FLYING INTO YOUR OWN WEAPONS
Stories
Homeward Bound
Messages about Life after Death
One of the dominant characteristics of our time is preoccupation with speed. Educators have to deal with "accelerated programs." Athletes are timed for their speed in the 40-yard dash. Business people want to know the "turn around time" on a matter and the salesperson wants to know "how soon it can be shipped." College and university campuses go through an incredible institution called "Rush Week." And that's exactly what it is, a week of rushed judgments in which one decides which group is to be his "brothers" or her "sisters" for college life. Likewise, after a week of vagrant moods and fleeting impressions, the fraternity or sorority is supposed to judge the personality, taste, and character of the individual.
One of our nation's greatest efforts in speed came with the initial breaking of the sound barrier. If you have read the autobiography of Chuck Yeager, you have gleaned an insight into that achievement. One of Yeager's accounts astounded me. It seems that some of the early test pilots actually shot themselves out of the sky. These inexperienced pilots would get a jet fighter up to two or three times the speed of sound. Then they would fire their weapons. The plane would travel faster than the bullets, and they would actually shoot their own wings off!
I cannot imagine anything more embarrassing than flying into your own weapons, shot down by your own defense mechanisms. Yet that seems to happen frequently in a society that moves as fast as ours. God has given our human personality many weapons with which to encounter life and find the way home at the end of it. We possess fight and flight responses, administrative ability, anger, egos, temperaments, grief reactions, and the like. These human characteristics are to be conscripted as our defense mechanisms as we journey through life. But travel too fast, and we can actually fly into our own defenses. It is indeed quite possible to outrun life. Consider, for example, the disease of depression. Depression is often caused when we outrun ourselves and fly into our own weapons. We can now physically run so fast and leave the clock so far behind us that our stomachs and our nerves and our timer get all out of kilter. In flying to Tokyo we gain 18 hours. In flying to Europe we gain six or seven hours. We travel so much faster than our stomach and nerves and body can adjust to time changes that we are at least two or three days settling down. It's called jet lag. We have the ability to outrun our own bodies. Much of depression is mental jet lag. We have the capacity to outrun our brain.
For several months I labored with Wayne Calloway, the president of PepsiCo. in Purchase, New York, to get an electronic scoreboard donated to a park in High Point. Finally the scoreboard arrived and a crew from our city installed it. It worked fine for two games, showing runs, hits, errors, the inning, and the balls, strikes and outs. Then, rather mysteriously, during the second evening of operation, it froze. The control box would not activate it. The lights stayed on the same inning and the same score. We had to shut it down. Someone took the control box home and tested all the connections. They were fine. We thought we had big trouble. But the next day an electrician from the city came out and it only took him a second, without even looking at anything, to discern the problem: "Somebody pushed all the buttons at the same time," he said. "You can't push but one button at a time." You see, inside that complicated apparatus is a little fuse. Pump more current into that little fuse than it can bear and it goes out - takes a little jet lag break.
The human machine has a little fuse between the ears. It's called the brain. It can handle joy, frustration, grief, love, anger, and pretty much everything that passes through it - that is, one at a time. Push all the buttons at once and it freezes; it becomes catatonic. Its fuse blows. Even though all the vital signs look great, the big machine shuts down. We call it "being depressed."
The Bible tells us that right after he was baptized, Jesus Christ faced the greatest temptation of his life. He had just realized that he was the Messiah. He was at the point of beginning his ministry. Satan tempted him to try to live his whole life in a moment's time. Satan promised him instant accomplishment of his ministry. Listen to the account: "The devil led him up to a high place and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. And he said to him, 'I will give you all their authority and splendor ... so if you worship me, it will all be yours (Luke 4:5-7).' " Just like that, promised the devil. Instant achievement. No waiting. No having to grasp the slow wisdom of the world. A shortcut. Just for the taking, in an instant. But who was deceiving whom? The devil was merely offering to Jesus in a shorter span of time what would ultimately be his anyway. God had promised Jesus that achievement from the very beginning at Bethlehem. The devil was merely offering Jesus something that was already promised. But the devil did offer it to him in an instant. That was the difference.
You wonder why evil thought it could trick Jesus into outrunning life. Well, the same tactic had worked before. Evil has a history of getting prominent individuals to outrun life and fly into their own weapons. It had worked with Jacob. You remember the story. Old Isaac tells his oldest son, Esau, to bring him some tasty food and game to eat that before he dies he can bless Esau. Rebekah, the mother, overhears the conversation. She tells Jacob and together they hastily prepare the old man's favorite meal. Jacob, pretending to be Esau, brings the food to Isaac. Isaac poignantly asks, "How did you find it so quickly, my son?" And Jacob uses the coverup for scam and fraud that hustlers have used for centuries when he responds, "Hallelujah, the Lord gave me instant success."
Now, Jacob stole most of what would have been his anyway. By law, after the passage of time Esau would have had to turn over a certain amount of the estate to Jacob. Jacob simply wanted it in an instant. Maybe he was lazy. Maybe he feared it would shrink in value with Esau as executor. At any rate, all Jacob's ego and assertiveness buttons were pushed at the same time and he overran his own life. It took him decades to recover from it.
Why shouldn't the devil have attempted the same thing with Jesus? It had even worked on David. No greater ruler ever commanded the Israelite people. David was depicted as God's personal choice to lead the chosen people. He unified the two nations of Israel and Judah. He was impetuous, aggressive, charismatic, manipulative and, above all, a great administrator. He removed the last vestige of Canaanite power in the land. Those personal traits and defense mechanism served him well. But one day even David flew into his own weapons. He was up on his rooftop when he saw the beautiful Bathsheba as she was bathing. Now, this royal Peeping Tom had plenty of opportunities to cultivate a relationship with any available woman in the kingdom, marry her, have children, and enjoy life. Any unmarried gal would have fallen off her feet over him. But that takes time and it involves decisions and choices and finding the right person. In an instant, David's weapons flooded his brain - he could have it all right then, no matter that Bathsheba was another man's wife. Impetuously and aggressively he sent for her, had an affair with her and got her pregnant. Then he used his manipulative and administrative abilities to have Bathsheba's husband placed in the forefront of the hardest fighting and have the men draw back from him so he would be killed. David outran his own brain. All those weapons that, pushed one at a time could have served him well, actually shot him down. The prophet Nathan found out about it and confronted David. The great king confessed his sin and went into a prolonged depression. And he was a great king. He just moved so fast that he outran his own best self. It is a great tragedy when someone blows his life trying to get something in an instant that could have been his in the longrun anyway.
It is a strange phenomenon in life that our strengths, our weapons, can become our undoing if we push all the buttons at the same time. Many a personal and national history can attest to that. When I was in high school, I loved to participate in the sport of track. I still think there's nothing more enjoyable to watch than a good track meet. One of the events I loved to run in was the 440 relay. Each team had four men who would each run 100 yards. You carried a baton and, after your leg of the event, you passed it full stride to the next man who would already be in motion as you approached him. One of the keys to success, of course, was to make a clean pass and reception of the baton within the exchange zone.
Well, our team had three very fast boys and an average runner named Sam. The coach always puzzled over where to run Sam. If he ran the lead-off leg, chances were we'd have to spend the next three runners catching up. If we ran Sam last, the other teams would run their fastest boy at the anchor and we never knew just how much of a lead Sam would need. Consequently, we would end up running Sam third. Usually we would get Sam a large lead and if he could come close to holding it we would be in great shape and still have a fast person to run the anchor.
On our relay team was a boy named Jeff. Jeff was the state champion in the 100-yard dash. In fact, Jeff later became the Atlantic Coast Conference champion in the 100-yard dash. He had tremendous acceleration and a tremendous will to win. Those were his greatest assets or weapons.
We came to the state meet in Orangeburg, S.C., and I just knew we had it in the bag. I went out to the anchor spot and saw that our biggest rival was running at anchor, a boy I had beaten by five yards in the 100-yard dash heats. If we were close to the lead, it would be a cakewalk.
Well, Charlie, our lead man, took off and ran his best leg of his career. He had two yards on the field when he passed it to Jeff. Jeff widened the lead to five yards and then to seven yards. Even Sam wouldn't lose seven yards. As Jeff rounded the curve, 20 yards from Sam, he yelled, "Go, Sam! Go, Sam!" But Sam, ever cautious, just stood there. At 15 yards away Jeff called, "Go, Sam!" But Sam waited. It was okay. At 10 yards away, Sam just turned around to start his trot. With about five yards to go, Jeff, whose adrenaline was really flowing and whose anger at Sam for not starting sooner was pitched, reared back, screamed, and threw the baton at Sam's head. The baton missed Sam and went sailing into the infield. I never got to run. Sam never got to run. We didn't get any medals. We didn't get a trophy. We didn't get anything. Jeff overran his adrenaline and his will to win. Ole Jeff wanted something in an instant that would have easily been ours in the long-run anyway. We had it won if he had not flown into his own will to win and aggressiveness, those very strengths that made him great.
Finally, I think I am coming to understand our society somewhat. We have a very Christian society and certainly fine, wonderful church members. We are not in the least bit ungodly. It's just that we have outrun church. We outran Wednesday evenings first. I'm not so young, so I can remember when the stores were closed on Wednesday afternoons. But we outran that quickly. Now we have athletic events, school events, concerts, and everything else on Wednesday nights. I'm not naive enough to think we'll ever go back to those old prayer meeting days of meditation, remembering in prayer your sick neighbors and other such things every Wednesday. We outran that long ago in our society, and I enjoy those other events as much as anyone. We are now coming close to outrunning Sundays, as well. It's a fast track. Second homes, automobiles and jet travel, make good investment credits. Preachers and teachers try to compress three thousand years of Hebrew-Christian experience into the 30 sermons and 25 Sunday school lessons the average person hears in a year. We'd be naive to try to do otherwise.
This person, Jesus, though, I think was on to something when he left us a church and his spirit of peace. He left us something for our souls in a world of speed. "I am the way, the truth, and the life," he said. "Put the Kingdom first and everything else will fall into place." He knew the danger of flying into your own weapons.
He also pointed the way home to a secular society unable to grasp the wholeness of the religious journey. Jesus spoke often of "fringe" people who find their way "home" in life and beyond life. In fact, he deliberately spoke of those who can only touch the fringe of the garment through the maddening crowd. They, too, find their way home as they march toward death.
One summer a group of us from High Point traveled to Greece and the Greek Islands. On the cruise portion of the trip we were assigned various times to eat our meals in the dining room of the cruise ship. Since we had an odd number, several of us, from time to time, sat at the table with other passengers who were not members of our particular tour. On one such occasion a rather elderly, immaculately dressed lady from England sat next to me. This lady had all the appearance of a grand dame - you know how refined and natty those English ladies can appear. She was the quintessence of refinement, except for an accident she had had. Her right arm was in a huge cast and she had a black eye. She conveyed to me that she and another woman from Britain had gone off on their own to see the sites on some remote island. As she was climbing the steps to some ancient ruin, she had slipped and broken her arm. Some people hauled her down bumpy roads in an old jeep and placed her in a little fishing boat. They carried her to a hospital in Athens and let her out by an X-ray room.
She encountered chaos. The Greeks do not organize in a systematic manner like we Westerners do. Inside the room was an X-ray machine and a doctor. The X-ray table was surrounded by 50 or 60 shouting, shoving people. One person would jump on the table, yell out the part to be X-rayed and the doctor would start the process. As soon as the patient was down from the table, the whole crowd would start pushing and screaming, "Me next. Me next. Me next." Then someone else would jump on the table. After an hour of watching this, she decided she had best push and shove her way with the rest of them. She finally yelled, "me next," and jumped on the table. Then, with her X-ray in hand, she went to the cashier's desk where another crowd, again with no organized line, was swaying and pushing and yelling "me next."
You and I have perhaps been the beneficiaries of so much medical organization, sometimes to a fault, that we cannot really place ourselves properly in the shoes of the little woman in Mark's fifth chapter, or even in the perspective of Jesus Christ as God's representative on this earth. Think how hard it must have been for doctors in ancient times, when the Bible was written. They depended on herbs and witchcraft instead of technology. And instead of a waiting room full of patients and an insurance person to file forms on typewriters and computers, they had to contend with pushing, shoving mobs yelling "me next." Imagine the chaos which surrounded a remarkable physician who never accepted money for what he did for people.
Mark's gospel tells it like it was. A shoving crowd surrounded Jesus. One of the members of that mass gathering was a plucky woman who really had a problem. She had "suffered" under many physicians. For 12 years she had had a flow of blood. She would have worn cumbersome bandages all the time in an age without laundering facilities. And if you can imagine 12 years of medical bills you can resonate with Mark's claim that she had spent all the money she had.
Finally, in one last desperate move she decided to try one more physician, the one from Galilee who claimed to be God's son. Such required some real faith from her because if you read the Bible, you will find that the largest portion of Jesus' cures dealt with the demented rather than the organic. In other words, his value seemed to be more therapeutic when people had problems functioning.
Nevertheless, she made her way to the place where he was. And when she got there she encountered this huge crowd, most probably pushing and shoving and yelling "me next."
Without hesitation, she pushed herself into the flow and reached out and touched his garment. Then it happened. She was healed! Jesus stopped and asked, "Who touched me?" He had felt the power go out from him. The woman obviously feared a reprimand as he searched for her in the crowd. She came and fell before him, blurting out the whole story.
She got more than she bargained for. She had not only touched a great physician, but she had touched the bearer of the kingdom of God. She had made contact with the kingdom. "Go your way," he said, "you faith has restored you."
Several aspects of the graphic story have always appealed to me. The woman represents many people. How many times you and I are just like this woman. We try every expedient first before turning to Christ. We exhaust ourselves, our time, and our resources seeking strength and happiness everywhere else, and then try him, only as a last resort. We spend all we possess in seeking cures instead of stretching out a finger to touch the Master. We call the lawyer; we go to the psychiatrist for two years; we call the banker and the brokerage firm; we talk to our best friends. We seek advice from anyone with whom we have contact, no matter how casual. And such is not bad because we should not avoid psychiatric help for our psychological needs or financial help for our financial needs or legal help for our legal needs. Maybe we humans have to get in the extreme, having spent everything before we are prepared to accept the value of Christ. Being a minister, our fast-paced world never ceases to amaze me.
Our church is open 52 weeks a year, trying to wrestle with the meaning of life, the road home beyond life, and the power available in Jesus. If there is something puzzling to me, it is to sit down with someone who has avoided most of that but has consulted with the realtor, the bank, the lawyer, the psychiatrist, and a half dozen "friends" who are in the same boat, before reaching out a finger in the direction of the Christ. Like I said, it is "puzzling," not discouraging or uncomprehensible.
Yet, there is still a deeper message in this story and that message is for the church. When all around Jesus the crowds are pressing in on him and yelling "me next, me next," the pitiful woman is not too little for Jesus. Jesus can make himself small enough to enter the loneliness of one single human being. The person is the center of his ministry. If we are to be the church, all demands must be measured against one unique function - ministry to persons. Peter Drucker is quite correct: Only a person can know despair. Societies only know "problems." So cities need traffic cops and salesmen and professors and judges. But a person needs compassion. The church is not a place of psychological analyzation. We are not psychiatrists. We are not even social workers. We are not here to be a leading institution in the community of High Point. Our job is compassion. And compassion is a very time-consuming job. You can't schedule compassion. A person can't say, "For this year we have spent our compassion budget."17 You can't say, "Our office hours for compassion are 9 a.m.-1 p.m."
The role of the church in a fast-paced society is a special one. Its role is to be a collection of compassionate Christians, ministering in tolerance and love to individuals who are trying to discover their way home as they march toward death.
I once saw a church lose its compassion due to the fast track on which it ran. It was the most frightful thing I have witnessed. This church averaged around 700 people in Sunday school and worship. It was a fine, caring church. Everyone knew everyone else and really cared about them. It met its budget and moved along teaching and preaching the gospel. It was not spectacular, but it was caring. Its staff left some things to be desired, as all human staffs do, but it was a caring church. It had for 50 years put individuals on the road toward "home." Then, a new order came to town and the church started to "set the woods on fire." It became a great organization, a truly great and complex organization. The new order started two morning worship services and even two Sunday schools. Attendance averaged 1,100 each Sunday. You would think that that is real success. But it doesn't care anymore. It only grows in data. There is a fight once a week. Really, there is a fight per week. As many people flee out the back door as come in the front door. The church now misses its budget by $250,000. Its mission, the objective of its ministry, is not the person but the organization. It, as an entity, is a community leader, has burgeoning social programs, and incredible marketing success. But it has lost its compassion.
It is a heavy burden that Jesus put on us when he encountered that huge mob pressing and shoving and shouting, "Me next, me next!" He stopped in his tracks, felt the outstretched finger and said, "Who touched me? Who are you? Come here; I want to see you and know you. I want to show you the way home."
Now, that is the kind of God that you can really put stock in, can't you? A God that can be there as if there were only you and he, and nothing else mattered. Among all the people that crowded around him, Jesus found the one person who required his help and needed him as a Savior.
Sometimes you and I do not have great religious experiences. I read Guidepost magazine and I wonder why I don't have experiences like some of those people. I see friends who read Norman Vincent Peale and feel his close relationship with Christ and wonder why it doesn't work the same way for their lives. I wish sometimes, not all the time but sometimes, that I could preach like Billy Graham or Harry Emerson Fosdick or somebody else, or have an experience like Elijah or John of Patmos or Saint Francis of Assisi or even Peter Marshall. I see friends whose lives are sometimes as purposeless as a car in neutral; friends who wonder if their children have gone astray; people who wonder if their marriage will break up. That is, all of us sometimes live exactly the way the woman in our text suffered, spending every last penny and every last impulse of energy seeking a great cure or at least a calming assurance.
Do we not often find ourselves only having a hold on the very fringe of Jesus' robe? Indeed, do we not more often find ourselves honestly grasping for that outer fringe, that extreme edge of Jesus, than we find ourselves walking down the road beside him talking eyeball to eyeball? Can there be then, for us any greater assurance than the knowledge that if we will but hold tightly to that which we can reach of him in whatever our state, he will stop and turn around and want to know exactly who it is that has touched him? And then he will put us on the road toward home, regardless of the speed at which we live.
Such a perspective can prove salvific, not only in a highly secular world of unparalleled speed, but when the forces of doubt, cynicism, and bitterness cause the lights of home to flicker, low.
PART THREE
9. DOUBT AND HUMAN WILL
Ministers do not like to deal with doubts. We traffic in truths, eternal certainties, and faith. The word "doubt" is often relegated to a preacher's verbal doghouse. We don't preach sermons asking you to doubt something. Preachers fear doubters. Thank goodness we have removed the part from the wedding ceremony where the pastor used to ask "if there is anyone here who knows of any reasons or has any doubts that this ceremony should take place, let him speak now or forever keep his peace." For generations pastors feared that someone would speak up and doubt that the couple should get married.
One of the great anxieties of life is that someone might stand up in the face of one of your certainties about life and say, "I doubt that! I just doubt if that's right."
Doubt is a genuine possibility in Western religion. In the West we view human beings as God's creation and hold to an exhalted view of human will. Western and Eastern religious views contain distinctively different perspectives on the human will. In the East, human beings are viewed as simply one species among many natural beings. For example, the religious art of the East takes nature as its primary subject. Such landscape paintings suggest vastness, solitude, and continuous movement. Mountain and water contain the two ends of the natural religious spectrum. The place of human beings in that vastness is small. In fact, humans are so small that we have to look closely for them in the paintings if we find them at all. Eastern artists paint figures occasionally, but not so much as we do in the West. Humans are viewed as no higher in the scale of things than any other kind of matter that comes into being. As such, the religions of the East downgrade individual will.18
We in the West, on the other hand, exalt the individual will. Few religious writings depict this exalted will better than does a selection from the Psalmist of the Old Testament:
When I look at the heavens, the work of Thy finger, the moon and the stars which Thou hast established: what is man that Thou art mindful of him, and the son of man that Thou dost care for him?
Yet Thou has made him little less than God, and dost crown him with glory and honor. Thou has given him dominion over the works of thy hands; Thou hast put all things under his feet,
all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the sea.
Psalm 8:3-8 (RSV)
Our Western emphasis on the human will, coupled with the realities of murder and violence in a fast-paced secular society, have helped sustain alternatives to religious belief systems. We encounter philosophies that are atheistic, human-centered, and this-worldly. Humanism, a negative philosophy, begins with an explicit rejection of belief in God. Atheistic humanists believe that scientific evidence and rational analyses of human experience do not warrant belief in a God who directs human destiny and who loves and cares for his creation. Christian humanism, through a union of MarxistSocialist commitments and Christian theology, plays a significant role in some contemporary liberation movements.
When confronted with these alternative systems in a very unequal and unjust secular world, many Christians find certain traditional beliefs laboring under increasing doubts. Such doubt often causes the once bright and familiar lights of the home toward which we march to glow exceedingly dim.
It is of great comfort, therefore, to learn that the child of Bethlehem who points the way home through the darkness is also a doubter. The central force of our faith is the birth in Bethlehem of the world's greatest religious doubter. Yes, Jesus was a doubter. Think about it. We are saved by Jesus' faith, and sometimes I think we are also saved by Jesus' daring doubts. Jesus is, in fact, a Savior for doubters. He was born into a world of universally accepted falsehoods and dared to stand up and cry: "I doubt that."
"An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth," was the true law. "I doubt that!" said Jesus.
People trusted in long prayers, rigid laws, and Sabbath rules as essential to true religion. "I doubt that!" said Jesus.
The popular idea was that Samaritans were an inferior people. "I doubt that!" said Jesus. "A good Samaritan is better than a bad Jew."
It was destined that way from his birth. You see, people believed that shepherds and lepers were unclean. Shepherds roamed the hillsides, keeping watch over their flocks. They could not always wash their hands or be careful about how they prepared food. They could not keep to the dietary laws of Judaism. "Shepherds are unclean and inferior," was the great truth of the established religion. In actuality, the words "for you a Saviour is born," as they were spoken to the shepherds, amounted to a great first century "I doubt that!"
"To you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour." That is extremely important. You see, in a way, we are all doubters. We live with skepticism, questions about God and humankind and uncertainties about life. Tell me Jesus is only the Savior of the true believers, the one who points the way toward home only for the great people of faith, and more often than not, I am left without a Savior.
Tell me Jesus is only the Savior of the true belivers, the great people of faith, and more often than not, I am left without a Savior. Tell me Jesus is a fellow doubter, a Savior come to lift me out of my doubts, empty himself that I might be exalted and find my way home, and his story then is a story that is enacted with me and for me.
We are all doubters. We believe that we possess unbelief. We may, even after all these years, doubt the Christian story although none of us would dare admit it.
There are human reactions to the Christian story which are rather unconscious ways of doubting the story. What goes through your mind when you hear about Caesar Augustus, about Joseph and Mary, about the shepherds in the fields and about the multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and singing?
Perhaps some of us do not listen very carefully, and that happens to me quite often.
Perhaps the story of this Christ seems like a nice fairy tale being told, far removed from the realities of life.
Perhaps, also, some of you, when you hear the story of his birth, life, and death, are reminded of the days of your youth long since gone by. As the late Karl Barth said on Christmas, it makes you think of when you "were told this story for the first time, of the Christmas tree, of the presents and the candies, of how beautiful things were, but are no longer and never will be again."19
These are some of our human reactions to the Christmas story. We are doubters even though our faith, our belief system, and our hope propel us into a church while others choose to stay home.
That's why the angels must come again. If we are to receive the Savior for honest doubters, the angel of the Lord must pass through the streets, the homes, and the churches. It is not enough to simply peddle the story. Something must be revealed to us and in us. The angel of the Lord must come to honest doubters like you and me, and point the way home again.
Peddling the story simply will not work. There's too much doubt, too much questioning, too much skepticism in us for that.
Harry Emerson Fosdick told of a family he knew who always kept Shakespeare's birthday. Every year on Shakespeare's date of birth, the father of the family, who was a poet, would light candles, call in a circle of congenial friends, and celebrate the evening with a great party. They would keep the birthday through giving gifts and reading Shakespeare's poetry to each other.20
That's nice, isn't it? It's memorable, noteworthy and quite a way to mark the passage of time.
The story of Christ is, hopefully, more than that. But it is more than that only if the Christ spirit comes to us through our doubts and skepticisms and lets something be born anew in us. The angel must pass through our homes and our churches each year or, at some point, our honest doubts will come to the surface and overwhelm the story.
One of the amazing recognitions of the early Christian church was that the peddling of a great story, even that of the resurrection or the babe in Bethlehem would not be enough for a world of doubters to find their way home.
The Apostle Paul wrote a letter to the Corinthian church in which he said, "We are not, like so many, peddlers of God's word; we are sincere ... do not believe us because we peddle a story ... you yourselves are our letters of recommendation ... written not with ink but with the spirit of God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts (2 Corinthians 2:17--3:3)."
Paul knew the Corinthians were, like us, too smooth, too scientific, too cautious, too doubting to be taken in by peddlers of stories. Apparently the peddler in the Mediterranean world had a reputation for cheating. The peddler took his message casually. His chief concern was: "How can I twist it a bit to make it appeal to an unconcerned audience so that they will buy it, and I will make a profit?"
There have always been religious peddlers in the world who have no experience with God's truth and who do not even believe all the hype they are saying but make a tremendous profit for themselves.
Paul said, "We are not peddling stories. There are plenty of people who can do that. We are asking you to accept the reality of God in your hearts. You, not the stories, will be God's letters of recommendation in the world. God doesn't need miraculous stories; God doesn't need a lot of ink; God needs you - your life - your expressions, to make the angels' truth heard again."
We should doubt the peddlers of wild stories but we must never deny the reality of the spirit of God that is written in human hearts.
The angels of God must continuously pass through the streets, the homes, and the churches of our fast-paced Western society each year. We must hear the voices of something that is a current reality if the home lights are to shine for us.
I see these angels all the time. And each time I encounter one, those faint lights of home start to glow brighter. One afternoon I saw an angel as I sat in my office scribbling away on a legal pad. I looked up and out of the window of the office I saw Sallie Memory slowly shuffling toward the sanctuary. Now, Sallie Memory was a member of our church who resided in Evergreens Nursing Home in High Point. On the day in question she was more than 94 years old. My initial thought was "my goodness, what's she doing away from the nursing home. She might fall down."
Well, Sallie had arranged for someone to bring her by the church because she had heard we had cushions in the pews and she wanted to sit on one and look at the Christmas decorations. She had also read in our newsletter where we were a little behind in the budget, so she had someone take her to the bank where she withdrew $100 in cash. She brought that over to "help us."
It took Sallie two little rest periods to walk the distance from the parking lot to the sanctuary. Finally, she got in there and sat down on the first pew. Her eyesight was too poor to see the poinsettias, but she could see the Chrismon tree. And she loved being there. She loved the cushions and the tree and what that place represented in her life. She and I just sat in there for a few minutes and somehow the place looked different. It looked better.
That kind of faith and expression of worth, evidenced in a 94-year-old lady getting out of her bed in the nursing home and coming over to the church with her frail body and money from her savings account, should say more to us about there being some truth to this Bethlehem event than any story we could ever peddle.
Doubt cannot stand up in the face of a theory or a story made flesh. Only the persistent presence of faithful visionaries can provide evidence in a world of doubt. Frankly, most of us must, at times, depend on the vision of others to point the way home when our own doubting eyesight begins to see only flickers of the lights of home. Especially is this true when our doubts degenerate into cynicism.
One of our nation's greatest efforts in speed came with the initial breaking of the sound barrier. If you have read the autobiography of Chuck Yeager, you have gleaned an insight into that achievement. One of Yeager's accounts astounded me. It seems that some of the early test pilots actually shot themselves out of the sky. These inexperienced pilots would get a jet fighter up to two or three times the speed of sound. Then they would fire their weapons. The plane would travel faster than the bullets, and they would actually shoot their own wings off!
I cannot imagine anything more embarrassing than flying into your own weapons, shot down by your own defense mechanisms. Yet that seems to happen frequently in a society that moves as fast as ours. God has given our human personality many weapons with which to encounter life and find the way home at the end of it. We possess fight and flight responses, administrative ability, anger, egos, temperaments, grief reactions, and the like. These human characteristics are to be conscripted as our defense mechanisms as we journey through life. But travel too fast, and we can actually fly into our own defenses. It is indeed quite possible to outrun life. Consider, for example, the disease of depression. Depression is often caused when we outrun ourselves and fly into our own weapons. We can now physically run so fast and leave the clock so far behind us that our stomachs and our nerves and our timer get all out of kilter. In flying to Tokyo we gain 18 hours. In flying to Europe we gain six or seven hours. We travel so much faster than our stomach and nerves and body can adjust to time changes that we are at least two or three days settling down. It's called jet lag. We have the ability to outrun our own bodies. Much of depression is mental jet lag. We have the capacity to outrun our brain.
For several months I labored with Wayne Calloway, the president of PepsiCo. in Purchase, New York, to get an electronic scoreboard donated to a park in High Point. Finally the scoreboard arrived and a crew from our city installed it. It worked fine for two games, showing runs, hits, errors, the inning, and the balls, strikes and outs. Then, rather mysteriously, during the second evening of operation, it froze. The control box would not activate it. The lights stayed on the same inning and the same score. We had to shut it down. Someone took the control box home and tested all the connections. They were fine. We thought we had big trouble. But the next day an electrician from the city came out and it only took him a second, without even looking at anything, to discern the problem: "Somebody pushed all the buttons at the same time," he said. "You can't push but one button at a time." You see, inside that complicated apparatus is a little fuse. Pump more current into that little fuse than it can bear and it goes out - takes a little jet lag break.
The human machine has a little fuse between the ears. It's called the brain. It can handle joy, frustration, grief, love, anger, and pretty much everything that passes through it - that is, one at a time. Push all the buttons at once and it freezes; it becomes catatonic. Its fuse blows. Even though all the vital signs look great, the big machine shuts down. We call it "being depressed."
The Bible tells us that right after he was baptized, Jesus Christ faced the greatest temptation of his life. He had just realized that he was the Messiah. He was at the point of beginning his ministry. Satan tempted him to try to live his whole life in a moment's time. Satan promised him instant accomplishment of his ministry. Listen to the account: "The devil led him up to a high place and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. And he said to him, 'I will give you all their authority and splendor ... so if you worship me, it will all be yours (Luke 4:5-7).' " Just like that, promised the devil. Instant achievement. No waiting. No having to grasp the slow wisdom of the world. A shortcut. Just for the taking, in an instant. But who was deceiving whom? The devil was merely offering to Jesus in a shorter span of time what would ultimately be his anyway. God had promised Jesus that achievement from the very beginning at Bethlehem. The devil was merely offering Jesus something that was already promised. But the devil did offer it to him in an instant. That was the difference.
You wonder why evil thought it could trick Jesus into outrunning life. Well, the same tactic had worked before. Evil has a history of getting prominent individuals to outrun life and fly into their own weapons. It had worked with Jacob. You remember the story. Old Isaac tells his oldest son, Esau, to bring him some tasty food and game to eat that before he dies he can bless Esau. Rebekah, the mother, overhears the conversation. She tells Jacob and together they hastily prepare the old man's favorite meal. Jacob, pretending to be Esau, brings the food to Isaac. Isaac poignantly asks, "How did you find it so quickly, my son?" And Jacob uses the coverup for scam and fraud that hustlers have used for centuries when he responds, "Hallelujah, the Lord gave me instant success."
Now, Jacob stole most of what would have been his anyway. By law, after the passage of time Esau would have had to turn over a certain amount of the estate to Jacob. Jacob simply wanted it in an instant. Maybe he was lazy. Maybe he feared it would shrink in value with Esau as executor. At any rate, all Jacob's ego and assertiveness buttons were pushed at the same time and he overran his own life. It took him decades to recover from it.
Why shouldn't the devil have attempted the same thing with Jesus? It had even worked on David. No greater ruler ever commanded the Israelite people. David was depicted as God's personal choice to lead the chosen people. He unified the two nations of Israel and Judah. He was impetuous, aggressive, charismatic, manipulative and, above all, a great administrator. He removed the last vestige of Canaanite power in the land. Those personal traits and defense mechanism served him well. But one day even David flew into his own weapons. He was up on his rooftop when he saw the beautiful Bathsheba as she was bathing. Now, this royal Peeping Tom had plenty of opportunities to cultivate a relationship with any available woman in the kingdom, marry her, have children, and enjoy life. Any unmarried gal would have fallen off her feet over him. But that takes time and it involves decisions and choices and finding the right person. In an instant, David's weapons flooded his brain - he could have it all right then, no matter that Bathsheba was another man's wife. Impetuously and aggressively he sent for her, had an affair with her and got her pregnant. Then he used his manipulative and administrative abilities to have Bathsheba's husband placed in the forefront of the hardest fighting and have the men draw back from him so he would be killed. David outran his own brain. All those weapons that, pushed one at a time could have served him well, actually shot him down. The prophet Nathan found out about it and confronted David. The great king confessed his sin and went into a prolonged depression. And he was a great king. He just moved so fast that he outran his own best self. It is a great tragedy when someone blows his life trying to get something in an instant that could have been his in the longrun anyway.
It is a strange phenomenon in life that our strengths, our weapons, can become our undoing if we push all the buttons at the same time. Many a personal and national history can attest to that. When I was in high school, I loved to participate in the sport of track. I still think there's nothing more enjoyable to watch than a good track meet. One of the events I loved to run in was the 440 relay. Each team had four men who would each run 100 yards. You carried a baton and, after your leg of the event, you passed it full stride to the next man who would already be in motion as you approached him. One of the keys to success, of course, was to make a clean pass and reception of the baton within the exchange zone.
Well, our team had three very fast boys and an average runner named Sam. The coach always puzzled over where to run Sam. If he ran the lead-off leg, chances were we'd have to spend the next three runners catching up. If we ran Sam last, the other teams would run their fastest boy at the anchor and we never knew just how much of a lead Sam would need. Consequently, we would end up running Sam third. Usually we would get Sam a large lead and if he could come close to holding it we would be in great shape and still have a fast person to run the anchor.
On our relay team was a boy named Jeff. Jeff was the state champion in the 100-yard dash. In fact, Jeff later became the Atlantic Coast Conference champion in the 100-yard dash. He had tremendous acceleration and a tremendous will to win. Those were his greatest assets or weapons.
We came to the state meet in Orangeburg, S.C., and I just knew we had it in the bag. I went out to the anchor spot and saw that our biggest rival was running at anchor, a boy I had beaten by five yards in the 100-yard dash heats. If we were close to the lead, it would be a cakewalk.
Well, Charlie, our lead man, took off and ran his best leg of his career. He had two yards on the field when he passed it to Jeff. Jeff widened the lead to five yards and then to seven yards. Even Sam wouldn't lose seven yards. As Jeff rounded the curve, 20 yards from Sam, he yelled, "Go, Sam! Go, Sam!" But Sam, ever cautious, just stood there. At 15 yards away Jeff called, "Go, Sam!" But Sam waited. It was okay. At 10 yards away, Sam just turned around to start his trot. With about five yards to go, Jeff, whose adrenaline was really flowing and whose anger at Sam for not starting sooner was pitched, reared back, screamed, and threw the baton at Sam's head. The baton missed Sam and went sailing into the infield. I never got to run. Sam never got to run. We didn't get any medals. We didn't get a trophy. We didn't get anything. Jeff overran his adrenaline and his will to win. Ole Jeff wanted something in an instant that would have easily been ours in the long-run anyway. We had it won if he had not flown into his own will to win and aggressiveness, those very strengths that made him great.
Finally, I think I am coming to understand our society somewhat. We have a very Christian society and certainly fine, wonderful church members. We are not in the least bit ungodly. It's just that we have outrun church. We outran Wednesday evenings first. I'm not so young, so I can remember when the stores were closed on Wednesday afternoons. But we outran that quickly. Now we have athletic events, school events, concerts, and everything else on Wednesday nights. I'm not naive enough to think we'll ever go back to those old prayer meeting days of meditation, remembering in prayer your sick neighbors and other such things every Wednesday. We outran that long ago in our society, and I enjoy those other events as much as anyone. We are now coming close to outrunning Sundays, as well. It's a fast track. Second homes, automobiles and jet travel, make good investment credits. Preachers and teachers try to compress three thousand years of Hebrew-Christian experience into the 30 sermons and 25 Sunday school lessons the average person hears in a year. We'd be naive to try to do otherwise.
This person, Jesus, though, I think was on to something when he left us a church and his spirit of peace. He left us something for our souls in a world of speed. "I am the way, the truth, and the life," he said. "Put the Kingdom first and everything else will fall into place." He knew the danger of flying into your own weapons.
He also pointed the way home to a secular society unable to grasp the wholeness of the religious journey. Jesus spoke often of "fringe" people who find their way "home" in life and beyond life. In fact, he deliberately spoke of those who can only touch the fringe of the garment through the maddening crowd. They, too, find their way home as they march toward death.
One summer a group of us from High Point traveled to Greece and the Greek Islands. On the cruise portion of the trip we were assigned various times to eat our meals in the dining room of the cruise ship. Since we had an odd number, several of us, from time to time, sat at the table with other passengers who were not members of our particular tour. On one such occasion a rather elderly, immaculately dressed lady from England sat next to me. This lady had all the appearance of a grand dame - you know how refined and natty those English ladies can appear. She was the quintessence of refinement, except for an accident she had had. Her right arm was in a huge cast and she had a black eye. She conveyed to me that she and another woman from Britain had gone off on their own to see the sites on some remote island. As she was climbing the steps to some ancient ruin, she had slipped and broken her arm. Some people hauled her down bumpy roads in an old jeep and placed her in a little fishing boat. They carried her to a hospital in Athens and let her out by an X-ray room.
She encountered chaos. The Greeks do not organize in a systematic manner like we Westerners do. Inside the room was an X-ray machine and a doctor. The X-ray table was surrounded by 50 or 60 shouting, shoving people. One person would jump on the table, yell out the part to be X-rayed and the doctor would start the process. As soon as the patient was down from the table, the whole crowd would start pushing and screaming, "Me next. Me next. Me next." Then someone else would jump on the table. After an hour of watching this, she decided she had best push and shove her way with the rest of them. She finally yelled, "me next," and jumped on the table. Then, with her X-ray in hand, she went to the cashier's desk where another crowd, again with no organized line, was swaying and pushing and yelling "me next."
You and I have perhaps been the beneficiaries of so much medical organization, sometimes to a fault, that we cannot really place ourselves properly in the shoes of the little woman in Mark's fifth chapter, or even in the perspective of Jesus Christ as God's representative on this earth. Think how hard it must have been for doctors in ancient times, when the Bible was written. They depended on herbs and witchcraft instead of technology. And instead of a waiting room full of patients and an insurance person to file forms on typewriters and computers, they had to contend with pushing, shoving mobs yelling "me next." Imagine the chaos which surrounded a remarkable physician who never accepted money for what he did for people.
Mark's gospel tells it like it was. A shoving crowd surrounded Jesus. One of the members of that mass gathering was a plucky woman who really had a problem. She had "suffered" under many physicians. For 12 years she had had a flow of blood. She would have worn cumbersome bandages all the time in an age without laundering facilities. And if you can imagine 12 years of medical bills you can resonate with Mark's claim that she had spent all the money she had.
Finally, in one last desperate move she decided to try one more physician, the one from Galilee who claimed to be God's son. Such required some real faith from her because if you read the Bible, you will find that the largest portion of Jesus' cures dealt with the demented rather than the organic. In other words, his value seemed to be more therapeutic when people had problems functioning.
Nevertheless, she made her way to the place where he was. And when she got there she encountered this huge crowd, most probably pushing and shoving and yelling "me next."
Without hesitation, she pushed herself into the flow and reached out and touched his garment. Then it happened. She was healed! Jesus stopped and asked, "Who touched me?" He had felt the power go out from him. The woman obviously feared a reprimand as he searched for her in the crowd. She came and fell before him, blurting out the whole story.
She got more than she bargained for. She had not only touched a great physician, but she had touched the bearer of the kingdom of God. She had made contact with the kingdom. "Go your way," he said, "you faith has restored you."
Several aspects of the graphic story have always appealed to me. The woman represents many people. How many times you and I are just like this woman. We try every expedient first before turning to Christ. We exhaust ourselves, our time, and our resources seeking strength and happiness everywhere else, and then try him, only as a last resort. We spend all we possess in seeking cures instead of stretching out a finger to touch the Master. We call the lawyer; we go to the psychiatrist for two years; we call the banker and the brokerage firm; we talk to our best friends. We seek advice from anyone with whom we have contact, no matter how casual. And such is not bad because we should not avoid psychiatric help for our psychological needs or financial help for our financial needs or legal help for our legal needs. Maybe we humans have to get in the extreme, having spent everything before we are prepared to accept the value of Christ. Being a minister, our fast-paced world never ceases to amaze me.
Our church is open 52 weeks a year, trying to wrestle with the meaning of life, the road home beyond life, and the power available in Jesus. If there is something puzzling to me, it is to sit down with someone who has avoided most of that but has consulted with the realtor, the bank, the lawyer, the psychiatrist, and a half dozen "friends" who are in the same boat, before reaching out a finger in the direction of the Christ. Like I said, it is "puzzling," not discouraging or uncomprehensible.
Yet, there is still a deeper message in this story and that message is for the church. When all around Jesus the crowds are pressing in on him and yelling "me next, me next," the pitiful woman is not too little for Jesus. Jesus can make himself small enough to enter the loneliness of one single human being. The person is the center of his ministry. If we are to be the church, all demands must be measured against one unique function - ministry to persons. Peter Drucker is quite correct: Only a person can know despair. Societies only know "problems." So cities need traffic cops and salesmen and professors and judges. But a person needs compassion. The church is not a place of psychological analyzation. We are not psychiatrists. We are not even social workers. We are not here to be a leading institution in the community of High Point. Our job is compassion. And compassion is a very time-consuming job. You can't schedule compassion. A person can't say, "For this year we have spent our compassion budget."17 You can't say, "Our office hours for compassion are 9 a.m.-1 p.m."
The role of the church in a fast-paced society is a special one. Its role is to be a collection of compassionate Christians, ministering in tolerance and love to individuals who are trying to discover their way home as they march toward death.
I once saw a church lose its compassion due to the fast track on which it ran. It was the most frightful thing I have witnessed. This church averaged around 700 people in Sunday school and worship. It was a fine, caring church. Everyone knew everyone else and really cared about them. It met its budget and moved along teaching and preaching the gospel. It was not spectacular, but it was caring. Its staff left some things to be desired, as all human staffs do, but it was a caring church. It had for 50 years put individuals on the road toward "home." Then, a new order came to town and the church started to "set the woods on fire." It became a great organization, a truly great and complex organization. The new order started two morning worship services and even two Sunday schools. Attendance averaged 1,100 each Sunday. You would think that that is real success. But it doesn't care anymore. It only grows in data. There is a fight once a week. Really, there is a fight per week. As many people flee out the back door as come in the front door. The church now misses its budget by $250,000. Its mission, the objective of its ministry, is not the person but the organization. It, as an entity, is a community leader, has burgeoning social programs, and incredible marketing success. But it has lost its compassion.
It is a heavy burden that Jesus put on us when he encountered that huge mob pressing and shoving and shouting, "Me next, me next!" He stopped in his tracks, felt the outstretched finger and said, "Who touched me? Who are you? Come here; I want to see you and know you. I want to show you the way home."
Now, that is the kind of God that you can really put stock in, can't you? A God that can be there as if there were only you and he, and nothing else mattered. Among all the people that crowded around him, Jesus found the one person who required his help and needed him as a Savior.
Sometimes you and I do not have great religious experiences. I read Guidepost magazine and I wonder why I don't have experiences like some of those people. I see friends who read Norman Vincent Peale and feel his close relationship with Christ and wonder why it doesn't work the same way for their lives. I wish sometimes, not all the time but sometimes, that I could preach like Billy Graham or Harry Emerson Fosdick or somebody else, or have an experience like Elijah or John of Patmos or Saint Francis of Assisi or even Peter Marshall. I see friends whose lives are sometimes as purposeless as a car in neutral; friends who wonder if their children have gone astray; people who wonder if their marriage will break up. That is, all of us sometimes live exactly the way the woman in our text suffered, spending every last penny and every last impulse of energy seeking a great cure or at least a calming assurance.
Do we not often find ourselves only having a hold on the very fringe of Jesus' robe? Indeed, do we not more often find ourselves honestly grasping for that outer fringe, that extreme edge of Jesus, than we find ourselves walking down the road beside him talking eyeball to eyeball? Can there be then, for us any greater assurance than the knowledge that if we will but hold tightly to that which we can reach of him in whatever our state, he will stop and turn around and want to know exactly who it is that has touched him? And then he will put us on the road toward home, regardless of the speed at which we live.
Such a perspective can prove salvific, not only in a highly secular world of unparalleled speed, but when the forces of doubt, cynicism, and bitterness cause the lights of home to flicker, low.
PART THREE
9. DOUBT AND HUMAN WILL
Ministers do not like to deal with doubts. We traffic in truths, eternal certainties, and faith. The word "doubt" is often relegated to a preacher's verbal doghouse. We don't preach sermons asking you to doubt something. Preachers fear doubters. Thank goodness we have removed the part from the wedding ceremony where the pastor used to ask "if there is anyone here who knows of any reasons or has any doubts that this ceremony should take place, let him speak now or forever keep his peace." For generations pastors feared that someone would speak up and doubt that the couple should get married.
One of the great anxieties of life is that someone might stand up in the face of one of your certainties about life and say, "I doubt that! I just doubt if that's right."
Doubt is a genuine possibility in Western religion. In the West we view human beings as God's creation and hold to an exhalted view of human will. Western and Eastern religious views contain distinctively different perspectives on the human will. In the East, human beings are viewed as simply one species among many natural beings. For example, the religious art of the East takes nature as its primary subject. Such landscape paintings suggest vastness, solitude, and continuous movement. Mountain and water contain the two ends of the natural religious spectrum. The place of human beings in that vastness is small. In fact, humans are so small that we have to look closely for them in the paintings if we find them at all. Eastern artists paint figures occasionally, but not so much as we do in the West. Humans are viewed as no higher in the scale of things than any other kind of matter that comes into being. As such, the religions of the East downgrade individual will.18
We in the West, on the other hand, exalt the individual will. Few religious writings depict this exalted will better than does a selection from the Psalmist of the Old Testament:
When I look at the heavens, the work of Thy finger, the moon and the stars which Thou hast established: what is man that Thou art mindful of him, and the son of man that Thou dost care for him?
Yet Thou has made him little less than God, and dost crown him with glory and honor. Thou has given him dominion over the works of thy hands; Thou hast put all things under his feet,
all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the sea.
Psalm 8:3-8 (RSV)
Our Western emphasis on the human will, coupled with the realities of murder and violence in a fast-paced secular society, have helped sustain alternatives to religious belief systems. We encounter philosophies that are atheistic, human-centered, and this-worldly. Humanism, a negative philosophy, begins with an explicit rejection of belief in God. Atheistic humanists believe that scientific evidence and rational analyses of human experience do not warrant belief in a God who directs human destiny and who loves and cares for his creation. Christian humanism, through a union of MarxistSocialist commitments and Christian theology, plays a significant role in some contemporary liberation movements.
When confronted with these alternative systems in a very unequal and unjust secular world, many Christians find certain traditional beliefs laboring under increasing doubts. Such doubt often causes the once bright and familiar lights of the home toward which we march to glow exceedingly dim.
It is of great comfort, therefore, to learn that the child of Bethlehem who points the way home through the darkness is also a doubter. The central force of our faith is the birth in Bethlehem of the world's greatest religious doubter. Yes, Jesus was a doubter. Think about it. We are saved by Jesus' faith, and sometimes I think we are also saved by Jesus' daring doubts. Jesus is, in fact, a Savior for doubters. He was born into a world of universally accepted falsehoods and dared to stand up and cry: "I doubt that."
"An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth," was the true law. "I doubt that!" said Jesus.
People trusted in long prayers, rigid laws, and Sabbath rules as essential to true religion. "I doubt that!" said Jesus.
The popular idea was that Samaritans were an inferior people. "I doubt that!" said Jesus. "A good Samaritan is better than a bad Jew."
It was destined that way from his birth. You see, people believed that shepherds and lepers were unclean. Shepherds roamed the hillsides, keeping watch over their flocks. They could not always wash their hands or be careful about how they prepared food. They could not keep to the dietary laws of Judaism. "Shepherds are unclean and inferior," was the great truth of the established religion. In actuality, the words "for you a Saviour is born," as they were spoken to the shepherds, amounted to a great first century "I doubt that!"
"To you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour." That is extremely important. You see, in a way, we are all doubters. We live with skepticism, questions about God and humankind and uncertainties about life. Tell me Jesus is only the Savior of the true believers, the one who points the way toward home only for the great people of faith, and more often than not, I am left without a Savior.
Tell me Jesus is only the Savior of the true belivers, the great people of faith, and more often than not, I am left without a Savior. Tell me Jesus is a fellow doubter, a Savior come to lift me out of my doubts, empty himself that I might be exalted and find my way home, and his story then is a story that is enacted with me and for me.
We are all doubters. We believe that we possess unbelief. We may, even after all these years, doubt the Christian story although none of us would dare admit it.
There are human reactions to the Christian story which are rather unconscious ways of doubting the story. What goes through your mind when you hear about Caesar Augustus, about Joseph and Mary, about the shepherds in the fields and about the multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and singing?
Perhaps some of us do not listen very carefully, and that happens to me quite often.
Perhaps the story of this Christ seems like a nice fairy tale being told, far removed from the realities of life.
Perhaps, also, some of you, when you hear the story of his birth, life, and death, are reminded of the days of your youth long since gone by. As the late Karl Barth said on Christmas, it makes you think of when you "were told this story for the first time, of the Christmas tree, of the presents and the candies, of how beautiful things were, but are no longer and never will be again."19
These are some of our human reactions to the Christmas story. We are doubters even though our faith, our belief system, and our hope propel us into a church while others choose to stay home.
That's why the angels must come again. If we are to receive the Savior for honest doubters, the angel of the Lord must pass through the streets, the homes, and the churches. It is not enough to simply peddle the story. Something must be revealed to us and in us. The angel of the Lord must come to honest doubters like you and me, and point the way home again.
Peddling the story simply will not work. There's too much doubt, too much questioning, too much skepticism in us for that.
Harry Emerson Fosdick told of a family he knew who always kept Shakespeare's birthday. Every year on Shakespeare's date of birth, the father of the family, who was a poet, would light candles, call in a circle of congenial friends, and celebrate the evening with a great party. They would keep the birthday through giving gifts and reading Shakespeare's poetry to each other.20
That's nice, isn't it? It's memorable, noteworthy and quite a way to mark the passage of time.
The story of Christ is, hopefully, more than that. But it is more than that only if the Christ spirit comes to us through our doubts and skepticisms and lets something be born anew in us. The angel must pass through our homes and our churches each year or, at some point, our honest doubts will come to the surface and overwhelm the story.
One of the amazing recognitions of the early Christian church was that the peddling of a great story, even that of the resurrection or the babe in Bethlehem would not be enough for a world of doubters to find their way home.
The Apostle Paul wrote a letter to the Corinthian church in which he said, "We are not, like so many, peddlers of God's word; we are sincere ... do not believe us because we peddle a story ... you yourselves are our letters of recommendation ... written not with ink but with the spirit of God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts (2 Corinthians 2:17--3:3)."
Paul knew the Corinthians were, like us, too smooth, too scientific, too cautious, too doubting to be taken in by peddlers of stories. Apparently the peddler in the Mediterranean world had a reputation for cheating. The peddler took his message casually. His chief concern was: "How can I twist it a bit to make it appeal to an unconcerned audience so that they will buy it, and I will make a profit?"
There have always been religious peddlers in the world who have no experience with God's truth and who do not even believe all the hype they are saying but make a tremendous profit for themselves.
Paul said, "We are not peddling stories. There are plenty of people who can do that. We are asking you to accept the reality of God in your hearts. You, not the stories, will be God's letters of recommendation in the world. God doesn't need miraculous stories; God doesn't need a lot of ink; God needs you - your life - your expressions, to make the angels' truth heard again."
We should doubt the peddlers of wild stories but we must never deny the reality of the spirit of God that is written in human hearts.
The angels of God must continuously pass through the streets, the homes, and the churches of our fast-paced Western society each year. We must hear the voices of something that is a current reality if the home lights are to shine for us.
I see these angels all the time. And each time I encounter one, those faint lights of home start to glow brighter. One afternoon I saw an angel as I sat in my office scribbling away on a legal pad. I looked up and out of the window of the office I saw Sallie Memory slowly shuffling toward the sanctuary. Now, Sallie Memory was a member of our church who resided in Evergreens Nursing Home in High Point. On the day in question she was more than 94 years old. My initial thought was "my goodness, what's she doing away from the nursing home. She might fall down."
Well, Sallie had arranged for someone to bring her by the church because she had heard we had cushions in the pews and she wanted to sit on one and look at the Christmas decorations. She had also read in our newsletter where we were a little behind in the budget, so she had someone take her to the bank where she withdrew $100 in cash. She brought that over to "help us."
It took Sallie two little rest periods to walk the distance from the parking lot to the sanctuary. Finally, she got in there and sat down on the first pew. Her eyesight was too poor to see the poinsettias, but she could see the Chrismon tree. And she loved being there. She loved the cushions and the tree and what that place represented in her life. She and I just sat in there for a few minutes and somehow the place looked different. It looked better.
That kind of faith and expression of worth, evidenced in a 94-year-old lady getting out of her bed in the nursing home and coming over to the church with her frail body and money from her savings account, should say more to us about there being some truth to this Bethlehem event than any story we could ever peddle.
Doubt cannot stand up in the face of a theory or a story made flesh. Only the persistent presence of faithful visionaries can provide evidence in a world of doubt. Frankly, most of us must, at times, depend on the vision of others to point the way home when our own doubting eyesight begins to see only flickers of the lights of home. Especially is this true when our doubts degenerate into cynicism.
