Get Rid of Your False Limitations!

"You know, I've decided to move to Delaware," announces my new friend as Pete and I gather our rackets and head to the sweltering tennis courts.

"Why Delaware?" I ask, dragging my feet so that I can hear any words she wants to share.

"Lower taxes."

"Lower taxes? Interesting. Do you know anyone in Delaware?" I ask.

"No, why do I need to know anyone to move to a new place? I didn't know anyone when we moved here from Connecticut. I managed. But I don't like the heat here. And the skiing isn't great here - better up north - and Delaware is closer." She scowls and seems to think that perhaps she has over-estimated me.

"Closer?"

"Closer to good skiing!"

"What do your kids think about your moving to Delaware?"

"They don't like the idea. It'll make it hard for them to get in my business. They keep wanting a key to my house and I tell them, 'You don't need a key to my house; I don't have a key to yours and I don't want one either!' "

In a world where most of us focus our attention on what we are afraid we will lose or never achieve, this little lady scans the horizon for new adventures. Who knows if she will move or not, but I would not bet against her. Isn't there something glorious about a woman who, at her age, still believes that new adventures await her? I love that so much!

So what about you? What false limitations are you placing on your own wild and precious life? Is it possible that you have a new adventures waiting for you?

Later that evening, sitting down on the dock and staring across a lake whose surface is smooth as glass, I marvel at the human heart's capacity to find kinship in spite of our differences.

A Well-Constructed Scaffolding

"Mom, how many therapists do you need?"

"As many as it takes."

"As many as it takes for what?"

"As many as it takes to support my limitations so that I can live my one wild and precious life."

Here is what I need you to know. Your limitations probably are not going anywhere. No one is as shocked by this as I am. I am shocked, stunned, gob-smacked, that I can be this old and still have the same limitations I had when I was twenty. But it is true. And I hate to break it to you, but I bet you do too.

The illusion of youth is that "growing up" means outgrowing our limitations. Sorry. Not my experience.

Instead, what I have learned is how to construct scaffolding around myself to support my growing up. Kate Bowler, one of my favorite humans on the planet, says that, "Life is a chronic condition." And boy is she right!

Maybe we can learn from our brothers and sisters in the mutual aid society world of AA, NA, al-anon, nat-anon, etc. Some things we manage. And that's ok. This is only a problem if we fail to recognize our need for managing our limitations with humility and hopefully a bit of grace!

Too Many Friends?

The man of too many friends [chosen indiscriminately] will be broken in pieces and come to ruin, but there is a [true, loving] friend who [is reliable and] sticks closer than a brother.

Proverbs 18:24

How could too many friends possibly cause us ruin? It's easier than one might think. Here's why. Friendship is hard; if you think you have a ton of friends, you might be misidentifying friendship; it is too hard to be a friend who is reliable and sticks closer than a brother to have but so many friends.

My grandson was telling me last night about his friend at school who he plays with all the time. Yesterday, this friend did not want to play with him. Does that make him an enemy? No! It gave me a chance to teach a toddler about boundaries. Afterwards, I considered how often it seems to me that we adults need to learn this stuff too.

Over the course of our lives we will have many opportunities to explore whether or not a person is a true, loving friend. Their (and our) limitations in the area of friendship is nothing anyone needs to judge. It's not always about whether or not someone is a 'good' or a 'bad' friend. More often, it is a question of discernment - is this person a friend to me? Do they have the capacity to stick closer than a brother? This is a high bar for me because my brother Bobby has set a high bar for my friends. I'm lucky that way.

The trick is to live in reality and not illusion. What does it look like to stick close? Tomorrow we'll explore that topic.

A Word of Encouragement

I want to encourage you with the encouragement that has been offered to people from Jesus...by example and exhortation and through story. There is nothing in the gospel about being successful. Preach him crucified. The confounding mystery of the resurrection - God breathing life into dry, dead bones, continues to be mysterious. God does not show us everything. But way beyond our capacity to know and see and understand and articulate is this true thing: God can work with whatever we give him. He takes our weakness our fear, our trembling and says, "I can work with that."

But let's not get but so excited about this. We do not what a sneaky form of heresy to slip in among us. We do not want to confuse God's mysterious work of resurrection with a form of narcissism that claims that God's power to save us includes God's willingness to make us rich or better than those "other people" - you know, the ones who sin. Not our sins, but the BIG sins. (Please know that this is sarcasm.) The gospel message is not one of "I was once dead but now I am alive and that makes me able to decide who the real sinners are among us." That is not the story.

So you ask - what do we do? What does it mean for us to live Jesus crucified? Here is all I have to offer. We try. We do the best we can with what we have to work with. We use the resources we have to figure out what that means. WE JUST SHOULD NOT KID OURSELVES INTO THINKING THAT WE KNOW WHAT IS REALLY GOING ON. (A paraphrase of Barbara Taylor Brown from her sermon, "In Weakness and Much Trembling".) If no one else will tell you this, hear me loud and clear: some of our most dismal failures please God very much. And I want you to know that in our community, we will be known and maybe criticized for who we love and that's ok. We know that we do not know what we are doing and that no one really knows what this resurrection life really means, wrapped as it is in the grand mystery of God. So even if we are dead wrong - God loves to bring dead things back to life.

Jesus was a huge disappointment in his day. So was Paul. So are we all. There will always be someone who is disappointed in you and me. But here's what I want us to join together as a community and preach: that when people hang out with us, in spite of all the ways we are a disappointment - no handbell choir, no stained glassed windows, no fancy preachers, in all those limitations here is one thing we do: we welcome the stranger. We offer the gift of hospitality. We do not kid ourselves into thinking that we know what is really going on but we never forget that God works with whatever we offer Him.

The Post-Christian Era

Did you know that many observers of all things Christian have labelled the age we live in the post-Christian era? They make a compelling case that we have lost our consensus about what it means to be Christian. We have lost the language of faith that we once thought we had in common. Every major denomination in our country today is in a fight of some sort or other that proves that we have lost this thing called consensus.

In response to all this deconstruction, the modern day church has turned to business techniques like market studies, mass mailing and telemarketing to increase church membership. It works too! There are plenty of examples of mega churches who do fill those pews and the coffers to the brim. They host Easter egg hunt using air drops to spread the good news - a modern day tradition I am totally fascinated by! And let's get real here - don't we have the same concerns at Northstar Community? How will we fund our mission we ask? Isn't that question awfully close to the one about getting lots of butts in the pews? These are legitimate questions that people in charge of such things must ask. But at what cost?

Barbara Brown Taylor says this about such things:

"All of these developments have given me reason to think hard about all the things we do to get people into church. Does the end justify the means, or are we playing a dangerous game with the gospel, by substituting our own expertise for the power of God?"

p.132, Teaching Sermons on Suffering

Paul's response? Preach him as crucified. Now, is that guy crazy or what? Here's more about Paul. The guy had limitations! He had a mysterious thorn in the flesh that served as a big limiter. He was not considered a great preacher, although people did not criticize his writing too much. A second-century source "The Apocryphal Acts of Paul and Tecla" described him as "a man of small stature, with bald head and crooked legs...with eyebrows meeting and nose somewhat hooked." And yet, with all these limitations the guys still managed to start at least 7 churches, write 13 letters quoted even today and several speeches found in the book of Acts that were impressive by any standards.

So why preach him crucified? Maybe it was because Paul also assessed himself like this:

"I stood in front of you with weakness, fear, and a lot of shaking. My message and my preaching weren't presented with convincing wise words but with a demonstration of the Spirit and of power. I did this so that your faith might not depend on the wisdom of people but on the power of God."

1 Corinthians 2:3-5 CEB

What, I wonder, is so terrible about acknowledging our own weakness, fear and shaking? What have we misunderstood, or forgotten about the Easter message that holds us back from expressing our own vulnerability and limitations?