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"Living Requires A Sermon Delivered By Reverend Richard E. Stetler – June 3, 2012 Centenary United
Romans 8:12-17; Isaiah 6:1-10 Most of us are
acquainted with God’s call of Isaiah.
In fact, our final hymn this morning features this episode in his
life. After he had his
dramatic vision of God’s presence, Isaiah was given the awareness that
all his sins were as though
they had never happened.
This sense of total forgiveness brought a contagious euphoria to his
life. When he heard God
ask, “Who will be our messenger? Whom shall I send?” Isaiah’s jubilant
response was, “Here am I send me?” This is generally
where our discussion about God’s calling Isaiah begins and ends.
Pastors often use this text as a springboard for various mission
projects. We seldom move on in
the passage to learn what God was asking Isaiah to say.
Here is that message:
Tell the people
this message: ‘No matter
how much you listen, you will not understand.
No matter how much you look, you will not know what is happening.
The truth I want to give you will make your minds dull, your ears
will not hear, your eyes will not see and your minds will wander from
understanding anything I say.
However, if some of you chose to understand and focus on the
guidance I am giving you, your spirits will be healed and you will hear.
You will see and understand.
(Isaiah 6:9f)
This morning we are
going to explore why these words are as
true today as they were over
2,700 years ago. From these
words we learn that God’s plan for
the spiritual evolution of
humankind is an infinite process, a process that takes place one person
at a time. When we understand
that we are spirit-beings in quest of enhancing the spiritual awareness
and evolution of others, our purpose requires a lot of patience.
Every person in each generation has to
learn the identity of who is living inside his or her body.
The vast majority of people, however, are not ready to hear, see and
understand this message. Each
of us tends to personalize our experiences in the material world and we
are not trained to focus on matters of spirit.
Initially, it appears to be too abstract to bother learning about
it, particularly with all the stimulation coming from the material
world. The substance of Isaiah’s message was that people will choose to
remain ignorant about their spiritual nature. I remember a visit
from a fifteen year old some years ago who was obsessing over a young
boy in her class. Her
eating and sleeping habits were affected.
She could not study.
She had temporarily abandoned many of her friends.
She came to me for some coaching and asked, “How can I get Jimmy
to notice me? He doesn’t even know I exist.
Boys are so stupid!”
Like countless other people, she was looking for a better strategy for
reaching her goal. How would she have
responded had I initially provided this advice?
God really wants
you to be yourself. You are
very attractive, you are a brilliant student and you have a remarkable
future ahead of you. If
Jimmy cannot recognize your qualities, well, just remember that there
are thousands of fish in the sea.
If you change who you are to match what you think he wants, your
life will become very complicated.
Why remain fascinated with a boy that does not notice you or care
that you exist? Becky, why
don’t you pray about it? She would have
looked at me and said, “What?” She knew nothing about God, prayer or
matters of the spirit. She had been referred to me from a teen in my
youth group. When there is no spiritual awareness in people’s lives, how
do they ever understand what is happening to them? What God was telling Isaiah is that when
people have their attentions fixed on matters of the material world,
they will neglect noticing the importance of feeding the part of them
that they cannot see.
They will not seek values of
peace and waiting patiently. If
we look at ourselves, we know how we detest being inconvenienced by
waiting in long lines. Today, what we are
seeing happening all over the world are people responding to their
unhappiness with protests and violence to get what they believe they
need and want. Having
patience appears to be an undeveloped skill of spirit.
We can easily justify our impatience and run to various
calls-for-action because of the logic once supplied by Edmond Burke,
“Evil will only triumph when good people stand by and do nothing.” Rather than being
patient with the unfolding of creation, people are angry that some
people have excellent financial resources and they do not.
They are angry that they cannot find work, angry because
austerity measures are trimming their entitlement programs and angry
because they believe their government has failed them.
There was a day when everyone
assumed full responsibility for their lives because there was little or
no government to intervene. Do we see a common
theme in these examples? Do
we sense why God and our spiritual awareness are no longer part of our
most essential questions about life?
God told Isaiah to tell his listeners, “No matter how much you
listen, you will not understand.
No matter how much you look, you will not know what is
happening.” People do not
realize that the public cannot fix governments by replacing the people
that are currently in power.
We cannot fix the church by moving around pastors.
We cannot give anything a permanent fix.
What we can do is to
continue to refine our patience with life and to teach others how to
accomplish that in their own lives.
One of the aspects
of life that all of us have in common is that healing happens only from
the inside out.
It is we who must be healed
before the conditions of the external world are free from anger,
greed and corruption. When societies have to settle conflicts by
using their militaries and when police have to be deployed to safeguard
the public interests, we have thousands of years of spiritual evolution
still in front of us. A lot of
patience is required. Jesus understood
this process better than anyone.
His goal was to change the attitudes and goals of everyone in the
world. Think of the
infinite patience he must have had.
He never traveled more than ninety miles from where he was born.
He never wrote anything. There
were no printing presses, no recording devices, no power-point
presentations and no websites.
He had to trust that his message would circulate by word-of-mouth
long after he was gone. His mission was left in the hands of other men
and women. There were times
when Jesus was powerless to help people. (Mark 6:5)
His listeners often responded to him the way many people are
doing today. People
may not say it, but their body language and choices communicate, “What
on earth does the Church have to say to me, what? . . . ‘Love my
neighbor’? If Jesus knew my
neighbors, he would never have said that! The church has become
irrelevant.” Is it?
Or, have people made it that way with their loss of interest?
Isaiah’s words were an accurate assessment of the human
condition. Once an elementary
school boy was labeled by
authorities as being
hyper-active or ADHD.
He had behavior and attitude difficulties with school and was being
rejected by his classmates.
I asked his mother, “Why don’t you bring him to Sunday School?
She shook her head and looked at me as though I had just asked
a
ridiculous question.
She responded, “What he needs,
Sunday School cannot give him.
How can hearing about Noah gathering animals into an ark make any
difference in his life?
Come on, Dick, get real!” Not only was that mother misinformed about what can happen when Sunday school is a part of her son’s impressionable life, but she was trying to fix her son without any guidance that might teach him how to better manage his inner world. People would prefer to control their symptoms with medication than understand and address what causes them. Again, Isaiah’s message is very relevant today. When we patiently
watch how people are behaving today and the attitudes they display, we
recognize how true Isaiah’s words are today.
People do not understand what they are experiencing.
There is one thing,
however, that people cannot sugarcoat or escape and that is themselves. One morning during
my college days I was shaving in the bathroom of my college dormitory.
Standing next to me was a young man that had everything money
could buy. His father owned
eighteen factories that produced high-end women’s fashions.
He was given an XKE Jaguar convertible at his high school
graduation. I once needed
to borrow a sport coat and I found a $500 Hickey Freeman on the floor of
his closet. I brushed off the
dust bunnies, shook out the wrinkles and put it on. The fabric was
fabulous. Paul stopped
shaving that morning and said, “Dick, where am I going?”
What do I have to look forward
to for the rest of my life?
I have everything and yet I have nothing.”
I said, “Paul, you are handsome, well-mannered, healthy,
financially secure and have not yet found your niche. That’s all!
Find something that really matters to you and make a
difference.” Every generation
that comes along has to learn that the material world is like
a holographic drama.
We are one of the actors in
a play that has been going on
for thousands of years.
Heroes come and go. Nations
rise and collapse.
Having patience with the
unfolding of creation is the most remarkable value anyone can have.
We cannot change the world, but we can change ourselves and
become a part of the spiritual formation of the future. One afternoon a
call came to the office requesting that I visit a woman who was dying.
As I sat by her beside and listened to her life’s story, she
reminded me of a person that paid attention when Isaiah preached 2,700
years ago. Her life also
reminded me of Jesus words, “Consider the lilies in the field, how they
grow. They neither toil nor
spin and yet I tell you that Solomon in all his glory was never arrayed
like one of these.”
(Matthew 6:28f) She worked for AT&T
having achieved only a high school diploma.
She was a fast learner, however, and did the work of three
people. When she retired,
that is the number of people it took to replace her.
Those in positions above her took advantage by accepting credit
for what she did. Her
accomplishments made her supervisors appear outstanding.
They got the bonuses and she stayed with a cost-of-living
increase for most of her career.
The others wanted
to climb the corporate ladder, securing the larger salaries and
benefits. She never made it her business to know what motivated other
people. She loved her job
and truly enjoyed allowing others to get the credit.
As I continued to listen to her story she said,
I never needed to
earn a lot of money. I did
not need a title after my name.
I have never needed anything in life because everyday I
was happy and grateful to God for what I had.
We common people in
the trenches were like
family. We enjoyed helping
to make our supervisors’ jobs easier and all of us wanted to deliver the
best possible service for our company.
That’s how we lived.
What more does anyone want or need? We had it all and we knew that.
She was a woman
that contented herself by making her place in the world identical to
living in Heaven every day.
She had infinite patience with every personality that came into her
life. She never worried
about anything. She held
the belief that whatever will be, will be.
She said, “When I leave this life, I
will remain happy just knowing that I was a part of whatever happens
next.
After all, isn’t
everything in God’s hands anyway?”
She lived a beautiful life because of the patience she brought to
each day. Three days after my
visit she made her exit from this world.
Hopefully, we can take a page from her life and insert it into
the loose leaf notebook that
describes our own spiritual journey. |