April 17, 2005

Stand Up and Shine

Imagine walking at night through the forest and you are lost… It’s cold outside, you’re hungry. Every shadow seems like something creeping up on you. You’re mind starts imagining all kinds of terrible things: wolves leaping out of the darkness, bad guys jumping out from behind a tree, a great panther gliding noiselessly along in the bushes, his eyes glowing green in the dark as he carefully watches you’re every move. And just when you think you can’t possibly take another moment of this, right there through those trees you see the glow of a fire. And the warmth of security and safety washes over you and you want to bolt and dash as hard as you can to that safe amber glow. Such is the power of light.

Refuge. Safety. Warmth, Security. It allows us to see things for how they really are. There’s truth; everything is transparent; there is nothing hidden from view. That’s a picture of God’s world. The bible speaks of the world to come as a city on a hill, shining brightly where all nations can see God’s glory.

Paul wrote a letter to his friends at church and told them that they could shine like stars in the universe. He wanted them to stand out like a warm, inviting light on a really dark night. And what a dream this is that Paul has for these people: to shine brightly and clearly in a hurting world.

Here is an example of this kind of desire to shine. Chicago Bears Hall-of-Fame Middle Linebacker Mike Singletary says:

The first thing in my life by far and the reason I do everything is my love for Jesus Christ. Number two is my family—being there for them and making sure I'm not missing time that I can't get back. Number three is my work, speaking to corporations about teamwork, leadership, and cultural diversity and trying to help people come together.

I don't care where I'm at or what I'm doing, the thing I want to do now in my life is make a difference and serve with a capital S. Serve in my home. Serve in my relationship with my wife. And serve my fellow man…. For me, it's a matter of "What am I doing to make a difference? What am I doing except making money." There are a lot of people out there who are hurting.

Light opens things up, it brings things together. Light is a metaphor for human relationships. The prophet Isaiah speaks of people who are lost in sin as “people walking in darkness” and when Christ comes, “they have seen a great light.” In John chapter 8, Jesus said, “I am in the light of the world. He who follows me shall not walk in darkness but have the light of life. This is the simple point: light is having the right relationships with God and other people. dream God’s dream is that we live in obedient fellowship with him and in harmonious fellowship with one another; in short, that we be a real family.

And thus we enter into another chapter of Paul’s letter to his friends. In this one we see him wishing them to really be a family that glows brightly in a dark world. He dreams of them glowing in such a way that people are drawn to them and find life. God dreams that for your life and my life today. But how can we really live like a family who draws other people to itself? How can we really have an impact on the lives of those we live around? In a moment, we’ll look closer at Paul’s wisdom he offers us on this point, but let me admonish you here: this is very simple and basic. Don’t overlook the magnitude of what we talk about.

The Ambition of Being Together

The first thing we come to after Paul makes it clear he is talking to people committed to being a family is this phrase: “do nothing out of selfish ambition…” Now that’s an interesting word. Ambition. Does that ever creep into human relationships? Does that ever creep into the church? Indeed it does and many times it sneaks in, slowly and without our knowing it. Ambition – what you want out of life. What do you want for yourself? That’s a question about what you really value and think is of eternal significance. We are well advised to periodically stop and reevaluate our own ambitions for life.

A striking mark of holy ambition is that it elevates Christ and not the ambitious striver. (Citation: James D. Berkley, Leadership, Vol. 11, no. 3.)

Paul’s ambition is to see his friends really love and serve each other. This is the spiritual glue that holds any family together: Mutual concern; watching out for one another. It is not coming to worship in the same place at the same time that makes a group a family; it is shared commitments and common values lived out day by day.
What’s behind this ambition? Paul wanted them to love the same thing “be like minded” and go the same direction “one in spirit and purpose”. You want to be able to see clearly how life is to be lived? Throw yourself full-fledged into relationships within the Body of Christ and let your consuming ambition be to see that group of people become unified and purposeful in living together! That will ignite your understanding of your life and its purpose – God made it that way!!

Do not be selfish in how you live. That will erode and sabotage the family. There is no room in community for individual agendas and activities that are designed to elevate one’s self above the crowd. Instead, Paul encourages and admonishes, put the other guy first.

Belden Lane tells this Jewish legend: Time before time, when the world was young, two brothers shared a field and a mill, each night dividing the grain they had ground together during the day. One brother lived alone; the other had a wife and a large family.

Now, the single brother thought to himself one day, "It isn't fair that we divide the grain evenly. I have only myself to care for, but my brother has children to feed." So each night he secretly took some of his grain to his brother's granary to see that he was never without.

But the married brother said to himself one day, "It isn't really fair that we divide the grain evenly, because I have children to provide for me in my old age, but my brother has no one. What will he do when he's old?" So every night he secretly took some of his grain to his brother's granary. As a result, both of them always found their supply of grain mysteriously replenished each morning.

Then one night they met each other halfway between their two houses. They suddenly realized what had been happening and embraced each other in love. The legend is that God witnessed their meeting and proclaimed, "This is a holy place—a place of love—and here it is that my temple shall be built." So it was. The First Temple is said to have been constructed on that very site. (Citation: Belden Lane, "Rabbinical Stories," Christian Century)

Finding the right direction in life and becoming a person of impact requires our ambitions to become focused on others rather than ourselves. Paul’s great desire was to see others unified in the Body of Christ. What are our ambitions pushing us towards today?

Everything in me wants to move upward. Downward mobility with Jesus goes radically against my inclinations, against the advice of the world surrounding me, and against the culture of which I am a part. (Citation: Henri Nouwen in the New Oxford Review, April 1987.)

This doesn’t mean we are to run around thinking badly of ourselves and trying to make ourselves suffer as much as we possibly can. What it does mean is that we become, with the help of the Spirit, brothers and sisters who really take on the burdens of one another and make the welfare of our family members as significant a part of our day to day lives as our own welfare. I warn you, if you don’t immediately recognize it—in today’s culture, that’s a radical way of living. But I am convinced: there is emerging a generation hungry and eager to respond to such a way of life. Is it possible that a family of believers who learned to live this way would draw lost and lonely people into the glowing circle of love and acceptance and life-change? Would you let God make you that kind of a family member today?

The Attitude of Serving Each Other

Paul presses the point: have the attitude of Christ Jesus. Out ambitions for life drive our attitudes about life and thus determine our values. Paul quotes here a very famous passage. It’s called the kenosis passage. ‘Kenosis’ is a word with a similar root to the word kinetic, motion. Kenosis is the movement of emptying oneself. This is God; this is Jesus; taking all the greatness and glory that was indeed his and giving it all up in order to be a humble servant to humankind. This passage is likely a hymn used in the church by the early Christians prior to Paul’s writing here. He would have been very familiar with it and chooses to use it in this passage as a way of illustrating how Jesus Christ himself had the attitude of a servant.

Toward the end of his life, Albert Einstein removed the portraits of two scientists--Newton and Maxwell--from his wall and replaced them with portraits of Gandhi and Schweitzer. He explained it was time to replace the image of success with the image of service. (Citation: Christianity Today, August 12, 1988, p. 72.)

Servanthood is the most unstoppable force on earth. Gandhi overthrew an empire; Martin Luther King, Jr. brought about ethical and moral reform in the world’s most affluent nation. Martyrs throughout history have impacted others because of their willingness to serve in the face of great persecution.

Timothy Keller, pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York, writes:

Pastors often hear, "I work my fingers to the bone in this church, and what thanks do I get?" Is that the way it is? Your service was for thanks? Are you in your right mind? Servanthood begins where gratitude and applause ends. (Citation: Timothy Keller, Ministries of Mercy )

These are hard words, are they not? In a way. We sometimes don’t like speaking of sacrifice and giving up – that gets a little closer to home, and after all isn’t the Christian life all about joy? Oh, yes, but let us not fail to recognize where the joy comes from. God has designed us so that we are the most happy and joyful when we are giving things away to others. Kids, have any of you ever felt that before? You’ve done something nice for somebody else, given them something of yours, perhaps, or taken time to help them with something they needed? Didn’t that feel good? Well, guess where that comes from. God! He’s wired us to be most successful when we are most desirous to see the other guy win. Now that’s upside-down thinking, huh?

I once read a story about a bicycle race in India. The object of the race was to go the shortest distance possible within a specified time. At the start of the race, everyone cued up at the line, and when the gun sounded all the bicycles, as best they could, stayed put. Racers were disqualified if they tipped over or one of their feet touched the ground. And so they would inch forward just enough to keep the bike balanced. When the time was up and another gun sounded, the person who had gone the farthest was the loser and the person closest to the starting line was the winner.

Imagine getting into that race and not understanding how the race works. When the race starts, you pedal as hard and fast as you possibly can. You're out of breath. You're sweating. You're delighted because the other racers are back there at the starting line. You're going to break the record. You think, “This is fantastic. Don't let up. Push harder and faster and longer and stronger.”

At last you hear the gun that ends the race, and you are delighted because you are unquestionably the winner. Except you are unquestionably the loser because you misunderstood how the race is run.

Jesus gives us the rules to the eternal race of life. The finish line is painted on the other side of our deaths, right in front of the throne of God himself. There you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous. The winning strategy for this life and for all eternity is caring about others and not about ourselves. It is letting others go first and not pushing to the front. It is giving without the expectation of getting in return. It is to be humble, like Jesus. (Citation: Leith Anderson, author and pastor of Wooddale Church in Eden Prairie, Minnesota; from sermon "The Height of Humility")

Finding the right direction in life and becoming a person of impact requires an attitude of wanting to humbly serve those around us. The Body is unified when everybody in it wants to help the other guy get ahead and be first. That kind of community draws people to it. What do each of us need to bring to the table individually in order for the family to be like this? God our Father came to show us how to love this way, he came to serve us, and through the power of the Holy Spirit we can seize this powerful, self-giving, humble attitude that builds everybody around you up.

Conclusion

We are challenged here by Paul to take our spiritual lives seriously. We live in a world driven by the urgent but unimportant. How many of us seem to function by going from one crisis to the next? This is not healthy. There’s work to be done; not salvation by works, but the deepening and making real every day what Christ has done and wants to do. The spiritual disciplines and the coming together of the Body are of utmost importance and urgency. We too often are willing to live in “fear and trembling” of other parts of life because they make the most noise. This is not the way to shine in a dark universe!

From Saul Bellow's collection of traditional Jewish tales comes this story:
In a small Jewish town in Russia, there is a rabbi who disappears each Friday morning for several hours. His devoted disciples boast that during those hours their rabbi goes up to heaven and talks to God.

A stranger moves into town, and he's skeptical about all this, so he decides to check things out. He hides and watches. The rabbi gets up in the morning, says his prayers, and then dresses in peasant clothes. He grabs an axe, goes off into the woods, and cuts some firewood, which he then hauls to a shack on the outskirts of the village. There an old woman and her sick son live. He leaves them the wood, enough for a week, and then sneaks back home.

Having observed the rabbi's actions, the newcomer stays on in the village and becomes his disciple. And whenever he hears one of the villagers say, "On Friday morning our rabbi ascends all the way to heaven," the newcomer quietly adds, "If not higher." (Citation: Jim McGuiggan, Jesus, Hero of Thy Soul)

The way to eternal life is to walk into the light. If today you are in the dark, outside the camp looking in, I invite you to come into the warmth of the fire of God’s family. Let him take you in. Accept the life he’s offering to you. For those that are the family here, let Paul’s challenge resonate loudly in your hearts and in your friendships: SHINE as brightly as stars in the universe as you day by day and moment by moment, a little bit here and little part there hold out the words of life to those around you in how you treat them, help them, love one another, bear each other’s burdens, and walk the journey of your lives down the same road of God’s purpose in this world. Shine. Brightly. Brilliantly. Flame with God’s holy love as he shines his light down into your lives even in this moment. Will you be this kind of light?