Life -- From The Inside Out
Sermon
Sermons On The Gospel Readings
Series I, Cycle B
Eleven people, so goes the story, were dangling from a rope beneath a helicopter in a rescue scenario. Being rescued were ten men and one woman. Word came down from the pilot that one of the eleven would have to let go; if not, everyone would perish. The woman spoke right up and said her whole life had been one of sacrifice -- for her children, husband, and parents -- and now she would be willing to sacrifice one last time by letting go. With that, the ten men applauded! The story's point? Never underestimate the power of a woman!
Never underestimate the power of the gospel because it too is full of surprises, reversals, paradoxes, and strategies that on the surface don't seem to make sense. If someone wants your coat, give him your cloak as well; if someone strikes the right cheek, turn the left one too; both are representative of surprising strategies that initially make us pause and scratch our heads, but the longer we live with these strategies and learn about them, the more sense they begin to make.
Anticipating what was ahead, Jesus began to acquaint his inner circle with how difficult life would become for him; it was to be short on joy and long on pain. Peter took exception to this, and having just completed a Dale Carnegie course on winning friends and influencing people, began to take Jesus to task for his foreboding anticipation. Jesus had to be more upbeat, Peter implied. Jesus would have none of it though, and in effect said to Peter that if the latter were to persist in those sentiments, he would be clearly aligning himself with the forces of Satan, not the forces of God. "For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things," (v. 33) is the way Jesus put it.
Then Jesus presses his case to a larger group nearby: "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For ... those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it" (Mark 8:35). There we have the paradox. If you try really hard to find your life, you are going to lose it in the process.
Remember the last time a simple tune began reverberating in your head and you couldn't seem to get rid of it? Every few minutes, it would return. Clearly there was no intentional way through which you could get rid of it. But then you got involved in some other undertaking and later suddenly realized the tune was no longer going off in your ear. Paradoxically, what you wanted to achieve came when you gave up your ardent effort to make it happen.
Jesus follows up then with this question: "For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?" (v. 36). What Jesus is asking reminds us of that question that asks the whereabouts of the life we have lost in the living.
Jesus, you see, turns conventional wisdom inside out and bids us live life from the inside out.
Saving our lives and gaining the world are tantamount to losing and forfeiting those lives, and that happens, Jesus suggests, when we live life from the outside in. The pressure to live from the outside in is strong indeed.
This pressure is something advertisers have long known and is why, according to one estimate, the average adult encounters 3,000 advertisements each day. Advertisements cover the gamut, all the way from products that address personal hygiene to plans for covering the cost of your funeral so you won't be a burden to your children. Professor James Twitchell from the University of Florida in Gainsville contends that many of modern advertising's founders ironically had religious backgrounds. It was a Baptist minister's son, Bruce Barton, who co-founded the large ad agency Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborne.
The professor points out that the founders of modern advertising modeled their messages after parables they heard. In selling a product like deodorant, a supplicant consults another person who gives witness: "If your deodorant doesn't hold up past 1:30 p.m., try this brand instead and suddenly your whole life -- including its romantic dimension -- will fall into place beautifully." One secular sin (halitosis or dandruff or whatever) after another will fall as it is confronted by this or that product.1
Powerful forces try to shape the decisions we make: the houses we live in and where they are located; the cars we drive (whose manufacturers are not above taking a word that belongs to the religious community like "soul" and using it to push their vehicles); the clothes we wear; the food we eat; the beverages we consume; the places we vacation; and all that is not even a tiny part of the iceberg's tip.
But it's much more than advertising. We can also subtly teach our children that what's most important in life is pleasing other people, setting out on a course whereby we introduce them to the dynamics of being excessively and fawningly nice, even when that course begins to undermine their own sense of integrity and rightness. The prize in all this? -- The assumption that such maneuvers will mean we are accepted and respected by other people. The opposite, in fact, is what is going to happen.
Were I to create a short list of people who live from the outside in, it would include people who don't know what their political beliefs are until they've read their favorite political columnist; don't know what books they want to read until Oprah tells them; don't know how to decorate for Christmas until Martha Stewart directs them; don't know what to believe until their denomination tells them; don't know what to wear until they have consulted a fashion guru; don't know how to respond to the controversial issues of the day until they check their windsocks to see which way the breeze is blowing.
People with this pattern are like submarines cruising through life at periscope depth and they will not come to the surface until they have surveyed the surrounding territory, making sure that their emergence will occur within optimal conditions for safety from others they perceive to be potentially menacing critics.
Living life from the outside in -- we have all been there at one point or another in our journeys. And when we are accurately so described, we are the same folks Jesus had in mind when he talked about people who have gained the whole world, but forfeited their lives.
We've gotten it backwards, Jesus says. Instead, turn matters inside out and live from the inside out.
I recently read a fascinating news story about a fifteen-year-old girl who was triumphantly strolling out of a Gap store with her new $150 black leather coat when her cell phone rang. Of all people, it was her mother. Said Mother, "A leather jacket? Are you sure this is what you need with your money?"
Now here's the kicker. Although Mother was more than 100 miles away, she still knew what her daughter was doing, thanks to an instant e-mail from Pocketcard Inc. Every time this daughter uses her mother's debit card, Pocketcard Inc. e-mails mom and alerts her. Soon it will be possible for parents to download live Web-cam videos from home on their cell phones and see precisely what's going on in their absence.
Technology is more and more awesome and impressive, but is there not a downside to all of this? What good is the technology if children are not being helped with the creation of an internal set of controls, making self-governance possible? We are talking here about the development of character, and parents do their children no good if they simply use technology as a further extension of discipline externally applied and not eventually internally cultivated. Self-control is absolutely necessary if one wants a life worth the living.
Or think of the value and joy of being soulful instead of reactive and shallow.
A friend had a rather large tree taken down recently. It looked basically healthy, but was very close to his driveway, and leaning in an ominous way. When the trunk was cut into fireplace lengths, he was surprised to discover that the tree was rotting from the inside out.
When we do not develop soulfulness, we run the risk of beginning to rot from the inside out.
By contrast, think of a body of water that is spring-fed or a tract of land that is loam. Both images convey richness, replenishment, creativity, receptivity, containment, and more.
Soulful people are not rotting from the inside out; they are living from the inside out. Whenever we are understanding, or forgiving, or accepting, or creative or wise, we are evidencing soulfulness. Tending to our interiority, whether it be through reflection, artistic exposure, wonderment, or pensiveness, indicates soulfulness.
Then, as well, soulfulness has to do with the making of meaning. It interprets and names. It takes the "sound and fury" of Shakespeare's Macbeth and says, unlike the bard, such has significance. It reads, and not reacts, to human behavior; it sees in the words of others disclosures that even they may not, in the short term, see. It understands how each human life is a mini-series, featuring the grand themes written about by philosophers and theologians, musically expressed by the great composers, and painted by the great artists.
Sam Miller was getting at this fifty years ago when, in a little volume titled The Life of the Soul, he wrote this about the grand stories of faith:
The stories of Eden, the Tower of Babel, the parables and the life of Christ all have truths that evade the literal nets of the historically wise. They are the ageless formulary in concrete terms of unending human experience. In all of them the eternal and historical meet and fulfill each other in such perfection that the truth is neither abstract nor merely local. It becomes rooted in life, but not limited by time or space. To be on the outside of such things, to be unable to use them, is indeed to be poor in spiritual health, for in them are the ample means of expression and communion for the soul.2
Life -- from the outside in or inside out? I believe that what we call eternal life is what's at issue. That's what hangs in the balance as we decide which way we will go.
____________
1. Richard and Joyce Wolkomir, "You Are What You Buy" (Smithsonian, October, 2000), p. 102.
2. Samuel H. Miller, The Life of the Soul (New York and Evanston: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1951), p. 86.
Never underestimate the power of the gospel because it too is full of surprises, reversals, paradoxes, and strategies that on the surface don't seem to make sense. If someone wants your coat, give him your cloak as well; if someone strikes the right cheek, turn the left one too; both are representative of surprising strategies that initially make us pause and scratch our heads, but the longer we live with these strategies and learn about them, the more sense they begin to make.
Anticipating what was ahead, Jesus began to acquaint his inner circle with how difficult life would become for him; it was to be short on joy and long on pain. Peter took exception to this, and having just completed a Dale Carnegie course on winning friends and influencing people, began to take Jesus to task for his foreboding anticipation. Jesus had to be more upbeat, Peter implied. Jesus would have none of it though, and in effect said to Peter that if the latter were to persist in those sentiments, he would be clearly aligning himself with the forces of Satan, not the forces of God. "For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things," (v. 33) is the way Jesus put it.
Then Jesus presses his case to a larger group nearby: "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For ... those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it" (Mark 8:35). There we have the paradox. If you try really hard to find your life, you are going to lose it in the process.
Remember the last time a simple tune began reverberating in your head and you couldn't seem to get rid of it? Every few minutes, it would return. Clearly there was no intentional way through which you could get rid of it. But then you got involved in some other undertaking and later suddenly realized the tune was no longer going off in your ear. Paradoxically, what you wanted to achieve came when you gave up your ardent effort to make it happen.
Jesus follows up then with this question: "For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?" (v. 36). What Jesus is asking reminds us of that question that asks the whereabouts of the life we have lost in the living.
Jesus, you see, turns conventional wisdom inside out and bids us live life from the inside out.
Saving our lives and gaining the world are tantamount to losing and forfeiting those lives, and that happens, Jesus suggests, when we live life from the outside in. The pressure to live from the outside in is strong indeed.
This pressure is something advertisers have long known and is why, according to one estimate, the average adult encounters 3,000 advertisements each day. Advertisements cover the gamut, all the way from products that address personal hygiene to plans for covering the cost of your funeral so you won't be a burden to your children. Professor James Twitchell from the University of Florida in Gainsville contends that many of modern advertising's founders ironically had religious backgrounds. It was a Baptist minister's son, Bruce Barton, who co-founded the large ad agency Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborne.
The professor points out that the founders of modern advertising modeled their messages after parables they heard. In selling a product like deodorant, a supplicant consults another person who gives witness: "If your deodorant doesn't hold up past 1:30 p.m., try this brand instead and suddenly your whole life -- including its romantic dimension -- will fall into place beautifully." One secular sin (halitosis or dandruff or whatever) after another will fall as it is confronted by this or that product.1
Powerful forces try to shape the decisions we make: the houses we live in and where they are located; the cars we drive (whose manufacturers are not above taking a word that belongs to the religious community like "soul" and using it to push their vehicles); the clothes we wear; the food we eat; the beverages we consume; the places we vacation; and all that is not even a tiny part of the iceberg's tip.
But it's much more than advertising. We can also subtly teach our children that what's most important in life is pleasing other people, setting out on a course whereby we introduce them to the dynamics of being excessively and fawningly nice, even when that course begins to undermine their own sense of integrity and rightness. The prize in all this? -- The assumption that such maneuvers will mean we are accepted and respected by other people. The opposite, in fact, is what is going to happen.
Were I to create a short list of people who live from the outside in, it would include people who don't know what their political beliefs are until they've read their favorite political columnist; don't know what books they want to read until Oprah tells them; don't know how to decorate for Christmas until Martha Stewart directs them; don't know what to believe until their denomination tells them; don't know what to wear until they have consulted a fashion guru; don't know how to respond to the controversial issues of the day until they check their windsocks to see which way the breeze is blowing.
People with this pattern are like submarines cruising through life at periscope depth and they will not come to the surface until they have surveyed the surrounding territory, making sure that their emergence will occur within optimal conditions for safety from others they perceive to be potentially menacing critics.
Living life from the outside in -- we have all been there at one point or another in our journeys. And when we are accurately so described, we are the same folks Jesus had in mind when he talked about people who have gained the whole world, but forfeited their lives.
We've gotten it backwards, Jesus says. Instead, turn matters inside out and live from the inside out.
I recently read a fascinating news story about a fifteen-year-old girl who was triumphantly strolling out of a Gap store with her new $150 black leather coat when her cell phone rang. Of all people, it was her mother. Said Mother, "A leather jacket? Are you sure this is what you need with your money?"
Now here's the kicker. Although Mother was more than 100 miles away, she still knew what her daughter was doing, thanks to an instant e-mail from Pocketcard Inc. Every time this daughter uses her mother's debit card, Pocketcard Inc. e-mails mom and alerts her. Soon it will be possible for parents to download live Web-cam videos from home on their cell phones and see precisely what's going on in their absence.
Technology is more and more awesome and impressive, but is there not a downside to all of this? What good is the technology if children are not being helped with the creation of an internal set of controls, making self-governance possible? We are talking here about the development of character, and parents do their children no good if they simply use technology as a further extension of discipline externally applied and not eventually internally cultivated. Self-control is absolutely necessary if one wants a life worth the living.
Or think of the value and joy of being soulful instead of reactive and shallow.
A friend had a rather large tree taken down recently. It looked basically healthy, but was very close to his driveway, and leaning in an ominous way. When the trunk was cut into fireplace lengths, he was surprised to discover that the tree was rotting from the inside out.
When we do not develop soulfulness, we run the risk of beginning to rot from the inside out.
By contrast, think of a body of water that is spring-fed or a tract of land that is loam. Both images convey richness, replenishment, creativity, receptivity, containment, and more.
Soulful people are not rotting from the inside out; they are living from the inside out. Whenever we are understanding, or forgiving, or accepting, or creative or wise, we are evidencing soulfulness. Tending to our interiority, whether it be through reflection, artistic exposure, wonderment, or pensiveness, indicates soulfulness.
Then, as well, soulfulness has to do with the making of meaning. It interprets and names. It takes the "sound and fury" of Shakespeare's Macbeth and says, unlike the bard, such has significance. It reads, and not reacts, to human behavior; it sees in the words of others disclosures that even they may not, in the short term, see. It understands how each human life is a mini-series, featuring the grand themes written about by philosophers and theologians, musically expressed by the great composers, and painted by the great artists.
Sam Miller was getting at this fifty years ago when, in a little volume titled The Life of the Soul, he wrote this about the grand stories of faith:
The stories of Eden, the Tower of Babel, the parables and the life of Christ all have truths that evade the literal nets of the historically wise. They are the ageless formulary in concrete terms of unending human experience. In all of them the eternal and historical meet and fulfill each other in such perfection that the truth is neither abstract nor merely local. It becomes rooted in life, but not limited by time or space. To be on the outside of such things, to be unable to use them, is indeed to be poor in spiritual health, for in them are the ample means of expression and communion for the soul.2
Life -- from the outside in or inside out? I believe that what we call eternal life is what's at issue. That's what hangs in the balance as we decide which way we will go.
____________
1. Richard and Joyce Wolkomir, "You Are What You Buy" (Smithsonian, October, 2000), p. 102.
2. Samuel H. Miller, The Life of the Soul (New York and Evanston: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1951), p. 86.
