What Motivates Change?

2 Cor 5:11-17

MP3: here

Tonight I am just going to start with a simple question:

Do people ever really change? And if so, How?

One of the great shared experiences of our humanity is that most of us in this room, at one point in our life, have probably undertaken some long term project of behavior change and…and failed. Either there was a behavior or habit that we want to minimize or discontinue all together: say carbon usage, porn, or procrastination - I mean, how many times have you told yourself, ‘next time, I am going to start writing my paper more than 12 hours before it is due.” Or there is some behavior that we would like to do more than we do (this quarter I am going to exercise more. And as you get older and start making money it will be what portion of your resources will you allocate for the poor and/or the environment instead of spending it on yourself). One thing we all have in common, is that we have all tried to change…and most of us have found it harder than it seems like it should be. It can get discouraging. You start to wonder “do people ever really change?” And if so, how?

Today’s passage seems to answer the first question with an unequivocal, YES. Look with me at verse 17:

2 Cor 5:17 "Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!"

Now this is kind of an inspiring verse. Chances are that if you have been hanging around the church for more than say six months, you’re familiar with it. And it takes a definitive position on the first question I posed. Tonight’s passage holds out the brazen claim that Christianity offers the resources to motivate sustained, non-trivial life change. But the verse is a little fuzzy on the second question…how? So how do you motivate long term, sustained change? Well the famous verse 17 starts with a ‘therefore’, which means to find the mechanisms of this change, we simply need to look up. And sure enough, the passage includes not one, but 2 surprising answers to the question: ‘How do we motivate change?’ Look with me at verses 11 and 14

Paul offers two, motivations for substantial and sustained life change: fear and love. Does that strike you as odd? I mean, these hardly seem like compatible motivations. And many people would contend that they are not. In fact one of the great poets of my generation, Ben Gibbard of DCFC, articulated his resistance to this:


Machiavelli famously agreed. He said

He takes it as axiomatic that fear and love are not compatible motivations…a sovereign can only select one to motivate his kingdom…and was better off choosing fear.

Commodus the Roman emperor depicted in the film Gladiator went the other way. Unable to inspire respect, he tried to win allegiance by making the people love them with ‘bread and circuses.’


So what happened here? Did Paul get confused? Are fear and love mutually exclusive?First, we need to ask if we really know what these words mean. Words have what semantic range. The meaning we attribute to them based on our experiences and background was not always the meaning the author intended. Take two examples from the retreat:

When we hear ‘fear’ and ‘love’ in terms of motivation we think ‘reward’ and ‘punishment’. We think God is holding out the cosmic Carrot and stick – what psychologists call extrinsic motivations – trying to coax us into good behavior with pie and spankings. But psychologists who study motivation suggest that punishment/reward motivators can generally only produce short term results. They don’t have the power to generate long term change.[1]

So what is actually going on here? Christian motivation is not based in what God can do for me or to me…but in who he is. It is god centered. And from a God-centered perspective, ‘fear’ and ‘love’ do not refer to ‘punishment’ and ‘reward’, they refer to ‘awe’ and ‘affection’. God motivates change by capturing our imagination and will with awe and affection. But that brings us back to the question: can the same God claim both?

At the bottom of the question of whether we should be motivated by fear or love is a fundamental question of what God is like. There are two basic ways to approach God. The first is to stress transcendence. This is the approach taken, for example, by our Muslim friends. Stressing god’s transcendence stresses distinction. Got is totally other. He is characterized by qualities like omnipotence, and inscrutability and holiness.

The other basic way to approach God is to stress immanence. This is at the heart of the approach taken by our Hindu friends. God is literally everywhere…all around us, in us. God is indistinguishable from the world, and fundamentally is expressed in each one of us. God is fundamentally accessible.

Transcendence stresses distinction, and the appropriate response is awe…and lots of it, so that the appropriate emotional response flirts with fear. Immanence stresses nearness. God is close, accessible. The appropriate response is affection. And so which way does Christianity go? Is the Christian God transcendent or immanent? The answer is ‘yes.’

Christians believe in a Trinitarian God. Who is entirely transcendent but fully immanent. He is holy, totally other, and morally inapproachable in his perfect justice in the person of the Father…but in the person of the Spirit, he is nearer to you than the person sitting next to you, giving you constant and total access. And in Jesus, God become flesh, the cosmic king of the universe soils his swaddle in a cold barn in a backwater town on the edge of the Roman Empire. He is simultaneously totally other and as identifiable as he possibly could be. That which was unapproachable invades our reality and works our salvation. Incidentally, that is what Christmas is about. In the incarnation, Jesus becomes the living embodiment of the transcendent immanent.


You see, some of you have a god like Commodus. You elevate his imminence at the expense of his transcendence. He is so in need of showing and receiving love that he has no moral seriousness. He is trivial. And so you are not inspired to serve him. Others of you have a god like Machiavelli’s prince. You elevate his transcendence at the expense of his immanence. He becomes so hard that you are terrified to cross him. You are scared of him. Eventually, this terror exhausts you, and you give up trying to serve him. But neither of those gods are worth service let alone worship.

So lets revisit the original question with these categories: what is the engine of real life change? What motivates the life transformation that Paul talks about in v 17? Awe and affection. Standing in awe of and cultivating affection for a God who is totally other, unapproachably holy, and perfectly just yet grants us total access and to the point that he is interested in our deepest hurts and our most trifling worries.

And what is the shorthand for Awe+affection in response to a God who is immanent and transcendent… Awe+affection = worship Actual, sustained change is wrought by worship. All sin is fundamentally a worship issue...a deficit of worship. You want to change? The carrot and stick form of religious motivation does not work in the long term. You need to cultivate a bigger awes and deeper affections. That is called worship. Worship (much more than, but including, corporate Christian musical worship) is the engine of transformation. Are you struggling with porn? Then your God is either not big enough or not near enough. Are you indeffeeent to the poor and the environment? Than your God either needs to be more just or more tender.
Sin is fundamentally a worship issue. It is organ failure of our capacity for wonder. If you are stuck in a behavior that diminishes you or are trying to cultivate a behavior that ennobles you, strategies will help, but fundamentally, you need a bigger and nearer God. You need to love the good and the beautiful more intensely. You need to cultivate more awe and better affections. You need to exalt in a fiercely beautiful God …so that our bleak lives of self centeredness looks as pitiful as they actually are. You need to worship.
______________
[1] See Daniel Pink’s Drive

The Riddle of Seeing: 2 Corinthians 4

MP3: here

2 Corinthians 4

About a year ago I woke up at 4 in the morning and could not get back to sleep. This doesn’t happen very often, but when it does, I usually get up and go for a walk. And so was walking around the North Davis green belt and I started to pray. And no one else was out at this hour so I started to pray out loud because it helps me focus. Plus, it is not as embarrassing to get caught praying out loud as it used to be. It used to be that the only other people who talked out loud with no visible companion were the mentally ill. Now if someone catches you praying out loud in public they just assume you have Bluetooth.

So anyway about 10 minutes into my walk, around Northstar Park, I hear a strange sound. It is the unmistakable rhythmic periodicity of trampoline. And before long, I see the occasional head and shoulders of a a college age dude bouncing behind his fence, just to the left of the bike trail. It was just him, no one else, He wasn’t practicing any trick or anything like that. It was just him, bouncing up and down on a trampoline in his backyard, in the dark, at 4:30 in the morning. Now, this struck me as totally absurd. And I wondered what his story could possibly be. How does someone end up bouncing on their outdoor trampoline at 4:30? Was he high, was he drunk, or maybe he was just weird. But then it occurred to me. I was walking around the neighborhood at 4:30 in the morning talking out loud to my invisible friend…Suddenly his choice does not seem quite so strange. I thought to myself “Bounce away morning trampoline guy.”

So let start with a question:

Why do you believe in something you cannot see?
And if you don’t, why on earth should you?

A lot of people, especially intelligent University types would say that you shouldn’t. You are at one of the top universities in the world. You are getting a first class education, many of you in the sciences. Surely you do not have confidence in realities that cannot be verified by sense data.

This perspective was popularized in the 1940’s and 50’s by the famous British philosopher AJ Ayer, the and came to be known as Logical Positivism. Ayer argued that all talk about god was, strictly, non-sense in the strict definition of the word…in that it could not appeal to sense data and, therefore, fundamentally has no meaning. He argued that a statement can only have meaning if it can be verified by sense data. Of course, positivism was not long lived, largely because the idea that statements are only true if they can be verified by sense data cannot be by sense data…but we have all felt the sting of this critique.

Well, the critique is not new. Paul, one of the authors of the New Testament, felt the weight of it as well. And he winks at it in the end of chapter 4 with this subversive little riddle. He says: “We fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen.”

Excuse me, What?

In this passage Paul reflects about why some people believe in Jesus and others do not. I mean, it’s an interesting question right. I know brilliant people who believe and brilliant people who do not. There is too much brain power on either side of that equation for it to be a simple matter of intelligence.


In fact, the most famous paleontologist in the world, the late, venerable Steven Jay Gould wrote in the pages of Scientific American, that “Either half my colleagues are enormously stupid, or else the science of Darwinism is fully compatible with conventional religious beliefs—and equally compatible with atheism”[1] Gould suggest that there are just too many smart people on both sides of this question to be definitively adjudicated by intellect. So this evening, I want to look at a couple of surprising things that the Scriptures say about how we come to know God…and then why I want to look at two brief applications. First, Paul lays the groundwork with ‘Why God seems so hard to know.”

1. Why God Seems Hard to Know

You do not come to know God in the same way you Calculus, Chemistry or Kafka. Knowing God is different. But why? To address that Paul starts out with a curious and borderline offensive observation.

He says that “the god of this age has blinded the minds of those who do not believe” and then follows up with this “God…made is light to shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory…”

Do you see what he is doing there? Do you see the contrast he is making? He seems to think that the mind might be a liability. Now, I don’t know about you, but my first impulse there is to be a little embarrassed by Paul. If you are a scientist, like me…Paul just lost you. But stay with us for a minute. You will have a hard time finding a bigger nerd than me. I love the life of the mind. Shoot, I am working on my fifth degree…my fourth in engineering and the hard sciences.
And while at first it seems like by questioning the role of the mind he is playing into the stereotypical religious anti-intellectual bias…what you have to understand is that Paul was a nerd too. He loved the life of the mind. He was better educated than 99% of the Roman Empire and was a rigorous thinker. So what happened here? Well, Paul is warning, that while learning and rational thought are incredibly valuable, overemphasizing them can distort our humanness. Paul is suggesting that perhaps we should not…”believe everything we think.” He suggests that though the life of the mind has immense value in the Christian life it can also be a liability if it is not experienced in the context of the other things that make us human.

Think with me about what Jesus says was the central purpose of life. He said to “Love God with all your heart, mind, soul, strength.”

But what I have always loved about this passage is that it also gives us insight into what it means to be human. Holistic personhood is a balance of these components. By elevating any of these components of our personhood to a dominant position we become a distortion of who we were meant to be. Think with me for a minute….what happens if you place too much emphasis on the life of the:

Emphasize the Heart (Emotions) – You Become Emotional
Emphasize the Soul (Supernatural Experiences) – You Become a Mystic
Emphasize Strength (Action) – You Become a Pragmatist[2]
Emphasize the Mind (Sense Data and Thought)- you become an Intellectual

CS Lewis, a man who did not lack intellectual firepower, called this distortion, of intellectuals who put disproportionate emphasis on the life of the mind…‘Men without chests’

“(Excessive emphasis on the life of the mind will) produce what may be called Men without Chests. It is an outrage that they should be commonly spoken of as Intellectuals. This gives them the chance to say that he who attacks them attacks Intelligence. It is not so. They are not distinguished from other men by any unusual skill in finding truth nor any virginal ardor to pursue her…It is not excess of thought but defect of fertile and generous emotion that marks them out. Their heads are no bigger than the ordinary: it is the atrophy of the chest beneath that makes them seem so.” CS Lewis – The Abolition of Man

This is like that guy at the gym who only works out his upper body and looks like a distortion.
What Paul is trying to say is: The mind is not unproblematic and our affections are not without value.

This passage doesn’t undermine the usefulness of the mind. It undermines the primacy of the mind. It deconstructs the enlightenment paradigm that our best shot at understanding reality is to figure it out by dispassionate analysis. What Paul is saying is that if you want to know something…but especially if you want to know God…you are going to have to engage it with your passions, your actions, and spiritual realities.

Paul suggests that what we think, the way we perceive reality is a function of what we love and what we expect.

Now I know this sounds countercultural, especially at an institution dedicated to intellectual development. But think about this with me for a minute: If knowing God was a matter of analytical ability, smart people would have an advantage. That does not really seem fair. Doesn’t it seem like a just God would set things up so that people who don’t have your IQ had an equal shot at knowing him. Smart people are welcome, but you have to recognize that the analytical analysis of sense data is not the only or even the primary process that God is known by.
So, you have to consider the possibility that you do not see God because you do not expect to. How we process sense data is influence by what we expect to see there.

One of the first movies I went to see as a kid was ET. Now, I am the same age as Drew Barrymore, so that will give you some idea of the age I was when I went to see it. But there is a scene in that film where the kids are hiding an alien from their mother and the mother walks into the bedroom. ET hides in the stuffed animals…but he is a brown leathery alien with an enormous dome…so plush kitty cats are not exactly a stellar camouflage. But she looks right at him and does not see him because when you look at a pile of toys in a child’s room, you expect to see toys, not an extra terrestrial being. You see what you expect to see.[3]

If we learned anything from the philosophical gyrations of the twentieth century it is there is no ‘view from nowhere.’ All knowledge is perspectival, it is affected by our passions, our categories, our loves, our hates. Sense data is not impartial.[4]

So how is God known if not through hypothesis testing an empirical observation?

Well that leads me to the second big idea in this passage...

2. You Can Only See With The Right Light

So Paul says you cannot know God in the same way you know Calculus, Chemistry or Kafka. He says, do not trust everything you think because the mind is not an unbiased tool. It is influenced by your affections and your expectations.

Well, OK Paul, then how do you suggest that we come to know God? Paul’s response…You have to turn the light on. In verses 4-6 he uses the metaphor of light four times. Paul says you have to process sense data under the right light. This, of course, reminded me of my favorite 15 seconds of the Office of all time:

I understand there was a similar incident at a CL Halloween party. The way the story goes, Brant came dressed as Fred from Scooby Do but when the black light came on, it became clear that Brant’s house had a mouse problem and that he probably should not be hugging anyone that night.

The black light illuminates reality to reveal the unseen. But there are less disgusting examples of phenomena or entities that are only visible under the right light. It is common for scientists to use polarization or phase contrast to illuminate realities that would otherwise be unseen.
Paul says, ‘you want to understand the essence of reality…you need the right light.” He suggests that there are fundamental realities that we simply do not see until we illuminate them with the right light.

And then he goes on to say…that light, is Jesus. Jesus is the black light of reality. He is the interpretive key by which things make sense. He is the seen thing that makes sense of the unseen. He is the empirical reality that gives us access to the unseen realties. In verse 4 he calls Jesus the ‘Image of God’. Elsewhere in scripture Jesus is called “the image of the unseen God.” The key to seeing unseen reality is to look at it in light of Jesus.

So, wrap up by unpacking this idea a little with two brief applications

Application 1: Want to Know God, Look into the Face of Jesus

Check out v 6. “God…made his light to shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God[5] in the face of Christ.”

He says you want access to light, knowledge, and glory of God look to Jesus. But I love the language here. He doesn’t say ‘learn about Jesus.’ You know God by looking into the face of Christ.

Some of you here tonight just need to realize that God is not known like you know Calculus, Chemistry or Kafka. He is not known by accumulating facts. He is known by looking into the face of a lover. If you want to know God, read the accounts of Jesus…but go beyond that, try talking to him. At first this will seem awkward. But you will start to see things differently. It is a lot like that scene in the matrix, where Neo has just been flushed, and he laying on that bench with all those weird electrodes in him to rebuild his muscles. He is going in and out of consciousness, and he asks Morpheus ‘Why do my eyes hurt.’ Morpheus replies “because you have never used them before.” If you look into the face of Jesus, your eyes will be calibrated to a new reality.

So, read the stories, talk to him. But then, the Scriptures teach something kind of strange. A third way you can look into the face of Jesus is by hanging out with his people. Now this is counterintuitive, because we are nothing special. You would not know that we have any special insight on reality by looking at us. We are messed up and often kind of strange. But Paul anticipates this in verse 7 where he describes us as ‘jars of clay’. He says that Jesus’ people are like unremarkable clay pots. Nothing special…but yet, they contain treasure. That is what you will find in Christian community. We are unremarkable, and sometimes we are just plain peculiar. But that is the way Jesus has always preferred it. He came to earth in a barn and now hangs out in Kliber 4. Look into the face of Jesus.

Application 2: Do Not Lose Heart

And finally…Paul’s whole point of going into this topic of ‘seeing the unseen’ is kind of surprising. He says it two times: in verse 1 and in verse 16. He says therefore, because God we have found ‘the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ’…’We do not lose heart.’ And then he goes on to describe…midterms. He says we were ‘hard pressed’, ‘perplexed’, we were ‘struck down.’ I mean is there a better three word description of the academic life. But you see, this is a dark chapter in Paul’s life. He is discouraged. He has been physically and emotionally hurt. But he says, because we can see what is unseen, we do not loose heart.

It is discouraging get all our data from our eyes and minds and when we look out there, and in here all we see are broken people, broken relationships and broken things, piles of history books, blank word documents, impeding deadlines and more chemistry, more calculus, more Kafka. It's hard to remember the glorious and eternal things God is doing beneath the surface. So I think the point of this text is to remind us about the unseen REALITY: not seen, but real nonetheless, which is of greater value and glory than the pressing/discouraging/broken world we live in.
“We are hard pressed, but not crushed, perplexed but not in despair, persecuted, but not abandoned, struck down but not destroyed…though outwardly we are wasting away, inwardly we are being renewed day by day.”

Our circumstances do not define our reality. We have insider knowledge that gives us courage and strength. I think if Paul were here tonight speaking into our context he might say “You are the loved child of a cosmic King, you have access to the face of Jesus. Don’t you dare allow some professor to tell you how much you are worth. No one can define you with a number.” The reality of your value is unseen. So go home and work hard to develop your mind and your ideas. But refuse to let the grade you see at the top of your paper define you.[6]

Paul says, look into the face of Jesus, let his light illuminate the true nature of your reality…and because of that, press on with and for him and don’t lose heart…because:

“We fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen.”
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[1] Impeaching a Self-Appointed Judge "Impeaching a Self-Appointed Judge," Scientific American, July 1992, 267(1):118-121;
[2] This could also turn into a moralist. If you put all of the emphasis on what you do…action…then correct action becomes ultimate. This is interesting because there are conservative and liberal versions of this. Conservatives tend to stress personal action (what bad activities do I avoid) and liberals tend to stress communial action (what good actions do I do for the public good) but both are distoritions by evaluating human value based on actions.
[3] This happens to me all the time as a scientist. Last quarter I went on a field trip with an entomology class I was taking. We went to a vernal pool and the whole class stared at this pool for 20 minutes looking for anything interesting. For 20 minutes we saw mostly nothing. Until someone said, what are all those little black things jumping around. There, right on the water edge, were hundreds of colembola jumping all over the place. They had been there all along, and once we were looking for them, you could not miss them, but it took 15 scientist 20 minutes to see them…because “How we process sense data is influence by what we expect to see there.“
[4] There are impediments to knowledge that are not purely cognative – how we interpret sense data is affected by personal and cosmic influences, and some of the cosmic influences are pernicious
[5] Ravi Zacharias has a great contextual note here where he points out that the pursuit of the Hebrews was light, the pursuit of the Greeks was knowledge and the pursuit of the Romans was glory…in other words, the highest pursuit of each person who was in Corinth (a Greek city, under Roman occupation, with a substantial Jewish community – especially in the new church) is culminated in Jesus.
[6] This is harder than I make it sound. I am intentionally trying to get sub-optimal grades in my most recent degree because it is superfluous. In a sense, getting an A in my current class is evidence I need to spend more time with my kids. Still, I got an A- on my first paper and it stung.

Live Free or Die

The MP3 of this talk is here.

You have all seen the commercial. British soldiers line up ready to do battle. Their formation is tight and they look formidable. Then, there is some mysterious dust in the horizon and out of the woods, comes George Washington driving a crappy American car but doing it with flair and purpose. The British soldiers scatter. And the announcer tells us un-ironically cut to Washington and the car : “Here’s a couple of things America got right. Cars and freedom.”

It seems like everyone wants to talk about freedom. It was the title of a horrid, six and a half minute George Michael[1] song that was released the year some of you were born and it is the climactic line of one of the best movies of all time. Shoot we even briefly used the term to describe fried potatoes.

Everyone wants to talk about freedom, but it seems like one of those words (like love or happiness) that so many people use to mean so many different things that it doesn’t really mean anything in particular any more.

But whatever freedom actually is, we’ve all felt pangs of something we want to call freedom. For each of us in this room, there was a moment freshman year, for some of you, it was in the past week, when it suddenly dawned on you, “I’m totally free.” I could literally do whatever I want right now. I could be whoever I want. I remember exactly where I was when the full impact of my new freedom dawned on me freshman year. It was exhilarating…and a little terrifying. All of the constraints I had felt in my parents’ house were gone…but so were the excuses. I was totally free, which meant I was totally free to fail.

You see, culturally we usually use the word freedom to refer to an unqualified good. Freedom is always better than constraint. But when the prolific existential philosopher and famous atheist Jean Paul Sartre tried to summarize his philosophy in a few words, he said that the stark reality of the human condition is that we are ‘condemned to be free[2].’ Sartre found the weight of unlimited options crushing because it brought with it such a dreadful responsibility. I suspect some of you are experiencing that tension, whether you are freshman and are new to this peculiar social experiment we call college, or maybe you got a couple years under your belt and feel like there has to be a better way to negotiate the freedoms and responsibilities of these college years. Well, what we want to do with our introductory series, over the next three weeks is to look at some counter-intuitive things Jesus and the Christian scriptures have to say about freedom and explore some of the resources the Christian worldview offer to help you actually experience freedom and avoid counterfeit versions.

You see, Jesus and the Christian Scriptures have a pretty radical vision of what freedom really is…and what it isn’t. According to Jesus, freedom is not just autonomy. It is not just the absence of constraints. It is not just being able to do whatever you want to do. Freedom, in the Christian worldview, is voluntarily selecting the constraints that were designed for human flourishing. The Christian paradox of freedom is that it costs you your autonomy. But the subtle paradox of autonomy is that it is usually an illusion.

One of the things we want to say to you tonight, as you are just starting a new year in this place (and maybe just starting your first year in this place), is that if someone is promising you freedom, make sure they can deliver. The Scriptures warn, that many who promise freedom, don’t actually even know what it is. Look with me at this passage from the Christian Scriptures:

2 Peter 2:19 They promise freedom, while they themselves are slaves of depravity—for a man is a slave to whatever has mastered him.

When I read this verse, I immediately think of a little green bear.

I went to undergrad at a little state school in upstate NY. And in the center of town, just east of campus, there was a big fountain in the middle of the road. And on top of that fountain there sat a little bronze bear. Now this little bear is a celebrity in this town. It even has its own facebook page.

But this local celebrity also had a legend associated with it, which I heard for the first time during my freshman orientation. Legend had it that if anyone ever graduated this school and by some cosmic confluence of bad luck and prudishness was still a virgin, that on that day, this little bronze bear would climb down from his perch, and walk out of town. Yet year after year, (click) there he sat, for 122 years, a little bronze monument to the sexual freedom of the American University.


So…you can imagine my surprise, when I logged on to the university web site recently and found this.

About a year ago, the bear went missing. And so, it had finally happened. Some poor, repressed, soul had gotten too busy with chess club and made it through 4 years at a college campus without having sex, and the little bronze bear, well that was just more than he could take.[3] He up and left town.

Now, the real story was that the bear had just been removed as part of a project to restored the fountain which, after 122 years of Western NY winters, was totally falling apart.[4] But the message of this little morality tale that I was told on the first day of my freshman experience was clear. The morality tale of the bronze bear was meant to offer us freedom. The moral of the story was that everyone gets laid in college. It is a time of sexual experimentation. So don’t be so uptight about it. Have fun with your bodies. Enjoy your new freedom.

But be careful, because “They promise freedom, while they themselves are slaves of depravity—for a man is a slave to whatever has mastered him.”

The thing I didn’t get about this from the start was “How is this really a message of freedom? “ What is the actual message of the parable of the bronze bear?
The actual message here is that:
Your sexual appetites are too strong
…resistance is futile
…you are at the deterministic mercy of your biology.
Therefore sexual degradation and experimentation are inevitable in college.

And somehow, this is supposed to be a message of freedom. How is that freedom? How is that not constraint?

Those who are offering freedom are saying that sexual forces that will pull at you in college are too powerful to be denied. Your sexual impulses are stronger than you are given the buffet of opportunities that university life provides. So just let it happen and get over the antiquated social pressures that cause you guilt. In other words, your sexual impulses are your master. You serve your sexuality. It owns you. Or, in other words, you are the bear’s bitch.[5] That is not freedom. Many of those who claim to offer you freedom in this place, are not themselves free. They serve their appetites.

“They promise freedom, while they themselves are slaves of (their impulses and their appetites) (φθορά[6])—for a man is a slave to whatever has mastered him.”

Three years before David Foster Wallace tragically took his life in 2008, he gave a commencement speech at Kenyon college. Now, I love Wallace. His has actually had a pretty substantial influence on me and his death was a blow. But to my knowledge, he was not remotely a Christian or even a theist. Which made his comments in this speech particularly intriguing. He said:

Here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it JC or Allah, bet it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.

If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. …

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear.

Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out….

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on these default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self…The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation.

Or in other words: “They promise freedom, while they themselves are slaves of depravity—for a man is a slave to whatever has mastered him.” or in DFW’s language – a man is a slave to whatever he chooses to worship.

Because freedom is not the absence of constraints, it is choosing the ones that were designed for our best.

Appetites are brutal masters – the more you give them the more they want.

Academic recognition and professional success are merciless masters. If you live for academic success and fail, academic success is not going to forgive you. It doesn’t love you. Your dreams will not let you off the hook if you fail them.

There is only one master who cares more about you than you care about yourself. There is only one master whose constraints are, without exception, for your good. Jesus.

You see, freedom is not autonomy. Freedom is not living without constraint. It is not living for your impulses and appetites. Freedom is choosing the right constraints. Freedom is choosing the right master. Freedom is selecting the master and constraints that enhance our humanity, that optimize human flourishing. But the world (particularly the University) is full of stuff that would entangle our hearts and diminish us.

And this is the central message of Christianity. The great paradox of the Christian worldview, is that freedom comes from giving yourself to Jesus. But the reason this ends up making sense, that freedom comes from belonging, is that he does my life better than I would. There is a poem in the Hebrew Scriptures that says ‘his boundaries are set for me in pleasant places.’ He is the only master who cares about you more than you do and his constraints are not arbitrary and capricious rules for your torture but wisdom for your best. Our hope from the start has been that CL would be a place for two kinds of people: those who have made a commitment to belong to Jesus and are trying to figure out what that looks like and those who are spiritually curious and wonder who this Jesus guy is. But really we are all the same. We all need to do the same thing to experience more freedom in our lives. We all need to give ourselves to Jesus.

And so, the heart of the Christian teaching on freedom is that Freedom counter-intuitively emerges from choosing the right master, Jesus. But over the next three weeks we want to look a little bit more carefully at a few specific resources that the Christian world view offers to help you find freedom at college.

In two weeks, Laeya will talk about how a Christian theology actually leads to a life of balance…how belonging to Jesus helps you to achieve a peaceful equilibrium between competing claims on your time.

Next week, Dan will talk about the life of the Spirit, and how the Christian scriptres teach that there are supernatural resources available to help you experience the kind of freedom that you were designed for.

But, finally, with the seven minutes or so I have left, I would like to investigate the primary resource Jesus gives us to maintain a life of freedom, which is not particularly supernatural seeming but is extremely effective. Jesus’ primary resource for helping us maintain a life of freedom is community. The second paradox of Christian freedom is that it is not only found in giving yourself to Jesus, but also in giving yourself to a community of his people. Let me read you one more scripture.

Hebrews 12:1 Let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us.”

I just want to observe two quick things about verse. The insight the Scriptures bring to an understanding of personal freedom is that our hearts entangle easily.[7] Our heart desperately wants to love something intensely. If it is not set on the one it was meant to love it can end up fixated on disappointing half loves. This verse warns that it is easy to get entangled.
But the second really interesting thing about this scripture is that even though it is using a race metaphore, which is an individual event, it uses corperate language.

“Let US throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let US run with perseverance the race marked out for US.”

One of the surprising things about Jesus following is that it is irreducibly corporate. Many people are willing to belong to Jesus, because, well, he is pretty great, but they draw the line at belonging to a people, because, well, we are often annoying, hypocritical and socially awkward. But notice the corporate language in this passage. If we want the freedom Jesus offers…if we want to avoid the things that can entangle our hearts[8] we can’t do it as an ‘I’. We have to do it as an ‘us’. Christianity is irreducibly corporate. Experiencing true freedom, selecting the right constraints, and avoiding entanglement by vesting our affections in things that disappoint, these things are most effectively accomplished in community.

I want to wrap up with a brief illustration. This is Hank Green a video blogger who alternates posts with his brother John. In this post, he talks about a new project that another video blogger by the name of “Dan Brown” has taken on:



I am convinced that Dan and Hank have tapped into something totally fundamental here. Jesus meant us to help each other to figure out what to do with this. And that is why we think that the most important thing you could do at the beginning of the year is to join a small group. It will cost you some autonomy. You will give a weekly night to six to ten other people, which, I get it, is an enormous cost. But it is worth it. community is fundamentally empowering. By helping you avoid entanglement and helping you ‘figure out what to do with this’ community generates opportunities for you to flourish, which isn’t a bad working definition of freedom.

Don’t confuse Jesus for a Jedi master. The way of the Jedi is non-attachment…but look what happened to them. The way of Jesus is community. In Christianity, community is the conduit of freedom. It is helping each other avoid entanglements and to choose healthy constraints. It is helping each other to figure out what to do with this.

In summary, freedom from a Christian world view is not the absence of constraint. It is selecting the constraints that were designed for human flourishing and the master that cares more about us than we do. And the first great resource that Christianity offers to get there is a community of Jesus followers, involved in each others lives in non-trivial ways. So we really hope that you this community or one of the other excellent Christian ministries on campus. We hope you will stick around, join a small group and:

“Help Me…Figure Out…What to Do With This.”

__________________________
[1] Really, the only kind of George Michael song there is.
[2] “because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.” Being and Nothingness
[3] Just an aside, it is kind of creepy that this thing kept such close tabs on our sex lives.
[4] And we knew this, because many of us did, in fact, graduate from that school as virgins, including myself, my wife and many of our friends.
[5] This should be cut, but I really don’t want to.
[6] Phthora - (fthor-ah') - From phtheiro; decay, i.e. Ruin (spontaneous or inflicted, literally or figuratively) -- corruption, destroy, perish.
[7] Jesus, as is his way, articulates the idea in the form of a story. He says that some people’s spiritual journeys are like a seed that grows quickly early on but is eventually entangled by weeds. When he was asked what the story meant he said that some make take an initial interest in him but “as they go on their way they are choked by life's worries, riches and pleasures, and they do not mature.” They become entangled by their fears and appetites and loose the opportunity for a life of freedom
[8] I want to do something with this like The human heart can not bear a vacuum. It is not satisfied unless it has something to love intensely. – maybe after the sower passage

Acts for the Rest of Us: Underrated Accounts of ‘Ordinary’ Christianity

Note: This was an odd message from a construction point of veiw. It actually grew out of a blog post that I wrote a couple months ago. The post is more technical than the message, but tries to convey the same content. It can be found here.

Mp3 here

A few weeks ago, I posted a question on my facebook. I’m going to repeat it here, and I promise you this is going somewhere.

“Why is it that movies usually include kissing and seldom include pooping?”

You can always count on me for important philosophical questions. This led to a lively exchange. Some of my some of my friend’s felt is was important to remind me of famous pooping scenes from various films. But my favorite response was by a man of many talents. Ray, the guy who probably gave you your nametag, wrote:

Apparently, he is not just an accomplished grant writer and a Mexican wrestler…he’s also a poet.
It can be summarized in one word. “Selection.”[1] Story telling is by its very nature selective. Take, for example, the recent film 500 days of Summer. It was 95 minutes long. That means that they left out 719,905 minutes of the story. If you have to make those kinds of cuts, sleeping and bathroom time are the first to go. But you can bet they include the first kiss, because it is important to the story.[2]

On the whole, this is good and helpful. No one is clamoring for more bathroom scenes in films. But, you have to understand the nature of selective story telling when you read the narrative books of the Bible, like, say, the book of Acts. Think about it, the book of Acts took 30 years to happen and only takes a couple hours to read. This is, on the whole, a good thing because, let’s face it, the Bible is a relatively longish book with a fair number of nap inducing sections as it is. But the selective nature of Biblical narrative can also be problematic. We can be left with the idea that normative Christianity is a string of miracles, cataclysmic break throughs and harrowing adventures.

When we read the Book of Acts we remember the miracle at the pool, Peter’s great sermon, Paul’s conversion…the dramatic moments. And then, when we compare them to our relatively normal lives, we can feel diminished…disappointed in ourselves and underwhelmed by the acts of God in our generation. There appears to be an empirical disconnect between the dynamic works of God on the pages of Scripture and the repetitive monotony of our daily lives.

In two weeks we are going to start our ‘big questions’ series and I am going to lead off with the #1 vote getter by any metric. The Problem of Uninspiring Christianity. But one of the issues with looking out over contemporary Christianity and finding it uninspiring in comparison to the Biblical story, is that you are comparing real life, which is unfolding in real time with all of the proverbial ‘bathroom scenes’ to a highlight reel. Do you wish that your life was more exciting, that you heard from God more, that you saw more miracles like the people in the Bible…well, you know what, so did they.

What Biblical narrative necessarily omits is the tedium. So you have to read the ‘white space.’ You have to read it with your eyes open for the uneventful MONTHS that Paul spent on the road between Antioch and Ephesus. You have to feel the lonely hours of chasing elusive sleep on some cold bumpy surface as Paul and his companions shivered the night away on a creaky ship navigating uneven seas.[3]

Between Paul’s conversion in Acts 9 and the account of Barnabas seeking him out to help with the church in Antioch 18 unremarkable years pass where Paul presumably stays put and does nothing worth recording. But this is hardly surprising. Remember Moses spent 40 years tending’s sheep before God used him for a couple years to lead his people. Shoot, the God of the universe spent 30 years working as a carpenter before a 3 year ministry.

In a sense, the last three weeks (my talk on Acts 17 at the end of last quarter, Adam on Acts 19 two weeks ago and me again on Acts 20 last week) have been, in a sense, a mini-series within our larger series on the book of Acts. In each of these passages, Adam and I mined the methods and message of Paul to find some principles that could inform our attempts to serve Jesus in this place. But the truth is, for most of us Paul is hard to indentify with precisely for the same reason that he makes such a good story. His passion and discipleship are normative and worth modeling…but his life and calling were peculiar to him.

Even in Acts, we see that the strength of the church was not in a few all stars, but in many quiet individuals making unnoticed contributions, undocumented sacrifices and understated adventures. Paul’s life makes good story precisely because it is NOT normative Christianity. Some of you may be called to those kinds of crazy adventures, but most of you will be called to contentment in the midst of raising children for Jesus, being faithful in a marriage a job and a ministry, stinging together several dozen quiet but strong years of love and service.[4] Instead of enduring ship wrecks and snake attacks you will be called to open your home to your co-workers and mentor the youth in your community.

But the truth is, that careful reading of Biblical narrative, yields compelling stories of people living ‘normal’ Christian lives well. So I just want to spend the rest of my time to relate two stories that Luke tells about guys not named Peter or Paul…stories that mostly reside in the white space of your Bible. I like to call them two stories with high coolness to ink ratio.[5] Two underrated stories in Acts, compelling in their ordinariness. Acts for the rest of us, if you will.

Philip’s Second Adventure: The Daddy Years

But Philip is the most interesting human character in the book of Acts, as far as I am concerned. But his story hardly seems like it should count as one of the underrated stories of Acts. We have already had a whole talk about him. In the fall Kevin told us Philip’s story from Acts 8.

He was a multi-cultural pioneer.[6] He was young, adventurous, brash, spiritually sensitive, and slightly impetuous. Acts 8 describes him performing miracles, preaching and healing the sick in Samaria without regard to the bitter racial hatred that should have kept him far away from ‘those people.’ He baptized an African man chapters before the rest of the church realized that Christianity was more than just a Jewish sect. He lived exciting months as a gospel pioneer from city to city; going on adventures and living daily the power of God. But the last we hear from him in Acts 8:40 is in Caesarea.

Acts 8:40 “Philip, however, appeared at Azotus and traveled about, preaching the gospel in all the towns until he reached Caesarea.”

After that he simply disappears from the story. Most people extrapolate from his early adventures and figure he spent his life doing crazy stuff for God in lands so distant that the stories simply didn’t make it back to Luke, due to their shear remoteness.

But that is not what happened.

We meet up with Philip one more time 20 years after his adventures. Paul stops in Ceserea between Miletus (where he met the Ephesian Elders in last week’s passage) on his way to Jerusalem (Acts 21[7]). Verse 8:

Acts 21:8 "Leaving the next day, we reached Caesarea and stayed at the house of Philip the evangelist, one of the Seven.[8] 9He had four unmarried daughters who prophesied. "

Paul finds Philip just where we left him, in Ceserea. The English text says he had 4 unmarried daughters but the Greek word is woman of marriageable age, meaning that for the youngest to be of marriageable age, the oldest would have to have been 18 or 19…in other words, his oldest child was born shortly after his arrival in Caesarea 20 years ago in Acts 8. FF Bruce essentially says, ‘Do the math…Philip met a girl in Caesarea and it put an end to his missional gallivanting.’

The shockingly normal story told in the white space of the text is that the fiery young Philip almost certainly met a girl when he reached Caesarea and live 20 faithful years as a generous, committed, active servant to his local church and community…and as an exceptional father. Some of the earliest church historians describe these daughters as key figures in the second generation of Christianity. According to these accounts, one of them went on to become a physician tending almost exclusively to the poor and destitute. God had a second adventure for Philip…as a daddy.

Philip spent 18 years elapsed between his brief adventure (in Acts 6) and hosting Paul (in Acts 21) changing diapers, whipping spit up, getting out of bed every morning and going to work, dealing with the drama of drama teenage girls. Yet Luke still esteems him ‘Philip the evangelist’. These are good strong years for Philip…the kind of years that the kingdom of God is built out of…the kind of years he should be proud of…the kind of years we could be proud of…but not the kind of years that ‘make the Bible.’ And, this is what is so widely misunderstood. The fact that we don’t hear the story of these years is evidence that they are more, not less, normative

Some of you may go to Uganda or Italy this summer or any of a range of wild adventures. Like Barnabas or Paul, you might decide that long term cross cultural ministry is for you. You really should go totally open to the idea. God might call you to a different sort of adventure, of having a family and raising kids to serve God in our broken culture.[9]

There is a subtle warning of the story of Philip is that the desire for adventure and significance can be an idol.[10] It can be unspiritual pride. If you are doing the Jesus thing for the adventure or for feelings of significance and not for Jesus himself, something is wrong. God could ask you to a sacrificial itinerant life like Paul or, like Philip, after some early adventures he could ask you to the sacrifice of parenthood and contentment serving Jesus in a community and a local church.

John Mark’s Second Chance: Failure is Never Final

The second story, shocking in its normalness, is the story of John Mark. In Acts 13 Mark accompanies his cousin Barnabas and Paul on their first trip. But, after they have a mildly terrifying encounter with a sorcerer at their first stop, Mark decides it is not for him. He goes home instead of continuing on with the team. Luke scarcely mentions it:

Acts13:13 “From Paphos, Paul and his companions sailed to Perga in Pamphylia, where John left them to return to Jerusalem.”

But this decision led to one of the ugliest stories in the book of Acts…starting in chapter 15 verse 36 (printed on your handout):

Acts 15:36“Some time later Paul said to Barnabas, "Let us go back and visit the brothers in all the towns where we preached the word of the Lord and see how they are doing." 37Barnabas wanted to take John, also called Mark, with them, 38but Paul did not think it wise to take him, because he had deserted them in Pamphylia and had not continued with them in the work. 39They had such a sharp disagreement that they parted company. Barnabas took Mark and sailed for Cyprus, 40but Paul chose Silas and left, commended by the brothers to the grace of the Lord.”

I’ve said this before in our series on Acts, but this is a really messy story. If Luke was simply interested in painting the best possible picture of the early days of Christianity he would have conveniently omitted stuff like this.[11]

But what we see again and again in the Scriptures that it is the grit and mess of life that is often the most fertile ground for redemption.[12]

The point of the story of John Mark is that, if you belong to Jesus, failure is never final.[13]

Years later, Paul writes a letter to the Church in Colosse and in the boring list of names at the end of that letter, we find this gem.

Colossians 4:10 “My fellow prisoner Aristarchus sends you his greetings, as does Mark, the cousin of Barnabas.[14] (just to make sure they are clear which Mark he is talking about) (You have received instructions about him; if he comes to you, welcome him.)[15]”

Colossians finds Mark, once again, in Paul’s small inner circle of trusted traveling companions. Paul tells the church, forget what you might have heard about me and Mark, we’re good. Mark gets another chance because, in Jesus, failure is never final.

Think for a minute about the implications of this principle: failure is never final. Think of how freeing that story is. The application is, try stuff, take risks…because even if it flops, in Jesus, failure is never final. If we were to take this seriously, the church could be the most innovative place on earth, full of daring new ideas, because it is the only place where failure is never final.

Rock Band and Relay for Life Illustration

At some point in your life, you will be John Mark. You will try something and it will go catastrophically poorly. Count on it. The question you need to ask yourself, is are you going to let it take you out, or will you recover, and try something else.

There is another side to this idea, however. At some other point in your life, someone you care about will let you down. They will disappoint you. Think about Paul in this story. It is easy to see how he could have harbored bitterness towards Mark. Mark not only disappointed him but was the catalyst of an ugly confrontation and a deep rift in his closest friendship. But if failure is never final in Jesus, the people who let you down, they get another chance.

So, what I wanted to do with my last talk in this great book was to try to demonstrate that it is not just a story about a few special people like Peter and Paul. It is a story about a lot of normal people like you and me. Don’t be intimidated by the Biblical highlight reel. Live for Jesus today. Live for Jesus tomorrow. And when you look back on your complete story, you will have a pretty remarkable highlight reel of your own…but more importantly, you will have many faithful days lived for him.

_________
[1] I planned to show a great clip here from Sports Night (season 1 episode 2) where Jeremy is in charge of making a 30 second highlight clip of a baseball clip and is unable to get it under 8 minutes.
[2] There is one exception to this…24…but even in 24 there are several stories going on at once and Keifer Southerland can somehow mysteriously make it across LA at rush hour in 15 minutes.
[3] I mean, it is highly likely, that Paul got sea sick and booted over the side of a boat often…but it doesn’t make the Bible.
[4]Here is what I find annoying about Acts. Believe it or not, I don’t particularly like Paul. I find him abrasive and a little annoying. I don’t think he and I would be close friends. As a side note, I think this augments rather than diminishes his qualifications to be used by the Holy Spirit to author Scripture. One of the outstanding things about the scriptures is that God used personalities as diverse as Paul and John to write it. Far from undermining its message, it shows that the Christian story is not only for a single temperament and that ministry is not pigeon holed by personality type. I don’t have to enjoy Paul to esteem him.
[5] Sometimes the best stories only get a few words, and are only yielded to the careful reader.
[6] He was the first to realize that the gospel was for the Gentiles. He baptized an African guy chapters before the rest of the church felt comfortable extending the faith outside of the Jewish community.
[7] on his way back from his meeting with the Ephesian Elders
[8] Luke adds this to assure us that this is, in fact, the same Philip from Acts 8.
[9] But you will notice, Philip jumps at the opportunity to host Paul, he never looses interest in the global mission of the gospel.
[10] If this idea is new or intriguing to you, I highly recommend my brother, Nic’s, excellent talk “Anatomy of a Sellout” – mp3 here
[11] I looked in vein for art illustrating this passage. Once again, it seems only the skeptics like this passage.
[12] Fruit grows best out of s***. Failure is the metaphorical Nitrogen of the Kingdom.
[13] We usually read this passage as Mark’s failure but as I already implied in an earlier note, I often wonder if it wasn’t extremely difficult to serve with Paul. For all his dedication and intellect and reckless passion, he may have overwhelmed more sensitive personalities. I wonder if the Collosians text isn’t a mea culpa.
[14] Notice, again, the care taken to make sure we know he is talking about the same Mark.
[15] Ancient traditions credit the young man with authorship of the second gospel.

Doing College Without Regrets: Paul’s Reunion with the Ephesians Elders (Acts 20)

Acts 20:13-38

MP3 here

In the opening scenes of Gladiator, Maximus Decimus Meridius of the Armies of the North, General of the Felix Legions is about to lead the Roman cavalry in a risky and courageous charge in the epic opening battle. He clasps forearms with his Quintus his first Lieutenant, looks him in the eye and says three words: ‘Strength and Honor’ – Quintus replies ‘strength and honor’ and the phrase ripples through the ranks of those closest to him: ‘strength and honor’ ‘strength and honor’ ‘strength and honor’. Now fast forward 90 minutes into the film, Maximus is a slave and a gladiator. He is trapped in a compound with surrounded by the Roman guard who want to kill him. There is a brief pause in the action while the soldiers break down the gate. Riddley Scott uses this pause in the action for a brief, quiet scene where Maximus looks around at a small unsavory group of gladiators who until now had fought out of motivations of self preservation. He says to them:

“I only need moments, so do not be careless with your lives.”
“If you don't want any part of this, go back to your cells.”

They do not flinch. They have obviously come to love him. To a man, they look back at him and reply in unison “Strength and honor.” This scene kills me. At this point in the film, the room invariably gets mysteriously dusty. But this is actually a conventional narrative device in action movies. I call it ‘the buddy scene.’ Near the end of many action films, there is a brief break in the action, where the characters who are about to face their death in the final scenes, have an opportunity to talk and communicate how much they have come to care for each other. There are great examples of this in Glory, Serenity[1] and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid[2] to name just a few.

Maybe the most famous ‘buddy scene’ of all pre-dates these other examples by about four centuries. In Shakespeare’s Henry the fifth, just before the young king is about to lead his army into a battle where he is outnumbered 5 to 1[3] he gathers his troops and says:

This story shall the good man teach his son…
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember'd;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother

So, why do I go into all this? Because I am convinced that this is precisely what Luke, the author of Acts, is doing in chapter 20. The later chapters of Acts read like an action film. Extended speeches that characterize the early chapters are replaced with riots and shipwrecks and snake attacks in the later chapters. And the opening verses of today’s passage fit the frantic pace of an action film. In fact, v 16, actually sets the pace by explicitly stating ‘they were in a hurry.’ Then they hit 5 islands in 2 verses. If this was a film, verses 14 and 15 would be a sea faring montage.

And this is how the final chapters of Acts go, Luke takes us from city to city, from danger to danger, from jail cell to ship wreck. It is a high pace action film…with one major exception…the rest of Acts 20. Acts 20 is Luke’s ‘buddy scene.’ Before they face their respective deaths in the final chapters of Acts, Paul gathers the Christian leaders he served with during his years in Ephesus one last time and it becomes clear how much they all mean to each other. NT Wright describes Acts 20 like this:

“Here we see Paul in a different mode, vulnerable, meditative…It is as though we have finally found him, no longer running around in a blur, but sitting for long enough to have his portrait painted.”

You almost expect the passage to end with the Ephesians elders saying ‘strength and honor.’

Acts 20 is a totally different kind of story.[4] This is the only speech in Acts addressed to Christians.[5] In it Paul reflects on the three years he spent in Ephesus with the people he came to love there.[6] And it becomes clear has no regrets. It is not a coincidence that the first time this passage really came alive to me was in my last semester of undergrad. I remember the day. I had found a quiet corner of the music building one morning and was just casually reading through Acts. I had read this story several times before. But, but this particular time, with my college years mostly in the rear view mirror, as I looked back over my own three years in that place, I resonated with Paul’s reflective, tone. A lot of people get to that point, where they look back on their college years, and say: “They were supposed to be the best years of my life…and they weren’t that great.”[7]

But as Paul looked back at his three years in Ephesus, Paul gives us at least three keys to doing college without regrets.[8]

1. He Finished the Race

Well, when Paul looked back on his three years in Ephesus, he used an athletic metaphor to describe that season of his life. He described it as a race. He said:

24However, I consider my life worth nothing to me, if only I may finish the race and complete the task the Lord Jesus has given me.”

He ran the race. Having been a runner, I find this metaphor an extremely vivid way to describe the college experience and I just want to highlight two things about it. The first thing you need to know about doing these years without regret, is that you need to do them with and for Jesus. You need to run the right race.

Almost ten years ago I was had a business trip to Denver and after the meeting I took a couple days off, rented a car, and climbed a couple mountains.[9] The first day I noticed that there was a major race through the town that I was staying near. The second day I climbed Mount Massive.

When I got to the summit I hung out there a while and several other climbers eventually came along including an attractive young woman who had climbed the mountain alone. There was also a dude that had climbed the mountain alone and I watched as made his way over and started to hit on her. I felt bad for the guy because it was pretty clear that she had just climbed the second tallest mountain in Colorado and wasn’t really interested in being chatted up.[10] But pretty soon it came out that they had both been in the race the previous day. Then they discovered that they had both placed second in their class. And she was totally beginning to warm up to him. I have to say that at that point, I thought his chances of getting a phone number were in the range of , say, 40%...until…he admitted that the reason he came in second was that he had missed a turn and cut several miles off the race...and even with that, someone beat him. Let’s just say, he went down that mountain alone. I think about this guy from time to time, though. He worked really hard. I’m sure he had a great race. But it was the wrong race. And he was left with regret…and no shot at the cute hiker.

The key to doing college without regret is to run the right race. You could work really hard in college. You could run a great race for your parents or for your future or for some cause or for some girl or some guy…but it’s the wrong race. Paul says that the key to looking back on his three years in Ephesus without regret was that he ran the race that Jesus Christ had given him. He ran with and for Jesus.

Paul could look back on his three years in Ephesus without regret because though, as we shall see, he had a lot going on while he was there, including a full time job, his time there belonged to Jesus from beginning to end.

Some of you may be running the wrong race. Maybe you are part way through your college years and are just realizing, ‘there has to be more than this.’ There is. You can finish the race for Jesus. Doing college with and for Jesus is the road to looking back at these years without regret and the great thing about Christianity in general and this community in particular, is that it is never too late to start running the right race.

A few months ago, Zach put this clip up on his facebook.



I love that clip, but my favorite part is the contrast between how the guard and the tackle respond to the broken play. The tackle realized that the game is going on without him and just lets it go. He is refused to join the play late. But the guard, once he realizes that the game is going on without him, he jumps out of his stance and makes a play. And a disaster turns into a respectable gain.

But some of you have been faithful in your first few years, and are thinking about coasting into the home stretch. To you, I think Paul would say, you want to leave this place without regret, leave it on the field…finish the race….complete the task.[11]

I have a close friend in who leads a college ministry comparable to CL at the University of Buffalo. We spent some time together this summer and he told me, ‘you can’t build a college ministry on seniors. They are done. They’re already looking to the next thing.’ I want to challenge you[12] to buck this trend. When I look at the kind of Senior Years that (just for example) Casie Wilson and Michelle Balaz are turning it, I think it is clear that you can build a college ministry on seniors running hard to the end. They are leaving it on the field.[13] (Of course, I also get the feeling they enjoyed their college experience). So Paul says the key to doing his three years in Ephesus without regret was to run the right race, the one Jesus set before him, and to complete it.

The second thing we notice about Paul’s look regret free retrospective is that:

2. He Worked Hard[14]

34You yourselves know that these hands of mine have supplied my own needs and the needs of my companions. 35In everything I did, I showed you that by this kind of hard work we must help the weak, remembering the words the Lord Jesus himself said: 'It is more blessed to give than to receive.' "

Paul’s time in Ephesus had something in common with your time at Davis. Christian community and ministry happened on his own time despite substantial competing commitments of a ‘secular vocation’. He was what we call ‘bivocational’ just like many of you who are trying to balance Christian community and ministry and enormous academic and even work commitments. The flat reality is that if you are going to make time for God at college, you are going to have to work hard.

But here is the interesting thing about Paul’s approach: did not separate his life into ‘secular’ and ‘spiritual’. Both his ministry and his work were done for God. Whatever he was doing, he was throwing himself into it. But he also worked hard so that he would have something left over to give.

Don’t write your studies off as unspiritual. Whatever you do, do it fully. Work hard at your studies because they are a great privilege and the vocation that God has called you to in this season. But if you are going to make time for Jesus, his people and his purposes in college, you are also going to have to work hard at your studies to produce the margins your life needs to ‘run the race’.

But here is the thing about Kingdom hard work done with and for Jesus. There is a lightness to it. There is a sweetness to it. There is a joy in it. And, Paul teaches elsewhere, that it is because in a non-trivial way, God himself gets involved with it.[15] Check out these two other places where Paul talks about hard work:

1Cor 15:10 “But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me was not without effect. No, I worked harder than all of them—yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me.”

Col 1:29 “To this end I labor, struggling with all his energy, which so powerfully works in me.”

But here is the catch. You only get to claim his power if you are after his purposes.

Finally, the third thing we see about why Paul looked back at his three years in Ephesus without regret is:


3. He Developed Intimate Jesus Focused Friendships[16]

36When he had said this, he knelt down with all of them and prayed. 37They all wept as they embraced him and kissed him. 38What grieved them most was his statement that they would never see his face again. Then they accompanied him to the ship.

This is almost a romantic passage. This passage practically drips with tenderness and intimacy. These guys have so much genuine affection for each other that they are sneaking around despite the non-trivial risk of death, just to see each other one last time.[17] The Ephesians had to make at least a day’s journey to Militus and Paul must have paused at least three days for this meeting…each day increasing the probability that he would hit rough winter seas on the way to Jerusalem. You cannot read this passage carefully without coming away with the realization that it documents a serious ‘bromance.’ And this made me think of a song:[18]



From: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lL4L4Uv5rf0

Slide: “Can’t one heterosexual guy tell another heterosexual guy he thinks his booty’s fly”[19]

Platonic guy love is considered weird in our culture…but it thrives in the church. And particularly, here in this community. And there is a reason that bromance (as well as substantial, intimate relationships between women that is more socially expected and, thus, does not have a cool moniker) is a mark of Christian community.


It is because the strongest most intimate friendships are about something bigger than the friendship.[20] The great irony of friendship is the same irony we found when we talked about marriage. Relational intimacy is undermined by the quest for relational intimacy in and of itself. It emerges from a shared external passion.

Friendships based on the emotional goods and services that the friend provides are fragile because as soon as they don’t offer that service, the friendship is disposable. My favorite line in mewithoutYou’s new album gets at this idea: “when they say my love is real, they mean I like the way you make me feel”

But friendships based on a shared passion or mission tend to sustain. The emotional benefits are a substantial side effect of a relationship that is based on bigger things but they are not the thing in itself. The paradox is that because the friendship is focused on something other than the friendship, it is more durable and more fulfilling. [21]

CS Lewis tackles this idea in his book: The Four Loves “That is why those pathetic people who simply “want friends” can never make any. The very condition of having Friends is that we should want something else besides Friends…[22]There would be nothing for the Friendship to be about; and Friendship must be about something, even if it were only an enthusiasm for dominoes or white mice. Those who have nothing can share nothing; those who are going nowhere can have no fellow-travellers.”

Friendships that are based on something bigger than how the person makes you feel are more substantive, more intimate and last longer. Friendships base on a joint passion for Jesus have the added benefit of outlasting death itself. If you throw yourself into a Jesus centered life during your college years and are intentional about doing it in community, there are people in this room who will be at your wedding…because you cannot be involved in something as real and as transformative as serving Jesus without developing sustained and genuine affection for those who are doing it with you.

And here is one of the truly original things about friends in the Church. It often looks weird because of its intimacy but also because of the pairings. You find some of the most unlikely friendships in the church because the intimacy does not emerge from sameness of personality but sameness of passion.

Let me wrap up with a story. Near the end of my college experience I was in the science building studying for my last final. The lab started out full of well meaning students but as it wore on, one by one, they opted for either their beds or the bars (and more for the latter than the former). Finally, it was just me and a geologist named Lauren. Then, three guys from the campus ministry I served with showed up. These are guys who, for three years, I had prayed with, worked with, grown with and faced disappointment with. They convinced me to take an hour study break to toilet paper our college pastor’s van. And so I did. I made it back to the lab around 2 just as Lauren was leaving, so I offered to walk her home before I got back to my studying. On the way to her place she asked where I disappeared to suggesting ‘I don’t exactly have you pegged as a bar guy.’ I told her what had happened and wrapped up the little story by saying, without really thinking about it, ‘It was totally worth it. I really love those guys.’ She was quiet. Then she looked at me and said, “You know Stan, you’re really lucky. I am about to leave this place, and can’t say that about anyone I have met here.”

You want to do college without regrets? Do you want to look back on your three to five years here and feel that they were well spent? Get connected to a Christian community if you aren’t. If you are…leave it on the field. Run the race to the end. Work hard, in your studies and in ministry. And throw yourself into friendships that are about something bigger than the friendship.

_________________
[1] I think this is the clearest example of what I am trying to get at. But I am sensitive to my own Joss bias, so I did not feature it.
[2] Amanda and I had a long discussion if this actually ‘counts’ as a buddy scene by my definition because it is, in some senses, a comedic deconstruction of the genere (despite being the oldest example). But I think that in the passive aggressive banter between Cassidy and Sundance (culminating in the epic line ‘for a minute there, I thought we were in trouble’) is the evidence of deep, mutual affection.
[3] Note: I was scanning the web for Henry V images and I found this film version rated NC 17 for “violence, action, bad hygiene”.
[4] And the detail. You get the sense that you are actually there. The passage starts with ‘we’ suggesting that Luke joined the party at this point and that this is an eye witness account.
[5] Several commentators agree that this is why the content of this speech, more than any other, correlates with the content of Paul’s letters – which essentially serve the same purpose but by a remote communication rather than a meeting.
[6] The longest he spent in any one place.
[7] I think I owe this observation to Cory Randolph
[8] Why is March Madness so popular? Why do people LOVE college football, even prefer it to the NFL, when the skill level of the athletes does not really compare. It is because it college sports are devastatingly final. Labron, Wade, Linscome, Manning, Brady, they will all have another shot at it next year. But college athletes, many of them will never again experience that sort of perceived significance. You can bet that they don’t wish those years away. Their stories are public. We get to experience their joy and heartbreak with them. We get to watch their regret. But their stories parallel the short window of potential significance and potential regret that typify the college years.
[9] Which, after sex and preaching, is my favorite thing to do…hold on, did I say that out loud. Actually, I didn’t – I cut it. This is just one reason why I write a manuscript and try to minimize extemporaneous banter.
[10] My wife wasn’t even there and I could hear her say, ‘get a clue dude, bad time’ as she has said about so many ill fated attempts to hit on her at the gym.
[11] Way too many sports illustrations in this point, but I had this one here:
I used to run track in HS to keep in shape for soccer. I ran the two mile. We had a distance coach that would run with us sometimes. I remember times that I felt like my body was about to shut down, he would tell me, “just run to the next telephone pole.” Then at that pole he would say ‘How about one more?’ and that went on until I had run through the pain and found the pace again.
“Run to the next pole.”
[12] I want to call out the Junior class here. We all know that you are one of the epic CL classes of all time. There is a tendency to fade out in campus ministry.
[13] For my fifth sports illustration in this point (interesting, since I don’t think I’ve used even one before in 1.66 years preaching at college life) I wanted to tell the story of the final soccer game of my High School year…but I will refrain.
[14] This point got cut in the final talk
[15] Rejected sports illustration #4 – this reminds me of the Olympics a few years ago when the Dad came out of the stage to help his injured son cross the finish line.
[16] This point may appear as indebted, as usual, to Keller. The truth is, in this case, the similarity is convergent (independently developed and later recognized as similar) rather than genitive (due to me stealing). I would be lying if I said that this did not thrill me.
[17] I didn’t have a good place to put this, but really liked it: “to need and to want deep friendships is not a sign of spiritual immaturity but a sign of maturity. It is not a sign of weakness but of health. If you are lonely, you are not dysfunctional, you are fine. You are lonely because you are not a tree.” -Keller
[19] Flight of the Conchord’s reference:
[20] It is only weird if the foundation of the intimacy is soley the emotional connection.
[21] Amanda and I have talked about this and realized that many of the friendships that we maintain from college have moved beyond the point where the friendship is based on the performance of the friend. They have become grace based. We are unconditionally for them.
[22] ellipsis: “Where the truthful answer to the question Do you see the same truth? would be “I see nothing and I don’t care about the truth; I only want a Friend,” no Friendship can arise—though Affection of course may.”
Here are two more Four Loves quotes: "It is therefore easy to see why Authority frowns on Friendship. Every real Friendship is a sort of secession, even a rebellion. It may be a rebellion of serious thinkers against accepted clap-trap or of faddists against accepted good sense; of real artists against popular ugliness or of charlatans against civilized taste; of good men against the badness of society or of bad men against its goodness. Whichever it is, it will be unwelcome to Top People.”
“The Friendship is not a reward for our discrimination and good taste in finding one another out. It is the instrument by which God reveals to each the beauties of all the others.”