“HDTV Re-Framing”
Scripture Reading: Psalm 1:1-3
Sermon Transcript for February 11, 2007
By Pastor Nancy Blevins
Well, I probably kind of confused them back at the sound booth because I had a few extra tools up here this morning. How many of you have one of these? (remote control) Most everybody. How many of you have two of these? How many have three or more? And none of them work on that. In fact, I’m not even sure what one of them does but it has twenty buttons just in this lower part alone that don’t have numbers on them. And what is on there is very, very small. I hope it lights up at night because otherwise I would never be able to see it. I doubt that many of you have one exactly like this. This one has its own special meaning to me; it has dog teeth marks on it.
But all of them do have one thing in common and I’d venture to say if you were to go home and look you would actually see that yours has something in common. It has a red button on it. And most of them only have one red button. Does anybody know what that red button says? Power! And so who gets the power? The person with the remote! Well, Margie, I guess I’ll have to give you this one because that’s my cherished one. I know you’ll take good care of it, right? And Jim, I know you always like to turn the preacher’s off so there you go. Remote—when we give up the remote what we do is give away the power, don’t we? We relinquish power. And, you know, I have looked at all of those remotes and many more besides and none of them have a Jesus button! Because sometimes that’s how fast I want Jesus to be in front of my eyes. I want, maybe like you, to change the channel. As one little boy told me, “I don’t like this part. Can we fast forward?” We don’t get that option; but we do have the power button. It’s fast, it’s effective, and it is pretty affordable.
The power button—“To do what?” you ask. Change to HDTV? No, the power button can help us as we try to determine how to design the view. Re-framing! When we think about re-framing, maybe you are thinking about a house. But let me tell you, most of those big TV’s I’ve seen require some adjustments that aren’t on the remote. People have to move furniture. Some folks that I particularly know have gone so far as to put framework like that around them to reframe their living room. Bookcases, shelves have come out to make room, to re-frame, the view. And it is true what we see TV does affect our view of the world, doesn’t it?
And so this morning I want to talk about re-framing our view; and, yes, it does have something to do with remotes and power buttons. Because Jesus is the best example of one who used His power in a way that got us into the Kingdom of God. Maybe, just maybe, if we look at His example, who have no remote, maybe we can learn a little bit ourselves about our world and how to allow the power that He demonstrated to be evident in our life. One of the things that Jesus did is pretty much indicated in that Psalm. Jesus knew the Psalms. As we like to say around Valentine’s Day, He knew them by heart. One of those verses says the word “meditate”; and that’s what I want to call your attention to today--the times in Jesus’ life where He went into solitude and meditation. I was telling Bob I think that probably about 30 years ago the transcendental meditation was getting started in the west and people were a little concerned as some of that started coming into churches. But really it wasn’t new. When you look back, meditation itself is sort of like the cow chews the cud, and ruminating over and over on the word of God. One time when I was in Israel, the practice of reading silently, you see that happen so often. And their lips moved but you hear no words.
I want you to thing about, this morning, solitude and meditation. Now, you are not going to be alone here this morning. I’m not going to ask you to go to various parts of the church. But I do want you to think about where you can, in your own home or perhaps in the surroundings even here in Franklin or whatever neighborhood you might live in, a place that you could go to break off human contact briefly. And then as times go on you might have an opportunity to do that for more prolonged periods of time.
You say, “Pastor, you don’t understand. I live with kids, children. I live with a parent who needs me. I live with people above me in the apartment, people below me. I hear people all the time. Well, you may have to make a lot of choices and you may have to be unavailable for a brief amount of time. One pastor in seminary told me that the way his grandmother did that he still remembers it. As a little boy he would be on the floor by the rocking chair she sat on in the kitchen. He said, “Grandma would go to her chair and then she did the oddest thing. She would take like a kitchen towel and throw it over her head.” And he said, “You knew when Grandma had the towel on her head not to bother her because that meant Grandma was praying.” And for the time that she had the hat on her head it was okay for him to be there but he wasn’t suppose to ask her any questions or pull on her. She wanted him at her feet quietly. So she broke human contact, in a sense, by shutting herself out for a few moments every day. She went in to what Jesus might have called her “prayer closet” though not physically shutting the door behind her she lost herself in that prayer veil that she used.
But most of us in America today have the benefit of having access to places. Even in Franklin when I was living in an apartment complex and I had people below me and behind me and beside me, there was a place, a park. It has a wonderful park down by the water. I would go there like “streams of living water”. It says you can be like one of those trees that’s planted by the water. And I’d go, amazingly to me, I can walk through an entire park sometimes, right behind a housing complex, and I would see not one other person. Right here in Franklin! So we do have those types of places that are available. For me it happens that it restores my soul to go down by water. I was so glad that the choir sang that about the ocean because it is by the seashore that many times we can find restoration and stillness. As long as you don’t go during spring break!
But find a place. Think about deliberately today a place. Some folks have it in their house. They go to an extra bedroom, a guest bedroom. And that’s a place that when the door is shut becomes their place of solitude. I use to worry about that when I was thinking about getting married because I thought, “Well, how am I going to let that person that I love know that I don’t want them to come in?” My sister solved that for me. She bought me a little door hanger that says something about “I’m chilling out and if you come in you are going to get the heat”.
That’s those practical steps. You’ll have to think of your own. But think today of a place if you haven’t gotten one already where you can find a place to be still to have a break in the grip of the usual, away from the usual. Jesus did that and many times we think about the wilderness story when He went in for 40 days into the wilderness and fasted and prayed. And then he was tempted. I don’t particularly want to call too much attention to that today. I’d rather take you over to the book of Mark. And Mark has an explanation of what it can be like for all of us some times that pull between what is urgent and what is ultimate. The pull of Jesus. Jesus was a human and He knew both the natural laws that affect our human body, but also the desires that we have to have a spiritual life and not just meet the desires of the flesh. So in His ministry with others we find in Chapter 1 of Mark, Verse 35, but I would like for you to begin with Chapter 1, Verse 32. “That evening at sundown, they brought to Him all who were sick or possessed with demons and the host city was gathered around the door.” Gathered around the door of Peter’s mother-in-law because Jesus had just healed her. The whole city was gathered around the front door! For those of you who are in politics or else, you might want that rally to speak to. But it was so totally unexpected it just happened.
“Around the door and Jesus cured many who were sick with various diseases and cast out many demons. And He would not permit the demons to speak because they knew Him as the Son of God. It was in the morning,” Verse 35 says, “while it was still very dark, He got up and went out to a deserted place and there He prayed. And Simon and His companions hunted for Him. When they found Him they said to Him, ‘Every one is searching for you.’ Jesus said, ‘Well, let us go on to the neighboring town so that I may proclaim the message there also. For that is what I came out to do.” See, Jesus knew the whole city had been gathered at the front door. And Simon, thinking that he was doing the right thing said, “They are waiting for you; you must come.” And what did Jesus do? Jesus knew his priority; He knew His ultimate goal and He was able to separate it. Yes, there were folks to be healed and it was not that He did not have mercy. But spending time with His Father, God Almighty, realigned His own purposes. But He was under the authority of what God had sent Him to do. Not to please or even to heal every one who was in front of Him. Not that that would have been a bad thing, but that got Him off of His sole purpose—to declare the gospel, to declare that redemption had come, to declare that God wanted more than just healing for their physical bodies. God wanted relationship with them and that would be accomplished through Word.
The ancient teachers used to instruct their pupils, “You must live and stand under the Word.” That’s different than having it sitting by you. One of the concepts of meditation is just that—sitting under the Word and letting that Word, maybe just one word, impact you and direct you and see if it can teach you a principle or maybe it can teach you something that you didn’t know about God or make you more aware of something that you did know about God.
So you found your place and for some it might be as frequent and as isolated as a Sunday afternoon nap. In my house when I was a child, we had Sunday afternoons from 2:00 to 4:00 p.m. Now you could study, but you best not make a racket because during that time our parents, one or the other, took a nap or read the paper and eventually took a nap. What if, for you, you found that place as frequently as once a week? It wasn’t a rare concept in Jesus’ days. Orthodox Jews had Sabbath; and people wonder why we abdicate Sabbath today. It goes all the way back to creation. All the way back to creation, God set a cycle up—a cycle of work, rest, and renewal. What if you reinstituted an hour of Sabbath rest in your home? What if you instituted a half an hour a week of Sabbath rest in your home where everybody went off to their own corner to be in solitude and silence? Because silence is a natural companion of solitude.
One guy last night said to me, and that’s why I made the comment to Jim, this guy said, “You know, you were making so much noise up there I wanted to turn you off.” You were trying to talk about being quiet. It’s difficult to be quiet these days and to lose contact with humans because we have TV’s, most of us, radios, phones, at least one. Even e-mail is a form of human contact. Going to the post office is another. But sometimes it takes lack of human contact for us to find the compulsions that drive us. And that’s what time alone, in solitude, deliberately, and meditating on the Word of God can give us. It can speak to us just in the quiet.
To give you an opportunity to practice this, I thought we might try a group exercise this morning. The choir sang about it. There was a line in the choir’s song, but let us take that line this morning and let us together meditate on that. The line was out of Scripture. It says, “Be still and know that I am God.” That first part will be hard for many of us. We not only have restless leg syndromes, we have restless mind syndromes. And so we do have to learn to quiet down. One of the ways that you might try to do that is with me simply repeat this verse: “Be still and know that I am God.” And what we will do together, consciously, is drop off the last word each time. So we will say the whole phrase together; and as we do so I would encourage you to put your prayer veil down. And then we will say all but the last word and we will shorten it by one word each time. So I invite you. If you don’t want to participate, you can just quietly sit there for a moment. But let us meditate on that one word of God. Please say it with me.
Be still and know that I am God.
Be still and know that I am.
Be still and know that I
Be still and know that
Be still and know
Be still and
Be still
Be
For many folks that may have been the first time that you’ve heard much silence, and you felt the stillness. If you didn’t experience even a moment of that today, my prayer for you is that you might just practice that same verse again and again in like manner for a few moments. And maybe that harassing, hovering feeling of have to will evaporate for you. But maybe you would make a commitment to try that this week as a tool, as an aide to refocusing your view. Because when you come out of that time with solitude and meditation, little by little, gradually the pieces will be put together in a different way and you will be different as well. May it be so in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.
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