Call

When Jesus came into the Galilee district, Matthew tells us a prophecy was fulfilled.

“The people living in darkness have seen a great light, and for those sitting in the region and shadow of death light has dawned.”

The prophecy is from Isaiah. It referred once to the people of Zebulun and Naphtali living under the threat and oppression of the Assyrian Empire. These tribes of Israeli were looking for a king who would set them free from their fears of captivity and death.

The prophecy became one of hope for Messiah. Maybe Messiah will deliver us all from our fear of death. We all have our own Assyrian oppressions. We all live in a region under the shadow of death.

Our contemporary culture is not immune to real fears of violence and terror, but here in America we are much more sheltered from those terrors than other parts of the world. Here our fear is a general one – no matter how safe, how prosperous, how enjoyable, how healthy my life is, something is lurking in the shadows, waiting for me. That something is the growing awareness that someday my life will stop. And no matter how you look at it, that stopping is a rude one, one we’d rather not think about too much.

So we make ourselves busy with careers and health clubs and vacations and investments. We try to find purpose in our many different priorities. Sometimes those priorities may seem funny to others.

The Quay County Sun once had this classified ad: “Farmer with 160 irrigated acres wants marriage-minded woman with tractor. When replying, please show picture of tractor.”

All of our priorities can get a little skewed if the reference point for our priorities is simply ourselves. After all, the farmer who placed that ad knew exactly what he wanted. . .in a tractor. His priorities seemed normal to him.

Or take the life of Richard Knerr who just passed away a week ago. Do you know who he is? Knerr and his partner, Arthur “Spuds” Melin put their heads together and founded Wham-O products, the company that introduced the world to the Frisbee and the Hula-Hoop. One writer has said that the “Hula-Hoop is still the standard by which all national crazes must be measured.”

For Knerr, coming up with a hoop that you mindlessly swivel around your hips was a good way to prioritize his life. And there are probably worse things that you can give your life to, I guess. To Knerr, this was normal. The hula-hoop craze didn’t seem crazy to him.



But I am still nagged by the question, is it enough to make lots of money or even pursue our personal goals and dreams? For most people “personal fulfillment” is their highest working ideal. It is our reference point. We are own north stars.

But how has that worked out for us?

In 1978 there was a flood in the Texas hill country and a lady needlessly lost her life. Her daughter told reporters, “My mother did not climb the tree with us. She lost her way before we got to the tree. See, she always kept every little bill and slip and stuff. She would not let go of her purse with those papers in it.”

It was revealed that the family was trying to make a chain, holding hands to get through the water. But the mother had her insurance papers all gathered up in her hands and wouldn’t drop those documents. So she just washed away. She trusted the papers more than she did the hands of her family members.

We can try to deny or cheat death with paper work. We can “insure” ourselves for life. But what is that? We buy life insurance but in order to collect you have to die. It’s actually death insurance. We don’t call it that because it’s too depressing.

One of our most popular cereals is called Life. Jerry Seinfeld speculates on the advertising meeting to name that cereal. Someone in the room suggested calling it “crappy oat squares” or “pretty good cereal” but someone else spoke up and said No, this is bigger than all that. This is such a great cereal. This is LIFE! The only place to go from here with cereal names is perhaps, “Almighty God.” But they’ll never make a cereal called Death. You can’t use the D word.


And yet there it is all around us. Death is a helpful reminder that the clock is ticking on the meaning and purpose of our living. I did a funeral service this week. I had never met the deceased. I tried to call those grieving people to hope and a consideration of their purpose and calling in life. Sometimes people will listen in those situations. But we don’t have to wait for the funeral home to find our purpose and calling in life.

C.S. Lewis once said, “Aim at heaven and you get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.”

The key to finding your call in life is to look outside yourself. Look up. Find out what God has in mind for you. God has a lot to say to you if you are willing to listen. Jesus came preaching, which is another way of saying, God came talking.

God tells people that we must turn away from sinful and selfish pursuits and priorities. Repentance is about thinking again and turning around. You go in a new direction with God. Jesus told Peter and Andrew, James and John, leave your nets and come follow me. It may have been possible for those men to have stayed in the fishing business but once they decided to accept Jesus invitation, their lives could never be the same. Their priorities were much different. Their purpose changed. They let go of their old safety nets. Didn’t need them. In fact, those nets would only get in the way of their true calling. Make no mistake, those disciples left everything. They denied themselves.

So do all disciples. And that may not make sense to some people today. That may sound like unnecessary religiosity or posturing. It may just sound foolish to those who are counting their trophies or their pleasures or their money market accounts. What does “denying yourself” have to do with personal fulfillment?

“For the word of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” 1 Corinthians 1.18

You are here this morning, I take it, because Jesus walked into your country. He came to your town. Some light has shined in your life. So now what will you do? What is God calling you to be and do?

Bless What God Blesses

A University of Hawaii Professor has written a book about risk, and an entire chapter of that book is on common household dangers. Some are obvious – 460,000 people a year are injured by kitchen knives; manual and power saws injure 100,000 a year. But some risks are more surprising – 20 people in America a year are strangled to death by drapery cords. Some 4,000 of us seriously injure ourselves on pillows.

But the most dangerous object in the home is, John Ortberg suggests, a little death trap called the easy chair (usually spelled EZ because that takes less effort). We don’t buy these chairs because they are the most beautiful. They are not called “adventure chairs.” They’re EZ. We buy them for one reason – comfort.

You know, I could preach an amazing sermon about going out and serving God, laying it all on the line for Jesus. The sermon could move you to heights of joy and a gushing of tears (really, I could preach this well). You could be so fired up and so motivated when you left the building today. But what happens when you go home? You ease yourself into that EZ chair. You do it today. You do it when you get home from work on Monday. You’ve got the remote in your hand, your favorite beverage, and bag of chips next to you. Let me ask you: Are you ready to spring into action for God? If God asks you to do a difficult thing are you likely to say yes?

It’s not so much what you do in this chair, but what you don’t do. Too much comfort is a very dangerous thing.

Well, a guy named Larry Walker was sitting in a chair in his backyard one day. It was a lawn chair, not an EZ chair. Larry always wanted to fly. So he got this idea. He hitched forty-five helium-filled balloons to his lawn chair, strapped himself in with some sandwiches, a pellet gun, and a six-pack of lite beer. His plan was to hover 30 feet or so above the backyard for a few hours, then shoot enough balloons to come down.

But when his friends cut the cord Larry did not level off at 100 feet. He didn’t level off at 1,000 feet. He stopped climbing at 16,000 feet. At that height he was reluctant to shoot any balloons. He was scared, but at least he had his beer and sandwiches. He drifted into the airspace of LAX. The transmissions in the flight tower of LAX that day all began with, “You’re not going to believe this but. . .”

After a few hours, Larry decided to risk shooting a few balloons, descended and got tangled in some power lines, and was eventually rescued. The FAA charged him with breaking the law even though it was unclear what law had been broken.

When asked by a reporter why he did it, Larry Walker replied, “A man can’t just sit there.”

Larry Walker may not win any awards for Intelligence Quotient, but he is write about one thing, a man can’t just sit there.

God asks us to do difficult things sometimes. If you look at all the call stories of the Bible – Noah, Moses, Jeremiah, Mary, John, Paul- these people react with, “What, Me?! I can’t do that!”

And so God says, “Oh yeah, that would be really scary for you, I can see. Never mind, I’ll go find someone else.”

Wait. No, God doesn’t say that. He says, yeah, it’s scary, but that’s what I want you to do, and I’ll be with you.

Sometimes the most difficult part is getting out of our comfortable chair. That in itself is a witness.

John the Baptist was called to be a witness to the coming Messiah. In fact, that’s what the whole Gospel is about – witness the Christ. Leon Morris says the word witness is used thirty-three times in John’s Gospel but only a grand total of two times in the other three Gospels combined.

People are coming to John and asking questions like, “Are you the Messiah?” “Are you Elijah the Prophet returned?”, “Who are you?” John is very patient at first, but he’s not there to talk about himself. His first answer is a nice declarative sentence, “I am not the Christ.” The second time someone asks, his answer gets shorter, “I am not.” The third time he has to answer, he becomes monosyllabic, “NO.”

John is not doing an Entertainment Tonight piece on himself. He is there to witness to Jesus. It’s interesting that not once but two times he says, “I myself did not know him.” John was not claiming a special knowledge of Jesus or a special relationship. John was saying, simply look at the signs, his message, his works, the testimony of the Trinity, “Behold this is my Son with whom I am well pleased.” This is witness enough. You must believe it.

John is also telling us something else about witness. Leon Morris uses the example of witnessing a car accident. Two cars are involved in a collision. As long as you the witness keep silent, both parties have the hope that you will testify on their behalf. But the moment you tell the police, “The Ford ran through a red light and crashed into the Chevy,” you have committed yourself. You can’t go back on what you say without being discredited. In other words, witness commits.

If you are going to be a believer, you can’t just sit there. You have to answer God’s call to get involved in what He is doing. Like John the Baptist, you may not have all the knowledge you think you need, but you bless what God blesses. You may be scared, but that’s not really a good enough excuse.

Risk something. Try something new to help others. For example, the other day we received the paper work for the deed to the Campbell property given to us. The paper work needed to be taken to the courthouse and the deed recorded and the appropriate fees paid. It involved some further calculations and research and paperwork at the office of the Recorder. It required someone with the skill and knowledge to do that sort of thing, someone with maybe legal experience, a sharp person. And apparently we couldn’t find anyone like that because the stuff was handed to me. I went into the courthouse to the office of Recorder. I was like a tourist in a foreign country who didn’t speak the language. I wandered around the room aimlessly for a few moments. All that I was missing was the Hawaiian shirt. But God helped, I believe. We got it done. And if it was done wrong then, as they take me away in handcuffs I will say, “A man can’t just sit there.” Kindly, someone has already offered to post my bail.

Stretching beyond our comfort zone is a good thing. We meet new people, make new connections. We become a part of God’s larger plan in our communities. We become witnesses of the Gospel. We show that it’s not just about us.

We become an instrument in God’s hands for goodness. In the words of the prophet Isaiah, “The Lord called me from the womb, from the body of my mother he named my name. He made my mouth like a sharp sword. . .he made me a polished arrow in his quiver.” Isaiah 49.1-2

I am a sharp sword. I am a arrow in quiver of the Lord. You are too.

What’s really amazing about the witness of the Baptist is that he so easily turns the attention over to Jesus. I mean, John has been preaching, teaching, and baptizing his guts out, out there in the Jordan wilderness. His life was decidedly not comfortable.

But when the time came, he said again and again, don’t look at me, look over there at Him. When the time came, he let his disciples, Andrew and Simon Peter, go with Jesus. He let them go with his blessing. He knew this was a part of what he was meant to do. This was his contribution to the work of God.

John summed up his own attitude a little later in the Gospel with these words:

“He must increase, I must decrease.”

Witness commits. Believers commit. And here is my commitment to you. This year I will do my best to make it as uncomfortable as possible for us just to sit here in our pews. We will commit to a holy discomfort, a holy restlessness to put our witness into action. I always thought these pews were comfortable. From now on, we’ll call them “adventure pews.”

The Inner You

We were watching Dances With Wolves the other night – Dances with Wolves falls in love with Stands With a Fist. Smiles A Lot is their young friend. I was interested to know what my family thought our Indian names would be.

We agreed one son could fittingly be called “Smiles a Lot” too. Another was dubbed, “Passes Gas A Lot”. I can’t tell you what Jennifer’s Indian name was. Suffice to say I “Laughed A Lot” and later became “In Trouble A Lot”. When I asked my son what my Indian name should be he said, “Busy A Lot”. Heh, heh. . . wait, not as funny. I wanted him to say something like “Plays With Us a Lot” or at least, “Big Chief Dad.”

What I got was a blow too close to reality. It’s interesting how others really see us as opposed to how we wish to appear and present ourselves.

Remember Jesus used the word hypocrite to describe those who “do not practice what they preach.” Jesus is only person in the New Testament to use this word. It is part of the vocabulary of the Western World because of Jesus. Archaeologists have excavated a large city named Sepphoris which was built by Herod when Jesus was a boy. This city was visible from Jesus’ little village of Nazareth, and this city contained a giant amphitheater where actors who put on plays were called hypocrites. The actors would put on masks and play their parts, and then at the end remove them and asked if the audience would applaud their performance.

Jesus teaches us that when we want the appearance of being good without the reality of being good, we are actors on a stage. We are hypocrites.

Someone has said that hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue. “It is also the pain that actors feel when the applause dies away.”

We try to take short cuts around the rules so we can have it our way and still maintain the appearance of goodness.

The IRS maintains what is informally called a “cheater’s account,” to which people with guilty consciences can send money they know they owe. There’s an old story that IRS received one letter that read, “My conscience is bothering me because of cheating on taxes, so I’m sending $10,000. If my conscience doesn’t clear up, I’ll send the rest of what I owe.”

I remember cheating on schoolwork in Junior High School. It was in science class. We were assigned individuals labs and workbooks. Everyone had to do the same work but it was at your pace. Obviously, there was more prestige and satisfaction for those who got farther faster. But it was, I thought, tedious “busy work.” I said to myself, I can do all this stuff, it’s not hard, but it’s boring. So what I did was, I found a friend who was a little bit ahead of me on the independent assignment and I “borrowed” his workbook and began copying his work into mine. I did this for about a week think, until one day my teacher caught me cheating. He embarrassed me and threatened to have me kicked off the basketball team. I was outraged. He was being grossly unfair. After all, I was a smart student and it was just “boring busy work.” When I didn’t show enough remorse the teacher wondered if I thought my parents should know. Well, no, I wasn’t outraged enough to involve them. I would take my punishment. And boy, did I. My classmates didn’t applaud my performance. They just stared. It was one of the best things that happened to me. But I still wince when I think of that time.

We break rules when we think we can get ahead or do better. But in breaking the rules we sacrifice our integrity. We become inside the very kind of person that is increasingly incapable of gratitude and purity of heart that makes happiness and meaning possible. John Ortberg says, “Strictly speaking, I cannot break the rules. They endure, for they reflect the way things are. I can only break myself against them.”

Another mistake people make is substituting behavior modification for integrity. In Jesus’ day this was the strategy of a group known as “the blind and bleeding rabbis.” They were so called because they would not only never speak to a woman, but they would close their eyes when one came into their peripheral vision and so were they forever falling off curbs and bumping into buildings.

Jesus responds in this way, “If God’s goal for you is sin avoidance or behavior modification, here’s a good idea: whack off any part of your body that might do something wrong, and you’ll roll right into heaven a mutilated stump. There is more to integrity than sin avoidance. My eye, hand, and foot are not the problem. The problem is my heart.

If my primary goal in life is to keep up appearances or avoid sin, then I will never have integrity. I never truly be good. I will always merely be an actor on a stage. The pursuit of integrity sometimes smashes appearances. “To make an omelet you have to break a few eggs.”

But integrity is always the best thing for us. God’s truth always helps us.

Listen to the prophet Isaiah:

Behold my servant, my chosen, I have put my Spirit upon him, he will bring forth justice. . . but he will not cry out or lift up his voice in the street. He is so gentle that a bruised reed won’t be broken, or a dying candlelight quenched.

In other words, Jesus, the Chosen Servant, will not hurt God’s people with the truth. He will set us free. He will bring us good things; the things we truly long for when we been fumbling around with our shortcuts and cheating.

Behold, the former things have passed, and new things I now declare; before they spring forth I tell you of them.

The new thing is heart surgery. The new thing is Jesus Himself, present with us. When we repent of our hypocrisy and believe Jesus, we are baptized with His Spirit. Inward change, which is the only real and lasting change, takes place. Jesus transforms us from the inside out.


First step – Repentance. Admit you’ve lied, cheated, play-acted - we all have.

The rock band, R.E.M. has this lyric, “That’s me in the corner. That’s me in the spotlight losing my religion.”

You can’t have religion if you’re in the spotlight of pretense all the time. Lose the pretense. Confess your sins and you will find true religion.

Be baptized in water as a sign of your repentance and a sign of the baptism of His presence. Begin the walk of integrity with Jesus.

Austin Farrer asks, “What are we to do about the yawning gulf which opens between this Christhood of ours and our actual performance; our laziness, selfishness, triviality. . .this gulf which yawns between what Christ has made us and what we make of ourselves?
We do what Jesus’ disciples did: on the first day of the week, we gather to reassemble the whole body Christ here, not a member lacking, when the sun has risen; and have the Resurrection over again.” We come and be church.

We remind ourselves that we are baptized. That’s our name. My name is baptized. My name is “Loves Jesus A Lot”. And that’s no acting.

Love Who Christ Loves

My first ever Administrative Board meeting, she threw a book across the table at another member. As church treasurer, “June” once demanded to hold an emergency meeting after worship on the fourth of July to approve the payment of an $11 ham. When I declined to call that meeting, she visibly shook with range. By that time, I was not surprised by June’s outbursts. But it wasn’t the outbursts that wore on you so much as the constant low rumble of complaint and unpleasantness. I once thought, “If I can love June, Lord, I can love anybody.”

We all have our own Junes, examples of difficult people and bad behaviors that we would rather live without. Most of the time we do. We live in avoidance of difficult and unlovely people. To paraphrase Donald Miller, we love the people who like us. This is what passes for our definition of love. We love at our convenience.

John Ortberg tells of a time he and his wife were on a plane and he was inconvenienced. He was reading a book on the Christian life and trying to prepare for a talk he was to give. “There was a small girl, maybe two years old, sitting behind him, kicking the seat just constantly. I started to get irritated. She was one of three small children traveling with their parents. Her six-month-old brother was screaming. I wanted to ask the flight attendant if they could play outside. Then the thought occurred to me. I’m reading a book on Christian heroism and martyrs, and I’m bitter because of a two-year-old. I turned to the mom. “You know, it wasn’t all that long ago that my wife and I had three children your kids’ ages. I remember how hard that was. If there’s anything my wife can do for you on this flight. . .” People are people at inconvenient times.

But let me call you to consider this inconvenient truth – you are the church, which means you are called to love whom Christ loves. And when it comes to that party, well, everyone is coming through the door.

Look who Jesus attracted as a baby even. By legend we call them “three kings” or “wise men.” But the scripture names them “magi.” What is that, honestly? They are pagan star-gazers, much closer to horoscope-reading astrologers than scientific astronomers – think Jean Dixon not Carl Sagan. But these magi, these Iraqis, are among the first to journey to see the Messiah. Being gentiles, they don’t know the Scriptures and so they must inquire of the Temple and King Herod where to find the babe. Can you believe that the Savior who dies for us also suffers for gullible, pagan Iraqis like them?

Surprise! Jesus came for everybody. This was a surprise to the Jews. To be one of the Chosen People was to belong to God’s own. You belonged to God, but very implicitly, God belonged to you. Now here comes a Messiah and his followers who begin to offer good news and forgiveness to the very unchosen, unseemly, and unlovable Gentiles. This was hard to take.

Paul wrote to the Ephesians, reminding them of this truth. . . “I’m sure you have all heard of the great mystery that is my calling to preach God’s grace to the Gentiles. . .It is now plain that God has made the pagans fellow heirs of what we are receiving in Jesus Christ.” Ephesians 3.1-5

The first Jewish Christians struggled mightily with this truth. But it’s not only Jews who struggle with this. Ever since, church people have had a hard time with who gets to come, who really belongs.

C.S. Lewis addressed this problem early on in his book, The Screwtape Letters, a fictional account of how one demon might instruct another on tempting and harassing a human being. The junior devil’s (Wormwood) “patient” has, regrettably, become a Christian. This is what his senior devil writes to him soon after:

One of our great allies at present is the Church itself. I do not mean the Church spread out through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners. . .fortunately (that Church) is quite invisible to these humans. All your patient sees is the half-finished sham Gothic erection on the new building estate. . .When he gets to the pew and looks around him he sees just that selection of his neighbors whom he has up to this point avoided. . .Provided that any of those neighbors sing out of tune, or have boots that squeak, or double chins, or odd clothes, the patient will quite easily believe that their religion must therefore be somehow ridiculous. . . All you have to do is to keep out of his mind the question, ‘If I, being what I am, can consider that I am in some sense a Christian, why should the different vices of those people in the next pew prove that their religion is mere hypocrisy or convention?’ You may ask whether it is possible to keep such an obvious thought from occurring even to a human mind. It is, Wormwood, it is!


Church, we are supposed to love each other! I am tempted to say that we better love each other if we are to love the world. But we can’t afford to wait until we have all our house in order. Maybe if we stretch ourselves to love the world, we will find that we have come to love each other as well. Maybe the feeling will come in the doing.

Our world begins here in Duncansville and Altoona. I’m restless for us to do more for those whom Christ loves. I think we can do a lot more. Our problem is that we have learned how to avoid people. We are going to have to intentionally work hard to get close to needy and unlovely people.

Pastor Rick McKinley talks about how his church began to reach out to people on the margins:

“When we started looking at the needs of our city, we have a very honest moment. We admitted that we didn’t really want to love broken, sinful people; we didn’t really want to love Portland. We prefer safe and protected lives. . .But Jesus is ruthless. He’s not ignoring the lepers and the people pushed into invisible places. Jesus goes right to them.

So we had to repent of our attitudes. We laid out the needs and we prayed.”

If we are gonna love our community, it must begin with our hearts changing. We must repent. And we must actively pray for the needs around us. This takes time. People take time. But Jesus doesn’t lose interest. When someone asked him a question, he never said, “Huh, I wasn’t listening.” Will we love and pay attention over time just like Jesus does?

Jesus Knows Trouble

Our circumstances say something about us. And the circumstances of the family we are born into and our upbringing can say a lot about us. The candidates for president of the United States in 2008 are being scrutinized for who they are. And who they are is at least partly determined by who they have been: Barack Obama, a black man raised by white grandparents in Hawaii; Mike Huckabee, a former Southern Baptist minister raised in Hope, Arkansas; Mitt Romney, member of the Mormon Church; Hillary Clinton, wife of the former President. Some of their stories are mundane, others inspirational, but all of them, significant.

Don’t overlook this basic truth that the circumstances of Jesus’ birth and early life carry significance as well. We do well to note the rough manger and lowly birth. There are reasons why his birth was not to worldly royalty and power. What if Jesus’ had been Herod’s son? What if he had been the son of a Roman Caesar? It’s very difficult to imagine that now. Our understanding of Jesus is powerfully shaped by his whole story, not the least, the story of his birth.

Jesus the Christ was of humble birth, but the Gospel writers, especially Matthew, the Jewish historian, are carefully to point out the connection between Jesus and the line of David and the prophetic announcements. As unlikely as this Messiah seems, his birth was no fluke or accident. His coming was foretold, repeatedly.

And this, too, was foretold – he would be “acquainted with grief,” in words of the prophet Isaiah. Jesus was born in trouble.

No sooner, seemingly, than he was out of the womb, Jesus was being whisked out of town. If you believe the angel, Egypt was safer place for the holy family than Herod’s Judea. They were soon on the run and would stay nomads for several years. Of course, lots of people have to move. Lots of people have enemies. Trouble is relative. We all got trouble.



Our troubles are very real to us. But it’s always helpful to keep perspective on things. Consider the Christmas Eve Robert Schoff of Des Moines, Iowa, had. The Associated Press reports that the 77-year-old man spent part of his Christmas Eve stuck upside down in the opening of his septic tank. What happened was, Schoff opened the tank last Monday and reached inside to try to unclogged a blockage in the system. Let me pause here, and maintain that if you have to open your own septic tank and reach in with your own hands and touch stuff, you’re already on your way to trouble. So it was with Mr. Schoff. He lost his balance, fell into the opening with his body and got wedged there, yes, I remind you, face first. Mr. Schoff “hollered and screamed for help but it was an hour before his wife, Toni, walked by a window and saw his feet in the air.

What did Mr. Schoff have to say about his trouble?

“It wasn’t good, I’ll you what,” said Schoff. “It was the worst Christmas Eve I ever had.”

You thought your Christmas stunk. Indeed.

Trouble always comes. Some of the most serious comes innocently enough at first, in the mundane commitments of our lives. John Ortberg calls this “commitment creep.” Commitments multiply without our permission and are “non-biodegradable.” They hang around longer than Styrofoam cups. We stick to certain commitments even when they no longer make sense; even when they become injurious to our health or the well-being of our souls. This goes on until we hit a crisis. And that’s when we find time to change.

A busy father whose neglected daughter runs away from home and gets sucked into a life of a addiction suddenly finds time to scour the country for her and spends weeks looking for treatment clinics.

A couple who were too busy for each other suddenly find massive amounts of time for counseling and lawyers and legal bills and apartment searches when a marriage falls apart.

A workaholic, rushalolic, compulsive overachiever suddenly finds twenty-four hours a day to ask what life really means when a lab report comes back from the doctor’s marked “malignant.”

Trouble will come our way, always. But it is better not to wait for it. Better to live more boldly and prevent what you can.

“Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. . .”

Sometimes we see people in crisis turn to God and the church with a passion and abandonment they never had before. They are desperate for help, desperate for God. I find nothing wrong with this and everything right.

Not everyone responds to crisis this way. Some turn their back on God and the church. They might wonder what God would possibly do for them if he hasn’t already done x, y, or z. Some ask, what does God know or care about my troubles?

Jesus knows trouble. His early childhood was marked by slaughter of brutality and scale rarely seen, thankfully. Jesus is no fragile flower. And the God Jesus reveals to us is no distant potentate or unfeeling spirit.

“In bringing many sons to glory, it was fitting that God, for whom and through whom everything exists, should make the author of their salvation perfect through suffering.”

And. . .

“Because he himself suffered when he was tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted.”

The Herods of our lives will die. Trouble will not always hold sway. Jesus calls us out of fear and into joy. Let us, brothers and sisters, do our best to put our troubles behind us. And let us embrace the coming year with joy and faith and hope in the One who does all things well.

People With Problems


“And he opened his mouth and taught them saying: Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.”

This is the beginning of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. It is undoubtedly one of the most important and misunderstood talks ever given. Here is how we misunderstand: we try to make of the persons and conditions described here – poor, grieving, lowly – as virtuous in themselves, something we must all try for.

But I ask you, is this really what Jesus is saying? Have you ever asked someone who just lost the love of their heart, whether it’s a good place to be or not? Do you need to ask them, all things considered, would they rather not be grieving right now?

Jesus is not lifting up certain conditions and problems as prerequisites for God’s attention in our lives. He is, rather, looking at the reality of our lives, our problems, both self-induced, and unasked for, and our conditions, and saying, “Here, you too, are a person that God’s kingdom has come for.”

The message of the Sermon on the Mount is that no one is beyond God’s blessing.


The past two days I had a sick child on my hands – so he said. He stayed home from school. You know how this works. They are sick and they need rest. But there is also the attraction of missing school, lying on the couch watching hours of cartoons, and getting waited on for drinks and sandwiches and ice cream. You don’t get that service at the Ramada.

But after a couple days, they begin to feel better. (Side note: did you all read the latest study suggesting all those antibiotics don’t make a difference. We’ll get better anyway, or we won’t. But either way, save your money.)

But the kid starts to feel better. And at the same time this is happening, they start to wonder what their friends are up to at school; and they’ve reached cartoon saturation, and they realize that they’re missing out on better things.

I mention this because people sometimes question whether the poor want to be helped; or whether the sick want to get well. What lies behind this question for some may just be a search for an excuse to do nothing. For example, “they have a TV and a phone, why should we help them with their rent?”

Defining who really needs help and how they can be helped is half the battle. Jesus asked a similar question of a man in obvious need. There was a pool of water in the town of Bethsaida that was rumored to have healing powers. It was said that angel of the Lord would occasionally come down and stir the waters, and the person in the water when this happened would be healed. There was a man, paralyzed for many long years, who sat by that pool day after day, waiting for a miracle. But in those times when something was moving in the water, someone else always beat him in there first. Jesus asked this man, “Do you want to be healed?”

What a question! When Jesus asks this question however, he’s not looking for an excuse not to help, he’s pointing a way toward a cure. If you wish to be healed, you must believe that things can be different. You must believe that there is something different to be had and that you’re tired of missing out.

Lawrence Mead of New York University writes, “It has become difficult to avoid the conclusion that serious poverty in America is rooted in the culture of the poor.” What is culture but the behaviors, lifestyles, and most of all, beliefs of a given group of people? People in the culture of poverty believe that they are meant to be poor. They believe that not much can change. Things are the way they are. They are victims of a system, of government, of their parents, of bad luck. There’s not a lot of hope there. But what Mead suggests is that if the culture, or rather, the beliefs of individuals can be changed, their behaviors can be, and if their behaviors can be changed, their lives can be changed. For example, it is pretty well known across the board of social agencies, law enforcement, and educators that if a person gets a high school diploma that they can read, stays out of jail, gets a job and stays employed, and gets married, it is very unlikely they will continue to be poor. Some people need a lot of help and encouragement to do these things, but if they do their lives will undoubtedly be better.

The vision of the Kingdom involves more than becoming a middle class citizen. The Kingdom is about the fullness of life on every level. The Kingdom of God, at every turn, every malady, every social dynamic, is about destroying the works of the Devil and bringing the healing power of God into play.

When John the Baptist wanted to know if Jesus was the promised Messiah, he sent his disciples to ask Jesus, “Are you the One?”

Here is how Jesus answered: “Tell John simply what you see and hear: the blind see again, the paralyzed walk again, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised; the poor are given good news for once. Blessed are they who can receive this and believe.”

Believe I am the Messiah based on the works I do. Believe because you see a new reality being born. Believe because this life is better than the life you have known. Don’t believe only because you’re obligated to, or you think you ought to. Believe because Jesus is for real. Jesus is true. Life in Jesus is a better life. It’s a life for people with problems.

The Kingdom life, however, begins with not what we can see on the outside, but what is going on inside. The necessity to change our beliefs before a better life will come is true not just for the poor; it’s true for all of us. John Ortberg calls this the Inner Game. The Outer Game is what most of us worry about most of the time, what everybody sees. It gets dressed up, whistled at, and ignored. The Outer Game is really a zero sum game. Everybody loses at this game eventually. You begin to lose brain cells, weight starts shifting from the poles of your body toward the equator, hair stops growing where you want it to and sprouts out from other unlikely places. It’s a humbling thing. “The hardest thing to bear as we get older is the feeling that we remain young inside.”

“It may be that you are not yet twenty-five. At some deep, preconscious level, you are thinking, This will never happen to me; I will never grow old like that. Everyone in your life who is over thirty wants you to know they understand. They love you. But it will happen to you. And frankly, they’re looking forward to it.”

That’s the Outer Game. We play it how we play it, but the results are always the same. Ironically, the Inner Game gets little of our attention, but it has the highest stakes by far. The Inner Game is for keeps. It’s for forever.

From a prison cell, St. Paul wrote to the Corinthians,
“We do not lose heart, though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day.”

Again, John Ortberg paraphrases Paul’s take on the two games being played, the Outer Game and the Inner Game:

“It doesn’t bother me much, ‘cause my body’s just kind of a loaner anyway. Rent-a-wreck material. It’s what’s inside that matters. Something’s going on inside of me; it’s like the opposite of what’s happening outside. Outside I’m dying a little every day. Inside I’m coming to life. Inside I’m growing. Changing. I keep getting stronger. Joy keeps bubbling up – even in prison. I keep getting more hopeful. . .I keep loving people more . . .It’s the strangest thing. I’m dying on the outside, but inside I’m coming to life. It’s fabulous.”

People like Paul and John the Baptist never had much use for the Outer Game, never worried about what people in soft robes thought. Maybe we can have this attitude as well. Stop worrying so much about the Outer Self and start giving more attention to the Inner You in God.

We have scales and mirrors and cameras to track the progress of our outer selves. How can we track the well-being of the part of us that will last? Here are a few mirrors and scales that we all probably need:

Self-examination and confession
Friends who love you enough to speak truth to you
Time to be alone and listen to God
Examination of your calendar and checkbook
Key questions, such as: How easily discouraged do I get these days? How easily irritated am I compared to six months ago?
Attention to your secret thought life. What is your mind drawn toward – really? Where do envy or blaming or judging or lusting rob your inner person of life and joy?

It’s with attention to such details about the inner self that we will see the Kingdom of God grow in and around us. People with problems become people with irrepressible joy.

“Strengthen the weak hands, and make firm the feeble knees. Say to those who are of a fearful heart, “Be strong, do not fear! Here is your God. . . He will come and save you.”
A highway shall be there, and it shall be called the Holy Way; the unclean shall not travel on it, but it shall be for God’s people; no traveler, not even fools, shall get lost.” Isaiah 35.3-4, 8