| The Center of The Universe |
October 08, 2000 |
I make my son Sam go to church because I can.
I outweigh him by nearly 75 pounds.
But that is only part of it.
The main reason is that I want to give him what I found in the
world, which is to say a path and a light to see by.
People with a deep sense of spirituality follow a brighter light
than the glimmer of their own candle; they are part of something
beautiful ....
Our funky little church is filled with people who are working for
peace and freedom,
who are out there on the streets and inside praying,
and they are home writing letters,
and they are at the shelters with giant platters of food.
-Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies
(New York: Anchor Books, 1999), 100.
An idea before you read the sermon...
Visit the Unofficial Brady Bunch Home Page
http://www.teleport.com/~btucker/bradys.shtml
and follow links to download a sound clip of Jan's incessant whining
about the oldest sibling, Marcia.
Marcia, Marcia, Marcia.
This Brady Bunch rant is a sentiment that surfaces
frequently in relationship squabbles between siblings or
sweethearts.
And by the time someone says,
"It's all about you, isn't it?",
the message is,
I don't know what to say but I feel powerless.
And the correct response in the world of manipulation, is,
"No, no, it's not about me, what do you want?"
The phrase has recently acquired a more positive spin.
United BMW of Duluth, Georgia, says in its print ads,
"It's all about you."
Day-Timer's Online store proclaims,
"It's all about you."
So does the Dietary Guidelines Alliance,
"make healthy choices that fit your lifestyle"
as long as that lifestyle includes eating beef.
Walla Walla World extols the virtues of living in Walla Walla,
Washington, saying
"It's all about you."
But if truth be told, a more appropriate mantra for this
generation is:
"It's all about me."
In fact, Web sites abound making that very claim.
Go to your favorite search engine...
Yahoo or Google...
type in "It's all about me" and you'll find
thousands of self-proclaiming, self-expressing netizens professing
"It's all about me" --
whoever "me" might happen to be.
Ebay, the online auction site, encourages "about
me" pages because your About Me page is a great way
for people to understand who you are."
You describe who you are - or if not who you are, then maybe how you
see yourself, or wish yourself to be.
You create a Web site which defiantly declares,
"It's about me! It's all about me! Me, me, me,
me! Notice me!
See me!
Here I am!
I matter!
Read about me!
Know
me!"
Jesus is well aware of the destructive nature of the
"all-about-me" mentality.
That's why he warns that his followers must be willing to deny
themselves before they can be counted as true disciples.
He understood that the only thing that stands between God and me,
is me.
I'm in my own way.
Every time I try to walk alone I trip over myself.
This getting-out-of-the-way is what makes Peter's proclamation
about Jesus so remarkable, so extraordinary, so
inconceivable.
For a moment, perhaps for the first time in his life, Peter gets
out of his own way.
For a moment Peter stops thinking about himself.
He stops putting self first.
In a flash of spirit insight he understands, if only for that
instant, that it isn't "about ME"
it never was and never will be.
In effect, Peter proclaims, "It's all about you,
Jesus!"
It's about Peter's becoming smaller inside himself --
and when that happens it creates the conditions in which Jesus can
become bigger inside him.
John the Baptist had the same insight when he said about
Jesus,
"He must increase, but I must decrease"
(John 3:30).
But I gotta tell you...
it is all too easy to move from a constructive, life-affirming
declaration of "It's you, Lord,"
to destructive, life-destroying declarations of self-interest.
At first Peter says,
"You, you, you ... Jesus, it's all about you. You are the
Messiah."
The very next minute he's thinking,
"Me, me, me.
It's all about me.
Don't go to the cross, Jesus, or I lose my place in the New
Economy...the new world order..."
Jesus' response is swift.
"Get behind me, Satan."
First, I love Jesus' response...
you want to know who the devil is?
The one who causes you such pain and sets you up to fall on your
face?
There it is.
Anytime your story is about you,
anytime your life centers around you getting what you think you
need...
anytime you believe the advertisers that it is all about you...
there are the words of Jesus. "Get behind me,
Satan."
Second, I think we need to notice something here.
Jesus doesn't speak this way to people very much.
Sometimes he's a bit brusque, but he calls Peter Satan!
And I don't think he says it matter-of-factly.
I think he loses his voice and it comes out as a forced whisper.
So what is it that Jesus knows that causes such a
blurting out of words?
And I love how Peter reveals to us how we step in and out of
being followers of Christ...
But what is it Jesus knows that brings such a blurting out of
words?
I think for the most part, for us...
Christianity is a belief system...
something we put in our head...
a way of having a positive outlook on life....
and it helps us to deal with what is happening to us...
and it is like positive thinking...
and it's ok...
but in the end it will not be enough.
Christianity... following Christ... is so much more...
And this is what Peter glimpses for just a second....
something so much larger than "all about him."
When the system collapses...
and every system collapses...
every Babylon collapses...
Even the Roman empire went down...
and we look at that and think we can avoid the pitfalls
but what we don't see is that every system will collapse.
If you want to know what the book of Revelations is about, read
chapter 18...
this is a summary chapter...
They will stand at a distance, terrified by her great
torment.
They will cry out,
"How terrible, how terrible for Babylon, that great
city!
In one single moment God's judgment came on her."
The merchants of the world will weep and mourn for her, for there is
no one left to buy their goods.
She bought great quantities of gold, silver, jewels, pearls, fine
linen, purple dye, silk, scarlet cloth, every kind of perfumed
wood, ivory goods, objects made of expensive wood, bronze, iron, and
marble.
She also bought cinnamon, spice, incense, myrrh, frankincense,
wine,
olive oil, fine flour, wheat,
cattle, sheep, horses, chariots,
and
slaves--
yes, she even traded in human lives.
"All the fancy things you loved so much are
gone,"
they cry.
"The luxuries and splendor that you prized so much will
never be yours again.
They are gone forever."
Revelation 18:11-20
This is what Revelations is about...
and all the images of the beast and seven signs are about the
struggle the church will go through in deciding...
whether to align itself with the culture of the day and say,
"It's all about me! Personal Salvation! I believed
correctly!",
Or with Jesus who says,
"If any of you wants to be my follower," he told
them,
"you must put aside your selfish ambition,
shoulder the cross you will be nailed too,
and follow me.
If you try to keep your life for yourself, you will lose it.
But if you give up your life for my sake and for the sake of the
Good News,
you will find true life.
And how do you benefit if you gain the whole world but lose your own
soul in the process?"
What Jesus is offering to Peter and also to the rest of us is a
question...
when the system collapses will we go down because we've heavily
invested in the system?
Or can we smile and say,
like Peter did in that brief instant of seeing,
"It's not about that.
My life says that he is the messiah.
I invest and trust in something larger than me."
I have some data that I find very disturbing.
- 37% percent of teens
do not live with their fathers;
a full 17 percent do not have a male in their household.
Where are these fathers?
Some are raising another woman's children.
Others have abandoned their families for other reasons.
It's all about me.
- The number of unmarried couples today
is up 700 percent since
1990.
"I can't commit to anything beyond myself!"
- Hugh Hefner is dating 22-year-old twins.
It just feels good!
- There is a new teen girls' magazine,
All About You!
What has society morphed into, but brainwashing teens to be
this way to be accepted?
The front cover contains another boy band, the message is
"if you want to date cool boys like this... you've got to
measure up."
The worst of all is the 'got-to-have-it!' sections which
list outrageously priced, tacky items.
The models in the magazine weigh at the most 105 pounds with
perfect features.
What kind of message is this magazine sending the teens of
today?
That you have to weigh 105, wear GAP clothes and buy Donna Karan
shoes to fit in and to be cool?
I think all teenagers have the potential to be deep, inquisitive
and soulful, but this magazine promotes everything but that.
It focuses on image ... and that is what society needs to
lessen its grip on.
I think a better title would be All About Image ...
- A 15-year-old Ohio girl
sued the school district when
she didn't make the cheerleading squad.
Is this symptomatic of an it's-all-about-me culture?
I find these bothersome because of the words of Jesus,
"If you try to keep your life for yourself, you will lose
it.
But if you give up your life for my sake ... you will find true
life.
And how do you benefit if you gain the whole world but lose your own
soul in the process? "
Other Information I Found in Preparation for this Soul Talk.
It is 1979, a basketball game in the Brandeis gym.
The team is doing well, and the student section begins a chant,
"We're number one! We're number one!",
Morrie [the professor] is sitting nearby.
He is puzzled by the cheer.
At one point, in the midst of "We're number one!"
he rises and yells,
"What's wrong with being number two?"
The students look at him.
They stop chanting.
He sits down, smiling and triumphant.
-Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
(New York: Doubleday,
1997), 159.
Self-denial has never been the strong suit of
the baby boom generation,
which for years ranked its priorities as sex, drugs and rock 'n
roll,
and only recently added IPOs and SUVs.
But history, with its eternal fondness for irony, now is offering
the boomers an opportunity to leave a very different political
legacy.
As the nation debates what to do with the federal budget
surplus,
the question largely may turn on whether the baby boomers, as the
nation's largest voting bloc, want to spend it on themselves - or
are willing to make the kind of sacrifice for the future that
lastingly marked their parents, the GI generation, which came of age
during World War II.
Over the next 15 years, the federal surplus is expected to
total a staggering $5.9 trillion - $3 trillion in the Social Security
accounts and $2.9 trillion in the rest of the federal budget.
So far, the debate over this windfall has focused on how the competing
alternatives allocate benefits among the rich, the poor and the middle
class.
That's an important debate.
But even more consequential may be how the plans allocate benefits
among generations.
Carving out a huge tax cut from the surplus, as some are
proposing, would primarily benefit workers who are middle-age and
older - that is, the baby boomers and their older siblings.
Applying the surplus more toward paying down the national debt,
as Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan is urging, would
produce the greatest benefits in 15 or 20 years, when today's young
workers would reap the maximum advantage.
So which is it going to be?
At most homeless shelters, new arrivals are given the basics: a
cot, a blanket and a plain hot meal.
Mary Jo Copeland believes that is not enough.
At her charity in Minneapolis, the 5'6" dynamo - who
drives a white 1998 Lincoln Continental with PRAYNOW license
plates - doesn't give her clients just a pat on the back
or even a gentle caress on the cheek.
She gets down on her knees and washes their feet.
In a hard-knock world, that simple gesture of compassion is
enough to bring tears to the eyes of Wayne Irving, a homeless
laborer who arrived in Minneapolis by bus from Chicago.
"Nobody ever did this for me," he says, sitting over a
basin of hot, sudsy water as Copeland, 57, wearing a pair of thin
rubber surgical gloves, rubs his callused feet with antiseptic
ointment.
"I've never met a lady like her in my life."
That's because there aren't very many women like Copeland.
With little more than a card table and a couple of coffeepots, she
founded a storefront charity 14 years ago on the edge of downtown
Minneapolis.
Today she is the guiding light of Sharing and Caring Hands, a $3
million nonprofit community center that caters daily to as many as
1,800 of the city's needy, dispensing everything from hot meals and
bus tokens
to eyeglasses and deodorant.
"It's heartwarming to see thousands of people benefit,"
says Jim Ramstad, a local congressman and sometime volunteer.
"Nobody does more to help people in need.
Mary Jo is a true saint - Minnesota's Mother Teresa."
Copeland, who draws no salary, says her work springs from a
biblical mandate.
"I believe in what Jesus said about helping the less fortunate
in memory of him," she says.
"That's why I wash their feet.
We are commanded to be servants of the poor."
-Susan Schindehette, "Mother of Mercy,"
People,
December 13, 1999, 142.
What people do to themselves and to the ones they love boggles my
mind.
A friend from Australia told me his family's sad story.
His brother, a Christian man, ended his marriage and,
simultaneously, his relationship with his children -
all for the
wild love of another woman.
Years later, when his brother confessed inconsolable remorse for
what he had done, my friend Ray asked him,
"Didn't you count the cost?"
"Ray," his brother replied, "I counted the cost,
but I greatly underestimated the consequences."
-Gary Kinnaman, Dumb Things Smart Christians
Believe
(Ann Arbor: Servant Publications, 1999), 91.
The first wrong attitude toward healing is peculiar to the West
in recent times -
the belief that suffering has no rightful place in the world and
certainly no place in the redeemed order of things.
Such complacency is surely one cause of the spiritual poverty of the
Western church.
Jesus didn't have that view, the writer to the Hebrews didn't either
- nor C.S. Lewis or John Donne.
Suffering has its place and value in this life, no matter how much
we yearn for its absence in the New Jerusalem of the next.
Instead of fully understanding and redeeming suffering -
praying for its removal but harnessing it to become more Christ-like
-
we've ignored it and impoverished ourselves, and virtually reduced
the onus to make practical steps toward its amelioration.
The second idea is that preacher's cliché - instant
gratification.
We all know about this and yet continually diminish our capacity for
perseverance by accepting it.
This is especially true when we have minor afflictions, and might be
excusable if we actually did anything worthwhile with our lives.
Instead, we can't wait for our flu to disappear by the natural
healing process God has given us, because it interferes with our TV
watching.
-Steven Ford, "Rant of the Month,"
Ship of Fools Online
Magazine, April 2000.
The nature of a trip 35 York [Maine] teens
recently took down to North Carolina reminded 16-year-old Kevin
Burnham of a Bible passage.
"For we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do
good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do,"
Burnham said, quoting
Ephesians 2:10.
The York teens, all high-school students,
and all from the First
Parish Church, traveled with seven chaperones to Cherokee, North
Carolina, to spend six days helping to repair 55 homes of people who
couldn't afford or couldn't do the work themselves.
In the process, the teens learned that doing good works not only
helped the needy, it also strengthened the teens' faith and helped
them feel better about themselves ....
Because it was populated mostly by Native Americans, Burnham did
not expect everyone to be Christian.
However, the woman whose house he worked on was a Christian; her
father had been a pastor.
"But she still had her own doubts," he said, explaining
that she had suffered through breast cancer and now had bone-marrow
cancer ....
"I was able to strengthen her faith, and in doing so, I was
able to strengthen my faith," he said.
Burnham and his five coworkers put a new roof on her home,
hammered in new shingles,
installed new flashing
and painted both
the inside and the outside of the home.
In the process, he said, they learned about team work, compassion,
joy and forgiveness.
"You get joy by putting Jesus first, others next and
yourselves last."
-Herb Perry, "York teens help repair 55 homes in Cherokee,
N.C.,"
The York Weekly Online Edition, August 4, 1999.
To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.
-Oscar Wilde
A bore is not only dull himself; he is the cause of dullness in
others.
-Samuel Johnson
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