Living the Yes
“For the Son of God, Jesus Christ...was not Yes and No; but in him is always Yes. For all the promises of God always find their Yes in him.”
Do you remember playing the game "May I?" when you were little? The leader would say take 2 or 3 giant steps or scissor steps or baby steps. Off you would go toward the goal. But "Stop!... No!... You didn't say 'May I." Sometimes life seems like a giant "May I?" game to me. Off we go doing our thing. Then our body perhaps says a big No with the development of an illness. We get married and plan to scissor step down the rose petalled lane of matrimony. But then comes the No of problems. Sometimes it is our guilt, grief, or conscience that keeps saying No to us in our efforts to have a happy life. "No, you don't deserve to have that joy!" Because things have turned sour on occasion, we are tempted to decide that life itself is just a big No trap, out to get you, out of the blue, when you least expect it. To watch some Christians talk and act, you get the impression that they think God is a cosmic "May I?" game leader just waiting to pounce on us if we get out of line, fail to say, "May I?", or act like we are enjoying ourselves. This perhaps is the reason the guy said: "A Christian is a person who has the mortal fear that someone, somewhere may be enjoying himself."
Enter Paul. Evidently, the people in the church at Corinth had gotten a little miffed at Paul. He sent word that he was going to visit them again on his way to Macedonia. In the end, he wound up going to Macedonia but not Corinth, so some of the people accused him of being wishy-washy, saying Yes one time and No another. Paul wrote to them. He pleaded with them to rise above the petty bickering about his alleged saying Yes and doing No, and went on to talk about the point of it all: God's unconditional, unequivocal Yes to humans in Jesus.
"Jesus Christ...was not Yes and No; but in him is always yes. For all the promises of God always find their YES in him.” Is God real? Yes. Is he in charge of this world even though it doesn't always look like it? Yes. Does God care about us? Yes. Does he want us to change this warring, hungry world into a peaceful, healthy Kingdom of God on earth? Yes. Can I trust God with my living and dying? Yes. 'So, get on with it,' Paul seems to say, 'Let your life show the Yes. Live the Yes.' God's Yes shatters the big "May 1? No Game" we inflict on ourselves and others.
Oh, if it were only that easy. Sadly, most of us wind up like the third guy in Jesus' parable of the talents. The master gave the first two men big sums of money, 5 talents, 2 talents, which were considered unbelievably great amounts of money in that day to work with their funds and doubled them. The third guy was so afraid that he took his one talent and put it in a hole. The master comes back. The first two guys are praised. The third guy begins his fast talking: "Master, I knew you were a tough and hard person. I didn't want to take any chances with what you gave me, so I didn't do anything with it." Bible scholars say we need to be very careful in reading this parable. Notice that there is no reference to the master being a hard person before the third man says it. In fact, the master seems like a pretty generous fellow to that point: he gives a big hunk of money to his servants to work with, then he gives them even more. It is only the third man who says how tough the master is. It is only at that point that the master says, "If I am such a tough customer, wanting more and more, why didn't you, for that reason, do better?" In other words, it was only the fearful third servant who internally decided that his master was a No power. Externally the master had tried to be a Yes to his servants.
Jesus, of course, is not talking about what people do with their money in the parable. He is talking about what people do with the life God gives them. That gift of life is given with God's YES to living that life with joy, love, and caring. Yet many of us are like the third guy. We decide that life is out to get us, that we are helpless victims of fate, that the best we can do is hunker down and not make waves. And so when we live our lives in a hole always expecting the worst, we wind up having less not more life. Deciding that life is a big No to us becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Bible scholars tell us that this parable was originally used by Jesus to counter criticism the Pharisees, the ultra-religious set, were putting on him. They criticized Jesus because he seemed to enjoy himself too much eating and drinking and particularly because Jesus included in God's love the outcast people the Pharisees rejected. He was trying to say to the good religious people of his day: You have received God's Yes of love but you go around living No's. You are so busy with your rituals you don't have any energy left to enjoy life. You are so busy keeping score on people who don't meet your standards that you miss God's call for you to love and help them. You are so busy trying to keep your nose clean and stay uninvolved that all the life God wants for you to have passes you by. How difficult it is for God's loving Yes to the world to make sense when His people live so many No's of self-putdowns and other-putdowns with criticism, blaming, and cold shoulders.
In the second half of this sermon, I would like to briefly sketch some suggestions of what living the Yes Jesus and Paul talk about means for you and me.
First, We need to live the YES with the life God has given to us. If, like the third guy in the parable, we decide life is out to get us, then we will spend most of our life tripping ourselves up, not able to see good things when they hit us between the eyes.
There is a story about a man who without notice received 5 one hundred dollar bills in the mail one month. No return address, no explanation, just a no-strings-attached gift. The second month came around. The money came again. So with subsequent months. The man’s response moved from feelings of excitement about the gift to accepting it as a normal, to-be-expected matter. After a couple of years of monthly money coming, the man went out for his envelope on the first day of the month – the day it had come in prior months. It wasn’t there. "Oh, well, maybe the mail is taking a little longer this month.” But after several dry runs to the mailbox that week, the man complained: "That skin-flint has stopped sending me my money!”
That we are alive at all against so many odds, that we can draw breath even when it hurts, is the result of something greater than us having said YES to us with the gist of life. This is not to minimize the problems humans endure and inflict – too many of us know them – in ourselves or witness them in loved ones. Yet we need to keep our perspective. The Nos that happen to us along the way come in the context of the YES gift of life in the first place.
As ministers, Bill Curl and myself spend considerable time visiting with shut-in members of the churches we serve. We have talked about marked similarities in the situation of many of these folks but the even more marked differences in their attitudes toward their life condition. SIMILARITIES: various dimensions of loneliness that are hard for you and me to fathom completely, physical problems brought on by illness and/or aging which makes normal activities difficult if not impossible. DIFFERENCES: some of these dear people give up, become bitter, and decide life is a cruel NO joke. Others, however, despite very real problems go on the best they can, they realize some folks are worse off than they, others are better, but they have to work with what they've got.I have heard these people continue to express gratefulness for what their lives have brought them and even what they presently have. They, as best they can, keep up with their church and how things are going for other friends and family members. There is a difference here between people who under difficult experiences have given up and said NO to life and those who under similar difficult circumstances, nevertheless, still say YES to life and the God who gave them that life.
I must add that these people are simply examples to me for what we all do. Either we say NO to our life and our problems: becoming bitter and pouting. Or we with God's help say YES even in no circumstances. During the 12 year period that writer John Howard Griffin was blind and did not know whether he would see again, he wrote about the problems he and people like him faced: "... tragedy is not in the condition but in man's perception of the condition.”Thus, if we decide life is a what's the use proposition, then that's what it will be. If we decide, again I affirm with God's help, that life is a YES, with treasures to give even in painful experiences, then life will be experienced as profoundly worth it!
Second, we need to live the YES in relationship with others. My children accuse me of never saying YES to their requests. Of course, I tell them they need to ask the right questions. For instance, we have the Sunday 20 Questions Game after church each week. Bailey and Alyce alternate a fairly constant series of questions: Can we go to Picadilly? No. How about Shoney's? No. McDonalds? No. Well, if we can't go out to eat, can we go to a movie this afternoon? No. About this time, one will mournfully say: "You always say NO." At this point the other knows I have been softened and guilted for the kill: "You've said NO to everything we've asked, can't we at least go skating?" Finally, I come across with what I suspect was the strategy goal all along: "Yes, I guess so. The game ends. They seem satisfied. And I am wondering if I have been worked again.
Seriously, it troubles me that sometimes we are most negative with the people who we love the most and who love us the most. Certainly, part of loving someone is the willingness to tell them what they need to hear about themselves even if it is not pleasant and contains criticism. Yet it is sad that we married folks are so plenteous with our critiques of our spouses and so limited with positive compliments, hugs, and encouragement. My love for my kids is one of the biggest YES's in me, yet I so often assume they know it without saying it, so often I am so over explicit with my NO's when their grades or behavior isn't up to snuff. It happens on the job, school, even in church. Criticisms come so much easier than compliments. We work so hard to look for ways to say NO to the hungry, the unemployed, and the down and out, so they won't cost us anything. What does it say about a nation that many call a Christian nation that keeps saying more NO's to money for food, health care, jobs, and education, while saying ever more YES's to expense for instruments of destruction?
I know human relationships are complex, intricate matters from family groups to social groups to national and international relations. Yet we who call Christ Lord must be people of the YES: "For... Jesus Christ... is always YES. For all the promises of God always find their YES in him." What a different world this would be if we spent as much effort and money trying to say YES to our loved ones and the out of luck people in society as we do looking for ways to say NO. People who accept the unconditional love of God for themselves make their God look bad when they put so many conditions and strings on their love for others. I challenge you to not let the sun set on you today before you have said YES to another human with a hug, a compliment, a visit, a call, or some YES of your own making!
Thirdly and finally, probably the hardest thing humans ever do is to say YES to themselves. Some of us say NO to ourselves because of our guilt, our feelings of not being attractive or competent, our fear that people would not like us if they really knew us. So many of us go through life afraid of being found out as not as good or smart as we want to be. So many of us have such difficulty just relaxing, liking and enjoying ourselves. It is as if we are unable to give ourselves permission to enjoy what is good about us because what is bad about us takes away our right to delight in the life God has given to us. The problem is that people who never are able to say YES to themselves, like themselves, forgive themselves, will never really be able to say YES to anyone else. They will have to go through life kicking the dog, gossiping about others, being racial bigots, and nitpicking to put themselves up by putting others down.
I could give a little psychological lecture here about the need for self-esteem, self-appreciation, and self-love. But I'm not going to do that for time reasons and really because the matter is fundamentally even deeper than psychological. It's theological. I want you to do a quick fantasy, an easy one. On the movie screen of your imagination project your face, the image you see in the mirror each morning. Then I want you to say inwardly to yourself more than ever before: that face, that person, is a creation of God; God loves that person with a love that will never let go; Jesus Christ lost his life trying to convince that person how much God loves and values them; that person is one of God's instruments of love and peace on earth; that person you see is imperfect but is nevertheless one of God's treasures, one of his living masterpieces. God in Jesus Christ has said YES to you. Now you say YES to yourself. We'll all be better off if you do!
In 1961, on a peace mission in Africa, then Secretary General of the United Nations Dag Hammarskjold died in a plane crash. Several months before on the Christian Day of Pentecost he wrote these words: "I don't know Who – or What – put the question, I don't know when it was put. I don't even remember answering. But at some moment I did answer Yes to Someone or Something and from that hour I was certain that existence is meaningful and that, my life, in self-surrender, had a goal.
God, help us say YES to you, each other, and ourselves for we live, and move, and have our being in the Yes you have said to us. Amen.