Leaping From Recognition Point
Sermon
Sermons On The First Readings
Series II, Cycle B
Leaping From Recognition Point
There is a small community in north-central Ohio named Clyde. Back in 1919, a man named Sherwood Anderson, who had grown up in Clyde, published a book of short stories called Winesburg, Ohio. But rather than being proud that one of their hometown boys had made good, a lot of the residents resented Anderson. It didn't take them long to figure out that the fictional Winesburg that served as the setting for his stories was a thinly disguised Clyde, and in the foibles and flaws of his characters, several of the townspeople recognized themselves. What they saw did not please them.
Actually, writers of fiction have been inventing characters based on real people for a long time, though often they mix things up enough that the persons copied do not identify themselves as easily as the Clyde people did. But imagine how you would feel if someone you know published a book in which you recognized yourself, with little more than your name and a few circumstances changed -- especially if that character were portrayed in a less than complimentary light.
That, in essence, is what happened to King David in our Old Testament reading for today. That reading follows the account we read here last week where David took to his bed the wife of one of his soldiers, and then had that man murdered. Subsequently, David married the widow. In today's account, God sent the prophet Nathan to David to confront him about what he had done, and Nathan fulfills his mission. Instead of coming at the king head on, however, Nathan tells the king a story about a rich man having large flocks and herds who steals the single lamb of a poor man, presenting the account as a legal dispute. At first, David hears the story literally and wants to have the rich man punished. But then Nathan delivers the punch line: "You are the man!"
Now in our culture today, when one guy says, "You are the man!" to another guy, it's usually understood as an expression of praise or congratulations, though we'd probably say it playfully as, "You da man!" But Nathan wasn't being playful or cute, but absolutely serious: "The cruel, selfish, rich man in that story I just told, O king -- that's you!" Of course, Nathan didn't actually say "cruel" and "selfish." He didn't have to. King David was intelligent, and as soon as Nathan made the connection for him, David was immediately able to fill in the details. David was a king with a whole harem of women, and instead of being content with them, he took the only wife of one of his men.
We can well imagine that at the moment Nathan said, "You are the man!" a wave of terrible self-realization surged over David, for in voicing his anger at the rich man who stole the poor man's lamb, he had in effect, pronounced himself guilty.
Almost immediately, David repented wholeheartedly for his actions. In fact, Psalm 51, which includes the line, "For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before," has traditionally been considered to be David's prayer of repentance on this occasion. God accepted David's remorse and forgave him, but the consequences of David's action could not be undone. David paid a horrible price in subsequent troubles in his family, largely because of forces his sin had put into motion. (Specifically, two of his sons eventually claimed the right, like their father, to do whatever they wanted whenever they wanted to, and great pain followed.)
That is another sermon, however. What is of interest to us today is what happens to any of us when we have a sudden recognition of ourselves in a tale or lesson we see or hear or read somewhere or in verses from the Bible. The story or lesson may not even have been aimed at us personally, but we see ourselves in it anyway. Now it is always possible that such a moment will be one in which we recognize something especially good about ourselves that we had not noticed before, but more often, it's something unflattering that we see.
For another example, consider the incident in Luke 7:36-48. Jesus tells a parable, and he narrates it particularly because of the attitude of a Pharisee named Simon at whose table Jesus was dining. During the meal, a woman who was a known sinner entered the house, and coming near Jesus, she began weeping on his feet. She then dried his feet with her hair and anointed them with ointment. Simon, disturbed by this whole business, says to himself that if Jesus were really a prophet, he'd know the character of the woman touching him. Jesus is able to discern his dinner host's thought, and then tells him a parable about a man who was owed money by two debtors. One owed him a small amount and the other owed him a substantial sum. The man forgave both debts. "Now which one will love him more?" Jesus asks Simon. The Pharisee answers correctly that it would likely be the one for whom the greater debt was canceled. It does not appear, however, that Simon recognizes himself as the one who had had a small debt forgiven and was not very grateful, but that seems to be at least part of the reason Jesus told the story. It was an invitation for Simon to come to recognition point.
It is also significant that Jesus concluded several of his parables or pithy sayings by adding, "Let anyone who has ears to hear, listen!"
G. K. Chesterton, one of the great British writers of the last century, wrote both Christian nonfiction and mystery novels featuring a priest, Father Brown, who was the protagonist in the stories. In one of his books, Chesterton has Father Brown explain how he solved some murders. The priest says, "You see, it was I who killed all those people." He wasn't saying he was actually the killer, but that he had looked inside himself and discovered there the kind of mentality that under the right circumstances would have allowed him to commit similar crimes. The priest goes on to say:
No man's really any good till he knows how bad he is, or might be; till he's realized exactly how much right he has to all his snobbery, and sneering, and talking about "criminals," as if they were [beasts] in a forest 10,000 miles away ... till he's squeezed out of his soul the last drop of the oil of the Pharisees; till his only hope is to somehow or other to have captured one criminal, and kept him safe and sane under his own hat.1
That is a "there but for the grace of God go I," understanding of human nature.
In a previous church appointment, I had the idea one time to put a small box in the back of the church and invite parishioners to drop in suggestions for sermon topics. I received a few helpful suggestions from the box, but I eventually discontinued it because every so often someone would drop in a suggestion that started something like, "Preach a sermon about how people shouldn't do thus and so." The tone of those notes convinced me that somebody was ticked off at somebody else and wanted to enlist the preaching to give the other person what for. But I've always made it practice never to preach a sermon with one person in mind. It's fair neither to that person nor to everybody else who has to sit through it, and I wasn't about to start then.
That said, however, every so often after a sermon someone will come to me and say, "I really needed to hear that sermon this morning" or "You must have been listening in at our house this week" or "You stepped on my toes this morning." And those comments usually surprise me because if I'd had to guess who might need to hear something, invariably, it wouldn't have been the person who said so. In other words, those people heard the equivalent of "You are the man" in the sermon even though I wasn't aiming it at anybody in particular.
There is, however, one person who rather consistently decides that sermons are aimed at him -- and that's me, myself. Many is the time when I have been writing a sermon, delving into my commentaries and illustration files, when it hits me that what I am writing about in the sermon is something that I need to hear, where I need to acknowledge, "I am the man!" Or sometimes I have to say, "Gee, the shoe fits me; I better wear it."
As the stories of David the king and Simon the Pharisee show us, God sometime delivers his messages to us by indirect means, and there is no shortage of those channels. It is, of course, possible to assume messages are for us where they aren't. I happen to be reading a book by a medical doctor right now who mentioned that one problem she had while in medical school was that almost every time she learned about a new illness, she began to suspect that she had it herself. She said a lot of med students have similar experiences. But in reality, she had none of those diseases, so whatever applications she was making to herself were wrong. There were no personal messages for her in her textbooks.
By the same token, we should not expect that every time we read the Bible there will be a personal communication from God imbedded it its verses. We should not expect that every devotional we read fits us or that every criticism someone levels at us is deserved or accurate. Not every story is our story and not every sermon is the one we need to hear.
Nonetheless, there are times when God does speak to us through some indirect means, by some parable or news or example or story that leads us to a point of recognition where we cannot help but observe, "I am the man!" or "That's me in that story."
The reason God sometimes leads us to recognition point is so that we can leap off of it. For David, the leap was to repent and seek God's forgiveness. For the Simon the Pharisee the leap -- though we don't know if he made it or not -- was to see himself as no less a sinner than the woman who knelt before Jesus and to be more compassionate and understanding of those who struggle against sin.
Recognizing ourselves in some of the Bible's stories or in some other medium not targeted directly at us is often an invitation to grow or leap in faith or in compassion or in understanding or in wisdom or in grace.
There's a song in our hymnbook that is about arriving at recognition point, though it doesn't say it quite that way. It's a spiritual that came out of the American slave community, and it says, "It's me, it's me, O Lord, standing in the need of prayer ... Not my brother, not my sister, but it's me, O Lord, standing in the need of prayer." Commenting on this spiritual, William B. McClain, who wrote a book about hymnody, said that "the slaves saw the assurance of salvation as largely a personal responsibility."2 In other words, each said in some way, "I am the one in need of prayer."
I cannot say this morning what personal messages God may want each of us to hear today. If indeed God is speaking to us now, those messages are likely as different as we are different people. But we can learn from David and Simon that not every communiqu? from God comes head on, and that there is always the possibly when we read the scriptures or hear about a "certain man" or a "certain woman," that we too are them.
When that happens, it's critical not to just linger too long at recognition point, but to leap off in the direction of what that recognition calls us to do.
____________
1.ÊQuoted by J. I. Packer, I Want to Be a Christian (Middlesex, UK: Kingsway, 1977).
2.ÊCome Sunday: The Liturgy of Zion (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1990), p. 101.
There is a small community in north-central Ohio named Clyde. Back in 1919, a man named Sherwood Anderson, who had grown up in Clyde, published a book of short stories called Winesburg, Ohio. But rather than being proud that one of their hometown boys had made good, a lot of the residents resented Anderson. It didn't take them long to figure out that the fictional Winesburg that served as the setting for his stories was a thinly disguised Clyde, and in the foibles and flaws of his characters, several of the townspeople recognized themselves. What they saw did not please them.
Actually, writers of fiction have been inventing characters based on real people for a long time, though often they mix things up enough that the persons copied do not identify themselves as easily as the Clyde people did. But imagine how you would feel if someone you know published a book in which you recognized yourself, with little more than your name and a few circumstances changed -- especially if that character were portrayed in a less than complimentary light.
That, in essence, is what happened to King David in our Old Testament reading for today. That reading follows the account we read here last week where David took to his bed the wife of one of his soldiers, and then had that man murdered. Subsequently, David married the widow. In today's account, God sent the prophet Nathan to David to confront him about what he had done, and Nathan fulfills his mission. Instead of coming at the king head on, however, Nathan tells the king a story about a rich man having large flocks and herds who steals the single lamb of a poor man, presenting the account as a legal dispute. At first, David hears the story literally and wants to have the rich man punished. But then Nathan delivers the punch line: "You are the man!"
Now in our culture today, when one guy says, "You are the man!" to another guy, it's usually understood as an expression of praise or congratulations, though we'd probably say it playfully as, "You da man!" But Nathan wasn't being playful or cute, but absolutely serious: "The cruel, selfish, rich man in that story I just told, O king -- that's you!" Of course, Nathan didn't actually say "cruel" and "selfish." He didn't have to. King David was intelligent, and as soon as Nathan made the connection for him, David was immediately able to fill in the details. David was a king with a whole harem of women, and instead of being content with them, he took the only wife of one of his men.
We can well imagine that at the moment Nathan said, "You are the man!" a wave of terrible self-realization surged over David, for in voicing his anger at the rich man who stole the poor man's lamb, he had in effect, pronounced himself guilty.
Almost immediately, David repented wholeheartedly for his actions. In fact, Psalm 51, which includes the line, "For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before," has traditionally been considered to be David's prayer of repentance on this occasion. God accepted David's remorse and forgave him, but the consequences of David's action could not be undone. David paid a horrible price in subsequent troubles in his family, largely because of forces his sin had put into motion. (Specifically, two of his sons eventually claimed the right, like their father, to do whatever they wanted whenever they wanted to, and great pain followed.)
That is another sermon, however. What is of interest to us today is what happens to any of us when we have a sudden recognition of ourselves in a tale or lesson we see or hear or read somewhere or in verses from the Bible. The story or lesson may not even have been aimed at us personally, but we see ourselves in it anyway. Now it is always possible that such a moment will be one in which we recognize something especially good about ourselves that we had not noticed before, but more often, it's something unflattering that we see.
For another example, consider the incident in Luke 7:36-48. Jesus tells a parable, and he narrates it particularly because of the attitude of a Pharisee named Simon at whose table Jesus was dining. During the meal, a woman who was a known sinner entered the house, and coming near Jesus, she began weeping on his feet. She then dried his feet with her hair and anointed them with ointment. Simon, disturbed by this whole business, says to himself that if Jesus were really a prophet, he'd know the character of the woman touching him. Jesus is able to discern his dinner host's thought, and then tells him a parable about a man who was owed money by two debtors. One owed him a small amount and the other owed him a substantial sum. The man forgave both debts. "Now which one will love him more?" Jesus asks Simon. The Pharisee answers correctly that it would likely be the one for whom the greater debt was canceled. It does not appear, however, that Simon recognizes himself as the one who had had a small debt forgiven and was not very grateful, but that seems to be at least part of the reason Jesus told the story. It was an invitation for Simon to come to recognition point.
It is also significant that Jesus concluded several of his parables or pithy sayings by adding, "Let anyone who has ears to hear, listen!"
G. K. Chesterton, one of the great British writers of the last century, wrote both Christian nonfiction and mystery novels featuring a priest, Father Brown, who was the protagonist in the stories. In one of his books, Chesterton has Father Brown explain how he solved some murders. The priest says, "You see, it was I who killed all those people." He wasn't saying he was actually the killer, but that he had looked inside himself and discovered there the kind of mentality that under the right circumstances would have allowed him to commit similar crimes. The priest goes on to say:
No man's really any good till he knows how bad he is, or might be; till he's realized exactly how much right he has to all his snobbery, and sneering, and talking about "criminals," as if they were [beasts] in a forest 10,000 miles away ... till he's squeezed out of his soul the last drop of the oil of the Pharisees; till his only hope is to somehow or other to have captured one criminal, and kept him safe and sane under his own hat.1
That is a "there but for the grace of God go I," understanding of human nature.
In a previous church appointment, I had the idea one time to put a small box in the back of the church and invite parishioners to drop in suggestions for sermon topics. I received a few helpful suggestions from the box, but I eventually discontinued it because every so often someone would drop in a suggestion that started something like, "Preach a sermon about how people shouldn't do thus and so." The tone of those notes convinced me that somebody was ticked off at somebody else and wanted to enlist the preaching to give the other person what for. But I've always made it practice never to preach a sermon with one person in mind. It's fair neither to that person nor to everybody else who has to sit through it, and I wasn't about to start then.
That said, however, every so often after a sermon someone will come to me and say, "I really needed to hear that sermon this morning" or "You must have been listening in at our house this week" or "You stepped on my toes this morning." And those comments usually surprise me because if I'd had to guess who might need to hear something, invariably, it wouldn't have been the person who said so. In other words, those people heard the equivalent of "You are the man" in the sermon even though I wasn't aiming it at anybody in particular.
There is, however, one person who rather consistently decides that sermons are aimed at him -- and that's me, myself. Many is the time when I have been writing a sermon, delving into my commentaries and illustration files, when it hits me that what I am writing about in the sermon is something that I need to hear, where I need to acknowledge, "I am the man!" Or sometimes I have to say, "Gee, the shoe fits me; I better wear it."
As the stories of David the king and Simon the Pharisee show us, God sometime delivers his messages to us by indirect means, and there is no shortage of those channels. It is, of course, possible to assume messages are for us where they aren't. I happen to be reading a book by a medical doctor right now who mentioned that one problem she had while in medical school was that almost every time she learned about a new illness, she began to suspect that she had it herself. She said a lot of med students have similar experiences. But in reality, she had none of those diseases, so whatever applications she was making to herself were wrong. There were no personal messages for her in her textbooks.
By the same token, we should not expect that every time we read the Bible there will be a personal communication from God imbedded it its verses. We should not expect that every devotional we read fits us or that every criticism someone levels at us is deserved or accurate. Not every story is our story and not every sermon is the one we need to hear.
Nonetheless, there are times when God does speak to us through some indirect means, by some parable or news or example or story that leads us to a point of recognition where we cannot help but observe, "I am the man!" or "That's me in that story."
The reason God sometimes leads us to recognition point is so that we can leap off of it. For David, the leap was to repent and seek God's forgiveness. For the Simon the Pharisee the leap -- though we don't know if he made it or not -- was to see himself as no less a sinner than the woman who knelt before Jesus and to be more compassionate and understanding of those who struggle against sin.
Recognizing ourselves in some of the Bible's stories or in some other medium not targeted directly at us is often an invitation to grow or leap in faith or in compassion or in understanding or in wisdom or in grace.
There's a song in our hymnbook that is about arriving at recognition point, though it doesn't say it quite that way. It's a spiritual that came out of the American slave community, and it says, "It's me, it's me, O Lord, standing in the need of prayer ... Not my brother, not my sister, but it's me, O Lord, standing in the need of prayer." Commenting on this spiritual, William B. McClain, who wrote a book about hymnody, said that "the slaves saw the assurance of salvation as largely a personal responsibility."2 In other words, each said in some way, "I am the one in need of prayer."
I cannot say this morning what personal messages God may want each of us to hear today. If indeed God is speaking to us now, those messages are likely as different as we are different people. But we can learn from David and Simon that not every communiqu? from God comes head on, and that there is always the possibly when we read the scriptures or hear about a "certain man" or a "certain woman," that we too are them.
When that happens, it's critical not to just linger too long at recognition point, but to leap off in the direction of what that recognition calls us to do.
____________
1.ÊQuoted by J. I. Packer, I Want to Be a Christian (Middlesex, UK: Kingsway, 1977).
2.ÊCome Sunday: The Liturgy of Zion (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1990), p. 101.
