July 31, 2011

The Life You Save May Be Your Own
W. Gregory Pope, preaching

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Psalm 8; Ephesians 4:25-5:2, 15-16

There comes a time in almost everyone’s life when you come face to face with your own brokenness and the truth about your own life.  If we refuse to act or seek help we will likely find our lives crumbling around us.  To face our brokenness, our weakness, our sin and to seek the help of God’s grace and the supporting love of a community of faith might just save your life.

I shared with you several weeks ago about my own personal struggle with depression.  For the past several years it has affected my life in ways I have not truthfully dealt with.  I tried to cover it up.  I made excuses as to why I did not do things I needed to do.  But I have a few friends who confronted me and forced me to face the truth about something in my life for which I needed help beyond myself.  If I did not get help, there was a good chance my life was going to unravel.  I am grateful for those friends.  I am grateful for the love and support of my wife.  And I cannot tell you what your words, smiles, letters, and the sharing of your lives have meant to me and how you have helped me gradually improve.  I still have work to do and things to figure out, but I’m glad to have at least begun the work.

Over the next couple of weeks I want to share with you what I am learning along this winding road, and what ancient scripture has tried to teach us for centuries.  And hopefully we can help one another along the way.

Many of you will recognize that the sermon title this morning comes from a Flannery O’Connor short story.  In that story, Tom T. Shiftlet was driving down the road and occasionally he would see a sign that warned:  “Drive carefully. The life you save may be your own.”¹

That sounds to me a great deal like the guidance from Ephesians that says, Be careful how you live, not as unwise people but as wise, making the most of the time.

If we live carelessly, there will likely be dire consequences.  But if we pay attention to our lives, and face the truth about ourselves, and do what needs to be done, seeking out whatever help we need, the life we save may be our own.

This morning I am seeking to offer what I have come to believe are essentials of wise living that must be incorporated into our lives in order to live carefully and fully.  Many of which are nestled into the words from Ephesians we heard earlier.

                                                                    Self-honesty

The first essential is self-honesty.

The writer of Ephesians says, Put away falsehood and let us all speak the truth to our neighbors. That includes the truth about ourselves, to ourselves, and to others.

We have an amazing capacity, do we not, for self-deception.  It is so easy to lie to ourselves.  To believe that we are worse or better than we really are.  Wisdom calls us to a growing capacity for self-honesty.

The twelve-step movement, popularized by Alcoholics Anonymous, has been in our time a call for self-honesty.  It’s not just about coming face to face with our addictions that have rendered us helpless.  It’s also a daily call for a moral inventory, a call to be honest with how we are living our lives.

Now, of course, we can overdo this moral inventory business, spending all our time morbidly going over our long list of faults so that we have no confidence or sense of self-worth to do anything good.

But self-honesty is essential for our spiritual health.  Because the illness we deny in ourselves is the most deadly one.  If you know what’s wrong and take steps to fix it, that’s healthy and good.  But when we deny something’s wrong and make no attempt to correct it, we become dangerous.

Scott Peck, in his book The People of the Lie, says that the source of human evil is the refusal to acknowledge the presence of sin in our lives or the capacity for evil in ourselves.

Psychologists tell us it happens again and again.  The darkness or sin that we deny in ourselves is projected out onto the people around us.  We blame everyone but ourselves.  And we end up causing damage to others as well as to ourselves.

The person most capable of evil is the person who is intent on changing everyone and everything around them, but sees no need to change themselves. 

So Jesus says, Judge not, lest you be judged.  Stop looking at the speck of sawdust in your brother or sister’s eye when you have a great tree trunk growing our of your own eye.  First take the tree trunk out.

Sometimes we are incapable of seeing the truth about ourselves, and we need friends who will be honest with us.

Self-honesty.  We must begin there.

                                                                       Courage

A second essential, one that is required for self-honesty, is courage. 

There are different forms of courage.

There’s physical courage, when we risk physical harm to save someone else from harm.

There’s mental/psychological/spiritual courage, what Paul Tillich called “the courage to be,” which is the courage to go on living day after day in the face of overwhelming despair or guilt or shame or grief.

And there’s moral courage, the courage to stand up for the truest glimpse of beauty and truth and goodness; the courage to stick by what you believe to be right regardless of the rejection of others or harm to yourself.  Sometimes it is a lonely path, and that’s why it takes courage.  As Mark Twain said, “Be good and you will be lonely.”

Jesus had the courage to stand up for what he believed was right.  He had the courage to love those whom his culture and religion hated.  He had the courage to take on the religious establishment when they had perverted the true purposes of religion to love God and neighbor, to welcome the enemy and outcast, to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God.  Jesus even had the courage to die for what he believed in.

We are called to a courage that makes us angry at injustice.  Angry enough to act on behalf of the poor and those in need.  But an anger that does not lead us into sin ourselves.

Courage.  Self-honesty.

                                                                      Kindness

And kindness.

Kindness must come next on the heels of courage.  For you see, it’s one thing to die for what you believe in.  It’s quite another to kill for what you believe in, or at least, hate those who do not believe as you do.  We need the courage to stand up for our convictions with passion and to be kind about it.

Jesus mixed a penetrating self-honesty, an uncompromising courage, with the most amazing kindness we’ve ever seen.

I don’t know about you, but it’s the kindness of God that just undoes me.  Paul was right when he said, It is your kindness, O God, that leads us to repentance.

How can a God so holy be at the same time so kind?  I think it’s because God understands.  God understands us much better than we will ever be able to understand ourselves.  And kindness follows understanding.

One novelist spoke of his family as outlaws.  Emotional outlaws.  An alcoholic father.  An aunt who was so depressed that she frequently flirted with suicide.  And a mother who never quite seemed to be able to cope with life, or to fit in, to make it.

Have you ever felt like an outlaw, an emotional outlaw?  That what you felt was way out of bounds?  Your heart had broken some rule or some taboo or some norm.  You loved someone you weren’t supposed to love.  Or you hated someone you were supposed to love.  You didn’t feel like being a mother or father anymore.  All of us, I think, are outlaws in some way or another.

So all of us need to hear the gospel:  The saving truth that while we were outlaws, prodigals, having broken some unbreakable rule, now on the run, God loves us still and seeks us out and desires more than anything to welcome us home.

Maybe we need to start believing in God’s prodigal kindness.  And then maybe we can begin to be a bit more kind to ourselves.  And more kind to those around us.

We heard the words from scripture earlier:  Let no evil talk come out of your mouths but only what is useful for building up as there is need, so that your words may give grace to those who hear.  But away from you all bitterness and wrath, malice and slander, and be kind, tenderhearted, forgiving one another as God in Christ has forgiven you.

Kindness.  Because we’re all doing our best to make it through this thing called life.

                                                                        Humor

A fourth essential that, coming from me, will be no surprise - a sense of humor.  Not the cruel humor that hurts others, but a gracious humor.  The kind of humor that lets us laugh at ourselves.  And how we need to do that.  A gracious humor helps us accept our humanity and be honest with ourselves.  It let’s us lighten up a bit.  It helps us not take life and ourselves so seriously.  Humor helps us bear the pains of life more easily. 

I have shared with you before this wonderful prayer by a Scottish pastor.  I have found it helpful in recent days.  Perhaps you can as well.  He was once heard to pray in church, “Lord, we thank Thee that it isn’t always like this.”  There’s profound truth in that humor.

                                                                      Gratitude

The humor of that prayer is medicine for the soul.  “Lord, we thank Thee that it isn’t always like this.”

It’s not really a bad prayer, is it.  It helps us get through the hardness of a difficult day.  It also gives us remembrance of and hope for better days.

And it points us toward a fifth essential:  Gratitude.
The Bible calls us to pray with thanksgiving in all circumstances.
I don’t know about you but I’ve never quite been able to pull that off.

But I think I can pray this prayer of thanksgiving when the road is difficult:

“Lord, I thank Thee that it isn’t always like this.”

Gratitude is crucial for honest living.  Brother David Stendl-Rast in his book Gratefulness: The Heart of Prayer, reminds us that gratitude requires us to acknowledge our dependence upon others, our need for relationship, because gratitude means there is a giver and a receiver.  The giver can be another person.  But ultimately, all good gifts come from the Great Giver of life and breath.

                                                                Awe / Reverence

And that leads me to the last essential I will offer this morning: a sense of awe.

We have Self-honesty.  Courage.  Kindness.  Humor.  Gratitude.  And Awe.

We could also call it reverence.

This I believe is our greatest essential and perhaps most elusive one.  Because we all need a place to kneel.  A place where you recognize and remember  that the world is in somebody else’s hands, not yours.  And that’s good news.

It means you can give up being President of the Universe today.  It means you can offer your life into hands better than your own.  The hands of your Maker.

To carry within yourself a sense of awe is to heed the summons of the psalmist:  O come, let us worship and bow down.  Let us kneel before the Lord our Maker.

Theologian Jan Lochman tells of his visit to Harvard and seeing inscribed on one of the buildings the words from Psalm 8:  What is man that Thou art mindful of him? 

He asked someone about this inscription and was told that originally a different inscription was planned, the words from the Greek philosopher Pythagoras which reads, “bon ton metron anthropos” - “Man is the measure of all things.”   But it was changed somewhere in the planning to the prayer of the psalmist.

I think it was a wise choice.  And one we need to make on the inscriptions of our own lives.  A choice that says life is not based on the human measurement of things.  For a life based just on the human has no place to kneel.  It has no sense of awe.

So I invite you to inscribe these words of the psalmist upon your heart as a prayer full of mystery: Who are we that God cares for us?

Awe and reverence bring us full circle back to self-honesty.  The deepest truth about us is that our lives do not lie in our own human hands.  Our lives lie in God’s careful, tender mindfulness of us.  And so we bow.  We bow in humility and wonder.  Wonder at God’s beautiful and intricate creation of us and the world.

For our own sanity and salvation and wisdom we must live in the awareness that there is Something, Someone, in this universe greater than we are, Someone who is our reason for being, Someone who is the very breath that sustains us.

Are you able to see that?  To profess that?  Do you have enough reverent self-honest courage to give your life into the hands that made you?

It might just save your life.