02-26-2012 Sermon by The Rev. Dr. Brian K. Jensen

THE SUPERFICIAL SAGA: PART III

    Does anyone remember the name Vicki Van Meter?  Vicki Van Meter was a sixth grader at East End Elementary School in Meadville, when she made national headlines in September of 1993.  She flew an airplane from Augusta, Maine to San Diego, California…thereby becoming the youngest pilot ever to complete a solo flight across the United States. Nine months later she became the youngest pilot ever to complete a trans-Atlantic solo flight when she flew from Augusta, Maine to Glasgow, Scotland. 

    These achievements propelled Vicki Van Meter on a nationwide celebrity tour.  She appeared on numerous television talk shows, including The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.  She was a guest of Bill Clinton at the White House, and even had her picture on display at the Smithsonian. Vicki Van Meter was the toast of the town. She was a national celebrity. Yet she was vilified, ridiculed and tormented by many of her classmates at school.  Vicki Van Meter ended up battling depression for much of her life, which ended all too soon.  Why do you suppose that was?

    Our former associate pastor, Travis Webster, had an interesting take on phenomena such as this.  He called it, “crabs in a bucket.”  I believe it was a South Carolina euphemism.  When he first said that to me, I said, “What do you mean, crabs in a bucket?”  He said it’s like this.  Say you go out on the beach and you pick crabs and you put them in a bucket. What are those crabs trying to do?  They’re trying to get out of the bucket, of course.  And every once in a while one of those crabs manages to peek its head up over the rim of the bucket.  What do the other crabs in the bucket do?  They reach up…and they pull that headstrong crab back down to the bottom.

    There you have it: crabs in a bucket. It was Travis Webster’s down-home way of describing the green-eyed monster we call jealousy, or envy.  Envy can provoke people to do some pretty rotten things.  Keep that thought in mind as we move on.

    This is the third in a series of sermons entitled, The Superficial Saga.  It’s a sermon series on the seven deadly sins. We poke a lot of fun at sin these days. Truth be told, I don’t think we take sin very seriously.  Yet God takes sin seriously.  In fact, God takes sin so seriously…that he sent his Son to die on a cross in order to overcome it. Sin is not a matter to be taken lightly, as though a person could saunter into God’s presence at any time, in any mood, with any sort of life behind them…and at once perceive God there.  No, the sense of God’s reality is a progressive and often laborious achievement of the soul; the soul that takes sin seriously and earnestly tries to dispel it.

    Like I said, The Superficial Saga is a sermon series on the seven deadly sins. The seven deadly sins are as follows: pride, envy, wrath, sloth, greed, gluttony, and lust.  Yet along with the seven deadly sins there are what we call the seven holy virtues or the seven cardinal virtues. The seven holy virtues are meant to counteract the seven deadly sins.  For example, the opposite of pride is humility.  The opposite of envy is love.  The opposite of wrath is forgiveness.  The opposite of sloth is diligence.  The opposite of greed is charity.  The opposite of gluttony is temperance, and the opposite of lust is chastity…or purity.  You see, the way to conquer sin…is to replace it with something better.

    Last week we examined the sin of pride.  There we determined that pride was a sin basically because Jesus said it was.  The secret to overcoming pride is humility.  We determined that the key to humility is to approach God not as the big, self-sufficient, self-reliant adults we pretend to be. Instead, we approach God as little children – frail, empty and dependent – needing a gracious and loving God in the worst possible way.

    Today we tackle the second of the seven deadly sins; the sin of envy.  What exactly is envy? Webster’s dictionary defines envy as a painful or resentful awareness of an advantage enjoyed by another, joined with a desire to possess the same advantage.  I think the Oxford English dictionary’s definition is even better.  It says that to possess envy is to be gripped with a feeling of mortification and ill will in thinking of another person’s life…when compared with your own.

    In other words, envy causes us to seethe and to stew in resentment over the good fortune of another.  From a theological standpoint this is to say that God made a mistake in creating us as we are; in giving us the gifts we have been given; and, by implication…in giving our neighbors the gifts that they have been given.  Our envy is evidence that we were not created the way we wish we had been created.  Thus, envy is evidence of our perception of certain mistakes we believe to have been made by our Creator.

    Sins like lust and anger and gluttony have a warm-hearted, hot-blooded, all-too-human quality about them.  Envy, on the other hand, is cold-blooded and cruel.  Consider a first cousin of envy, what the Germans call Schadenfreude. Schadenfreude is defined as a perverse delight in the failure or misfortune of another.  That’s why a philosophical friend of mine named Bob O’Shea has observed that you should never complain about your troubles in life.  He says 90% of the people don’t care what’s going on in your life.  The other 10% think you’ve got it coming!”

    For example, weren’t some of us just a little bit pleased at the demise of Martha Stewart, a fabulously wealthy woman who kept her house just a little bit better than we keep ours?  The taking of delight in another’s demise is Schadenfreude at its best.  Ladies and gentlemen, enjoy the feast while you can.  For one day we may wake up and realize that our celebration of Martha Stewart’s demise…just might reveal as much of our moral weakness as it does hers.

    Jesus outlines his position on envy in the passage we read from the gospel according to Matthew.  There we see that a landowner hired laborers to work in his vineyard.  He agreed to pay them the usual day’s wages.  For the sake of argument, let’s just say he agreed to pay them eight dollars an hour…not a bad wage for a laborer. Thus, those individuals toiling out in the hot sun all day would likely have brought home about ninety-six dollars.  Chances are, they put in a good twelve-hour day.

    Three hours later, he hired more laborers. Three hours later, he did it again. Then three hours after that, he did it one more time. And finally, two hours later, he hired the last of his laborers.  For those of you doing the math at home, let’s get this straight.  Some laborers worked twelve hours. Some worked nine hours, some worked six hours, some worked three hours…and some worked only one.

    When it came time to settle up accounts at the end of the day, the laborers who only worked one hour got paid ninety-six dollars.  It was the same way all down the line.  Even the laborers who worked for twelve hours got ninety-six dollars. Let me tell you, they were not the least bit pleased. They grumbled against the landowner. But the landowner said, “Hey! I gave you what we agreed upon this morning.  Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me?  Or are you envious because I am generous?  So the last shall be first and the first shall be last.”

    The lesson here is clear.  God is the landowner…and we are the laborers.  God bestows his gifts upon us and God is free to bestow them as he chooses.  It remains for us to trust that God knows what he’s doing.  It remains also for us to realize that there will always be Mozarts, and there will always be Salieris. There will always be someone just a little bit better than we are…no matter how hard we try.

    When I was twelve years old, I was the third baseman for the best Little League baseball team in Sioux City, Iowa.  I worked hard at baseball – probably harder than anyone else on the team – and I desperately longed to be the star.  But there was a boy on the team by the name of Mike Courey who was just better than I was.  Mike Courey ended up being a first team All-State short-stop in baseball, a first team All-State guard in basketball, and a first team All-State quarterback in football.  Such a feat had never been accomplished in the history of Iowa sports.  He received a full-ride college scholarship to Notre Dame.  He backed up a guy his first two years of college by the name of Joe Montana.  Perhaps you’ve heard of him. And by the time he was a senior, he was the starting quarterback for Notre Dame.

    Some of the neighborhood kids – who we played against and beat – referred to us as a one-and-a-half-man team. I don’t suppose I have to tell you who the half-man they referred to was.  Mike Courey was just better at baseball than I was, no matter how hard I worked.  Like I said, there will always be Mozarts…and there will always be Salieris. We can envy those people all we want, yet some people just have the gift.  They are just destined to be better than we are.  God bestows his gifts upon us and God is free to bestow them as he chooses.  It remains for us to trust that God knows what he is doing. How do we come to do that?  I think Jesus sums it up when he says, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength and with all your mind.  And you shall love your neighbor as you love yourself.”  Therein lies the secret.  It has to do with how we love our neighbors.

    As the Eskimos have eleven different words for snow, the ancient Greeks had four different words for love. They are: eros, philos, storge and agape. Eros is passionate love, like that which might exist between a husband and a wife.  Philos is the love of friendship, like that which might exist between best friends.  Storge is the love of parenthood, like that which might exist between a mother and a daughter.  Agape is often simply described as Christian love…and that is the love to which Jesus refers in the gospels.  We are to love our neighbors with agape love.

    Agape love is hard to define.  So let me try to explain it as best I can.  To love someone is to wish what’s best for them.  Actually, I think that definition applies to all four kinds of love.  To love someone…is to wish what’s best for them.   And when we do that, the green-eyed monster goes out the window.  We let the more adventurous crabs…climb right out of the bucket.

    So you see, to love someone is – at least in part – a conscious choice. It is the conscious choice to wish what’s best for them – not for us – but what’s best for them.  Try it some time.  Take the time to intentionally wish what’s best for someone else.  And in the process, you just might find what’s best for you as well.  Amen.

 

02-19-2012 Sermon by The Rev. Dr. Brian K. Jensen

THE SUPERFICIAL SAGA: PART II

    I served the First Presbyterian Church of Luverne, Minnesota from April of 1991 until July of 1996. There were a number of farmers in my congregation and occasionally they would come to me to ask me to pray about the weather.  Farmers tend to be a rather faithful lot.  You have to be faithful when your livelihood is dependent upon something as precarious as the weather.  In any case, occasionally a farmer would come to me to ask me to pray about the weather.

    One Sunday morning, a farmer stopped me before worship and asked me if I’d pray for rain.  I asked him when he wanted the rain. He said, “Tomorrow would be nice.” I said, “I’ll tell you what.  I’ve got a softball game tomorrow.  How would it be if we prayed for rain on Tuesday?”  He said that would be fine.   We prayed for rain during the worship service that morning…and on Tuesday morning, it began to rain.

    Another Sunday morning, a farmer stopped me before worship and asked me if I’d pray for some sunshine. I said, “What, exactly, do you need?”  He said, “How about eighty-five degrees and sunny by Wednesday?  And a little wind to dry up the fields would be nice.” We prayed for that in church and what do you suppose happened?  On Wednesday it was 85 degrees and sunny, and it was windy to boot.  Of course, it’s always windy in Minnesota, but that’s beside the point.

    As you might suspect, I began to get a little cocky.  What was that line Janice read from the book of Proverbs?  “Pride goes before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall?”  Trust me.  I was about to get my comeuppance.

    Not long after my perceived success at impacting the weather, I was helping to lead a mission trip to New Hampshire. The youth director and I and twenty-one teenagers were camped in tents in upstate New York, right beside Lake Ontario.  That evening there were ominous clouds out on Lake Ontario, and our youth director said that I’d better do something about it.  I said, “No problem.  I’ve got it covered.”  After all, I had God on my side.  I had prayer power over the weather …or so I thought.  

    That night at about 4:00 in the morning, we were hit with just about the worst electrical storm I’ve ever seen.  Our tents flooded and we were forced to sleep in the van. The youth director said to me, “I thought you said you had it covered!”  God taught me a very valuable lesson that night.  The lesson is this: God is God and I am not.  Oh, there is power in community prayer when there is a true need…but that power has absolutely nothing to do with me.  We often shorten Proverbs 16:18 into five simple words.  We say, “Pride goeth before a fall,” and that’s the truth.  When we strut out to the end of the stage and place all the focus and the glory upon ourselves, we are wont to topple off the end of the stage…and fall, flat on our faces.   I speak from first-hand experience.  Keep that thought in mind as we move on.

    This is the second in a series of sermons entitled, The Superficial Saga.  It’s a sermon series on the seven deadly sins. We poke a lot of fun at sin these days. Truth be told, I don’t think we take sin very seriously.  Yet God takes sin seriously.  In fact, God takes sin so seriously…that he sent his Son to die on a cross in order to overcome it. Sin is not a matter to be taken lightly, as though a person could saunter into God’s presence at any time, in any mood, with any sort of life behind them…and at once perceive God there.   No, the sense of God’s reality is a progressive and often laborious achievement of the soul…a soul that takes sin seriously and earnestly tries to dispel it.

    Like I said, The Superficial Saga is a sermon series on the seven deadly sins. The seven deadly sins are as follows: pride, envy, wrath, sloth, greed, gluttony, and lust.  Yet along with the seven deadly sins there are what we call the seven holy virtues or the seven cardinal virtues. The seven holy virtues are meant to counteract the seven deadly sins.  For example, the opposite of pride is humility.  The opposite of envy is kindness.  The opposite of wrath is forgiveness.  The opposite of sloth is diligence. The opposite of greed is charity. The opposite of gluttony is temperance and the opposite of lust is chastity…or purity.   You see, the way to conquer sin…is to replace it with something better.

    Today, we’ll be looking at the sin of pride.  In The Parson’s Tale in The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer refers to the seven deadly sins at length.  He compares them to a tree whose branches produce twigs that stick out in many different directions.  Yet at the root of the tree is pride. C.S. Lewis dedicates an entire chapter to the topic of pride in his book, Mere Christianity.  There Lewis writes:

According to Christian teachers the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride.  Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere fleabites in comparison. It was through Pride that the devil became the devil.  Pride leads to every other vice.  It is the complete anti-God state of mind.

    That’s pretty harsh, don’t you think?  After all, pride – considered in itself – can be a most attractive virtue.  As parents, don’t we try to instill a sense of pride or self-worth in our children?  My wife and I have two boys, and they could not be more opposite.  For example, our oldest boy could be in a baseball game playing shortstop.  He could boot four ground balls in a row, yet still he would come off the field believing that he was the best player on the field.  Our youngest son could play in a baseball game as well.  He could go four-for-four at the plate, with two doubles, two home runs, and ten runs batted in.  Then he boots one ground ball and he comes off the field saying, “I’m no good!”  My quandary was always to lower the pride level in the one and to build it back up in the other.

    To be sure, too much pride is called “arrogance.”  But perhaps there is also a beneficial side to pride.  Pride can give us a sense of achievement, a desire for excellence, and an aspiration to do the best we can in all that we do.  Surely those are not bad things, are they?

    Pride is unique among the seven deadly sins in that it has undergone something of a transformation in recent years.  It is not an overstatement to say that pride has moved from being the chief of the seven deadly sins – the root of all evil – to being the root of all virtue.  We see it now as a positive good to be carefully practiced and lovingly nurtured.  Pride has been rehabilitated from being a vice to be avoided…to being a virtue to be cultivated.   How often do we hear the words proclaimed these days: Black Pride, Gay Pride, Pride of Workmanship, and so on? 

    Perhaps the great sin in our minds today is not pride, but rather, the great sin in our minds   today is low self-image.  Somehow pride and all of its cousins – arrogance, egotism, vanity,    and conceit – got trumped by self-respect, self-esteem, self-confidence, and the like.   As a philosopher named Adam Smith once said, “Take away pride…and you have a society of lethargic, slovenly creatures who are content to live in the mud.”  To him, pride is a good    thing. Greed is a good thing.  Envy is a good thing. And we thus live in a world that could produce a Donald Trump.

    To tell you the truth, I can’t think of much that’s wrong with a healthy sense of pride except for this one important thing: Jesus was against it.  Only a faith that believes that Jesus Christ was the full revelation of God would consider pride to be a sin. When we take too much credit for our lives and for our achievements – and when we come to look at our lives as the product of our own striving, rather than as a gift from God – then we are moving close to an idolatry in which the creature refuses to give due to the Creator.

    Arrogance, conceit and vanity are just some of the sins that stem from the sin of pride.  Self- respect is one thing.  Self-infatuation is another.  Self-infatuation keeps us centered on ourselves and forever separate from the real world.  The secret to overcoming pride and self-infatuation is humility. In fact, that is exactly what Jesus was getting at in the passage we read from the gospel according to Luke.

    Jesus tells a story about two men who went up to the Temple to pray.  One of the men was a Pharisee, while the other man was a tax collector.  The Pharisees, of course, were an exclusive sect of the Jewish faith 2000 years ago.  This particular Pharisee was a very righteous man.  He worshiped God in the Temple, he gave God 10% of his income, and he dutifully obeyed Jewish law.  Thus, the people listening to Jesus’ story would have seen him as the hero.  The tax collector, on the other hand, was not a righteous man.  The people listening to Jesus’ story would have seen him as the villain.

    Tax collectors in Jesus’ day were actually thought to be traitors.  They were ordinary citizens who had the good fortune – or the bad fortune, depending on how you look at it – to have been appointed by the Roman government to assess and collect taxes.  They were notorious for their dishonesty.  They frequently overcharged the Jewish citizenry, obtaining great wealth for themselves and earning the disdain of the general populace.  Because the Pharisees hated tax collectors, they thought Jesus should hate them too. Thus, in the parable Jesus tells, we have a clear-cut case of good versus evil – the good and faithful Pharisee versus the evil and traitorous tax collector.

    The Pharisee was quick to make distinctions.  He actually said in his prayer, “God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers…or even like this tax collector.  I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.” The Pharisee sees the tax collector as less than human.  In making this distinction between himself and the tax collector, he is arrogant in his assertion that he is not like him.

    I think of a wonderful line from Jonathan Swift, who is perhaps best known to us as the author of Gulliver’s Travels.  He once said, “We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.” We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another. Perhaps that was the Pharisee’s problem as well.

    The tax collector, however, was in the Temple to pray as well.  His prayer was a little bit different than the prayer of the Pharisee.  He stood far off – he could not even bring himself  to look toward heaven – he beat his breast and he cried, “God be merciful to me, a sinner!”

    Now remember, this is a parable.  A parable of Jesus always has a twist and a central truth.  The twist of the parable is this. Jesus says, “The tax collector went down to his home justified, rather than the other.”  Jesus’ audience would have been shocked.  It was not the happy ending they expected.

    The question we’ve got to ask ourselves is this: “Why?”  Why was the tax collector justified   in the eyes of God while the Pharisee was not?  I believe Jesus gives us the answer to this question at the end of the parable.  He says, “All who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves…will be exalted.”  That’s Jesus’ way of saying, “Pride goeth before a fall.”  The secret to justification – the secret to peace with God – is humility.

    Well what, exactly, is humility?  Does it have to do with keeping your eyes to the ground and seeing yourself as a nobody? Does it have to do with self-deprecation? I don’t think it does.  One can have a healthy sense of self-esteem and still be a humble person.  Let’s look again to the writing of C.S. Lewis in, Mere Christianity.  Regarding humility, he writes:

Do not imagine that if you meet a really humble man he will be what most people call humble nowadays.  He will not be a sort of greasy, smarmy person who is always telling you that, of course, he is a nobody. Probably all you will think about him is that he seemed a cheerful, intelligent chap who took a real interest in what you said to him.  If you do dislike him, it will be because you feel a little envious of anyone who seems to enjoy life so easily. He will not be thinking about humility. In fact, he will not be thinking about himself at all. 

    In other words, a humble person is a person who thinks of someone besides themselves.  A humble person is a person who puts you ahead of him or herself.  A humble person places others above himself because he has learned to see others as precious children of God as well.  This is the kind of person who will be exalted, as Jesus says, because this is the kind of person who comes nearest to the heart of God.  Think of the truly humble people you have known in your lifetime.  They do seem strangely “Godly,” do they not?

    How do we get there?  I think of how we do the sacrament of baptism in this church. Typically, a mom and a dad bring a child to the baptismal font.  After the parents answer a few questions, I take that child and baptize him or her.  Then I present that child to you, as you sing, “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”   The child, ideally, looks at you and beams.  And the child does nothing in the baptismal service…except humbly and graciously receive.

    When it comes to approaching God, this is who we are.  We are not the big, self-sufficient and self-reliant adults we pretend to be.  We are little children – frail, empty, and dependent – needing a gracious and loving God in the worst possible way. You see, you can’t get into God’s kingdom if you are all grown up, and big, and important.  You can only come in through a very small window…as a dependent and empty child. 

    To overcome pride, one must first encounter humility. To encounter humility is to see oneself as one really is. And to see oneself as one really is…is to see others in the world as being in the same boat in which we find ourselves.  We all need God.  We all need God in the worst possible way.  And perhaps we need him now, more than ever.  Humility…is the first step to finding him.  Amen.

 

02-12-2012 Sermon by The Rev. Dr. Brian K. Jensen

THE SUPERFICIAL SAGA: PART I

    My wife had this dream not long ago in which she and I were killed in an automobile accident.  Naturally, we went to heaven and we were met at the Pearly Gates by none other than Saint Peter himself.  Peter said to us, “Heaven is not what you think it is.  In heaven you are actually chained to another person based upon the life you lived on earth.” 

    The next thing she knew she was chained to a 400-pound man.  He was toothless and hideous and mean.  He looked an awful lot like Shrek…that’s Shrek from the Disney movies, not Frank Schreck from the Crawford Central school board.  In any case, she was mortified.  She said to Saint Peter, “Why am I chained to this hideous man?” To which Peter replied, “Leslie, you had sin in your life.  Your punishment is to be chained to this ogre for all eternity.” 

    Crestfallen, she began to look around for me.  Much to her surprise, she saw me chained to none other than Marilyn Monroe.  She cried out to Saint Peter, “Why am I chained to this hideous man while my husband is chained to Marilyn Monroe?” To which Saint Peter replied, “Marilyn Monroe had sin in her life…”

    We poke a lot of fun at sin these days. Truth be told, I don’t think we take sin very seriously.  Yet God takes sin seriously.  In fact, God takes sin so seriously that he sent his son to die on a cross in order to overcome it.  Sin is not a matter to be taken lightly: as though a person could saunter into God’s presence at any time, in any mood, with any sort of life behind them and at once perceive God there.  No, the sense of God’s reality is a progressive and often laborious achievement of the soul…a soul that takes sin seriously and earnestly tries to dispel it.

    We are fast approaching the season of Lent. The church has traditionally seen the season of Lent as a time of repentance and fasting.  In other words, in the season of Lent we are called to turn away from our sin and to focus on Jesus Christ. Such is the soul that takes sin seriously and earnestly tries to dispel it.

    Now Lent doesn’t actually begin for two more weeks.  Thus, you may be wondering why I’m beginning a Lenten series of sermons so early.  The answer is twofold.  First, this sermon series consists of eight sermons. Since Lent is only six weeks long I have to start a little early. Second, I didn’t want to spend Easter Sunday talking about sin.  I’d rather talk about the resurrection on Easter Sunday. Thus, today we begin a sermon series on sin that a friend of mine suggested I call The Superficial Saga. 

    Once upon a time, there was One who came to us.  He touched the untouchables, he turned   his back on the bright baubles of the world, he loved us all the way to the cross…and he never turned his eyes away from God.  And we hated him for it.  He came to us with arms wide open in gracious invitation, seeking us…patient with us and hotly pursuing us at the very same time.  And in the process, he brought out the very worst in us.

    We figured that things between us and God were not really all that bad.  But when he spoke to us of God and of ourselves, and rubbed our noses in the filthy rags of our self-righteousness, we had to do something about it. He called upon us to attempt great moral feats, then he watched as we fell flat on our faces. He invited us to sign on as his disciples, but then he set the demands for discipleship so high that when it came time to stand up and be counted, we fled…slithering into the darkness.  He said, “Follow me, and take my yoke upon you.” And we, with one voice, cried, “Crucify him!”  No one wants to see themselves as sinners.

    A recent television documentary entitled, “The Changing Face of Worship,” took us into dozens of growing, innovative, “postmodern” churches.  Sunday mornings at many of these churches was upbeat, energetic and shallow.  It was just what you might expect from a well-furnished, modern, seeker-sensitive church.  Yet one young pastor on the West Coast, the leader of   a growing, mostly young adult congregation, was asked to explain why so many people flocked to his church.  He said, “Too few young adults have had anyone look them in the face and say to them – with a sense of concern and compassion – ‘You really stink.’”

    I’m not going to say that you stink in this series of sermons.  But we are going to look at the truth.  As Dr. Phil once put it, trying to explain his remarkable success, “People are ready to be told the truth about themselves, even when it hurts…because they know that without getting the truth, they won’t get life.”  Yet perhaps 19^th century Russian physicist Anton Chekov put it best.  He once wrote, “Man will only become better when you make him see himself as he really is.”

    Who really are we, then?  We are sinners…each and every one of us.  As C.S. Lewis once said, “We are half-hearted creatures, fooling around with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered to us; like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at sea.  We are far too easily pleased.”

    Perhaps the place to begin is to explore just exactly what sin is.  Humanity was created in the image of God for fellowship with God.  Yet humanity fell from its destiny, as we saw in the passage Howie read earlier from the book of Genesis. Adam and Eve are persuaded to defy the command of God by a twofold argument.  First, the word of God is questioned.  The serpent says to Eve that if she eats of the forbidden fruit she will not die.  Second, the serpent argues that if they do eat of it, their eyes will be opened and they will be like God. 

    Christian theology sees here the basis of sin as unbelief and pride.  Humanity’s sin begins when it doubts God’s word, and culminates in its attempt to make itself like God. Yet the ultimate irony of humanity’s revolt against God is that it begins by declaring its freedom from God…and it ends by falling into servitude to a variety of idols of its own creation.

    Allow me to simplify.  Sin is defined as separation from God.  The way I like to describe it is this. Obedience to God draws us closer to God. Sin is nothing more than turning our gaze in the wrong direction. So if that lectern over there is God, my obedience draws me closer to it.  Sin is turning one’s gaze in the wrong direction.  So what does my sin accomplish?  All it does is lead me away from God.  Sin…is separation from God.

    Here we come to a closer understanding of what makes sin sin for Christians.  For those of us who are trying to take Jesus seriously, sin is not a foible or a slipup.  It is an offense and a rebellion against our Creator.  Sin is that which separates us from a just and holy God.  Jesus makes the rather astounding claim that, when it comes to sin, it’s the thought that counts. Sin carries with it its own punishment.  It erodes the soul.  It severs the intended relationship between Creator and created.

    Eleventh century theologian Thomas Aquinas noted that the problem is that people never   seem to see evil as evil. People are conditioned to seek that which they perceive to be good; that which adds to the joy of life; and to avoid that which they believe to be evil.  Therefore, if someone pursues some harmful course of action, it is because of a failure to perceive it as wrong.   He believed that our sin is mostly a matter of a failure to know what’s good for us.  In other words, in the mind of Thomas Aquinas, sin is more often a failure of the intellect than    it is a failure of willpower.  Some would top that statement off by saying that biblical illiteracy is the scourge of our age.

    The Superficial Saga is a sermon series on what we call the seven deadly sins.  The seven deadly sins were first known as the seven mortal sins.  Perhaps the word “mortal” sounds less lethal than the word “deadly,” but the result is essentially the same. And why seven deadly sins as opposed to, say, six or eight? Well, seven is kind of a sign of biblical perfection. Seven is the number of days in a week, there are the Seven Last Words of Christ, Seven Gifts of the Spirit    in the book of Isaiah, Seven Hills of Rome, and…Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.  Make of it what you will.

    The seven deadly sins are as follows: pride, envy, wrath, sloth, greed, gluttony and lust.  We will look at each in turn.  Yet perhaps most importantly, we will note that along with the seven deadly sins are the seven holy virtues. The seven holy virtues are meant to counteract the seven deadly sins.  For example, the opposite of pride is humility.  The opposite of envy is kindness.  The opposite of wrath is forgiveness.  The opposite of sloth is diligence.  The opposite of greed is charity.  The opposite of gluttony is temperance, and the opposite of lust is chastity, or purity.  You see, the way to conquer evil is to replace it with something better. 

    Of course, that tends to run against the grain of human nature.  The great fourth century theologian Augustine described our penchant for sin in his epic treatise, entitled, Confessions.  He talks about stealing some pears as a boy.  By this time in the account of his life, Augustine has fathered a child out of wedlock and hinted at many other youthful indiscretions. Yet when he comes to describe the prime example of his deep perversity, of his own sinful nature, he gives   as evidence an episode of stealing a few pears as a boy.

    Augustine and some of his friends stole a few pears from a neighbor’s tree.  They stole not because they were hungry or because they needed the pears in any way.  They stole the pears, as he put it in Latin, eo liberet quo non liceret. It means literally, “that which is not permitted allured us.” In modern day vernacular we might say they stole the pears just for the heck of it.  Ah, the important thing to Augustine was not the transgression, for that was relatively minor.  The real problem here…is the inclination – or the desire – to sin.  Perhaps the way to conquer evil then is to replace the desire with something better.

     Along those lines, I think of something Harry Emerson Fosdick once wrote in a book entitled, The Manhood of the Master.  He wrote:

Only by a stronger passion can evil passions be expelled, and a soul unoccupied by a positive devotion is sure to be occupied by spiritual demons. The safety of the Master    in the presence of temptation lay in his complete and positive devotion to his mission: there was no unoccupied room in his soul where evil could find a home…for he knew what Dr. Chalmers called, “The expulsive power of a new affection.”

 

When Ulysses passed the Isle of Sirens, he had himself tied to the mast and had his ears stopped up with wax that he might not hear the sirens singing; a picture of many a man’s attempts after negative goodness.  But when Orpheus passed the Isle of Sirens he sat on the deck, indifferent, for he too was a musician…and could make melody so much more   beautiful than the sirens that their alluring songs were to him discords.  Such is the Master’s life of positive goodness – so full, so glad, so triumphant – that it conquered sin by surpassing it.  Have you such a saving positiveness of loyal devotion in your life?  

    The secret to facing the seven deadly sins is to possess the expulsive power of a new affection.  One can only conquer sin…by surpassing it.  Remember that as we embark upon our superficial saga.  Amen.

 

02-05-2012 Sermon by The Rev. Dr. Brian K. Jensen

ON EAGLE’S WINGS

    The passage I just read from the book of Isaiah ends on a real high note, does it not?  It says, “Those who wait upon the Lord shall mount up with wings like eagles.  They shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint.”  Who doesn’t love the idea of soaring above the muck and the mire as the eagle does, looking down on creation below?  Who doesn’t love the image of rising above the problems we encounter in life, as if we were resting on eagle’s wings?  Yet before we explore life from an eagle’s perspective, I believe the prophet Isaiah invites us to explore life from a grasshopper’s perspective first.

    Consider verse 22 in the passage I read from Isaiah.  Speaking of God, Isaiah writes, “It is he who sits above the circle of the earth…and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers.”  Its inhabitants are like grasshoppers?   In other words, Isaiah is saying that compared to God, humans are more like grasshoppers than they are like eagles.  How does that make you feel?

    I’ve never been too fond of grasshoppers myself.  Some of my cousins grew up on farms in Iowa.  I can remember wandering through fields of corn or soy beans as a child and being completely engulfed by swarms of grasshoppers.  And have you ever had a grasshopper land on the bare skin of your arm or leg?  It’s an eerie feeling you don’t soon forget. 

    As they were to the ancient Egyptians, they were to the Iowa farmer, as well: a plague.  Grasshoppers could devastate a field of corn or a field of soy beans and ruin a farmer’s income for the year.  Unfortunately, they never seemed to bother the rhubarb. Thus, I was still forced to endure rhubarb pie or rhubarb crisp or rhubarb...you name it.  I do not agree with Garrison Keillor when he says in his Prairie Home Companion sketches that rhubarb is a part of the good life.

    Grasshoppers have traditionally gotten a bad rap in literature over the years as well.  In Aesop’s Fables, the grasshopper is the lazy one who takes it easy all summer long, making fun of the ant who is busy storing up food for the winter.   Then, come wintertime, who’s pounding at the door of the ant looking for food?  The grasshopper! As I understand it, this then carries over into a movie called, “A Bug’s Life,” where the grasshoppers torment the       ants like a street gang. And this is that to which Isaiah compares us?  Not very flattering, is it?

    Yet grasshoppers do have some positive attributes. They do have wings. While they may not be able to soar like an eagle, they can jump to a height of about twenty times their body length.  For a human being, such a feat would be akin to jumping about 120 feet in the air. Imagine how much money the NBA would pay for an athlete who could do that!  What’s more, grasshoppers are among the most successful insects on earth. They come in roughly 11,000 different species.  Apparently the brighter colored grasshoppers warn birds that they are not good to eat, although my grandfather once said that they were good dipped in chocolate.  I think he was kidding.

    But here’s the most amazing thing of all.  Grasshoppers have five eyes.  They have two compound eyes and they have three simple eyes.  Part of their adaptability and survival comes from their ability to see everything around them in a great panorama.  Perhaps there’s a lesson in this for us as well. Perhaps we need to learn to see not just what’s happening all around us, but what the things that are happening all around us really mean. 

    If we see only the next blade of grass in front of us, we will not grow or thrive.  As long as we remain deeply embedded in the grass, content to look only in front of us, we will quickly become mired in minutia.  We will become easily annoyed by the attitudes and behaviors of others.  We will forever be caught up in our own selfish struggles.  And we will never be able to look beyond what is happening right in front of us…to how God intends to redeem that which is happening.

    When I read Isaiah, I hear him saying to us, “Look, grasshopper.  Look around you at what’s happening in the world.  Behind it all is your Creator, who has the power to redeem creation.”   A part of faith is the capacity to look at the vast expanse of the world with a sense of awe and wonder and possibility. Seeing things with the eyes of amazement, and seeing ourselves in the context of being a part of what God is doing to redeem creation…enables us to mount up with wings like eagles.  Thus, may we learn to live with an eagle’s wings and a grasshopper’s eyes.  

    What was the context for Isaiah’s challenging words?  Isaiah was prophesying to the Hebrew people during a very difficult time in their history.  The Babylonian army, having defeated the Assyrian army that had threatened Jerusalem for so long, invaded the country and destroyed Jerusalem in 587 B.C.  Jerusalem’s king, a man named Zedekiah, tried to escape.  He was subsequently captured and forced to watch the execution of his sons, and then his eyes were poked out.  The execution of his sons was the last thing he ever saw.  People could be quite cruel in those days.

    The so-called “movers and shakers” of Jerusalem were deported to the city of Babylon.  The only people who were allowed to stay in Jerusalem were the poorest of the poor.  The deported Hebrew people were not slaves in Babylon.  In fact, some of them even prospered. And what they saw in Babylon was eye-opening indeed.  Let me try to show you the way the Hebrew people might have seen things by painting a picture that I actually presented to you in a sermon last year.

    Imagine you were born and raised in Meadville.  Never in your life did you venture outside of Meadville, and Meadville was all you knew.  You’d be proud of that gleaming college up on the hill. You’d believe that there could be no finer football venue than Barco-Duratz field.  And you would know in your heart that the sanctuary of the First Presbyterian Church of Meadville is the most beautiful and glorious and sacred place imaginable.

    Then Meadville gets overrun by Pittsburghers…kind of like Conneaut Lake in the summer.  Sadly, you find yourself deported to Pittsburgh. There you come to realize that Meadville was not quite all you thought it was.  You see the fabulous skyscrapers that dot the Pittsburgh skyline. You sit in Heinz Field and watch the Steelers play.  You worship in churches that are literally twice the size of the First Presbyterian Church of Meadville.  You come to realize that your previous world view was really rather limited.  And then you start to wonder about some of the other things in life you had always believed to be true.

    Such was the case with the Hebrew people who were deported from Jerusalem to Babylon.   The glorious city they now inhabited made Jerusalem pale by comparison.  It was then that they started to wonder about some of the other things in life they had always believed to be true.  For example, could it be that their God was not as powerful as they had once believed him to be?  The Babylonian god Marduk appeared to have defeated their God quite soundly.  The life of faith, it seemed, was an exquisite but fragile flower that had been crushed by Babylonian boots.  As far as they were concerned, their God had either failed them or abandoned them.  A great many of the Hebrew people then signed on with Marduk – and the unrivaled prosperity and unbridled militarism – of Babylon.  They bound themselves to the Babylonian culture, and their faith in God began to wane. 

    These are the people Isaiah is trying to address.  Truth be told, they’re having a real hard time seeing beyond what’s right in front of them.  They’re having a real hard time seeing why God would need to redeem a world such as theirs. They’re seeing that they’ve got it pretty darn good right now.  Why on earth would they want things to change?

    Can we blame them?  Like them, we want quick and easy solutions.  Why, these days we’ve come to expect life’s greatest mysteries to be resolved in the course of a thirty-minute sitcom or a sixty-minute drama or a two hour movie. What’s more, we’re most concerned with how things affect us directly.  “Never mind the greater good,” we say.  “What’s in it for me?”  

    Isaiah calls upon his people to remember.  He calls upon them to remember the faith they were taught when they were young.  He reminds them that God created the heavens and the earth.  He points out that the inhabitants of the world are like grasshoppers before God.  But perhaps most important of all, he reminds them that God gives power to the faint, and strengthens the powerless.  In other words, God has not forgotten or forsaken you.  And what’s important to you is also important to God.  God wants what’s best for you.  Did you catch that?  What’s important to you is also important to God.  God wants what’s best for you. 

    The unfortunate thing for us here is this: God’s greatest gifts tend to emerge from great personal travail. Write that down. God’s greatest gifts tend to emerge from great personal travail.  Case in point, the gift of a child.  Now I’ve never had a baby, but I understand it can be quite painful.  Yet after a while, I suspect, people tend to forget how painful an ordeal it really was.  Otherwise no one would ever have more than one child. Ladies and gentlemen, I’m here to tell you that great spiritual awakenings are much the same.  The greatest spiritual awakenings tend   to emerge from great personal travail as well.

    For example, I have recently had a great spiritual awakening that emerged from great personal travail.  I feel as if I have failed in a couple of pastoral care issues. When a minister fails in a pastoral care issue, people can be hurt very badly.  And any minister who’s worth his salt agonizes very deeply about that.  It hurts us deep in our souls.  None of us get into the business of ministry to hurt people.  And when we do, inadvertent or not, it literally tears us up inside.

    I’ve done a lot of thinking and praying about this.  It struck me that in the Presbyterian Church we call the minister of a large church the Pastor/Head of Staff.  Most of us tend to emphasize the Head of Staff part because there are others on staff who are called to address pastoral care.  Thus, we end up spending the bulk of our time trying to run an institution.  Yet in light of the agony I have felt over a couple of pastoral care issues, my great spiritual awakening is that I am going to dedicate myself anew to the Pastor part of my job.

    And listen to this.  A couple of women in this church were also aware of what happened.  They were quick to point out that such things have been happening in this church – and other large churches, I’m sure – for 50 years or more. They came to me to work with me to devise a better system of communication in the church as a whole.  That way, there will be fewer oversights.  More specifically, there will be fewer pastoral oversights.

    The greatest spiritual awakenings tend to emerge from great personal travail.  If you find yourself suffering from some great personal travail, put on the eyes of a grasshopper.  If we see only the next blade of grass in front of us, we will not grow or thrive.  As long as we remain deeply embedded in the grass, content to look only in front of us, we will quickly become mired in minutia. 

    A part of faith is the capacity to look at the vast expanse of the world with a sense of awe and wonder and possibility.  Seeing things with the eyes of amazement, and seeing ourselves in the context of being a part of what God is doing to redeem creation…enables us to soar on eagle’s wings.  Amen.