| 25th Sunday in Ordinary Time |
September 19,
1999 |
"Sir," the officer replied, "The cabins are identical."
"Yeah," said the man, "but his cabin looks out on the ocean and my cabin looks out on this old dock."1
The man had become so absorbed with playing the comparison game that he became blind to the obvious-the ship would soon be on the ocean and all the views will be the same.
Have you ever noticed that we are perfectly content with what we have-until we compare what we have with what someone else has.
This is a difficult message for us to live out. We measure our worth based on our accomplishments. This is true even in ministry. I was on a telephone interview with a church and they asked me what I had accomplished when I served in another church. I only mentioned a few things. It had been several years and I had trouble recalling everything. I also tend to downplay my accomplishments because I do not like to sound as if I am bragging. There was a pause then one of the people asked, "Is that all you did?" I should have hung up the phone. For me the interview was over. If they were going to measure my suitability for the position by how much I accomplished in another church, I knew I did not want that position. One of the main thrusts of my ministry is to help people accept that their worth is not based on what they have done but who they are.
Over the past several years, I have had the privilege of visiting with people who are dying. One of the real struggles of the dying is accepting their worth as a person after they can no longer contribute to the basic duties and responsibilities of the home. One person seemed to summarize aptly the frustration of all the dying patients I have ever visited when she said, "John I am just no damn good to anyone any more."
To me, that is a sad commentary on how we have live; to reach the final stage of our life and to measure our worth and value only by our contributions. President Ronald Reagan and Al Tofte preformed different roles in their life. Both men made valuable contributions to the economic prosperity of our country. Now both men live out of the public eye as they deal with the crippling effects of Alzheimer disease. Both men deserve visits from their friends and family and their pastor not because of what they have done but who they are-a child of God.
The parable reminds us that we are more important that our works.
A church growth consultant was speaking to a group of pastors. He asked them to list the ten most significant things that their church did during the last year and then to mark the ones in which they were heavily involved. He then told them that if they were heavily involved in more than a majority of them they were failing as a pastor. He went on to explain that effective pastoral leadership gives birth to the ministry of the laity.4 It does not do the ministry for the laity. However, before a pastor can give birth to lay ministry each member has to be willing to serve in the vineyard.
Across the river at First Pres, they have written a series of value statements that guides their ministry. One of them states, "Every member is a minister" If properly understood and applied it is a very good statement. Of course, there will be shut-ins and nursing home residents and the sick who are not able to perform ministry but every member should see themselves as a valuable contributor to the ministry of the church.
Dr Bill Bright the founder and president of Campus Crusade for Christ often compared the organization to a chain. He would tell the staff that Campus Crusade was only as strong as its weakest link. The same is true in the ministry of the church. We will only be as strong as our weakest member. We will only be as effective as each member becomes involved in the harvest. No one has the luxury of sitting idly in the market place using the excuse that there is no work.
Everyone needs to be working
A sparrow complained to God, "You gave beautiful colors to the peacock and a lovely song to the nightingale, but I am plain and unnoticed. Why was I made to suffer?" "You were not made to suffer," stated God. "You suffer because you make the foolish mistake of comparing yourself with others, be yourself, for in that there is no comparison and no pain." 5
That's easy to say, isn't it, but hard to implement. Comedian Dennis Miller puts it this way: "Remember how good you felt when your neighbor's house got struck by lightening because he got the new satellite dish?"6
Jesus understood that the Pharisees were playing a comparison game with their religion. They had reduced spirituality to a merit system. The more good deeds a person performed the greater their reward. The length of tenure also brought the expectation of greater recognition. Jesus wanted to shatter this misconception of God and open them up to a new way of understanding his grace and work in their life. He wanted to move them beyond a religion motivated by rewards and punishment to a faith that could enjoy the wonder and beauty of grace and mercy.
In the fourth century, a monk lived in the Egyptian desert who had both a brilliant mind and a love of learning. He read all the classical works of the desert fathers and organized them in his own book which he entitled The Eight Deadly Thoughts. The work reached the church in Rome and was revised by the Pope, Gregory the Great who published The Seven Deadly Sins. The Eight Deadly Thoughts stress that you and I do not wrestle with sins so much as thoughts which stir up passions and cause emotional turmoil. We are not evil people just because we find ourselves thinking these "deadly thoughts." These eight deadly thoughts can be found in the temptation of our Lord and every believer can expect sooner or later to be assailed by them. Unless we gain mastery over these thoughts, they will lead us into sin. Even when we do not commit an overt sin, these eight deadly thoughts hinder us from following Christ. They are easily aroused and distract us in our struggle preventing us from being attentive to others and to God.
That Egyptian monk warns us that the comparison game will lead to the thought of sadness. Whenever we compare our achievement with those of others, we will be deeply disappointed with our lives. This is a form of self-pity. We think about what we might have become if we had not suffered the restrictions of becoming a Christian. "So rather than finding joy in following Christ's ways, we think of all the pleasures we could have enjoyed were it not for our obedience." It is the same sense of despondency when we think, "What could I have become if I had married a different person?" "What could I be doing if I had pursued a different career." Those thoughts will only lead to a sense of entrapment that produces anger. We lash out at others who we think are responsible for the lackluster life that we must endure. "Sadness is a deadly thought, fraught with unrealistic fantasies of how much greater we might have become." 7
