“HDTV”
Scripture Reading: 1 Peter 1:13-16
Sermon Transcript for January 14, 2007
By Pastor Nancy Blevins
I invite you to read with me the Scripture that will be displayed up here on the screen. It is from Eugene Peterson’s translation called, “The Message”. It is 1 Peter, Chapter 1, Versus 13-16. Would you read with me please. “So roll up your sleeves, put your mind in gear, be totally ready to receive the gift that’s coming when Jesus arrives. Don’t lazily slip back in to those old grooves of evil doing just what you feel like doing. You didn’t know any better then; you do now. As obedient children let yourselves be pulled into a way of life shaped by God’s life—a life energetic and blazing with holiness. God said, ‘I am holy; you be holy’.” Amen.
I like that part of that verse, if you could just leave it there for one second that says, “…be pulled into a way of life”. How many times have you been pulled to do view by a child? “Come look! Come look!” Sometimes, for illustration purposes, I’ve had a child sit on the floor and then stand them up on a ladder. It looks different from up here—our view of life. It says that life can be energetic, blazing with holiness. Thank you.
If you haven’t heard, I was on vacation; and I went to North Carolina. I was told that I had a slight inflection now from North Carolina. Before I left I practiced a little bit some skills related to a prior profession called “financial accounting”. And so from the halls of the Raleigh Observer I bring you a stock tip. According to their financial pages last Sunday, we might all want to start investing in Home Depot and Lowes. According to people that tract such things, there has been a percentage rise dramatically in those that have desires in the coming year, plans to have home remodeling projects. The interesting thing is there has been a decrease in people who are interested in revising their physical health. We can’t do anything more about our bodies it seems so we are going to tackle the house.
Let me ask you a question that I was asked and it was at the top of this article. What are you looking for in the coming year? What are your plans for the coming year? We’ve got almost 50 weeks stretched out in front of us I suppose. Has anybody asked you that question? What are you looking for in the coming year? Financial security? Better health, maybe? Are you going to remodel? Can’t sell it; remodel it! Maybe you are looking for less anxiety in your life in the coming year. Just going to North Carolina, at first it brings me anxiety because I’m sort of in the same mode of push and let’s get this done kind of thing. Even somebody going across with a grocery cart in North Carolina, they go slow. And when I started adapting myself… that this is just going to take a little time. I’ll never forget when I was going on the road when I lived there, people don’t honk at you in North Carolina like happened to me at a stoplight recently here in Indianapolis. I didn’t push the accelerator fast enough. So I waved. I always hope that it’s not one of the people in my church. I don’t know who would feel worse. But in North Carolina if they honk the horn do you know what they are doing? They just want to say, “Hey!”
So just going there relaxes me; so I was very, very glad that I had an opportunity to do that and spend some time down there. Maybe you, too, look forward to a vacation this year, your plans are for a vacation. Maybe you’re planning to communicate better in your primary relationships with your close family. Let me urge you to make it visible what you are looking for. Maybe you will jot down this morning something that says, “I am going to look primarily for this in the coming year.” When you come here on Saturday evening or on Sunday morning, what are you looking for? Most of us, the first thing that we receive is a bulletin that tells us what to look for. Occasionally those of us up here get confused and it’s not always in this order. But people like to know what to expect—most people. And so there is an order to it. We give you an expectation of a prayer here, a psalm there. But we are really looking else or at least something beyond what we can see in a bulletin. We are looking for inspiration, aren’t we? We are looking for comfort maybe. Or maybe we are looking for a connection with community that evades us outside of this place. Maybe we are looking for a friend that we haven’t seen in a long time. Maybe we are wanting some opportunity for encouragement of a spiritual nature; something beyond what the bulletin says is planned for this hour of worship.
I still remember a phrase, and I’m sorry I don’t know where it comes from, that most often we see what we are looking for. I didn’t say you find it! Most often when we practice and have a trained eye, we get to see what we are looking for. As a child I looked for mushrooms. I was convinced that as we walked through the words that there weren’t any there. But my father would have us stand in a particular place because he had seen them already. His eye was trained on what to look for. You know those beautiful honeycombs that just pop up out of the woodland floor. Have you ever had any of those? Well, come down south to southern Indiana. There are a few more down there on those hills. Likewise Dad walked us through the woods and he looked for ginseng. We didn’t apply it for medical purposes; we dried it and sold it. But he could look and just cast his eyes around and find the plant and we would dig it up. You see what you look for, what the eye is trained to see, whether it is a contact lens on the carpet or a mushroom on a woodland floor.
I cleaned out my car this Christmas; and I was reminded of another thing that I had in my childhood been trained to see. They are not so prevalent any more and I think that we don’t sew things quite by hand, but my Mom used to have a thimble. Does everybody know what a thimble is? You know you are starting to get old when you have to ask that question, you are in the wrong generation. Well, Mom on rainy days would have us play a game. It was called “Hide the Thimble”. I don’t know if she made it up herself or decided that she had some extra thimbles that she could do without, but we played a game called “Hide the Thimble”. And it trained our eyes to look for that thimble. Imagine this, I’m cleaning out my car after Christmas and what do I find? A thimble! I have no idea how it got in my car; I hope it is not a car part and I am mistaking it for a thimble.
But coming across that thimble, made me remember the game. And we would go and we would search. And the person who was responsible for hiding the thimble could give you a clue. Now you couldn’t hide it like under the living room couch. It had to be visible yet invisible. The way that it became invisible was you weren’t expecting it to be there. And sometimes people would hide it, my brothers, in such places as flowers or right in front of your eyes. It could be in the pot, it could be sitting up on the bookcase, it could be on the piano key. Your eyes became trained after a few rounds of that to look for that thing in that big room that was only about the size of the little finger. And, you know, isn’t it true for you and for I that sometimes we miss a lot in life because we are not looking for it. The clue would be given, “You’re getting closer. You’re getting warmer.” And if you were really far away from it and you didn’t have a snowball’s chance, they would say, “You’re cold”. But if you were right on top of it and you said, “Am I getting warmer?” they’d say, “You’re hot!” And it had nothing to do with the fashion. “You’re hot!” That means you were right on top of it. And so you would look intensely and you still wouldn’t see it. You just knew it was there.
See we come to church and then we go out in life and we come here expecting Jesus. At least I hope we do. We come here expecting that God might show up. But then we leave and He didn’t say He became invisible, did he? He said, “I am with you always.” Not just on Sunday morning; not just in this place. But you have to have your eyes trained to look for Him elsewhere. It’s easier sometimes here if “we” don’t get in the way. That’s what our prayer is each Sunday morning as we gather before worship is that “we” don’t get in the way of what God wants to do, what God wants to say, what God wants you to hear. And to experience in this hour that you are with one another and with us and to train you, sort of, so that you will be warmer, to be closer to seeing what is in plain sight.
My brother-in-law has plans for the New Year. He’s going to be 70 years old and he is not retired yet but I know what he is going to be doing this year. The minute that I walked into their living room I saw it. After all, maybe you’ve seen it; there was this thing that began with an “H”. It was huge. There was his support of something related to basketball. In case you don’t know, North Carolina—he has a banner. That wasn’t it. He went there; it’s his alma mater. We spent a lot of time talking about North Carolina and the blue hat and the blue sweatshirt. But there was something else that he got for Christmas besides that big huge thing; it was a “D”. Guess what it stood for? Definition! It defined the view of the living room for me. It was so big. Furniture had been angled toward it with a “T”. And, yes, it caught my view. HDTV—ever heard of that? It’s everywhere. It even made it to the marketing mecca of eastern North Carolina. You can hardly get cable there but you can get HDTV.
Since that item is so hot in our culture right now, this acronym so prevalent, I thought I would use it as a sermon series introduction. Bob and I are going to be speaking in the next few weeks about classical practices, sometimes known as spiritual discipline, to help you and maybe give you some hints on how to design the view. We are not talking about that program that is on. I understand Barbara Walters and Rosie McDonald and some of those have a program called, “The View”. What we hope to do is to help you do what my sister did. Not just designing and angling furniture, but training your eye so designing the view that you see, not what others see of you, but what you see. You say, “Well, what am I supposed to see?” Have you ever seen one of those pictures where it says, “What do you see?” and there are two different possible images that you can see? Well, that’s what we hope to help you with.
My sister is one who loves to watch the sun rise in the morning, so the windows on the East face the sunrise all the way down to the horizon there is a field so you can see it in its beginning. And her rocker faces that. She has tea in the morning if she sits long enough and watches the sunrise. My brother-in-law, he loves the water and it is on the other side. But now there is a little problem with “the view”. What’s your angle of view? Maybe that’s the big question. What is your life angled around or toward? What if, in the coming fifty weeks of this year 2007, we individually and collectively said, “I am going to work on my view of life”? Not about optimism and pessimism but defining our view of life by something other than our careers or our consumption or our clocks.
In seminary I have to admit I felt a little intimidated. One of the things that was frequently asked my first semester was, “Well, what is your world view?” First thing that came to my mind was the globe. I had been trained for sixteen years to look at life by one thing—the bottom line, the profit and loss, the balance sheet. What was a world view? How did God interact and form and design? What was my theology or my philosophy about God and His involvement in our world and God’s desire and purpose as a whole?
Friends, in the coming year there will be some life changing events for those of us gathered in this room. I don’t know, and I can not tell you what they will be for you, but I know that there will be relationships, there will be economic changes, there will be possibly career changes. Health might get better. You might have epiphanies in your thought processes. But I can tell you this, that no matter what, no matter when, no matter how, whether you find yourself in a tight space in 2007 or a very, very wide place, our view of life will be shaped, our view of life will be defined by things we cannot control during 2007 at least in some form. So Bob and I, we are talking about a series to begin the year with. And we decided let’s start with some primary basics. Now we don’t have something called the “Sermon Series for Dummies”. I understand that series of books that has titles like, ”Gardening for Dummies, Computers for Dummies, Word Process, Parenting for Dummies”, we don’t have a series like that but that sold over 35 million copies. Not just the parenting one, the whole series, such and such for dummies.
We are going to be teaching sermons, a series called—well, we haven’t actually come up with a title yet. We’re preaching though on these classical things such as Scripture, prayer, accountability, confession, solitude, meditation, service, techniques that have been proven to change your view of life. Why are we going back to the basics? Well, being on an airline trip to and from Carolina reminded me how much trust that we put when we get on a silver tube and fly through the air trusting the person that is piloting it. “178 Seconds to Death”, that’s what the article was entitled. Bill Hybels refers to this in his book about the Book of Proverbs called Making Life Work. He says pilots that have been seasoned airline pilots, that have years of experience flying. So they took a group of them that had flown for years but had not passed the instrument training, what we call “flying blind”. When there are storms around them, clouds sinking in on them, they were fair weather pilots I suppose. The instrumentation was there but they didn’t know the best way to use it and when it would become critical. So they put them, for test purposes, in one of those flight simulators. And then they gave them the tight view. They couldn’t see anything but the instruments. And I understand that it made them feel disoriented. And they were to then react and straighten the plane out, but they were only to use the instruments. Instead what some of them did was use their intuition. And that’s where the 178 seconds came in because all of them failed. They would have put themselves and anyone else to death in less than three minutes because they relied on intuition instead of the technique of training themselves to focus themselves on those guidelines that were the instruments.
And I think that’s what we all do. Sometimes we need to remind ourselves where to look, how to develop that trained eye and those techniques, those instruments. I don’t know exactly what your plans are or what you are looking for in the coming year, but I can tell you that as Bob and I pastor this church you can know that Jesus will be in the center here no matter what the bulletin might say as far as titles. Jesus and His covenant with us, His trust has life, as it said, His holiness will always be lifted up in this place that we all might trust and look for a renewal, that we might look for a celebration, that we remember that Jesus was not just a rigid Savior but He was a celebrant of life. He looked at life, I like to think, with big eyes—seaside picnics and boat trips, wedding celebrations. Those too were a part of His life. And He knew how to look at life because He knew where life began in relationship with God, the Father. Maybe that would be a place for us to look in 2007 as well. Amen.
E-mail Comments to: Pastor Bob Coleman