Rev. Ron Sumners
October 2, 1994
God is not a giant IBM card who comes sliding out of some colossal computer when you have pressed all the right buttons.
But you can find Him. You can be for real. You can be a new person.
Most of us live lives of quiet desperation. "I am not desperate," you may say. "Things are not too bad with me." Well, I don't mean that you are panic-stricken. I don't mean your pulses are pounding with despair or that your hearts are racing in fear all day, every day.
Most people are quietly desperate. Behind masks and Novocain smiles put on every morning, there is a deep sense of uneasiness. They have become clever and very adept at putting it away from their consciousness, but still at some time during most every day the meaninglessness and the phoniness of their routine flits across their conscious minds and they think, "If only it could make sense. If only I could escape from this stage on which I play out my daily role. If only . . . if only!”
They are quietly desperate.
We are full of contradictions. Each of us wants to be for real. Each of us wants to become a new person.
But we erect walls between ourselves and reality. Life is a process of removing the bricks from that wall so we can see clearly. These are some of those bricks we cannot remove by our own strength. We know that! We have sincerely tried, but they won’t budge. We need help, big help.
Well, there is help. Big Help. You can find God! You can become real. I know this is true. I’ve seen it happen to many of you. I’ve felt it happen in my own life.
Almost everyone, in a sense, is desperate, either openly or quietly. But many want easy answers to the emptiness of their lives, and there are none. You see, the symbol of our faith is a Cross, and a cross is a painful, hurtful thing. It is shame, tears, and rejection, and soul-searching and ultimate death. For Jesus, physical death, for us, death to self. Still, many of us persist in seeking easy, pat answers. They want God in a giant economy-size box and at a bargain price.
A pastor friend of mine got a call at home about 2:00 p.m. one afternoon. The church custodian said that there was a man in his office who had to see him at once. When he got to the church, he found a transient wretch of a man, dirty, unshaven, red-eyed and ragged. He was obviously drunk and sat with his head in his hands, sobbing his heart out. He looked up at my friend and like a frightened animal cried, "You're a preacher, aren't you?" You're supposed to have all the answers - well, give me God!"
My friend said that he wished with all his heart, as he looked with sympathy at this shell of a man, that he could just hand God to the man and solve all his problems. He wished he could hand God over in a neat package.
God was there with them. God was as near to that miserable man as he was to my friend. But the man had erected a wall between himself and reality. He was desperately searching for God, but not willing to pay the price for the victory.
Most of us have never reached this stage of physical depravity, and yet millions of persons live within the framework of the same principles of self-delusion and unreality which had snared this wretch of a man.
It is no trouble to see the desperate ones among the down-and-outers. The drug addict, the alcoholic, the hopeless faces in the ghetto – these are all easy to see. But just as often, it is not just these who are desperate, but also the up-and-outers.
A college student sat in my office at Auburn and said to me with a terrible earnestness, "What is the point in it all? If we are honest and try to live right and share the gospel we are labeled as fanatics and treated with contempt. The only way to get along is to be a phony like everybody else.”
A dynamic, successful salesman with three cars and a beautiful home said to me "I know it is all a fake. My business is based on buttering up people, feeding their egos. My fine home, my boat, my cars, my four-hundred-dollar suits - they're all only the necessary props for making still more money." "Even my marriage is a fake. My wife and I play roles for the sake of the children. There is nothing deep and honest and real."
A young housewife confessed, "I feel like a squirrel trapped in a revolving drum. I run frantically all day long and get nowhere. I am not loved for what I am, but for what I do. If only I could find some meaning in throwing clothes into the washer, or picking up toys thrown around the house, or going to wedding showers, and Tupperware parties. Even church seems to be something I do to meet someone else's expectations!"
Over in India, gliding sluggishly across the bosom of the land like a long, brown, twisted, snake is the Ganges river. It is muddy and filthy and filled with the garbage and human refuse from a hundred million people. But annually, thousands of the devout crawl on their bellies for miles doing penance, until they reach its slimy banks. Then they wade out into it to their waists and lift their hands heavenward and cry aloud to the Great Brahman. What are they doing? They are seeking to make atonement for their own sins. They are trying to find God. Life as they know it is one day after another of hunger and small meaningless days within the structure of their primitive society, and they are desperately seeking sense and meaning to it all. Through this ritual they hope to become new persons.
“Holy men” there sit on beds of nails and stare at the sun until their eyes become sunken, sightless holes in their heads. And why? Because they deeply sense that there is something big and wonderful and meaningful to life as it is given to us, but they haven't been able to find it, so they seek it through self-mutilation.
In all honesty, what is the basic difference between these people and the drunken, defeated man in my friend's office? What is the basic difference between them and the college student, the successful salesman, and the young housewife? Down where life matters, most are all identical. They want to find God! But they have erected a wall of lies between themselves and reality, and as long as that wall stands there, they can never find the healing they seek. Something is bugging them, and they cannot isolate it. They are bewildered and mystified, seeking small answers for big questions, cheap solutions for costly problems.
Do you fit in here somewhere? Do you want to find God? I hope so, because it is the most important discovery of your life.
ls there an answer? Of course, there is. If you are living in the shadows, stop and think. There could be no shadows if there were not light somewhere!
But before we get to that light, let's look a little further into the symptoms that develop when we live behind a mask we built.
When the stress of living a lie comes upon us, we have escape mechanisms. For some it may be alcohol or drugs. But it is too easy to single out these overt actions. Many of us have symptoms that may be just as much escapisms as those of the alcoholic or dmg addict.
Work for some becomes an escape. I know of a minister who spent many years in the ministry. He was known as a sixteen hour a day person. He was tireless and drove himself to the point of utter exhaustion every day. He was admired by his peers and by his congregation for his zeal. But at the age of forty-five he suddenly resigned from the ministry and took a job in another area of work. He blamed others. "He could obtain no cooperation from his congregation; his superiors did not appreciate his work." All the faults lay with others. He had attempted by sheer busyness to atone for the vacuum he knew was in his heart. He was not for real, and deep down he knew it. Sometimes people fall into the classification of those who "enjoy poor health." They drift off into one physical complaint after another in order to avoid facing up to the reality of their need.
Some have a need to gossip – to take a morbid interest in the affairs of others. They know all the latest scandals, the latest rumors, and are quick to speculate about the activities of others. These persons are almost always hypercritical. Negative criticism is the hallmark of their lives. This is an escapism. They must eternalize their own inner conflicts in order that they might avoid reality.
Even churchgoing can become an escape. It seems for some the more they do in the service of ty church the emptier they get. Could it be that they are running from their real need?
Our world is full of people who live out their lives in boredom, meaninglessness, and all the while presenting the illusion that they are happy. They give the impression of happiness but there is no sparkle in their lives. Go to a local mall and sit and look at the faces that pass, faces away from friends and neighbors upon whom they must make an impression. How many Happy faces will you see? When the mask is off, their faces are tired and lined and strained with the inner tensions of living a lie! 1l1ey have found no real reason for living and have no real hope for dying.
The only question that has any relevancy to what I have said thus far is simply this: What about you? In all of this, have you seen anything about yourself? Are you, down underneath it all, still seeking for something you have not yet found? Or Someone? Are you actually weary to death of all the phoniness the role - playing, the false relationship to life and to others and to yourself?
If so, you should be glad, for you can find answers from God. You are ripe for finding that which you have been seeking. It is only those who feel no need whom God cannot help. For them He must await another day until they feel their need. But not for you! You see a need in your own life, and you feel a sincere yearning to be freed from all this artificiality that keeps you from being the real person God intended.
Now let me assure you that I have not arrived. I do not stand here today looking down my nose and telling you how to live your life. I am still struggling with phoniness just like many of you.
As we sit here most of us have walked an aisle at one time in our lives and we chose at that time to be a real, authentic child of God. But for many of us, we've gotten sidetracked, and now we grope in quiet desperation looking for God and that relationship we need so desperately.
Well, I have good news! God gives second chances! The God who brought the creation out of chaos will bring His creatures who have been flattened by failure back to their faith in Him. And then He gives them something with which to glue it tight to reality - even His love. The God of a second chance!
In a lonely spot in England a young doctor was assigned to be in charge of a hospital. He had not been there long when a six-year-old boy was brought in who had a severe case of diphtheria. The boy was gasping and choking and on the verge of death. Even though he had never performed the operation, the young doctor knew that only a tracheotomy could save the child. So, he made the incision in the windpipe, and inserted a tube and the boy began to breathe easily. He was assisted by a young girl who had just graduated from nursing school.
In the early hours of the morning, he heard a loud pounding on his door. Opening it he found the young nurse who had helped him. Hers had been the job of sitting up through night to make certain the tube remained open. But though her spirit was willing, her flesh was weak, and she too was exhausted from the strain of the surgery. She had fallen asleep and while she was asleep, the tube became blocked, and the boy had died.
The story goes that at this point the doctor lost his head and told the young girl that she would never work as a nurse again. The girl who was already filled with shame and remorse over the boy's death said, "Please sir, give me another chance."
That night he could not sleep. He kept hearing her cry, "Please sir, give me another chance." The next morning, he tore up the report against her.
Years later the young nurse went on to become head of a great children's hospital, loved by all and giving herself over and over again to children who needed her love. Suppose the girl had fled and not faced up to the wrong that was in her actions? Suppose the good doctor had not given her another chance? Ah! but that is idle speculation - because he did!
Well, would God do any less than he? He is God of a second chance. That is why prodigals' rags can be exchanged for purple robes of royalty. Because He is a God of beginning again.
And He shows us the way! The story is told that in a certain province in Japan many centuries ago, crops failed because of a drought and that Fall, famine came to the land. So, the Emperor decreed that all persons over the age of 70 must be destroyed in order that the young might live through the winter.
Sorrowfully, one young man in the village picked up his aged and weakened mother and began to search for a place in which he could take her life and bury her. He climbed slowly and painfully to the top of a high mountain to a clearing in the woods. He tenderly laid his mother upon the ground and rested for a moment before doing what he had been ordered to do.
"One thing, Mother," he asked, "Why did you keep tearing bits of your shawl loose as we came up to this place?" And the weakened mother replied, "I wanted you to be able to find your way back down the mountain!"
Could God do this for us? Would God do this? Yes! We have made a mess of things. Famine has come into our lives. We even carried Him up a mountain outside an ancient city and there we crucified him, but He scattered drops of his blood, visible through all the ages of time so that we might see them and find our way home.
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