Month: August 2024

Preached at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla on August 25, 2024. Based on John 6:56-69.

---

Who here is familiar with the book Good to Great by Jim Collins? It’s a famous book about companies that somehow emerged from mediocrity to become great. One that they talk about that has a nexus with S&T is Nucor. Nucor was a mediocre company that provided services and equipment for the nuclear industry, but somehow emerged as the leading steel producer in America.

I’d like to share with you one of the principles discussed in the book: the Stockdale Paradox. Admiral Jim Stockdale was a prisoner of war in the Hanoi Hilton, the highest-ranking US military officer there. Collins had the opportunity to interview Stockdale and ask him how he survived and who didn’t survive. He said, “I never lost faith in the end of the story. I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade.” Stockdale was convinced that he would eventually be victorious.

But who didn’t survive? The optimists. As Stockdale related, “They were the ones who said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they’d say, ‘We’re going to be out by Easter.’ And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart.” The Stockdale Paradox is summed up in his statement: You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—a faith that you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality.

When Rhonda was going through her face pain, I was one of those optimists. I would think, The next doctor will fix this. Or the next drug, or whatever. While Rhonda was having a surgery that was ultimately unsuccessful, I talked with my friend Sharon for some moral support, and she reminded me how many times I had thought that we were about to solve the problem. That helped to prepare me for the eventual let-down when Rhonda’s pain returned.

On the flip side, we Americans are notorious for seeking instant gratification and easy answers. When those aren’t available, we just give up and stay in our comfort zone. We think, Oh well, that didn’t work out, so why bother trying? Things are fine the way they are. We stay in the comfort zone. Well, the comfort zone is one of the most dangerous places to be.

Think about it: comfort foods are some of the worst foods for your health. Things like, pasta served in a bread bowl. Or grilled cheese. When I go elk hunting, while I’m at base camp, I eat a lot of grilled cheese because I’m so mentally and emotionally and physically drained from hunting. That’s fine for a week, but if I ate grilled cheese for dinner every day, I definitely wouldn’t be as thin as I am!

Couches are comfortable, too. I try to run every morning, although I’ve been struggling lately due to travel and injury. The reason I run is because if I don’t, my lifestyle is basically sedentary, and that’s terrible for your health. I know some of you are not able to be as active as you once were, but it’s best for your health if you stay as active as you are physically able. Otherwise, what you don’t use, you lose.

So those are two of the ways you can fail. On the one hand, you can live with false hope that everything will be fixed tomorrow. We just have to do this one thing and our problem will be solved. Or on the other hand, you can give up, accept your current reality as the best it can be, and slowly decay instead of reaching your potential.

I’ve read a couple of books by Phil Stutz and Barry Michels. In The Tools, they describe a visualization tool for escaping the comfort zone. It’s a little bit like the image I walked through two weeks ago, where we are drawn to God through the cross. The tool that Stutz and Michels describe goes like this:

1. Imagine the pain that you are avoiding as a black cloud in front of you. Silently scream at it, “Bring it on!”
2. Imagine yourself entering that black cloud and feeling that pain. Silently scream, “I love pain!”
3. Imagine yourself being propelled out the other side. Silently scream, “Pain sets me free!”

There’s a lot more to the book, which I highly recommend. But the basic idea is that you succeed by being willing to confront the pain head-on and blow through it. It’s like a running back breaking a tackle. I had a wonderful clip, but the NFL blocked it from playing. So just imagine it: an amazing running back who runs straight into a defender, keeps pushing, keeps pushing, and finally breaks through for a touchdown. He is courageous—maybe not fearless, but willing to confront his fear and blow through it. Now, the reason these kinds of plays are on YouTube is that nine times out of ten, this kind of play results in a tackle for a loss. But once in a while, the running back succeeds. Do that often enough, and you win games, you win championships, and you end up in the Hall of Fame.

The key is to be willing to endure temporary pain for the promise of eventual success. Now, I’m not talking about being a masochist. Not all pain is redemptive, and I certainly didn’t see anything positive in the misery that Rhonda went through fighting her facial pain. Sometimes, life just sucks. But sometimes, the pain, or discomfort, or embarrassment, or fear, or whatever else is holding you back is just temporary, and if you power through that, you’ll come out the other side stronger, better, and victorious.

Coming back to our Gospel lesson, we hear John again and again talking about consuming Jesus, which we are supposed to take metaphorically. Maybe it’s the Eucharist, or maybe it’s a reference to integrating Jesus’s teachings in our lives. Either way, we are called to abide in Christ so that he may abide in us. We are called to dedicate our whole selves to Christ—not just our Sunday mornings, but every waking hour, all that we have and all that we are. And in return, Christ will strengthen us and bring us abundant life. Not a life of abundance—this isn’t the Prosperity Gospel. Abundant life—love, and joy, and hope, and life-giving relationships. Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. He is the Way—following him is the only way to enter God’s kingdom. He is the Truth—the hard truth, the challenging truth, but the divine truth that reveals our true potential as beings made in the image of God and a church that is Christ’s body. And He is the Life—the source of abundant blessings that we enjoy when we are connected to each other and to God through Christ, and the source of strength when we are weak, of courage when we are fearful, of wisdom when we are filled with doubt.

But if we really want to know Jesus as the Way, Truth, and Life, we must be willing to confront the facts before us. We can’t ignore the problems that plague us, individually and as a church, and hope that they will just go away. We can’t be afraid that knowing the Truth will mean more work, or sacrificing something good for the sake of something better. We need to turn away from pleasant lies and accept the uncomfortable truths.

At my commissioning service two weeks ago, the congregation affirmed the Great Ends of the Church:

• the proclamation of the gospel for the salvation of humankind;
• the shelter, nurture, and spiritual fellowship of the children of God;
• the maintenance of divine worship; 
• the preservation of the truth;
• the promotion of social righteousness;
• and the exhibition of the Kingdom of Heaven to the world.

These are in our Book of Order, and I think we can all agree that they are all important for truly fulfilling our calling as the body of Christ. I’d like to ask the ushers now to distribute the papers. On the paper, I want you to rate First Presbyterian Church of Rolla on how well we are fulfilling these Great Ends. On the right end, I want you to imagine the nearly perfect church—perfect for you. The church as you think it should be, as closely following God’s will as imperfect humans possibly can. On the left end, I want you to imagine that this church is gone, shut down, the people all dispersed to the community or across the country. On that scale, how are we doing? Are we proclaiming the Gospel? Are we promoting social righteousness? At the end of the service, please place the papers in the basket provided for the purpose. NOT the offering plate! The basket.

We need to know. We need to take a hard look at ourselves and evaluate just who we are, or else we will never know how to become who we could be. Then once we know where we are, we can plot a course towards a better future. And when I say “we,” I mean everyone who is worshipping here today. Whether this is your first time or you’ve been coming for months or years or decades, you matter to God, so you matter to me. I want to know what you think of our church.

There are many paths that we can take, but let’s focus on just two options. One is the easy path: stay in the comfort zone, don’t push ourselves too hard, keep doing what we’re doing and hope for the best. That is the wide path that leads to destruction. The other is the hard path: follow Christ. Follow wherever he leads, even if it means following him to his crucifixion, because we know that the Way of the Cross leads to eternal life.

Jesus’s teachings in this chapter of John are hard. They turned a lot of people away. It’s like he was trying to weed them out: every paragraph gets a little more graphic, a little more demanding. Eventually, he is left with just the Twelve, and Peter says those fateful words: “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.”

Do you believe? Do you believe that Christ is the Holy One of God? As they entered the Promised Land, Joshua challenged the people. He said that the future was uncertain, the path was hard, but if they stayed on it, they would be victorious. Then he said, “As for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.” Jesus Christ has the words of eternal life. Will you serve the Lord? Let us choose each day to take the hard path, the narrow path, knowing that Christ will sustain us and strengthen us, and knowing that the challenges are temporary, but the glory is eternal. Amen.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Preached at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla on August 11, 2024. Based on John 6:35, 41-51.

---

Let’s back up a couple of weeks and paragraphs. At the beginning of chapter 6 in the Gospel According to John, we hear of one of the few miracles that are reported in all four Gospels. Jesus is in a deserted place, preaching and teaching a huge crowd. Five thousand men! Assuming there were some women and children among them, we’re talking about roughly the number of students who attend S&T. Jesus is moved by their need and feeds them. He feeds them with bread and fish. All ate and were satisfied, and the leftovers filled twelve baskets.

This establishes Jesus’s bona fides. Water into wine is nice, healing a leper or blind man is nice, but how does that help me? What has Jesus done for me? Well, here’s what he did for you: he fed you. In a deserted place, like the Sinai desert, he fed a vast multitude who he was leading to the Promised Land of God’s kingdom.

In case the Exodus symbolism is too subtle, he followed up with crossing the sea. He didn’t split it like God did for Moses, but he did walk over it. So clearly, Jesus is no ordinary man.

The problem with feeding people that day is that the next day, they would still be hungry. In fact, the people he fed track him down in Capernaum so that he can feed them again. But you know the old aphorism, If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day; if you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime. Right now, they have Jesus with them, but they won’t always. He can feed them now, and so he did. But he needs to teach them how to survive after he’s gone.

Thus begins Jesus’s teachings on the bread of life. We only read a snippet today, but most of chapter 6 of John’s Gospel, starting from verse 25 that Susan read last week, is about the bread of life that doesn’t spoil, but instead lasts to eternal life. We will discuss how the story ends in a couple of weeks, but for now, let’s stay focused on this basic teaching: Jesus IS the bread of life.

What can that possibly mean? Right after this passage comes what I call the cannibalism verse: Jesus said, “Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.” We read this from our comfortable seats in 21^st-century America with two millennia of associating Jesus’s body and blood with the Eucharist. But if you put yourself back in first-century Judea or Galilee and imagine hearing this statement, you couldn’t help but be repulsed. This is outrageous! How could a man offer his literal body and blood as food and drink for a whole crowd?

Obviously, he can’t. Obviously, Jesus was speaking metaphorically. Perhaps this is a reference to the Eucharist. Even if it isn’t, though, we need to understand his statement as a metaphor that somehow extends the life-giving sustenance that he offered to those five thousand men into all of eternity.

Each week, after the scripture lessons, the preacher says, “Heaven and earth will pass away, but the word of the Lord is forever.” Variations of this statement appear in the three synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke. John’s Gospel is less explicit and more metaphorical.

The first chapter of John says that in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Then the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Jesus was the incarnation of the Logos, the divine Word, the organizing principle of the universe, the absolute Truth. The Word became flesh, and Jesus told his disciples that they had to “eat” the flesh. That is, they needed to, and now we need to, consume the Word, the true Word that transcends the words about God that we read in the Bible, the divine Truth that stands within and behind the Gospels and other teachings that have been passed down to us. We are not supposed to just hear the words read, but also internalize their message. We are supposed to make Jesus’s teachings a core part of our lives, of our very being.

This is a challenge. First of all, we don’t have Jesus here with us to teach us. What we have instead are some stories and teachings that his followers shared and someone eventually wrote down, in Greek, which were eventually translated into English. Jesus taught people in first-century Judea and Galilee, so there is a cultural barrier that we need to transcend in addition to the language barrier. But if we try hard enough, we can receive the message that stands behind the words in our Bible.

Jesus taught us to pray, “Give us this day our daily bread.” If Christ is the bread of life, then maybe we ought to turn to Christ every day. Think about it: Can you eat a big meal on Sunday afternoon and then fast for the rest of the week? No. So why would we think that we can study the Word of God on Sunday and ignore it the rest of the week? Every day, we need to turn to Christ and receive his nourishing words of life.

Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean that we need to study scripture every day. We are also nourished when we pray. Through prayer, we are connected to our Triune God, if we take the time to listen for God’s message to us.

There are other spiritual disciplines that I’ve talked about before. The point is, every day, we need to do something to re-center our lives in Christ. And then, we need to connect our hearts and minds to our feet and hands and mouths. We need to put Christ’s teachings into practice to further God’s kingdom.

Throughout the Old Testament, God appears to Israelites in various forms—in dreams and visions, as a pillar of fire or smoke, as a burning bush, and so forth. At some point, God realized that wasn’t getting the job done. In order to truly transform the world, God had to enter it as a human being. Only a human can teach other humans how to meet their true potential as God’s image-bearers. And so we have the Incarnation, God Made Flesh, Jesus Christ, who came to really show us how to live.

By truly living into Jesus’s teachings, we too incarnate the Word. Incarnate—that’s kind of a strange word. It means to make something into flesh and blood. It’s not just words and thoughts and ideas and such, but actually living people. We are the incarnation, when we do God’s will. When we connect with Jesus’s teachings, when we allow Christ to dwell in us, when we work for a better world that more nearly approaches God’s vision for a perfect humanity.

Later in John 6, we hear that lots of Jesus’s followers fell away because of this teaching. The truth is that following Christ is hard. It’s painful. Sometimes, it means turning from things that bring instant gratification towards things that you know will be good in the long run, but are unpleasant now. Sometimes, it means giving up the good for something better. Always, it means leaving the comfort zone. But growth never happens in the comfort zone, only when we strive to go beyond it.

Let me give you an example from my career. In 2018, I was promoted to full professor. In truth, there are few positions at a university that are objectively better than being a tenured full professor. I could have just stayed the course, taught a couple classes per year, kept my research program cranking along, and so forth. That would have been staying in the comfort zone. But I knew that I had the potential to have more impact on the university if I chose a leadership path. First I was a research center director and then became department chair. Now, being department chair is a little bit more pay for a whole lot more work and a whole lot more stress, with the added benefit of the opportunity to make lots of enemies. But I was willing to make that sacrifice because I knew that I could make my department better. A similar motivation drove me to become your commissioned ruling elder, effective this afternoon. I know that I’ll do things that make some people angry at me, but I also know that something needs to be done and someone needs to do it, so I’ll be that someone. Lord willing, something better awaits us all.

Jesus said, “No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father who sent me.” The word translated as “drawn” is maybe a bit more like “dragged.” When I read this, an image came to mind. Look at this cross on the Table. It’s a variation on a Celtic cross, with a ring around the crossing point. I want you to imagine that ring is a halo, which is a feature that appears in the sky when there are ice crystals dispersed in the atmosphere. Under the right conditions, a circular halo appears around the sun. Sometimes the halo is just white, but other times you can see the colors of a rainbow. Anyway, even if you just see the halo, you know the sun is there in the center, too.

So I want you to imagine that this ring is a halo, meaning that the sun must be back behind the cross creating the halo. But you can’t see it, because the cross is in the way. The sun is the light of God’s heavenly kingdom. You feel an irresistible pull towards the sun, like gravity, a gentle force but one that you can’t ignore or escape. God is dragging you towards God’s eternal kingdom, but to get there, you have to go through the cross. There is no way to get there except through Christ, and Christ’s way is the way of the cross. You know that the cross is a place of extreme pain, torture, agony. But you also know that it’s temporary. Everything is temporary, everything except the kingdom of God. And so you let yourself be pulled towards the cross. You get to the cross, and the pain is almost unbearable, but Jesus is right there with you. He too is suffering, but he helps you to bear the pain. And then, you’re through. You emerge on the other side of the cross in the blazing light of God’s glory. All of the pain is gone, and you know that it was worth it.

That’s the Way of the Cross. Jesus was willing to give his life for us all, because he knew that the pain and suffering were temporary, but the glory is eternal. In the same way, we can be confident that any suffering or loss we incur as we help to build God’s kingdom here in Rolla will be temporary, it will be bearable because Christ is with us, and in the end, it will be worth it for the glory on the other side.

This too is a daily need. Elsewhere, Jesus said, “If any wish to come after me, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it.” We must each take up our cross daily. This is hard. Some days, I just don’t want to. I want to take the easy path, just once. But the easy path slowly becomes a path away from God. So I do my best to choose the hard path, the painful path. I am empowered to take the hard path because I am nourished and strengthened by Christ’s flesh, his words of life, his love that continually flows over me. May God grant you the courage to also choose the hard path as you are drawn through the cross into God’s eternal glory, knowing that you are nourished and strengthened for the journey by Jesus Christ, the Bread of Life. Amen.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download