Today's Sermon

 

"Seeing Differently"

 

First Reading
Psalm 32
1Happy are those whose transgression is forgiven,
whose sin is covered.
2Happy are those to whom the LORD imputes no iniquity,
and in whose spirit there is no deceit.

3While I kept silence, my body wasted away
through my groaning all day long.
4For day and night your hand was heavy upon me;
my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer.  

5Then I acknowledged my sin to you,
and I did not hide my iniquity;
I said, "I will confess my transgressions to the LORD,"
and you forgave the guilt of my sin.

6Therefore let all who are faithful
offer prayer to you;
at a time of distress, the rush of mighty waters
shall not reach them.
7You are a hiding place for me;
you preserve me from trouble;
you surround me with glad cries of deliverance.  

8I will instruct you and teach you the way you should go;
I will counsel you with my eye upon you.
9Do not be like a horse or a mule, without understanding,
whose temper must be curbed with bit and bridle,
else it will not stay near you. 

10Many are the torments of the wicked,
but steadfast love surrounds those who trust in the LORD.
11Be glad in the LORD and rejoice, O righteous,
and shout for joy, all you upright in heart. 

“Seeing Differently”

            After a weeks-long series on the Psalms, and we’ve already started today’s readings with…another Psalm, this time from the assigned lectionary readings.  Ah well.  Last week, we spoke about how the first psalm begins, “Happy are those who do not follow the advice of the wicked” (Psalm 1:1).  Today, from the 32^ndPsalm we hear, “Happy are those whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered” (Psalm 32:1).  So, in sum, keep to the good road, but if you stray and want to return, there’s room for that.  There’s grace.  It’s reassuring to know when it doesn’t come together as we would like, it’s not over.

            Let’s admit it, things don’t always turn out as we would like.  I was talking to a mother (not associated with the church) who told a potentially frustrating story about putting together a puzzle.  You know, you’re not asking much when what you want out of life is not to be dazzled, not to showered in great wealth, but just to be able to let down, put on some soft pants, and piece together a peaceful landscape. 

            Well, this mom and her family had worked hard on putting a puzzle together, and I gather it was an ambitious one, the kind that makes you work for it, where your back hurts from leaning over the table, and you have to walk around funny every time you take a break.  They persevered.  They made it right to the end only to discover…they were missing the last few pieces. Not fallen off the table, not under the rug, gone into the abyss.  The picture they had come to expect did not come together.  Ah well.

            As you know, we’re in this season of Lent.  One way of thinking about Lent is a time of reflect on the picture we’re putting together.  Do we like the pieces we’re working with? Do we like where the image is headed? What about with whom we’re working and how?  Lent often begins with the story of Jesus going off to fast and pray, to face his demons, and to return to the world ready to face what was before him, a picture at times he did not want. 

            Jesus’ life was about piecing the world together in a way that made it look a little more like heaven’s image.  That’s really our quest as Jesus’ followers.  So, how does it look?  What kind of lives and communities are we putting together. Where are things fitting nicely, where not?  Where do things feel only as if they’re coming apart?   I don’t know about you, but when I was young, I saw the life kind of like a puzzle.  I assumed it would come together.  It may take time, there will be frustrating searches, but the pieces are all there and they will come together.  That’s a nicely optimistic way to look at the world. Progress was almost automatic.  What happens when our peaceable image isn’t born out? 

            I went to preach at my home church a couple of months ago, first time in almost 20 years.  In the sermon I recalled times of my youth, including some tragic ones, ones in which the church was there:  for example when my older brother’s best friend Wendy Ware died in a car accident, when on senior night for the swim team we presented flowers to Ryan Hogan’s mother, Ryan who had rolled his jeep and died the year before.  I was a pallbearer for Andy Keen, who died of cystic fibrosis.  God-willing, I will turn 50 this December.  Wendy, my brother’s friend, didn’t make 18, Ryan never 17, and Andy not 16.  What about the life they dreamed of, the pictures their families had in mind, and all the pieces that never even got touched? 

            I go to the personal because it’s the easiest way to connect, but it’s the same for our collective pictures.  Not long ago someone remarked to me that if you had told them in the 1960s that we would still be having some of our current struggles around race, they would have never believed it.  Surely, we’d be doing better by now.   

            You might say that our other scripture passage for today is addressed to a people frustrated by the picture before them.  Their world seems broken.  The Apostle Paul, its author, says to them that there is brokenness in the world, but actually it’s all been overcome.  It’s all been healed by Jesus.  Paul is always trying to make sense of the “Jesus event,” the implications of who he was and what happened to him, his life, death, and resurrection with which he had a mystical experience. 

            This is what he’s worked through the lines preceding today’s passage:  Here’s this Jesus, he dies out of love and commitment to a way, and somehow that death is a gift for the benefit of all (2 Corinthians 5:14-15).  That might sound strange to us, but remember, this is a sacrifice culture. The way a fissure between God and humanity gets repaired is through a ritual act.  You see this in shamanic traditions as well.  For the ancients, this was animal sacrifice.  Therefore what you have is a sacrifice people making sense of an unexpected death through the lens of their worldview—just as we would do.  Jesus’ must be a sacrifice and sacrifice accomplishes reconciliation.  We, then, are called to live into reconciliation in the world, reconciliation which is part healing and part justice—you can’t have one without the other. 

            Paul says living into reconciliation all starts with seeing the world differently.  He writes:

16From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way. 17So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! 18All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; 19that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us. 20So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making God’s appeal through us…(2 Corinthians 5:16-20). 

             We piece together a healed world by first learning to see it differently than we may have been trained to do.  Paul, as he does, draws a binary, to help provide clarity of choice. The terms he uses here are seeing things from a human point of view and the view one gets from being “in Christ” (v. 17).  To see from a human point of view is to see fundamental alienation.  To see from a position of being in Christ is to see primarily communion.  Notice it’s not taking Christ into your heart, but operating from within Christ. To be in Christ is not to punch your ticket to heaven, escaping a broken world; it’s to see the world differently and in doing so piece together something beautiful, albeit requiring some backbreaking effort. 

            Paul recognizes none of the work we do will be effective, however, if we’re not rewired to recognize the vision.  Here’s an analogy - There’s this video getting quite the attention these days. It was put up by Mark Rober who is a YouTuber who used to work for NASA.  Rober tests a potential weakness in the Tesla automated driving system. Tesla relies entirely on cameras for its self-driving feature, thinking the car should “see” as people see, while some other automakers also make use of different kinds of sensors.  Rober sets up an experiment in which he places a foam wall in the middle of a test track that he has painted to look like a road. It’s sort of the Wylie E. Coyote them from the Roadrunner cartoon if you remember that.  A sensor would easily detect the foam, but a camera might confuse the foam painted like a road for an actual road and blow right through it, which is what happens in Rober’s test.[1]

            Now, like everything these days, this becomes a big fight.  Accusations abound.  Pro-Tesla, anti-Tesla.  Proper test, staged and doctored.  We just can’t have nice things anymore.  That’s not the point.  The point is we, like the car, we can only respond to the world as we perceive it.  It’s so obvious it barely bears saying aloud.  If we believe that we are at war, that alienation is central, we will see in the other enemy.  If we think the other is after our stuff, and having the most stuff is the most important, we will see them as a threat.  If, however, we are in Christ, then we accept as starting point that any alienation has fundamentally been overcome.  If we are in Christ, our hearts soften to the other because we trust the divine heart has forever been softened to us.  It’s the original software update.

            To carry the metaphor further, Christ is the ultimate download from the heavenly cloud and has given us a new operating system, which is really the eternal operating system that we seem to have trouble installing.  In many ways, the world is still operating with a lesser system, and accordingly Paul’s binary distinction remains helpful.  Don’t work out of a framework of retribution based on alienation. Work out of the mainframe of communion built on reconciliation. 

            When it comes to how we see the world, I’m afraid too many are still nearsighted, only looking out for one’s own, oneself. Being ambassadors for reconciliation, which is Paul’s language, is aboutgoing out, rejecting retribution in favor of a different way of being with the other.  It’s a shift from how we’ve been programmed to respond.  This is what Jesus was getting after when he tells his followers not to strike back but to, “turn the other cheek” (Mt. 5:38-40).

            A fair question – Does this mean we are simply to go out and seek out and soak up abuse?  No, and this is where Christians get it wrong or not right enough.  When our Spiritual Life Committee had David Richo lead this excellent workshop on relationship without retaliation he answered a question on precisely this issue. He said, when we have been violated, we are to give voice to it, to speak the truth of the harm committed and to what’s needed to prevent that harm from happening again.  We often stop at simple forgiveness in Christianity thinking that’s the whole story, but Jesus himself doesn’t justforgive.  That’s the first part.  The second part is “sin no more” (John 8:11).  He tells people they need to change.  They need to stop hurting others or themselves.  As a beloved professor of mine, who was also a pastor, and really had a pastor’s heart, once said, sometimes in love you have to say to people, “Stop it.”  “Snap out of it.”  “Shape up.”

            When you are in Christ, you start to recognize what shape you’re looking for, and you realize you might have to get a little creative about how to make the picture come together even when the pieces aren’t all there.  That family I told you about, when they discovered missing pieces, rather than sweeping it off the table, they chose to get creative and constructive.  First, they sat for a while with the fact sometimes we don’t get to complete the picture we want.  Then, once they were honest, they started to get playful.  Ah well, let’s see what else we can do. They looked at those gaps left by the missing pieces and started to think about what they could put in their place. Ultimately, they cut out pictures of themselves and put them inside to unfinished puzzle.  Now, that will preach.  Find the gaps in our broken scene.  Because you see a deeper healing, put yourself in the holes, and in doing so tell the world a different story than the one you’ve been taught.  Let your piece be a peace that helps make things whole.    

            Amen.

[1]https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/youtuber-mark-rober-s-tesla-autopilot-crash-test-sparks-hoax-accusations-should-sue-the-pants-off-this-guy/ar-AA1Bbr01