Category: A Word or Two

Once upon a time …

(…with gratitude to Frederick Buechner who put these thoughts in my head)

Once upon a time, or so the fable goes, there was an orphaned, motherless lion cub who was adopted by goats and brought up by them to speak their language, eat their food, and in general, to believe that he was goat himself. 

Then one day, the king of the lions happened by and all the goats scattered in fear leaving the young lion … that thought it was a goat … all alone, to confront the king of beasts. He was afraid, of course and yet somehow, strangely  not afraid.

The great lion king asked the young one what he meant by the foolish masquerade of being a goat, but all the young one could do was bleat nervously as any goat would and tried to ignore the question by nibbling at the grass. 

So the lion king picked up the young beast by the scruff of the neck and took him to a pond nearby where he was forced to look at their two reflections side by side in the pool and draw his own conclusions. The poor goat could only bleat in confusion.

Finally, the lion king took him to the carcass of a recent kill and offered him his first taste of raw meat. At first, the young lion was repulsed by the idea and recoiled at the unfamiliar taste of it. 

But then, as he ate more and more of it, and began to feel it warming something deep within him, it began to dawn on him. Lashing his tail and digging his claws into the earth, the young lion finally raised his head high and the landscape trembled at the sound of his first, mighty roar.

This old fable illustrates a very basic point about life: that as human beings, we usually live life in this world at less than what we were created to be. We are supposed to be lions, but we usually live as goats. 

The goat in this fable is really not a goat at all, of course, he is really a young lion. But he doesn’t know that. And as long as he believes he is a goat, in one sense, he really is a goat. Or at the very least, he is really not a lion. 

To cast it then in terms of the humanity that is ours and the spirituality that is available to us in Jesus Christ, we were created in the image of God, a spiritual image, but something has gone desperately wrong. Like a young lion cub, orphaned, left to live among goats, we have been orphaned by our sin to live far below what we were meant to be. 

What all this means is that we have wrenched ourselves out of the kind of spiritual relationship we were intended to have with God and with each other. Like Adam, we have all lost paradise … lost our birthright as lions … lost our full spiritual capacity for life. We have been orphaned by sin.

And yet … and yet… we all carry something of the original intentions of paradise around inside of us like a haunting memory … like a deep longing for what we have lost or a strong yearning for what we dream could one day be.

In the language of our fable, if the lion who thought he was a goat, could really be a goat, he wouldn’t have this problem. He’d just go on being a goat. But there is still enough lion left in him, as there is left in all of us, to make us discontented with being a goat. 

So we may run with the other goats, ignore the larger question of identity and meaning, nibble at the grass and hope that the Lion of Judah will just leave us to bleat along with the rest. But real meaning in life seems to forever elude us, and life as a goat never seems to satisfy us … there is always some something we cannot name, dangling out there, twisting the in the wind of our soul, just beyond our reach. We may bleat well enough, but deep down  …there is a gnawing suspicion that we were really made to roar.

SVE

Behind Closed Doors

Once upon a long ago, I was staying in a well-known big hotel that the organizers of the event paid for … maybe just trying to provide for me in memorable way, I guess. I was speaking at a gathering of clergy on adapting to the waves of cultural change hitting the church and how to avoid getting caught in the undertow of it all and thereby lose focus on our message. There was also a huge business conference of sorts in the hotel at the same time. Their meeting room held 1,200 people or so. Ours held 60. You get the picture: significance and importance and sophistication in Room A-1 and humble and meek and lowly in Room A-23.

One could be intimidated by the impression such inequity created if you didn’t know the story about a destitute and desperate widow found in II Kings 4. There, the prophet Elisha instructs the widow to collect as many pots as she can from her neighbors and then go into her house and shut the door behind her. And there, behind closed doors, through Elisha, God does the miracle of multiplying the little oil she has … over and over and over again. It’s a miracle … not a spectacle. It is done in hiddenness, behind closed doors. 

Jesus said in Matthew 13 something similar about the Kingdom of God. It is like yeast, He said, subtly growing and penetrating this world almost imperceptibly. It’s mustard seed size to begin with but quietly grows and becomes this mighty tree that the birds of heaven nest in. It’s miracle … not a spectacle. It is done in hiddenness, behind closed doors. 

So, as with the miracle of the widow’s oil, the Kingdom is multiplying and at work: behind closed doors. Do you know that the overall World Population is growing by .87% each year, less that one percent? But do you also know that the overall growth in the Christian Population is 1.08% with 4 major Protestant movements leading the way with growth figures of 6.73% each year… almost seven times more than the growth of this world’s population?

Do you know that it took 1400 years to get to where 1 out of every 100 persons in the world was a believing Christian?  Then took over 500 more years, until 1940, to cut that number in half, 1 out of 50. But it took only 70 years to get from that to where 1 out of every 8 people on earth was a believing Christian.  And it is a movement that is still gaining steam. The world holds about 2.52 billion Christians today and that population is projected to grow to 3 billion by 2050. Three billion. That’s a whole lot of Kingdom believers.

Today, there are more churches, more missionaries, more radio broadcasts and more pod casts and more computer on-line teaching courses than ever before. There are more Bibles in more languages than ever before, more Christian books, more Christian music, more Bible colleges and seminaries and training schools…

More relief work, more literacy work, more medical work, more compassion work, more justice work, and more and more and more work of all kinds all being done in Jesus’ name. So let’s stop wringing our hands. Forget the cultural optics. The Kingdom of God is doing quite well, thank you very much.  It’s just doesn’t have a ticker on Wall Street so the whole world can be impressed. It’s never going to be a headline on CNN or FOX News but it’s making the 6 o’clock news each night in Heaven. Why? Because it’s a miracle … not a spectacle. It is being done in hiddenness, behind closed doors.

So don’t let the cover of Forbes Magazine or Time Magazine or Newsweek intimidate your Kingdom faith and hopes. Don’t let Amazon or Google or Intel fool you into thinking they are the really big news of this world. The truly big news of this world is in the little mustard seed and the little yeast and the little bit of widow’s oil. The big news is what is happening behind closed doors. How can we say that? Because God is at work behind those closed doors. And He’s just keeping an old promise He made back in Mt. 16:18 “I will build my church and (even) the gates of hell will not prevail against it!” But don’t look for a spectacle. Look for a miracle.

SVE

You Never Know

A wonderful thing begins when the rule and reign over your life is ceded to the One who has given you new life, Jesus Christ. You abandon the sense of needing all the answers and needing to be in control and you never know what a day might hold or what wondrous thing might unfold. 

Which must mean that you never know (1) what will come of an everyday conversation. At the end of John’s gospel we find Nicodemus at the foot of the cross, a fearless follower of Jesus who defies the Sanhedrin and identifies fully with Christ. But he doesn’t get there if the conversation doesn’t happen in John 3.

So I repeat myself, you never know what will come of a conversation. You with one of your children, you with a friend at work … you with that guy you meet at the auto parts store all the time. I meet people all the time who say to me, “Pastor, I’ll never forget the time you said…” and I’m too shy to admit that I sure can’t remember having said that.

But words last and conversations matter. Part of what it means to sew the good seed of good news, is to treat every conversation with the possibilities it contains. You never know when it might be the conversation of a life time. 

Because there are times when like a young mom you walk someone toward the right understanding of what it means to be a child of God. Yet on a lot of days, you don’t have the chance to give the gospel explicitly. But folks should be able to read the gospel in you implicitly by what you say and how you relate to them. Every conversation is a doorway for Jesus to be seen through.

And another you never know is that you never know (2) how God might use you. Nicodemus proves that it’s not about credentials or status. It’s about who is reigning in your heart.

I remember a young man who ran a small trucking company, the kind of guy with grease under his finger nails from work and creases in his forehead from worry about work. His name was Gord and I was his pastor. 

Gord was an introvert of the first order. Shy, quiet, a back ground kind of guy. He had a high school education, loved his family, loved golf and hockey… if you mentioned Augustine in a sermon, he’d probably ask you what team he played for. And Gord would often say of himself that he was a just a garden variety follower of Jesus. 

But I always saw him as a great saint. Because he lived in such a way that people were drawn to him…they admired and trusted him. I remember a year or so after he moved out of our area, bumping into a neighbor of his at the grocery store. We knew each other a bit but we both knew Gord well and his name came up quite naturally in our conversation.

And Gord’s old neighbor said to me, “Ya know, the thing about Gord was, if ever I was going through a hard time, he’d be the guy I turned to.” Not to me, a pastor. Not to a credentialed counselor. Not to a lawyer. But to a guy with a grade 12 education who loved Jesus.

Somewhere this morning, Gord is probably wondering if his life really mattered to anyone. He has no idea. And neither do you, because you never know how God will use you. It’s not about your spiritual credentials. It’s about your spiritual life.

Steve