The scriptures referred to are in the text. Most of the
quotations are from the NET.
C.S. Lewis pointed out that while lovers are usually depicted as
facing each other, friends are depicted as standing side by side, looking in
the same direction. Lewis felt that what frequently binds friends are a mutual
interest or activity. It can be sports, or movies, or building and flying model
planes, or photography, or gardening, or a million other things. In Lewis' case
it was fantasy. That, as well as writing and Christianity, were at the center
of his friendship with J.R.R. Tolkien. And around those interests gathered
other friends, who came to be called the Inklings. They met in Lewis' rooms at
Oxford on Thursday evenings and read their latest works to each other. In fact,
it was Lewis and his group that encouraged Tolkien to continue his Lord of the
Rings saga. If I had a time machine I would definitely set aside my Thursdays
to visit that group.
Lewis was very fortunate in finding a mate who was also a friend.
Poet Joy Davidman was an American fan of Lewis who wrote him. Considering this
part of his ministry Lewis always wrote back. But this correspondence grew to
be something other than a duty. For one thing they shared a love of the
fantasies of George MacDonald. And for another she was his intellectual equal.
When she visited England, their friendship grew. Eventually they married and
Lewis adopted her sons. He wrote the preface to her best known work, Smoke
on the Mountains: An Interpretation of the Ten Commandments, and she
inspired the central character of his last novel, Till We Have Faces.
The loud Irishman and the brash New York Jew were truly soulmates. Lewis wrote
of her: “She was my
daughter and my mother, my pupil and my teacher, my subject and my sovereign;
and always, holding all these in solution, my trusty comrade, friend, shipmate,
fellow-soldier. My mistress; but at the same time all that any man friend (and
I have good ones) has ever been to me. Perhaps more.”
Part of getting closer to someone is doing things together. You
see them in a different light than you would merely chatting with them. And
since this Lent we are talking about getting closer to God, let us look at
doing things together with him.
Ever so often you run into “Christians” who say that God does
everything; we should just sit back, let him work and be grateful. Part of this
is based on the idea that we are saved by grace, not works. They might even
quote Ephesians 2:8-9 to prove it: “For by grace you are saved through faith,
and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God; it is not from works,
so that no one can boast.” But if we continue, the very next verse says, “For
we are his workmanship, having been created in Christ Jesus for good works that
God prepared beforehand so we may do them.” (Ephesians 2:10) We are not saved
by good works but we are saved for
good works. It's like repairing a car. There are people who restore old cars
and then just put them in museums to be looked at. But that's not what they
were made for. They were designed to go places. God gave us our brains and
bodies and talents in order that we use them for good. And he intends to work
with us on that.
Actress Octavia Spencer got her start working as a paid intern on
a movie set. She was in charge of the extras. Sometimes there would be a part
where an extra was given a single line. She wanted to be an actress and she
could have auditioned for the one line part. But she didn't because of her
stage fright and so she would suggest another extra do the role. It wasn't
until Director Joel Schumacher insisted she play a nurse in the movie A
Time to Kill that she actually had her movie debut. She then worked
for 15 years in both movies and TV before getting her Oscar winning role
in The Help, a part that had been written with her in mind. In both
pivotal roles, it was a matter of the person in charge offering her the
opportunity and her choosing to take it. As I've said before, God's saving
grace is participatory. He offers it but we must accept it.
The same is true of God's everyday grace. We cannot live the
Christian life under our own power. We need God's help. In Philippians Paul
says something that sounds confusing at first. He writes, “...work out your own
salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who is working in you to
desire and to act for his good purpose.” (Philippians 2:12-13) C.S. Lewis points
out that the first part of the verse, where we are told to “work out your own
salvation,” makes it sound like it is all our doing. Yet in the second part of
the verse it looks like it’s all on God. To illustrate this paradox Lewis uses the
example of a teacher helping a child having trouble writing the letters of the
alphabet. She might put her hand around the child's and move the hand to form
the letters. The child is holding the pen but at first the teacher is controlling
the writing. It can happen when learning any activity. A coach might use his
feet to widen your stance at the plate when you learn baseball, or use her hands to
reposition your arms or straighten your back when learning to dance. When
learning to reuse your legs your physical therapist will be right beside you, keeping
you from falling, correcting your gait, pushing your foot farther ahead as you
walk. If you resist, they tell you to relax, loosen up, let them move you until
you get it.
God works with us and through us like that. Even someone like Paul
said, “But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me has not been
in vain. In fact, I worked harder than all of them—yet not I, but the grace of
God with me.” (1 Corinthians 15:10) Paul also wrote, “I have been crucified
with Christ, and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me.”
(Galatians 2:20) His words recall what Jesus said the night before he died: “I
am the vine; you are the branches. The one who remains in me—and I in him—bears
much fruit, because apart from me you can accomplish nothing.” (John 15:5)
That's a real slap in the face for those of us raised on the idea
that we are or can be totally self-sufficient. We aren't and can't, as this
current pandemic shows. If you get sick, you will need doctors and nurses and
hospitals and medical equipment to beat it. The reason for the social
distancing is to not overwhelm our ICUs or run out of ventilators, as has
happened in Italy. There, in order to save those they can, they are writing off
others, mostly the elderly with additional ailments, as unable to be saved.
Even those who are sheltering in place by themselves could not do it without
houses built by others, food harvested and prepared and delivered by others,
water and electricity and news provided by others. Even “preppers” generally
get everything to build their bunkers from businesses who make and sell the
materials, plans, food, guns and the survival manuals they use. “No man is an
island, entire of itself,” wrote John Donne, Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral in
London. He spoke of our connection with our fellow human beings. We are also
connected to our Creator who gives us everything we need to live: our bodies,
minds and talents.
Now at a certain point, the coach or therapist will loosen his
grip a little and step back a bit to see what you can do. After Jesus
sent out the Twelve to preach the gospel and heal people, and after they
returned astonished at what God did through them, they find themselves
facing 5000 hungry people. And what does Jesus do? He says to them, “You give them something to eat.” But
they balk at how impossible the task he's given them is. So Jesus shows them
how to do it. But I think he sincerely meant it when he told them to feed the
5000 themselves. He knew he had given them the ability. He offered them the
role and they had turned it down. They were thinking in human terms. They
forgot that Jesus had given them power to restore the sick to life and health.
Couldn't that same power be used to nourish and sustain life and health?
God wants to do things together with us. As St. Augustine said,
“Without God, we cannot. Without us, God will not.” God could choose to set everything
right in this world without our involvement. But we are not the passive audience in the
theater of God's mighty acts. From the beginning we have had a role. In Genesis
2:5, it says, “Now no shrub of the field had yet grown on earth, and no plant
of the field had yet sprouted, for the Lord God had not caused it to rain on
the earth, and there was no man to cultivate the ground.” The Hebrew word
translated “cultivate” literally means “to work.” Just 2 verses later God
creates humanity. The implication is that human beings are to take care of the
paradise given them, to be gardeners in the Garden of Eden. And when in Genesis
6 we are told that God regrets making humans and wants to start over, the
reason given is “Now the earth was ruined in the sight of God; the earth was
full of violence.” (Genesis 6:11) No gardener is supposed to ruin the garden,
nor are the gardeners to get violent with one another. So God could simply wipe
us out and make things better all by himself. But he chooses Noah and his
family to survive and start over. He is determined to achieve his better world,
through the cooperation of people.
And the rest of the Old Testament is God trying to work through
people to make known what kind of God he is and what he is doing to make the
world better. He chooses Abram who cooperates when God tells him to leave home
and civilization and go to Canaan. God tells him, “...all the peoples on earth
will be blessed through you.” (Genesis 12:3) God then works with Abraham's
grandson Jacob or Israel, and then through his descendants by his son Judah,
and then through his descendant David and finally through his descendant Jesus.
And after Jesus completes his work, he doesn't start the last judgment but
entrusts the good news of what God's done in him to the Twelve, who tell and
enlist others, first Jews, and then Samaritans, and then Gentiles. Jesus holds
off returning until the task of giving every person the chance to join in his
work is completed.
And what is the work he has given us to do? To love God with all
we are and all we have. To love our neighbor, which is anyone we encounter, as
ourselves. (Luke 10:25-37) To love our enemies. (Matthew 5:44) To serve Jesus
by clothing the poor, feeding the hungry, giving water to the thirsty, caring
for the sick, visiting the imprisoned, and welcoming the foreigner as if they
were Jesus' brothers and sisters. (Matthew 25: 31-46) To be peacemakers, to be
humble, to be pure in heart, to be merciful, to hunger and thirst for
righteousness. (Matthew 5:3-9) To make disciples of all nations, to baptize
them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, and to teach
them to obey everything Jesus commanded. (Matthew 28:19-20)
But we are not alone in this gargantuan task. Jesus assured us
that he would be with us always, that he would in fact be in us.
Because of that, he promised that we would do greater things than he had (John
14:12, 20, 23). And indeed the body of Christ on earth has built and runs
hospitals and schools and food panties and homeless shelters and disaster
agencies and other works of love. And most of those things do not pay for
themselves and so there is a lot of praying to meet the budget and even to
increase the ways we serve the least of Jesus' siblings. We rely on God's help
and understand that we are not on our own but are working with him in doing
these things.
God has given each of us talents, and skills and experiences. He
has put us in different places in life and in society. And he wants to do
things with us in these different circumstances using these gifts. He wants to
bless the world through us, the spiritual children of Abraham. And let me tell
you, when you start cooperating with God it is a bit scary but also exciting.
He will take you places you did not expect and give you challenges you did not
foresee. But he will provide what you need to do what he wants you to.
Some of those resources will be other people. Because he wants all
of us, his friends, to do things together as well. We are not to be “Lone
Ranger” Christians but part of a vast team, a worldwide family, all working
together with love. Indeed when Jesus spoke of the identifying mark of his
followers, he did not say it would be exceptional righteousness, or doctrinal
purity, or uniformity of ritual, but he said, “Everyone will know by this you
are my disciples—if you have love for one another.” (John 13:35)
Seeing that God is love (1 John 4:8) doing things with love are
doing things with God. And anyone who really loves knows that love is not
always easy. You can love people even at times when you don't like what they
are doing. Any parent knows that. But love helps us overcome those obstacles.
There are limits, however, to our natural capacity for love. God's love is
necessary to surmount the highest barriers. And often when we fail to overcome
them, it is because we neglect to work together with the God who is love.
That God's love is greater than ours is shown in how he sent his
son to a violent and ungrateful world, knowing full well that it would kill
him. He did it anyway. Because when you love people you do things for them.
That is another way to get closer to someone: do something for
them. We will talk about how that helps us get closer to God next week.
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