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"Straight Talk Spoken In Love” Sermon Delivered By Rev. Dick Stetler – March 1, 2015 Centenary United
Romans 4:13-18; Mark 8:31-38
Our Scripture
lesson today describes a time when Jesus gathered his disciples and
others so he could share more of his distilled wisdom for living.
Such teaching moments were going to be fewer in number because
the end of his life was near.
Jesus had decided to be frank and deliberate in his determination
to teach people about their options if they wanted to live fruitful
lives. There are three
lessons of Jesus in the latter portion of Mark's Gospel that I want to
discuss. The first is very familiar.
"If you want to save yourself, you will lose it.
If you lose your life by following my teachings, you will save
it." In essence,
Jesus told his listeners that fruitful living comes from accepting
whatever life brings up for them and then responding to it with
attitudes of understanding and compassion.
However, if their neediness and their desires of self-interest
motivate them to respond otherwise, they risk losing their opportunity
to grow spiritually. (Mark 8:34)
What life brings up for us can come in many different forms. A couple once
came to me to perform their marriage.
What made this one different was that the man had already been
married three other times. This would be his fourth attempt at a lasting
marriage. For the woman,
this would be her first. After building
some rapport with them, I asked the man the most obvious question,
"Three times your marriages have not worked for you; what is different
this time that will prevent history from repeating itself?"
He did not mind such a direct question and he answered it this
way: Lisa has trained me
to realize that if I did not change my attitudes and responses, no woman
in the world would stay married to me.
Since we started dating, she has been very direct with me. Living
with her is like having your own personal trainer.
I cannot control her.
She is not hurt by what I say.
She tells me what my attitudes and behavior symbolize to her and
everyone else. They are ugly. No
one has ever taken the time to teach me that I have been the problem
in all my relationships. No one
had ever held a mirror in front of me as Lisa has. She has taught me the
meaning of love and how to continue loving even when it hurts my pride
and sense of worth. This man had
been reared in an environment where women had
a cookie cutter role to play
as a wife. They were to stay
home, raise the children, have dinner ready when he came home and to
become warm and cuddly when it was bedtime.
His real issue was that he was stuck with an image and role of
women that most had outgrown fifty years earlier.
When people assume that others are responsible for making them happy,
they are looking at what others cannot possibly deliver.
Jesus' second
lesson has been very controversial among Christians for centuries.
He said, "If you are ashamed of me and my teachings in this
godless and wicked day, then the Son of Man will be ashamed of you when
he comes into the glory of God's Kingdom."
(Mark 8:38) This lesson as
is, suggests that our behavior and attitudes will cause Jesus to stoop
to our immature responses when he greets us in the next life.
The problem with this interpretation comes from a poor choice of
words when it was translated from the Greek.
What Jesus was
teaching is that when people pay little or no attention to his message,
they will not have the
course corrections that come from making
his wisdom a part of their lives.
In other words, if someone gives us a map to a unique and
beautiful destination and we choose to ignore it, the chances of finding
that place are almost nonexistent. There is a
parable mentioned in a literary work entitled
The Arabian Nights concerning
a farmer whose plow came to an abrupt stop. He discovered that one of
the tines was caught in a large ring in the ground.
That ring was attached to a lid covering an underground chamber
that contained buried treasure of gold, silver and jewels. The point of
the story is that our treasure is buried within us and life becomes
energized by the jewels that
we find. This is precisely
what Jesus wanted his listeners to learn.
Everything they need for a fruitful life is inside and cannot be
found in our external environment. Such an
awakening occurred during the early life of Pablo Picasso.
He did not like school even during his primary days and was a
very defiant student. He
spent a lot of time in detention because of his attitudes and behavior.
He loved detention because there he had time to draw.
Noticing his skill, his father sent Pablo to the When Pablo
reached the age of 16, he created two painting that were academically
perfect in the eyes of
critics. He gained entrance
to Picasso went on
to create beautiful forms in nearly every field of art.
He created 1,885 paintings, 1,228 sculptures, 2,880 ceramic
pieces, 12,000 drawings and thousands of prints.
He created tapestries and rugs with intricate designs.
He wrote poetry and plays. The
discovery of his inner
wealth energized him until his death in 1973 at the age of 91.
Whatever the
form our creativity looks like, we have the means to express it in spite
of the constraints that may exist. We can live no-limit lives by finding
our passion and following where it leads.
We will make mistakes and
at times become our own worst enemy, but when we refuse to be defined by
our lack of good judgment, we become strengthened through numerous course corrections that Jesus'
teachings readily supply to those wanting to grow in spirit.
The period of Lent is our season
for such reflection. The final
teaching in our lesson remains among the most profound that Jesus gave
to humanity. This teaching
requires no beliefs for it to be true one hundred percent of the time.
It was taught by one who knew far more than what his followers
could understand and assimilate into their lives. (John 16:12) Humanity has
entered a time in history when angry people are using technology to
spread fear and to destabilize societies.
No doubt, in a very short period of time we will experience the
use of drones to hover near the homes of world's leaders, government
buildings and aircraft.
Instead of delivering boxes of pizza, they could be carrying light
weight plastic explosives that can destroy their targets.
What is different from every other enemy of humankind is that terrorists can remain invisible after reaching their goals. They can steal money by hacking into a bank's assets, obtain our personal information and establish accounts for their use, and commit deeds that inflict deep cultural pain as they did last week through the destruction of priceless, irreplaceable 4,000 year-old artifacts housed in an Iraqi museum. In many cases, the perpetrators can vanish, remain anonymous and become untraceable. We have entered
an age where societies built on the value of mutual trust have become
vulnerable. There is little
we can do to turn back the clock to a day when we never worried about
our safety.
What we are experiencing in many
parts of the world is an example of what happens when adults have access
to powerful weapons while still living with the emotional levels of
children. The teaching of
Jesus that was referenced earlier addresses the result of what happens
to such people and their ideologies.
Jesus said, "Is anything achieved by imaginative and manipulative
people if they gain control over all the populations on the earth, if,
during their pursuit, they ignore their potential and creativity by
forsaking the things of substance in life for the shadow created by
their fantasies?" (Mark
8:36) These people
have seduced social media outlets and news organizations by enticing
them to cover as breaking news their gross and unfathomable atrocities. This has become an inexpensive
way to spread terror and fear throughout the world.
Jesus was
absolutely correct. Years
from now such people will be largely marginalized.
Human fears tend to magnify their
importance among the world’s seven billion inhabitants.
The surging creativity of
the world's populations eager to enter into trade-agreements and eager
to develop and share new technologies will propel the teaching of "serve
one another" to overpower and diminish the ideology of genocide as a
solution to anything.
Pablo Picasso
disliked his country's institutions for learning, but he found
the pearls within himself and
left the world with over 50,000 works of art.
During the eighth, ninth and tenth centuries, the Vikings did the
same thing that we see terrorists trying to do today.
Their marauding fighters advanced up the rivers of
The other
morning, Bermuda awakened to graffiti painted on a number of our
government buildings proclaiming, " The energies of darkness will only have a season and then they will vanish. The central theme of Jesus' teachings was to love our neighbors. Whatever other teachers and their prophets proclaim that is vastly different from this is to miss the mark. There is nothing in creation powerful enough to prevent God's Will from being done. During our Lenten season and beyond, we must never forget this. |