Just A Crazy Story
Sermon
Sermons On The Second Readings
Series II, Cycle A
Object:
Zack had seen the movie. You know, the one with Jim Carrey and Jennifer Aniston -- Bruce Almighty. Zack thought it was a pretty cheesy movie ... so predictable ... God helps the guy get the girl. But Zack was thinking, who wants a girl who wants commitment and kids? And who really wants a job? Zack didn't want a job; all he wanted was money. Even oil company executives probably had to do something to make money other than raising prices every time some Middle Eastern king had a toothache. Zack didn't want to do anything. All Zack wanted was money and lots of it -- and babes.
Still, Zack had to figure out how to get God to give him the kind of power God gave Bruce in the movie. Unlike Bruce, Zack didn't have a bone to pick with God about how unjustly the world was run. Zack didn't really give a rip how the world was run. He knew from the movie that God knew what he was thinking, so there was no way he could pretend he was angry with the way God ran the world. God would see right through that, Zack thought.
"That's right. I would," God said.
Zack slowly lifted his head up off his kitchen table. He'd fallen asleep there after beer number seven. He was eager to see if God really was right there in his kitchen with him or if he was still drunk, because the voice he was hearing sounded exactly like the voice of God in the movie. Zack had to lift his head up slowly, because it felt like a planet that had just been smacked by an asteroid into a wobbly orbit.
"That's very perceptive of you to realize you can't pull the wool over my eyes, Zachary," said God.
After he rubbed the sleepers out of his eyes, Zack found himself looking at the same Morgan Freeman guy who was in the movie. He had the mop and the bucket on wheels and everything.
"And I was impressed that you were so quick to hope that I was with you when you heard my voice. I like that. Hope is important. And finally, Zachary, you have some very orthodox beliefs about me despite the fact that ostensibly, you want to have nothing to do with me."
"Right," said Zack, "What I want is money...."
"And babes," said God.
"Yeah. Babes. So it is you."
"It is. And during the time you'll have all my powers, I'm going to be cleaning this place up. How can you live in this pigsty?"
"You sound like my mother."
"I like to think it's the other way around: Your mother sounds like me."
"Don't you have anything better to do than clean up my mess?"
"No, I don't, Zachary. You remember, of course, the story of the lost sheep."
"Yeah, I remember the Sunday school thing. So while you're out looking for the lost sheep, when do I get the babes?"
"You remember the two rules, Zachary?"
"Uh ... yeah: I can't kill anyone. And I can't interfere with free will."
"Excellent. Despite the loss of 348,215 brain cells last night alone, you're a pretty sharp young man. I designed the human brain with its superfluous capacity for the folly of youth."
"Very generous of you."
"Thank you."
"Hey, God?"
"Yes?"
"Don't people ask you for your powers a lot? I mean, after that movie, you'd think there'd be like this huge rush of people thinking they could do a way better job being God than Jim Carrey."
"No, Zachary, there hasn't been a big rush to be Bruce Almighty. Most people can tell the difference between a movie and reality. But there is some truth in that movie. From the beginning of human life, people wished they were God. Adam and Eve wished they were God. It's a very old story, Zachary. Humans have always wanted to do their own thing. Make their own rules. Get special treatment. I have to let you people do what you want. I didn't make you puppets. It's tempting, though. Most days I wish I could just force you to you love me and appreciate all that I've done for you. But I can't."
"There's stuff God can't do? Wow. Anyway. About those babes."
"You're all set, Zachary."
"I got the power?"
"Every bit."
"Cool."
"Now kindly get yourself out of my way, Zachary, so I can get to work around here."
"Yes, sir!"
"Now, that's just what I like to hear, son: obedience."
Zack smiled at God, shaking his head. "Nice try, dude." Zack slapped his hands on the table so that all the dishes on it jumped and clanged. Zack groaned and brought his hands to his temples to attempt to massage the pain and dizziness out of them. God chuckled to himself as he began clearing a space at the sink, so he could fill his bucket with hot water. Zack eventually pushed himself away from the table and staggered off into his bedroom to take a shower and dress for his divine debut.
Now, nothing God said convinced Zack that equality with God was something that he ought not to be exploiting. So as soon as he was dressed and ready to go, Zack wished for ten bazillion dollars. Stacks of green backs appeared in his bedroom instantaneously. "Cool," was all Zack could say, and he filled his car up with the cash, drove to his bank and deposited it using the ATM machine to avoid answering any embarrassing questions from the tellers. It took three hours, even though he kept two bazillion dollars in his pocket for chump change.
After that, he drove straight to a tax accountant to have him figure out how much tax he had to pay on ten bazillion dollars, because Zack was afraid the IRS would find out and spoil his spree.
While he was waiting around at the accountant's office, Zack began hearing this tremendous background noise like he was in a room with about ten bazillion people all jabbering away at once, and he remembered from the movie that he was going to have to listen to all the prayers in the world. Even though he miraculously understood all the prayers, Zack could tell they were in at least ten bazillion languages, and he wondered how God could think straight with all that racket.
A lot of the prayers came with incense to which Zack discovered he was allergic, because he eventually started sneezing uncontrollably. When he left the tax accountant's office, he went straight to the emergency room and was told ($1,000 later) there wasn't anything the doctors could do for people with allergies to incense except to advise them to become Baptists. But Zack wasn't just the God of the Baptists. He was also the God of those incense-burning Catholics and Episcopalians and Orthodox Christians.
So he was stuck with incense and the constant post-nasal drip.
He also correctly foresaw that Sunday was going to be one heck of a racket.
But that was a day away, and he had lots to do -- like get on an airplane, go to Washington State, and buy a nice 10,000-acre spread in the Olympic Mountains to build a sprawling, 80,000 square-foot mansion. And invite some babes over for one whale of a party.
Since Zack didn't have any luggage, and since the name on his driver's license now read "Yahweh Elohim," he was immediately shunted aside by several courteous homeland security officers and locked up in a small room for interrogation. When they discovered that he also had two bazillion dollars in his pocket, officers of the FBI, NSA, CIA, and the ASPCA were rushed to the scene. When they had all assembled, Zack calmly explained everything: "Okay, dudes, this is the deal: I'm God. I'm prepared to give each one of you a billion dollars if you'll just forget this ever happened."
Zack was encouraged by the fact that the FBI agent thanked him politely for his generous offer and asked him if he would excuse them all for a moment while they discussed it.
They were back two hours later, after having tried to figure out which issue they were having with Zack was the worst: the fact that he had an Arabic-sounding name, the fact that he had offered them a billion dollar bribe, the fact that he thought he was God, or the fact that he had failed to pay a parking ticket back in 1974. Since even Adam and Eve had wanted to be God, the officials decided that wasn't a punishable offense, just proof that he was crazy as a loon. Since Zack was crazy as a loon, he obviously didn't understand that attempting to bribe an entire room full of governmental officials was a felony, so they agreed the parking ticket was the only thing they could pin on him, and they released him after taking $8 to cover the ticket.
By then Zack had missed his flight.
It was dark when he finally reached the Seattle Tacoma International Airport, but he was very anxious just to be in the Olympic Mountains, just to smell the cedar-scented ocean air. He rented a car right away and headed south on I-5. At about two in the morning, in the middle of the Olympic National Forest, the car just quit running. Being God you'd think he could have just snapped his fingers and repaired the car just like Bruce did in the movie, but this wasn't a movie. It was reality. Because computers ran all the car's systems (which God had not created), Zack couldn't get the car started. After Zack had slammed the hood of the car down in disgust, he noticed he was surrounded by some extremely creepy looking characters who had slunk out of the woods behind him.
"Dude," they said, "what are you doing out here at two o'clock in the morning?"
Zack explained his life-long wish to see the Olympic Mountains and asked them if they might have a place where he could spend the night.
"Dude. We're meth squatters. We can't show you our operation."
Zack convinced them that he had absolutely no idea where he was, and if they blindfolded him, led him to their shelter and back, he'd never be able to find them again. "All these trees look exactly alike to me, man."
So they took him in. Just as Zack reached their "operation," the whole thing blew up. All of the squatters were severely burned and were lying about wherever the power of the blast had thrown them. They were all groaning and dying. Zack knew he'd never be able to find the highway again, but also felt he just couldn't leave them there to die, so he started groping about in the forest, listening for their groaning, and one by one he healed them -- not only of their wounds, but of all of their addictions as well. It was absolutely clear to Zack and the squatters that they would have all died if he hadn't been there -- none of them were in any shape to drive out and get help. Their wounds would have become infected, rains would have come, they would have all succumbed to hypothermia or pneumonia, and they would have all been dead in days.
When Zack had finally helped gather all of them around a campfire, one of the squatters asked Zack how he'd been able to heal them, and Zack reluctantly revealed to them that he was God. They all believed Zack and fell to their knees to worship him and thank him, tears in their eyes. One by one, they began to tell him their stories. When they had all spoken, one of the squatters looked at Zack with a pitiful, grateful smile, "We want to follow you, Lord! We want to go down into Seattle and start a homeless shelter and a twelve-step program for meth addicts, so we can save them like you saved us. If we can't get your car started, we can take our truck down. Soon as it's light." They all agreed, nodding their heads, some of them saying, "Amen." One by one, they rose up and each gave Zack a big hug.
Zack couldn't bear to tell them that he really didn't want anything to do with running a homeless shelter and a twelve-step program for meth addicts in Seattle, and that what he really wanted to do is get the heck away from all the world's problems and build his bazillion-dollar house for babes in the mountains. Yet, Zack couldn't change their freely chosen plan.
Deep down, he felt like it was kind of a cool plan. He felt proud of them. As they began to talk about how to organize their homeless shelter, he began to regard these bedraggled, bedeviled people as better than himself. Somehow his equality with God didn't seem to be something he should be exploiting any longer. He began to feel that their interests were more important than his own. He began to feel of the same mind with them, of one accord with them. He felt their love for him.
No, not that kind of love.
The only woman among the squatters was no longer a babe.
She had scraggly, oily hair with pine needles stuck in it, she was bone thin, her face was skeletal, several of her yellowed teeth were missing, her clothes were filthy, and her jeans were so torn up even a teenager wouldn't want to buy them for $150.
It was then that all of them started hearing the voices that had been a distracting background racket for Zack all along. Voices in ten bazillion languages suddenly became discernable to Zack and to all of them. The sound was a beautiful, mournful, joyful, singing sort of sound that they all gradually understood was the sound of the million worship services that were beginning one after another to the east of them as the new day was dawning.
They sat up the rest of the night enraptured by the sound of worship of the real God as it began spreading toward them, time zone by time zone, growing louder and louder: pianos, pipe organs, choirs, children singing, bells ringing, and yes, the fragrance of incense and flowers and beeswax candles all effusing the magical essence of which they were miraculously made. When the sun arose they were entranced, embraced, enraptured by all this worship everywhere: They closed their eyes and swayed and hummed along or sang along; they were completely filled with joy and happiness.
They got into the old, rusty, extended-cab pickup, started the coughing, sputtering engine, backed it out on the highway, and started down the road. At a curve where a spectacular view of a plunging rocky chasm suddenly opened before them, the rusty front axle snapped, sending the truck into a spin that took them all over the edge to their deaths.
It was then that Zack truly became like God: When he had come to have the same love and mind of Jesus Christ who did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, who gave his life looking to the interests of others, and who was obedient in this way to the point of death -- not death in a 1972 Ford pickup plunging off a switchback -- but death upon a cross.
Let that same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, that was in Zack and his friends. Have that same kind of love. "Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus," that was in Zack and his friends (Philippians 2:3-5).
I know it was just a crazy story.
But there's some truth in it. Amen.
Still, Zack had to figure out how to get God to give him the kind of power God gave Bruce in the movie. Unlike Bruce, Zack didn't have a bone to pick with God about how unjustly the world was run. Zack didn't really give a rip how the world was run. He knew from the movie that God knew what he was thinking, so there was no way he could pretend he was angry with the way God ran the world. God would see right through that, Zack thought.
"That's right. I would," God said.
Zack slowly lifted his head up off his kitchen table. He'd fallen asleep there after beer number seven. He was eager to see if God really was right there in his kitchen with him or if he was still drunk, because the voice he was hearing sounded exactly like the voice of God in the movie. Zack had to lift his head up slowly, because it felt like a planet that had just been smacked by an asteroid into a wobbly orbit.
"That's very perceptive of you to realize you can't pull the wool over my eyes, Zachary," said God.
After he rubbed the sleepers out of his eyes, Zack found himself looking at the same Morgan Freeman guy who was in the movie. He had the mop and the bucket on wheels and everything.
"And I was impressed that you were so quick to hope that I was with you when you heard my voice. I like that. Hope is important. And finally, Zachary, you have some very orthodox beliefs about me despite the fact that ostensibly, you want to have nothing to do with me."
"Right," said Zack, "What I want is money...."
"And babes," said God.
"Yeah. Babes. So it is you."
"It is. And during the time you'll have all my powers, I'm going to be cleaning this place up. How can you live in this pigsty?"
"You sound like my mother."
"I like to think it's the other way around: Your mother sounds like me."
"Don't you have anything better to do than clean up my mess?"
"No, I don't, Zachary. You remember, of course, the story of the lost sheep."
"Yeah, I remember the Sunday school thing. So while you're out looking for the lost sheep, when do I get the babes?"
"You remember the two rules, Zachary?"
"Uh ... yeah: I can't kill anyone. And I can't interfere with free will."
"Excellent. Despite the loss of 348,215 brain cells last night alone, you're a pretty sharp young man. I designed the human brain with its superfluous capacity for the folly of youth."
"Very generous of you."
"Thank you."
"Hey, God?"
"Yes?"
"Don't people ask you for your powers a lot? I mean, after that movie, you'd think there'd be like this huge rush of people thinking they could do a way better job being God than Jim Carrey."
"No, Zachary, there hasn't been a big rush to be Bruce Almighty. Most people can tell the difference between a movie and reality. But there is some truth in that movie. From the beginning of human life, people wished they were God. Adam and Eve wished they were God. It's a very old story, Zachary. Humans have always wanted to do their own thing. Make their own rules. Get special treatment. I have to let you people do what you want. I didn't make you puppets. It's tempting, though. Most days I wish I could just force you to you love me and appreciate all that I've done for you. But I can't."
"There's stuff God can't do? Wow. Anyway. About those babes."
"You're all set, Zachary."
"I got the power?"
"Every bit."
"Cool."
"Now kindly get yourself out of my way, Zachary, so I can get to work around here."
"Yes, sir!"
"Now, that's just what I like to hear, son: obedience."
Zack smiled at God, shaking his head. "Nice try, dude." Zack slapped his hands on the table so that all the dishes on it jumped and clanged. Zack groaned and brought his hands to his temples to attempt to massage the pain and dizziness out of them. God chuckled to himself as he began clearing a space at the sink, so he could fill his bucket with hot water. Zack eventually pushed himself away from the table and staggered off into his bedroom to take a shower and dress for his divine debut.
Now, nothing God said convinced Zack that equality with God was something that he ought not to be exploiting. So as soon as he was dressed and ready to go, Zack wished for ten bazillion dollars. Stacks of green backs appeared in his bedroom instantaneously. "Cool," was all Zack could say, and he filled his car up with the cash, drove to his bank and deposited it using the ATM machine to avoid answering any embarrassing questions from the tellers. It took three hours, even though he kept two bazillion dollars in his pocket for chump change.
After that, he drove straight to a tax accountant to have him figure out how much tax he had to pay on ten bazillion dollars, because Zack was afraid the IRS would find out and spoil his spree.
While he was waiting around at the accountant's office, Zack began hearing this tremendous background noise like he was in a room with about ten bazillion people all jabbering away at once, and he remembered from the movie that he was going to have to listen to all the prayers in the world. Even though he miraculously understood all the prayers, Zack could tell they were in at least ten bazillion languages, and he wondered how God could think straight with all that racket.
A lot of the prayers came with incense to which Zack discovered he was allergic, because he eventually started sneezing uncontrollably. When he left the tax accountant's office, he went straight to the emergency room and was told ($1,000 later) there wasn't anything the doctors could do for people with allergies to incense except to advise them to become Baptists. But Zack wasn't just the God of the Baptists. He was also the God of those incense-burning Catholics and Episcopalians and Orthodox Christians.
So he was stuck with incense and the constant post-nasal drip.
He also correctly foresaw that Sunday was going to be one heck of a racket.
But that was a day away, and he had lots to do -- like get on an airplane, go to Washington State, and buy a nice 10,000-acre spread in the Olympic Mountains to build a sprawling, 80,000 square-foot mansion. And invite some babes over for one whale of a party.
Since Zack didn't have any luggage, and since the name on his driver's license now read "Yahweh Elohim," he was immediately shunted aside by several courteous homeland security officers and locked up in a small room for interrogation. When they discovered that he also had two bazillion dollars in his pocket, officers of the FBI, NSA, CIA, and the ASPCA were rushed to the scene. When they had all assembled, Zack calmly explained everything: "Okay, dudes, this is the deal: I'm God. I'm prepared to give each one of you a billion dollars if you'll just forget this ever happened."
Zack was encouraged by the fact that the FBI agent thanked him politely for his generous offer and asked him if he would excuse them all for a moment while they discussed it.
They were back two hours later, after having tried to figure out which issue they were having with Zack was the worst: the fact that he had an Arabic-sounding name, the fact that he had offered them a billion dollar bribe, the fact that he thought he was God, or the fact that he had failed to pay a parking ticket back in 1974. Since even Adam and Eve had wanted to be God, the officials decided that wasn't a punishable offense, just proof that he was crazy as a loon. Since Zack was crazy as a loon, he obviously didn't understand that attempting to bribe an entire room full of governmental officials was a felony, so they agreed the parking ticket was the only thing they could pin on him, and they released him after taking $8 to cover the ticket.
By then Zack had missed his flight.
It was dark when he finally reached the Seattle Tacoma International Airport, but he was very anxious just to be in the Olympic Mountains, just to smell the cedar-scented ocean air. He rented a car right away and headed south on I-5. At about two in the morning, in the middle of the Olympic National Forest, the car just quit running. Being God you'd think he could have just snapped his fingers and repaired the car just like Bruce did in the movie, but this wasn't a movie. It was reality. Because computers ran all the car's systems (which God had not created), Zack couldn't get the car started. After Zack had slammed the hood of the car down in disgust, he noticed he was surrounded by some extremely creepy looking characters who had slunk out of the woods behind him.
"Dude," they said, "what are you doing out here at two o'clock in the morning?"
Zack explained his life-long wish to see the Olympic Mountains and asked them if they might have a place where he could spend the night.
"Dude. We're meth squatters. We can't show you our operation."
Zack convinced them that he had absolutely no idea where he was, and if they blindfolded him, led him to their shelter and back, he'd never be able to find them again. "All these trees look exactly alike to me, man."
So they took him in. Just as Zack reached their "operation," the whole thing blew up. All of the squatters were severely burned and were lying about wherever the power of the blast had thrown them. They were all groaning and dying. Zack knew he'd never be able to find the highway again, but also felt he just couldn't leave them there to die, so he started groping about in the forest, listening for their groaning, and one by one he healed them -- not only of their wounds, but of all of their addictions as well. It was absolutely clear to Zack and the squatters that they would have all died if he hadn't been there -- none of them were in any shape to drive out and get help. Their wounds would have become infected, rains would have come, they would have all succumbed to hypothermia or pneumonia, and they would have all been dead in days.
When Zack had finally helped gather all of them around a campfire, one of the squatters asked Zack how he'd been able to heal them, and Zack reluctantly revealed to them that he was God. They all believed Zack and fell to their knees to worship him and thank him, tears in their eyes. One by one, they began to tell him their stories. When they had all spoken, one of the squatters looked at Zack with a pitiful, grateful smile, "We want to follow you, Lord! We want to go down into Seattle and start a homeless shelter and a twelve-step program for meth addicts, so we can save them like you saved us. If we can't get your car started, we can take our truck down. Soon as it's light." They all agreed, nodding their heads, some of them saying, "Amen." One by one, they rose up and each gave Zack a big hug.
Zack couldn't bear to tell them that he really didn't want anything to do with running a homeless shelter and a twelve-step program for meth addicts in Seattle, and that what he really wanted to do is get the heck away from all the world's problems and build his bazillion-dollar house for babes in the mountains. Yet, Zack couldn't change their freely chosen plan.
Deep down, he felt like it was kind of a cool plan. He felt proud of them. As they began to talk about how to organize their homeless shelter, he began to regard these bedraggled, bedeviled people as better than himself. Somehow his equality with God didn't seem to be something he should be exploiting any longer. He began to feel that their interests were more important than his own. He began to feel of the same mind with them, of one accord with them. He felt their love for him.
No, not that kind of love.
The only woman among the squatters was no longer a babe.
She had scraggly, oily hair with pine needles stuck in it, she was bone thin, her face was skeletal, several of her yellowed teeth were missing, her clothes were filthy, and her jeans were so torn up even a teenager wouldn't want to buy them for $150.
It was then that all of them started hearing the voices that had been a distracting background racket for Zack all along. Voices in ten bazillion languages suddenly became discernable to Zack and to all of them. The sound was a beautiful, mournful, joyful, singing sort of sound that they all gradually understood was the sound of the million worship services that were beginning one after another to the east of them as the new day was dawning.
They sat up the rest of the night enraptured by the sound of worship of the real God as it began spreading toward them, time zone by time zone, growing louder and louder: pianos, pipe organs, choirs, children singing, bells ringing, and yes, the fragrance of incense and flowers and beeswax candles all effusing the magical essence of which they were miraculously made. When the sun arose they were entranced, embraced, enraptured by all this worship everywhere: They closed their eyes and swayed and hummed along or sang along; they were completely filled with joy and happiness.
They got into the old, rusty, extended-cab pickup, started the coughing, sputtering engine, backed it out on the highway, and started down the road. At a curve where a spectacular view of a plunging rocky chasm suddenly opened before them, the rusty front axle snapped, sending the truck into a spin that took them all over the edge to their deaths.
It was then that Zack truly became like God: When he had come to have the same love and mind of Jesus Christ who did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, who gave his life looking to the interests of others, and who was obedient in this way to the point of death -- not death in a 1972 Ford pickup plunging off a switchback -- but death upon a cross.
Let that same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, that was in Zack and his friends. Have that same kind of love. "Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus," that was in Zack and his friends (Philippians 2:3-5).
I know it was just a crazy story.
But there's some truth in it. Amen.
