Matthew 12:43-45
Luke 11:24-26
THE
GIFTS
It’s easy to make a mistake at seventy miles per hour. You
don’t get a lot of time to decide. The repercussions can be
devastating, and deadly – and not just for you. Ambling
along a country road on foot or even on horseback, you could
make a mistake of approximately the same magnitude, but the
repercussions would be so slight you might not even notice
them. You might nod off to sleep on the back of a horse and
still find yourself safe at home, with the horse waiting
patiently for you to wake up, take off the saddle, and do
some feeding. If you fall asleep behind the wheel at seventy
miles per hour – well, I don’t have to explain it to you. It
is a concern we carry that our ancestors never thought
about.
Today we live at seventy miles per hour most of the
time, so to speak. It doesn’t take much of an error on our
part to crash us big time – physically, emotionally,
relationally, occupationally ... and oh yes, spiritually. We
are making many more decisions each day, and with much less
time to ponder them, than our grandparents did. Our
intentions may not be as different from our forebears as we
sometimes think, but most of us give ourselves far less time
to think, pray, ponder, and prepare ourselves to keep our
balance, and to keep our values and purposes clear and in
plain sight.
The other side of
the coin is that we can speed past the gifts, the blessings,
and the benefits which the Holy Spirit is trying to give us.
I am suggesting that the speed of life today makes some of
the disciplines of the Christian Path more difficult and
more necessary than ever before. In other words, a season
like Lent is more important and more necessary to our
well-being than ever before. So are retreats, vocatio
workshops, and prayer time each morning when we wake up.
Even so, the principles are not new. The necessities have
been there from the beginning. It has always been necessary
for those who wanted to follow Jesus – for those who have
wanted to walk the Christian WAY – to shield themselves from
the outside world – from outside influences – in some ways.
We hear the thread and theme from almost endless places in
the New Testament. Here it is from Second Peter: “With
all this in view, you should make every effort to add virtue
to your faith, knowledge to virtue, self-control to
knowledge, fortitude to self-control, piety to fortitude,
brotherly affection to piety, and love to brotherly
affection.” (II Peter 1:5-7)
Now that’s a formula
and a half! Wouldn’t that be a great passage to ponder for
an entire Lenten season? Well, one of these years ... I try
not to get you into anything too deep until you’re ready for
it. (I hope you are laughing!)
This teaching about a house swept clean is vintage Jesus.
How curious that it reminds us of the standard approaches
most Christians use toward the Lenten season each year – and
why most of the time it doesn’t do them any good. You have
noticed, I presume, connections between giving up things for
Lent and making New Year’s resolutions. They both
deteriorate before we barely get started because they are
self-help approaches. Lent was certainly never intended
to be a self-help program. Heavens, how can we be watching
Jesus – thinking about The Passion and all it means to us –
and still get into self-help antics? Nevertheless, Satan
always tries to twist our good intentions to his ends. Satan
doesn’t have to fight our evil intentions, only our good
ones. Therefore most of our struggles with Satan are about
the corruption, or twisting, of the very best motives and
intentions within us.
On
the inside, we are sincere and conscientious people. We know
we are not perfect. Suggest that we should improve, and
presto! – if we are not wide awake and full of faith
(trust), we are soon engaged in yet another self-improvement
program. And bingo! – Satan has us playing in his ball park.
We are in charge and we are going to fix ourselves – and
mess up God’s design in the process. And then either we will
end up discouraged (today I think they call it “depressed”)
and feeling worse about ourselves than when we started, or
we will be filled with pride and a self-satisfaction that
helps us look down on lesser mortals not endowed with the
superior character traits that we possess. Doesn’t Satan win
either way? Satan wouldn’t still be in business if he were
as simple and obvious as most of us would like to think.
Lent can be a
marvelous time. It reminds us of Jesus’ forty days in the
wilderness after His own conversion (baptism). It reminds us
of the depth of prayer and pondering it took for Jesus to
get clear about His own identity and His own purpose. Not
always, but often we need to get fresh and clear about our
own Christian identity and purpose. Lent reminds us of the
Christian Path or WAY, which we try to walk all the time but
which sometimes gets fuzzy, and we need extra time to
refocus. Lent is not laid on us from outside. We want to
follow this WAY because we have watched and loved and wanted
to follow Jesus. We want Lent to be a time when we open
ourselves to receive the Spirit of Jesus our Lord in fresh
new ways. This often crowds some things out of our lives
that we no longer have room for, that we no longer have time
or space for. But that’s not the same as “giving things up
for Lent.” Making more room for Jesus is not the same as
clearing things out just to get tidy. Of course, you cannot
tell the difference from the outside looking in. But on the
inside, if we experience more of His presence, there is no
comparison. Sorry if the analogy bothers you, but a spring
cleaning is not the same as making love.
Does “giving things
up for Lent” sound a lot like the picture Jesus gives us of
the man who swept his house clean? We would be hard put to
find a phrase that could sound any more like “sweeping your
house clean.” Get rid of bad habits; drive some of your
personal demons away. How is it possible that a Lenten
tradition could develop which so blatantly falls into the
very trap Jesus warns us about? Do we not know how the
teaching ends? Do we not read the Scriptures? Do we not pay
any attention to what Jesus teaches us? Actually, the notion
of giving things up for Lent does come from a wing of
Christendom that puts no emphasis on reading or studying the
Bible.
Perhaps, then, they have an excuse, albeit a lame one, for
being off the mark. “We don’t know the Scriptures very well
because we never intended to know them very well.” On the
other hand, what is our excuse? Protestants,
Puritans, and Congregationalists have always put enormous
emphasis on reading and studying the Bible. We have always
maintained that the Bible should be the overt rule and guide
of our faith communities – outranked only by the Holy Spirit
of God in Christ Jesus. And yet, for over fifty years now,
our churches have been neglecting the Bible, despite our
claim that it is supposed to be our rule and guide, and the
central focus of our worship. Almost none of our churches
today put any emphasis on Bible study. Even in worship, our
denomination uses the Bible in the most cursory fashion,
often making it clear that no one should take it very
seriously – reading small sections, often out of context,
and saying nothing about them even after they are read. A
few of our churches are wonderful exceptions, of course, or
our denomination would be dying even faster than it is.
The vast majority of
members in the United Church of Christ do not crack a Bible
for months on end. And I kid you not: When I first arrive at
one of our churches, very few members can tell me whether
Elijah comes before or after King David, or whether Hezekiah
is one of the books in the Old Testament. That is far from
true here any longer. But it is still true of some of
you. Some people think they are so smart that they don’t
have to read the Bible to know everything they need to know
about being a Christian. They prove the point, too, but not
in the way they think.
When I was a young pastor in New England, most of our
sanctuaries were still designed around a central pulpit. It
wasn’t because our pastors had big egos, though that was
sometimes true, and we were accused of it far more often
than was true. We had central pulpits to remind
ourselves that the WORD was central, and that preaching the
WORD was the most important part of worship. Obviously,
liturgical churches don’t agree with this. In Catholic
worship, it doesn’t matter whether there is a sermon or not,
and usually there is not. Even if there is a homily, it has
none of the stature or import of a Protestant sermon. What
is central is the Eucharist – the communion meal.
I
was raised, as most of you know, in the East Whittier
Friends Church. Do you think there was an altar or a cross?
Communion was every Sunday, and consisted of five minutes of
silence. Toward the end of my high school days, we moved to
Long Beach and joined the First Congregational Church. It
had a central pulpit, of course. That was back in the ’50s.
Emerson G. Hangen was a strong and devoted preacher. He
lifted up the importance of the WORD by memorizing the
Scripture reading each Sunday. He recited the passage (and
often it was lengthy) with fervor and feeling, and often it
was the highlight of the service – which was exactly what he
intended. “If I have a good sermon – well and good. If I
have a poor sermon – I’ll try again next Sunday. But as for
you: STAY WITH THE WORD.” Of course, the true WORD is never
just what is printed on the page. It is what lurks behind
that – and pondering what the Bible says is one of the best
ways to get to it. But I digress ...
We
then moved to New England for ten years. I saw many
Congregational churches there, and nearly all of them had
central pulpits. Where I worked and preached – Amherst in
New Hampshire, and Paxton and Andover in Massachusetts – all
had central pulpits. But a new trend was coming: redesign
our sanctuaries so they would have a divided chancel, and
then we could make the altar central and have a
cross. This caused a fight within our denomination. No
self-respecting Congregational church in New England would
allow a cross in the sanctuary back then. Too Catholic;
don’t get the focus off the WORD. In the years following,
more and more churches remodeled their sanctuaries to have
divided chancels, like ours is today. Much better for
weddings. So we lost the fight. And then we lost
Congregationalism. And then we lost the Bible. And in most
places we lost the Faith – and now we are losing more and
more of our churches all the time. Of course, as a
denomination we’ve been too busy with important things to
notice any of these connections. But then again, maybe there
are no connections; it’s just the way life happens, and
nobody is responsible.
By
now you may have forgotten the point. The point is that if
we pay any attention to what Jesus teaches us, we cannot do
Lenten disciplines in the traditional manner. Giving up
things for Lent is the cart before the horse. It
deteriorates into a self-help program. It misses the real
purpose. There are many people who enter Lent year after
year and reenact this very teaching about a house swept
clean – and end up with more demons than when they started,
yet still they don’t catch on. In one way or another, most
of us have tried it too. So we do not feel superior, just
sympathetic. On the other hand, why would we ever allow
ourselves to get caught in such a fruitless and
counterproductive bootstrap operation ever again? Christ
have mercy!
Whether you realize
it or not, we are heading toward the gifts of the Spirit. At
least that has been my hope since this Lenten season began.
But I have wanted to put the gifts in a better context, for
reasons I will mention in a minute. If we go directly to
contemplating the gifts themselves, wondrous as they are,
many people get thrown off track. Over the next two Sundays,
we will only have time to touch on a couple of the gifts.
But I know you. You are not a WORDless, prayerless
community. It will be enough for most of you to open
yourselves to whatever gifts you are willing to receive.
Meanwhile, one last chance to get the ground ready.
The gifts are not morals. The gifts are not commandments,
rules, or laws. This is an extremely important point. The
gifts are not morals, they are GIFTS. I have done sermons
and retreats and workshops on “The Gifts of the Spirit” off
and on for many years now. What I have noticed, over and
over, is that people end up thinking about the gifts of the
Spirit in “normal mode.” That’s horrible! We cannot “learn”
the gifts of the Spirit like we learn geometry or
accounting. Hearing in “normal mode” – that is, in the way
we tend to hear and react to most other information we
contemplate or acquire “in the world” – will only leave us
further off track than ever. Without warning, most people
try to deal with the gifts of the Spirit as if they were a
list of character attributes they ought to have – and if
they don’t have them, then they better rush out and get
them. Even worse, we can hear the list of the Spirit’s gifts
as a kind of religious report card: a morals checkup; a test
of how well we’re doing. If I don’t have these qualities in
my life – if they are not big enough in my life – it means I
am inadequate, or bad, or wrong. Shame on me! I better shape
up before I go to Hell ...
The old construct dies hard, doesn’t it? In truth, these
gifts take us out of Hell – they release us from our
present bondage. And that is not something we can do for
ourselves. Not to jump the gun, but the gifts of the Spirit
are LOVE, JOY, PEACE, PATIENCE, KINDNESS, GOODNESS,
FAITHFULNESS, GENTLENESS, AND SELF-CONTROL. (Galatians 5:22)
Obviously we cannot have these gifts in our lives and
have bad, boring, or useless lives at the same time. But
they are a grace thing. They are given to us by the
Holy Spirit – as gifts.
If
I can find, purchase, produce, or manufacture such things
for myself, they are not gifts – certainly not gifts of the
Spirit. I don’t mean to imply that you are slow, but do you
get it? I have been pretty slow to catch on myself, which is
why I am so eager for you to “get it.” If we can take
care of such things for ourselves, we don’t need Jesus – we
don’t need His Holy Spirit. If we can take care of such
things for ourselves, then these are not gifts at all. And
most of you know very well that the way the church usually
approaches the gifts of the Spirit is that they are not
gifts at all, and they do not come from the Spirit. We try
to turn them into just another self-help program. And where
does that lead us? Straight into the teeth of this teaching
Jesus uses to try to warn us. Straight into the trap of the
seven demons worse than the first. Isn’t that cute!? No, it
is Satan.
What happens when we go after the gifts of the Spirit as if
they were something we could get for ourselves? We play-act,
of course. We pretend we have them. We put them on as
if they were spiritual cosmetics – religious makeup. We try
to act like we have these gifts – try to make it look
like we have them so other people will think we have
them. But smiling all the time doesn’t mean we have joy. Do
we imagine that it doesn’t matter if we really have
peace, as long as we can get people to think we have
peace, or as long as we can get a reputation for being
“peacemakers”? Or that it doesn’t matter if we actually have
peace in our homes, as long as we can get people to think
that we live in happy homes? Hey, if that’s all we’re after
– the veneer, the makeup, the pretend love, the friendly
smile that hides the true venom – then the critics are
right: we are just a bunch of hypocrites. They are right to
want nothing to do with organized religion.
Well, we all know
that there is plenty of pretense in this broken world, but
some of us know that that’s not all there is. The gifts
really do exist. The Spirit really does want
to give us these gifts. The wheat and the tares grow
together.
Back to us and our own Lenten devotions: What does the
Spirit have to do to get a “date” with us? To get time,
friendship, and a setting and an opportunity to give us
anything? That is what Lent is really about – saying “yes”
to the Spirit’s invitation: “Come with me. We need to spend
more time together. I have some things I want to give you,
but I cannot do that unless we spend some time together. I’m
not going to propose in this mayhem you call your life.” The
gifts commemorate our bond of love with the Holy Spirit. We
accept the invitation – we make and keep the date. We even
decide to “go steady” with the Spirit. Just as soon as we
do, we are given gifts. Jesus is a great giver, as we should
know by now. But I’m jumping way ahead of things, I suppose.
On the other hand, the truth is, “The church is the bride of
Christ.” So I am not way ahead – I am way behind.
In
any case, the gifts all come from the interior life – from
our relationship with the Spirit. They are the blessings of
knowing the Holy Spirit of our Lord and Savior. Any other
approach is merely play-acting, a charade. We don’t want the
gifts because they are useful in the outer world or because
we are trying to impress anybody. We want them because He
gives them to us – because they remind us of His presence
and His love. If they sometimes spill over into outer life,
so what? It was just an accident – just the overflow. I am
certain the Spirit knows that these gifts will bless us
greatly, and sometimes help us through very difficult outer
circumstances. But we do not receive them or cherish them
because they “work” in the world. Sometimes they do
“work” in the world. Sometimes they make things ever so much
more difficult – just like they did for Him, and for all His
sincere followers. We receive and cherish the gifts because
He gives them to us, and because they are so
appropriate to who He is, and what He is like. And that
happens to be far more important than anything going on in
this fickle and broken world.
Back to the house swept clean: “House,” I remind you, is a
primordial symbol of the soul. It appears as such in dreams,
fairy tales, visions. It is a universal symbol in the
language of the subconscious. And clearly that is what it
stands for in this teaching. What do we put in the place of
any departed demon? Time and life and relationship with
Jesus (Holy Spirit). Of course! Only if Jesus comes more and
more into our lives will the demons find no room to get back
in. Who else could fill such a void – flood our “house” with
light and joy – until we have no more desire for demons, or
the fake gifts they offer us? Come, Lord Jesus ...
Copyright 1996-2010 by
Bruce Van Blair. All rights reserved.