Text: James 1:17-27
What brought you to church this morning? Why are you here? What would lead you to voluntarily spend the last Sunday morning of August, basically the last Sunday morning of the summer, at church?
Maybe you are here out of habit. Maybe going to church is “what you do” on Sunday morning.
Maybe you are here because your parents made you come. Perhaps you have heard of the mother who kept trying to get her son up for church on Sunday morning. She finally woke him up and said, “Son, you have to get up. It’s time to go to church.” He said, “But mom, I don’t want to go to church today.” She asked, “Why not?” He answered, “Well, I don’t like to go to church. The people aren’t very friendly it’s boring. I just don’t want to go.” Finally the mother responded, “Well son, you have to go because you are the pastor!”
There are a lot of reasons to go to church.
Today, maybe you are here because you have been kind of curious and coming to a service outside seemed more relaxed and informal and an easier way to check us out.
Maybe you are a student, you are new in town, and you are shopping for a church. Maybe you are here for the barbecue. Or the root beer!
Maybe you are here because you feel something is wrong or missing in your life.
Maybe you are here because you are going through a trial or a crisis of some sort and you are looking for strength and wisdom and a word from God.
None of these are bad reasons to be at church today. But here is the bottom-line reason we gather to worship each Sunday, whether we are sitting in a nice sanctuary or whether we are outside on an unexpectedly cool August morning: We worship to wake up. We worship to come alive and take notice of the presence and power of God in the world and in our lives.
The word “religion” comes from the Latin “re-ligare.” This has the root lig, from which we get the word “ligament.” Religion holds life together — it connects us to one another and to God. And the root lig is also traced back to meaning “pay attention.” A religious service, a religious act, should cause us to pay attention. It should make us wake up and take notice and look around and see God’s presence all around us. We worship in order to wake up.
It is easy to go through our day-to-day routine without much thought as to what we are doing. We can eventually kind of lose consciousness to the wonders that surround us – the wonder of God’s creation, the wonder of love, the wonder of family, the wonder of life.
Sometimes even worship can be so routine for us that we can sleepwalk our way through a Sunday morning. For no reason other than this, it is good for us to gather outside here this morning, outside of our usual routine, to be reconnected and to wake up.
We generally follow the lectionary readings in our worship here at First Baptist – these are readings for each Sunday over a 3-year cycle, so that over time a good portion, a pretty wide swath of scripture is covered. It happens that the Epistle reading for the next several Sundays is from the letter of James.
James is a very practical, “rubber hits the road” kind of book. He deals with living the Christian life. He speaks to what is real and genuine and provides a balance to Christian faith. Being a Christian involves both believing and doing, and sometimes we can get stuck on the believing part.
James says, “Be doers of the Word, and not hearers only.” Be doers, not just hearers.
Most Sundays, we gather in the sanctuary to worship. And the sanctuary can lend itself to hearing. It’s designed for hearing, with very good acoustics. And worship can feel like a lot of other events that we attend. We go to concerts, we go to lectures, we go to sporting events. We go to class, we go to plays, we go to movies, we go to the symphony. We sit around and watch TV. And in each case, our role is as a watcher and listener. We take in information or we watch a performance, and it does not necessarily prompt any real response from us.
What happens when we go to church? What happens when we gather to worship? We can fall into this same role. We watch and we listen. We listen to the choir. We take in a sermon like we are taking in a ballgame – just without the cheering. (And maybe you don’t yell at the preacher like you do the ref, at least not till you get home.) Oh, we sing a little bit and we may have a responsive prayer or litany, but for the most part we do not see ourselves as participants nearly as much as we see ourselves as the audience.
It is easy to start thinking of Christian life as involving going to church and sitting through a sermon on a Sunday.
James challenges us by saying that this is not enough. You can be here every week, you can know the Bible backward and forward, but if that is as far as it goes, if there is no evidence that what happens Sunday morning makes a difference in the rest of your week, there is a problem.
James’ point is that if our faith is real, it can’t help but affect our actions. Real religion, genuine religion, wakes us up and connects us to God and to one another.
Real faith involves not just hearing, but doing.
Not just theory, but practice.
Not just loving God, but loving neighbor.
Not just “me and Jesus,” but all of us together as followers of Jesus.
Not just in the sanctuary but here in the neighborhood.
It is easy to get caught up in a head-oriented kind of religion in which Christian faith is about having right beliefs. And in a university environment, that can be especially easy. We can make faith to be about thinking deep and important thoughts. James doesn’t let us get away with that – he reminds us that real religion is about the way we live.
James says that “religion that is pure and undefiled is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself unstained by the world.”
That is really an astonishing statement. Astonishing because of what it doesn’t say. It doesn't say that pure religion is about going to church or believing the creeds or even spending time in prayer. Pure religion, says James, is caring for those in need, caring for vulnerable people, caring for those who won’t repay your effort or make you look good. Pure religion, says James, is helping people in need even if you won’t get anything out of it.
If we did the person on the street interview and asked, “What is real religion?” I don’t know how many would say helping widows and orphans, but I doubt it would be that many. I don’t know how many would say volunteering at the shelter. I don’t know how many would say, helping my neighbor with her yard work. I don’t know how many would say, real religion is tutoring children or being kind to colleagues or including a kid who gets left out. I don’t know how many would say real religion is carrying on my work ethically and with integrity, even when nobody is watching, but I doubt it would be that many.
I don’t know how many would say, real religion is visiting in the hospital or nursing home or caring for someone who is sick. I don’t know how many would say, inviting a student over for meal or listening to a friend who is going through a hard time or helping build a Habitat house. But I doubt it would be that many.
But that’s what James says. True religion is seen in our actions. It’s not enough to hear the word. We can’t stop there; we have to do the word.
All of this sounds suspiciously like Jesus. In Matthew 25, he speaks of a Great Judgment in which the King will say, “Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you… For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you took me in, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you visited me.” Then the righteous will answer him, “Lord, when did we do any of these things?” And then comes the reply: “Whatever you did for one of the least of these, you did for me.”
James won’t let us off the hook. He won’t let us get away with going through the motions. James might say to twenty-first century Christians something like this:
It’s very nice that you attend church on Sundays, but if that makes no impact on how you live Monday through Saturday, your hearing has been in vain. It’s helpful that you put money in the offering plate to sustain your church’s ministry and mission, but if that has had no effect on how you spend the rest of your money, your hearing has been in vain. It’s good for you to go to Sunday School and read the Bible. But if that makes no difference in how you treat your family and friends, and even your enemies, your hearing has been in vain.
Most of us, of course, are working on it. We are somewhere in process. That’s why we keep coming back to hear the Word. We all stumble, we all fail, we all fall short, and so together we come here to wake up, to be reminded of who we are and what we are about, so that we can go back out and work on doing the Word.
C. S. Lewis addressed the problem of getting from hearing to doing in his Screwtape Letters. Screwtape is a demon who is writing to give advice to an apprentice demon, his nephew Wormwood. He writes:
The great thing is to prevent his (Wormwood’s new Christian client) doing anything. As long as he does not convert it into action, it does not matter how much he thinks about this new repentance. Let the little brute wallow in it. Let him, if he has any bent that way, write a book about it; that is often an excellent way of sterilizing the seeds which the Enemy plants in a human soul. Let him do anything but act. No amount of piety in his imagination and affections will harm us if we can keep it out of his will.
Being a Christian is not so much about what we hear on Sunday mornings, but what we do with our life. And gathering here this morning, outside the walls of the church building, can be a good reminder of that.
James’ message is this: Wake up. Look around. See this beautiful world. See all of the needs and hurts and beauty and potential and joy and pain. And then go out and do the word.
Why did we come this morning? What is the point? We come together to hear the Word, to reflect on the Word, to consider the Word, to be nourished by the Word, to be awakened by the Word, so that we may go out and do the word. Amen.
(I borrowed liberally from Leonard Sweet in the introduction to this sermon.)
Friday, August 28, 2009
Friday, August 21, 2009
"You Are Mine" - August 23, 2009
Text: Isaiah 43:1-3a, I John 3:1-3
School started this week for the Ames schools and most school districts in the area. Many college students moved in this week and classes start tomorrow at Iowa State. The start of a school year brings with it all kinds of emotions – excitement, anxiety, sadness, anticipation, hopefulness. And it raises a lot of questions. How tough will my classes be? Who am I going to hang out with? Where is Marston Hall? And will I be able to get along with my crazy roommate?
One of the questions raised for us by changes in life, including the start of a new school year, is “Who Am I?” We may not consciously focus on that question, not in so many words, but the issue of identity is there.
Those who graduated from high school last spring might have thought of themselves as big bad seniors, but no longer. Now their identity may be as a college student, but it is also as a freshman. Others are no longer underclassmen but now seniors. Or no longer undergrads, but now a grad student, a vet student. Identities are shifting.
It’s not just college students. If you are a new middle school student, it changes the way you think of yourself. It’s a big deal. If you have just started kindergarten, you are now a student, a big kid, and it is a big transition. Even at age 5, it affects one’s identity.
And this shift in identity is by no means limited to those in school. If you are parents whose child has gone off to college, it affects you. You may be sad or you may be celebrating, and truth be told it’s probably some of both, but it affects the way you think of yourself. It affects the way you answer the question, “Who am I?”
If you have recently graduated, you have to rethink who you are. I am no longer a student, now I am an engineer or a salesperson or a biologist or a technician. Now I am working for a living. And if you are looking for work and can’t find it, we all know that that will certainly affect your sense of identity.
The start of a school year may prompt questions like these, but life is changing all the time, and with it the way we think of ourselves changes. Our identity won’t sit still. A job change, a new grandchild, the loss of a spouse, a breakup with a boyfriend or girlfriend, moving to a new place, a health problem, a new hobby or activity you enjoy, these and a hundred other things affect our identity.
Identity – who we are - is one of the big issues in life, and it is never quite settled because we are never quite settled. We keep changing. We keep growing. It’s kind of like the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. You science types know about it: it says that you cannot simultaneously know both the position and the momentum of a subatomic particle. You can’t know the position because the darn thing is moving too fast. Or, if you know the position, it is because you have isolated such a small snippet of time that you can’t know the momentum.
Well, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle applies to lots of things. In a way, it applies to us, it applies to our lives. It’s hard to state with absolute certainty who we are because we won’t hold still. We keep changing. I am not the same person today that I was 10 years ago. Oh, it’s still me, but I’m not exactly the same. I’m a little grayer, a little older, I’ve experienced new things, both joys and heartaches, I’ve learned some new skills and gotten rusty on some others, made some new friends and lost touch with others, and hopefully I’m a little wiser. I’m still me, but I’m not exactly the same.
A while back, I was going to be preaching on a particular text and I looked in my files to see what sermons I may have preached on this passage before. I found a sermon from 10 or 12 years ago and read over it. And I thought, “I preached THIS?” I mean, it wasn’t awful, it wasn’t terrible, but I wouldn’t preach the same sermon today. I am a different person than I was 10 or 12 years ago. I have changed and hopefully grown.
None of us is the same person we were 10 or 15 or 20 years ago. And we are not the same person we will be 10 or 15 or 20 years from now. “Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed.”
We are always in the process of becoming. “What we will be has not yet been revealed.” Students beginning classes tomorrow don’t really know where it will all lead. Many of us can attest that we never could have predicted the twists and turns life would take. The future is wide open. “What we will be has not yet been revealed.”
This is both exciting and scary. Exciting because it means there is a future before us that is not set. It’s not determined, it is in process, and there are wonderful possibilities. The sky is the limit. And it is scary for the very same reason. An unknown future brings with it anxiety.
A professor was known for having a very no-nonsense approach to being on time for class. It was a large lecture hall class with over 100 students, and some students tended to just wander in late. So the professor would lock the door to the class. If you were late, well, too bad. At some point it was decided that locking the door was not the best policy, but that was this professor’s reputation.
On a test day, a young woman was running late and arrived 15 minutes after the test started. She came in, sat down, and started answering the essay questions on the board in her blue examination book. The professor told her that she was late and could not take the test, but she kept writing.
At the end of the class, students turned in their blue books. This young woman who had been late for class brought her book to turn in. The professor said, “I told you that you cannot turn in this test because you were late.” She said “Do you know who I am?” He said, “I really don’t care who you are.” She said a second time, more forcefully, “Do you KNOW who I am?” He said, “I don’t know who you are and I really don’t care.”
“Good,” she said, and she put her blue examination book in the middle of the stack and walked out.
There are those times when being anonymous is a good thing. But for the most part, we long to be known. We long to be understood. We long to be accepted. That was the attractions of Cheers – a place where “everybody knows your name.”
I saw signs of identity around campus this week. Driving down Lincoln Way, I saw several women wearing identical T-shirts that said on the back: “I’m a Theta Lady.” It’s about identity. Across the street, they were throwing CRT monitors off the balcony and smashing them on the sidewalk below. You never do this alone, it happens in a group and once you have smashed computers with somebody, you have bonded. It’s about identity. I looked out my window and saw a bunch of guys in front of Alpha Chi Omega singing “Uptown Girl.” You wouldn’t do that by yourself – it had to do with belonging and identity.
I noticed campus police in uniform. The badge and the uniform are a part of their identity, just as the jerseys worn by players over at the football practice facility are a sign of identity.
We might define ourselves in a lot of different ways. There is no one answer to the question of “Who am I?” But as we ponder such a question, we hear these words from the prophet Isaiah: “Do not fear, for I have redeemed you, I have called you by name, you are mine.”
We live in an anxious time. There are so many things to fear. This week we heard that an all-time high ocean temperature has been set. It may have been pretty mild around here this summer, but this week I talked to someone from Seattle where they had day after day of 100 degree temperatures and no air conditioning because normally, it rarely gets above 80. There is worry over our environment and climate change.
There is certainly fear over the economy. I know several folks who have lost their jobs – longtime employees with stellar work records, computer programmers and engineers and production managers. Finding another job can be very difficult. People are losing their cool over the healthcare reform, and it is really about more than just healthcare. All of the anger and harshness has to do with deeper anxieties.
And then there are the sort of concerns we deal with all the time – concerns over relationships and questions of belonging and worries over difficult decisions. “Do not fear” catches our attention because there is a lot of fear around.
In the face of such fears, we hear again the words from Isaiah: “Thus says the Lord who created you… ‘Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine.’”
God is not like that hardnosed professor who does not know nor care who we are, but God has called us by name. And God says, “You are mine.” We need not fear because God is with us, God has called us by name, and we are God’s children.
You might think of our identity as being made up of many layers. Many of those layers are shed over time and others are added. Part of my identity was once as a Hoosier, part of my identity was once as a student, but those layers are gone. When a relationship is fractured or when there is a major change in life, we lose part of our identity. But then there are those deeper layers that mostly stay constant. We are a son, a daughter, a parent. And the bottom layer, the bedrock, is this: you are a child of God. At the deepest level, that is who we are. “See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are.”
When we think of ourselves first and foremost as children of God, it does a couple of things. We live in a culture that is all about stuff. What matters is what we have and what we accomplish. And there is pressure to produce. If we are not as talented as we would like or if we don’t have the GPA we would like to have, or if the boss isn’t that impressed with our work, or if our house or our clothes or our car do not quite measure up to the latest standards of success, we can feel diminished.
But if we see ourselves at the most basic level as a child of God, these others things take on a lesser importance. You are a child of God, and that cannot be taken away. Nothing you do and nothing anyone else does can change that.
Lily Tomlin once said that the problem with the rat race is that even if you win, you are still a rat. If our value lies not in how well we do in the rat race, but in our identity as a child of God, that changes things. And the irony is that we will probably be better students and do better work when we don’t place such ultimate value on achieving and accomplishing.
Another thing about being a child of God: it means we are part of a family. If I am a child of God and you are a child of God, then we are brothers and sisters. Understanding ourselves as children of God can affect the way we relate to one another.
I was at our national conference center in Green Lake, Wisconsin this past week for the Ministers Council Senate. This is a group of ministerial leaders from across the country that meets each year. At various times during the Senate, we broke into small groups for sharing and prayer together. We kept the same small groups through the Senate.
I cannot imagine a more diverse group than the one I was in. There were five of us. Shakespeare is from Columbia. His dad named him Shakespeare because he loved Shakespeare and wanted his son to be a person who uses words well. Shakespeare pastors a Spanish-speaking church in Chicago with members who have come from 12 different countries.
Mar is from Nagaland, an area mostly in eastern India. A large percentage of Nagas are Baptist as a result of our American Baptist mission there many years ago. Mar came to the States to do graduate work and wound up pastoring a church in Boston. Arcadio is a pastor in Puerto Rico. The Puerto Rico Ministers Council is one of our stronger councils and Arcadio is a longtime American Baptist leader there.
And the other member of our group was Carolyn. I was shocked to learn that she is 81 years old because she certainly doesn’t look it. Carolyn works part-time as a pastoral counselor and is president of the Chaplains and Pastoral Counselors Ministers Council. She was also the pastor of the University Baptist Church in Columbus, Ohio when Michael Thompson was a member there, which was – what? - about 60 years ago. (Or maybe it wasn’t that long ago.)
In what universe would a Columbian, a Naga, a Puerto Rican, an older woman like Carolyn and me come together in a group and become good friends? I mean, it sounds like the beginning of a bad joke. (“A Columbian, a Naga, a Puerto Rican, an older lady, and a white guy from Iowa go into a bar…”)
This diverse group shared together and prayed together because we are brothers and sisters in Christ. When you are a child of God, and when you see all people as children of God, it means that we are connected to one another. It changes things.
It can also affect the way we relate to the wider community. We all relate to difficult people. We all have to deal with folks we would just as soon not deal with. We all know people who drive us crazy. We all know people whose beliefs and behavior and maybe even general existence we find offensive, or at least at odds with our own.
And we may still feel that way, but if we see them as children of God, it changes something. If we can see in them just a bit of shared humanity, if we can say that they too are children of God, it can make a huge difference.
Who are you? A student, a teacher, an employee, a brother, a parent, a ballplayer, a singer, a soldier, a writer, a grandparent?
“See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are.” Amen.
School started this week for the Ames schools and most school districts in the area. Many college students moved in this week and classes start tomorrow at Iowa State. The start of a school year brings with it all kinds of emotions – excitement, anxiety, sadness, anticipation, hopefulness. And it raises a lot of questions. How tough will my classes be? Who am I going to hang out with? Where is Marston Hall? And will I be able to get along with my crazy roommate?
One of the questions raised for us by changes in life, including the start of a new school year, is “Who Am I?” We may not consciously focus on that question, not in so many words, but the issue of identity is there.
Those who graduated from high school last spring might have thought of themselves as big bad seniors, but no longer. Now their identity may be as a college student, but it is also as a freshman. Others are no longer underclassmen but now seniors. Or no longer undergrads, but now a grad student, a vet student. Identities are shifting.
It’s not just college students. If you are a new middle school student, it changes the way you think of yourself. It’s a big deal. If you have just started kindergarten, you are now a student, a big kid, and it is a big transition. Even at age 5, it affects one’s identity.
And this shift in identity is by no means limited to those in school. If you are parents whose child has gone off to college, it affects you. You may be sad or you may be celebrating, and truth be told it’s probably some of both, but it affects the way you think of yourself. It affects the way you answer the question, “Who am I?”
If you have recently graduated, you have to rethink who you are. I am no longer a student, now I am an engineer or a salesperson or a biologist or a technician. Now I am working for a living. And if you are looking for work and can’t find it, we all know that that will certainly affect your sense of identity.
The start of a school year may prompt questions like these, but life is changing all the time, and with it the way we think of ourselves changes. Our identity won’t sit still. A job change, a new grandchild, the loss of a spouse, a breakup with a boyfriend or girlfriend, moving to a new place, a health problem, a new hobby or activity you enjoy, these and a hundred other things affect our identity.
Identity – who we are - is one of the big issues in life, and it is never quite settled because we are never quite settled. We keep changing. We keep growing. It’s kind of like the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. You science types know about it: it says that you cannot simultaneously know both the position and the momentum of a subatomic particle. You can’t know the position because the darn thing is moving too fast. Or, if you know the position, it is because you have isolated such a small snippet of time that you can’t know the momentum.
Well, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle applies to lots of things. In a way, it applies to us, it applies to our lives. It’s hard to state with absolute certainty who we are because we won’t hold still. We keep changing. I am not the same person today that I was 10 years ago. Oh, it’s still me, but I’m not exactly the same. I’m a little grayer, a little older, I’ve experienced new things, both joys and heartaches, I’ve learned some new skills and gotten rusty on some others, made some new friends and lost touch with others, and hopefully I’m a little wiser. I’m still me, but I’m not exactly the same.
A while back, I was going to be preaching on a particular text and I looked in my files to see what sermons I may have preached on this passage before. I found a sermon from 10 or 12 years ago and read over it. And I thought, “I preached THIS?” I mean, it wasn’t awful, it wasn’t terrible, but I wouldn’t preach the same sermon today. I am a different person than I was 10 or 12 years ago. I have changed and hopefully grown.
None of us is the same person we were 10 or 15 or 20 years ago. And we are not the same person we will be 10 or 15 or 20 years from now. “Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed.”
We are always in the process of becoming. “What we will be has not yet been revealed.” Students beginning classes tomorrow don’t really know where it will all lead. Many of us can attest that we never could have predicted the twists and turns life would take. The future is wide open. “What we will be has not yet been revealed.”
This is both exciting and scary. Exciting because it means there is a future before us that is not set. It’s not determined, it is in process, and there are wonderful possibilities. The sky is the limit. And it is scary for the very same reason. An unknown future brings with it anxiety.
A professor was known for having a very no-nonsense approach to being on time for class. It was a large lecture hall class with over 100 students, and some students tended to just wander in late. So the professor would lock the door to the class. If you were late, well, too bad. At some point it was decided that locking the door was not the best policy, but that was this professor’s reputation.
On a test day, a young woman was running late and arrived 15 minutes after the test started. She came in, sat down, and started answering the essay questions on the board in her blue examination book. The professor told her that she was late and could not take the test, but she kept writing.
At the end of the class, students turned in their blue books. This young woman who had been late for class brought her book to turn in. The professor said, “I told you that you cannot turn in this test because you were late.” She said “Do you know who I am?” He said, “I really don’t care who you are.” She said a second time, more forcefully, “Do you KNOW who I am?” He said, “I don’t know who you are and I really don’t care.”
“Good,” she said, and she put her blue examination book in the middle of the stack and walked out.
There are those times when being anonymous is a good thing. But for the most part, we long to be known. We long to be understood. We long to be accepted. That was the attractions of Cheers – a place where “everybody knows your name.”
I saw signs of identity around campus this week. Driving down Lincoln Way, I saw several women wearing identical T-shirts that said on the back: “I’m a Theta Lady.” It’s about identity. Across the street, they were throwing CRT monitors off the balcony and smashing them on the sidewalk below. You never do this alone, it happens in a group and once you have smashed computers with somebody, you have bonded. It’s about identity. I looked out my window and saw a bunch of guys in front of Alpha Chi Omega singing “Uptown Girl.” You wouldn’t do that by yourself – it had to do with belonging and identity.
I noticed campus police in uniform. The badge and the uniform are a part of their identity, just as the jerseys worn by players over at the football practice facility are a sign of identity.
We might define ourselves in a lot of different ways. There is no one answer to the question of “Who am I?” But as we ponder such a question, we hear these words from the prophet Isaiah: “Do not fear, for I have redeemed you, I have called you by name, you are mine.”
We live in an anxious time. There are so many things to fear. This week we heard that an all-time high ocean temperature has been set. It may have been pretty mild around here this summer, but this week I talked to someone from Seattle where they had day after day of 100 degree temperatures and no air conditioning because normally, it rarely gets above 80. There is worry over our environment and climate change.
There is certainly fear over the economy. I know several folks who have lost their jobs – longtime employees with stellar work records, computer programmers and engineers and production managers. Finding another job can be very difficult. People are losing their cool over the healthcare reform, and it is really about more than just healthcare. All of the anger and harshness has to do with deeper anxieties.
And then there are the sort of concerns we deal with all the time – concerns over relationships and questions of belonging and worries over difficult decisions. “Do not fear” catches our attention because there is a lot of fear around.
In the face of such fears, we hear again the words from Isaiah: “Thus says the Lord who created you… ‘Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine.’”
God is not like that hardnosed professor who does not know nor care who we are, but God has called us by name. And God says, “You are mine.” We need not fear because God is with us, God has called us by name, and we are God’s children.
You might think of our identity as being made up of many layers. Many of those layers are shed over time and others are added. Part of my identity was once as a Hoosier, part of my identity was once as a student, but those layers are gone. When a relationship is fractured or when there is a major change in life, we lose part of our identity. But then there are those deeper layers that mostly stay constant. We are a son, a daughter, a parent. And the bottom layer, the bedrock, is this: you are a child of God. At the deepest level, that is who we are. “See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are.”
When we think of ourselves first and foremost as children of God, it does a couple of things. We live in a culture that is all about stuff. What matters is what we have and what we accomplish. And there is pressure to produce. If we are not as talented as we would like or if we don’t have the GPA we would like to have, or if the boss isn’t that impressed with our work, or if our house or our clothes or our car do not quite measure up to the latest standards of success, we can feel diminished.
But if we see ourselves at the most basic level as a child of God, these others things take on a lesser importance. You are a child of God, and that cannot be taken away. Nothing you do and nothing anyone else does can change that.
Lily Tomlin once said that the problem with the rat race is that even if you win, you are still a rat. If our value lies not in how well we do in the rat race, but in our identity as a child of God, that changes things. And the irony is that we will probably be better students and do better work when we don’t place such ultimate value on achieving and accomplishing.
Another thing about being a child of God: it means we are part of a family. If I am a child of God and you are a child of God, then we are brothers and sisters. Understanding ourselves as children of God can affect the way we relate to one another.
I was at our national conference center in Green Lake, Wisconsin this past week for the Ministers Council Senate. This is a group of ministerial leaders from across the country that meets each year. At various times during the Senate, we broke into small groups for sharing and prayer together. We kept the same small groups through the Senate.
I cannot imagine a more diverse group than the one I was in. There were five of us. Shakespeare is from Columbia. His dad named him Shakespeare because he loved Shakespeare and wanted his son to be a person who uses words well. Shakespeare pastors a Spanish-speaking church in Chicago with members who have come from 12 different countries.
Mar is from Nagaland, an area mostly in eastern India. A large percentage of Nagas are Baptist as a result of our American Baptist mission there many years ago. Mar came to the States to do graduate work and wound up pastoring a church in Boston. Arcadio is a pastor in Puerto Rico. The Puerto Rico Ministers Council is one of our stronger councils and Arcadio is a longtime American Baptist leader there.
And the other member of our group was Carolyn. I was shocked to learn that she is 81 years old because she certainly doesn’t look it. Carolyn works part-time as a pastoral counselor and is president of the Chaplains and Pastoral Counselors Ministers Council. She was also the pastor of the University Baptist Church in Columbus, Ohio when Michael Thompson was a member there, which was – what? - about 60 years ago. (Or maybe it wasn’t that long ago.)
In what universe would a Columbian, a Naga, a Puerto Rican, an older woman like Carolyn and me come together in a group and become good friends? I mean, it sounds like the beginning of a bad joke. (“A Columbian, a Naga, a Puerto Rican, an older lady, and a white guy from Iowa go into a bar…”)
This diverse group shared together and prayed together because we are brothers and sisters in Christ. When you are a child of God, and when you see all people as children of God, it means that we are connected to one another. It changes things.
It can also affect the way we relate to the wider community. We all relate to difficult people. We all have to deal with folks we would just as soon not deal with. We all know people who drive us crazy. We all know people whose beliefs and behavior and maybe even general existence we find offensive, or at least at odds with our own.
And we may still feel that way, but if we see them as children of God, it changes something. If we can see in them just a bit of shared humanity, if we can say that they too are children of God, it can make a huge difference.
Who are you? A student, a teacher, an employee, a brother, a parent, a ballplayer, a singer, a soldier, a writer, a grandparent?
“See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are.” Amen.
Friday, August 7, 2009
Apples, Oranges, and Happy Hypocrites - August 9, 2009
Text: Ephesians 4:25-5:2
There is a lot packed into these verses from Ephesians. Our choice this morning is to treat this passage as either an orange or an apple. How do we eat an orange? Section by section. How do we eat an apple? All at once.
There are a lot of individual injunctions here – put away falsehood, give up stealing, do this, don’t do that. We can treat each verse like a separate section of the orange. We could choose one specific section to focus on – like working honestly – or we could take a quick, cursory look at each of the various sections.
Or, we might look at it as an apple. With an apple, we just chomp into the whole thing. We could treat it as an apple and look at the overarching themes and principles at play here.
Well, being ever wishy-washy, I decided to do a little bit of both. So we’ll look at the whole passage in order to gain context, but spend most of our time on a couple of sections. So you might say we are going to treat the passage as a fruit salad.
Are you with me so far? First, the “apple” issues. Our passage begins with the word “therefore,” and as someone once said, when a verse starts with “therefore,” you need to look and see what it is there for.
When we go back to the beginning of chapter 4, we see that the big issue is unity in the church. We are to “make every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.” We are all one in the Body of Christ, and there is “one Lord, one faith, one baptism, and one God and Father of us all.”
By virtue of our common life in Christ, we are new people, and we are to cloth ourselves with a new way of living. This is the background, and our text spells out some of the implications of living the New Life – what it looks like to “maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.”
So what we have is not a list of random rules for Christians, not just a laundry list of do’s and don’ts, but a way of living our life together as a community. These are not just rules for individual Christians to follow, but a way of life for all of us to live together.
OK, that is a big bite out of the apple. But back to our fruit salad. In most salads, one or two tastes or textures really stand out. We could choose any number of items in this salad of a passage, but I’m going to deal especially with two. And I want to start by telling you the story of Frank.
I had been in town for only a few weeks when I first met Frank. He was not particularly friendly, but I learned not to take it personally—he was unfriendly towards a lot of people. He was a deacon at the church I had been visiting. On a Sunday morning, I went forward at the end of the service to join the membership. The pastor asked folks if they would support and encourage me as a brother in Christ and they indicated their desire to do so with a hug or a handshake after the service. It felt good to “officially” be a part of this church.
That evening, I went back to church for a potluck dinner and the quarterly business meeting. This was a small church and there couldn’t have been more than 15 or 20 people, tops, at the dinner. After the meal we headed upstairs to the sanctuary for what I assumed would be a quick, let’s-get-it-over with business meeting. But boy was I wrong! There were a lot of people upstairs—many whom I had never seen before. And the business meeting was one I will never forget.
This was a young church, a church struggling with its identity. Things had been changing and new people were in the church—people like me. There were growing pains. All of this was difficult for Frank.
Frank had a high-stress job and was all the time worried about how his boss would react to his work and his decisions. Things felt out of control at work. But at church, things were different. At church, he was somebody. Over the last 15 years, he had served in pretty well every office and on every committee. But things were changing. There were new people. The church had taken some progressive stands. Frank did not like the changes, but they came anyway. That night at the business meeting, Frank got together as many people as he could who weren’t satisfied with the direction of the church. For most of them, it wasn’t so much that they were upset with things as it was they didn’t really care—they hadn’t been to church in years, but Frank got them to show up for the business meeting.
In the meeting, Frank criticized the pastor, criticized the finance committee, railed against the choir director. He broke confidences and slandered people. Others joined in with Frank. Finally, Frank rose and moved that the pastor be terminated immediately.
I was in shock. I had just joined the church that morning. I had thought these were nice people. Now I wondered what I had got myself into. Frank had gathered together enough folks that it appeared the pastor was gone. The core members of the church, those who had been at the potluck dinner, were shell-shocked, and no one seemed to know what to do. And so finally I stood up and said that given the importance of this vote, it seems like the membership should know about it ahead of time. So I moved the motion be tabled until a special called business meeting was held.
Now you can imagine what Frank thought of my idea. “Brother Moderator,” he said, “When does a person become a member of the church? Isn’t when we actually receive the letter of transfer from his last church?” In other words, somebody shut this kid up. But Judy stood up. She was thoughtful and fairly quiet, a much-respected person. Judy said, “This morning we all promised that we would encourage and support David as a brother in Christ, and now you’re slapping him in the face!” Gene, the moderator, ruled that I was a voting member and could make the motion to table.
That motion passed by 2 votes. When the special business meeting was held, 85% of the membership supported the pastor. Frank left the church, the other 15% never attended anyway, the pastor stayed 10 more years, and the church moved forward. But the outcome was very nearly quite different.
What happened in that church, and what happened to Frank, happens far too often. Paul’s words have something to say to Frank, and to all of us. The letter to the Ephesians was a circular letter, written to churches in the region around Ephesus. Frank’s church was a lot like those churches that Ephesians was written for—small churches, new churches, churches that had to decide in what direction they would go and what kind of church they would be. These were churches with conflicts and struggles, both from within and without, and these were churches that had to deal with anger.
Verse 26, this section of the orange, begins, “Be angry,” which may be one of the easiest admonitions in the Bible to follow. Being angry is not a problem. Read the news. Watch 60 Minutes. Drive to the grocery and watch some jerk driver will pull out in front of you. Go on vacation and spend extended time together with family and see if someone doesn't get angry at some point. Try to play golf and chances are you will get angry at whoever invented the stupid game. Anger is just part of life.
This doesn’t seem like a huge revelation, but sometimes we don’t hear the message in church that anger is OK. Sometimes we get the message that it is wrong to get mad, or that Christians should never become angry.
It is ironic that the church would teach that anger is wrong. Anyone who has read the Bible much at all knows that God gets angry--angry at injustice, angry at corruption, angry at sin. Jesus became at the moneychangers in the temple. He got angry with the Pharisees for their smug self-righteousness, and was even put out at the denseness of his own disciples.
Paul did not say, “Do not become angry.” But he did say, “Don’t let your anger lead you into sin.” How might anger lead us into sin? This can happen when we allow our anger to control us. When anger controls us, it leads us to sin and has an almost exponential potential for compounding itself.
As a kid, I remember Jimmy Riess, normally a kind of reserved boy in the neighborhood, getting mad and taking a swing at me with a baseball bat. Most of us learn a measure of self-control as we get older, but it’s not always easy. Some never learn to deal appropriately with anger, and take it out by abusing their spouse or their children. At some point, we all let anger get the best of us.
Suppressing our anger may work--for a while. Frank suppressed his anger at work, and he had for the most part kept quiet about changes at church, but eventually the anger exploded.
Paul gives us some very wise, very simple teaching regarding anger: “Be angry but do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and do not make room for the devil.” Failing to deal with anger can lead us into sin.
Now remember, Paul is speaking to the church. Anger is not in itself a threat to the unity of the church. Anger is just going to happen, whether we like it or not. But the way we deal with anger can be a huge threat to unity. It is important for the church to learn to deal creatively and constructively with conflict. Conflict comes with change, and if there is never any conflict and never any anger, we are probably not open to change and probably not being the church we are called to be. Be angry – but do not let your anger lead you into sin. We can allow anger to be a motivating force for bringing about justice, for working toward reconciliation, for building up. Like Powdermilk Biscuits, it can “give shy persons the strength to do what needs to be done.” Or anger can be a destructive force used to tear down, used to destroy the unity of the church. It’s all in how we deal with it.
And then one other section, one other orange slice, which can kind of be an antidote to letting anger lead us into sin. “Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ ahs forgiven you.” Be kind.
I have known people to get all worked up over passages of scripture, sometimes over obscure passages. Folks get worked up about homosexuality, citing a verse in Leviticus that is right next to the verse about stoning unruly teenagers. People scream loudly that they are more Christian, more spiritual, more scriptural than others. Self-proclaimed Christians can resort to all kinds of devious means, rumor and innuendo and outright slander – they can take their playbook right out of the list of what not to do that we find here in Ephesians. And for all of these Bible screamers and Christian warriors, I just want to quote a very simple Bible verse. “Be ye kind one to another.” That’s the way I learned it in Sunday School, back in the King James days. “Be ye kind one to another.” Why don't people want to focus on this verse?
Zoe and Marian were among the couple hundred high school students who attended an All-State choir camp at ISU this week. Zoe said that one day, there was a guy preaching outside of the library. Yelling at people. Telling students he had never met how sinful they were. He believed the Bible backwards and forward, believed every word. Well, how about the part where it says, “Be ye kind one to another?”
On the way home from Virgil Lagomarcino’s memorial service, there was a crowd at the corner of Lincoln Way and University Blvd. Fred Phelps’ gang was there to protest, and counter-demonstrators were across the street. Phelps’ extended family is known as Westboro Baptist Church although as far as I can tell their only purpose is to travel around the country spreading hate and getting attention. They picket churches and schools and busy street corners with signs that say “God Hates Fags” and worse, and they picket military funerals with signs saying that this is God’s judgment on America. Bible believers, spreading the gospel, they say.
What about kindness? Do they believe that part? What about, “Be ye kind one to another?”
Well, the weird preacher on campus or the Phelps bunch are easy targets. What is harder to admit is that we don’t always do so well with kindness ourselves. It is extremely hard to be kind to some people, especially people like the weird preacher or the Phelps clan. And if we are honest, it is sometimes hard to be kind to each other in the church. Paul knew that. Kindness is simple, but it can be very difficult. But in a way, kindness is an antidote to all of the issues discussed here. Kindness leads us to speak truthfully, to manage our anger well, to work honestly and share with those in need. Kindness makes us build up rather than tear down and keeps us from bitterness and slander and malice.
Kindness is needed in the church, and it is certainly in short supply in our culture. The Kindness Index has dropped off even more than the stock market. There are all kinds of campaigns that go on, in and out of the church, but it seems to me that we could really use a Campaign for Kindness. Believe it or not, the very first record album I bought was a Glen Campbell album. And he sang, “you’ve got to try a little kindness.” What a difference that would make.
Well, we started with the apple and then a couple of orange slices. We’ll end with the rest of the apple. Which makes this a kind of sandwich, I suppose, if you are keeping score.
Paul concludes this passage by saying, “be imitators of God.” As a way of summarizing what it is he is asking of us, he says, “Be imitators of God.” And we thought kindness was hard. How can we possibly be imitators of God?
Craig Watts argues that in the “Christian life we are called to a sincere hypocrisy” because we are to be imitators of God. Hypocrites because of course we don’t measure up - we don’t live out what we claim to believe - but we sincere hypocrites because we sincerely wish to be like Christ. We pray that by God’s grace we become what we are not yet.
Max Beerbohn wrote the play, “The Happy Hypocrite.” Lord George Hell is a corrupt, wealthy aristocrat who falls in love with a pious girl. To disguise his debauchery, he dons a mask of a saint. They marry and live together happily until a woman from his past tells his wife of George’s true identity. Confronted by his wife, George takes off his mask only to discover that his face has conformed to the mask of the saint. He has pretended to be saintly until in the end he is.
By being sincere hypocrites, says Watts, “the goodness that we pretend to have may finally become real.”
We are to maintain the unity of the church by imitating the One we follow. “Be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us.” Amen.
There is a lot packed into these verses from Ephesians. Our choice this morning is to treat this passage as either an orange or an apple. How do we eat an orange? Section by section. How do we eat an apple? All at once.
There are a lot of individual injunctions here – put away falsehood, give up stealing, do this, don’t do that. We can treat each verse like a separate section of the orange. We could choose one specific section to focus on – like working honestly – or we could take a quick, cursory look at each of the various sections.
Or, we might look at it as an apple. With an apple, we just chomp into the whole thing. We could treat it as an apple and look at the overarching themes and principles at play here.
Well, being ever wishy-washy, I decided to do a little bit of both. So we’ll look at the whole passage in order to gain context, but spend most of our time on a couple of sections. So you might say we are going to treat the passage as a fruit salad.
Are you with me so far? First, the “apple” issues. Our passage begins with the word “therefore,” and as someone once said, when a verse starts with “therefore,” you need to look and see what it is there for.
When we go back to the beginning of chapter 4, we see that the big issue is unity in the church. We are to “make every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.” We are all one in the Body of Christ, and there is “one Lord, one faith, one baptism, and one God and Father of us all.”
By virtue of our common life in Christ, we are new people, and we are to cloth ourselves with a new way of living. This is the background, and our text spells out some of the implications of living the New Life – what it looks like to “maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.”
So what we have is not a list of random rules for Christians, not just a laundry list of do’s and don’ts, but a way of living our life together as a community. These are not just rules for individual Christians to follow, but a way of life for all of us to live together.
OK, that is a big bite out of the apple. But back to our fruit salad. In most salads, one or two tastes or textures really stand out. We could choose any number of items in this salad of a passage, but I’m going to deal especially with two. And I want to start by telling you the story of Frank.
I had been in town for only a few weeks when I first met Frank. He was not particularly friendly, but I learned not to take it personally—he was unfriendly towards a lot of people. He was a deacon at the church I had been visiting. On a Sunday morning, I went forward at the end of the service to join the membership. The pastor asked folks if they would support and encourage me as a brother in Christ and they indicated their desire to do so with a hug or a handshake after the service. It felt good to “officially” be a part of this church.
That evening, I went back to church for a potluck dinner and the quarterly business meeting. This was a small church and there couldn’t have been more than 15 or 20 people, tops, at the dinner. After the meal we headed upstairs to the sanctuary for what I assumed would be a quick, let’s-get-it-over with business meeting. But boy was I wrong! There were a lot of people upstairs—many whom I had never seen before. And the business meeting was one I will never forget.
This was a young church, a church struggling with its identity. Things had been changing and new people were in the church—people like me. There were growing pains. All of this was difficult for Frank.
Frank had a high-stress job and was all the time worried about how his boss would react to his work and his decisions. Things felt out of control at work. But at church, things were different. At church, he was somebody. Over the last 15 years, he had served in pretty well every office and on every committee. But things were changing. There were new people. The church had taken some progressive stands. Frank did not like the changes, but they came anyway. That night at the business meeting, Frank got together as many people as he could who weren’t satisfied with the direction of the church. For most of them, it wasn’t so much that they were upset with things as it was they didn’t really care—they hadn’t been to church in years, but Frank got them to show up for the business meeting.
In the meeting, Frank criticized the pastor, criticized the finance committee, railed against the choir director. He broke confidences and slandered people. Others joined in with Frank. Finally, Frank rose and moved that the pastor be terminated immediately.
I was in shock. I had just joined the church that morning. I had thought these were nice people. Now I wondered what I had got myself into. Frank had gathered together enough folks that it appeared the pastor was gone. The core members of the church, those who had been at the potluck dinner, were shell-shocked, and no one seemed to know what to do. And so finally I stood up and said that given the importance of this vote, it seems like the membership should know about it ahead of time. So I moved the motion be tabled until a special called business meeting was held.
Now you can imagine what Frank thought of my idea. “Brother Moderator,” he said, “When does a person become a member of the church? Isn’t when we actually receive the letter of transfer from his last church?” In other words, somebody shut this kid up. But Judy stood up. She was thoughtful and fairly quiet, a much-respected person. Judy said, “This morning we all promised that we would encourage and support David as a brother in Christ, and now you’re slapping him in the face!” Gene, the moderator, ruled that I was a voting member and could make the motion to table.
That motion passed by 2 votes. When the special business meeting was held, 85% of the membership supported the pastor. Frank left the church, the other 15% never attended anyway, the pastor stayed 10 more years, and the church moved forward. But the outcome was very nearly quite different.
What happened in that church, and what happened to Frank, happens far too often. Paul’s words have something to say to Frank, and to all of us. The letter to the Ephesians was a circular letter, written to churches in the region around Ephesus. Frank’s church was a lot like those churches that Ephesians was written for—small churches, new churches, churches that had to decide in what direction they would go and what kind of church they would be. These were churches with conflicts and struggles, both from within and without, and these were churches that had to deal with anger.
Verse 26, this section of the orange, begins, “Be angry,” which may be one of the easiest admonitions in the Bible to follow. Being angry is not a problem. Read the news. Watch 60 Minutes. Drive to the grocery and watch some jerk driver will pull out in front of you. Go on vacation and spend extended time together with family and see if someone doesn't get angry at some point. Try to play golf and chances are you will get angry at whoever invented the stupid game. Anger is just part of life.
This doesn’t seem like a huge revelation, but sometimes we don’t hear the message in church that anger is OK. Sometimes we get the message that it is wrong to get mad, or that Christians should never become angry.
It is ironic that the church would teach that anger is wrong. Anyone who has read the Bible much at all knows that God gets angry--angry at injustice, angry at corruption, angry at sin. Jesus became at the moneychangers in the temple. He got angry with the Pharisees for their smug self-righteousness, and was even put out at the denseness of his own disciples.
Paul did not say, “Do not become angry.” But he did say, “Don’t let your anger lead you into sin.” How might anger lead us into sin? This can happen when we allow our anger to control us. When anger controls us, it leads us to sin and has an almost exponential potential for compounding itself.
As a kid, I remember Jimmy Riess, normally a kind of reserved boy in the neighborhood, getting mad and taking a swing at me with a baseball bat. Most of us learn a measure of self-control as we get older, but it’s not always easy. Some never learn to deal appropriately with anger, and take it out by abusing their spouse or their children. At some point, we all let anger get the best of us.
Suppressing our anger may work--for a while. Frank suppressed his anger at work, and he had for the most part kept quiet about changes at church, but eventually the anger exploded.
Paul gives us some very wise, very simple teaching regarding anger: “Be angry but do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and do not make room for the devil.” Failing to deal with anger can lead us into sin.
Now remember, Paul is speaking to the church. Anger is not in itself a threat to the unity of the church. Anger is just going to happen, whether we like it or not. But the way we deal with anger can be a huge threat to unity. It is important for the church to learn to deal creatively and constructively with conflict. Conflict comes with change, and if there is never any conflict and never any anger, we are probably not open to change and probably not being the church we are called to be. Be angry – but do not let your anger lead you into sin. We can allow anger to be a motivating force for bringing about justice, for working toward reconciliation, for building up. Like Powdermilk Biscuits, it can “give shy persons the strength to do what needs to be done.” Or anger can be a destructive force used to tear down, used to destroy the unity of the church. It’s all in how we deal with it.
And then one other section, one other orange slice, which can kind of be an antidote to letting anger lead us into sin. “Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ ahs forgiven you.” Be kind.
I have known people to get all worked up over passages of scripture, sometimes over obscure passages. Folks get worked up about homosexuality, citing a verse in Leviticus that is right next to the verse about stoning unruly teenagers. People scream loudly that they are more Christian, more spiritual, more scriptural than others. Self-proclaimed Christians can resort to all kinds of devious means, rumor and innuendo and outright slander – they can take their playbook right out of the list of what not to do that we find here in Ephesians. And for all of these Bible screamers and Christian warriors, I just want to quote a very simple Bible verse. “Be ye kind one to another.” That’s the way I learned it in Sunday School, back in the King James days. “Be ye kind one to another.” Why don't people want to focus on this verse?
Zoe and Marian were among the couple hundred high school students who attended an All-State choir camp at ISU this week. Zoe said that one day, there was a guy preaching outside of the library. Yelling at people. Telling students he had never met how sinful they were. He believed the Bible backwards and forward, believed every word. Well, how about the part where it says, “Be ye kind one to another?”
On the way home from Virgil Lagomarcino’s memorial service, there was a crowd at the corner of Lincoln Way and University Blvd. Fred Phelps’ gang was there to protest, and counter-demonstrators were across the street. Phelps’ extended family is known as Westboro Baptist Church although as far as I can tell their only purpose is to travel around the country spreading hate and getting attention. They picket churches and schools and busy street corners with signs that say “God Hates Fags” and worse, and they picket military funerals with signs saying that this is God’s judgment on America. Bible believers, spreading the gospel, they say.
What about kindness? Do they believe that part? What about, “Be ye kind one to another?”
Well, the weird preacher on campus or the Phelps bunch are easy targets. What is harder to admit is that we don’t always do so well with kindness ourselves. It is extremely hard to be kind to some people, especially people like the weird preacher or the Phelps clan. And if we are honest, it is sometimes hard to be kind to each other in the church. Paul knew that. Kindness is simple, but it can be very difficult. But in a way, kindness is an antidote to all of the issues discussed here. Kindness leads us to speak truthfully, to manage our anger well, to work honestly and share with those in need. Kindness makes us build up rather than tear down and keeps us from bitterness and slander and malice.
Kindness is needed in the church, and it is certainly in short supply in our culture. The Kindness Index has dropped off even more than the stock market. There are all kinds of campaigns that go on, in and out of the church, but it seems to me that we could really use a Campaign for Kindness. Believe it or not, the very first record album I bought was a Glen Campbell album. And he sang, “you’ve got to try a little kindness.” What a difference that would make.
Well, we started with the apple and then a couple of orange slices. We’ll end with the rest of the apple. Which makes this a kind of sandwich, I suppose, if you are keeping score.
Paul concludes this passage by saying, “be imitators of God.” As a way of summarizing what it is he is asking of us, he says, “Be imitators of God.” And we thought kindness was hard. How can we possibly be imitators of God?
Craig Watts argues that in the “Christian life we are called to a sincere hypocrisy” because we are to be imitators of God. Hypocrites because of course we don’t measure up - we don’t live out what we claim to believe - but we sincere hypocrites because we sincerely wish to be like Christ. We pray that by God’s grace we become what we are not yet.
Max Beerbohn wrote the play, “The Happy Hypocrite.” Lord George Hell is a corrupt, wealthy aristocrat who falls in love with a pious girl. To disguise his debauchery, he dons a mask of a saint. They marry and live together happily until a woman from his past tells his wife of George’s true identity. Confronted by his wife, George takes off his mask only to discover that his face has conformed to the mask of the saint. He has pretended to be saintly until in the end he is.
By being sincere hypocrites, says Watts, “the goodness that we pretend to have may finally become real.”
We are to maintain the unity of the church by imitating the One we follow. “Be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us.” Amen.
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