First United Methodist Church
Birmingham, Michigan
Scriptures: Luke 18:9-14; I John 1:5-10
January 5, 2003
All right, church, listen up. On this, the first Sunday of the new year, I want to make an introduction. His name is Paul. He is 25 years old. And he has never been sick a day in his life. Until now. Suddenly, and with little apparent cause, he has begun experiencing stomach upset, intestinal distress, frequent headaches and low-grade fevers. He sleeps fitfully….when he sleeps. Checking into a clinic, he is given a battery of tests, where they examine every crack and crevice of his body (including all of his fluids). They miss nothing. They also find nothing. Leading to a summary conversation between Paul and his doctor…..a conversation that goes something like this.
Doctor: “Paul, I have checked all of your test results and cannot find anything to account for your symptoms, even though your symptoms seem to persist.”
Paul: “You better believe it, Doctor. It’s getting so I can barely do my job.”
Doctor: “You mind if we take some time to talk for a while?”
Paul: “No, not at all.”
Doctor: “Let’s start with some questions. I see that you are 25 years old. Are you married?”
Paul: “No.”
Doctor: “Do you have anybody special in your life?
Paul: “I did, but I broke things off about a year ago.”
Doctor: “Are you dating much?”
Paul: “Well, I really haven’t been able to find anybody who interests me.”
Doctor: “What about your job? Do you like it?”
Paul: “I used to think it was what I wanted. But over the course of the last couple of years, it’s become pretty dull.”
Doctor: “Are you thinking about looking elsewhere?”
Paul: “Funny you should ask. The other day I started searching the want ads. But I haven’t found anything yet.”
Doctor: “Where are you living?”
Paul: “When I moved to town, I found this nice, one-room apartment. It’s air conditioned and the complex comes with tennis courts and a pool. It’s really perfect. Or it was. Last fall, a friend of mine came to town and he kinda needed a place to stay. So I let him move in. Then my old college roommate showed up looking for a job. So he moved in, too. Now there are three of us in my one-room apartment. Which is kinda close.”
Doctor: “What about exercise? Are you getting any regularly?”
Paul: “I keep meaning to, but I’ve been super busy.”
Doctor: “How about your diet? What do you eat?”
Paul: “I pretty much live on fast food. With my schedule, I eat on the run. At home, my diet begins and ends with bologna sandwiches.”
Doctor: “Are you much of a church-goer?”
Paul: “I used to be. But since I came to town, the few churches I’ve tried have been pretty boring. It’s hard, you know, when you go to church and don’t know anybody. Besides, you can be a Christian, even if you don’t go to Sunday worship.”
Doctor: “You say that you’re a Christian. Do you make time to pray or read the Bible?
Paul: “No, I can’t say that I do. But I am getting your drift. You don’t need to go on. I think I see what my problem is. It’s not that there’s all that much wrong with me. It’s just that there’s not all that much right with me.”
Does that sound familiar? It should, given that all of us know Paul. Some of us are Paul. And we’re smart enough to see what Paul sees, and to figure out what Paul has figured out. I mean, we’re not dumb. We catch on quick. We know that body problems are sometimes mind problems….or feelings problems….or spirit problems. We know that all that “stuff” gets muddied up together. And if we cannot sing “It is well with my soul” and mean it, it will not be many days before it is less-than-well with our body, also.
And I’ll tell you what else we know. We know that in spite of the best professional care in the world, there is a lot about wellness that might be termed “an inside job.” If you have listened to me attentively, you have heard my disdain for the self-help promoters and publishers out there who claim to know the secret, and are willing to pass on the secret for $24.95 (plus shipping and handling). But the fact remains, we wouldn’t keep buying their books, enabling them to keep raking in profits, were there not some truth to the idea that if we can be our own worst enemies, we can also learn to be our own best friends.
“Do you want to be well?” That’s what Jesus asked the lame man who had been lying beside the healing pool for 38 years. And years ago, it occurred to me that if Jesus made the effort to ask the question, the answer must be important. “Do you want to be well?” Think about it. What if the man had said, “No.” Would Jesus have healed him anyway? Could Jesus have healed him anyway? I suppose all things are possible. But it would be darned hard. Or what if the man had said “Yes,” but meant “No.” Do people do that? Sure people do that. People do that all the time. In Deuteronomy 30:19, Moses says to Israel: “I call heaven and earth as my witness, this very day….that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore, choose….”
Well, you know what he said to choose. “Life,” is what he said to choose. With the amazing thing being that there is a choice….that there are some things we can do to meet healing halfway.
I have kept a book by Bruce Larson on my shelf for a number of years, in part because I am in love with its title: There’s a Lot More to Health Than Not Being Sick. In it, he invites us to take something of a self-inventory, the better to determine our positioning (globally and spiritually) on the road to wellness. And since this tends to be “inventory time” for a lot of us (new year….new broom….new plan), I give you just one of Bruce’s questions for reflection.
Is it becoming any easier for you to say “I was wrong”?
The question, of course, implies that some of us have a higher than average need to be right. Which is a good thing, isn’t it? To be right, I mean. Sure it is. Unless it leads us to become overly cautious….or utterly obnoxious.
Start with the overly cautious. Like you, I got a lot of messages when I was a kid. But replaying them now, there was an over-arching theme to them (as they came to me, handed down parentally): “Ritter, your mission in life (and you’d better accept it) is to stay out of trouble.” Boiled down, what they were trying to say was “Be good.” But it was said so many times…in so many ways….about so many things….that I internalized it to mean “Be careful.” Which I was. And am. To this day. Sort of.
My parents’ message was accented by the veteran preacher who told me (in the years when I was still a rookie): “Ritter, you’ve got a great career ahead of you. Just keep your nose clean and you’ll go a long way.” Which were wise words. But which were also cautionary words. “Don’t do wrong. Don’t be wrong.” Which quickly became “Don’t risk wrong.” It took a long time before I realized that great ministry begins with….but is so much more than….clean nasal passages.
Bruce Larson tells of the day he joined a group of men on a pleasure outing for the purpose of trying out a friend’s new sailboat. The boat was slick. The breeze, brisk. The mood, mellow. All of a sudden, the friend at the tiller began to reminisce. “You know,” he said, “I’ve been sailing for almost 70 years. Got my first boat when I was ten. Paid $10 for it, best as I remember. I fixed it up and have been sailing ever since. And would you believe that, in all those years, I’ve never tipped over a sailboat?”
The other two friends were aghast. “Are you serious?” they asked. “You’ve sailed for 70 years and never capsized? Man, you’ve never really sailed.” And the point is not that the friends were encouraging recklessness. The point is that true sailing is more than the avoidance of all the things that can go wrong on the water.
Or in a marriage. Early in our marriage, I had a variety of ways to drive Kris crazy. If she would appear to be even mildly withdrawn or uncommonly quiet, I would bore in relentlessly, trying to figure out what was wrong. You might have considered my behavior concerned….empathetic…. perhaps even loving. I thought it was rather noble. I used to tell her so. “Some husbands,” I said, “wouldn’t even notice anything was wrong. Or if they noticed, wouldn’t care.” So I would give her no peace until she told me what was on her mind. But she knew something about me I didn’t know about myself. She knew I wasn’t as concerned about her feelings as I pretended to be. She knew that what really concerned me was to learn whether or not I was implicated. I was really asking: “Did I do something?” And what I wanted to hear was: “No, you didn’t do anything.” Once I learned I wasn’t at fault, I tended to lose interest. I have since learned something about myself. There was a period in my life when my primary goal in human relationships was to stay out of trouble. I didn’t want to be wrong.
That’s why I love this Pharisee (whose classic Temple prayer illustrates my point in spades). “Lord, I thank thee that I am not like other people (especially that jerk over there). I have stayed out of trouble.” My credentials, Lord? I’ll tell you my credentials:
I don’t smoke and I don’t chew
And I don’t go with girls that do.
Ah yes, our preoccupation with rightness can lead some of us to become overly cautious. But it can also lead others of us to become utterly obnoxious. Ask any therapist and they will tell of the people who come in hopes of finding an ally who will tell them they are right and someone else is wrong. A lot of people want the same thing from the church. “Tell me, preacher, that I am right and he is wrong. Tell us, preacher, that we are right and they are wrong.” At the end of the day (or at the end of the sermon), they want the record to show that truth is on their side….in their house….among their own. I have not met many people (thank God) who want vengeance. But I have met any number of people who want vindication. What is the difference? People who want vengeance want to smack their lips over the defeat of their enemies. People who want vindication simply want the record to show they were right.
Years ago, the state of Michigan veered in the conceptual direction of no-fault divorce. Which made things easier to sort out economically. And, I thought, made pretty good sense spiritually. I figured anything that could move folks down the road from blaming toward recovering was a good thing. What I did not foresee was the psychological limbo that no-fault divorce would create for those who either cannot (or will not) live until a satisfactory assessment of blame has been rendered.
I keep meeting people who have long since said to each other in court: “I have no further use for this marriage. In fact, I have no further use for you.” Yet months, even years later, these same people keep seeking new and vicious ways to destroy each other, even as they seek to gather about them a climate of opinion that supports their claim to virtue, and seconds the judgment that their former partner is steeped in vice. I know why it happens. It’s not hard to figure out why it happens. It happens because the bottom line of divorce is failure. And nobody wants to fail. So we will do whatever we can to get out from under such feelings, even if it means projecting the cause for those feelings onto somebody else.
But some of you will protest: “What if I am right? And what if they are wrong?” It happens, you know. Some things are more clean-cut than others. Sometimes the blame really is locatable in the other court. Some of you deserve vindication. And I hope you get it. But if you get it, I hope you don’t savor it. And if you don’t get it, maybe you ought to drop it. If nothing else works, let me suggest something. Just come into my office and say: “Bill, I’m right.” Then I’ll say: “Darned right you’re right.” Then we’ll high five each other and you can get on with the rest of your life.
Mark Trotter is helpful when he writes:
I see this all the time. Someone tells me they are not happy in their life. From all external appearances, things seem to be okay. But upon digging a little deeper, it comes out. There is a bit of messy business with a brother or sister. Or perhaps the messy business is with a parent or child, or with this neighbor or that friend. Years have gone by, but the hurt only deepens. They’ve been wronged. They are certain of it. Every time they think about it, they get angry all over again. And you realize by looking at them that it’s eating up their body as well as their spirit. It’s eating lines in their face. It’s eating inches off their shoulders. It’s eating their innards as it swims in their gut. But at least they’re right. They know they’re right. They’re absolutely correct. They’ve been offended. They are waiting for redress to happen. And you’ve got to admire them for that. But you’ve got to feel sorry for them, too. Because they’re twice victimized, don’t you see. They are victimized the first time by the offense itself. And they are victimized the second time by the anger spilling out of the offense itself. There must be a better way.
And there is. It begins when we realize that our preoccupation with rightness, while it has the capacity to help us, also has the capacity to hurt us….and may even consign us to the very hell we would avoid (albeit a present, as opposed to a future, version). I’m talking about the hell experienced by the overly cautious and the utterly obnoxious….those trying desperately to stay out of trouble, and those trying (equally desperately) to deny any complicity in whatever trouble there may be. I’m talking about that special hell occupied by people who live under the delusion that heaven is reserved for people with clean noses.
So in the spirit of those who think that a new year ought to be marked by something, I offer not five resolutions, but five admissions:
Let us admit that, to some degree, we are all afraid of failing, a fear which promotes a certain defensiveness about life and about our complicity in those things in life that do not go well.
Let us admit that where benefits of the doubt are handed out, we are far more charitable to ourselves than to others, tending to judge others solely on the basis of their actions, while judging ourselves (more kindly) on the basis of our intentions.
Let us admit that some of the rightest people we know are also the most insufferable people we know, proving once again that while we admire people from afar because they are correct, we love them up close because they are human.
Let us admit that there is only one fraternity or sorority in the world that admits everyone without discriminatory clauses….that being the noble fraternity and sorority of sinners. Or, as James McCord once wrote: “To sin is man’s condition. To pretend that he does not sin is man’s sin.”
Finally, let us admit that on the day it becomes easier to say “I was wrong,” we shall begin to clean up the garbage that clogs our relationship with God.
So let me repeat Bruce Larson’s question. “Is it becoming any easier (good friends) to say ‘I was wrong’?”
Hear the gospel: “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins, and will cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” I love the word “cleanse,” given that it supports my contention that almost all the biblical images of grace come in liquid form (water, rain, wine, blood, etc.). To be “cleansed” means that we can experience in body, mind and soul that incredible luxury associated with a refreshing bath. But I have yet, in any of my travels, to find a bath worthy of its name that did not first require us to get undressed.
