Grasping and Giving

Jesus’ spirit: giving, not grasping

Philippians 2:3-11

 

We “get” grades.  We “get” what we want.  We are a culture of “getters.”  We are motivated to obtain items/experiences/relationships outside of ourselves.  This is partly because what we want has a glimmer to it.  New technology or clothes look edgy and cool.  A higher social status makes us feel larger.  But even if the items are inherently appealing, our desire for them is based more upon on evaluation of ourselves.

 

We want, because we feel empty.  We desire more, because we feel like less.  The desire to obtain, to grasp everything from material items to grasping achievements is motivated by our belief that our status quo is not enough.  We feel like we are missing something and our souls long to fill that void with another item which will inevitably become outdated.

 

When we grasp, we grasp because we feel like we are internally missing something.

When we give, we give because we feel like we are internally filled with something worth sharing.

 

In Philippians 2, Paul describes the attitude of Jesus.  Jesus did not grasp for making his equality with God used for this advantage.  He did not feel like he was lacking and needed more.  Instead Jesus humbled himself.  Jesus gave himself.  This self-emptying action, from the Greek word kenosis, reflects Jesus’ belief that he had something to offer.

 

When Jesus calls us to serve, he does not call us into being busier.  His call to serve is a compliment.  When nearly every other voice we hear is telling us that we are fundamentally lacking and that we need something else, Jesus offers an alternative.  Jesus’ call to serve says “You have so much already.  You are filled with my Spirit.  Your cup overflows.  Go and share your abundance of me with others.”

 

The contrast between giving or grasping is not primarily about the other item you want or the other person who needs serving.  The contrast between giving and grasping relates to your overall attitude towards yourself.

 

Do you feel like you are fundamentally lacking and need to grasp things to make you full?

Or

Do you feel like you are fundamentally filled with good things already, (given by God), and need to respond to that feeling of abundance by giving to others.

 

Which one of these two versions of yourself leads to the most joy?  Which version of yourself defines you more highly?

 

Give, not Grasp.  Because you are full, not empty.

 

In Christ,

Steven Blair

Pastor of Congregational Care (M-R)

steven.blair@cor.org

 

When I Stopped Praying

When I Stopped Praying
[Luke 22:39-46]
“…and that is when I stopped praying.”

My bus stop was .7 miles away from my house.  That is pretty far for the short legs of a 7^th Grade Boy.  That is also a long time to think, two times a day every school day.  Most of those thoughts centered on prayer and whether prayer was even worth it.

As I walked home, I allowed my pace to place me yards behind the other kids.  In the relative privacy, I lived out the questions I had about prayer.  As I would walk, I would quickly flail my right arm to the side.  I would then quickly flail my left arm.  My intent?  I was trying to make a sudden movement before God knew I was going to make that move.  After each flailing of the arm, I assured myself that God must have know which arm I was going to flail regardless of whether I had known beforehand.  I tried to complicate matters by faking left, then faking right, and then flail left in hopes of fooling God. I painfully consented that God knew everything I would do and would not be fooled by my fakes.  I concluded that nothing I did mattered because either way God already knew what I was going to do.

  ….   And that was when I stopped praying.

For over a year, I continued to attend church and read the Bible, but I did not pray.  I thought “Why pray for something that God already knows will happen or not happen?”

In Luke 22, Jesus knows God’s Mission for sending him to earth and yet he prays.  He prays that God would intercede and remove the pending crucifixion that waits for him.  So, either Jesus is a fool who does not know what a 7^th Grader knew or Jesus knew that our futures are not all determined.

Somewhere during those obligatory trips to church in middle school, I caught a glimpse of praying Jesus.  I noticed that even though Jesus did not get the answer that he may have been wanting, his simple act of prayer meant that he believed in prayer.  His prayer was not futile. My prayers are not futile.  Prayer is not a waste of time regardless of whether you get what you prayed for or not.

Prayer can change things.  It can change the future, or in this scene of Jesus’ life, prayer can change us in the present.  After over 18 months of not talking to God, I learned enough of this lesson to renew my belief that God was acting in this world.

   .. And was when I started praying.

[Reflection]
1.  When was a time in your life when you stopped praying?  Why?

2.  When was a time when you did not “get what you were praying for” and still received the intimacy with God that you needed.
Steven Blair

Pastor of Congregational Care (Last Name M-R)
steven.blair@cor.org
www.stevenblair.wordpress.com  (personal blog, updated weekly)

LeBron Made the Wrong Decision

LeBron James Made the Wrong Decision

Put More Appropriately ….

LeBron James Made His Decision Wrongly

I am making this statement based upon John Wesley’s Three Simple Rules:
1. Do No Harm
2. Do Good
3. Stay in Love with God

John Wesley started the Methodist Church. He was not trying to start a new denomination, just be faithful to Scripture, embrace Tradition, celebrate Reason and treat Salvation as something a person can personally experience which motivates them to change the world. The movement started gaining steam. When there were just a few hundred Methodists, Wesley offered these three simple rules for guiding Christian behavior.

LeBron James’ main rule for guiding behavior: Winning a Championship.

The rules we choose to guide our behaviors guide our choices. LeBron made the wrong choice because he chose the wrong rule to guide his behavior. What if LeBron’s first rule was Wesley’s first rule? What is Lebron’s first rule was to “Do No Harm?” If that was the case, there would have been no way he would have left Cleveland. Ohio has been a tough place to live and Cleveland is not a hot spot for tourism and culture. Economists estimated that LeBron’s departure would result in the city of Cleveland losing $20million in revenue per year. That is a lot of lost jobs, lost revenue. That is a lot of harm.   Then you add onto that harm any emotional harm of feeling abandoned or cheated by your hero.

But avoiding harm was not LeBron’s motivation, so it was not the result of his decision. But about us … what motivates our actions? What set of rules do we apply to making our decisions?

My suggestion (and John Wesley’s) is that we begin with the rule “Do No Harm.” If we all began with that rule, our relationships, our workplace, and even Cleveland would be a lot happier.

Cain Kills Abel

Cain murdered Abel   Genesis 4:1-8
[Scripture]
“And while they were in the field, Cain attacked his brother Abel and killed him.”  Genesis 4:8

[Reflection]
“Something is rotten in the state of Denmark” quips Shakespeare in Hamlet.  “Something is rotten in God’s Garden” narrates God in the Holy Bible.  Perfect Paradise from chapters 1-3 is just a stone’s throw away.  Something … is rotten. 

The smell stems from Cain’s relationship with God.  In verse three, Cain is described to have offered God an offering from the ground while Abel’s offering to God is described as explicitly coming from the firstborn in his flock.  Firstborn meant top notch offering.  The lack of a reference to Cain’s offering being the ‘first fruits’ indicates that Cain gave something less than his best.   

Something was rotten in Cain’s relationship with God.  It led Cain to give God less than the best.  It ultimately led Cain to kill his brother.  What could have spoiled his relationship with God?  Perhaps bitterness that his work was harder than Abel’s.  Perhaps jealousy that God seemed to love Abel more than himself.  Perhaps both, or neither.  What we do know is that something was rotten inside Cain’s heart towards God and Abel (and Cain) suffered for it.

Have you noticed the same happening to you?  Have you noticed that when your relationship with God is missing out, someone else in your life gets hurt?  The Bible warns us to not grow flippant or nonchalant about our relationship with God because “sin is crouching at your door and it desires to have you.”  We all have persons who are either the first benefactors of our relationship with God or the first victims when we have stopped valuing God.  The story of Cain and Abel is a lesson in how our intimacy with God is connected to our intimacy with our “brother” or “sister.”

 [Applying to Your Life]
1)  God has an unfailing love for you.  What are the factors that cause you to drift away from God like Cain drifted away?

2)  Who are the Abel(s) who suffer first (and most) when your relationship to God is waning?

3)  How can you better nurture your relationship with God for God’s sake, yours, and all your Abels?

4) What does good fruit look like in your relationship to God and to others?

 
As always thanks for reading.  Please let me know your thoughts by leaving your comments below or telling me your blog address.

Steven Blair

Pastor of Congregational Care (Last Names M-R)

steven.blair@cor.org
913-544-0276
www.stevenblair.wordpress.com (personal blog, updated weekly)

Haiti: The Ministry of Jenga and Balloons

Nicholas and A-Jon at PartyNicholas' Serene, Classy MomNicholas' Mom and I Playing "Balloon"

 

Haiti: The Ministry of Jenga and Balloons
Psst….. I think I found the Kingdom of God.

For four days, our group moved rocks from an earthquake dismantled wall and then hauled the cement blocks needed to build a new wall.  The repetitive motion of “lift and carry” was exhausting physically and spiritually.  “Who travels to Haiti to move rocks and blocks?!”  We learned that the four days of back-aching work was necessary for us to build what really mattered.

On Thursday May 6th, our group bought a cake for $10 and threw a party for the eight Haitian men who were building the wall.  The cake was joined with a cold $1 Coke or Sprite.  The average Haitian worker makes $3-$5 a day.  Cake and Coke was a unique treat.   At the end of the work day, they sat with us and we all feasted together.    The first four days of somewhat tedious work had built a relationship where the workers felt welcome amongst us, and vice versa.  And then it came time to play Jenga.  Jenga transcended the language barrier.  Men charactrized by hard toil and hard times became childlike in their play.  They showed a side to us that was largely unseen during the  previous days.  There, in Haiti sharing cake, Coke, and playing Jenga with these eight men as equals … I found the Kingdom of God.

The next day,
Nicholas’ mom played “Balloon” with me for twenty minutes.  Like the men from the day before, she came to life.  The Kingdom of God made an encore.

Ministry is often complicated.  It often needs to be quite serene and serious.  But Haiti taught that ministry can be as simple as Cake and Coke, Jenga and Balloons … especially if we are willing to take some time to build the relationship first.

Today, Is there a way you can bring a piece of heaven to this world by buying someone a Coke or surprise them with a cake? Playing Jenga or playing with a balloon?  Or perhaps, is there some small thing you can do with great love to build a relationship?

(A group of six people from the United Methodist Church of the Resurrection and I went to Haiti for a Mission Trip from May 2th-8th. )

As always, thanks for reading.  Please add your comments or blog address below so I can hear your throughts, too.

Nicholas' Mom and I Playing with Balloon

Forgive and Don’t Forget

[Scripture]
“Bear with each other and forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another. Forgive as the Lord forgave you.” – Colossians 3:13

[Reflection]
Forgiveness is a necessity for survival.  A lifetime accumulates a massive amount of hurts and we need a good way to deal with them.  Instead, we’re given the advice that we must “forgive and forget.”    

That’s horrible advice!  I don’t know about you, but that advice just piled more pain on me.  First, someone hurts me and now I am somehow less of a Christian because I can’t forget it.  There has to be a good word out there somewhere to help us deal with forgiveness. 

Sitting in an Illinois Burger King, I found that “good word.”  It has made all the difference.

“Forgiving presupposes remembering. And it creates a forgetting not in the natural way we forget yesterday’s weather, but in the way of the great “in spite of” that says: I forget although I remember.  Without this kind of forgetting no human relationship can endure healthily. (Paul Tillich (1886-1965), German-born U.S. theologian. “Forgetting and Being Forgotten,” The Eternal Now, Scribner (1963).)

Forgiveness is not about forgetting a person’s wrong like you would forget what you wore 37 days ago.  That is not realistic or authentic to who we are as humans.  Forgiveness is about saying, “I don’t forget.  In fact, I think about what you did all the time.  But even though I remember, I choose to forget.  I choose to view you in light of your identity as a child of God rather than in light of your mistake.”

When God forgives us, I do not believe that God suddenly loses an awareness of a whole set of events that happened.  Instead, when God forgives, God stares right into the wrong that was done and chooses to view us in light of His grace rather than our sin.  This is what it means to “forgive as the Lord forgave you (Colossians 3:13).”

Tillich then offers a good word about whether we need to make a formal statement of that forgiveness.

“I don’t refer to a solemn act of asking for and offering forgiveness. Such rituals as sometimes occur between parents and children, or friends, or man and wife, are often acts of moral arrogance on the one part and enforced humiliation on the other. But I speak of the lasting willingness to accept him who has hurt us.”

There are times that a face-to-face forgiveness is necessary.  Usually those are the times when the other person is wrestling with guilt over the offense.  But most times, forgiveness is something that can be done by yourself which can reduce the urge to hurt the other person by recanting the mistake. 

Thinking about forgiveness in this way is more natural, and more Divine.  It is also more doable.

[Application]
1.  Have you struggled with the “forgive and forget” advice? 
2.  Which wrongs are you being called to forget, even though you remember?
3.  How would your heart be different if you forgive in this way?  Your actions?

As always thanks for reading.  Please add comments or share your blog address so that I can hear your thoughts.

Mardi Gras, Ash Wednesday, a Rabbi, and Nuns with Beads

[Scripture]  ”Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” – Matthew 11:28-30

Last weekend, I preached at The United Methodist Church of the Resurrection on Mardi Gras, Ash Wednesday, a Rabbi, and Nuns with Beads.
Rather than reading a blog about it on Ash Wednesday, you can watch it at www.cor.org by clicking on “The Easiness of Following Jesus” screen.
 The sermon is roughly 28 minutes and can be played in the background as you work.

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