First United Methodist Church, Birmingham, Michigan
Scripture: Romans 2:17-24, 12:1-5
October 29, 1999
Whenever we have a discussion in our house about the realignment of chores….especially when that discussion centers around the enormous number of things that Kris is responsible for, measured against the miniscule number of things that I am responsible for….I find myself making the grand gesture of offering to do the laundry. Don’t ask me why. Maybe it sounds easier than the rest of the stuff she does. Maybe it’s because I did my own laundry in college. Maybe it’s because the penalty for failure seems lower in the laundry than in the kitchen. Having heard Julie say (on more than one occasion): “Oh no, Dad’s gonna cook,” I can’t remember her ever saying (on any occasion): “Oh no, Dad’s gonna wash.”
Promises notwithstanding, however, I still do not do the laundry. At least not very often. It’s not that I can’t. It’s just that I don’t. But Robert Fulghum does. The laundry, that is. What’s more, he likes it.
It gives me a sense of accomplishment and time alone in the back room, which is nice sometimes. I like sorting the clothes….lights, darks, in-betweens. I like setting the dials….hot, cold, rinse, time, heat. These are choices I can understand. I still haven’t figured out how to program my VCR, but washers and dryers I can handle. The bell dings. I pull out the warm, fluffy clothes, take them to the dining room table and fold them into neat piles. I especially like it when there’s lots of static electricity and I can hang the socks all over my body and they stick there. My wife caught me doing that once and gave me “the look.” I didn’t even try explaining.
Besides, doing the laundry is a religious experience. Water, earth, fire, polarities of wet and dry, hot and cold, clean and dirty. The great cycles….round and round….beginning and end….Alpha and Omega. And then, but for a moment, life is tidy again.
Robert Fulghum uses Cheer. He likes the idea of a happy wash. Besides, Cheer is filled with amazing stuff. Just read the box. Cheer contains dirt lifting agents (anionic surfactants), water softening agents (complex sodium phosphates), agents to protect washer parts (sodium silicates), agents to improve processing (sodium sulfates), plus small quantities of stuff to reduce wrinkling, prevent yellowing, enhance whitening and introduce perfume. But that’s not all. Cheer works in cold water, is completely biodegradable, and costs about a nickel an ounce. A virtual miracle in a box.
Then Fulghum becomes downright eloquent, concluding:
Sitting there watching the laundry go round and round, gives me cause to think about the round world and human hygiene. We’ve made a lot of progress, you know. We used to think that disease was an act of God. Then we figured out that it was a product of human ignorance. So we’ve been cleaning up our act, literally, ever since. We’ve been getting the excrement off our hands, clothes, bodies, food and houses. If only the experts could come up with some way to get it out of our minds. All we need is one cup of “fix-it” that will lift the dirt from our lives…. soften our hardness….protect our inner parts….improve our processing….reduce our wrinkling….enhance our natural color….and make us sweet and good.
Alas, for that kind of wash, Cheer won’t cut it. Because sin, as I have told you repeatedly, is incredibly persistent. And the propensity for evil is as near as the shadow we cast when we walk. I’ve talked about that biblically. I’ve talked about that psychologically. Now, let me talk about it geographically.
Let me compare human nature….my nature….your nature….even the choir’s nature….to the nondescript town of Centralia, Pennsylvania. Centralia is a mining town. More than 25 years ago, a fire broke out in the maze of tunnels and shafts which honeycomb the earth beneath the village. First local officials and then state and federal mine authorities tried to put the fire out. And they were largely successful. But not completely successful. Having done everything they know, the fire still burns somewhere in those tunnels. Every now and again, a puff of smoke breaks through the surface, just to let everyone know the fire is still there.
Sin is like that. It is not always rampant. It is not always raging. It is not always out of control. But it is there. Sometimes it smolders. Sometimes it smokes. Sometimes it singes. If you don’tbelieve that, just look in the mirror and think “Centralia, Pennsylvania.”
But such honesty need not lead to despair. The purpose of talking about sin is not to depress people….which is why the “happy talk pulpits” (in Orange County) don’t mention it much. The issue is not depression over our prospects, but recognition of our natures. For we believe that recognition leads to repentance, and repentance to regeneration. At least it can. We can get clean….or at least a lot cleaner.
Whenever ministers are ordained in the United Methodist tradition, they are marched up onto the stage as a group. Then, in the presence of 1,000 Annual Conference delegates, they are asked a series of questions that have been in force since the days when John Wesley was commissioning class leaders in Great Britain. Obviously, some of the questions are a bit archaic. They are also somewhat humorous. For example, every ordinand is asked: “Are you in debt so as to embarrass you in your ministry?” Well, what seminarian isn’t? The way that question is answered says more about the threshold of one’s embarrassment than about the size of one’s debt.
But that’s one of the easy questions. Try this one on for size: “Do you expect to be made perfect in this life?” To which there can be but one answer: “By the grace of God.” But the related question cannot be easily dodged. “Are you earnestly striving after it?” Think about that. How would you answer that? Are you earnestly striving after perfection? If your answer be “no” or “not really,” I suppose you are excluded from the collegiality of the ministry. But if the apostle Paul be believed, a negative answer ought to indict the entire lot of you, not just the clergy.
“God has not called us for uncleanness, but for holiness,” says Paul to the Thessalonians (4:3). And to the Romans, Paul writes: “I appeal to you, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and acceptable to God. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your minds, that you may prove what is the will of God…. what is good….what is acceptable….what is perfect.” In short, Paul is saying to us what we are always saying to our kids: “Clean up your act.”
And the primary purpose in doing so is not to please God or purify the self. The purpose is to “prove what is good, acceptable and perfect.” And what does the word “prove” mean? It means to model before the world what a Christ-filled life might look like, so that its obvious superiority (over competing alternatives) might be demonstrated.
Earlier in his letter to the Romans, a group of Jews felt the sting of Paul’s anger for failing to live in such a manner. He writes to them:
You who teach others, will you not teach yourselves? While you preach against stealing, do you steal? While you say that one must not commit adultery, do you commit it? You who abhor idols, do you rob temples? You who boast in the law, do you dishonor God by breaking the law? Gentiles spit upon the name of God because of you.
“Clean up your act,” Paul says. Bring your deed into harmony with your word. That’s at the heart of our faith. It’s also at the heart of our denomination. When Methodism was formally established in America (at the Christmas Conference in Baltimore, 1784), the question was asked: “What can we rightly expect to be the task of Methodists in America?” To which came the answer, clear and strong: “To reform the continent and spread scriptural holiness across the land.”
What a monstrous task. But what does it mean? “Simply put,” says Maxie Dunnam, “it means that we Christians are called to be demonstration plots of holiness, set down in a less than holy world.”
I like that concept. It is not necessarily a preaching function, although it involves preaching. It is not necessarily a missionary function, although it involves mission activity. To become a “demonstration plot of holiness” is a modeling function, living out Christ’s “better way” by doing it. William Willimon makes the same argument when he says: “The best way for Christians to criticize the world is to be the church.” We can yell, scream and prophesy till we’re blue in the face. We can point at sin, both public and private, until our finger falls off. We can preach fire and brimstone until the world responds with the cruelest cut of all….its laughter. Or we can attempt to live (in the church) as people who have decided to do business a little differently. And to the degree that we succeed, we may even demonstrate that “different” is “better.”
In recent years, I have come to see that the well-lived Christian life has enormous evangelistic power. If you go through life quietly trying to live as you think God wants you to live, somebody is eventually going to wonder what your secret is. They will want to know what you have found that they are missing. Which may not happen daily. And you may not even know it when it does. But it happens. Trust me.
In the days when I served my previous church, Frank Tanana moved into the neighborhood. In fact, he bought his house from a pair of my parishioners. And his arrival was big news, given that Frank was still pitching for the Tigers….and had (not that many months earlier) thrown the 1-0 shut-out on the last day of the season that propelled the Tigers into the post-season play-offs….their last post-season appearance, I might add. Before Frank hung-‘em-up for good, he won a couple hundred major league games….in his earlier years, depending upon a blazing fast ball….and, in his later years, depending on pinpoint control. Frank Tanana won throwing bullets, and he won throwing marshmallows.
In his early years, Frank was a rather wild pitcher. He was also, by his own admission, a rather wild man. He lived in the fast lane. And what he didn’t already know about hard living when he got to Los Angeles, Bo Belinski (how’s that for a name from the past?) taught him. Frank lived as hard as he threw. Then one day his arm went….and his life wasn’t far behind.
Some of you know that Frank Tanana is a Christian. But you may not know what got him started. When Frank’s life was going as fast in reverse as it had been going forward, Frank began to notice a couple of teammates who, in his own words, “just seemed to have something I didn’t.” They knew who they were. They knew where they were going. They had a purpose beyond the moment. They had a reason to get up in the morning. And they had a center that wasn’t fixed on themselves. Which led Frank to conclude that he wanted what they had. Like I was saying, there is enormous evangelistic power in the well-lived life.
Which would be contagious, were more of us living one. But we’re not. So, given the penitential nature of the Lenten experience….even if we are not among those Christians who voluntarily smudge our foreheads on Ash Wednesday….this might be as good a Sunday as any to “fess up” (as my old Boy Scout leader used to say).
For let’s face it. Some of us live sloppy lives and have settled quite nicely into them. We don’t take care of our bodies. We have given up any attempt to become the master of our habits. We talk about “my only vice” as if it were proof that we are normal…..or, worse yet, as a badge of pride. We are intemperate in speech, circulate sick humor, relish and repeat gossip, participate in put-downs and tell lies whenever it is self-serving to do so (after coating them with a thin veneer of respectability by calling them “white”).
We steal a little here, fudge a little there, criticize more than we praise and gamble more than anybody imagines. We flirt to the edges of danger, wink at recreational sex and color outside the lines of chastity and fidelity, all the while pleadingthat ours is the exceptional case.
While we probably haven’t shot, lynched, raped, slugged or dragged anybody behind a truck in the last few months, we are closet voyeurs of violence….which shows up, not all that innocently, in the way we talk and drive. We admit to more prejudice than we have worked to curb. We make little effort to understand the victims we help, and would prefer that our helping be done at safe and respectable distances. Most of us can name at least three people we are currently not speaking to. And concerning reconciliation….which ought to be the first item on any Christian’s agenda.….many of us are led to say: “I’ll consider it, but I won’t make the first move.” We go half a mile, not two. We send a check rather than turning a cheek. And while most of us are ready to give the shirt off our back, it is probably last year’s shirt….and out of style.
Now I know not all of this fits. But some of it fits. So the question is not: “Do you expect to be made perfect in this life?” That’s God’s call. Rather, the question is: “Are you earnestly striving after it?” If not, clean up your act.
The fortunate thing is that you are not without help. On one of those children’s shows, the TV announcer asked a young lad what he wanted to do when he grew up. “I want to be an animal trainer,” the kid said. “I’ll have lots of lions, leopards and wild tigers. I’ll walk right into their cage.” Then, after a slight moment of hesitation, he added: “And, of course, I’ll have my grandpa with me.” And while a part of me rejects the oversimplified depiction of God as grandfather, I understand the comfort that brings.
A better image comes out of my homily two weeks ago Tuesday (at the 6:15 Service of Healing and Holy Communion). On that occasion, I told the story wrong. Which drove me into the bowels of my library to get it right this morning. It comes courtesy of Leonard Sweet. Leonard tells of a mother who decided to encourage her son’s piano progress by taking him to a concert by Paderewski. After mother and son were seated, she spotted a friend in the audience and walked over to greet her. Seizing the opportunity to explore the wonders of a great concert hall, the boy rose and eventually explored his way through a door marked “No Admittance.” Suddenly the house lights dimmed, the curtains parted and, in horror, the mother saw her little boy at the keyboard of the Steinway plinking out “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”
At that moment, the grand master made his entrance, quickly moved to the piano, and whispered in the boy’s ear: “Don’t quit, keep playing.” Then, leaning over the boy, Paderewski reached down with his left hand and began filling in the bass part. Then he reached his right arm around the other side of the child, adding a running obbligato (complete with grace notes). Together, the old master and the young novice transformed an embarrassing situation into a creative experience. And the audience was mesmerized.
My friends, to you who are struggling to tame, train, clean and purify the self….no matter how embarrassingly far from perfection you may have fallen….God is whispering: “Don’t quit. Keep playing. You are not alone. Together, we can mesmerize the world.”
