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.
