There is a long standing college tradition to head south for the vacation that happens in March or April …some people like to call it (air quotes) “Spring Break”. Apparently the way this tradition goes, you are supposed to go to a beautiful place...
...with beautiful people...
...and do things that you will almost certainly regret...
…and of course the pictures end up on facebook.Now, even though I have had a full time job for over a decade, I have been continuously enrolled at one university or another for over 15 years…but had never actually experimented with this tradition. So this year, when spring break rolled around, I got on a plane and I headed south.
But I’m not sure I did it right…because 91% of Latin American countries have beaches…but I went to one of the two that don’t…I went to Asuncion Paraguay…and while I was there I averaged 12 hour work days…It began to occur to me that perhaps I missed the point of this tradition.
But, really, how much can you expect of an Engineer on Spring Break. Well, except maybe for these guys.
“Engineers Gone Wild”[1]
(I don’t know what I am going to do for images when Frank graduates.)
But the cool thing about doing your Spring Break travel for work is that you don’t have to pay for it. My trip was paid for by one of the biggest slabs of concrete in the world…the Itaipu dam. It is 5 miles long, 640 ft high and produces more power than any dam in the world. Each one of those spillways releases more water than Niagara Falls.
But as I stood in the bowels of this almost comically immense structure, watching one of the penstocks turning water into power, I was reminded of my favorite themes in 2 Corinthians.
We talked about a number of great topics this year from the pages of 2 Corinthians: including stuff like comfort, joy, thankfulness, reconciliation, generosity. But you see, one of the great puzzles in life is how to tap into these things in a regular and sustained way.
What is the process that gives us sustained access to these things? How are they most fully and consistently experienced?
Many of us have had fleeting or episodic encounters with joy or comfort. Most of us have flirted with generosity and thankfulness. But…I don’t know about you, but more often than not, I find these things elusive. They seem like they are harder than they should be. Which is why I perk up when one of the Biblical authors gives us a clue about how they work. In 4 different places in 2 Corinthians Paul uses a metaphor to describe our experience of these things…and it has struck me that maybe things like joy and comfort and generosity elude us because we don’t entirely understand how they were meant to work. So we have spent 13 weeks over the course of the year studying this book and it has exhorted us to a bunch of helpful stuff. But I just want to wrap up this series and anticipate an evening of worship by asking one final question:
How do we move our experience of these things from episodic events to consistent lifestyles?
How do we experience these things more consistently.
And, it turns out, that for this talk, my expertise as a hydraulic engineer is useful for the first time ever here at college life…or actually, for the first time ever outside of my cubicle. Seriously, being an engineer is not really that interesting at dinner parties. One of my best friends is a wine maker, that is a great job to talk about at parties. When people ask me about my job, I try to change the subject as quickly as I can to keep the icy grips of boredom from taking control of the conversation. But, being a water engineer happens to matter tonight, because Paul actually uses a hydrologic metaphor, when he talks about how things like comfort and joy and generosity and gratitude work in our lives (Joy mechanics sight gag)…which is why it came to mind in the dark depths of that huge dam. The metaphor he uses to describe how we are supposed to experience these things: overflow. Look at four verses with me from different places in the book.
2 Cor 1:5 “For just as the sufferings of Christ flow over into our lives, so also through Christ our comfort overflows.”
2 Cor 4:15 “All this is for your benefit, so that the grace that is reaching more and more people may cause thanksgiving to overflow to the glory of God.”
2 Cor 8:2 “Out of the most severe trial, their overflowing joy and their extreme poverty, welled up in generosity.”
2 Cor 9:11 “This service that you perform is not only supplying the needs of God’s people but is also overflowing in many expressions of thanks to God.”
There are two aspects of this metaphor that I find interesting and that I want to briefly talk about tonight. If the dynamics of joy, thankfulness, comfort and generosity in our lives are best described by a metaphor of ‘overflow’ then there are two implications for tapping into these things in a consistent rather than episodic way. You need to:
1. Look for Opportunities to Spill Over
2. Hook into a Reliable Source
First, If you want to really experience joy, comfort, thankfulness or generosity you need to look for opportunities to spill over
Usually, when we think of something that we want more of, we see ourselves as a control volume, with a deficit. Say that our joy levels are at 30 units of joy and we need to acquire another 70 units of joy to fill up. And essentially, to keep joy levels up the sources of joy have to exceed the sinks.
But the implication of this ‘overflow’ language is that stuff like comfort and joy and gratitude and generosity are not things that you can really possess. They are only things you can experience as they pass through you.
This is the first way that the things God offers us are like the Itaipu dam. The dam doesn’t do any work by simply storing water. Water only becomes power when it passes through the dam.
Comfort was never meant to be just received. Joy is not a private exchange between you and God. These things do not really become what they are, until they pass through you on the way to someone else.
We are not designed to be receptacles of the things God gives us, we are meant to be conduits of these things. We are not vessels – we are superconductors.
And this is why Christianity is not a private faith. This is why Christianity is only Christianity if it is built around mission and in community. Essentially, joy, gratitude, generosity, comfort…these things we want from God…they cannot be stored. We can’t fill up on joy and then use it over the course of time. You don’t get to hoard joy. It has to pass through you to do its best work. The only way to get a sustained effect is to pass it around.
In Cory’s passage from a couple of weeks ago, Paul compared the stuff we get from God to the mana of the Exodus narrative. In this story, as God’s people wandered the desert, God essentially made it rain bread every morning. But it couldn’t be stored.
If they tried, it got moldy and wormy and, just plain gross. After one day, it looks like a container of mashed potatoes that had been hiding in the back of “The Bulge” fridge for six months. Joy is like Vitamin C…It doesn’t matter how much you consume today…I mean you walk out of here, go to the DC and flat out OD on 24 grapefruits… you will still need it tomorrow. You are going to need new joy and new generosity tomorrow… which means you are going to need to tie into a reliable source.
And this leads to the second insight from this overflow metaphore.
Second, If you want to really experience sustained joy, contentment, thankfulness or generosity you need to You need to hook into a reliable source
The ‘overflow’ metaphor is apt for our experience of joy, comfort, gratitude and generosity because if these things have a short residence time in our hearts. They don’t stay long. Our hearts generate entropy against them. So, we need to find a reliable constant external source.
You see, the Itaipu dam is not the biggest dam in the world – the Three gorges dam in China is bigger – but the Itaipu dam produces the most power because it is fed by rain forests and has new water flowing in year round. The water source for Three Gorges is mountainous which means it is flashier, more episodic and less reliable.
You could look at it this way: the overflow metaphor connects worship with community/mission. And this is why I am talking about this on a worship night. If joy is maximally experienced by passing through you to others – in the context of community and mission – then you need to tap into a consistent, reliable source of joy. And that is why worship is at the center of so much Christian theology and practice.
Now before I talk too much about worship, let me take a second to say, this thing we do, where we stand here each week, turn down the lights and sing for a while…it can be a little awkward. Some of us have been around the church long enough that we have just forgotten that it’s weird. But for some of you it is a little bit like a bad Family Guy gag (click)
that goes on just a little longer than you are comfortable with…
(Peter emerges from the copy room)
and then just keeps going.
I mean the aggie pack guy is raising his hands…he should have more dignity than that…well, unless UCD is beating Sac state.
And if you are a little confused about the purpose of this, well you are not alone…Google has demonstrated that they are a little confused about sung worship – and you can tell by their seemingly misguided attempt to monetize it.
I’d like to believe that this is highly misguided.We get it…its weird. And I’d also like to be very clear that the musical expression of worship is a very small part of what Christians mean when we use the word ‘worship’…but it is the emphasis of tonight so let’s run with it. Though culturally strange, we do not apologize for sung worship. This Christian practice has a very specific and valuable purpose. Artfully rehearsing truths about God and the gospel - together with others who have also experienced these things, but without the distraction of what the people around us are wearing or who they are looking at...this is one of the ways we ‘tap into’ the sorts of things that we want to pass through us.
Like a dam turns water into power (video)…you were designed to turn worship into contagious joy and surplus thankfulness. You were constructed to generate generosity, service and reconciliation from the raw materials of worship.
Postscript
But let me say one more thing about this overflow metaphor. So far we have talked about being an agent of overflow. But, every mature Christian I have ever met, and nearly all of the great theologians and mystics that constitute our 2000 year old tradition, they agree that for some reason, it is impossible to maintain a full time connection to the gushing source of joy, gratitude, generosity that is our God.
The Christian life is cyclical. Now, to unpack the hows and whys of this, it would take another talk. But, let me just assert that if you stick with Jesus, there will be days that he will be more real to you as than person sitting next to you, and there will be days where you will wonder if he called in sick to the whole ruling the universe thing. And there are theological reasons for why he seems to prefer to interact with us in this way. But part of the provision for this is ‘overflow.’ If we are in a worshiping community, then there will be days in which we are the overflower and days in which we are the overflowee. Essentially, the way God worked it out, there is always enough joy to go around, but that it is not always evenly distributed. If you are tapped into it, you spill it over into those you love…and if you are not getting it directly from the primary source, it is entirely legitimate to get it indirectly, from a secondary source. In addition to worship, meaningful Christian community is your rain forest. It keeps you flush with comfort and joy and generosity even when worship is hard work.
God intended for us to spill his goodness over into each other. And this is true with respect to psychological states like thankfulness, joy and comfort…but it is also true about material resources like time and money, which is why the ‘overflow’ metaphor shows up in the chapters on generosity that Cory covered. We toss around the phrase ‘God provides’ all the time…but the truth is that God does not provide on the level of the individual. God provides on the level of the community. He expects us to overflow into each other.
So, there are really just two things I want you to get out of my favorite hydrologic theme in the Bible. First, if you want to experience the things God offers, you have to be tapped into the source of these things. We call that worship. And while we recognize that some of our cultural expressions of worship are odd, we do not apologize for them. While our cultural expression of worship is somewhat arbitrary…the fundamental need to be worshipers is at the heart of our world view.
And second, God provides these things to a community, not necessarily to individuals. Even as a consistent worshiper, you will not experience the consistent joy or contentment that God wants for you alone because you will you will have no one to spill them into…and you won’t have anyone to spill them into you when you go dry. For you engineers, the control volume isn’t drawn around the individual, it is drawn around the community.
So, let me wrap up by unpacking this separately for Seniors and underclassman. First, Seniors, You have been an epic CL class. I count many of you as friends. Many of you have repeatedly overflowed grace into my life. And most of you have left it on the field. But even the most spiritually mature and theologically prepared of you are in for an enormous challenge . Making the transition from CL to a local church is probably going to be harder than you expect it to be. It is simply harder to find these meaningful friendships in an intergenerational local church. We have friends who have squandered their twenties trying whining about how the church is not like college ministry. So yes. It is going to be harder when you have a 9-5, and aren’t living within 100 yards of 50 Christians. But it’s possible…and it’s on you. If there isn’t a compelling structure set up for you to share your lives deeply with people you respect…make it happen. Don’t wait for someone to set up a compelling community for you…build one.
But most of you are underclassmen. Which is awesome, because it means that you have more years to represent Jesus on this campus. But if you are on the margins of this community make it your goal over the next 5 weeks to start build something that you want to come back to in the fall. The problem with a community this size is that it is hard to break into. And as much as Tuesday nights are the highlight of my week, you cannot find community at a gathering this size. If you want to connect with this community…if you want to find lifelong friends that you can spill over into and who will spill over into you – you have to eventually get into a growth group…or…COME ON RETREAT! There simply isn’t a better, more efficient way to you’re your people in this community to spill over into and that will spill over into you, than to come with us on retreat this weekend. If you have found Tuesday nights intriguing but look around the room and there still aren’t people who are spilling over into you…don’t leave Geidt tonight without filling out that little yellow sheet. But take some steps to put yourself in situations to know some of these really remarkable people sitting in this room.
You need people to spill your joy and gratitude over into and you need people that will spill over comfort and generosity into you. That is the way the system was set up. Do what it takes to find those people.
[1] The pictures got better than this…but I thought I’d limit the internet post to this one.
