The Elephant in the Room

Scripture: John 2.13-22; 1 Corinthians 1.18-25


There is a company called Travel Mansions. Travel Mansions comes to big homes and makes them bigger by adding on huge rooms and major additions. Their motto is, “We sell what no one needs.” We sell what no one needs. This has the virtue of being honest, but it also has the vice of raw and wicked materialism. Advertising is not about filling needs, but creating them, or rather, creating the perception of need.

Every one of us here, and I mean every one, must own up to the fact that we live in a super-consuming society. We are super consumers. We are the first generations of average people in this country dealing with a surplus of wealth and we don’t know how to deal with it. We don’t know how to say no. You may say, “Not me, I don’t have a surplus – you ought to see all my bills!” Well, I believe you, but that just proves the point. A lot of us don’t have a surplus of cash or assets, but we live like we do. In other words, we borrow so we can live as super-consumers, according to the standard we think we need.

We have bought into the lie that says satisfaction of desire is the key to happiness. Some desires you can’t satisfy. The more you give, the more they take. You can’t stand on desire. It is a losing game!

Take, for example, the story of Antoine Yates. Yates lived in New York City and for some reason brought home a 2 month-old tiger cub and later, an alligator. It’s not clear where he found them. But they were with him for two years – in his apartment. What was a little tiger cub became a 500 pound Bengal tiger monstrosity.

It was inevitable. The police got a call about a “dog” bite and when they got to the 19-story public housing apartment building, they discovered Yates in the lobby with injuries to his right arm and leg. Someone alerted them to the possibility a “wild animal” was at his apartment. Apparently, neighbors had complained about a “cat odor.” I bet!
When they arrived, the police peered through a hole and saw the huge cat prowling around the apartment. Long story short, they tranquilized the cat, which was lying on a pile of newspapers. The alligator was nearby. Both animals were relocated to shelters. As for Antoine Yates, he says he misses the tiger, demonstrating that it’s possible to be in love with the very things that can kill you.

Yates had a tiger and alligator. He didn’t have an elephant. We do. The elephant in our room is big and just as dangerous as the tiger. The elephant’s name is Money. Do we realize that Money can kill us? Do we realize that the misuse of money is killing people right now, taking the life right out of them – people we know. Maybe people right here today.

I never understood quite why Jesus got so mad at the people buying and selling in the Temple courtyard. After all, they were selling stuff for religious purposes, and it wasn’t like they were right in the worship area either. But now I think I understand. He was angry because the people were not honoring God at God’s temple, they were honoring Mammon, Money god, the very god that would destroy them if it could.

Jesus emphasizes this point time and again in his teaching and storytelling. Remember the rich young ruler? He was a good, religious man. He had all his ducks in a row. He was feeling good about his prospects in eternity. “I have kept all the commandments since the day I was born, Rabbi, what else is there for me to do?” And Jesus sees the man’s wealth and just blows him up with this – “One more thing you must do – sell everything you’ve got, give it to the poor, and then come and follow me.” And the man went away with his back to Jesus and his eyes on the ground, “for he had many possessions.”

This is the only place in the New Testament where Jesus invites someone to be a disciple and they turn him down. That ought to give us pause. If you love your stuff too much, you can’t love God. Loving money and the stuff of this world kills your relationship with God. Can you see why Jesus is ticked off?

Now, church folks ought to know better. What’s more, we ought to be telling others to watch out. We ought to be showing people that there is a better way to live. I think we are not doing a better job than we are because we haven’t yet admitted that there is an elephant in the room. We are still schizophrenic about money. Six days a week we think about it, talk about it, use it, revel in it or despair over it. Money runs the show! Then, come Sunday, things get quiet. We don’t talk about it. We act like we never heard of it before.

Let me give you an example. When I came to Hicks my salary package was set up a certain way in which my giving, my tithe, was included in my salary package, so that there was figure in my salary that was my tithe but it was then deducted so that I was not paid that money. It was set up this way for legitimate reasons, but it was impressed upon us by some folks in the conference that this was probably not a legal deduction according to the IRS. So, we changed how we do my salary. And for the first time in about five years I actually have the pleasure and responsibility of writing a check out of my salary to the church as a tithe. A couple weeks ago, we were getting ready to leave for San Diego and I asked my mother if she would drop my check in the offering plate for me the Sunday I would not be here. She said sure, but then she looked me and said with a funny look on her face that only I and my siblings truly understand, and then said, “Don’t you have an envelope to put it in.” What I want you to understand is, my mother was not concerned about the record-keeping procedures of the church. No, knowing her, I know there is a part of her that thinks it’s, well, unseemly to just throw a check in the plate, or cash for that matter, because money is unseemly in church.

She and her parents before her felt that way, maybe, based on this very Gospel lesson we study today. But again, the anger of Jesus is directed at people not because they have money in church. Jesus is angry because Money has them. Money drives what they do. Even when they come to church. Money drives what we do when we fail to give it to God in prayer; when we fail to honor God with how we spend and save (provided that we do save). Money is in the driver’s seat when we make giving and afterthought rather than the first and best thought.

There is an old story, a true story, about a king of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, which at one time once one of the greatest kingdoms in the world. This king had a very beautiful daughter who was of age to be married. There was a great Roman general, a pagan, who saw this princess and immediately fell in love with her and asked her father, the king, for her hand in marriage. The Austrian king said to the soldier, “You are a man of violence and an unbeliever, if you would marry my daughter, you must renounce your violent life, be baptized into the Christian faith and then you may marry. Well, this general seriously considered the matter, and agreed to the terms. The general’s men were so inspired by their leader’s decision that they too wanted to be baptized into the Christian faith. They had a problem however. They were to go into battle soon. So when it came time for them to be baptized with their general, they all walked into the river of baptism, but as they did so, they all held their swords aloft over their heads, so the waters of baptism would not touch them.

Maybe you have baptized your sword, but for many of us, our wallets and checkbooks and possessions, we struggle to keep out of the baptismal water. We must baptize our money. We must put that idol in its proper place. When we do, then the idol becomes a holy servant. It becomes God’s servant. And it becomes our servant.

Jesus would have us be free of Mammon’s clutches and servitude. Jesus gets angry when he sees our lives being destroyed by something that should serve us instead.

Make no mistake – this is a spiritual issue. When Jesus said, “It is better to give than receive,” he knew what he was talking about. Jesus ties giving to forgiveness and joy and loving relationships. “Give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap; for the measure you give will be the measure you get back.” Luke 6.38 Our growth as persons corresponds directly to the generosity or meanness of our giving.

Next week is Consecration Sunday. Believe me when I say this: Our goal for next week is not to pay the bills, or get more money in our church account. Our goal is for you to keep growing into the person God intends for you to be. Our goal is for all of us together to follow the Master in all of our ways, with all our hearts, all our minds, and all our strength.

That commitment card – don’t throw it away. Don’t ignore it. It’s a prayer. It’s a response to the invitation Jesus gives you to follow.

Trinity II: What God Needs

Scripture: Mark 8.31-38; Romans 4.13-25


This message is part two of what we started last week, our focus on why we believe in the Trinity. This is, I admit, heavy on theology. Theology is “the study of God’s words.” This is not to be confused with “bracketology”, which is the study of random picks of basketball teams about which you know nothing. But that’s another story.

We are studying God’s words today. What does God say about himself? That’s the question we should always be asking, every time we crack the Bible; every time we gather for worship – what does God say about himself?

We don’t ask that question very often. If we’re honest, it’s because we’re not as interested in that question as in this question – what about me? We are always interested in that question. My life is a movie about me. I know this because I am in every scene. You thought life was about you. You’re wrong - it’s about me. Or at least that’s how I think, too much of the time. Theology, God’s words, reminds us that life is not about us – or at least not in the way we think it is.

Even us churchgoing disciples seem to think it’s about our preferences, our opinions - whether we’re “getting something out of it.” Who ever said church was like this? Who said you were supposed to get something out of it? Where is that verse found in the Bible? Yes, worship is primarily about what God has done for us. The cross and the sacraments are visual and vivid reminders that God has acted, God has worked, God has sacrificed, all for us. But look at the cross again. The cross beckons us to come and decide. When you come to the cross, you come to a crossroads. This is what Jesus said about it:

If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it.

See, there are apparently conditions, requisites that Jesus puts on anyone that wants to come to God. We talk so much about what we need, we forgot to ask, “What does God need?” Now, in one sense, God, of course, needs nothing. But in another very real and pertinent sense, it’s pretty clear, from’s God’s mouth to our ears, that He does need and expect certain things from us.

The other day I saw my cat, Mavis. I mention it because I hadn’t seen her in several months. She doesn’t live us anymore. See, we got a big dog last year and Mavis doesn’t like the dog. It could have something to do with the dog trying to bite her in half. So, Mavis took to living in the garage for a while. We put her food and water and litter out there. It worked fairly well until about November, when it got too cold for Mavis out there in the garage. So she left. Without so much as a goodbye, I might add. I know, it’s a sad story. We hadn’t seen her in some time, as I said. I thought she was dead. So did my wife. Until the boys saw her last week down the street, and then I saw her the other day. She runs away from us now, like she doesn’t know us. Typical cat behavior.

I know this a stretch – cats aren’t exactly a biblical animal – but I think we expect God to hang around the margins of our lives the same way we expected our cat to. We expect our faith in God to survive on occasional feedings and waterings and a compartment in the garage. We forget that God needs more.

He needs us to put Him first. “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. . .”

God needs to talk with us and eat with us. “Listen! I am standing at the door, knocking; if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to you and eat with you and you with me.” (Revelation 3.20)

God needs us to love Him and his words more than we love the world.

When the hit show, Everybody Loves Raymond, went off the air, Ray Romano, the star of the series, spoke to the studio audience after the last day’s filming. Because of the series, Romano had gone from a struggling stand-up comedian to one of the highest-paid actors on television. Romano reflected on the series and his past and future with the audience that day. He read a note his brother had stuck in his luggage the day he moved from New York to Hollywood nine years earlier. It said, “What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his soul?” A tearful Romano looked up and told the audience, “Now I’m going to work on my soul.”

What good is it if you love the world so much and so well your whole life, but only find out at the very end that the world doesn’t really love you back? What if, at the end, you need for someone to speak a good word on your behalf, and the only one who can do that for you is the One Man you were embarrassed to admit you knew in this world? (my paraphrase).

Sometimes it’s hard to love God. Sometimes his words are just hard. Peter thought so. Peter wished Jesus would be quiet. He was embarrassing himself! All this talk of suffering and sacrifice and death is going to turn people away. Financial support will suffer. People will think we are weird. But Jesus talks about these things quite openly.
God keeps talking, seemingly oblivious to what we think we need. God rearranges our needs.

What also causes me embarrassment, and sometimes tears is the knowledge that we are living shadow lives right now. We have an idea of how we ought to live and who we should be living for. But we have this shadow mission, the thing that’s going on in our hearts and minds all the time. One man, a good, prosperous, giving man by all accounts, admits that if he could, he would “just sit around in my underwear, eat chips and watch football, all the time.” That’s his shadow mission. He’s not alone. How easily our lives can descend into trivia!

But Jesus keeps talking. The Trinity keeps talking. God seems to think that his words can change us. He thinks his words are destroying and creating worlds. He is “the God who gives life to the dead and calls things that are not as though they were.” (Romans 4.17) Conversation = Creation.

The Bible tells us that there is going to be a big conversation on the last day of this world. I think it’s going to go something like this:


God: Yesterday, we created this world. Remember how we made humanity in our image. We were so full of love for them!

God: Ages and ages of their history have come and gone. It’s today now. Do they love us? Do they trust? Have they listened to us? Have they understood?

And all the holy angels will gather around and lean in to listen to how God answers those questions.

How do you answer? In the shadow of the cross, what decision do you come to?

Why We Believe in the Trinity

Scripture: Mark 1.9-15; Genesis 9.8-17


After 9-11 happened, President Bush made a statement about Christianity and Islam. I know why he made it – he was trying to stress our commonality and unite people faith against terrorism. He said, “Christians and Muslims worship the same God.”

Well, yes and no. But mostly no. Christians and Muslims are monotheists, that is we believe that God is One. But Christians are different monotheists.

We are Trinitarians. Ask a Muslim if they believe in a God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and they would most emphatically tell you no. In other words, Allah, and the God of the Trinity are very different. The God of the Koran in many respects bears very little resemblance to the God of the Bible.

Some have accused Christians of making up the Trinity. If you’ve ever had conversation with Jehovah’s Witnesses at your door you probably have heard this. The Trinity is our attempt to account for the God who meets us in Scripture. In other words, the Trinity is a scripturally-based doctrine. God is revealed to us in the Old and New Testaments as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

In the beginning, Genesis 1, The Holy Spirit is moving over the deep, the Chaos, the Void. And the Word of God, which we understand is Jesus the Son, (John 1, in the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God) begins to create by speaking, by declaring, “Let there be Light!” And it was so.

God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are together creating. In verse 26 of chapter one, we read, “Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image.” Let us. . .

Who is God talking to but Himself, the three persons of the Trinity in this divine conversation?

In Mark’s Gospel we are given the scene of Jesus’ baptism, and here, like at the Creation, we are given a glimpse of the Holy Trinity and that divine community and relationship. Jesus is coming up out of the water and the heavens are torn open and the Holy Spirit descends on him like a dove. (the Son and the Spirit) And then an audible voice speaks from heaven, “You are Beloved, my Son, with you I am well pleased.” The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

This is a pattern, that the Father honors the Son, the Son obeys the Father, the Spirit testifies to the Father and the Son, and does the work of the Father and the Son. In John 5, Jesus tells people, “Very truly I tell you, the Son can do nothing on his own, but only what he sees the Father doing; for whatever the Father does, the Son does likewise. The Father loves the Son and shows him all that he himself is doing.”
Jesus obeys the Father. Likewise, Jesus only ever does things by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Notice, immediately after Jesus baptism, the Holy Spirit drives Jesus (casts him out, ekballow) into the wilderness to begin the next step of God’s acting and working in the world. Jesus first public sermon begins, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because He has anointed me. . .” The Baptism of Jesus is His anointing. Jesus is creating a New Way of Life, a New Kingdom through the power of the Spirit. In fact, Jewish word, Messiah, simply means, “anointed one.”

St. Augustine says that the voice came from heaven for our ears, and the Spirit looked like a dove for our eyes. Jesus didn’t need these signs – we do. Jesus baptism is one of those moments where the Trinity shines through and we see clearly this relationship and community of Love. The fabric of heaven is torn open and “what is up there comes down here.”

Sigmund Freud once said that religion was something man made up to make life easier. He called religion, and Christianity in particular, “a helpful illusion and projection.”

But ask you, if religion were a projection of our our needs and fears, would we project this God?

The Trinity is mysterious and complicated. It can’t be fully explained. That doesn’t mean there are signs and metaphors for Trinity in the creation.

The Trinity is like the actor, the play, and the playwright all in one, In the words of John Wesley, “These Three are One.”

The reason the modern world tried to turn its back on the God of Christianity is that He came in a form we found difficult to worship – God came as a Jew. Even, and especially, Jews found that difficult is accept.

The Trinity is a rebuke to a modern world that would make a god in its image, even one that it would disbelieve. Every time we make up a god of our choosing, we sin against the Trinity. Which person of the Trinity are we likely to sin against? Do we sin against the Father? He is not a distant, aloof God – a god that made the universe and then stepped back and just let things run their course – or a heavenly grandfather whose only hope is that everyone have a good time and get enough sleep. These gods are sins against the Father. What about the Son – how did we sin against the Son? We try to cut Jesus down to size. We expect him to do therapy for us. We expect him to protect us from any trouble or pain. Name it, claim it. No blessing left untapped.

Jesus went to his hometown, soon after he started his public ministry, and the people there wanted to know why he wasn’t performing all the miracles they heard he had done in other towns. Jesus said to them, “There were widows and lepers in Elijah’s day, but he helped only two.” Jesus just wasn’t concerned with what the people thought he should do. He wasn’t compelled by what they thought they needed.

Jesus had bigger fish to fry. He had to do the will of the Father. Jesus was caught up in the life and will of the Trinity. And in many ways, the Christian Life is our lifetime of training in obeying and giving honor to the Trinity – it is our time to be caught up in this life and relationship.

I don’t know about you, but if I pay attention, I can find about a hundred examples a day that I most value independence rather than community and conversation. I fail to share with my wife not only everyday, routine stuff, but important stuff as well. Conversations that I should initiate, I don’t. My marriage would be better if I were more the person God intends for me to be.

I was at the National Pastor’s Convention last week. Jennifer and I went to an evening worship session and a man in his sixties maybe, sat down next me. Almost immediately he turned and smiled and introduced himself. Soon Jennifer and I were enthusiastically engaged in conversation with this pastor from California. We talked about what God was doing in our lives. Admittedly, he was easy to talk to and it was a safe environment in which to talk, with a lot of common experiences between us. But I wonder why I don’t readily and easily engaged with other people like that in the course of my regular day. If the love of God and the Good News of Jesus Christ is so important to me, why don’t I try to share it more often with the guy in the coffee shop or the new neighbor down the street? I’m finding priorities that need to change. I find these every time I see how God is and then look at how I am.

The Trinity is everything we are not. Holiness, Love, Relationship, Constant Conversation. The Trinity is a rebuke to individuality and hierarchy.
Why did God create the world? Because God loves to talk. God loves to be in relationship. That’s who God is. Trinity. Even on a day of utmost sacrifice and pain, Good Friday, we hear the anguished conversations between the Son and the Father and the Spirit.

Shouldn’t this change our picture of God? Don’t you know that God wants to talk to you? The whole point of the Cross and those anguished conversations is so God might have a relationship with you! Remember the Old Testament story of Eli and the boy Samuel. How Samuel doesn’t know really who God is, but God starts speaking to Samuel and Eli helps him understand and answer. Eli taught Samuel to answer this way:

“Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.” (1 Samuel 3.9-10)

Let that be our prayer today. Speak, Lord, your servant is listening. You’re servant is participating in the conversation you are trying to have with us. The Trinity is not some dry, dusty, doctrine that we have to do mental calisthenics to accept or to shut off our minds to accept. The Trinity is a relationship we fall in love to experience.
The Trinity is our name for reality. As Charles Wesley wrote, “We are transcripts of the Trinity.”


We can’t be transcripts, love letters, by ourselves. Together, we are God’s conversation made visible in the world. In other words, we are the Church. Let the Church hear the Lord’s invitation to come and eat with Him!