One of our dear senior adult ladies asked me this past week, when I take Griffin off to school this next Wednesday, if I was going to cry.  I told her, “I’m planning on it.”  Some may think that the preacher comes to church with his life all together every week.  That he’s something like a spiritual vending machine.  He spends all week restocking the racks and on Sunday someone puts in a couple of hymns and an offering and out comes a sermon with answers to all of life’s questions.  More often, he comes not overstocked but, in fact, hoping to find the same hope and courage everyone else is seeking in order to face what is coming the next week.  I preach as much through confession as through proclamation.

We’ve somehow trained ourselves to think it should be the other way around.  That God is not interested in our worship if there is anything amiss in our lives, anything lacking.  If we have any sin, any doubts or fears, well, we should go to the mall or the ball game but certainly not to church.  Actually, the only thing that disqualifies us from worship is not our humanity but our unwillingness to come out of hiding and confess our faults and needs.  It’s the secrets we keep from God, just like in any relationship, that build barriers to closeness.  So, yes, I plan on a good cry sometime about midweek.  That will be the only way I know of to get honest enough with God to get connected to the only hope that matters when life keeps, well, being life.  This is a truly meaningful moment.  I wouldn’t miss it for anything.  And, I want God along, too.  I need him to go with me to Arkansas next week, and then, especially, to make the long six-hour drive back home, with one seat empty.

Isn’t that all Jesus ever wants from us, just a little honesty?  The only thing I’ve ever seen in scripture that makes Jesus truly angry is not sin, but hidden sin, dishonesty in the darkness, secrecy.  He sounds angry in this passage.  We’re not comfortable, at least I’m not comfortable, with Jesus’ anger.  But, he sounds angry to me in the text we’ve read this morning, don’t you think?  What was bothering him?  Some dishonesty in the darkness?  Was somebody holding back?

Well, for sure, part of what was bothering Jesus was that he was about to go through something that makes taking your firstborn off to college seem like a walk in the park.  “‘I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what stress I am under until it is completed!’”  We know what he’s talking about don’t we?  His crucifixion.  It’s coming soon, too soon.  And, listen to the honesty!  “You gonna’ cry, Jesus?”  “I’m planning on it!  This is going to hurt.  I’m going to die but not before I suffer.  They’re going to draw it out and kill me slow.  I know what’s coming and just the thought is, to say the least, stressful.” 

I like the way Jesus comes to church.  Nothing to hide.  Not even his worst fears or greatest anxieties.  Just lay it out for all to see.  This is meaningful moment in his life and he needs someone to know and share the meaning with him.

Somehow, as is too often the case, folks are preoccupied with lesser things.  What seems to have to set Jesus up for these harsh words was a conversation he had over lunch not long before, in the home of a Pharisee (Luke 11:37ff).  Just like some boys I know, Jesus sits down to eat without first washing up.  It bothers his Pharisaic host enough that it shows.  Of course, to the folks who like to dot all the religious “i’s” and cross all the super-spiritual “t’s,” washing for dinner wasn’t so much about hygiene; it was about ritual that was meant, as much as anything, to show others how deeply spiritual they were, nothing impure entering the body – that kind of thing. 

Maybe Jesus was using the dirty hands version of the five second rule.  It’s the rule you learn after you have your second baby when you decide you can’t live anymore with the obsessive need to sterilize the pacifier every time you drop it.  Starting with the second baby, if you drop anything on the floor and you pick it up before it’s been there five seconds, it’s still clean.  Of course, the other day on the way home, I bought a sandwich for lunch.  When I got out of the car, I dropped it on the garage floor.  In that case, the split second rule was in affect and I fed it to the dog.  Whatever the case, germs

on the hands didn’t concern Jesus as much as the germs of the heart and he didn’t wash up.  He knew that real impurity doesn’t have anything to do so much with what we put in our mouth as what we allow in our hearts.  When Jesus didn’t wash up, he saw the surprise on the Pharisee’s face and said to him, “‘You Pharisees clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside you are full of greed and wickedness’” (Luke 11:37-40).  You may know the five second rule about what’s on your hands.  But, what rules your hearts seems of no concern to you.

Do you see?  Jesus didn’t so much mind eating with dirty hands.  What did and still does bother him are the dirty little secrets, the stuff that can’t be washed away with soap and water.  He knew something about this guy’s secrets, greed and wickedness, he called it.  What secrets are we keeping from him today? 

I have a confession to make this morning.  Jesus almost always makes me a little uncomfortable.  Just when I’m getting pretty good at getting, at acquiring and owning, just about the time I finally have some net worth, Jesus starts talking about the wickedness of greed.  I keep trying to find some way of fitting my middle class lifestyle into the gospel paradigm and it’s feeling more and more like a square peg in a round hole all the time.  That’s kind of how Jesus does.  His right way feels like a rub the wrong way.  It can certainly cause friction.

Maybe that’s something of what he meant by the fire he’d come to bring on the earth.  Fire is an interesting metaphor.  It can mean that he came to purify and cleanse, which fire does, whether the dirt’s been there five seconds or five hundred years.  It can mean that he came to spread his good news everywhere, like a voracious late summer fire blown up by a desert wind in southern California, consuming mountainside dry brush in thousand-acre-sized gulps.  Or, it could mean that what he has to say is going to cause friction because it’s going to rub up against what we like to call our comfort zones, even sometimes in those relationships that are bloodline close,          “‘father against son and son against father, mother against

daughter and daughter against mother,’” where even in our closest loyalties Jesus calls our values into question.  Rubbing causes friction and friction causes sparks and gospel sparks up against the overabundance of sin for fuel and it won’t be long until something Jesus says causes a fire. 

In this particular case, it seems to be that what bothered Jesus is that people were more worried about hand washing than soul cleansing, more concerned about what they can see and others can see, appearance of purity than soul purity his gospel fire had come to bring.  Only seeing what they wanted to see, not what they ought to see. “‘When you see a cloud rising in the west, you immediately say, ‘It is going to rain’; and so it happens.  And when you see the south wind blowing, you say, ‘There will be scorching heat’; and it happens.  You hypocrites!  You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present time?’”

“‘Hypocrites’” is a tough word.  Jesus must not have read anything about how to win friends and influence people.  You just don’t talk to people like that unless, unless you’re Jesus and you’re more interested in truth and you want people you love enough to die for to see it, too.  Hypocrisy can mean many things, in this case, a godless view of life.  Not playacting so much as a genuine preoccupation with not much more than where their nose touches the grindstone.  Jesus wanted them, wants us, to pay attention to what God was up to right in front of their face but just beyond their noses, the fire of truth being kindled, to see more than just what their eyes could see and only what their hearts could see.  If you want to know what God is up to in this world, you’re going to look beyond what you can see with your eyes, beyond the headlines, beyond the most visible, to what you will only be able to see when you look with the eyes of your heart.

Like when you look into the face of your wife or husband, or your children or your grandchildren.  Someone else looking on might see just another face.  But, when you’re staring into their eyes, you see all of your dreams, your hopes, your deepest, most passionate love, like love you’ve never known anywhere else – because you’re seeing more than your eyes can see and only what your heart can see.

This devastating Category 4 hurricane that struck the Florida coast caused some 2,000,000 people to evacuate.  They were fortunate.  It recalls to memory a time not that long ago when people weren’t so fortunate, back before hurricanes had names and no one saw them coming.  When what we would now call a Category 5 hurricane came ashore at Galveston in September, 1900, it became the greatest natural disaster ever to strike the continental United States.  Between 5,000 and 7,000 people perished.  All because they couldn’t read the signs.  Just hours before the hurricane hit, people were still playing on the beach.  Only a few began to suspect something was up by the strange tides and wind but, by then, it was too late.  The island was cut off and there was no escaping the 200 mph winds and storm surge that virtually raked the island clean.  Loss of life to a hurricane on that scale in the United States today is all but impossible because, now, radar gives us eyes we didn’t have before.  We’re able to see beyond what our natural eyes make visible.  If you want to see what God is up to, you’ll have to look beyond what your human eyes alone can take in to what only the eyes of faith make visible.  

This is a meaningful moment today.  Several of my high school classmates are here.  At our last reunion just two years ago, our 30^th, we decided that we better start seeing each other more often if we wanted to see each other again.  Some of us were laughing about that last night.  About how the first twenty years out of high school we were so busy accumulating as much as we could and trying to prove something that we hardly had time for each other.  Some thirty plus years out, we’ve been humbled up pretty good and now, we’ve gone back to looking to see if we have any friends left.  As though life has taught us to look for more meaningful things than just things, just what the human eye can find to lust after.

You look out on this crowd of sixties-raised baby-boomers and you see a bunch of people who are finally beginning to show their age.  It looks like we’re getting older, doesn’t it?  More times than I care to count, someone scratched these words in my high school annual my senior year, “Stay the way you are!”  It didn’t work.  Now days, it seems that only thing that’s stuck on staying the way it was is my weight and my golf score.  Nothing else is staying the way it was.  From the looks of things, well . . .!  But, only if you see what your eyes can see.  When you look with the eyes of your heart, you can see more.  Though we are outwardly wasting away, inwardly, we are being renewed day by day.  That’s not just a quippy little platitude.  That is the promise of the living God and my eternal hope.

Sometimes I’m not so thrilled with what I see in the mirror staring back at me.  But, when I think about what’s going on inside of me, I’ve never been more thrilled.  I like what’s happening there, what God is up to in me.  I just have to keep remembering to look with the eyes of my heart, not just my head.  When I only look at what my human eyes alone can see, my existence becomes a godless hypocrisy consumed with consuming and not the joy of simply being.  And, secret sins abound.  And, joy flees.  And, there is no hope.  Unless I look beyond what my eyes can see.

If you look with the eyes of your head, you might say there’s just another inner city church struggling to survive in a changing cultural environment, trying this program and that.  When you look with the eyes of your heart, you’ll see more.  You’ll see God blessing an after school ministry about to start and Mission Oak Cliff flourishing because a church made a decision twenty years ago to stay put.  God is up to something – the same God who created this world will redeem this world – will fulfill his purpose for all of us in it.  What’s more, he’s invited us to participate with him in that redemptive work!

When we were in high school, we thought we had forever to live.  We were talking last night about some of the dumb things we did when we thought our bodies were made of steel and our bones of rubber.  Now, a couple of knee replacements here, a hip replacement and a pacemaker there and we’ve been sobered up to realize that life is a sacred gift.  This is the moment God has given us to live and to participate with him in his recreation of his creation.  God is at work in it and in us.  And, we only see and know the meaning of this moment when we come out of hiding, stop keeping secrets, tell God the truth and invite him to open the eyes of our heart to see beyond the end of our grindstone blistered noses. 

We can see that now.  I’m seeing that now, better than ever, and not just with my trifocals. 

This is the day the Lord has made, and the day in which he is alive and at work in this world.  Jesus has come to make this journey with us so that it will take us where he wants us to be.  He’s right here, even now, in this moment.  That is the meaning of this moment.

Can you see it?