We are talking this first Sunday of Lent about conversion, about turning around, about facing in a new direction. Lent is the season in the church year when converts turned their lives in a new direction. Prepared themselves to enter the church at Easter.
Each of the Sundays of Lent will take us a little closer to that final destination:
Easter’s city of new life. We will walk with Jesus in Lent: from the moment he turned his life toward God’s will at his baptism; through his public ministry; to his faithful allegiance on the cross and his glorious victory after death.
But this journey is not just about Jesus. It is about you and me. It is about this church. It is about how Christ lives in us and calls us to serve the world God loves.
One theologian says conversion is like a locomotive that has to pull a train from London to Glasgow but is facing the wrong direction. So the locomotive is swiveled in a new direction on a turn-table. Still there is a 450 mile journey before it reaches its destination.
The invitation today is to put your life on a spiritual turn-table. To swivel yourself in a new direction. To begin the long pilgrimage toward God. Each Sunday of Lent we will take a portion of that journey of discipleship and grace together.
But today I want us to explore what happens when we turn our lives around for the first time or for the hundredth time. What happens when we are converted or reconverted to a new way of thinking and living.
I realize the very word "conversion" is a strong word. Even tainted for some.
It is often associated with a certain type of religion.
Thought of as happening in a specific way: at some mass meeting; following an emotional appeal; with a certain kind of hymn – that Mr. Swan would undoubtedly not approve of – being played or sung. And this misperception: that conversion involves almost no use of the intellect.
In fact, there are as many kinds of conversion as there are people. And my purpose in talking about the subject today is not only because church is, sadly, the last place we expect to hear about conversion; but because unless we consider it we will never move from the sidelines to the playing field of our faith. What better time than Lent to talk about what it takes!
One preacher says, "his hair still wet from his baptism by John, no sooner did Jesus come out of the water than the dove that lit upon him turned into a guide bird, leading him away from the river, into the desert. The voice of God still ringing in his ears, "this is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased."
It is worth noting the bible’s great saga of salvation always starts in a wilderness. Adam and Eve in Eden, Noah and his family bobbing on their watery wilderness, Moses and Miriam and Israel trekking through the Sinai. Now Jesus, as Mark says so succinctly, with the wild beasts.
I would not be surprised if we soon find ourselves as a church in some wilderness – now that we have turned ourselves in a new direction; freshly baptized a vision for our mission and ministry.
The wilderness we enter and the wilderness Jesus entered is a wilderness of the soul.
The story says Satan tempted him. The word means literally adversary.
In Hebrew Scripture, it has three nuances: first, "human adversary" as Goliath was the adversary of David. Second, the word means "one who pleads a case against another" as in the adversary of Job. Let me say this is not intended as a definition of the legal profession. Thirdly, Satan was understood by the Jews after their Persian exile to mean the "ultimate adversary," the essence of all that is opposed to God: evil, darkness, death.
Jesus’ wilderness test has cosmic implications. It is a struggle between the reign of love and a dictatorship of force; between the promise of personal freedom and the despair of spiritual paralysis. Jesus’ wilderness test is the elemental struggle of human existence. His test and every human test has bearing not just for a single life but for the well-being of all creation.
Conversion begins with a personal decision. Jesus submitting his life to God’s will.
You choosing to follow Jesus. What happens at this point is that God moves from the periphery to the center of your life. It is the last thing the adversary wants to let happen. Until it does you will find every kind of excuse and reason imaginable not to allow it to occur.
From the odd appearance or manners of some Christians, to an unfounded fear that too much of anything, especially religion, is a bad thing. Excepting, of course, money, sex, material things and leisure time.
Almost immediately after a personal decision has been made to follow Jesus or seek God’s will for your life the next thing that happens is disappointment and doubt.
"Such uncertainty occurs on the threshold of every human endeavor," says C.S. Lewis. "When the boy who has been enchanted in the nursery by Stories from the Odyssey buckles down to really learning Greek. When lovers have gotten married and begin the real task of learning to live together. In every department of life disappointment marks the transition from dreaming aspiration to laborious doing."
"The Enemy," says Lewis referring to God from the perspective of Satan, "takes this risk because He has the curious fantasy of making all these disgusting little human vermin into what He calls His ‘free’ lovers and servants – sons and daughters…. Desiring their freedom he refuses to carry them to any of the goals which He sets before them."
Acclaimed writer, musician James McBride tells the story of his growing up as one of twelve children. Raised by his Jewish mother after his African-American father died.
They lived in tough neighborhoods in New York City and Wilmington, Delaware.
Remarkably, because of her wit and determination and tenacity every one of those twelve McBride children earned bachelors and graduate degrees from the best schools including Yale, Columbia, Penn, and Oberlin. It is a heart-warming story.
McBride talks about his turning around and then his disappointment. " ‘You have to choose between what the world expects of you and what you want for yourself,’ my sister Jackie told me several times in the midst of my adolescent rebellion.
" ‘Put yourself in God’s hands and you can’t go wrong.’ I knew she was right, and when I got back to New York in the fall of 1973 for my junior year of high school, I resolved to jump back into my studies and rebuild myself.
"Like my mother in times of stress, I turned to God. I lay in bed at night praying to God to make me strong, to rid me of anger, to make me a man, and God listened, and I began to change."
But the journey from choosing to follow Jesus to Easter’s city of new life is long. James McBride had new direction. But dreaming turned to doing. The day came for him to go off to college. His mother took him to the Greyhound station. Plunked down enough money for a one way ticket to Ohio. Singles, coins, even pennies, he said, because they were always broke.
Then she squeezed into his hand a bunch of bills. "It’s all I have," she said.
Jim McBride remembers counting it. Fourteen dollars. "Thanks, Ma," he said.
After they hugged, he scurried onto the bus, took his seat, and remembered how she was always pushing him, wanting him to go, sending him off on a bus to someplace – Fresh Air Camp, elementary school, relatives in Kentucky, now to college. Pushing him just as she’d pushed his older brothers and sisters. There she was on the platform. Pacing up and down, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand.
Older, more weary now than when the first kids went off to college.
"I felt I was abandoning her," he said with pangs of guilt and doubt.
It’s always like that isn’t it! You wrestle with something for days or weeks or years, make the decision, set off with high expectations, then proceed to be convinced that you have done the wrong thing.
The disappointment after turning ourselves in a new direction. I was reading recently about Dr. Albert Schweitzer. Everyone knows what he accomplished as a medical missionary. The life of acclaim and scholarship he left in the States to go to Africa. The Nobel Prize he won. But few people remember the disappointment he experienced in his first year as a medical missionary. Nothing went right.
It wasn’t enough to have the supplies and medications he needed. Communicating his purpose and remedies was nearly impossible. Suspicion. Distrust. Genuine dislike confronted him. It was months before he achieved enough respect to conduct an effective medical practice.
I dwell on the doubt and disappointment we experience in our spiritual journey because lately many of you have shared your doubts and disappointments with me.
Marriage, parenting and family life. The direction and shape of your career.
Some of your struggles to effect change in our city – around any number of issues facing us now. Or the wilderness of disappointment and doubt of poor health or old age. Losing friends and purpose for living.
I am convinced this is the struggle for the strategic center of your soul. That if you make the decision to move God from the circumference to the center of your life, to tip the scales in favor of God rather than in favor of the Adversary that you are on the threshold of a conversion.
So often in our busy, segmented, urbane or chaotic lives depending on which day it is our faith gets compartmentalized too. We construct a fence around our heart and soul comprised of such flimsy scraps of rationalization and fear as "common sense" or "propriety" or "fulfilling my obligation." It is a fence that constricts our souls, limits God’s Spirit from enlarging our lives, stunts our faith and personal expectations.
One preacher says this is the experience of someone for whom religion remains real enough but for whom it has its own place, but is seldom or never allowed to exceed its place. This is the person who has what might be called a spasmodic awareness of God, who does know times when God is real, but for whom these times are rather the exception than the rule.
What I am pressing us to consider today is taking down that fence. Removing the barrier to stronger faith. Allowing God to assume the rightful center of our lives.
A few weeks ago Carol and I had dinner with a small circle of acquaintances.
The purpose was to meet a revered Tibetan Buddhist monk who is visiting the University of Buffalo and traveling for four months in the United States lecturing to colleges and universities and various religious communities.
He is a member of the entourage of the Dali Lama and has, to say the least, a magnetic personality. His conversation in broken but respectable English is accompanied with gales of laughter revealing his large dimples and sparkling teeth. His eyes – dark and warm and kind – constantly, trustingly engage yours.
His lectures to students at the University of Buffalo, which are not for credit but optional and additional, are filled to over-flowing.
One of the people at the dinner table – where we sat for three hours talking about Christianity and Buddhism – asked the Gheshe La, as he is known, the difference between "tolerance" and "compassion." His answer which took about twenty minutes was laced with example after example from daily living. Sitting there with his closely shaven head and his saffron robe I thought to myself what he believes and what he does is nearly identical.
God is at the center of this man’s life.
Well that’s a Zen monk you might be saying to yourself – he is supposed to be a holy person. But I give to you the example of any number of people. Yesterday we were touring the campus with our new member class and saw our wonderful mission window on the north side of the front of this sanctuary.
Dr. Albert Schweitzer himself. Dr. Samuel Van Vranken Holmes, pastor of this congregation who established our passion for serving the city. Miss Holmes the director of Westminster House when German immigrants were flooding into Buffalo in the 1890s and early 1900s.
There are any number of people we could point to today who found a new direction. Who chose God’s way, for whom God took up residence in the center of their living, and whose lives have been given away in service to others.
And that’s the point of conversion. It is not simply or only about a single life. It is about the community of faith and the world. Once God moves to the center of your life, your life has a way of moving to some center of human need and suffering and pain.
You find ways in your family or neighborhood or our city or nation or world to reach out. That’s the litmus test of a first time or hundredth time conversion.
So if you find yourself today wondering what place in the constellation of the activities of your busy life God occupies; and if you suspect that it should be a location closer to the heart of things, closer to your heart, then you may be in the crucible of conversion.
There is an old story about a fourth century saint named Abbot Joseph. Abbot Joseph was in charge of a large community of monks living in the desert. His job was to instruct young monks who came for spiritual guidance.
One day one of those monks came to see him, forlorn and worried. He had followed all the rules, done everything right, but still felt there was something missing.
"Father," he said to Abbot Joseph, "according as I am able, I keep my little rule, and my little fast, my prayer, my meditation, and contemplative silence; and according as I am able I strive to cleanse my heart of thoughts. Now what more should I do?"
Abbot Joseph rose up in reply and stretched out his hands to heaven, and his fingers became like ten lamps of fire.
He said, "why not be totally changed into fire?"
Maybe it is time for you to become totally changed into fire.
To let the fire of conversion burn away the old props the Adversary of God has used to limit the vibrancy of your life and ministry. Amen.