Second in a Lenten Series, "Entering Into the Mystery"

We've all probably heard the story about the man who felt guilty about getting home extremely late from work one evening. On the way home, he stopped and bought a bouquet of roses for his wife. Instead of entering the house through the garage as he always did, he decided to surprise her by ringing the front door bell instead.

As his wife answered the door, he pulled the bouquet from behind his back and presented it to her. As soon as she saw it, she broke out crying. The man stood there in shock! "Sweetheart, what did I do wrong? I just brought you some roses!" She said, "You have no idea what this day has been like! I had to get the kids off to school and then, while I was cleaning the house, the refrigerator went out and I had to call a repairman. After that, I did the laundry and started your supper. Now it's cold because you got home late. After all of that, you show up at the front door, drunk!

In all fairness to the woman, who could blame her? There must have some history there behind the flowers and her husband's drinking habits. Perhaps she was too exhausted to see the bright side of anything, to see the flowers for what they were meant to be. She confused them with an apology for something that hadn't even happened and not for the blessing they were meant to be. As for the man, how long do you think it was before he brought any more flowers home again? If you give a gift expecting to be blessed and instead are cursed, how likely are you to give that gift again?

The three texts we've read this morning may appear to have virtually nothing in common. If you listen closely, the common theme among all three of them is the idea of repentance. All three of them pull either from current events or from the history of the people of Israel themselves and move toward the same end. Listen to just a selected few words, from each of them again. From Isaiah's text: "Come, listen to me so that you may live. Seek the Lord while he is near. Let the wicked forsake their way; let them return to the Lord."

In Luke's gospel, over and over again, Jesus emphasized that all sin causes death. He also says to those who thought they were more righteous than others were simply because the affect of their sin wasn't clear and immediate, "Unless you repent, you will also perish."

Then, from Corinthians, there are warnings to beware of specific behaviors that carry with them their own built-in self-destruction. Please listen again to a few verses, as translated in The Message. "We must be on guard," Paul writes to the ancient church, "so that we never get caught up in wanting our own way, as they did" (referring to the children of Israel in the wilderness). "And we must not turn our religion into a circus as they did. We must not be sexually promiscuous. They paid for that. We must never try to get Christ to serve us instead of us serving him. They tried it, and God launched an epidemic of poisonous snakes. We must be careful not to stir up discontent. Discontent destroyed them."

From these diverse texts, this much seems clearly evident. Sin is the act of taking God's good gifts and choosing to use them as instruments of our own personal pleasures or agendas. Repentance is the choice to return to God the good gifts he's given us and to discover in relationship with him what life's gifts were meant to be all along.

This is the third Sunday in the Lenten season. We are just a few weeks from Easter. This time of year, we are meant to spend time in deep personal reflection, confession, and even repentance. It's a time of year when we are invited to see repentance as our own personal responsibility, as something God both allows for us and creates for each of us as individuals so that, in our living, we won't miss out on the personal opportunity of entering into a relationship with the mystery of eternal God, only to end up dying.

Some of the sins for which we're called to repentance in these texts of scripture are very obvious, especially in the Corinthians text. One is sexual immorality. "We should be careful not to enter into sexual promiscuity." When we use other people as the means to the end of personal sexual satisfaction then we have been sexually immoral, no matter what form that immorality takes.

Most sermons that deal with sexual immorality tend to do one of two things. One is that they keep sexual sin at something of a safe third-party distance. Hardly a week goes by that the news doesn't contain some story of a great national leader or spiritual leader being found guilty of or exposed for some form of sexual immorality. When we hear those stories, we breathe a sigh of relief that there, except for the grace of God, go I.

Now, I would never do this, but it would be interesting if we were to have everyone in this sanctuary stand who had never in any way, shape or form, been guilty of some kind of sexual immorality. Would there be anyone left seated? As long as we keep the discussion about sexual immorality at a third-party distance, though, and we don't have to stand and name the sin as our own, then we really don't engage the subject on a serious level.

The other problem with sermons that deal with sexual immorality is that they do a great job with guilt but not much with hope. They tend to moralize the issue of sex and never discuss it on even the level that scripture does. We talk about homosexuality, for example, as an issue instead of entering into serious dialog with God and with each other about how homosexuals are people too, for whom Christ also died. People just like you and me, all of us in need of relationship with God.

A second sin tends to be pervasive in these texts. That is the sin of (and this is my paraphrase) turning God into our own personal vending machine. Putting God on the witness stand, making him answer to us about why life has turned out for us as it has. The Corinthians passage refers back to Numbers 21:5 in which is recorded a rehearsal of the history of the children of Israel coming out of captivity in Egypt. Things got hard for a while on the way to freedom. Then, "The people spoke against God and Moses and said, 'Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness, where there is no food and water, and we loathe this miserable food.'" In their questioning, they put God on trial, using as their standard how much he had blessed them and made their life more pleasant. They expected that God owed them something, or that they were entitled to something from which God had deprived them.

It is so difficult not to turn prayer into a manipulation of God for our own personal gain instead of expressing prayer as an act of submission to God for his purposes in our lives. Though I don't remember all of the details, you have told me this story before. Some years ago, there was a man in this church who was praying in a public meeting. As he was praying for the people in the community who were hungry and needed clothing, he suddenly stopped and said, "You know, Lord, don't worry about those people; we'll take care of them." Then, he finished his prayer. That can be a funny story, especially when well told. But, I've often thought about that prayer as a great example of how true prayer transforms us instead of manipulating God to do our bidding.

There's a third sin mentioned in these texts, one that's particularly intriguing. One that we hardly ever discuss but one from which we are called to repentance just as much. It is the sin of complaining.

If this week, we heard of someone losing their Christian reputation because of some sexually immoral behavior, what's new? We hardly pay attention anymore. If we hear of someone losing their reputation because they had abused the trust of others, especially within the church and especially with regard to money, what's new? Listen to this specific sin to which Paul calls the ancient church to repentance, based on the history of their own spiritual heritage. "Do not complain, as some of them did and were destroyed."

Am I reading this correctly? Is the scripture actually putting the act of complaining, the sin of complaining, griping, on the same level as the sin of sexual immorality? Both sexual immorality and complaining are a choice to see the world from a very self-centered perspective and then act in destructive ways toward others accordingly. To treat life, not as the gift of God it was meant to be, but simply as a means of personal gratification and enrichment, no matter what the effect may be on others.

Imagine this morning turning on the news to hear that yet another church is caught up in scandal because of the immoral behavior of one of its members or its pastor. Not because of sexual immorality or materialistic immorality but because they had been caught red-handed, complaining too much! Can you imagine? Would you terminate your pastor for complaining too much? Would we "de-deacon" a deacon for complaining too much?

Back during the days of the Jesus Movement, I was in college. I had a friend that enjoyed living on the edge. It was very popular back in that day to have bumper stickers that had some kind of a Jesus saying on them like, "Honk if you love Jesus," or whatever. My friend had a Jesus sticker on his bumper. One night, he and some of his buddies wanted to go out and see an X-rated movie at a drive-in theater. He was worried about pulling his car into the open theater with the Jesus sticker on his bumper. So, he took a rag, stuffed it inside the bumper and then folded it back over the outside of the bumper thereby covering up the Jesus sticker. Then, he drove on into the drive-in to see the X-rated movie. To this day, I remind him of that when I have a chance. Shame, shame! My friend covered up his Jesus sticker so he could go see an X-rated movie!

What about those who never attended an X-rated movie but live daily with X-rated attitudes toward the gifts of God in life? What do we say about them? What do we say about ourselves? There is nothing more uncomely to Christ than a bitter, negative, cynical Christian! Talk about an oxymoron! A bitter Christian! "I believe in Jesus, but life is a joke." Can you imagine saying both of those things in the same breath? I never feel more hypocritical than when I'm caught red-handed, griping. I'm confident that one of the reasons the Lord God blessed me with my dear wife was so she could catch me red-handed as frequently as possible!

Complaining is what happens when I am more focused on how others have failed me than how God has blessed me. I've said this before and you'll hear me say it again. It's one of the best pieces of marriage advice I could ever give you. Behind every broken marriage, whether that marriage has ended in divorce or two people have vowed to stay together, hating each other until they die, behind every broken marriage, someone got stuck complaining about what the other person wasn't, instead of celebrating what they were. Behind some of the saddest stories of parental failure are not children who misbehaved first but parents who never found a way of celebrating, in the presence of their children, the good they brought into this world.

My father had the most difficult time being a positive person. Just in the past few years have I begun to understand some of the family story behind all of that. It's a story that I probably would have never known had he not died, when families tend to have conversations with other family members they don't have otherwise. As a young man, without understanding why my father was the way he was, his negative and cynical attitude toward life tended to drive a wedge between us. It was never to the point that our relationship was totally broken and we couldn't experience good times together. But, I do remember feeling a sense of dread at times when my father was coming home at the end of a day. I know now it was because I knew there would be something negative to hear and, before I was more mature, I took too much of that too personally.

My father also read the Bible to me and, as I've told you before, did more to teach me about Jesus than any other person who's ever lived. Over time, largely due to the influence of the scriptures he read to me, my father's negative and cynical attitude began to trouble him deeply. About the time I went off to college, he gave me a copy of Norman Vincent Peale's The Power of Positive Thinking. It had made an impact on his life and he was hoping it might make one on mine. I've wondered at times if that was because, as all parents eventually do, he began to see some of what he didn't like in himself being repeated in me, his son, and wanted to do something to correct that. Or, maybe it was his way of repenting, of trying to help me see what he was just beginning to see not long before he died, that God is really good to us, and life is a gift. We are never guiltier of sin than when we complain about the hand we've been dealt instead of playing the hand we've been dealt the best we can in a spirit of living gratitude.

As I wrote just a few weeks ago in my Pastor's column (A Ring, a Watch and a Bible, February 5, 2007), one Sunday morning not long before he died, Dad came to visit. I was sitting upstairs, working on a sermon. Dad was sitting in the room as I worked. I could see him in my peripheral vision, sitting over in the corner, just staring at me. It was awkward, in a way. I was trying to stay focused; he was sitting and staring. He finally got up, walked across the room, put his hand on my shoulder and said to me, "I'm so very proud of you." I still marvel at how the power of a father's blessing can wilt a thousand curses and then some. My father's blessing of me later in life now serves as the source of some of the richest, and most healing, memories I have of him and us.

Folks, especially during Lent and as we think about the resurrection we are about to celebrate, could we possibly consider for a moment that complaining is a failure to see beyond what is to what can and still will be, no matter how badly others may have disappointed us or life has turned out for us? Let me cut closer to the bone. Of course, we're all guilty of griping from time to time. We feel bad, it's been a long day, we're sick, whatever. But a constant, focused spirit of complaining, of negativity, of cynicism, bitterness and of rehearsing over and over and over and over again the failures of other people and a how God has failed us is a sin because it is a denial of the resurrection. It is a choice to see life for what it is not, to interpret the eternal in light of the immediate and according to what we think life should be right now, instead of what it is becoming because of what God is now doing through the resurrected Christ, bringing new life through death. "The people spoke against Moses and God," the scripture says. "Why have you brought us up out of Egypt?" They could only see what was in the wilderness, in that immediate moment, and not what would be on the other side. It cost them their lives. Their complaining became their own self-fulfilling prophecies. Every minute we spend complaining is a minute of our life that has been lost forever. Our complaining becomes our own destruction, too.

When she recorded these words in her diary on February 23, 1944, Anne Frank was only fourteen years old. "Nearly every morning I go to the attic to blow the stuffy air out of my lungs. From my favorite spot on the floor, I look up at the blue sky and the bare chestnut tree, on whose branches little raindrops shine, appearing like silver, and at the seagulls and other birds as they glide on the wind. As long as this exists, I thought, and I may live to see it, this sunshine, the cloudless skies, while this lasts I cannot be unhappy" (Anne Frank's chestnut tree faces ax, CNN.com, March 10, 2007).

We know that Anne Frank and her family spent 25 months in the attic above her father's office in Amsterdam, hiding along with several other Jews from the Nazis in World War II. That's where she wrote those words. Just a little over a year later, after being betrayed and arrested, Anne Frank died of typhus in a Nazi concentration camp. What makes her story so remarkable, among many things, is that even in her youth, even under the oppression of living in an attic under the threat of death every day for two years and crammed in with other people like sardines in a can, she chose to see life as a gift. Even though she died too young, at least it can be said she truly lived before she died.

What if every sin brought with it this mysterious possibility of discovering through personal repentance to God a way we never thought possible? What if every sin, our sexual sins, our self-centered sins, our complaining sins, what if in every one of those we accepted the mysterious responsibility of choosing to come back to God and seeing life as a gift instead of a curse?

That's the kind of repentance that will lead to a personal resurrection in Christ and nothing short of it.