Our scripture lesson is taken from the 10th chapter of the Gospel of John, beginning with the 7th and reading through the 18th verses. I’m reading from the Revised Standard Version.
This is the word of the Lord. “So Jesus again said to them, truly, truly, I say to you, I am the door of the sheep. All who came before me are thieves and robbers, but the sheep did not heed them. I am the door. If anyone enters by me, he will be saved, and will go in and out and find pasture. The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that you may have life and have it abundantly. I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. He who is a hireling and not a shepherd, whose on the sheep or not, sees the wolf coming and leaves. And the wolf snatches them and scatters them. He flees because he is a hireling and cares nothing for the sheep. I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me. As the father knows me and I know the father, and I lay down my life for the sheep, and I have other sheep that are not of this fold, I must bring them also and they will heed my voice so there shall be one flock and one shepherd. For this reason, the Father loves me. Because I lay down my life that I may take it again. No one takes my life from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have the power to lay it down and I have the power to take it up again.” That’s the word of the Lord for you and me. Let us pray.
Lord, may we hide your word in our heart in order that we might not sin against you. May your word become a light unto our path, a lamp unto our way, and cause it to become so clear to us this morning that whatever we need to hear in order to be helped, may we hear it. Take the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts and make them acceptable in your sight, for you are our strength and our redeemer. Amen.
Jules Phifer is cartoonist, but more than that, he is an irritant to those who seek to live unexamined lives. His cartoons are carried in daily newspapers across the country, but are special features of the magazine section of the Los Angeles Times. And in these cartoons he really probes our sensitivities with a kind of sword like wit and subtle humor. Behind the humor there is always that sword that he’s piercing into your mind and into your soul seeking to get you to see yourself as you actually are. In a particular rendering, he exposed our poisonous indecision. He depicted a man lying in a prone position with no physical activity save the moving of his jaw as he spoke in a kind of slow fashion. The captions accompanying the 12 frames become a kind of soliloquy against our indecisiveness. Our shiftless and undirected lives. As he lies flat on his back, unmoving, the character says, ‘pretty soon I’ll have to get up. It is not healthy to lie here. Got to rouse myself. Got to get up. Got to get involved. Now, right now. Or am I rationalizing. Perhaps I don’t want to really get up. Perhaps I feel that at last I found my role. Or perhaps lying here attracts me, and getting up also attracts me. Hence, my indecision. So the real issue is not getting up or lying down. But the real issue is how I honestly feel about the matter. Because I must question myself relentlessly, my path is clear. I must dig. I must probe. Pretty soon I’ll start probing, I’ll count to three. ‘
It’s a parable of life. Most of us never get around to counting to three. We start, we debate, we rationalize, but we never get to the point of decision and action. We like to discuss matters, so we talk endlessly about alternatives. Someone has said we are victims of the paralysis of analysis. I like that. We’re the victims of the paralysis of analysis. Life then is prone, immobile, ineffective. Therefore, we’re only half alive. Now another picture, from scripture. A snapshot of Jesus himself. It is a word vignette from our second scripture lesson, the 17th and 18th verses of the 10th chapter of John. Jesus is speaking. For this reason, the Father loves me, because I lay down my life that I may take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my accord. I have the power to pick it up and I have the power to lay down. Such daring boldness. What reckless fate, such confident trust. How audacious it must have sounded to the heavy ears that heard Jesus speak them. The dark shadow of the cross was already falling across Jesus’ path. By this time, he knew that the events were moving steadily and surely to a grim ending. With existing opposition that he had already experienced, he would have been naïve not to realize that the end was drawing tragically near. Yet with a head high in an audacity of glorious hope, he affirmed his capacity for self direction. Jesus was living deliberately. He was his own man. He would not allow himself to be the pawn of pressures, the victim of vengeance, the capricious cut out of circumstance. I have power to lay it down and I have power to take it up again. His claim was confirmed in the terrible story of the crucifixion. We read the horrors, the demeaning circumstances, the mockery, and ridicule, yet we come out knowing that this victim who was spat upon, who was whipped and bruised and jostled about, and finally nailed to a crude cross was really not a victim. He was not the puck of circumstance, he was not the play thing of calloused enemies, he was the victor and even in death he was living deliberately.
So in our third sermon on the general theme, Self Help and More, I want to talk about living deliberately. Normally I would not call your attention to a mistake in the bulletin, but I can’t resist it. Because nothing is more antagonistic toward what I understand to be the task of preaching than the title that’s in the bulletin for the sermon series. Shelf Help and More. We don’t go to the shelf. We don’t go to the shelf to get that which we need for the religious life. Not at all. We’re talking about self help and more. And I want to suggest three words as pegs upon which we hang our thoughts about living deliberately. These words are attention, reflection, and involvement. They’re really three modes of being that produce deliberate living.
The first is attention. Jesus talked about men seeing but not really seeing, of hearing but not really hearing. This is where many of us are. We’re like the American tourist in Paris who rushed into the Louve and shouted, “Quick, where’s the Mona Lisa, I’m double parked outside.” We flip through the pages of the Bible, we drop in on Church now and then, we offer a quickie prayer as we fall asleep at night, and feel that we have performed our religious duties. We become so conditioned and calloused by science and technology, we have so given ourselves an affirmation to the reign of law and invariable natural order, that we repudiate even the possibility of some deeper meaning hidden beneath the surface of all the things we observe and measure, but really fail to see.
The quatrain from Gilbert & Sullivan’s marvelous musical, HMS Pinafore, will not find its way into an anthology of great poetry, but the wisdom of it is unquestioned. Do you remember that chorus. Things are seldom what they seem, skim milk masquerades as cream, externals don’t portray insides, Jekylls may be masking Hydes. The simple practice of paying attention is the beginning of living deliberately. Amazingly we can reach back in the Old Testament and get the classis story of a person giving attention. We read this as our first scripture lesson today. Moses’ encounter with the burning bush and thus with God, is a perfect example of a person paying attention and coming alive. He was doing his job in an ordinary sort of way, tending the flock of his father in law. In the midst of that mundane task, he suddenly observed something that he had never seen before - a bush aflame in an unusual way. I will turn aside and see this sight. While the bush is not consumed, he said, the bush was burning but there was no end to the burning. Here is the initial movement of attention, to turn aside and see.
We generally approach life in two ways. One, we accept and take for granted. Now that’s the way most of us live. We simply muddle along through life just move along accepting and taking for granted. Then there is a second impulse, and that is to look with inquiring wonder. Moses responded to the latter impulse. He made the decision to leave his shepherd task for a moment to turn aside from leading the flock, to leave that shepherd task for just a moment and follow his curiosity and see what was going on. So the monotonous flow of life was decisively halted for a while as Moses gave attention to this new experience. His mind and soul stood at attention, open and ready to receive whatever this experience had to offer. Now the capacity for wonder is the beginning of wisdom. It is also the beginning of growth, and that’s our deepest wisdom. Out of wonder and mystery spring those shoots of personality that develop into mature personhood. A child sees the world as if for the first time. That’s what’s beautiful about children. They see the world as if for the first time, likewise the poet. This is the reason the child and the poet speak so tellingly to us, in the deep recesses of our soul, there is that hard rock reality from which sparks fly, when the flint of the poet or the child strikes it. Poets do not write of the extraordinary, they add the extra to the ordinary. They take the commonplace and breathe sublimity into it. My heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky, so was it when I was a child, so is it now I am a man, so be it when I shall grow old or let me die. Artists do the same thing. So Van Gogh with canvas and paint can make a kitchen chair a thing of beauty and a joy forever.
I remember and experience my wife and I had in Hong Kong. Jeri and I were walking through a park in one of the resettlement areas. Children were swarming about everywhere, playing in the fountain, sleep, skipping about in the freedom of their release from their little 12 x 14 cubicles in which they were forced to live with families of 8 and 10 and 12. Among all the children, Jeri saw one child, a little girl asleep on a park bench, no grown up was around, she must have been no more than three or four. Just a little blouse on for clothing. This was a burning bush for Jeri and she turned aside to see. One of her best paintings came after that trip. It’s a presentation of what is happening in Hong Kong because of Christian human concern. In the foreground of the painting, barely visible are the sampans, then the miserable shacks that have provided the humble homes for thousands. Dominating the painting are the tall resettlement complexes built by government and other concerned agencies to provide homes for the thousands who came to Hong Kong as refugees and through the years have lived in filthy misery. A part of the painting is shadowy and dim, but the clouds are breaking in the background and the sun is barely bursting through. It’s a lively painting, but at first no human life is present. Looking closely though, you see the vague outline of a person. Looking more intently, you discover that the person is a little child half-naked lying on a park bench. For Jeri that was the message of Hong Kong. That little child. And what Christians were doing on behalf of little children, housing them, providing childcare, clothing them, education, especially the hilltop, or rather the rooftop schools. Inasmuch as you did it unto the least of these, you did it unto me.
Every time I think of my ministry, and the ministry of the church, our call to be servants of the world, Jeri’s painting looms on the screen of my consciousness and all because she turned aside to see. Jesus said, “Your eye is the lamp your body. When your eye is sound, your whole body is full of light. But when the eye is not sound, the whole body is full of darkness.” This is the beginning of deliberate living. To sensitize our eyes, to look harder, to give attention. And that leads to the second word.
Reflection. Go back to the story of Moses. The burning bush caught Moses’ attention. There it was flaming up in the wilderness. It was not enough for Moses to see, he had to attend to this. And this is the business of reflection. It was the decision to look closer that made the difference. Now most of us read the scripture in such a casual way that we never really reflect as to the meaning of the scripture and appropriate the message of it in our life. We’ve been hearing the story of the burning bush all our lives and yet most of us have not gotten the message that the burning bush isn’t the message. The burning bush was God’s way to get Moses’ attention, and had not Moses gave God his attention, there would be no message. The wording of the story is not accidental. The scripture says, when the Lord saw that Moses turned aside to see, God called to him out of the burning bush. It was when Moses attended to what he saw that God spoke to him. The height of the mystery is Moses’ response to the happening. The scripture says, ‘he hid his face for he was afraid to look upon God.’ The root of the word mystery is a Greek word meaning literally to shut ones mouth. That’s what it means. To shut ones mouth. This is a part of reflection. To shut ones mouth that God might speak. To take off our shoes for the ground on which we stand is Holy. To be still and know that I am God. Tom Trotter reminds us that that latter passage, be still and know that I am God, often muttered in breathless tones actually is a shout. It means, shut up while I tell it like it is. So the next time you read that passage in the Psalms, know that God is saying to you, shut up now and I’ll tell it like it is.
God comes to us in the common events of the day, he also comes to us in those deliberate disciplines of worship, of prayer, of sharing together in fellowship, of studying and service. Our task is to shut up and reflect, that we may ascertain what he is seeking to communicate. Reflection is the practice necessary for deciphering God’s word in the experience that is ours. You can be sure that the experience of the burning bush was never lost from the memory of Moses, but more searing than the flames that leaped from the bush was the fire that burned in Moses’ soul as he reflected upon that episode. That means that reflection means more than seeing clearly and deeply. The ability to perceive the content of any experience is dependent upon our willingness to receive. The ability to perceive the meaning of any experience is dependent upon our willingness to receive. To see depends upon our readiness to be. How often when some unfortunate experience comes our way - illness, the loss of a job, children disappointing us, the death of a loved one. How often in these circumstances do we cry out to God, why are you punishing me in this fashion, and we’re greeted by silence. No response from God because we’re asking the wrong question. God is not punishing us. We need to ask then, what do you want to teach me by this experience. What can I learn. This is the question of reflection. We cultivate feelings, we mentally fondle and experience a relationship, an event, until we come upon some insight or understanding about it. Limited insight, limits light. Expanded insight, expands light, and that’s what reflection is all about. This is a kind of contemplation, a sort of prayer. We deliberately, self consciously, purposefully open ourselves to some event of some experience to see what God is saying to us in it. To see if he will speak in some language we can understand, to see if we can get beneath the wrapping of the paper to the gift that is within the box. God speaks to us in all the events and experiences of life, but we miss about 90% of what he says. We miss it because we don’t reflect. We don’t stay silent and reflective long enough for the message to come clear. That leads to the final word.
Deliberate living requires involvement. In my introduction to the sermon I said Jesus was his own man. He had the power to take his life up and he had the power to lay down. As a model, there is another dimension to Jesus’ life that must not be overlooked. He was his own man, that’s true. But he was his own man for others, he possessed a fantastic inner freedom which allowed him to be the man for others. To be in control or our lives is not to keep ourselves for ourselves, but to give ourselves away for the sake of our brothers and sisters. This is what Jesus meant. Greater love hath no man than this, than a man lay down his life for his friends.
About seven years ago, one of my only two brothers was killed in a mindless industrial accident. He was killed because of the carelessness, nothing but the carelessness of a workman. I overcame, I overcame the bitterness of that experience and the anger and the hate that was cultivated in my life as a result of such a waste of life, only by the fact that I knew that my brother died seeking to save three other men who were caught in the dilemma of the careless workman who had left gas on in the hull of a ship. I knew that he died, he lost his life, by giving it for someone else. To keep life for ourselves is to lose it. To lay our lives down in full scale devotion for others is to find it.
Here it is in one man, Chaplain Emeil Capone, in a prisoner of war camp. Mike Dow wrote about it in the old Saturday Evening Post, in his soiled and ragged fatigues with his scraggly beard and his queer woolen cap, made of the sleeve of an old GI sweater, pulled down over his ears, he looked just like any other half starved prisoner. But there was something his voice that was different, Mike said. “A dignity, a composure, a serenity that radiated from him like a light, wherever he stood, was Holy ground, and the spirit within, a spirit of reverence and abiding faith, went out to the silent listening men and gave him and courage and sense of peace. By his very presence, somehow, he could turn a stinking louse ridden mud hut, for a little while, into a cathedral. He did a thousand little things to keep us going. He gathered and washed the foul underwear of the dead and distributed to them to men so weak from dysentery that they could not move, and he washed and tended these men as though they were babies. He traded his watch for a blanket, and cut the blanket up to make socks for helpless men whose feet were freezing. All one day in the freezing wind with a sharp stick and his bare hands, he cut steps in the ice covered path that led down to the stream so that the men carrying water would not fall. The most dreaded housekeeping chore of all in the prison was cleaning out the latrines, and men argued bitterly over whose turn it was to carry out that loathsome task, and while they argued he’d slip out and quietly do the job. On the day they took him away to his death, the Chaplain himself made no protest. He looked around the room at all of us standing there and he smiled, tell them back home that I died a happy death, he said. And he smiled again. As they loaded him on the litter, he turned to Lieutenant Nardella, from whose missal he had read the services, and put the little book in the lieutenant’s hand and said, ‘You know the prayers Ralph, keep holding the services, don’t let them make you stop.’ Then he turned to me, ‘Don’t take it so hard, Mike,’ he said, ‘I’m going where I’ve always wanted to go, and when I get there I’ll say a prayer for ya.’”
Well there it is. In a person, everything that this sermon is about. Attention, reflection, involvement. The aspects of deliberate living. Life will take on new meaning. Other persons will be served redemptively. God will be pleased, and you will be rewarded with meaning here and with eternal life hereafter, because you will have found you life by losing it for Christ’s sake. That’s what it means to live deliberately. Let us pray.