In order for the story I’m about to tell you to make sense, most of us in this room are going to have to travel back in time to our high school years.  If you are in Middle School or High School right now, you may be able to relate to this story in real time. 

His name was Bobby.  As I remember him, he was a very tall, lean and always looking-for-a-fight machine.  He was one year ahead of me in high school.  Do you remember how one year’s seniority carried a lot of weight?  Bobby looked like Goliath to me.  Goliath could have taken lessons.  I’ve always wondered what happened to Bobby.  From all appearances in the way he dealt with most people, he was a human weapon of mass relational destruction.  One day, working out at track, Bobby put me down in a very demeaning and vulgar way in front of a lot of people.  I didn’t dare say a word back; I just had to stand there and take it.  If I had said a word, he would have done vulgar things to me.  Of course, I later thought of a million things I wish I’d said to him, but only the things you say when you have the courage of not actually having to say them.

But, this all happened before I understood that people who put other people down usually do so because of the Goliath’s in their lives who have been putting them down since before they can remember.  They’re only giving to the people they perceive as weaker what the mean people in their lives gave them.  People who say mean things are only repeating what they’ve heard and believed about themselves from others.  People who spew anger do so because they saw how anger worked for the big people in their world.  People who walk away from commitments usually do so only because the people they once trusted did the same to them and so on and so on.  But, I didn’t know all of that back then. 

When Bobby put me down that day by saying what he said about me, as much as it hurt, I kind of believed him, that what he said about me was true just because he said so.  It has only been because of my walk with Jesus, and my walk with others who walk with Jesus, that I have come to understand that there is only one person who has the right to put anyone down, and he’s chosen not to.  It’s up to us whom we choose to believe, those who curse us or the One who blesses us.  I’ve even learned to be careful about being too dependent on the blessing of others.  They can always take it back and sometimes do.  God never does.  When you go so far as to give your only son, you’ve gone too far to ever take that back.  Now, we all get to choose whether to believe the curse or the Blessing and the outcome of our lives will turn on the then dime of that choice. 

That was what had Jesus so torn as we encounter him in our walk with him this morning.  On the one hand, there was the curse of Herod.  On the other, he’d come to deliver his father’s blessing to the very people who sought to kill him.  He would only have power to deliver his father’s blessing if he didn’t run from the curse.  He had a choice to make. 

This is really a rather curious turn from normalcy.  Of all people, some Pharisees came to warn Jesus to take a hike.  The very people who usually harassed and taunted him were now warning him that Herod was out to kill him.  It’s too suspicious, really. 

Maybe these were teenage mutant Pharisees who really cared for Jesus and wanted to protect him.  Maybe the Pharisees were working for Herod and thought that, if they spooked Jesus enough, he’d get out of town.  There’s really no way of knowing for sure what their motives were, only what they actually did.  For whatever reason, they were trying to get Jesus to just move on down the road.  Herod would eventually play no small roll in helping to crucify Jesus, and Jesus knew it.  So, in the words of the old King James version, the Pharisees told Jesus, “‘Get thee out, and depart hence.’”

What do you say to someone who is out to curse you, even kill you?  It was a defining moment for Jesus.  What would we do?  Stand and fight?  Run and hide?  Defining moments don’t always present themselves in pleasant ways.  Sometimes they present themselves in the form of a threat.  Like Bobby’s curse, or Herod’s threats, defining moments, those rare moments when we finally discover our true purpose and clarify our identity, sometimes come in very painful ways.  It’s a moment when we define for ourselves and others who we are and what our purpose in life is, or we to choose to live the rest of our lives being bounced around like a billiard ball by the next thing that hits us.  As painful as those defining moments may be, we literally could not live without them. 

The summer of 1988 turned out to be the driest in the recorded history of Yellowstone National Park.  By June, the first of some fifty mostly lightning related fires began to burn.  By August, the fires were all but out of control even though 25,000 firefighters were risking their lives fighting them.  Eventually nearly 800,000 acres, thirty-six percent of Yellowstone’s acreage, was charred.  Only an early September snowstorm finally extinguished most of the fires, even though some of them burned until November.  The scars will be visible for decades.  No one alive today will live long enough to see Yellowstone fully return to normal.  Yet, oddly enough, even as the fire was burning, something essential to the life of the forest was happening. 

The lodgepole pine makes up some eighty percent of the forest in Yellowstone.  The seeds of the lodgepole pine are enclosed in pinecones that are sealed with a resin so thick and hard that only the heat of a fire can crack them.  As the fires of 1988 burned beyond control, millions of lodgepole pine seeds were being released.  What appeared to be destroying Yellowstone was actually causing it to give birth to a whole new forest.  In fact, without the fires, the lodgepole pines could not reseed and the forest would eventually die.  Only the heat of adversity allowed something new to be born.

When word of Herod’s threat reached Jesus, something that would make any normal person run and hide, the heat of adversity only gave Jesus the opportunity to declare to others what he had come to know about himself.  “‘Go and tell that fox for me, ‘Listen, I am casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow, and on the third day I finish my work.  Yet today, tomorrow, and the next day I must be on my way.’”  It wasn’t that Herod’s threats were lame or insignificant.  Herod would eventually play no small role in Jesus’ crucifixion.  It was just that, by this time, Jesus knew that the threat of Herod’s curse could not undo the blessing or the call of his father to be a blessing to all of God’s children.  Herod would have his turn with Jesus but not until Jesus had completed what God had given him to do.  What could have sent Jesus packing only served to give him opportunity to declare, yet again, who he was and what he was up to. 

Jesus could have spent his time fighting Herod.  I admire him for stopping with only calling him a “‘fox.’”  What would we call someone who threatened to take our life?  Instead, what could have destroyed him only served to give him a chance to extend a blessing.  “‘Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it!  How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!’”

If we choose to walk with Jesus, almost certainly, there will come a defining moment for us.  That moment in time when we come to face to face with a choice of why we are here, whose we are and who we will serve with our lives.  Those defining moments come for churches as well as individuals.  In my experience, there will be more than one defining moment; there will be many.  And, with rare exception, they have presented themselves in the form of a Bobby or a Herod or a Goliath.  Someone who stands in our way, someone who curses our dream, someone who then presents me with the opportunity to choose whether I will be Christ’s presence in that person’s life by extending the blessing of God forgiveness in me to them or perpetuating the curse of my unforgiveness into their lives.  It’s always a defining moment when we have to choose to curse with unforgiveness or bless with forgiveness.

Anne Lammot writes that she went around for a long time saying that she was “not one of those Christians who is heavily into forgiveness,” but “one of the other kind.”  She kept up with this until she “began to feel punished by” her “unwillingness to forgive” and decided to become one of ones who is heavily into forgiveness (Anne Lammott, Traveling Mercies, Anchor Books, 1999, p. 128).”  I think she was just discovering what we all eventually get to discover if we really choose to walk with Jesus very far.

For one thing, if we choose to be one of the “other kind” of Christian who doesn’t forgive, we always end up being punished by our unforgiveness.  For myself, I discovered that every time I rehearsed what I would have liked to have said to Bobby when he put me down, I had to listen to him rip me all over again.  By being unwilling to forgive him, even years later, he was still beating me up.  You can’t rehearse the pain of the past without relieving it and being hurt by it all over again. 

For another thing, if we decide to walk with Jesus, we eventually discover that there is no so thing as the “other kind” of Christian who does everything it means to be Christian except forgive.  It doesn’t work like that.  We don’t get to edit the instruction manual to suit our personal wishes and whims.  We either obey it or not.  Jesus once said, “‘If you forgive men when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you.  But if you do not forgive men their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins (Matthew 6:14-15).’”  In other words, we either follow Jesus all the way to sharing with others the forgiveness he’s extended to us, or we don’t follow him at all. 

Is there anyone in your life today, this very moment, who needs your forgiveness?  This is your defining moment.

Is there anything happening in your life right now that just about has you beaten into the ground?  Maybe it hurts more than anything you’ve ever known.  Maybe it’s never been harder than it is right now.  This is your defining moment.  Maybe trusting God sounds like a stretch beyond your imagination.  Or, maybe, just maybe, by allowing the adversity to come your way, God has given you the opportunity, for the very first time, to appreciate the power of adversity to unlock a whole new meaning for your life it would have never had otherwise. 

Up until about the 1940’s, the forest service tried to put out every fire in every forest if at all possible.  Fires were only feared because of their immediate destructiveness.  Once it was discovered that fires actually give the forest new life they could not have any other way, the forest service adopted a “let it burn” policy.  Let it burn so it will live.  God doesn’t want you to hurt.  He doesn’t enjoy watching you suffer.  But, the same God who would not protect his own son from the cross won’t protect those who choose to be his disciples from those terribly painful defining moments when we finally discover who we are and why we’re here.  What kind of life would we have if we only spent it running from one problem to the next, always bouncing around like a billiard ball, always at the mercy of whatever hits us next?  Or, like Jesus, despite what has happened to us yesterday, we can choose what we’re going to do with today, tomorrow and the next day.

If we would follow this Jesus, if we would walk with him, we’ll discover over and over again that he isn’t interested in what used to be.  He took care when he finally made it to Jerusalem.  He’s only interested in what we’re going to do with today, tomorrow and the next day.

We can spend them reliving yesterday’s curses, or choosing to be a part of this revolutionary movement where people are being transformed from those who curse to those who bless. 

Just thought I’d ask.  What were you planning to do today, tomorrow and the next day?