During a visit to the mental asylum, a visitor asked the Director how he knew whether or not a patient should be institutionalized. “Well,” said the Director, “we fill a bathtub with water, then we offer the person a teaspoon, a teacup and a bucket to the patient and ask him or her to empty the bathtub.” “Oh, I understand,” said the visitor. “A normal person would use the bucket because it’s bigger than the spoon or the teacup.” “No.” said the Director, “A normal person would pull the plug. Do you want a bed near the window?” How much of our lives is spent making things more complicated than it has to be! Every day, we live in a wilderness of too many choices, and so we try to fit in everything. People try to do the same with our faith too—pray this many times a day, every church should have this, everyone should do this, and don’t forget to forward every religious e-mail you get or bad things will happen. In our passage for today, Paul helps us cut through all the “stuff” to see what truly matters, and how God can bring sanity to our lives.
First, Paul encourages us to move from self-focus to Christ-focus. “It’s all about me” seems to work great on TV and in the movies, but it doesn’t work so well in real life. One of the guys I knew in college was a very interesting, very funny guy to be around. He made me laugh, but it was all about him, his studies, his greatness, his going on to medical school. There was very little space in his life for anybody else. A while back, I went back for my college reunion, and there was my friend, yes, a doctor now, but very lonely in many of the same ways. In verses 4–6, Paul lists all the reasons he would have for thinking he was hot stuff. If you are a Jew, they are very impressive. Then Paul adds in verse 7, “But whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ.” As long as we are focused just on what works for ourselves, all we have and all we do will fall short and fail to satisfy. Ultimately, no matter how impressive our resumé, no matter how good we may think we are, what we do for God is never as important as what Jesus has done for us.
Second, Paul encourages us to keep moving forward. Have you seen the Disney movie, Meet the Robinsons. It’s great! It’s about a boy named Lewis who is given up for adoption as a baby, and likes to invent things. Lewis has a remarkable opportunity to travel into his own future and see the world as it will be. It’s full of amazing technology helping people make a great community. But best of all, he meets a wonderful family who love and enjoy each other. He comes to find out that they will be his family—if he continues to work hard and with imagination. Many of Lewis’ inventions will help make his own future. Indeed, Lewis discovers he is willing to give up anything in order to have this great family in the future. One of the challenges of being a great church family is that we really truly like being together. We like what we have, partly because so much of what we have by God’s grace is so wonderful. Unlike Lewis, we are not able to travel into our future to see what our church family will be like in the future, though I think we catch some glimpses of it when we see our children playing together, or when we sit around the tables at Porchfest. We are people of the promise. Jesus promised that “whenever two or three are gathered in my name, there will I be in the midst of them.”(Matthew 18:20) Jesus also promised that if we would follow Him, He would always be with us, even to the ends of the age. And He called on us to “go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.”(Matthew 28:19–20) From the beginning, we have been a people who were looking forward to enlarging the family of God. It’s the whole reason Jesus came. It’s the whole reason our church was founded, so that the family of God could include more people in this part of North Quincy. Moving forward together is our mission.
Finally, Paul encourages us to let ourselves be refined. No, not the nose in the air “refined” that may come to mind. Refining is that process of heating a chunk of rock with silver or gold or whatever in it and burning away everything that is not metal until all that’s left is pure. I know I’ve told this story before, but I really love it. Once a journalist wanted to learn about how silver is refined, so she found a silversmith and asked if she could watch. The silversmith put some silver in a crucible and heated it, hotter and hotter, until the ore inside melted. Mesmerized by this process, the observer asked, “How do you know when it’s ready?” “Oh that’s easy,” said the silversmith. “I know it’s completely refined when I can see my face in it.” Paul writes in verses 8–9, “What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in him…” When we are in the fire of our daily lives, we can just go through the motions, keeping up and not much more. Or little bit by little bit, we can learn to let go of what is not of God, and discover that our lives more and more belong to God. As we give ourselves over to Jesus and His purposes, as we let his life and teachings live and guide us, people begin to see Jesus more clearly in and through us.
They say that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Albert Einstein would add, “The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.” Which is why the numbing busyness and choices that our society encourages can make our lives feel crazy and very complicated with. Like the choice of how to empty a bathtub, I wonder if all the choices and busyness we are given miss the point. Part of what I love about following Jesus is that it makes all the rest of my life make more sense. Instead of having to build a resumé as a good person, we simply try to become like Jesus. We don’t have to wonder if we can make it to heaven, we just have to trust that the one who loves us will take care of us. We don’t even have to do the heavy lifting for becoming the person Jesus made us to be, we simply have to place ourselves in His hands and say, “Teach me, mold me. Shape me in your image.” I would worry about whether this could really happen if Jesus hadn’t already run this race. But He did. He was a man like you and me—born a baby, grew up like us, dealt with problems and temptations of living you and I deal with—and yet somehow, Jesus was able to love completely even in the face of an unthinkable death He did not deserve. Jesus has run this race and can help us run ours too. To paraphrase Paul, “Not that we have already obtained all this, or have already been made perfect, but we press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of us. Brothers and sisters, let us not consider ourselves yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing we do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, let us press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called us heavenward in Christ Jesus.” This week what busyness or false choices could you leave behind, so you could run your race better? How will you trust Jesus more this week to help you run well?