It’s Mother’s Day and I couldn’t agree more with Marv Knox who says that his vote for mother of the year goes to Karen Hughes (Marv Knox, “Hughes provides surprising example of mother’s love,” The Baptist Standard, May 6, 2002).  She’s been George Bush’s senior counselor since 1994.  But, she’s quitting her job.  Giving up arguably the second-most powerful position in the White House because she wants to spend more time with her family.  She’s worked shoulder to shoulder every day with the most powerful person in the world.  She is also a grandmother and still has a fifteen year-old son, Robert, at home.  Saying “yes” to one thing always means saying “no” to something else; Hughes decided to say “yes” to her son while she still could. 

What do you think made her shuffle the deck of her priorities so that her son got the winning hand?  Granted, she’s got a different deck to shuffle than most.  Many single parents, for example, find themselves being both mother and father to their children and having no choice but to work till they drop.  And, many parents, especially in the public service sector, find that one salary isn’t enough to cover even the basic cost of living.  Firemen, policeman, teachers.  A friend of mine once qualified for food stamps on a pastor’s salary.  For many people, quitting work is not an option.  The principle applies, nonetheless.  Saying “yes” to one thing always means saying “no” to another and life is lived in the balance of juggling the “yeses” and the “nos.”What Hughes did was something rather counter-cultural, especially by American standards.   So was what was happening in the first church.  After Peter preached what is clearly the seminal gospel sermon, he then challenged his listeners to, “‘Save yourselves from this corrupt generation.’”  My paraphrase, “Don’t let the culture around you determine your yeses and nos.  Live by a different standard.”  Like the man who confessed that he’d gone broke for no other reason that just trying to maintain the same lifestyle as his friends. He finally decided there was a better way to live than letting the culture, even that of his closest friends, set his lifestyle standard. 

These first Christians believed there was a better way, too.  They heard the gospel, and, after saying “no” to their sin, they said “yes” to Jesus as their Lord in their baptism.  Then, they confirmed their baptism as legitimate by setting out to order their lives around three very specific priorities that gave life to those priorites, meaningful daily worship, genuine spiritual community and sacrificial giving. 

Beyond the fact that these people were devout Jews, we don’t know much about them.  Peter did confront them for their role in crucifying Jesus.  But, they probably weren’t any more or less responsible or hard working than we are.  And, they certainly loved their children, just as we love ours.  Even then, parents who locked their children in closets and starved them were the exception to the rule.  But, something had shuffled the deck of life’s priorities for these folks.  Now, daily worship, genuine spiritual community and sacrificially sharing all they had ordered their days.  What could possibly cause that kind of shuffle?  What had turned them from unbelief to the meaningful daily worship of the Jesus they helped crucify, devoting “themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and prayers”? 

Testimonies from people in my generation and older tell of the days when we were in church Sunday morning, Sunday night and Wednesday night.  Listening closely, there’s a sound of exhaustion in our voices.  Like we’re worn out and proud of it.  But, genuine worship shouldn’t wear us out or make us proud of our exhaustion, should it?  Shouldn’t it build us up, invigorate and give life, not drain it?  If what we’re doing is draining us more than helping us, it’s not worship, whatever it is.  These folks, “Day by day . . . spent much time together in the Temple.”  They didn’t even have Bibles.  All they knew of the gospel was what the apostles had told them.  All they could do was sit around and rehearse the Jesus story over and over again.  They didn’t have church buildings; they had to meet, as Christians, in the Jewish Temple.  But, being together was so important they did it daily.  That’s even more than Sunday morning, Sunday night and Wednesday night.  They must have been discovering the joy of genuine spiritual community.

I was visiting recently with a person who has been involved for years in a program for adult children of alcoholics, ACOA.  Children who grow up with alcoholic parents often discover, in adulthood, that they are carrying a lot of emotional baggage laid on them by their parents’ addictions.  ACOA is a program designed to help these people discover a more meaningful life than one dominated by undefined guilt and anxiety.  Like Alcoholics Anonymous, it is built around honest and open confession of fears, needs and hope.  This person was lamenting the fact that he found more open confession of fears, need and hope in ACOA than he did at church.  How is it that the people who know us the least are often those we call our Christian “sisters” and “brothers?” 

The first church was born in an atmosphere of open confession.  After Peter preached the gospel, these folks received it in a spirit of “repentance;” they “welcomed his message and were baptized.”  Words like repentance and baptism may seem ancient to this culture, I suppose.  But, what they mean is timelessly essential.  Repentance doesn’t mean getting our lives in order, first.  First, it means admitting our lives have no meaningful order without God.  It means confessing to God our lack of self-sufficiency.  Baptism means allowing ourselves to be bathed in a grace that doesn’t demand perfection before acceptance.

One man was telling me recently of his father’s ability to do nearly anything with his hands.  His father lived in an older home with an old dilapidated garage detached from the house.  He marveled at how his father decided one day, at sixty-five, to single-handedly fix the garage by jacking up the sloping side and then rebuilding it.  When he finished, it was as strong and sturdy as the day it was first built.  While we were having this conversation, it registered with us that what kills most of us is trying to do just that.  Trying to fix what’s broken by propping it up and rebuilding it ourselves.  Doing that with an old garage is an enviable skill. 

Repentance is what happens when we finally realize that we don’t have any skills to fix our own souls and we give them back to God to remake as he sees fit.  Repentance is what happens when we stop trying to prop our broken selves up and decide to trust.  Baptism is, again, bathing in a grace that doesn’t demand perfection before acceptance.  Community is what happens when we confess to each other how broken our lives are without God.  Community is what happens when we stop trying to prop ourselves up and make ourselves presentable to each other.  When we stop hiding.  When we start telling the truth to each other about our sin, our anger, our greed, our lust, our fears, our addictions and so on. 

But, the reason we have such a hard time with this is because we still believe, more than we will allow or admit, that grace is transactional.  That God will do grace for us when we’ve behaved gracefully enough for him.  Believing that we have to keep ourselves propped up to be good enough for God or anyone else to gain their love is precisely what keeps us from experiencing the third new priority of the first believers, sacrificial giving. 

Listen again to what these folks in the first church had done.  Talk about counter-cultural.  This is so foreign, it sounds like a fairy tail.  By this time, several thousand had become new believers.  And, “All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need.”  This isn’t the only model for Christian giving in the New Testament.  But, it’s one of many that makes tithing pale in comparison. 

It works like this.  The more we believe that we have to prop up our sloping sides and rebuild ourselves, the more we hold back.  The less we believe that God accepts as we are and the less we experience a community of faith in which that grace predominates, the more we have to hold back; the more we need our resources to keep up pretense of perfection and control.  Sacrificial giving is what happens when we tell God and others the truth about ourselves and discover, to our utter amazement, that we are loved anyway. 

This past week I was visiting one of our homebound folks.  Her husband has been gone for years now.  As we were small talking about this and that, out of nowhere she blurted, almost cried, “I am so very lonely.”  This woman has been a member of our church for decades, taught Sunday School for years.  But, when she went to talking about family, she talked more about her pet dogs more than her church.  She could and did name the last person who’d spent more than one hour with her.  It’s really hard to know when it’s best to leave one of those conversations.  Two things come to mind.  One, whatever we do to move toward what we believe our God-given calling for this church’s future, we better not leave her, or those like her, behind (James 1:27).”  Being a genuine spiritual community here means making certain that we continue to extend this community to those who can no longer physically be with us.  Our Stephen Ministry, designed to maximize our care of these folks, is about to start a new training cycle.  It’s not too late to enroll.

But, there’s something else.  In her confession, this woman modeled Christian community.  When was the last time we told someone how lonely we are?  When was the last time we stopped trying to prop up our broken hearts in front of others so that they wouldn’t see anything lacking in us, even the need for one hour of conversation?  The only difference between our homebound friend and many of us is that she just doesn’t have as much to keep her distracted from her loneliness as we do.  Isn’t that what drives us to be so driven more often than not?  Keeps us running and working ourselves ragged.  Keeps us working at jobs that make keeping up appearances affordable, even at the expense of our families?

What happened in too many confessionals between priests and small children is nightmarishly tragic.  What is also tragic is that, beyond being baptized at a young age, most of us have never made our confession to anyone about anything.  Again, community is what happens when we stop trying to prop ourselves up and make ourselves presentable to God and to each other.  It is that sinister sense that we have to earn love that keeps us from the kind of honesty that gives birth to community. 

Peter started this cultural revolution with these words, “‘Jesus . . . you crucified and killed . . . but God raised him up, having freed him from death, because it was impossible for him to be held in its power (Acts 2:22-24).’”  What was it that shuffled the deck of life’s priorities for these folks? 

It was discovering that God’s love, his grace, is not only sufficient for any and every need and that this is not one thing anyone can do to make God reward us with more of his grace than he has already given.  “In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to (die) for our sins (1 John 4:10).”  Some speculate that the day that changed the world forever was 9/11.  Not so.  The day that changed the world forever is the day God woke Jesus up in the tomb and set him, and us, free from death.  That’s the gospel. 

My mother died sixteen years ago.  On Mother’s Day, I have to celebrate my mother through my memories.  One of the most poignant memories is of the time I had chicken pox, in about the second grade.  They had me covered from head to toe in that pink medicated lotion.  I can still smell it.  One day, I was so miserable I started crying.  And, my mother, who had already done all she could for me, knelt down beside my bed and cried with me.