 |
|
 |
|
Home
|
||
|
Worship Times Refreshments & Christian Education Nursery Services Provided Handicap Accessible All Are Welcome!
A Congregation Of The "Never place a period where God has placed a comma." - Gracie Allen |
From August 20, 2006 The best way to understand how you were parented is to become a parent yourself. Or, in my case, spend time with children. Dear friends once asked me to watch their children and I was only too happy to comply. Both kids were ferociously active and the older one seemed entirely undaunted by gravity. Prone to wild leaps off the backyard jungle gym, I was sure the boy would wind up with a broken arm before the first hour was up. "Careful! Careful!" I shouted in his direction as he scrambled back up to the top of the jungle gym and flew toward earth a second time. "Careful," I exclaimed when he decided that the fence was just wide enough to serve as his tightrope. "Careful!" I shouted when he jumped down and shimmied up the trunk of a tree, inched his way out on a limb, and grabbed on with one arm so that he could swing down to the ground like a great ape. "Careful!" I called out so many times I lost count. Somewhere between "careful" number ten and "careful" number twenty, my voice became my mother's. That's where I'd heard it before! "Careful" was her wisest counsel to us kids. In my mother's book, to be careful was to be wise. To be wise was to be careful. The two were as equal as equal could be. My mother wasn't the only one who had this figured out. The author of Ephesians did, too. Be careful then how you live, not as unwise people but as wise... he wrote to the church in Ephesus. Be careful, be wise, he urged his far-away friends, a collection of believers who were new to this Christian faith thing, new to a faith rooted in a tradition different from their own. Unlike the Jews, who had understood wisdom to be an aspect of God's own self, believers in Ephesus had been raised differently. Influenced by Greek thought, wisdom was understood to be the product of careful, well-reasoned thought. Make the most of the time... our writer says, be careful... do not be foolish but understand what the will of the Lord is. In this first-century philosophical tradition that was the norm for the Ephesians, to be wise was to be self-possessed, disciplined, independent in spirit and the will. Perhaps in this regard, you and I aren't all that different from our brothers and sisters in Ephesus. We, too, have been raised ideas about what makes for wise, careful living based more on worldly example than God's will. But we don't always call it wisdom. Most of the time we call it common sense or realism. We call it being pragmatic or practical or prudent. Often our wisdom is summed up in sayings like those we learned as kids and which we repeat to our own children in the hopes that they will repeat it to theirs: A penny saved is a penny earned. A stitch in time saves nine. Measure twice, cut once. Better to be safe than sorry. Don't put all your eggs in one basket. Buy low, sell high. You only have one chance to make a good impression. There are two kinds of wisdom, suggests Ephesians' writer: there's the wisdom the world affirms and then there's the wisdom that emanates from God. If you're going to choose one over the other, urges our writer, don't choose the world's wisdom. Instead, go with the wisdom that comes from God. Sure looks good on paper. Sure sounds good coming out of the preacher's mouth. But how many of us really want to live that way? To the world's eyes, doing God's will can make us look foolish. Doing God's will can make people think we're the opposite of wise. Most of the time, anyway. Jesus' life is a prime example. Right after he gets dipped in the Jordan and God affirms him as God's very own beloved son, a son worthy of being listened to, what does Jesus do? Does he draw up his business plan, outlining his goals and objectives? Does he march straight into Jerusalem and up the Temple steps? Does he grab the nearest megaphone and begin teaching right then and there? No. What Jesus does is strap on his sandals and he heads into the wilderness where he does nothing but sit and pray for 40 days and nights. What kind of foolishness is that? And what does Jesus do after he comes down out of the desert hills? He doesn't even stop to take a shower and jot a few pithy insights in his journal. He high-tails it to the beach, walks up to complete strangers and begins recruiting them to be members of his inner circle. Surely a wise and worldly guy places an ad in the Galilee Gazette. He requires resumes. A worldly wise fellow screens his applicants and calls his finalists' references. A careful man sends his twelve new trainees off for two weeks of Ropes Course-work and team-building exercises. What fellow bent on succeeding would dare do what Jesus does? He rents no posh office space, leases no impressive chariot. He doesn't call a graphic designer to develop an eye-catching logo. He doesn't order thousands of embossed business cards nor does he have glossy brochures ready to distribute every time a crowd of potential customers shows up. He just says what needs saying and then often slips away without even thinking to collect email addresses to build his marketing base. And when Jesus mobilizes his manpower, when he sends the seventy out to minister to his brand of faith, he doesn't put his guys in sharp suits nor does he set them up with nice expense accounts like some smart executive would. He simply gathers them together and pushes them out the door without putting so much as a dime in their pockets. "See, I am sending you out like lambs into the midst of wolves. Carry no purse, no bag, no sandals; greet no one on the road... [W]henever you enter a town and they do not welcome you, go out into the streets and say, ‘Even the dust of your town that clings to our feet, we wipe off in protest of you.'" (Luke 10) To the world, most of the time what Jesus elects to do looks absolutely, positively foolish. And most of the time, what Jesus teaches seems that way, as well. He lectures that the goal in life is not to be the one who gets waited on; the best person, the most successful person is the one who strives to be everyone else's servant. When he stays with his sister-friends, Mary and Martha, Jesus is foolishly wise again. He says that choosing the better part means sitting at his feet with the other guests, not standing in front of a sink full of dishes after a long night of trying to be the hostess with the mostest. (Luke 11). When making a point about truly foolish living, Jesus is quick to tells a parable about a rich man. The rich man's foolishness wasn't that he bought stock in Enron; it wasn't that he purchased ocean-front property in central Iowa. Instead, Jesus equates foolishness with fearful hoarding, with saving for the rainiest of rainy days. Instead of hatching a plan to tear down his barns and build bigger ones, the wisest thing for the man to do would be to kick back with a beer and a brat, throw his own personal party where he just hung out for a while thanking God for blessing him. (Luke 12). Now that, that is the wise thing, says the one who is the embodiment of wisdom. Don't worry about your life or what you will eat, or about your body, or what you will wear, Jesus says sounding more like a surfer dude than a savior. Don't strive for the things of this world, says the one who would surely confound Madison Avenue's wise guys. Hey everybody, Jesus shouts out nice and loud: Sell your possessions and give alms. Make purses for yourselves that don't wear out, purses of the heart that hold heaven's unfailing, unstealable, indestructible treasure. (Luke 12). Most of the time, Jesus does and says what sounds like a completely careless, entirely unwise way to live a life. It makes him come off like a hippy or a nut case. All the way to the end, Jesus lives a life that looks outwardly foolish. Instead of trying to forge alliances with those in positions of religious leadership, he risks offending them by speaking truth to power. Instead of recruiting a mini-militia to follow him into Gethsemane's Garden where they can fend off his ambush, he puts up no fight and lets himself be arrested. When called before the authorities, he refuses to offer even one a word in his own defense. When Pilate quizzes him, when Pilate gives him chance to speak in his own defense, Jesus simply stands there and says nothing. What a foolish, foolish thing to do. Doesn't he know? Doesn't he know that the path he's on leads to the most humiliating of endings? Why not be a wise willow and bend? Why not be shrewd and compromise just a smidge to save your own hide? Why not be discerning and back down so that you have a chance to grow old with grandchildren at your knee? What's so smart about putting all your eggs in the one basket that says God's love goes the distance, that God's love gets the last word, that God will not abandon you in your worst hour or humanity in its? What's so wise about insisting on that when you're just a nobody, just peasant from a backwater place, a poor boy who knows all the wrong people and does all the wrong things? What's so wise about walking a path that leads straight to the cross when even a fool on a bad day knows how to save his own hide? Amen. ©
Rev. Karen Winkel Do not be foolish but understand what the will of the Lord is. In other words, shift your perspective, friends. Wisdom isn't found within the inner reaches of your intellect; it's grounded in God. To be wise is to know and to do God's will. That's what's wise. What's wise is to be filled with the Spirit. What's wise is to sing psalms and hymns and to give thanks to God all the time for anything and everything. Huh? Give thanks to God all the time for anything and everything? |
Check the Announcements and
Calendar pages to
Please join us for a special viewing of
Promises
on September 7th |
