“WHEN STRANGE THINGS HAPPEN”
A MESSAGE ON I CORINTHIANS 1:18-25 & JOHN 2:13-22
LENT III
15 MARCH 2009
Last week I read an interesting news story. A woman bought a couch at a second
hand store—one of those heavily padded and cushioned squishy couches that
we all love to sink down in. The next evening, her boyfriend was over and was
sitting on the couch watching TV when he started to hear strange noises. Small
animal noises. A little alarmed, he got up and started to remove the cushions, and
down under the seats of the couch he found a cat—hungry, distressed but very
much alive. They fed the cat and took it to the local shelter, which under the
circumstances, put out word in the community about this lost cat. Happy ending:
the owner turned up and later remarked that yes come to think about it, his kitty
cat had disappeared at about the same time he sold his couch.
But I thought about this from the perspective of the woman. How often in life do
we think we are just buying a couch—something inanimate that we arrange our
furniture around—only to find something entirely unexpected? We think we are
just having lunch with a colleague and a year later we find ourselves married to
them. We agree to help our friend with a project and we find ourselves drawn into
a whole new business venture and vocation. We think we’re just going to church
to appease our spouse but something we hear there throws us face to face with
Christ and we find ourselves converted.
Time after time, the kitty cats pop out of the couch to prove to us that we are not
as in control of the process as we thought. The odd thing is that in the life of
faith, this is actually supposed to happen. “My thoughts are not your thoughts,”
says the Lord in Isaiah. “Neither are my ways your ways.”
Amplification from the world of marriage counseling: early on in our marriage,
John and I worked with a man who was a Jungian therapist. Jung was a Swiss
analyst who took Freud’s idea of the unconscious and brought a more spiritual
perspective to it. Jung believed that when people got married, there were actually
four people getting married. There was the bride and groom standing in front of
the altar who wanted nothing more than to live happily ever after, and there was
the unconscious, internal counterparts of these smiling figures who understood
that this intimate relationship was their best chance of healing in life and who
were prepared to fight and argue and love and struggle their way in this marriage,
happiness be darned, until they were well. The point being that underneath our
physical life, etched in stone and wood and paper and flesh and blood, there is a
process going on, a deeply spiritual process that moves us in the direction of
health and salvation and God, that in fact begins and ends in God.
Paul, I think, is trying to make this point in his letter to the Corinthians. Most of
this letter is very practical. The Corinthian church is very divided, not over one
particular problem or conflict but just by their very nature—they’re a diverse,
cosmopolitan group and everybody thinks they know best. Paul spends most of
his time dealing with all of these issues that threaten to undo the church—
leadership in his absence, interfaith marriage, immorality—evidently one of the
guys was having an affair with his stepmother. In this first chapter, he lays a
theological foundation for everything he’s going to say later.
Consider this, he says. Everybody seems to think that their way is the best, but
it’s not our way we’re about. It’s God’s way. And then he appeals to the Gospel
for justification of his point. Think about Jesus, who didn’t try to be right. He just
preached and lived God as he saw it and was willing to die for it. God then took
the cross—a symbol of a horrible death, what should have been the end of
everything—and turned it completely around so that it became a symbol of God’s
power and God’s love. Makes no sense by the world’s standards. Suffering and
death, as we said last week, are things that most of us try to avoid at all costs.
But God uses the suffering and death of Jesus for God’s purposes, which are
larger than ours. God uses the cross to come to us in our most vulnerable hour
and point us the direction of health and grace and eternal life.
Two weeks ago, I thought I was enjoying a day off—sitting on my couch reading,
in fact—when the phone rang. My basic position in life is that if you don’t like
change, you should never answer the phone. Because on the other end of the
line that day was our district superintendent, and she was calling about the
Pound Ridge church.
Four years ago last Sunday I interviewed here at Zion’s Hill. It was a snowy
evening, as I remember, and Jeannette and I drove up here together from
Stamford. SPR—and most of them were there despite the weather—met in the
CEB conference room, and the agreement we made that night started us in a
process. On one hand, it was a material, factual sort of process—there were
things like salary and parsonage repairs to be negotiated and different
personalities to be related to, and a first Sunday that fell on the Fourth of July
weekend to be dealt with—would anyone be there to welcome our new pastor?
Somehow a real congregation with its own personality and a real pastor with her
own personality needed to come together in ministry, and I know that both parties
on that snowy March night and that warm July morning wanted nothing more
than to live happily ever after with each other. (“Ever after” in Methodist circles
being on average 12 years.)
But sometimes a kitty cat jumps out of the couch. Sometimes things happen that
remind us we are not in control of the process after all. Perhaps a grieving church
and a grieving pastor had more work to do than we thought. Or perhaps it was
not happily ever after that God was after but that strange and wonderful growth in
faith and righteousness and grace that happens underneath the surface. I came
in here and without a doubt had clear ideas about where this church needed to
go, and I suspect you came to the relationship with pretty clear ideas about what
a pastor was supposed to be and it may be to all of us that Paul’s words are
addressed this morning—in the end, it’s not my way or your way, but God’s way.
I have shared this with SPR over the last couple of months and would like to put
this on public record this morning, that I have struggled deeply over the last eight
months whether to stay or go. The struggle has been this: that I have sensed that
unseen process unfolding here, that I know is doing a great thing in this
congregation and it grieves me that I will not be the one moving into that future
with you. But here’s the blessing: God’s ways are not only different from our
ways. They are better than our ways. “I know the plans I have for you,” says the
Lord in Jeremiah (the prophets were heavily into understanding God’s way and
God’s plan because in the middle of exile it was the only way they could make
sense of things.) “And they are plans to give you a future and a hope.”
I may not be going with you, but I know that the One who began this good work in
you decades and decades ago will bring it to completion. I trust that God has
used these years we will have had together to move both of us, all of us, in the
direction of wholeness and towards Him. And I pray that God will allow us to use
our remaining time together well, as we continue to serve our sometimes
mysterious but always gracious God.