Daniel T. Hans
Second Presbyterian Church
Sermons: February 17, 2008

"If I Had Only One Sermon to Preach"

Back at Gettysburg Presbyterian Church I am probably best known for two things, and, no, one of them is not my boyish good looks! I am best known for preaching sermons and telling jokes – and not necessarily in that order. I truly enjoy doing both. I wonder: what would it be like if I had only one joke to tell? What singular joke would it be? And why would I select that joke as my signature jest? I also wonder: what would it be like if I had only one sermon to preach? What singular sermon would it be? And why would I select that sermon as my signature message? I’m at a loss as to what I would say if I had only one joke to tell; but I know exactly what I would say if I had only one sermon to preach. And here it is.

I

A Hindu story from India tells of an orphaned tiger cub that was raised by goats. It grew up thinking like a goat, talking like a goat, even eating like a goat. It believed it was a goat. One day the great tiger king of the jungle stepped the clearing where the goats were grazing. All the goats scattered except for the young tiger-goat. It continued chomping on the grass, making nervous goat sounds. When the great tiger king asked the meaning of the masquerade, but the young tiger goat did not understand the king. So, the tiger king took the cub to a pool of water where it pointed to the similarity in their appearances. The tiger goat still didn’t understand. Then the tiger king placed some raw meat in the cub’s mouth. At first, it recoiled at the strange taste. After chewing a while, an awakening began within the cub. It flexed its powerful neck and shoulder muscles and stretched its claws across the ground. Finally, the young beast raised its head and let out a mighty triumphant roar that filled the jungle. It found its true identity.
     (Fred Buechner, The Magnificent Defeat)

You and I are tigers living a goat existence, so much less than we could be. Our world and our lives are a far cry from the ideal for which we were created. The Bible’s ideal for us is to love God, to love others and to love ourselves. But, let’s face it, we don’t see that ideal in the people around us, not at work, not at home, not even at church. Nor do we see that ideal when we look in the mirror. Like a stripped bolt, our lives do not mesh with the threads of the fitting God has cut for us.

We are tigers living a goat existence, so much less than we could be, so much less than we were created to be, so much less than we want to be.

II

The history of religion is a record of attempts to bring us back into the proper fit and meaningful relationship with our Creator. One attempt to correct this problem is to redefine God to lessen the difference between our ways and God’s ways. We, too, ask the infamous question from the Garden of Eden story, "Did God say?" Did God say certain actions are wrong or was that merely the result of uptight prudish thinking of past generations?
   Does God care what I do with my life so long as I don’t hurt anyone?
   Does God care about my attitudes so long as I keep my actions in check?
   Does God care what I do privately so long as I keep it out of the public eye?
Here, in calling into question the concern and involvement of God in this world, we try to soften the idea of a God who takes an interest in our lives in the hopes of slipping by unnoticed. But the Almighty Tiger King takes notice!

Another attempt to redefine God and overcome our stripped relationship with God is to soft pedal the idea of personal responsibility. We like to take the Consumer Report approach to life and claim, "Well, at least I’m not as bad as all those other people!" Relative comparisons between people have little meaning to God. God compares us, not to each other, but to his ideal for us. Of that comparison, the Bible says, "All have sinned and fallen short of God’s glory (God’s ideal)." (Romans 3:23) All of us have missed the mark.

None of us likes to hear about sin, especially our own sin. So, we place the blame for our less-than-ideal lives elsewhere than on ourselves. The genetically-focused among us argue, It’s all in my genes. You can blame my parents but you can’t blame me! The developmentally-focused among us argue, I cannot help it. I’m a product of my environment! We’re like the 7^th grader who showed his parents his report card on which were a C, two Ds and two Fs. Then he asked his parents, "Well, what do think? Is it due to heredity or environment?" While there are some strong negative influences on our lives, we are the ones who make the choices. We alone are responsible for our choices.

These attempts to change God and to change God’s ideal for us cannot overcome the fact that God is God by God’s definition not ours. This is the first lesson in discovering our true identity as we are intended to be: God is God by his definition not ours.

III

Since we cannot change God, we try to change ourselves to bring us back into gear with God’s ideal. This self-help approach follows two paths.

First, we add things to our lives, good works. We pursue the religion of the do-gooder. One day, Jesus is asked by a rich young man, "What must I do to have eternal life?" Jesus responds, "Keep the commandments" and starts naming the 10 Commandments. The young man interrupts, "Those are easy. I’ve kept all those! What else must I do?" Even if he adds another exemplary action to his impressive resumé, he still has the same misplaced center, which is himself. His life is a mobile of good deeds all revolving around himself. He has broken the first commandment: Have no other gods. His own goodness has become his god. Jesus wastes no time in getting to the point, "Go and sell all you have, give the money to the poor and you will have treasure in heaven, then come and follow me." Jesus challenges him to put God first in his life. The man goes away sad for he has great wealth. Jesus knows that this man doesn’t need to add another merit badge to his life. He needs a new center for his life, a change at the heart of his life.

God is more interested in a relationship with us based on loving trust than on mere outer compliance to rules. Outward compliance alone is not enough for relationships - not for marriages, not for families, not for faith.

The other way we try to change ourselves is to subtract things from our life.

Self-sacrifice is vital to the Christian faith, as are good works. However, religious addition and subtraction do not gain us God’s love. The subtraction approach has created one of the most damaging distortions of the Christian faith - legalism, the religion of don’ts. God becomes a strict parent whose only comment is: Don’t do that! Here one’s religion can be expressed solely in the claim: I don’t drink, smoke, cuss or chew and I don’t date girls that do! This approach to religion stresses the negatives rather than the positives. All one’s energy is spent avoiding the taboos. The result is a life empty of any joy, any freedom, any spontaneity, any discovery, any of the things God wants for us.

A lot of people if asked the rich young man’s question, "What must I do to have meaningful and eternal life?" would respond with a list of dos and don’ts. Addition and subtraction only address the outside of our lives. God wants to be in touch with the inside. Our outer problems arise from a restless heart within.

These self-help attempts are efforts to climb a spiritual ladder to reach God.
They all come up short because human efforts alone cannot change us.
This is the second lesson in discovering our true identity as we are intended to be: Human efforts alone cannot change us.

IV

Since we are unable to change God’s ideal for us and unable to change ourselves to fit that ideal, we are left with but one option. We have to accept God as God is and accept ourselves as we are. This is the third and completing lesson in discovering our true identity as we are intended to be: God as God is loves and accepts us as we are through his grace.

Grace is the only means we have of experiencing life as it is intended to be.

The Bible says, "For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God." Our acceptance by God does not result from anything we do or don’t do. Grace is not about spiritual addition or subtraction. Grace is a gift, a free gift through God’s love.

Author Fred Buechner writes: Grace is something you can never get but only be given. There is no way to earn it or deserve it or bring it about any more than you can earn the taste of raspberries and cream or deserve good looks or bring about your own birth. (Wishful Thinking, p. 34) Through grace, God does for us what we cannot do for ourselves. The ideal life we cannot reach on our own God reaches for us and offers to us as a gift in Jesus Christ. This free gift of grace comes to us by God’s initiative not our own.

In religion, we try to climb up the ladder to reach God, using the steps of dos and don’ts; in grace, God climbs down the ladder to reach us in the person of Jesus. Borrowing a metaphor from chemistry, grace means God is always a catalyst and never a reactor. Theologian Karl Barth said it best: "We were known by God before we knew him [and] loved by God before we ever loved him." Because God takes the initiative and makes the first move, grace comes to us by surprise.

Years ago I spoke to a man who occasionally attended church. He had seen his wife go through a faith awakening and observed something new and alive and appealing in her life. He heard her talk about God, not as an abstract concept, but as a living, personal being. He desired this new life that she had found and asked, "When will God’s love come into my life?" He wanted to know when he would experience what she had found. I told him the fact that he wanted this relationship with God was evidence that it was already happening. The feelings and events would not be the same as had happened to his wife since we are all unique, but the results would be the same. He was awakening to the life-changing, life-charging love of God. God comes to us by surprise and in this man’s case he simply had not yet fully awakened to God’s grace already at work in his life.

While God’s grace is a free gift of love that comes by God’s initiative, we must respond to that gift personally and from the heart. We respond to God’s move of acceptance with our move of faith. The Bible says: "For by grace you have been saved through faith." Faith is a commitment to trust God - to trust that God has accepted us unconditionally, forgiven us fully, and given us new meaning at the center to our lives. Grace says: You are accepted by God through Jesus Christ. Faith says: Yes, I know and that acceptance gives me the power to become a new person, the person God intends me to be, the person I truly want to be.

V

God’s grace does not depend on what we see when we look in the mirror of our lives or upon what we know ourselves to be. It depends on what God sees and what God knows we can become by his love given to us in Jesus Christ.

The story of Don Quixote in the play The Man of La Mancha illustrates the power of grace to enable us to become what God intends us to be. The grace-giving Man of La Mancha meets a prostitute named Aldonza. Upon meeting her, he bows and says, "My lady." She sneers, "Lady!" "Yes, you are my lady and I shall give you a new name. I shall call you Dulcinea. You are my lady Dulcinea." Later Aldonza asks him suspiciously, "Why do you treat me so kindly? What do you want from me? I know men; they all want something from me." Why do you call me your lady Dulcinea? What do you want?!" "I just want to call you what you are," he says, "You are my lady Dulcinea."

Aldonza is raped during a backstage scene. She stumbles on stage weeping, bruised and broken, having been dealt one of the ultimate human indignities.
He sees her and says compassionately, "My lady Dulcinea. Oh, my lady."
She can’t take it anymore and explodes, "Don’t call me your lady. Can’t you see what I am? I was born in a ditch by a mother who left me there hoping I’d have the good sense to die. Don’t call me your lady! I’m a thing men use and forget. Don’t call me Dulcinea. I’m Aldonza. I am nothing!"
With that she runs off into the night of despair and self-rejection, carrying with her those feelings we’ve had when we looked in the mirror and hated what we saw but felt powerless to change ourselves. The Man of La Mancha cries out to her, "But, you are my lady!"

The final scene has the Man of La Mancha dying like our Lord Jesus, despised, rejected, misunderstood, a man of sorrows. To his bed comes a woman dressed like Spanish nobility. She kneels and prays over him. He opens his eyes and asks faintly, "Who are you?" "My lord," she says, "don’t you remember? You once sang me a song. You sang: "To dream the impossible dream, to fight the unbeatable foe, to bear the unbearable sorrow, to run where the brave dare not go, to right the unrightable wrong, to love pure and chaste from afar, to try when your arms are too weary, to reach the unreachable star." My lord, don’t you remember? You gave me a new name. You called me Dulcinea." And with that she stands proudly and announces, "I am your lady!"

The goat has become a tiger; the sinner has become a saint; the lost has been found; the blind can now see! When we look in the mirror, we might see an Aldonza from our perspective: someone so much less than he should be, someone so much less than she could be, someone chained and stained and drained by sin. We see an Aldonza within us. But God sees a Dulcinea. In his love God sent his Son Jesus to set us free to become that Dulcinea.

God loves us as we and God loves us too much to leave us as we are.

Have you ever dared to dream the impossible dream? The dream of becoming God’s ideal, God’s man, God’s woman, God’s child? By faith in God’s grace revealed through Jesus Christ, the impossible dream is possible, for you, today.

Prayer:
Lord, you have made us for yourself; and our hearts are restless until we find our rest in you through your amazing grace. Amen. (St. Augustine)