And Another Thing . . . Change Your Mind
As the Christmas of my eighth year of life approached, I was busy making a large list of all the things I either seriously needed or desperately wanted. Before the Internet existed, the Montgomery Ward Christmas catalogue served as the source of childhood fantasy. I stared at the pages in that brightly colored booklet the way my own children now watch YouTube videos of the things they desire. At the top of my list that year was the Screaming Mee Mee-E rifle. (Here is a link-- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeSpk6YQw4o-- so you can see the thing my dreams were made of.). I wanted this toy badly.
As it turns out, my grandmother owned a children’s clothing store, and when we arrived in Kentucky for our annual family Christmas vacation, I learned that the grand prize in her Christmas contest was the aforementioned Screaming Mee Mee-E rifle. I could not believe it. There was the source of my Christmas wish vision being proudly displayed by my own grandmother in the boys section of her store. To say that I started begging and lobbying for that gun would be an understatement. I don’t remember the full extent of my pleading, but I know that it was so outlandish enough that my parents were embarrassed and made me stop. But of course, by then the case had been made and my strategy worked. On Christmas morning I received the object of my desire. I eagerly removed it from its box, loaded its screaming dart, aimed and pulled the trigger. The dart flew out of the gun with a screaming sound that immediately annoyed the adults in the room—and, in a few short moments, even began to annoy me. Also, the dart did not go nearly as far as it had appeared to in the commercials. Horrifyingly for me, within about 15 minutes I was bored with the toy. But because I had made such a big deal about wanting it, I felt obligated to fake it for a while—even though it fell far short of my expectations. So after getting what I thought I wanted, I quickly changed my mind.
The notion of changing your mind is the thought behind the biblical word repent. The story of my Christmas gun has been repeated many times in my life, and I suspect most of us can relate to chasing something only to find it is not what we hoped it would be. Many things in our life look different when they move from fantasy to reality. Solomon, who is said to be the wisest man who ever lived, declared in Ecclesiastes that “everything is meaningless.” The King James Version of the Bible translates this passage as, “all is vanity.” Mick Jagger later translated it as “I can’t get no satisfaction.” Solomon concludes Ecclesiastes by saying, “Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man.” In other words, you cannot be the source of your own fulfillment. Only God can fill the emptiness we carry with us.
The process of moving from a life of self-directed ambition to a life of faith begins with learning to believe in God and then growing to understand that his plan for your life is both different and better than the choices you have been making. The second step, after believing in God, is to repent or change your mind about what is important in life. You change your mind about chasing after meaningless vain things in hopes of finding some sort of fulfillment. Jesus’ counterintuitive declarations begin to make sense, like when he says in Matthew 10:39, “Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”
Whether it is a Screaming Mee Mee-E gun, a house, a job, or a relationship, unless we are seeking first his kingdom and his righteousness all of these other things will ultimately feel meaningless. Jesus said, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” Changing our minds to recognize that there is a way more compelling than our own enlightened self-interest reveals the possibility of walking in a hope that is beyond what we can see.
In our natural state, we are all Screaming Mee Mee-E’s and at some point we become annoying even to ourselves. The good news is that God has made a way for us to change our minds, even about ourselves.
And that is all I have to say about that . . . for now!
And Another Thing . . . God in the Box
The documentary “God in the Box” was a Heartland Film Festival selection for 2011. The premise is pretty straightforward. A portable box is constructed with cameras hidden behind a mirror. Random pedestrians walking by are invited to go inside the box and answer one or two questions about God . The first question is, “What does God mean to you?” and the second is, “What does God look like?”
The answers surprised me. Some were funny, like the girl who thought God looked sort of like Kenny Rogers. Some were sad, like the burly, shaved-head guy in sunglasses who said, “God used to mean everything to me . . . but not anymore.” Some were quirky, like the Elvis impersonator who said, “God is sort of like Elvis . . .” The Hindu and Muslim participants seemed to have a bit clearer perspective on how to address the question. Several people spoke of the way that God had changed their lives for the better. Several others were atheists who felt the whole question was the province of the ignorant, superstitious, or uninformed. One man who claimed to be an atheist said, “I wish could believe in God, because I would probably be happier.”
Mystery is inherent in any discussion about God. God cannot be perceived by our senses and so he is intangible. Intangible is hard to quantify. Still, people claim to experience God but typically in an extrasensory way . The language that is used to describe these encounters is almost always on an emotional scale. We sense God’s presence and immediately wonder if it was perhaps something we ate. We have learned to not trust our emotions, and yet our emotions are an important part of any encounter with spiritual things. This quickly becomes confusing. At one point in the documentary, the narrator says something to the effect of, “I wish God would just show himself to us and clear this whole thing up!”
That of course, from the Christian perspective, is exactly what he did. The great grace of the Jesus event was that God revealed himself by becoming one of us. “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.” “Christ is the visible image of the invisible God.” “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.” “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.”
Jesus entered the human story and showed us how God would act if he were in our shoes. He loved deeply. He pursued truth. He sacrificed his life. In his love he gave all of himself to others as he submitted himself to God.
God looks like Jesus.
And that is all I have to say about that . . . for now!
And Another Thing . . . Belief
Selling drugs to doctors makes for an interesting life journey. I started my career in pharmaceutical sales back in the ‘80’s before things were regulated, and also before medicine had advanced to anywhere near where it is today. I remember calling on an old country doc in eastern Indiana who told me of an “off label” use for one of my products. The drug I sold was essentially a form of Tylenol packaged in an impressive two-toned capsule and with an obscure but powerful sounding name. This was in the days before the internet, and people had no way to Google what a medicine was, so the country doc used my drug essentially as a placebo. It was benign medically, but it looked impressive and he would sell it as a “powerful, rarely used drug, which he thought would help.” He mostly used this placebo to treat patients he had diagnosed as hypochondriacs and so it probably was an appropriate therapy. He was selling hope by creating belief.
Jesus said in Mark 9:23, “Everything is possible for one who believes.” This is both an inspiring and a troubling statement that has garnered many stipulations over the years. People have tried to minimize or make it more rationale, but one thing is definitely true. Everything is impossible if you have no belief. Belief enables hope and vision. Lack of belief leaves a person paralyzed or at least unmotivated. If you do not believe you can, you probably won’t try. Belief leads to action.
Jesus speaks this truth to a father who wants his son to be healed. The father responds by saying in Mark 9:24, “I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!” His statement has resonated across the ages. This is each of ours confession. Each of us is aware of the bloom of faith in our life and of the shadow of doubt which lurks around and through it. We believe in God and yet we wonder at times. We step out in faith and hope that the ground will hold. We pray believing and yet know that there is a partial wish embedded in our amens.
Fredrick Buechner once wrote,
“Whether your faith is that there is a God or that there is not a God, if you don’t have doubts you are either kidding yourself or asleep.
Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving.”
Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 5:7, “For we live by faith, not by sight.” People are wired to trust the things they see. Seen things are easy to believe in. Doubtable things are the only things that may be embraced by faith. Therefore, those who “live by faith” are always vulnerable to the questions raised by people who only believe what they see. This is why it is important to live in such a way that “sight-livers” can see the evidence of lives changed by the hope created through faith in an unseen God.
When we believe in Jesus he begins to change us. Belief stirs and inspires action. We begin to shine. Jesus is unseen, but the actions he inspires in the hearts of the people who believe in him are not. Jesus tells us to, “let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.”
A changed life is a great argument for God. Loving others is good one too. What we believe matters, because “everything is possible for the one who believes.”
And that’s all I have to say about that . . . for now.
And Another Thing . . . Lies of the Moment
It seems that we live our life in moments. And no moment yet has been the final moment. Everything is constantly in a state a change. Much of the time I feel caught in a stereophonic cacophony of positive and negative thoughts and circumstance. Optimism surrenders to pessimism and then rises again, and then surrenders, and then resurrects, and so it goes. Moments are a difficult place from which to judge life. It is difficult to know, at times, if one is winning or losing or simply treading water.
I read the story of Eli in 1 Samuel this week. His life ended in a very tragic way. His final moment was as horrific as could be imagined for a priest, filled with ominous foreshadowing. Samuel, the young boy in his care, is awakened one night by God and told that the priest and his sons had been judged and would all soon die. Later, a random holy man shows up and foretells the destruction of Eli’s family. His boys are the source of his fall from blessing. They had turned the family calling, being priests in the temple of God, into a family business and had gotten rich and fat off the sacrifices offered to God. They made a habit of profaning sacred things for their own benefit. Eli let this happen, and everything started to fall apart.
Eventually, his boys decide to carry the Ark of the Covenant, the embodiment of God’s presence among his people, into battle. They hoped it would work as a charm, to force God into blessing them in their crusade. They had manipulated the religious system to their own advantage for so long that they thought God was just another pawn in their clerical schemes. “We will carry the Ark into battle and God will be forced to make us win,” they thought. The lies they believed about God were vigorously corrected. Eli’s sons, Hophni and Phinehas, were killed in the battle along with 30,000 Israelites. The greatest tragedy, though, was that the Ark of the Covenant was captured by their enemies, the Philistines.
When Eli heard this news it made for a terrible moment. His thoughts were filled with failure and horror. God’s warnings were fulfilled in the death of his sons, and I’m sure he felt responsible. Eli had allowed his boys to make a mockery of holy things. He allowed them to take the most sacred gift Israel possessed, the Ark of God’s Presence, into a battle and now God himself was lost to the nation. The army was diminished. His sons were dead. He felt judged and rejected by his God. And the Ark of God was no longer residing with his people. This was the end of the faith. The thing that could never happen did happen. With the horror of this unthinkable circumstance swirling in his head, he fell off of his chair, broke his neck, and died. In his last moment, it seemed that all was lost.
1 Samuel 5-6 tells the story of the next moments. It turns out that the Philistines could not manipulate God any more than Eli’s sons could. After months of dealing with tumors and rats, the Philistines had had enough and decided to send the Ark back to Israel – sort of. They created an against-all-odds-situation in which they yoked together “two cows that have calved and have never been yoked.” Then, with the cows lowing as if moving against their wills, they marched directly out of the land of the Philistines and straight home to Israel. This was an amazing moment for everyone. The Philistines were relieved and the people of God were ecstatic. God proved he was larger and more improbable than the schemes of the men on either side of the battle lines. He would not be manipulated or trifled with. His faithfulness to his people was stronger than the evil of the men who tried to ruin his name. Eli’s last thought was that he was witnessing the end of God in Israel. That was the way it looked for a moment. Eli’s story ended, but God’s story did not.
In the next moment, the boy Samuel grows and becomes both judge and prophet and leads Israel back to God -- sort of. Then there is the moment where Israel rebels and asks for a king and a gets a lousy one. Followed by the moments where the lousy king, Saul, tries to kill the future amazing king, David. Succeeded by the moments when David presides over a glorious age of faithfulness and expansion. Continuing into the moments of his son’s reign when the temple is built and, conversely, foreign gods are reintroduced back into the kingdom. And so it goes . . .
This past week we held our second concert at the Carmel Gazebo. For many moments before the concert it looked as though rain, in contradiction to our prayers, was going to bring a halt to the whole event. Then there was the moment when the sun came out.
And that’s all I have to say about that . . . for now.
