Sermon of November 23, 1997

Sermon of November 23, 1997 Rev. Mark Trotter First United Methodist Church of San Diego (619) 297-4366 Fax (619) 297-2933 Joel 2:21-27 Matthew 6:25-33 "EYE EXERCISES" I think I have spent my whole life in the back row. I started that way in school when they assigned seats by alphabetical order, or by size. Either way, I was in the back row. In the upper grades where they gave you freedom to choose the seat you wanted in the class, I elected to sit in the back row, with the shy people and the tall people, who were always the same. There was a great fellowship back there in the back rows. Mostly boys. We didn't like to be called upon, we liked to observe the dynamics of the classroom. We noticed that just as the same people sat in the back row all the time, the same people sat in the front row all the time. It was always the same, every class. People in the front row usually got the best grades. We didn't look with warm feelings on the people in the front row. But we felt superior to them. We were sort of a back row aristocracy in the classroom. We would never be caught dead sitting in the front row. www.fumcsd.org/sermons/sr112397.html 1/6

The only problem was that I should have sat in the front row, because I couldn't see the blackboard. I used to get marked down in grades because the teacher said I got the answer "almost right." All my academic career teachers would write in the margin of my papers, "This is unclear," or, "This needs more focus." Well, my whole world needed more focus, though I didn't know it at the time. I just thought it was the nature of reality to be blurry and vague. It gave me my philosophical bent, my tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty. Then I discovered that it was physiological. I was nearsighted, that is why I couldn't see clearly. After years of squinting at the blackboard, I was finally taken to the doctor, and he prescribed glasses for me, saying, "You are nearsighted." But he also said, "You are not only nearsighted, you also have an astigmatism." Which meant that things far away were not only blurry, there were two of them. I played basketball in those days. The coach tried to improve my shooting percentage by giving me a tip. He said, "Aim at the front of the rim." I said, "Which one? The one on the left or the one the right?" The doctor also told me this. He said, "Don't wear these glasses unless you have to. If you wear them all the time, your eyes are going to get lazy. Exercise your eyes. Take your glasses off. Focus on the environment. Fix your gaze on some object at some distance away. Concentrate on the things all about you. Eye exercises. You do that, and it will strengthen your vision." I don't know how good advice that is in ophthalmology, but I can tell you that it is very good advice in theology. In fact, it is what Jesus is saying to us in the Gospel lesson for this morning. Look at the birds of the air: [focus on them] They neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet God takes care of them. How much more precious are you than they? Look at the lilies of the field, [fix your vision on them] how they grow; they neither toil nor spin; yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. "Eye exercises." That's what he is prescribing for our spiritual problems. Look at the world about you. Consider nature, consider the birds of the air, consider the lilies of the field. It will improve your vision. And your improved vision will improve your soul. Just before this passage, in the same chapter, chapter six (it's really like a prologue to this passage which considers the lilies of the field and the birds of the air), Jesus says, "The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is sound, then your whole body will be filled with light; but if your eye is not sound, your body will be filled with darkness." That is an amazing insight. What it says is, the way you see the world out there, is going to affect the way you feel inside here. It is instructive to look at the history of Thanksgiving with that in mind. The first Thanksgiving occurred because the Pilgrims were overwhelmed with the grandeur of this land and the providence of God. They couldn't get over it. They had never seen anything like this in England's old and tired land, its over-crowded cities. Nothing like this. It was as if they had stumbled on Eden. It was as if they were opening their eyes to the world for the first time. They saw things they had never seen before. They saw beauty all around them. They saw the abundance that had been stored on this continent for them. www.fumcsd.org/sermons/sr112397.html 2/6

The Pilgrims were Calvinists in theology. That meant that they believed we are dependent on God, that God's providence is to provide us with what we need. They sang the wonderful old hymn, one of my favorites, "Old 100" it's called, because it is a metrical reading of the 100th Psalm. It is where we get the doxology, "Praise God from whom all blessings flow." Which is the way the metrical hymn ended. In the second verse is this wonderful line, "Without our aid he did us make." We are dependent on God not only for our existence, we are dependent on God for our provisions, for all those things that make life rich. So the 100th Psalm, "Old 100," sings, O enter then his gates with praise; approach with joy his courts unto; praise, laud, and bless his name always, for it is seemly so to do. What a wonderful word, "seemly." It means "good manners." It is "seemly" to give thanks to God for all of this. It's as if you spent a weekend with a gracious host, such lovely surroundings, green trees, the colors, the flowers, and the meals were abundant and sumptuous. At the end of that weekend it is only "seemly" for you to give thanks to your host. That is the way they saw nature and our place in it. God had done all of this, for us. O enter then his gates with praise; approach with joy his courts unto; praise, laud, and bless his name always, for it is seemly so to do. Consider the birds of the air... Consider the lilies of the field... How much more will God provide for you? The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is sound, then your whole body will be filled with light. That is the way they saw things. The beauty and abundance of nature was there as a sign, a symbol, of God's gracious providence over our lives. Then something happened. They were Puritans. As Puritans their theology not only emphasized God's providence, but also human depravity. After a while they stopped focusing on the world out there, and started turning inward, to the misery in here. They turned their gaze from the outside to the inside. And in that wonderfully descriptive phrase of Puritanism, "Puritanism curdled into censoriousness." It got negative and mean. Instead of seeing all the beauty in nature all around them, all they could see was the ugliness of human sin inside of us. Ever since then there has been a strain of gloom in American religion. It's just beneath the surface, ready to pop up at any time. It's not just in religion. It is also in our culture, this emphasis on turning in upon the self, this focus on me, myself, my problems, me, me, me. www.fumcsd.org/sermons/sr112397.html 3/6

I tell you, it is very, very hard to be thankful if all you can see is me. If all you can see is your misery, and you can't see God's mystery, it is going to be very hard for you to give thanks. Ralph Waldo Emerson lived in the wake of this introspective period in American history, and he rebelled against it. He took Jesus' teaching, "pray without ceasing," and revised it to read, "observe without ceasing." Observe, look about you, without ceasing. Which is exactly what Jesus is saying in the Sermon on the Mount, observe without ceasing. Even make your prayers a focusing on God's providence over your life, rather than making your prayers a recitation of the problems in your life. If closing your eyes in prayer means that you are going to focus inwardly only on yourself, then open your eyes when you pray, look about you at the world. "Look at the birds of the air...the lilies of the field. How much more precious are you than they to God?" Pray like that, then lift up your concerns, and see what happens. You know they stopped celebrating Thanksgiving after the first couple of years. It didn't last very long in New England. It would be resurrected in Lincoln's time. Lincoln would issue the first national proclamation at Thanksgiving. Lincoln had a biblical understanding of our life as a nation. For that reason he also called for a Day of Repentance. But he balanced it with a Day of Thanksgiving, because not only is God judge of our life, he is also the graceful giver of life, and we ought to be thankful for that. But that would come later. In Emerson's day, joy and happiness, gratitude and thanksgiving, were considered by some to be irreligious and certainly to be irrelevant to the real business of religion. They believed that religion had to do more with serious matters, like me, my salvation, my sin, my problems, my trouble, my destiny. In Emerson's day, not only was Thanksgiving not observed, Christmas was not observed by many Christians. If it was observed, it was observed as a fast. Can you imagine that? How self-centered can you be than to deny yourselves the joy and pleasure of celebrating Christmas, and focus through fasting on you, on me and my problems, me and my sin. Emily Dickinson lived during that same period. She refused to have anything to do with the Church. Up in Amherst the Congregational Church, steeped in this morbid religion, every year demanded that everybody in that town turn inward, examine their lives, confess their sins, and seek God's salvation. She refused to do it. The only one in Amherst, I think, who refused to do that. She wrote, "`Consider the lilies of the field,' is the only command I always obey." Introspection is good. I don't want to be quoted as saying that I am against introspection. And the doctrine of sin is important. I almost said that sin is good, too, but I didn't want you going out of here saying the preacher thinks sin is good. The biblical understanding of sin is good, because it is a way of diagnosing what is wrong with our life. But the point of religion is not to focus on the problems of our life. The purpose of religion is to focus on the graciousness of God. The only way that that is going to happen is for you to get outside of yourself and see all about you what God has done for you. There is a platitude, "Seeing is believing," which expresses the common belief that all I have to do is observe what is out there in order to understand the nature of things. I can just look at the surface www.fumcsd.org/sermons/sr112397.html 4/6

of things and understand it. But the fact of the matter is, we don't believe what we see. We see what we believe. Which is another way of saying, what we expect to see is what we will see. For a long time we simply believed that science could find the truth of things by the inductive method, just by gathering all the evidence, observing it, then drawing a conclusion from it. Then Einstein came along, a hundred years ago, and said, "Theory shapes the observation." Which means, you will see what you want to see. Or better expressed, you won't see what you aren't prepared to see. If you believe that the world is devoid of mystery, then you won't see it. But if you believe that God is the maker of heaven and earth, then you will see the evidence of it. The chances are you will see that evidence more clearly with "eye exercises." Here are some "eye exercises." Thanksgiving was set this time of year so that you could see the harvest. Fixing your gaze upon the harvest would indicate to you your dependence on God. Unfortunately, those of us who live in this day and age in the city, have never seen the harvest. We are separated from the land. I was born in the city, raised in the city, never lived on the farm. I am like Dorothy Parker, who when asked, "What is your favorite animal?" said, "Steak." It's all we know in the city. We have never seen a cow. We can't see the harvest. But you can see the autumn. In fact, you can feel the autumn. These wonderful days we have experienced lately in a California autumn. There is nothing like it. The gentle days, the crisp nights, the soft light of the afternoon, the glorious colors of the rising and the setting of the sun. It must have been an autumn day in which Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary, "I can fasten on a beautiful day as a bee fixes on a sunflower. It feeds me, rests me, restores me, as nothing else does. All this is holiness. This will go on after I am dead." "Eye exercises." People talk about El Niño coming. They talk about it as if it is the cause of all our problems here in California. The Chargers are losing because of El Niño! They talk about it as if some enemy were on the way here to destroy us, as if the Babylonian horde were outside the gates. Every night some television channel gives us an El Niño watch, like the watchman on the wall, predicting disaster for us. But people, El Niño is a gift. If you defy nature, if you build shopping centers in river beds in Mission Valley, they will end up in Pacific Beach. But if you look outward at nature, the gift of nature, with some ecological sensitivity, then you know the coming of rain is a blessing. The rains will fill our reservoirs and our aquifers. The rains will bring new life to the earth. This is how the Bible looks upon a phenomenon like El Niño. You heard it in the Old Testament lesson read to you this morning from Joel. Do not fear, you animals of the field, for the pastures of the wilderness will be green; the tree will bear its fruit, the fig tree and vine will give their full yield. O Children of Zion, be glad and rejoice in the Lord your God; for he has given the early rain for your vindication, and he has poured down for you abundant rain, the early and the latter rain, as before. www.fumcsd.org/sermons/sr112397.html 5/6

"The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eye is sound, your whole body will be full of light." We all need "eye exercises." "Consider the lilies of the field...consider the birds of the air...how much more does God care for us?" A young man was having trouble in his life. He went home to visit his parents and talk to them about it. Near the end of his visit, he and his father took a walk along the beach, just at the sunset. They stood there for a while, watching it. The son, however, was still turned in upon himself. He still focused on his problems. The son said to his father, "If we could take all the great moments that we experience during a lifetime and put them back to back, they wouldn't last twenty minutes." The father, who was absorbed in the beauty of the sunset, paused for a while before he spoke. Then he said, "You may be right." Then he added, "Precious aren't they?"1 1 I got this from Buzz Stevens, Phoenix, Arizona, who got it from Don Shelby, who got it from DeWane Zimmerman, who probably got it from someone else. It is called, "The Connection." Help us to be masters of ourselves, that we might be servants of others, through Christ our Lord. Amen. Click here to send your comments via e-mail to Rev. Mark Trotter. If you find these sermons of benefit, please let us know. Printed or audio tape copies of all sermons are available by subscription. Your e-mail is welcome. Your browser must support mailto. Click here to send e-mail to the church staff. NEWS * SERMON * MUSIC * KIDS * YOUTH * COUNSELING * MAIL * HOME Click here to send e-mail to Webmaster. www.fumcsd.org/sermons/sr112397.html 6/6