Humility

Isaiah 52: 13-15

Hebrews 2: 5-9

John 18: 19-24

Humility

Three boys in the school yard were bragging about who had the better father. The first boy says, "My Dad
scribbles a few words on a piece of paper, he calls it a poem, and they give him $100." The second boy says, "That’s nothing. My Dad scribbles a few words on a piece of paper, he calls it a song, and they give him  1000." The third boy says, "My Dad is even better than that. He scribbles a few words on a piece of paper, calls it a sermon, and it takes four men just to collect all the money!"

A  United Methodist pastor, a Presbyterian pastor, and a rabbi were having a conversation one day over lunch. The Methodist pastor proudly proclaimed, “One of my ancestors preached alongside John Wesley.” The Presbyterian pastor said, “One of my ancestors signed the Declaration of Independence”. They both thought the rabbi would be very impressed by this. To his chagrin, the rabbi responded, “I understand your pride. One of my ancestors signed the Ten Commandments.”

One of the problems with pride is that there will always going to be someone who can top you. They will run faster, jump higher, win more, be more beautiful, tell a funnier story, receive more applause and go one step farther than you did. Even if no one beats your record in your lifetime, someone eventually will.

But an even greater problem with pride is that it puts you in opposition against God. He is the only one who should receive glory, and when we try to steal some of his glory for ourselves, we commit a sin. That is why God did not choose those the world saw as wise and the beautiful and those who had everything together to do his work. He chose the weak because they would be smart enough to understand that the only way that they could ever accomplish anything of any value would be through God’s power. And so, whenever something good happened, they knew they had to give all the glory to God.

Sometimes, we forget our weakness and start to allow pride to creep into our way of thinking. When we do, we are in for a downfall, sooner or later. We are opening ourselves to humiliation, which is to be shamed, or disgraced, or at least to be taken down a notch or two.  It is something we do to ourselves, not something done by others to us. We cannot be humiliated by someone else.

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The Sanhedrin, the Jewish court that demanded Jesus’ death and the Roman soldiers who carried out the execution, all tried to humiliate Jesus. They beat him, spit on him, taunted him, and tortured him. But nothing they could do would humiliate him. Why?  Because Jesus was humble.

There is a huge difference between humility, which is the quality or condition of being humble, and humiliation, which is the self inflicted result of too much pride and self confidence rather than recognizing our place in God’s work. Humility is freedom from pride and arrogance.

There are some things we need to consider or remember about our judge and reward giver the Lord Jesus Christ. He wants us to do what he commands us to do. We will not be rewarded according to what our circumstances were, how hard the work was, how long we had to endure rough conditions, or what the results of our labors were. Jesus who was humble in the face of death, and who offers us salvation, has called us into his service and will judge us according to how faithful we were to do what he asked us to do. 

It is Jesus who chooses the field of service for each of us if we will allow him to, and he will reward according to our faithfulness in that field. It is not how successful we are in doing good works, as we can never earn our way into heaven. It is in our humble service to God that counts. It is our acceptance of Jesus not just as Savior, but also as Lord. 

The biggest obstacle to serving Christ as he wishes is pride. Not pride in the pursuit of excellence. In fact, not to pursue excellence is a sin. It means accepting mediocrity, and not doing our best on behalf of God with the gifts he gives to each of us. Pride is sin when it’s a God-defying and neighbor-disdaining arrogance. The key is the distinction between excellence and arrogance.  If we consider our success in our work for God all our own doing, we are being arrogant, not humble.  As long as we think there is anything in us that God can recognize and reward, we are pride-deluded.

The story is told of two ducks and a frog who lived happily together in a farm pond. They were great friends and enjoyed playing together. When the hot days of summer came, however, the pond began to dry up. They soon realized that they had to move. This was no problem for the ducks because they could just fly to another pond. But the frog was stuck. So they decided to put a stick in the bill of each duck that the frog could hang onto with his mouth as they flew to another pond. The plan worked well ­ so well, in fact, that as they were flying along a farmer looked up in admiration and said, “Well, isn’t that a clever idea! I wonder who thought of that?”

To which the frog said, “I did…” Be careful of pride ­ it can cause you to fall. 

Trade Offs

Proverbs 8: 8-11

Hebrews 11: 24-26

Luke 23: 13-25

Tradeoffs

Every day we make many, many choices. Sometimes we make tradeoffs. There is a major difference.

A few years ago, a very rich businessman decided to take a vacation to a small tropical island in the South Pacific. He worked hard all his life and decided that now was the time to enjoy the fruits of his labor. He was excited about visiting the island because he’s heard that there is incredible fishing there. He loved fishing as a young boy, but hadn’t gone in years because he had been so busy working to save for his retirement.

So on the first day, he had his breakfast and hea ded to the beach, at about 9:30 AM. There he spotted a fisherman coming in with a large bucket full of fish.

“How long did you fish for?” he asked. The fisherman looked at the businessman with a wide grin across his face and explained that the fished for about three hours every day. The businessman then asked him why he returned so quickly.

“Don’t worry”, says the fisherman, “There’s still plenty of fish out there”.

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Dumbfounded, the businessman asked the fisherman why he didn’t continue catching more fish. The fisherman patiently explained that what he caught is all he needed for the day. “I’ll spend the rest of the day playing with my family, talking with my friends and maybe drinking a little wine. After that I’ll relax on the beach.”

Now the rich businessman figured he needed to teach this peasant fisherman a thing or two. So he explained to him that he should stay out all day and catch more fish. Then he could save up the extra money he made and buy even bigger boats to catch even more fish. The he could keep reinvesting his profits in even more boats and hire other fisherman to work for him. If he worked really hard, in 20 or 30 years he would be a very rich man and retire.

The businessman felt pleased that he had helped teach this simple fellow how to become rich. Then the fisherman looked at the businessman with a puzzled look on his face and asked what he would do after he became very rich and retired.

The businessman responded quickly. “You can spend time with your family, talk with your friends, and maybe drink a little wine. Or you could just relax on the beach.”

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Some things need to be turned down or turned away for other more important  things to be gained. That is what a tradeoff is.  When we go to a grocery store for bread we have a lot of choices. We can choose one brand or another. But in the end we still go out with bread. We may go to a car dealer to buy a car and realize we cannot afford exactly what we want but we buy a different model instead. We have made a choice, but we still go off the lot with a car. 

A tradeoff is very different. In making a tradeoff a person gives up something much desired for something completely different that is much more important.

In this passage Jesus says that we must make a tradeoff. We must deny ourselves in order to gain some other things. What does he mean?

Well, one example is, we might give up buying a car at all, to help a child pay college tuition. Or, if you want to pursue a certain career, you might have to deny yourself time spent on vacations to devote your time to learning what is needed for that career. A young person might deny themselves marriage, or starting a family, or even dating in some cases, to go to college. Or, he or she might give up going to college right away to take a job or go into the military gain income for college later.

Pontius Pilate offered the Jewish leaders and the crowd a tradeoff. He didn’t have to. He found Jesus had committed no crime. But he wanted to avoid problems with those leaders and the crowd. They chose Barabbas over Jesus, and Jesus went to the cross.

When Jesus told his disciples that they must deny themselves, he was saying they must deny things that were very important to them, such as time, energy, even the careers they had, to follow him. They had to be willing to give up their very lives if necessary. Eventually they all traded their lives to follow Jesus, even to death, because they had the promise of the resurrection.

Our society and culture today gives us many choices and makes it hard to make tradeoffs. But just as Jesus called his followers to make a tradeoff, he calls us to do the same. Jesus himself made a tradeoff.  He went to the cross for us. What are we willing to do for him in return? How willing are we to give him our whole lives, wherever he leads?

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So that.....

Genesis 1 18-19

1 Peter 2: 21-24

John 3: 16

So That….

There is a series of commercials on TV that I enjoy. That doesn’t happen often, but these commercials are clever in building a case for why we should buy the services of Direct TV.  They show us a sequence of decisions, one leading to another. They show us the possible unintentional consequences of our actions if we do not do purchase Direct TV.  Today we are going to touch upon our intentional and God-intended actions and their consequences.

The phrase “so that…”  is found over 760 times in the Bible. That phrase is used to link a sequence of actions, or desired or expected actions.   It is used to link cause and effect.  It is also used to explain why God has chosen to do something. And it is used to show us what Christ expects us to do. God and Christ use the words “so that” very intentionally.

In the year AD 42, Herod, king in Judea, killed the apostle James with a sword. When he saw it pleased the Jews, he threw Peter, another apostle, in prison. The night before Herod was about to dispose of him an angel of the Lord woke Peter and led him out of the prison unharmed. After going to the house of Mary, the mother of John Mark, where the disciples were praying for him, Peter left town.

The next morning Herod was enraged that Peter was gone and had the guards put to death. Then he left Judea and went down to the coastal town of Caesarea where a very strange and terrible and instructive thing happened. Herod had a grudge against the people of Tyre and Sidon—we don't know why. But at the same time he had them over a barrel because they were dependent on him for food. So holding the purse strings like he did, Herod enjoyed making himself scarce and watching the people be pinched. It gave him a great sense of power to have others so dependent on him.

So the people of Tyre and Sidon tried to get an audience with King Herod by going through his personal chamberlain named Blastus. This attempt succeeded and a day was appointed for King Herod to make an appearance and an oration. The rest of the story is very brief. It is recorded in Acts 12:21–23: "On an appointed day Herod put on his royal robes, took his seat upon the throne and made an oration to them. And the people shouted: The voice of God and not of man! Immediately an angel of the Lord struck him because he did not give God the glory and he was eaten by worms and died."

Jesus said in Matthew 5:16, "Let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven." Jesus clearly commands that the goal of our lives should be to behave so that God gets the glory. Live so that men will see your life and give your Father in heaven glory, not you. So it should be very clear that glorifying God is not merely an act of worship on Sunday. It is a peculiar kind of living.

For God to get glory from the way we live, we must be engaged in good works—we must be fruitful. Glory is far less than merely avoiding gross sins by which God's people display his glory. It is in the pursuit of good works, acts of generosity, works of kindness, ways of love. Since it is God's goal to be glorified in his people, and since Jesus says this happens when his people do good works, we would expect the Bible to tell us that God's goal in redeeming a people is so that they might do good deeds. And this is exactly what we find. Paul says in Titus 2:14 that Christ "gave himself for us to redeem us from all iniquity and to purify for himself a people of his own who are zealous for good deeds."

The fifteenth chapter of John’s Gospel contains rich imagery of the vine and the branches, an image that would have been obvious to those who labored in vineyards and enjoyed the fruit of the vine. “I am the vine; you are the branches,” he teaches his disciples and us. We draw our strength, our life, from him: “I am the vine; you are the branches, and apart from me,” he says, “you can do nothing.”

Then Jesus concludes with a necessary implication. We are connected with God, and we are in communion with each other as a church for a larger purpose: a calling in the world. “You did not choose me,” Jesus says. “I chose you…  I appointed you to go and bear fruit.”

Fruitfulness is about more than individual spirituality. Jesus had been with the disciples for some time — a significant amount of time with just a few people, twelve people. He was teaching them about friendship with God, which involved prayer and the reading of scripture. He gave them a command and an invitation: love one another.

But it was always about more than an individual’s spiritual life or a group of people and their love for each other. He was not teaching them to be a closed group, an inwardly focused group. He wanted the disciples to bear fruit; he wanted their lives to make a positive difference in the lives of others who had yet to come to know God’s love.  He calls us to do the same. We exist to make life better for others outside our own circle of family and close friends.

When we pray “thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven”, they are words with a profound meaning after the resurrection. Christ was not speaking of a kingdom in some far distant future, or up in the clouds. He was speaking of the here and now. Christ came to show us that we exist to bring God’s kingdom here on earth. His words to his disciples after the resurrection made it clear his kingdom work was to continue, and we are to make new disciples and help to transform lives.

“So that” applies to the church as a whole too, not just to us as individuals. “So that” should accompany every decision we make as a church. When a new program or activity is planned, we should say, “We are doing this program so that…..”  Christ expects the answer to “so that” to be “so that others come to know him, and accept him, and grow in faith and knowledge of God’s love”. 

Christ died so that we might do good works, bear fruit, and so bring glory to our Father in heaven.

Fruitfulness involves accountability. We are accountable to Christ for the life we have received from him. What is important is that we allow the grace of God to be poured out through us. Through our actions we are to allow the inward and spiritual grace to become an outward and visible sign of God’s love for everyone, so that lives will be transformed, and others will come to accept Christ as their Savior and Lord. It is the only reason we, and this church, exist.

Amen

Encounters

Exodus 3: 1-5

Ephesians 1: 1-4

Luke 24:13-35

Encounters

While at the Methodist Theological School of Ohio, some of the classes I took were about the history of Christianity. One of those classes dealt with the period we know as the Crusades. It is a period of Christian history not to be proud of.  There were several crusades, because the city of Jerusalem was fought over several times, with the European Christians first capturing, then losing, the city and surrounding land.

In the year 1187, the Muslim leader Saladin re-conquered the city of Jerusalem as well as most of the Crusader strongholds throughout the Holy Land. In response, the kings of Europe including Frederick Babarossa of Germany (who died on route), Phillip of France and Richard I of England (the Lionheart, famous for the Robin Hood stories) mounted a campaign to rescue the city. The Third Crusade was underway.

There is a moment in Ridley Scott’s 2005 epic film The Kingdom of Heaven about this third crusade where the character Balian—a crusader who has come to Jerusalem to defend the Holy City—sits on a hillside above the city, allegedly the hill of Calvary. Balian sits in the darkness and feels a complete lack of any sense of holiness. There is no sense of the presence of God in the place. The director, Scott, chose the title of the film carefully—the violence and the hatred perpetrated by the church and the crusaders contradicts everything that people might associate with heaven. The one moment when there seems a sense of reverence is when Saladin, the Saracen leader, picks up a cross that has fallen to the ground during the battle, and puts it back onto the altar.

The Crusades were about recovering and holding on to the ‘Holy Places’, as though meeting with God depended on going to a particular place; as though the Day of Pentecost where God pours out his Spirit on all people never happened. Not all the Crusaders were Knights or military. Many were civilians of all ages, wanting to make the journey and be part of the “recovery.” Hundreds of people died on the long journey the Crusaders took from France and Germany to the land we now call Israel. Thousands died during the battles--- and many were innocent people, including Jews, who at the time lived in peace with the Palestinians and other Arab people. The Crusaders were not very discriminating when it came to killing.

If we watch the TV news enough, we might come to agree with the thoughts of Balian. We might come to believe there is no sense of God’s presence in that land. Bethlehem and Jerusalem and the holy places there are so much the centers for dispute and disunity, that Balian felt, and we might agree, there is no space for God.

When I read the Bible, when I read the stories of people encountering the Risen Jesus, I find their meetings with him are not in the ‘holy places’ of the time. They do not meet Jesus in the Temple or in the synagogues; they meet Jesus in the ordinary places. They meet Jesus in the garden, in a room where the doors are locked, walking along the road to Emmaus, eating food at the lakeside in Galilee. Jesus meets people where they are in their own lives. It is in meeting with Jesus in the ordinary things that gives us a sense of God’s presence in worship; knowing God is with us from Monday to Saturday gives meaning and purpose to our worship on Sundays..

A farmer I know has said that he believes that unless she met with God during her work on the farm during the week, it is pointless to go to church in the hope of meeting with God on a Sunday. What he was saying was that if we are truly Christian, then we know that God is with us in all places and at all times, and to treat him as someone to whom we can come and speak once a week is to treat him as though he was not God at all. Either he is God all the time, or he is not God.

Do we ever have experiences like that farmer? More importantly, are there times when our hearts burn within us, as was the experience of the two disciples on the road to Emmaus? What is asked of us is not that we be religious. There were plenty of people in Jesus’ time who were religious, but had no sense whatsoever of God’s presence. What is asked of us is openness. Being open to things happening, we can meet with God in the most unlikely of places. In her book Travelling In, Monica Furlong writes of two very unexpected encounters:

“During the two years just before and after I was twenty I had two experiences which led to religious conversion. The first occurred when I was waiting at a bus stop on a wet afternoon. It was opposite the Odeon cinema, outside the station, and I was surrounded by people, shops, cars. A friend was with me. All of a sudden, for no apparent reason, everything looked different. Everything I could see shone, vibrated, throbbed with joy and with meaning. I knew that it had done this all along, and would go on doing it, but that usually I couldn’t see it. It was all over in a minute or two. I climbed on to the bus, saying nothing to my friend – it seemed impossible to explain – and sat stunned with astonishment and happiness.”

The second experience, she said, occurred some months later: “I left my office at lunch-time, stopped at a small Greek cafe in Fleet Street to buy some rolls and fruit, and walked up Chancery Lane. It was an August day, quite warm but cloudy, with the sun glaringly, painfully bright, behind the clouds. I had a strong sense that something was about to happen. I sat on a seat in the garden of Lincoln’s Inn waiting for whatever it was to occur. The sun behind the clouds grew brighter and brighter, the clouds assumed a shape which fascinated me, and between one moment and the next, although no word had been uttered, I felt myself spoken to. I was aware of being regarded by love, of being wholly accepted, accused, forgiven, all at once. The joy of it was the greatest I had ever known in my life. I felt I had been born for this moment and had marked time till it occurred.”

Monica Furlong encountered God not at a great cathedral, not on a pilgrimage, but at a bus stop outside the Odeon Cinema and sitting on a park bench, amongst the lawyers’ offices, in Lincoln’s Inn Fields.

God is there to be encountered in the ordinary things. God is present when we welcome him. ‘Were not our hearts burning within us?’ say the disciples as they think about that evening walk to Emmaus. May the Jesus of the garden, of the locked room, of the walk from Jerusalem, of the lakeshore in Galilee be with us, and may we be blessed to recognize his presence.

 Have you had an encounter with God lately?  Are you available to meet with him?

Amen