Do you remember the scene from City Slickers when Billy Crystal’s character speaks to his son’s class at school one day and spends the entire time bemoaning how old he’s becoming, as he’s about to turn 40?  From his bleak perspective of aging, he warns the children that with increased years comes increased suffering.  He exhorts them to enjoy their childhood before they reach that age when the word “procedure” will become a regular part of their vocabulary.  It will really be surgery, he says, but you’ll call it a “procedure.”  In my case, it was an arthroscopic procedure to repair a torn meniscus in my right knee.  Frankly, until now, I didn’t even know I had a meniscus.  And, we’ve still not been able to answer the question about when I actually tore it.  Nancy thinks it was in July on vacation when I was trying to throw her refrigerator-sized suitcase into the back of the car.  Nonetheless, I’ve had a “procedure.”  And, I’ve also determined that “arthroscopy” is Greek for “this won’t hurt that badly for more than ten to fifteen days.” 

It’s actually been ten days, nearly every one of them flat on my back, during which time I haven’t been able to do much of anything I’m accustomed to doing.  It’s been a humbling reminder about how it is too important to me to always be doing.  We do live in a world where time for reflection is not as highly prized as what we do and make, where mystery doesn’t count as much as manufacturing, where what we produce that adds to the bottom line, whether we’ve reflected deeply on its meaning or not, is the bottom line.  This past ten days, not even able to drive a car, I’ve been reminded that an obsession with feeling that we only have value if we’re doing something can cause a person to neglect the inner life, in which case our disconnected outer doing can become artificial, even unholy. 

It’s a theme repeated over and over again in scripture.  Life happens from the inside out, not the other way around.  Remember Paul’s warning?  “For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in high heavenly places (Ephesians 6:12).”  And, before we get too comfortable thinking that evil is always disconnected from us because it is “out there,” James joins in.  Everyone “is tempted by one’s own desire, being lured and enticed by it (James 1:14).”  A man cannot lay blame for his lust, for example, at the feet of that gorgeous woman he’s not married to.  Her beauty wouldn’t have an unholy meaning for him if it weren’t, in James’ words, for “his own evil desire.”  Meaningful living in general and Christian living in specific means learning to live from the inside out.  It’s at the heart of all the spiritual disciplines.  Living from the inside out means cutting against the cultural grain and our own grain as well.

That must be why Jesus scolded his disciples the day they came to him complaining about a man they had seen casting out demons in his name.  Apparently believing that they owned the patent on exorcism, their specific complaint to Jesus was that this man “was not following us.”  They didn’t exactly say that what bothered them was that he was not following Jesus.  What they said was, “he was not following us.”  The fact that he was doing good by casting out demons was not good enough to them because he wasn’t doing good exactly the way they thought it had to be done. 

We can sympathize with these disciples, can’t we?  I well remember the day when I seriously doubted whether my Methodist or Church of Christ or Episcopalian friends were actually going to heaven someday because they didn’t believe in Jesus exactly the way I did.  This dangerous temptation to deify ourselves by hijacking the right to define the genuineness of the faith of others through the prism of our personal experience is nothing new.  It’s been with us since before the church was born.  It also betrays our terrible weakness for living life from the outside in, instead of the other way around, of being so consumed with our perceptions of others’ faults that we are blind to our own.  It’s a blindness that, for centuries, has destroyed families, churches, even whole communities. 

It was also the exact point at which Jesus joined the conversation with his disciples by saying, “‘Do not stop him; for no one who does a deed of power in my name will be able soon afterward to speak evil of me.’”  There’s a progression of faith thing going on here, it sounds like.  Like some people learn how to behave first and

then believe later, or some people belong before they believe.  Either way, Jesus goes on to say, “‘Whoever is not against us is for us.  For truly I tell you, whoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you bear the name of Christ will by no means lose the reward.’” 

It sounds like Jesus is saying that God knows how to see people through the prism of mercy instead of perfection and to work with people starting where they are, to work with what little faith people have and grow it into something more.  So, Jesus said, we’re not to get in the way, especially in the name of Jesus, of what God may be up to in someone else’s life.  God is up to more than what he is up to in you or me.  God doesn’t need our protection.  In fact, if we’re not careful, Jesus was saying, we may end up throwing a roadblock in someone’s path who was on the way to faith even if their infantile struggles didn’t look like it to us.  We’re never more useless to God or dangerous to others than when we think we have it right and everyone else who doesn’t have it like we have it has it wrong.  That’s why Jesus warned about not putting “‘a stumbling block before one of these little ones.’”  Even people who consider themselves righteous can be responsible for discouraging faith in its spiritual infancy in others by narrowly defining righteousness in terms of their own experience and demanding that everyone else conform accordingly.  Which means that we will then be doing to others what we most often resent when it’s done to us, forcing upon them an external conformity to faith that runs contrary to their inner convictions and even the work of God in their life.

So, Jesus said, leave the man alone.  Let him be.  But, that’s not easy to do, is it?  Partly because, if we can stay focused on the faults of others, it detracts us from having to face our own.  Like, if we spend $87 billion more to fight the next phase of the Iraqi conflict in our effort to rid the world of terrorism, we can overlook our 34.6 million American neighbors who live in poverty.  Overseas evil is always easier to face than next door evil.  So, Jesus goes on to say some things that sound really strange.  Instead of worrying about others, which involves living from the outside in, he suggests that we cut off our own hands or feet or gouge out our eyes if, in any way, they might lead us to touch, stumble over or look away at something that might cause harm to our souls.  Is Jesus actually suggesting physical mutilation as a means of spiritual renewal? 

This is hyperbole, overstatement for the purpose of making a greater point.  “I’m starving to death.”  “I’m so hungry I could eat a horse.”  Ever said those things?  It’s not that you’re actually on the verge of death or that you’ve suddenly developed a taste for blue-meated horsehide.  You’re overstating the case to make the point that you’re so hungry everything else will have to wait until you get something to eat.  Jesus is doing the same on a much more serious level.  He is saying that there is no sacrifice too great, especially material or physical, to insure that we have not lost sight of what is of eternal value.  Even that is a mouthful, and a life full, just saying it.  Yet, the most dangerous of risks is to be so externally focused that we neglect what is inside, of living life from the outside in rather than living from the inside out. 

Some months ago, when I complemented a friend on having lost some weight he told me he wasn’t sure how much he’d lost, that he wasn’t worried about his weight.  His professional trainer had told him, and trained him to believe, that how much he weighed wasn’t as significant as how good he looked.  So, what’s needed is more emphasis on building abdominal six packs and less on what we put in our abdomens that generates high cholesterol?  My friend and his trainer are only expressing the modern version of an ancient human weakness for the tendency to be superficial in our judgments, not reflective enough on the substance of what we see.  Jesus wanted his disciples to stop being so consumed with what this other man was doing, so externally focused, that they failed to reflect on the significance of their own inner character before God.

Parker J. Palmer has written a marvelous little book, Let Your Life Speak.  He found himself in his 30’s asking about how much he’d sold himself out to superficiality by being so focused on what others expected of him.  William Stafford’s poem, “Ask Me,” gave him pause. 

Some time when the river is ice ask me

        mistakes I have made.  Ask me whether

        what I have done is my life.  Others

        have come in their slow way into my

        my thought, and some have tried to help

        or to hurt: ask me what difference

        their strongest love or hate has made.

I will listen to what you say.

        You and I can turn and look

        at the silent river and wait.  We know

        the current is there, hidden; and there

        are comings and goings from miles away

        that hold the stillness exactly before us.

        What the river says, that is what I say.

Stafford’s poem became a metaphor of the central question of Palmer’s own life and caused him to think “of moments when it is clear – if I have eyes to see – that the life I am living is not the same as the life that wants to live in me.  In those moments I sometimes catch a glimpse of my true life, a life hidden beneath the ice.”  He goes on to write of how he’d followed all the rules for “accumulating wealth, holding power, winning at competition, or securing a career,” only to discover that it is “indeed possible to live a life other than one’s own.”  A life, he says, “spent imitating heroes instead of listening to my heart (Palmer, Let Your Life Speak, Jossey-Bass, 2000).”

If you listen to your heart this morning, what is it telling you about the life you are living as compared to the life that wants to live in you?  Jesus’ ways of getting us to ask that question and of exposing our inherent tendency to allow ourselves to be remade in the image others have of us rather than to live out the image of God already in us may seem strange to us, hard to decipher.  It’s well worth the struggle.

This next several weeks we’re going to do some of that work by focusing our Sunday morning conversations on living from the inside out.  We preachers call these things a sermon series.  I’d rather we think about it in terms of a conversation, so that we leave a comma at the end of each week’s sentence rather than a period.  And, this is where Jesus leaves the conversation with the disciples that day, and with us today.

Having heard their complaints about this man who wasn’t “exorcising” his faith properly and after having told them to leave him alone and to focus more on their own personal tendencies to miss the life they should live, Jesus says, “‘everyone will be salted with fire.  Salt is good; but if salt has lost its saltiness, how can you season it?  Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another.’”  Salt of the earth.  Remember?  From the Sermon on the Mount?  That’s what Jesus said we are.  Salt.  Influence for long lasting good.  Undeniable presence.  Those who call on Jesus as Lord, who choose to apprentice themselves to his way of life, are the ones through whom he intends to give this world his character, his presence, his influence for what is eternally good.  Have salt within, Jesus said.  Live out your calling, the gift of God’s life to you within.  Live it out in this world making peace with each other as God in Christ has made peace with you. 

Here is what I hear in Jesus’ words as I overhear him speaking to his first disciples.  Perhaps I won’t be the only one this morning who heard them this way.  This is a very personal conversation I’ve been having with Jesus.  I share it with you trusting you to receive it as something very personal.  But, this is what I hear Jesus saying to me.

Stop being so angry that this world doesn’t act the way you wish it would.  Every time you focus on the faults and failures of others, you are distracted from the one thing over which you have any control, whether or not this world receives the gift I intend to give them through you.  You are the salt of the earth.  Through you I want to influence this world for what is eternally good and true.  I intend to make my presence in this world known through you, through your strengths and weaknesses, your failures and successes, your personality, your sense of humor, your way of painting pictures with words, in your leaping and your limping.  Living the life I’ve given you and called you to live will be hard enough.  “‘Everyone will be salted with fire.’”  You have many “procedures” yet to face that will be difficult enough without taking on the burden of remaking the world in your image.  Just the same, never let this world remake you in its image.  Be transformed in my grace, not conformed to someone else’s idea of what you should be.  Only you can choose to protect my gift in you from those who would steal it away in the name of making you what they think you should be.  Make certain that you pay whatever price is necessary, whatever that may be, to stay true to the calling of the gift of my life within you.  Live your life from the inside out, or whatever you do, it won’t be living.  It will be hell, where “worm never dies, and the fire is never quenched.”  Now and forever.  In simple, childlike faith, live your life.  Live it fully all the way to the end.  Run the race, faithfully and fully.  Live your life.  Live it from the inside out.  Leave everything else to me.

That’s what I hear Jesus saying. 

What do you hear?