August 30, 2009 Sermon

The Mirror
Galatians 6:1-10

Last week I spoke of how as a Presbyterian Church we do not tell people what they must believe. This is not the same as telling people to believe anything—or nothing—at all. Presbyterians have always stressed the responsibility of individual Christians to learn the Gospel, and to live it by the grace of God. Presbyterians insist that their clergy be well-educated. (You can judge for yourself whether this church has met that goal.) A proper Presbyterian church teaches the Gospel. Here at Northern Lakes we offer two weekly Bible studies for adults, small groups and youth groups that include Bible study, Sunday school for all ages, and a few special programs that get people into the Bible. I try to preach every sermon strictly from a biblical foundation. We teach the Gospel. We invite you to learn it and to live it.

This week we read Galatians chapter six. This passage has a point: carry the load. Three years ago Derrick Rose, a high school basketball player the major college programs lusted after, took the ACT test for the third time. For the third time he failed to score well enough to qualify for admission—even to schools with pathetically low standards. But the Memphis University coach arranged false IDs for another student and sent him to a distant city, where he posed as Rose and took the SAT test. His score got Rose into Memphis. This kind of cheating happens all the time. And it pays. On one level. Memphis had one terrific season with Rose. The team made it to the championship game of the NCAA tournament. Rose became the first pick in the NBA draft and earned the Rookie of the Year award. His contract pays him millions.

On another level, however, both Rose and Memphis have paid a price for breaking the rules. We now know Rose is willing to cheat. He has joined the long list of athletes whose character looks suspect. Companies that otherwise would have paid him more millions to endorse their products now shy away from his image. And Memphis will have to pay back the hundreds of thousands of dollars it earned for its run through the NCAA tournament. The coach who presided over the cheating, John Calipari, has skipped town. The University of Kentucky lured him away. (Interestingly, UK has issued a statement that it will retain Calipari as its basketball coach. A university 100 miles to the northwest, Indiana, fired its cheating coach. Now we know which school actually means it when it speaks of “student athletes”.)

Derrick Rose claims he did nothing wrong. John Calipari claims he did nothing wrong. The facts suggest otherwise. When I read about such things I wonder, “How can these guys look at themselves in the mirror?” In his letter to the Galatians the Apostle Paul urged Christians to take responsibility for their behavior. He encouraged them to carry their own loads, and to “bear one another's burdens”. Fulfilling the will of Christ requires doing all we can to live an upright life and it requires that we help one another. A few sentences earlier Paul listed fruits of the Holy Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Live out these qualities. Hold yourself accountable. Following Jesus means more than avoiding the negative (do not cheat on college entrance exams, for example). Following Jesus means taking responsibility for your own life and supporting others as they try to do the same. It means living out love, living out joy, and so forth. When we make this attempt we can look at ourselves in that mirror.

Paul opens our chapter with a careful order: “If anyone is detected in a sin, you who have received the Spirit should restore such a one in a spirit of gentleness.” Sadly, people often appear to think this verse reads, “When you catch somebody sinning, set them straight.” But if we have received the Holy Spirit we have also received the fruits of that Spirit. We have received love, patience and self-control, to name three. The Bible tells us to use these spiritual qualities to restore one another. When I started work as a youth pastor at a great big church, a local radio station had a phone-in trivia contest. For a few cents a call you could try to answer five sports-related questions. Success meant a check for one thousand dollars. I fell hook, line and sinker. Every time I called I answered three or four questions correctly. Then would come the final question. One I remember was, “Name the number of yards Neil Lomax lost carrying the football in the 1983 season.” In those pre-Internet years it was impossible to win that contest.

But that did not stop me from trying. I called from my church office again and again. I did not realize how many times I called until at a staff meeting the church Business Manager reported that the previous month the phone bill included charges for calls to a 900 number. That had caused her to look at previous months. She found charges totaling over $100. She wanted to know who was making those calls. I did not confess. I felt ashamed. I was wasting the God's time. Plus, most 900 numbers are used by pornographic, ah, services. I feared that if I spoke up nobody would believe that I had been calling the sports trivia line.

Every time I saw our Business Manager I felt a stab of guilt. Days passed. I felt worse and worse. Finally I walked into her office and told her what I had done. I will never forget her response. “Mike,” she said, “I am really surprised it was you. But thank you for telling me. Now let's figure out a way to take the charges out of your next several paychecks. That way nobody has to know.” And as far as I can remember, she never spoke to me about it again. She never stopped treating me graciously. She continued to bring me brownies. (She baked them for her husband but usually “stole” one or two for me because, she said, he did not need that many of them.) Confessing to her took a load off my heart. Paying off my debt made me feel like a responsible citizen. She restored me.

Paul's use of the word restore in connection with spiritual accountability is not trivial. He hammers home his point: if we think we have the right lord it over others we deceive ourselves. We must constantly test ourselves. We must provide for the livings of those who teach the Gospel. And he concludes, “Do not be deceived; God is not mocked, for you reap whatever you sow.” Again, we can fall prey to the temptation to apply these words to others. “Aha!” we think, “those bad guys will get what's coming to them.” But Paul's entire argument applies to the self, not to the other. “You reap what you sow,” he writes. If we plant evil seeds we will receive evil. If we plant good seeds we will receive good. And all of it works toward the purpose of restoring us: restoring us to the community of faith, the church; and restoring us to God.

When we sow bad seed let us take responsibility for our actions. When others sow bad seed let us, with spiritual gentleness, restore one another. As he came down from having preached his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus met a leper. In their Jewish culture of that day, people felt this man's disease resulted from some unconfessed sin of his. To this superstition add their knowledge of the contagiousness of leprosy, and you can just see the crowds parting to get out of this man's way as he approaches Jesus. He was unclean, ritually and physically unclean. But Jesus reached out and touched the man. He healed him. He cleaned him up in every way. He restored him. Jesus restored that man's health and he restored him to life in the community.

Each of us carries the burden of unconfessed sin. It may not cause leprosy, but it does cause guilt. It erodes our confidence that God could love us. And it builds barriers between us. A young man moved back to the town where he had grown up. He had left to go to prep school and then college. Fifteen years later he had a couple of degrees, a wife, a house full of sons, and a tremendous chip on his shoulder. He remembered quite clearly that kids in town had mocked his thick glasses, his lack of coordination, his rich family, his stammer. He also remembered how he had poured sugar in the gas tanks of a whole row of cars in the student lot at the high school the day before he had left. As far as he knew, he and I were the only two people in town who knew about that one—and he told me in my study a few days after returning. He did not know who owned every car he had damaged, but he did know that at least two of them belonged to people who regularly attended our church.

He wanted me to go with him as he went to every car owner he could find in order to confess his sin. I accompanied him a couple of times. Then he no longer needed me. Without exception, every person he identified and confessed to responded at first with anger, then with laughter, and at least a couple of times with expressions of respect for his “doing the right thing”. They forgave him. This happened in the quintessential small town. (John Mellencamp wrote a song about that small town. And John Mellencamp, though he did not have a car in that lot at the time, had graduated from that high school with our man's older sister.) If it happened there it can happen in a church, or a family, or wherever it needs to happen. We can trust the Holy Spirit to work in and through us when we try to carry our loads responsibly. We can trust the Holy Spirit to work when we bear one another's burdens.

Stand up. Carry your load. Look to yourself, to your behavior, to your thoughts. Confess your sin. Confess it to God and, when possible, confess it to those against whom you have sinned. With the gentleness of the Holy Spirit, forgive others when they sin against you. Let us constantly be about the business of restoring one another. As the Apostle Paul puts it, “Let us work for the good of all, and especially for those of the family of faith.”