Heaven Doesn't Wait

What is heaven like? Lots of people are writing books about it. But maybe we can experience a little bit of eternal life here any now! If you choose to read my sermon, you'll find out what I think about that.

There seems to be a lot of interest recently in the afterlife. Actually, people have always been interested in that topic. It’s only natural to want to know where we’re headed when our mortal lives are over. But in the last few years, people have wanted details! We not only want to know where we’re headed; we want to know what it’s going to be like! Who’s going to be there? What will we do there? What will God be like? Will I really meet Jesus? Because we’re all so interested in the details of heaven, quite a few books have recently appeared that claim to be able to describe it to us. For example, I imagine that you’ve all heard of the book Heaven Is For Real. We have a copy in our church library. It’s the story of a four-year-old boy’s experience of heaven after his death during emergency surgery. Many of you have read that book, and some probably saw the movie that was based on it. And there are plenty of other books that are similar to it. One is titled To Heaven and Back: A Doctor’s Extraordinary Account of Her Death. Another is My Journey to Heaven: What I Saw and How It Changed My Life. A very recent one is titled Answers about the Afterlife. It was written by a private investigator who researched this topic for 15 years; and it claims to answer “150 of the most crucial questions about what happens when we die.”

I admit to having mixed feelings about these books. If they help sustain your faith, that’s wonderful. Many of us could use a little bit more confidence in our eternal destination, after all, given the number of atheists who pooh-pooh heaven and anything else connected with Christianity. But in our curiosity to nail down exactly what happens when we slip into glory, let’s not lose sight of something. Despite the experiences of so many people who claim to have experienced the afterlife, I doubt very much if it’s going to be exactly like what we read about in books. After all, the people who wrote those books are trying to explain an eternal experience in terms that limited human beings can understand. That seems to me to be like trying to describe the ocean in terms of a puddle on the front sidewalk. Oh, sure, they’re both made of water; but that’s where the similarity ends! I’m sure that when we finally experience the afterlife, it will turn out to be far beyond anything that we can describe here on earth!

Even Jesus had to remind people that some things are simply beyond describing. In the story that you heard just a few minutes ago (Mark 12:18-27), a group of religious scholars asked a question about the afterlife based on a situation in this life. “Suppose,” they said, “that a wife had seven husbands during her lifetime. Whose wife will she be in the afterlife? Will she belong to this one or to that one? Or maybe to that one over there? Tell us, Jesus. Who will get her for eternity?” I can almost see Jesus rolling his eyes. “Things aren’t going to be like that after the resurrection!” he told them. “No one will belong to anybody else! We will all be like angels: completely different than we are now!” No, heaven won’t be just like our lives are here. The problems that we have here won’t even apply when we are in heaven. And even though we’ll still be us, we won’t be us in the same way that we are now. In Jesus’ own words, it we try to describe the afterlife in terms from our lives now, we are “badly mistaken.” That’s a tough thing to understand. Even so great a writer as Paul had trouble when he tried to explain it to the church in Corinth. “Someone may ask,” he wrote, “’How are the dead raised? With what kind of body will they come?’ How foolish! The body that is sown is perishable; it is raised imperishable. It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. The trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed!” (I Corinthians 15:35, 36, 42, 44, 52) Some questions simply can’t be answered now. And let’s face it, no matter how many books we read about after-death experiences, we won’t really know until we get there ourselves.

But I’m convinced that every now and then we catch a glimpse of heaven in this life, right now. Have you ever considered that possibility? Most people believe that eternal life begins when we die. But if eternal life really is “eternal” – if it exists beyond space and beyond time (and I’m convinced that it does) – then surely we can experience it in this life, even if it’s only a fleeting feeling now and then. The Christian writer Fred Buechner has considered the possibility of experiencing eternal life here and now. He believes that we miss brushes with heaven because of the clamor that’s all around us here on earth. “This side of Paradise,” he writes, “people are with God in such a remote and spotty way that their experience of eternal life is at best like the experience you get of a place [while] approaching it at night in a fast train. Even the saints see only an occasional light go whipping by, hear only a sound or two over the clatter of the rails. The rest of us aren’t awake enough to see as much as that, or we’re mumbling over nightcaps in the club car. But the day will break, and the train will pull into the station, and the ones who have managed to stay with it will finally alight. We think of eternal life as what happens when life ends. We would do better to think of it as what happens when life begins.” A cartoon in the Sunday Dayton Daily News several weeks back considered the very same possibility. The cartoon was Red and Rover, a comic strip about a boy Red and his dog Rover. In that day’s cartoon, the two of them were sitting in the shade of a tree on a beautiful summer’s day. “Pinch me, boy,” Red says. “Pinch you?” Rover asks. “Nip me on the arm, then,” Red responds, “but not too hard, OK?” “To make sure you’re not dreaming?” Rover asks. “No,” Red says, “to make sure I’m alive – because this is what I imagine heaven to be like.”

Maybe we can experience a little bit of heaven right now. I invite you to use your imagination. First, think about the place where you feel closest to God. For me, that would be on the beach, with the waves lapping on the shore, and the rays of the sun spilling over my shoulders. For you, it might be a starlit night, the grandeur of the Rocky Mountains, or even the silence of a cathedral. In my God place, I’m quiet; but some of you will feel God while you are doing something creative – gardening, perhaps, or woodworking, or cooking, or painting Now, wherever you feel God’s presence, and whatever you are doing when you feel it, close your eyes and go there in your imagination. Sit in silence for about a minute, experiencing your God place. How do you feel? I hope that you feel a deep peace way down in the center of your being. While you’re there, you feel time and space slip away; and you feel as though you’re a part of something way bigger than yourself. Maybe you feel a connection with the universe, and the sense that you belong here. And I hope that you feel loved and accepted; because you are! Now come back to the physical place where you are right now. But even though you leave behind your God place, don’t leave the feelings behind! Hang on to the feelings of peace and connectedness and acceptance – because I think that’s a little bit of heaven.

Heaven, you know, is no more and no less than the fulfillment of everything that we’ve ever yearned for deeply. We want peace, security, acceptance, and love. Every now and then, we touch the fringe of that place in this life; and we are indeed blessed if we realize it when it happens. The Welsh pastor and poet R. S. Thomas wrote a poem about eternal life, and the blessedness of realizing what it is when we experience it. I offer it to you now as I bring my thoughts today to a close. The title is “The Bright Field.”

I have seen the sun break through

to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the pearl
of great price, the one field that had
the treasure in it. I realize now
that I must give all that I have

to possess it. Life is not hurrying

on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seems as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

Getting the Message

Why do Christians sometimes proclaim the message of Jesus so differently? Some of them preach love and acceptance, while others preach only sin and judgment. What's up with that? It might be because of the way they understand the Bible. If this makes you stop and think, you might want to read this sermon.

It is comforting to realize that Jesus’ disciples didn’t always understand what he was talking about. In fact, according to the gospel of Mark, the disciples weren’t really the brightest crayons in the pack. This morning’s text is a perfect example. When this story takes place, Jesus has just fed four thousand people with seven loaves of bread and a couple of fish. The disciples are now in a boat with him travelling to the other side of the Sea of Galilee (Mark 8:14-21). On the way, Jesus warns them to “Watch out for the yeast of the Pharisees and of Herod.” But the disciples don’t understand what he means. They think that Jesus is taking them to task because they didn’t bring along any lunch! They don’t understand that Jesus is contrasting the power of God that just nourished so many people with the oppressive power of the authorities of their day.  Even when he tries to point them in the right direction, they don’t get it. “Do you still not understand?” he finally asks in frustration.

“Do you still not understand?” It is a question that Jesus could very well ask us today. Even people who have grown up in a Christian household and attended church all their lives sometimes misunderstand Jesus’ message. In fact, that message is sometimes garbled beyond recognition! Often, that confusion is because people don’t understand the Bible. Lots of people think that it’s a book of rules that God insists that we follow; when in reality, it is a collection of writings that proclaim God’s love and power of liberation to all kinds of people and in all sorts of situations, with Jesus as the climax of the story. I have to wonder how many people these days even read the Bible. Lots of people don’t. Others just read the parts that they like – maybe the 23^rd Psalm and some of Luke’s parables. Now, I’m not trying to beat up anybody up. We all read the parts that we like. Some of us even have those parts memorized. (I know that I do!) And that’s wonderful, because we can pull up those verses at the moment that we need them! But the Bible is there to do many things: to comfort us, to inspire us, to challenge us, and sometimes even to criticize us! And to let it do its job fully, we have to know something about it. So this morning, I’m going to suggest some important things that we need to remember about the Bible if we’re going to understand it.

First of all, the Bible was written by lots of different people over the span of about 1,000 years. That’s a long time! The earliest book was probably written in the time of King David; and the latest was probably written in about 100 AD. That means that even the most recent book was written almost 2,000 years ago, and the oldest another thousand years before that. In addition, the Bible was written in cultures that are very unfamiliar to us. Think about the ways that we are different from our biblical brothers and sisters. We aren’t a nation of farmers and shepherds like Old Testament people were, scratching out a living within sight of a fortified city where we take cover when the neighboring kingdom decides to attack. And we don’t live under the boot of an imperial power like Rome in which only 10% of the people have any rights. Most of us don’t really understand the times that gave birth to our scriptures.

Making the issue even more confusing is that different books of the Bible were written in very different situations. Some of the scriptures were written when Israel and Judah were independent nations ruled by kings, others were written during the Babylonian Exile when the Israelites were prisoners in another nation, and some were written when Rome was their imperial overlord. That’s why different books of the Bible are written from different points of view. God’s concern for his people is expressed in a way appropriate for the time in which it was written. The book of Joshua, for example, takes place during the conquest of the Promised Land by God’s people. In that text, the people of Canaan are the enemies of the Israelites. In fact, the Israelites are told to kill all of them! But Isaiah, which was written many years later, insists that people of all countries are God’s people; and that God cares about everyone. You can’t reconcile those points of view, because they were written in different times and for different sets of readers. And so, it is not enough to claim, “The Bible says…” The Bible says all kinds of things; and some of them simply do not apply to us. You know the saying, “The devil can quote scripture for his own purposes.” The devil did that with Jesus in the wilderness when Jesus was tempted (see Matthew 4 or Luke 4 for that story); and the devil still does that, all the time! To really understand the Biblical message, it is important to know the difference between a “proof text” and a “representative text.” A proof text shows up only once or twice in scripture. For example, “Don’t wear clothing woven of two kinds of material” is a proof text. (Leviticus 19:19) Very few people pay attention to that anymore. On the other hand, just a couple of verses away, we are told: “Don’t go about spreading slander, and don’t do anything that endangers your neighbor’s life.” (Leviticus 19:16).That sounds a lot like Jesus’ instruction to “Love one another as I have loved you.” That is a representative text, and you can find variations of it in many places in the Bible.

And Jesus can help us sort through all of this. If you’re not sure what to believe, go to the gospels. Jesus interprets scripture all the time! In fact, I think of Jesus as the lens through which we see everything else in scripture. He’s like a pair of eyeglasses. Without Jesus, everything we read is fuzzy, and we start to wonder what is important. But when we use Jesus as our glasses, we can judge the message of the rest of the Bible with much more faithfulness. My own rule of thumb is that “If a text proclaims love and liberation just as Jesus did, then I should pay attention to it.” If it doesn’t proclaim either of those things, then I’m probably safe setting it on the back burner.

So, let’s go back to this morning’s story. What is Jesus saying by telling the disciples to “Watch out for the yeast of the Pharisees”? Not surprisingly, it involves the Bible. The Pharisees interpreted the Old Testament scriptures. They were famous for telling people to follow all the rules that are found there; and they were also famous for holding people to their own very high standards! And what was Jesus’ opinion of them? “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees! You give a tenth of your spices – mint, dill, and cumin – but you have neglected the more important matters of the law – justice, mercy, and faithfulness… You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel!” (Matthew 23:23-24) “Don’t you understand?” Jesus asked his disciples. “Don’t you see what is important?” Just a little bit of that legalism will spread through your whole life, just like yeast spreads through a bunch of dough. It’s not important to follow every law in the Old Testament. Jesus didn’t care about that! But it is important to love others, to know that God loves us, and to participate in God’s work of liberation from oppression wherever we can!

The story is told about Karl Barth, one of the most important Christian biblical scholars of the 20^th century. During his lifetime, he authored the multi-volume Church Dogmatics, a work that influenced Christians around the world. It is said that near the end of his career, he gave a lecture to a packed assembly hall of his colleagues. His lecture was complicated and made many fine distinctions. At its conclusion, all the people in his distinguished audience honored him with a standing ovation. He then indicated that he would answer questions. A young graduate student got up. “Dr. Barth,” he asked, “your theology is complicated, and I had difficulty following everything you said. Can you sum up your thinking for me in a sentence or two?” The audience murmured in embarrassment. How could anyone expect Karl Barth to summarize the theology that he had spent a lifetime putting together? But Barth just smiled. Leaning towards the microphone, he said, “Of course. Jesus loves me, this I know; for the Bible tells me so.”

That’s the message of this whole wonderful, confusing, irritating, thought-provoking book. Jesus loves me, this I know; for the Bible tells me so. And Jesus loves everyone else, too! This is the message of the Gospel of John, and it’s the message of the whole Bible, as well: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten son, that whosoever trusts him should not perish, but have eternal life. And God sent his son into the world not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.” (John 3:16-17) I am absolutely convinced that, in the end, that’s the only message that God really cares about.

The Most Difficult Job

Need a new job? Why not be a prophet! Oh, wait... Maybe not. Prophets are rarely popular people, and usually ignored, if not resented or even hated. But they are absolutely necessary to God's people! If you read this sermon, you'll find out why.

Those of you who use Facebook are probably familiar with the quizzes that pop up on your daily feed from time to time. For those of you who don’t use Facebook: these quizzes are just free online entertainment. They claim to tell you who you “really” are by answering a few questions. For example, one that I took recently asked, “Which witch are you most like?” Based on my answers, it compared me to fictional characters like the sea-witch Ursula from The Little Mermaid, the sorceress Maleficent from Sleeping Beauty, and even the three weird sisters from MacBeth. I must confess that I was somewhat disappointed in the result. After clearly stating that I am a bad witch, it concluded that I was most like Glinda, the good witch in The Wizard of Oz. I had hoped for a more exciting character!

I imagine that somewhere online there is a quiz that asks, “Which Bible character are you most like?” If you ever take such a quiz, you can rejoice if the result says that you’re like Paul or Abraham or Ruth, or maybe even Mary or Joseph. But if it says that you’re like one of the prophets, my suggestion is that you run for the hills! You do not want to be a prophet! Prophets have the most difficult job in the whole biblical text. That’s because the job of a prophet is to speak for God. Prophets carry messages from God to the people. And those messages are a mixed bag. Sometimes prophets remind the people of God’s promises. For example, you all know the text from Isaiah 11: “A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse: from his roots a branch will bear fruit. And the spirit of the Lord will rest upon him: the spirit of wisdom and understanding.” That’s a promise of the coming Messiah. But for every uplifting promise, there are many more warnings. This text is also from Isaiah: “Thus says the Lord: Jerusalem staggers, and Judah is falling. Their words and deeds are against the Lord, defying his glorious presence. The look on their faces testifies against them! Woe to them! They have brought disaster upon themselves!” (3:8-9) That’s not such an upbeat message!

The reason for the warnings is that God’s people frequently forget how they are supposed to behave. And so, prophets take people to task. Understandably, those people usually don’t want to hear it. And when the prophets’ targets are political leaders, the situation can get very sticky indeed! Many of you will remember the conflict that existed between Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Governor George Wallace. While Dr. King preached the equality of the races, Governor Wallace clung to the idea of segregation. That kind of conflict is nothing new. The story that you just heard from the gospel of Mark (6:14-29) is over 2,000 years old; but a lot of it could have happened yesterday.

Let me give you a little bit of background to this story. You won’t understand the players without a scorecard! The Jewish ruler who had authority over Galilee in Jesus’ day was named Herod. (This is the same Herod, by the way, who sings the jazzy song in Jesus Christ, Superstar.) His father was Herod the Great, the bloodthirsty tyrant who was king of Judea when Jesus was born. Our Herod had originally married for political purposes, which was nothing uncommon in that day and age. But then he met Herodias, who was married to his half-brother Phillip. By the way, Herodias was also Herod’s niece – the daughter of another one of his half-brothers. Herod was so smitten with Herodias that he promptly divorced his wife, and persuaded Herodias to leave her husband Phillip and marry him. It sounds like something out of reality TV, doesn’t it? (And you thought that the Kardashians were bad!) John the Baptist was disgusted with their behavior, and he apparently didn’t keep his thoughts to himself. As a result, Herodias went gunning for John the Baptist; so Herod arrested him and threw him into prison.

Let’s stop the story there for a moment, while John’s head is still on his shoulders. Did you notice that Herod had mixed feelings for John? On the one hand, he was madder than a wet hen at the comments John made about his morals. On the other hand, though, Herod respected him. John the Baptist was everything that Herod was not – courageous, eloquent, and moral. John had the strength of his convictions, and the courage to speak out against what he believed was wrong. Mark tells us that Herod “was greatly puzzled” with John the Baptist; and that Herod wanted to protect him. In fact, Herod “liked to listen” to what John had to say. Why do you suppose he felt that way? The story doesn’t tell us; but maybe it was because John awoke feelings in Herod that he hadn’t felt in years – not since he was an idealistic boy growing up in a household that was anything but idealistic! Maybe it was because John held a vision before Herod’s eyes that he secretly yearned to see in reality. Maybe John offered Herod a view of a life that he could have instead of the life that he did have. Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann claims that “it is the [job] of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination.” He goes on to say that prophets nourish a perception that is something other than that of the culture that surrounds us. (This quote is taken from “Living by the Word” by Marilyn McEntyre. It appeared on page 18 of the July 8, 2015 issue of the Christian Century.) In other words, prophets offer us a vision of what could be in addition to what is. Prophets ask “What if…?” and invite us to imagine it with them. Martin Luther King offered us that vision when he declared that he had “been to the mountaintop” and seen all races growing up in peace, harmony, and unity. Did Herod secretly wish that he could scrap all the politics and power plays that are part and parcel of being a ruler? Perhaps. He was certainly disturbed by John’s message. And that is part of a prophet’s job – to be disturbing. At their best, prophets shatter our comfort zones, challenge our assumptions, and wake up our consciences. That’s why prophets usually end up in jail – or worse. We don’t much like to be disturbed. If we’re honest with ourselves, we’d rather be left alone.

Let’s go back to Herod’s story. You know how it ends. One day Herod gave a birthday party for himself; and part of the entertainment was a dance by Herodias’ daughter. Tradition says that her name was Salome, and that her dance was the Dance of the Seven Veils. The text doesn’t say that; but in any case, it must have been a heck of a dance! Without thinking, Herod blurted out that she could have anything she wanted – even half of his kingdom! But she didn’t want half of his kingdom. Instead, she wanted the head of John the Baptist on a platter. Herod couldn’t go back on the promise that he had made to her – not in front of all those people! So John the Baptist was silenced at last.

No, you don’t want to be a prophet. Prophets are not only called to speak for God, they are called to hold God’s vision for us in front of our eyes – whether we want to see it or not – and to ask us in the bluntest possible terms why we aren’t working towards that vision! Prophets are as counter-cultural as flower children were in the 1960s. They don’t fit in anywhere! As Flannery O’Connor put it, “You shall know the truth, and the truth will make you odd.” Fortunately, not many of us are called to be prophets. But we are called to pay attention to them! We are called to constantly reevaluate the culture around us and what it demands of us and of our fellow human beings. We are called to constantly reevaluate ourselves and to change ourselves when we are following the world’s vision instead of the vision of God. And sometimes we are called to take a risk in order to follow God’s vision. Fortunately, that usually doesn’t end in our losing our heads, or even being thrown into prison; but it can mean risking our social status or our reputation or even our job! Yes, when we not only know the truth, but follow it, that truth will make us odd.

But maybe that’s not so bad. After all, Jesus was a bit odd, himself. He didn’t have a home. He went around with a bunch of rag-tag followers. He ate dinner with prostitutes and tax collectors and all kinds of lower class people. Why, he even associated with women! Maybe it wouldn’t hurt any of us to be a little bit odd like that. In fact, maybe if the church were as odd as Jesus, it would actually do what God is calling it to do – to be a prophetic voice to the whole world, calling it to repent and change its ways. And that wouldn’t be odd at all. That would be wonderful!

Homecoming

Do you enjoy class reunions? Or do you skip them because you feel that you don't measure up? This sermon examines the expectations that other people have of us, as well as those that we load on ourselves. Even Jesus had to deal with expectations! If you choose to read my sermon, you'll find out what that was all about -- and how we might deal with all those expectations.

Our older daughter recently reminded us that next year will be her 10^th year reunion at Muskingum University. She is planning to fly up for homecoming weekend in October, and is hoping that Fred and I will find the time to drive over while she is there. (I imagine that we will.) In addition to setting me back on my heels a little bit (I can’t believe that she has really been teaching for 10 years!), it got me to thinking about homecomings in general. I usually don’t attend my college homecoming celebrations, but I’ve been to several of my high school class reunions; and in general, I enjoy them. Homecoming is a great time to reconnect with classmates that I’ve lost track of, as well as to catch up on the latest news. I must confess, though, that I’m beginning to feel like the man who attended his 50^th class reunion. After he returned home, his wife asked him, “How did you enjoy it?” “Oh, it was fun,” he responded, “but there were so many old people there!”

All kidding aside, there can be a downside to our class reunions; and it’s not that we have all grown older. Although we may have changed, some things stay exactly the same, especially in a small town. Even after all the years, some class members are still “in,” while others are still “out.” You know what I’m talking about. Once you’re a football star, you’re always a football star; and once you’re an outsider, you’re always an outsider. That never seems to change, whether we’ve been out of school for 5 minutes or for 50 years. The expectations that people have of us are as permanent as if they were carved into the monument next to the post office in the middle of town. The popular cheerleader married a rich, good-looking man who financed her face lifts and tummy tucks. We expected as much. The son of the local banker has become successful in his own business. We expected that, too. But the gawky kid who never had much to say in or out of class – we didn’t expect him to do anything much worthwhile! After all, he was a nerd! Yes, expectations can follow us our whole lives.

Jesus ran into that kind of mindset when he came back to Nazareth for a visit. The townspeople had already heard of his reputation, so they asked him to teach in the local synagogue on the Sabbath. And they were amazed at him! But what amazed them was the fact that this local boy had made something of himself. They couldn’t picture Jesus as anything more than the shy kid who always had a runny nose. “Where does this man get these things?” they asked. “Isn’t this Mary’s son? Why, he’s the brother of James and Joseph and Judas and Simon!” I can’t help but wonder whether they were also thinking, “Isn’t this the kid who was born before his mother got married?” Far from being impressed with Jesus, they were offended at him. That’s the trouble with homecomings: you can never quite leave your past behind.

I heard a lot of these comments while I was growing up. My parents were both fair, open-minded people; but they had both grown up in Piqua, and my father owned his own business there. That meant that they knew everybody in town. Many nights at the dinner table, I would comment about a classmate – about a school accomplishment, perhaps – and more often than not, Dad would ask, “Isn’t that so-and-so’s boy?” Mom would say something like, “I think so. Remember, his grandfather owned the store on South Street.” And then Dad might reply, “Oh, yes. His family was a bunch of deadbeats. They never paid their bills on time.” It used to make me madder than a wet hen to have my classmates judged by their ancestors – but that’s exactly what happened. And many of us are still judged that way – not by our ancestors, perhaps, but by what we did 10 years, 30 years, or 50 years ago. Expectations of other people are powerful things. They surround you like a cloud of gnats in the summer. You can swat at them until you’re blue in the face; but you can never quite get rid of them.

But as troubling as the expectations of other people are, there’s something even worse – the expectations that we have of ourself. Many people would never think of setting foot at homecoming because they are afraid that they don’t measure up to their own expectations. And oh, my, those expectations can be enormous! I’ll bet that you even have some of those expectations yourself. Do any of these sound familiar? “I’m not thin enough. I’m not fit enough. I’m not good-looking enough. I’m not successful enough. My kids aren’t successful enough. My hair is grey (or I don’t have any hair left).” No wonder that people who are planning to go to homecoming start crash diets, take out gym memberships, and get new dresses and suits! We buy into all those expectations that our culture tells us we should have of ourselves; and we end up feeling inferior to everybody else!

And those expectations can kill us, friends! Whether it’s what other people expect of us or what we expect of ourselves, they can push us right into an early grave! I wonder whether Jesus had unrealistic expectations of himself, too. After all, he was God’s son! Don’t you think that made him want to be just a little bit of an overachiever? I imagine that he went back to Nazareth eager to help them out – to proclaim the good news that God loves them, and to heal those who were ill. But it didn’t work out that way. Jesus couldn’t do much of anything in Nazareth because nobody believed in him! Even Jesus, with all his power, can’t control the expectations of other people. Mark tells us that Jesus was amazed at their attitude – and I imagine that he was disappointed, as well. And so, he simply went on. There was absolutely nothing that Jesus could do about all those expectations except leave them behind. He went to other villages where their minds and hearts were much more open than in Nazareth. He went on to teach and preach and heal where he was accepted and welcomed.

Maybe that’s what we need to do, too. When other people try to hold us down by expecting that we will fail, maybe we need to find other people who will accept us and welcome us and encourage us! Eleanor Roosevelt once said, “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent,” and she was exactly right. Jesus moved on away from Nazareth; and sometimes God calls us to move on, too, away from people who don’t recognize us for what we are – beloved children of God.

But what about the things that we say to ourselves? What do we do when we hold ourselves down by comparing ourselves to impossible ideals? It’s important to recognize that those ideals don’t come from God; they come from Madison Avenue. Not as attractive as the models you see in magazine advertisements? Those models are wearing tons of makeup; and their photos are airbrushed to make them look even better! Not as fit as the trainers on “The Biggest Loser”? Those trainers spend hours every day keeping in shape, because they are paid to look like that! Are you ashamed of looking older? Don’t be ashamed, give thanks! Many people haven’t lived as long as you have! My father, who was a professional photographer, once did a portrait of an older woman whose face showed her age. In an effort to make her more attractive, he removed all the wrinkles from the finished portrait. When he showed it to the woman, she glared at him and demanded, “Young man, you put those wrinkles back! I earned every one of them!” Whether we’re old or young, fit or not so fit, attractive or average, we are all children of God. We don’t have the right to put ourselves down, because God created us and pronounced us “good.” In God’s eyes, our dress size or our abilities or the amount that we have in our bank account doesn’t matter! What matters is whether we show love for God and for others. All the rest isn’t worth a hill of beans!

So don’t worry about other people’s expectations of you! And don’t set your own expectations so high that you can never measure up! Go right ahead and go to your class reunion when homecoming rolls around; or, if you know that you won’t enjoy that reunion, stay home and watch a movie on TV. After all, the only homecoming that really matters is the one that we’ll all attend when we are gathered into glory. And on that day, we won’t be compared to anyone else. On that day, we’ll hear God say, “Welcome, beloved child! I’m so happy that you’re finally here! There’s no one here who is exactly like you are. Nobody else can take your place. You’re perfect just the way you are!”