worries means turning to God in the face of them.
What Jesus is really talking about is restoring balance to our lives. He’s recognizing that the reasons we end up with so many worries is that our lives get out of balance. And the fact is that most of our lives are out of balance.
For example, I believe that one of the most evil ideas Americans every created and subscribed to is the idea of 24/7. It is incredibly alluring to show how committed we are to our work by saying that we are available 24/7, but that availability really doesn’t make life better. In fact, it makes life terrible because it creates unbalanced lives. And much of American life has become unbalanced. It doesn’t take long to see examples of how systematic our unbalancing act is. Look at our federal budget. It’s not only unbalanced, but it is persistently unbalanced, and we’re locked in dissonant wrangling over it. Our politics is unbalanced. We don’t work together. Instead, we have a culture that is invested in being Republicans or Democrats over being American. Many of us are unbalanced in our work and home lives. And we have this obsession with thinking that acquiring more wealth can bring more balance. But having grown up in incredibly wealthy areas like Sewickley and the Mainline of Philadelphia, I’ve noticed that greater wealth brings about greater imbalance. Many people with great wealth live lives that lead to great spending. They have the same problems we do, but on a larger scale. They spend their money on bigger things than we do, so their greater wealth becomes consumed with more expensive houses, cars, activities, and baubles.
Jesus preached balance. His life was a testimony to balance. Of course, in the American interpretation of the Gospel, we turn him into an energy dynamo, always doing, doing, doing. We see him teaching here, preaching there, healing everywhere. We think he was a guy on the go with no place to rest his head. But that’s because we read the gospels with a 24/7 mindset. Read it more closely. Jesus taught, and then went off by himself to pray. Jesus preached, and then went off with his disciples on retreat. Jesus healed, and then went to a mountain to spend time with the Father and the Spirit. Whenever Jesus was on the go, he later retreated for a time of recollection, reflection, and relaxation. He was balanced.
I’ve learned from Jesus that life is like a tightrope, and that balance is the key. It is hard for us to walk that fine line of being involved in life and taking time for ourselves, for our families, and for God. It’s hard for us to walk that fine line between work and play, time with others and by ourselves, activity and rest, self-focus and other-focus, world-focus and faith-focus. Most of us would rather gravitate toward ones side and not the other, but when we do that we don’t move forward. We fall off the wire into a safe-feeling net that leads us to become stagnant, causing our lives to become complacent.
To live in balance means to walk that tightrope of life by living life from a center that lets us live calmer, more grounded lives, and more compassionate lives. It means getting enough sleep, trying to eat what’s healthy and not too much, drinking in moderation, balancing work/home/play, exercising, reading, resting, relaxing, and praying and reading scripture—being intentional. Being intentional means making decisions intentionally to live a life of balance, no matter what we face in life. It means “Don’t worry, be faithful.”
The key to all of this balance is not trying to do everything, but trying to let everything come out of God at our center. When we live life by placing God at the center, it makes all the difference in the world. The question that I’d like you to reflect on this morning is this: What kind of balance do you have in your life?
Amen.
Real-Life Proverbs: Focus on the Fundamentals
Ephesians 4:1-6
June 26, 2011
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.
Many of you heard that I wasn’t in worship on Memorial Day weekend because I was taking part in a special event. I was down in Baltimore, Maryland, taking part in a celebration on the field of the Baltimore Ravens’ stadium. Every year the NCAA hosts the college lacrosse championships at a major stadium, where they attract upwards of 50,000 people. On that Sunday, the 1978 Roanoke Lacrosse team, which won the Division II-III championship, was introduced and celebrated at halftime of the Division II championship game. It was a fun event, and an honor, to be part of that group.
Before and after the event, I spent time reflecting on what it meant to me to be part of a championship team. Even though we were a small college of only 1200 students, we competed and beat most of the teams that came from the biggest universities. For example, we beat Duke University, Virginia Tech, North Carolina State, and others with big-name college lacrosse pedigrees.
I learned a lot from being on that championship team, even though I was only a freshman. I didn’t have a big role, but I absorbed a lot, especially learning lessons that I use in being pastor of this church. And one of the biggest lessons I learned was about what to do when things aren’t going well. I learned that when things go awry, focus on the fundamentals.
The first time I really saw this principle in play was after we lost to the University of North Carolina. The game was a close one, and it was one of only two losses we had that year. We were as good a team as them, but we just didn’t play well as a team. We struggled to find continuity. The low point of the game was when the goalie, who had the ball (goalies in lacrosse often come out of the goal to carry the ball up field to look for open players), couldn’t find anyone open, so he tossed the ball backwards to a player he thought was behind him. There was no one there, and the ball bounced into our own goal.
At our next practice, I expected the coach to do what we all want coaches of our favorite teams to do when things don’t go well. You know what I’m talking about. Whenever the Steelers or Penguins are doing really poorly, we say to others, “The coach needs to let them have it and yell at them! He needs to wake them up.” I expected that we would be yelled at, but instead the coach said to us very calmly, “We didn’t lose to UNC because they were better than us. We lost to them because they played better than us. They did the simple things better, and that’s what we need to get back to.” So we spent the whole practice working on our fundamentals. In lacrosse, the fundamentals are picking up the ball, throwing the ball, catching the ball, and shooting the ball. We spent 2 and ½ hours doing drills.
We started out doing what are called ground balls. The ball would be thrown out and we’d have to pick it up and throw it back. Then we would do one-on-one’s, where the ball would be thrown out and we’d have to compete with another to get the ball. Then we’d do two-on-one’s, with the person in the middle competing against the two on the outside. The expectation was that the person in the middle would beat the two. We moved onto catching and throwing. The whole practice was culminated in a weaving drill. We were broken up into groups of three. We had to run all 120 yards of the field, passing the ball back and forth to each other, while moving from the wing to the middle and back out to the wing. We were told that we couldn’t leave the field until we managed to go the length of the field without dropping the ball.
By the next game, we were a different team. We were solid. We were fundamentally sound. I’ve since learned that the really good coaches are always like this. I’ve been able to watch the Steelers’ coaches—Chuck Noll, Bill Cowher, and Mike Tomlin—and they all respond to losses by focusing on the fundamentals. I’ve noticed the same things when the Pirates and Penguins were winning championships. Championship coaches lead their players to play fundamentally sound, and all other success flow out of that. We responded to that loss by focusing on fundamentals, and that philosophy remained the same all four years I played.
I also learned from lacrosse how ineffective yelling can be. I’ve learned that the best coaches rarely yell in anger. They teach. Our college deviated from our norm of focusing on fundamentals in one game during my senior year. We were playing North Carolina State University as part of a double-header lacrosse game that also featured the University of Virginia against the University of Maryland. ESPN was televising both games, so this was perhaps part of my fifteen minutes of fame. By halftime we were down 10-3. And we weren’t playing even that well. We gathered in the locker room. The coach came in and proceeded to yell at us. He overturned tables in his anger. We were so motivated after that we ended up losing the game 23-11. We were worse in the second half than the first. What we needed was a way to calm down and focus. We needed simple instructions on how to get back into the game. We had a young team that was making fundamental mistakes. The yelling just magnified our problems. He never did that again, and in the future we always went back to fundamentals.
I learned a lot of lessons from those games, lessons that have influenced my faith and my life. One of the prominent lessons I learned is that when anything in life gets confusing, difficult, or uncertain, we need to focus on the fundamentals.
Unfortunately, when most of us go through tough times, instead of focusing on the fundamentals, we tend to look for answers that make our lives more complicated. And the added complexities tend to make our lives harder. Richie Furay is a perfect example of this, and of how focusing on life’s fundamentals can get us back on track.
Do you recognize Furay’s name. You’ve most certainly heard his voice. Furay is a musician who first gained notoriety as part of the Au Go Go Singers in New York City in the early 1960s. The group only recorded one album, but it was a first step to his greater fame. Stephen Stills was part of that group. After the group folded, both moved out to L.A., where they joined some other up-and-coming artists, such Neil Young and Jim Messina (later of Loggins and Messina), to form a supergroup. It lasted only three years, but they produced some really memorable songs. Their group was Buffalo Springfield, and they are known for songs such as “For What It’s Worth,” “Mr. Soul,” and “Rock and Roll Woman.”
As one of the lead singers, Furay was riding on the top of the world. He had fame, fortune, and everything he could want. His life was moving fast. Then everything crashed as the group broke up. Stephen Stills and Neill Young formed a new group with David Crosby from The Byrds, and Graham Nash from The Hollies. Jim Messina formed a new group with Kenny Loggins. Furay struggled for a while, but got it all back when he formed a new group called Poco, which became well known for a number of songs in the early 1970s.
Still, not everything was right. He was popular, playing sold-out halls and stadiums, and wealthy beyond his dreams. But something was wrong. It all came crashing down when he almost overdosed while in Paris. He realized things weren’t right, but he didn’t know what to do. He left Poco to form the Souther Hillman Furay Band, a band that also had some top hits. His life fell further apart, despite his success. It was during his seven-month separation from his wife that he started to focus on the fundamentals. He decided to put faith at the center of his life. From there everything changed.
He started attending the Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa, California, and there he worked on creating a solid foundation for his life. It led to his wife and he getting back together. In 1982, he felt called to take his faith deeper and become a pastor, eventually starting the Calvary Chapel in Boulder, Colorado. He has been pastor there ever since. This doesn’t mean that he’s disconnected from life, while living in a religious reverie. He continues to play music, both Christian and rock. He’s rejoined with Stephen Still, Neil Young, and others to tour this fall with Buffalo Springfield. The difference is that now he’s doing so with the fundamentals in place.
Furay learned a lesson we all need to learn. As Christians, we’ve been given fundamentals. These aren’t the fundamentals that fundamentalists believe in. Those are theological fundamentals that often feel oppressive and restrictive. I’m talking about spiritual fundamentals that simplify and ground our lives. Just as in lacrosse, where the fundamentals are picking up the ball, catching the ball, throwing the ball, protecting the ball, and shooting the ball, in the life of faith there are fundamentals. And the spiritual fundamentals ultimately are those that help us love God and love others.
Our passage gives us some of these fundamentals. Among them are the fundamentals of our passage. I want to close by sharing some of these fundamentals with you to help you get a sense of how to root your life.
The first fundamental comes from Paul’s statement that he begs us to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called. He is saying that all of us have a calling in life, and our callings are distinct from those of others.
My calling is probably easier to recognize than yours, but that’s because they church has given my calling a title: pastor. To be a pastor isn’t the only calling, nor the most important one. I have other callings, too, some of which are more important. At one point my calling was to be an athlete. Now I’m called to be a writer, a teacher, a counselor, a spiritual guide, a father, and a husband. All of us have callings in life. Our careers and jobs may be part of our callings, but there’s much more to them. We’re called to find ways to love others, and care for others, to make the world better in our own small ways in the places we are—at work, home, with friends, or even in stadiums. The question is whether we pay attention to our callings. Do we seek God’s calling for us in life, in whatever stage of life we are living, and in each moment? To get back to the fundamentals of life means to spend time asking what our calling is, and to try to the best of our abilities to live that calling out.
Another fundamental is to live lives of humility and gentleness. What that means is that we are quit thinking so highly of ourselves, and instead to treat others with gentleness and consideration. To be humble doesn’t mean to become will-less and weak. It takes a lot of strength to be humble. It means having a strong enough ego to not have to be the center of the universe. It means being strong enough to not be offended by other’s slights. It means to be strong enough to put others first, especially God.
Humility means recognizing that at our foundations we are nothing but glorified dirt. The world “humble” comes from the word dirt. It comes from “humus,” or “earth,” which is also the root of the word “human.” To be humble means to recognize that we were created from earth, and that whatever we have that’s special comes from God’s breath—God’s Spirit—within us.
Patience is another fundamental. The life of faith is a life of patience. We recognize that God is really patient with us, and so we need to be patient with others. Impatience is arrogance. It’s thinking that the world must revolve around our schedule. Patience recognizes that some things take time. God takes time. And we often have to wait for God. The life of faith is fundamentally built on being patient with God, being patient with others, and being patient with life.
Finally, Paul talks about living in unity, saying that we should make every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. In other words, we should find ways to work on what connects us, not divides us. We Americans aren’t good at this. We’ve become very good at dividing over everything: political belief, generational differences, faith differences, racial and ethnical difference, economic differences, and so much more. The life of faith calls us to union, not division.
I learned from being on a championship team that the greatest teams have this kind of unity. They have stars, but the stars are never more important than the unity of the team. To gain this kind of unity in faith, it requires being rooted in our callings, becoming humble and gentle, and becoming patient.
Living a life of faith isn’t necessarily hard, but it does require being grounded in fundamentals that form a foundation for our lives. And this is especially true whenever we begin to struggle. The question for us to answer is whether our lives our grounded in fundamentals, or in something else?
Amen.
June 26, 2011
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.
Many of you heard that I wasn’t in worship on Memorial Day weekend because I was taking part in a special event. I was down in Baltimore, Maryland, taking part in a celebration on the field of the Baltimore Ravens’ stadium. Every year the NCAA hosts the college lacrosse championships at a major stadium, where they attract upwards of 50,000 people. On that Sunday, the 1978 Roanoke Lacrosse team, which won the Division II-III championship, was introduced and celebrated at halftime of the Division II championship game. It was a fun event, and an honor, to be part of that group.
Before and after the event, I spent time reflecting on what it meant to me to be part of a championship team. Even though we were a small college of only 1200 students, we competed and beat most of the teams that came from the biggest universities. For example, we beat Duke University, Virginia Tech, North Carolina State, and others with big-name college lacrosse pedigrees.
I learned a lot from being on that championship team, even though I was only a freshman. I didn’t have a big role, but I absorbed a lot, especially learning lessons that I use in being pastor of this church. And one of the biggest lessons I learned was about what to do when things aren’t going well. I learned that when things go awry, focus on the fundamentals.
The first time I really saw this principle in play was after we lost to the University of North Carolina. The game was a close one, and it was one of only two losses we had that year. We were as good a team as them, but we just didn’t play well as a team. We struggled to find continuity. The low point of the game was when the goalie, who had the ball (goalies in lacrosse often come out of the goal to carry the ball up field to look for open players), couldn’t find anyone open, so he tossed the ball backwards to a player he thought was behind him. There was no one there, and the ball bounced into our own goal.
At our next practice, I expected the coach to do what we all want coaches of our favorite teams to do when things don’t go well. You know what I’m talking about. Whenever the Steelers or Penguins are doing really poorly, we say to others, “The coach needs to let them have it and yell at them! He needs to wake them up.” I expected that we would be yelled at, but instead the coach said to us very calmly, “We didn’t lose to UNC because they were better than us. We lost to them because they played better than us. They did the simple things better, and that’s what we need to get back to.” So we spent the whole practice working on our fundamentals. In lacrosse, the fundamentals are picking up the ball, throwing the ball, catching the ball, and shooting the ball. We spent 2 and ½ hours doing drills.
We started out doing what are called ground balls. The ball would be thrown out and we’d have to pick it up and throw it back. Then we would do one-on-one’s, where the ball would be thrown out and we’d have to compete with another to get the ball. Then we’d do two-on-one’s, with the person in the middle competing against the two on the outside. The expectation was that the person in the middle would beat the two. We moved onto catching and throwing. The whole practice was culminated in a weaving drill. We were broken up into groups of three. We had to run all 120 yards of the field, passing the ball back and forth to each other, while moving from the wing to the middle and back out to the wing. We were told that we couldn’t leave the field until we managed to go the length of the field without dropping the ball.
By the next game, we were a different team. We were solid. We were fundamentally sound. I’ve since learned that the really good coaches are always like this. I’ve been able to watch the Steelers’ coaches—Chuck Noll, Bill Cowher, and Mike Tomlin—and they all respond to losses by focusing on the fundamentals. I’ve noticed the same things when the Pirates and Penguins were winning championships. Championship coaches lead their players to play fundamentally sound, and all other success flow out of that. We responded to that loss by focusing on fundamentals, and that philosophy remained the same all four years I played.
I also learned from lacrosse how ineffective yelling can be. I’ve learned that the best coaches rarely yell in anger. They teach. Our college deviated from our norm of focusing on fundamentals in one game during my senior year. We were playing North Carolina State University as part of a double-header lacrosse game that also featured the University of Virginia against the University of Maryland. ESPN was televising both games, so this was perhaps part of my fifteen minutes of fame. By halftime we were down 10-3. And we weren’t playing even that well. We gathered in the locker room. The coach came in and proceeded to yell at us. He overturned tables in his anger. We were so motivated after that we ended up losing the game 23-11. We were worse in the second half than the first. What we needed was a way to calm down and focus. We needed simple instructions on how to get back into the game. We had a young team that was making fundamental mistakes. The yelling just magnified our problems. He never did that again, and in the future we always went back to fundamentals.
I learned a lot of lessons from those games, lessons that have influenced my faith and my life. One of the prominent lessons I learned is that when anything in life gets confusing, difficult, or uncertain, we need to focus on the fundamentals.
Unfortunately, when most of us go through tough times, instead of focusing on the fundamentals, we tend to look for answers that make our lives more complicated. And the added complexities tend to make our lives harder. Richie Furay is a perfect example of this, and of how focusing on life’s fundamentals can get us back on track.
Do you recognize Furay’s name. You’ve most certainly heard his voice. Furay is a musician who first gained notoriety as part of the Au Go Go Singers in New York City in the early 1960s. The group only recorded one album, but it was a first step to his greater fame. Stephen Stills was part of that group. After the group folded, both moved out to L.A., where they joined some other up-and-coming artists, such Neil Young and Jim Messina (later of Loggins and Messina), to form a supergroup. It lasted only three years, but they produced some really memorable songs. Their group was Buffalo Springfield, and they are known for songs such as “For What It’s Worth,” “Mr. Soul,” and “Rock and Roll Woman.”
As one of the lead singers, Furay was riding on the top of the world. He had fame, fortune, and everything he could want. His life was moving fast. Then everything crashed as the group broke up. Stephen Stills and Neill Young formed a new group with David Crosby from The Byrds, and Graham Nash from The Hollies. Jim Messina formed a new group with Kenny Loggins. Furay struggled for a while, but got it all back when he formed a new group called Poco, which became well known for a number of songs in the early 1970s.
Still, not everything was right. He was popular, playing sold-out halls and stadiums, and wealthy beyond his dreams. But something was wrong. It all came crashing down when he almost overdosed while in Paris. He realized things weren’t right, but he didn’t know what to do. He left Poco to form the Souther Hillman Furay Band, a band that also had some top hits. His life fell further apart, despite his success. It was during his seven-month separation from his wife that he started to focus on the fundamentals. He decided to put faith at the center of his life. From there everything changed.
He started attending the Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa, California, and there he worked on creating a solid foundation for his life. It led to his wife and he getting back together. In 1982, he felt called to take his faith deeper and become a pastor, eventually starting the Calvary Chapel in Boulder, Colorado. He has been pastor there ever since. This doesn’t mean that he’s disconnected from life, while living in a religious reverie. He continues to play music, both Christian and rock. He’s rejoined with Stephen Still, Neil Young, and others to tour this fall with Buffalo Springfield. The difference is that now he’s doing so with the fundamentals in place.
Furay learned a lesson we all need to learn. As Christians, we’ve been given fundamentals. These aren’t the fundamentals that fundamentalists believe in. Those are theological fundamentals that often feel oppressive and restrictive. I’m talking about spiritual fundamentals that simplify and ground our lives. Just as in lacrosse, where the fundamentals are picking up the ball, catching the ball, throwing the ball, protecting the ball, and shooting the ball, in the life of faith there are fundamentals. And the spiritual fundamentals ultimately are those that help us love God and love others.
Our passage gives us some of these fundamentals. Among them are the fundamentals of our passage. I want to close by sharing some of these fundamentals with you to help you get a sense of how to root your life.
The first fundamental comes from Paul’s statement that he begs us to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called. He is saying that all of us have a calling in life, and our callings are distinct from those of others.
My calling is probably easier to recognize than yours, but that’s because they church has given my calling a title: pastor. To be a pastor isn’t the only calling, nor the most important one. I have other callings, too, some of which are more important. At one point my calling was to be an athlete. Now I’m called to be a writer, a teacher, a counselor, a spiritual guide, a father, and a husband. All of us have callings in life. Our careers and jobs may be part of our callings, but there’s much more to them. We’re called to find ways to love others, and care for others, to make the world better in our own small ways in the places we are—at work, home, with friends, or even in stadiums. The question is whether we pay attention to our callings. Do we seek God’s calling for us in life, in whatever stage of life we are living, and in each moment? To get back to the fundamentals of life means to spend time asking what our calling is, and to try to the best of our abilities to live that calling out.
Another fundamental is to live lives of humility and gentleness. What that means is that we are quit thinking so highly of ourselves, and instead to treat others with gentleness and consideration. To be humble doesn’t mean to become will-less and weak. It takes a lot of strength to be humble. It means having a strong enough ego to not have to be the center of the universe. It means being strong enough to not be offended by other’s slights. It means to be strong enough to put others first, especially God.
Humility means recognizing that at our foundations we are nothing but glorified dirt. The world “humble” comes from the word dirt. It comes from “humus,” or “earth,” which is also the root of the word “human.” To be humble means to recognize that we were created from earth, and that whatever we have that’s special comes from God’s breath—God’s Spirit—within us.
Patience is another fundamental. The life of faith is a life of patience. We recognize that God is really patient with us, and so we need to be patient with others. Impatience is arrogance. It’s thinking that the world must revolve around our schedule. Patience recognizes that some things take time. God takes time. And we often have to wait for God. The life of faith is fundamentally built on being patient with God, being patient with others, and being patient with life.
Finally, Paul talks about living in unity, saying that we should make every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. In other words, we should find ways to work on what connects us, not divides us. We Americans aren’t good at this. We’ve become very good at dividing over everything: political belief, generational differences, faith differences, racial and ethnical difference, economic differences, and so much more. The life of faith calls us to union, not division.
I learned from being on a championship team that the greatest teams have this kind of unity. They have stars, but the stars are never more important than the unity of the team. To gain this kind of unity in faith, it requires being rooted in our callings, becoming humble and gentle, and becoming patient.
Living a life of faith isn’t necessarily hard, but it does require being grounded in fundamentals that form a foundation for our lives. And this is especially true whenever we begin to struggle. The question for us to answer is whether our lives our grounded in fundamentals, or in something else?
Amen.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)