Cultivate The Observer In You”


Sermon Delivered By Rev. Dick Stetler – January 31, 2016

Centenary United Methodist Church

Psalm 71:1-6; I Corinthians 13:1-8a

 

    Our lesson this morning has words that come from the Apostle Paul's famous love chapter.  The number of times both church and non-church people have requested this passage for their weddings and funerals is beyond measure.  Paul's words are even more well-known than the prayer attributed to St. Francis of Assisi, "Lord make me an instrument of your peace. . . "

    The questions that we are going to explore this morning are, "How do we get there?"  How do we get to a point in our lives where every day we live the following mission statement?

Love is patient.  Love is kind.  Love does not envy.  Love does not boast.  Love is not proud. Love is not rude.  Love is not self-seeking and love is not easily angered.  Love keeps no record of wrongs.  Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.  Love always protects, always trusts, always hopes and always perseveres. (I Corinthians 13:4f)

    We have often heard the story that alcohol-dependent people sometimes have to hit rock bottom before they awaken.  Translated, this mean the spouse is gone, the family is gone, the job is gone, the house is gone and the savings are gone.  That is a very deep hole, but people caught in such a prison have dug that hole by themselves.

    Life can be like that for millions of people who are living alcohol free lives.  There are other choices that will encourage responses that dig a similar hole.  People choose to worry, to experience anxiety-attacks, to be in constant competition with others, to mistrust everyone, to experience chronic stress disorders and depression.  There are many highly talented and gifted people that have no idea that they possess a gold mine called their minds.

    When I talk to my spirit guides, my favorite spot is sitting on one of the walls that surround the parsonage patio.  I dangle my feet over the side.  I talk out loud to them.  Not long ago I asked them this question, "Why is it that more people with Jesus' qualities and abilities do not show up?"  An answer entered my mind in words that I later jotted down.

Those of us who choose to enter physical forms arrive with every new birth, but only a few of us wake up to what we are.  What we do recognize, we use to earn a living.  The physical world becomes the only realm we respond to because too many thoughts about our totally new experience block our ability to remember where we came from. 

    Buckminster Fuller became an interesting example of this form of amnesia. He was highly confused by his thoughts that matched no one else's.  He took the path of believing that he was going insane.  Using today's methods of diagnosing people, he would have been labeled as clinically depressed.  By the age of thirty, his depression had become so debilitating that he decided to end his life.  He purchased a gun but before he used it, he had the presence of mind to consult a very close friend.  

    After sharing his feelings with his confidant, that friend engaged in some fairly forthright directive counseling.  His friend said:

Oh come on, Bucky, why don't you first see what you can do with what you have.  You can always throw your life away if nothing works. I like you, why don't you like you? Do something useful instead of dwelling on how miserable you feel.

    Buckminister Fuller had not recognized what his inner-observer was trying to tell him.  As the years passed, he became a philosopher, an architect, a master of creative design, a specialist in geometry that designed one of the first geodesic domes, a master of engineering sciences and a creator of accurate maps.  His genius knew few boundaries.  It is no wonder that he could not find a match for his intellect. 

    During his life he wrote 30 books, a number of which are still in print.  He made words popular such as , "Spaceship Earth," and "Synergistic," a word that describes the result when two flows of human energy combine their creativity.  He died at the age of 90 in 1983.  

    Fuller's spirit was stimulated by his confidant's challenges and through hindsight, he learned that he almost threw away an archangel that was living inside of him.  His recognition of the mistake that he almost made is what prompted him to write a number of quotable quotes.

    He wrote, "There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells us that it is going to become a butterfly."  The crown jewel of all his quotes may be this one:  "Ninety-nine percent of who we are is invisible and untouchable.   Most of what we think we know comes from the other one percent that believes that what we understand is all that there is.

    We are incredible beings that could easily live what Paul wrote in our lesson today, but many of us find it extremely difficult to take charge of how we think.  Have you ever thought of cultivating the observer in you?

    Get in touch with that part of you that notices that you need to lose some weight, that you need to exercise more intentionally, and that you need to pull the plug on the amount of time you spend thinking thoughts that produce nothing of value. Your observer will tell you where you are focusing your thoughts.

    Sitting in the barber's chair often allows listeners to eaves drop on conversations that other clients are having with their barber.  Here is the substance of some conversations I have heard while sitting in the chair:

You would not believe what happened to us last week.  We were visiting our son in Ontario.  He is living with a real whacko.  She is demanding, selfish, demeaning and loves to spend his money on clothes. She can't cook.  She does not know where the switch is on the vacuum cleaner.  She needs the newest iPhone that she keeps glued to her ear.  What a piece of work!  He needs to throw her out and move on!

 

Is Bermuda's weather always like this?  Our room is scented with some kind of a hidden deodorizer. We could not find the thing.  We find mold everywhere.  Is everything always wet? The window air-conditioner makes so much noise, we can't sleep. 

 

Why does it take so long for our government to get things done?  They think about a project for six years, then they get a group of people together to conduct an impact study and then they take the report to the people. The people say, "Not in my backyard." Then they do their project anyway. Finally, the Opposition party cuts to shreds what was accomplished because nothing is ever right for them.  Why do we elect people who do not have the sense to get along with each other.

    Think about this.  Such issues are ones over which these men have no control.  By personalizing their experiences of other people, they fill their minds with thoughts that cannot change anything except their health.  BIG question -- Why do we do this to ourselves?   There is no way that the words written by the Apostle Paul or the words of St. Francis' prayer could possibly penetrate the minds of people that are too often clogged with such nonsense.

    What most people do not understand is a spiritual law that teaches, "What we think about only expands."  The minds of a number of people become increasingly filled with everything that has gone wrong, that is disagreeable and that lacks credibility.  Such thinking surfaces in their personalities often creating a distance in our friendships with them.

    This is how thousands of spirits, that may possess similar qualities of Jesus, find themselves locked in prisons because they trained their minds to think negative, frustrating and discouraging thoughts. Even slight glimmerings about the origin of their spiritual nature would be viewed as fantasy or bordering on science fiction.  They cannot connect the dots. 

    This is what caused Buckminster Fuller to buy a gun until a friend said, "Oh, come on Bucky, why don't you first see what you can do with what you have."  Fuller reversed his energy flow, awakened the archangel that was inside of him and he began creating.  The process of awakening becomes easier once our observer teaches us how to use our thoughts creatively. 

    Lois and I boarded a flight from BWI airport to Philadelphia in order to make a connection to Bermuda.  The turbo prop aircraft took off twenty minutes late and landed at concourse F.  Our departure gate to Bermuda was located on concourse A.  With great haste we made our way to the other end of the airport only to be denied entrance to our aircraft.

    We could see our airplane still connected to the automated gangway, but its door had closed three minutes prior to our arrival.  We had to rebook a flight to Miami, Florida, experience a four hour layover before we could come home. This is the moment where what is inside of us spills out. The observer in both of us opted for considering our detour to Miami as our next adventure.       

    Why do people get crazy when they are inconvenienced?  Our observers reminded us that nothing we do will change what is happening.  Why not respond with Paul's admonition, "Love is not rude.  Love is not self-seeking and love is not easily angered. Love keeps no record of wrongs."  This response for all of us is always one thought away.  Life has a way of falling into place in the most miraculous ways.

    After the Bishop and the members of the Cabinet decided to move the Stetlers to our last church in the States, we found ourselves in the position of having to buy a house.  A realtor at St. Matthew's showed us house after house and we liked none of them.  We finally selected one that would do but we did not like that one either.  I had the pen in my hand to sign the contract when the phone rang in her office. 

    I said, "Who was that?"  Thelma said, "It is someone who wants me to sell their house."  I asked, "Can we go see it?"  She said, "I'll check.  It's just around the corner."  We went and it was love at first sight.  The couple in that house knew my parents. When we got back to the office, her phone rang again.  They said, "We want to sell our house to the Stetlers and we are willing to do so immediately." 

    We were going with the flow and making no judgments about where life was taking us and this house suddenly became available out of the blue. This was one of those seemingly magical moments in life.

    All of us have the ability to display the energy-flow that Paul described in our lesson when we take charge of our thinking.  Even when our lives are in knots, life teaches us to let go of thoughts that are not working for us.  Years down the road, hindsight will teach us why it took all the challenging chapters in our lives to bring us to this awareness.  The real miracle is that God is not yet finished with any of us.