Head and Heart: It's Not About Us--A Sermon

photo by Christos Tsoumplekas / flickr

You may have read this poem. It was called “How to Live With Your Dash.” A man spoke at the funeral of a good friend. He talked about the year of her birth and the day she died. These two dates would be etched on her tombstone. But he said between the birth date and the date of her death there was this dash. What made this woman the person she was, was the dash. Those years in-between her birth and death. And so it seems to me that the challenge for all of us is to learn how to live with our dash—this time between yesterday and tomorrow.

So the church has a dash, too. After eight interims I have learned first hand that this in-between time that can be one of the most important times in the life of your church. It can be a time of learning, of growing, of hammering out the kind of church you want. And, in learning that, you will be pretty sure of the kind of person you want to serve as your next Pastor.

One prominent church consultant has said that it doesn’t matter if the church is conservative or moderate or liberal. It doesn’t matter what kind of worship you have—overhead projectors and guitars or a mighty pipe organ. He says if you hammer out your identity—know who you are—fly that flag—serving God and the congregation here and the community around you—you will never go out of business. And one of the important questions for you ask yourselves and the person you hope to call as Pastor Is; what is God calling you to be and to do in 2017 and the years that follow.

So we come to our text. It is found in First Kings. It’s really an aside comment and if you don’t read it very carefully you will miss it. In Kings 5.5 Solomon early in his reign as king told the people he would do something that his father never did—and that was to build a temple for the Lord God. Not just any temple—but it would be the finest temple the world had ever seen. And all of the fifth chapter and part of chapter six deals with the details of recruiting workmen, getting the finest material available, taxing the people and going to work. And so, by the end of the sixth chapter Solomon has kept his promise. The Temple is finally finished. But we don’t stop there—we move on to the first verse of chapter seven... And this is what I Kings says: “In the fourth year the foundation of the house of the Lord was laid…in the eleventh year…(and) the eighth month, the house was finished in all its parts, and according to all its specifications. He (Solomon) was seven years in building it.” (And now we come to the seventh chapter—listen closely.) “Solomon was building his own house thirteen years, and he finished his entire house.” (I Kings 5. 37-38. 7.1)

Do you hear what the text says? It took Solomon seven years to build God’s house. It took thirteen years to build his own house. Isn’t this interesting? It took the King almost twice as long to build his own house as God’s house. And the size of the house he built for God could not compare with the mansion he built for himself.

Walter Brueggemann, a very fine Old Testament scholar has said: “The Lord did not hold as large a place in the heart of Solomon as he did his father David. The spiritual eclipse had begun.” And before Solomon’s reign was over it would all come crashing down and the kingdom would be split forever. Why? Because Solomon thought it was about him—that was his primary purpose. And he forgot it really was to be about God.

Photo by Peter Coughlan / flickr

Does it sound just a little familiar? It used to be that we looked out on the horizon of any town and you would see the steeples, steeples dotted everywhere. The tallest buildings in any town would be the steeples. But no more. The tallest buildings are the Banks, the Savings and Loans. Driving down the road I have said, “What a beautiful building.” And they say: “Oh, that’s our new bank.” It’s a parable really.

What about us—our purposes? Many of our epitaphs could read: “Born a man—died a grocer.” Or we could add: died a preacher, a teacher, a doctor. But these labels we wear and the roles we assume are not near enough. I had a teacher in Seminary one time who was just brilliant. But outside that school very few people knew him. He hadn’t written any books or spoken at any great churches. He was just a good teacher and a good man. His wife walked out on him one day and left him with a little redheaded girl. He was just devastated. And I heard him say one day: “When I die I want them to say about me: I was a good father.” What a great epitaph.

Wouldn’t it be great if they could say of us: She was a decent human being or the light of God shone through him or you could always count on her or he was a good husband. In every church I have ever had there was that little handful that kept it going. They were always there. They came with their offering and their Bibles to teach a class or give out bulletins or just support their church. Without them those churches would not have survived. But they had found out something that Solomon, in all his wisdom, would never know. It wasn’t about them. They had found a larger purpose. And that’s my dream for every church I know today.

But we can’t do this unless we get ourselves off our hands? Remember the old song, “Turn your eyes upon Jesus, look full in his wonderful face, and the things of earth will grow strangely dim in the light of his glory and grace.” We find this vision in worship. Real worship saves us all from selfishness, from smaller purposes, from living in the basement of a great big house where there are so many, many rooms upstairs.

photo by Dieter Weinest / flickr

I don’t know if you ever saw the movie that came out several years ago entitled, “Grand Canyon.” In the movie, Danny Glover a black man lived in the slums of his city. And the only thing that kept him going was that once in a while when it all pressed in on him he would make a trip to the Grand Canyon. And he would just sit there looking, looking at the colors and the majesty and the sheer size of that wonderful chasm. And somebody asked him why he did that? And he said: “There ought to be a place where you can see something a whole lot bigger than you are.” And after his visits he would turn around and travel back home to a little bitty house and a job that did not pay enough, but he would make it.

With all the stuff that is going on in our world—it is really hard for any of his to keep a healthy perspective. With so much news coming at us every single day—we can’t escape the breaking news. One lady who works out at the same gym I do stopped me the other day and said: “You know, I wish they would turn off the TV’s here.” And I said, “Me too.” We cannot escape the news whether it’s the doctor’s office or some restaurant—Breaking News is everywhere.

Fred Craddock who was one of our greatest preacher told that one day he went to the hospital to see a member who was having very serious surgery the next day. And when he entered she had something like: “As the World Turns” and there was a stack of reading material by her bed. Fifty Shades of Grey…a couple of tabloids like we see at the Grocery Store. Will Angie Jolie and Brad get back together? Where's Melania?Or what outfit Ivanka wore to her father’s dinner last night. The woman in the bed was facing serious surgery the next morning and she was reading all this stuff—and Craddock said there wasn’t a calorie in the whole stack. Nothing to help her get through the night and face her surgery.

Once when I was Pastor a little couple with two children knocked on my study door one sad afternoon. They sat down and said: “Our house just burned down. We lost everything. We didn’t know what to do and so we came to the church.” They needed something in that hard time that they could hang on to.

We all need something bigger than ourselves when houses burn and husbands die and you find this lump or you lose your job. One woman writers: “Many of us are juggling so many things that we run by our lives rather than living them as gifts from God. What if we could learn to stop for a moment many times a day? What if in those moments we could decide to notice the sheer miracle of being alive? We would then be taking awe breaks instead of coffee breaks.” We all need some Grand Canyon where we can stand on tiptoe and just say: “Ahhhhh.”

photo by Esther Gibbons / flickr

What we are talking about is genuine worship. Meeting God. Real worship is putting down all that heavy stuff you carry for just a few minutes and whispering: “Help me! Help me—I don’t know what to do.” It’s asking forgiveness or just sitting there in the silence. It’s looking around you at people just like you. Remember Paul called us treasures in earthen vessels. Mrs. Jones who had a breast removed and is worried about the future. There is Henry over there in the shadows who lost his wife. And there is dear Elaine, sitting there on the front row of the choir; she buried her twenty-two year old son Friday who committed suicide. Mrs. Johnson is there worried that she may have to go to some nursing home. And all of them under the same roof—singing and praying and opening their Bibles and sometimes even finding something in a sermon or a hug or a handshake or just a smile after church.

It doesn’t happen every Sunday. Carlyle Marney a great Baptist preacher used to say, half-kiddingly. You know, God does not come to church every Sunday. Sometimes the Lord God just sleeps in. When you’re God you don’t have to go every week. But every once in a while God will open those doors back there and come into the sanctuary on a Sunday morning. And he will walk down this aisle and stop at your pew. And if that happens you will never be the same again. You will be turned inside out. Marney ended that story by saying no, God does not have to come to church every Sunday—but you better be there because one day when you least expect the Almighty—he may just decide to drop by.

Solomon, with all his wisdom missed it. He spent more on himself that he did the Lord God that had called him. He never really knew who he was. He got lost in the folds of money and women and success and power and greed and selfishness. The King, with all that promise, never did find out that it really was not about him after all.

I hope here on some Sunday when you least expect it the Lord God himself might just walk down that aisle and sit down next to you. For when that happens you will take whatever comes and somehow it will be enough.