July 18, 2004

"Emergency Numbers"

I read a great article this week, a eulogy to a lady who worked at the Pittsburgh Steelers headquarters, where they have a cafeteria for their staff and players. Stephanie Porter, died of a heart attack at the tragically young age of 44. But she left behind quite a legacy. She knew how to dish out a lot more than meatloaf. Jerome Bettis said of her, “She was always helpful, always upbeat.” Other Steelers talked about Miss Stephanie as if she were their mom, a ready source of consolation and even a nag about eating right.

But she was more than just a shoulder to cry on. Miss Stephanie had a deep spirituality, a belief that we’re not in control of our destiny. Our plays are called by the coach upstairs. At the funeral home, a piece of paper was given to all the visitors, with the caption “Emergency Numbers” on it. Here’s what it said: “When in sorrow…call John 14. When you have sinned…call Psalm 51. When you are lonely and God seems far away…call Psalm 139. When people are unkind…call John 15. For assurance…call Mark 8:35.” Let’s check those numbers out together, shall we?

When we’re in sorrow, Jesus said, “I’m the one to turn to.” Why should we turn to Jesus in our sorrow? First, because Jesus will send the Spirit, “who will stay with you forever.” Second, because Jesus himself promised to come back to us, “and because I live, you will also live.” And third, because Jesus is about to voluntarily hand himself over to the power of Satan. “He has no power over me, but the world needs to know how much I love the Father.” Jesus promised that we too will suffer, and know sorrow, but he will give us strength to endure.

I’m quoting from John 14:27, “Peace I leave you, peace I give you. Not as the world gives, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled; neither let it be afraid.” He knew we would have abandonment issues; that’s why he said, “I will never leave you; I will never abandon you.” His love has the power to drive out fear; and it is stronger than anything that is breaking your heart. But remember, it takes two to tango, and Jesus needs you to meet him halfway. Perfect love is when Christ’s powerful hand reaches down from heaven, and our weak hand reaches up from earth and meets him halfway.

Let me tell you something about how God works—if you are in sorrow, it was not God’s will for you to be there. It was the broken and fallen nature of the world we live in that put you there. But God promised to be there in the pit right alongside of you. That’s what his peace is all about. He wants everyone in the world to know and embrace that peace, that’s the awesome loving father he is to all his children, but you have to have faith. Remember, God knew you before you ever knew him. He picked you out of the crowd, he thought you were special; he calls you to trust him and live in intimacy with him.

Now there are certain universal truths in life, certain things that are pertinent to everybody everywhere, and here’s one of them: We’ve all messed up. It does not matter whether we are old or young, rich or poor, black or white, male or female, we have all messed up, by which I mean we have sinned. We have offended God. We have dug a hole for ourselves. I have dug holes in my life so deep I thought I would come out the other side in downtown Shanghai. I have dug holes for myself so deep that I thought God would just push in the dirt on top of me.

King David, the author of Psalm 51, dug a huge gaping hole for himself. He dug a Grand Canyon-sized pit when he fell in love with the wife of another man.

Do you remember this story? He saw Bathsheeba as she bathed and decided he had to have her. He brought her to the palace, things took their course, and Bathsheeba became pregnant. To cover up his sin, David sent Uriah, Bathsheeba’s husband, into battle and sent orders for his other troops to retreat and leave Uriah to die. So it happened, and David thought he had literally gotten away with murder, until Nathan, a prophet, told him that because of his sin, the baby will die. One of the great Biblical examples of how the sins of the father are visited on his children.

So David, the great king of Israel, the slayer of Goliath, beloved of God, dug himself a huge hole with his sin. Completely and utterly shamed before God. Don’t miss this, folks—if it could happen to David, it could happen to anybody, including you and me. We may not go out and commit adultery and murder on a daily basis, but all of our sins, even those we think of as trivial, are offensive to God. We’re all in the same boat, it’s just that some sit lower in the water than others. We’re all just sinners whose only hope is God’s grace. Psalm 51 simply reminds us to seek that grace, ask for God’s forgiveness, and start fresh with a clean slate.

Psalm 51 apparently was written after David got himself into this mess, but it gives the reader a clear path out of whatever mess we happen to have made for ourselves. It says, “a broken and contrite heart you will not despise.”

How many of you saw that Martha Stewart got five months in prison this week for lying to federal investigators? How many of you think she got off pretty easy? How many of you think she was persecuted just for being Martha Stewart? I read yesterday that Martha considers herself a victim like Nelson Mandela, who spent 30 years in prison for protesting the injustice in South Africa. When I read that I just said, “Get over yourself, will ya? You lied and got caught, now do your time and shut up.”

But you know what? It’s not that simple, not for Martha and not for us. And it probably wasn’t that simple for King David, either. We all, being weak and human, want to try to wiggle off the hook for our sins. I know I’ve tried to rationalize my way out of one thing or another—“It wasn’t really a sin. My sin’s not as bad as his sin. It’s not my fault, it’s her fault. And the ever-popular, The Devil made me do it.” But you know as well as I that God’s heard them all. Can you imagine what King David probably said to God? “Lord, if you hadn’t made me king I wouldn’t have seen her in the first place? And did you see what she wasn’t wearing?”

Nowadays those have been changed to “Well, if you were married to such a jerk, you’d cheat, too.” Or, “It’s not my fault, my boss is so cheap I have to steal from the company just to survive.” Or perhaps, “If I didn’t have such terrible neighbors, I wouldn’t lose my temper so much.” Psalm 51 reminds us that you can call a pig a dog, but you can’t make him bark, or to put it another way, sin is sin, and the way out is not down denial, but through a broken and contrite heart.”

Now the problem with sin is that it is very divisive. It separates us from God, and separates us from each other. Anybody here ever have a fight with a really good friend, and afterwards felt that knotted up emptiness in your stomach, a fear that something precious had been snatched out of your life? I’ve sure had that, and usually it was because I said something stupid and hurtful. When you have a good close friend it is a foretaste of heaven, and when we lose that friend it surely feels like we’ve been plunged into hell—a hell we’re afraid we’ll never escape.

That’s how bad loneliness can feel sometimes—like a living hell from which there is no escape. And it’s a big, big problem in this country, and getting bigger all the time. A survey by the American Council on Life Insurance reported on the top eight groups of people in this country who are most lonely. Guess who made number one on that list? College students. Makes sense when you think about it, because college kids are young and vulnerable and want to be part of the in crowd. After that, the loneliest groups in America were the divorced, the bereaved, welfare recipients, single mothers, rural students, housewives and the elderly.

A person placed an ad in a Kansas newspaper: “I will listen to you talk for half an hour without comment for $5.” It sounds like a hoax, right? But the person was serious. And the calls started coming—soon 10 and 20 calls per day. The pain of loneliness is so acute that some people are willing to do anything for half an hour of companionship.

Sometimes the joys we experience or the pains we suffer are of our own making. Sometimes they are thrust upon us. Either way, a crucial lesson our faith teaches us is that we do not walk alone. God is near, enhancing our joys or comforting our sorrows. God is near, and because of that the good times are better and the bad times are bearable. Everyone in this life experiences some heaven and some hell, but the author of Psalm 139 wrote that God is in both places, and wherever God is, there we can find peace. “Even when the darkness falls around me, thou makest the darkness bright, for darkness is as light with thee.”

Of course, we all have experienced that God’s companionship is often preferable to that of people, especially unkind people.

Since we’re about to plunge into the Summer Olympics, let me share with you a story that is quite old but still makes you smile. In the 1928 Olympics Henry Pearce of Australia was competing in the single scull rowing event. He was leading, when he saw a duck and her string of ducklings crossing his path up ahead. He was on a collision course, and he figured that if he kept going he would probably kill at least a couple of the baby ducks, so he pulled up and let them pass. For once, there was a happy ending to the story: Pearce won the gold medal.

You see, Leo Durocher was full of it. Nice guys do not always finish last. Sometimes they win.

And that’s what Christ was reminding us in John 15, one of the very last things he said before his passion: “I long for your joy to be complete, so love one another, just as I love you.” Just love one another. Be kind to each other. Help each other. You all know the ratings they put on TV shows and movies, M for mature, R for restricted. Have you ever wondered what would happen if the ratings were reversed? Instead of ratings being negative about sex and violence, what if shows were rated according to their positive values? Would there be many shows that could be rated K for kindness?

Jesus taught us that at the end of our lives we would be judged on how kind we were. The kind will be gathered on his right hand, and who will be on his left? Not just the unkind, the cruel, but also the indifferent, the ones who just couldn’t be bothered. And we don’t have to be Mother Teresa to be judged worthy; we don’t have to change the world. Jesus is just looking for simple acts of everyday kindness from us. They don’t mean much in the eyes of the world, or even to ourselves, but to God they’re everything, and they can have a profound effect on the lives of others.

In 1921 Lewis Lawes became the warden of Sing Sing Prison, at the time the one prison with a reputation for being the toughest, meanest in the world. But when he retired 20 years later, Sing Sing had changed, and Lawes was given credit. He in turn said he owed it all “to my wife Catherine, who is buried outside the prison walls.” Catherine Lawes was a young woman with three small children when her husband became warden of Sing Sing, and many warned her that she must never set foot inside the prison. But she did. When the first prison basketball game was played, she and her children sat in the stands. Her attitude was, “My husband and I are going to take care of these men, and I believe they will take care of me.”

Catherine found a blind man among the inmates. She asked him if he could read Braille, and he said, “What’s Braille?” So she taught him to read. She found a deaf-mute among the prisoners, and taught herself sign language so she could teach it to him. She was the face of Christ to the inmates for 16 years,

In 1937 Catherine was killed in a car accident, and her body was laid out in her home, about a mile from the prison. That morning, the acting warden found the prisoners huddled around the main gate, many with tears in their eyes. He knew how much they loved Catherine, so he said to them, “All right men, you can go, just be sure to check in tonight.” And they all walked the mile to the house without a guard to pay their respects, and every one of them came back that night. Simple acts of kindness, which Jesus asked of us, can make all the difference.

Who has the reputation for being the coldest, most indifferent people of all? New Yorkers. Yet I well remember when we visited New York having an accident where my crutch slipped into a sewer grate and the bottom snapped off. This was right in front of a fire hall, and the firemen came running to help. They fished the crutch tip out of the sewer, found me a new crutch piece, and our trip to New York was saved. It’s a far cry from that act of kindness to what happened on Sept. 11^th, but I already knew that New Yorkers weren’t the cold rude people they were cracked up to be. People are people—all children of God, all with the potential for kindness locked inside them. The key is to let it out—or as Christ said, “Love one another.”

Which means, Don’t make saving your own life your top priority. Make giving up your life your priority. It doesn’t mean taking a bullet for somebody. It doesn’t mean selling everything and plunging into poverty. It means giving yourself away a tiny bit at a time, not for a reward, not to get your name in the paper, but simply to follow Christ. Those are the people who will inherit the kingdom, Christ says in Mark 8:35.

An experiment was conducted with young children. They were divided into two groups—each group was encouraged to give some of their toys to needy children.

And afterwards, they told one group that what they did was kind and nice, thank you for doing that. And the second group was given a prize, a reward for giving their toys away. Which group tended to want to keep giving after the experiment was over? It wasn’t the group that received a prize, it was the ones who were taught that their gifts were kind who tended to continue. That’s only one experiment, but it suggests that people have a natural desire to want to give, even at a very young age.

A selfish person’s fame ends in the grave, with a headstone marked, “He took care of himself.” But the life of a giving person lives on—eternally, Christ assured us. We have made the preservation of life a high art form, and I’m not talking about medicine, I’m talking about the frantic impulse to preserve youth. It always reminds me, though, that the Egyptians discovered cosmetics, and the best preserved thing in all history was an Egyptian mummy. The surest way to become a spiritual dried-up mummy is to devote yourself to saving your own life.

So what do you think about Miss Stephanie’s emergency numbers? She points out to us the key to successful living is not how young or how old you die, but what you do with the time you’ve got. Jesus, after all, only lived 33 years and found time to save the world. Keep these numbers handy and remember, Jesus is still in the life saving business.