A few years ago, my brother Andrew was working in the kitchen when one of those sickle-shaped food processor blades slipped out of his hand and buried itself in the vinyl flooring.  It went through his foot between the bones and pinned him to the kitchen floor.  To make matters even worse this happened not long after the company he founded got venture funding so he was between jobs and without healthcare.  It cut away some of my own illusions of invulnerability.

In Hebrews we hear that, “the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword… it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart” (Heb. 4).  To translate into modern language, sometimes God’s word seems sharper than a food processor blade.  This sharpness comes from the way it exposes us, and cuts away the lies we habitually tell about ourselves.  It reveals our true intentions and desires.  We don’t read scripture enough because quite often we don’t want to know who we really are.  In G.K. Chesterton’s words, “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting, it has been found difficult and left untried.”

The German reformer Martin Luther (1483-1546) famously used the Latin phrase incurvatus se to describe our condition.  Sin means that rather than being open to the world, to truth and to God, we are curled in on ourselves to such an extent that we even try to use our ideas about God against God.  We are blind to ourselvesIn one way or another we ignore our shortcomings, either we choose not to think about them or we harbor the sneaking suspicion that we’re pretty good.  We quickly come up with excuses for our failures.

Here in Silicon Valley when a racing BMW cuts my wife Heidi off, I sometimes remind her that the driver might be racing to the hospital for an emergency.  She thinks I’m incurably naïve.  When we’re the ones driving like that we always justify it with a reason.  What we accept in ourselves is often what we condemn in others.  C. S. Lewis points out that we know we are guilty of the sin of pride because we hate it so much when we see it in others.  He writes that every person’s pride is in competition with everyone else’s pride.

Let’s go back for a minute to Martin Luther.  He believed that although we are curved in on ourselves, God provides the Bible to help us.  For him the Word of God is not the same thing as scripture.  He might even object to the way we say, “The Word of the Lord,” after we do a reading in church.  Luther regards scripture as a kind of potentiality.  It only becomes the Word of God when it confronts us.

Luther writes, “It is one thing when God is present, and another thing when he is present for you.  But he is present for you when he adds his Word to scripture and declares, ‘here you shall find me.’”

God’s word confronts us.  It exposes how we choose to avoid reality in big ways and small ways in virtually every moment of our life.  Luther compares these false shelters to the blankets a child hides under out of fear of the dark.  God’s Word strips away what we falsely imagine will protect us.  Standing nakedly in this holy presence, God asks, “Where are you in your life?”  “What do you really stand for?”

So a rich man from somewhere like Los Altos Hills or Sunnyvale or Mountain View comes to Jesus.  He has it all but knows that something is missing.  He doesn’t feel whole.  He sees the falseness of the lie that we believe most of the time – that more success, more power, more wealth, better reputation, intelligence or even our own beauty will be enough for us to feel complete.

Jesus tells him that to inherit eternal life he should keep the commandments.  The young man feels pretty proud to say that he has done so.  Jesus loves him.  He says “sell what you own and give the money to the poor and you will have treasure in heaven” (Mk. 10).  For that rich man and for us a seemingly ordinary encounter suddenly becomes the Word of God.  It feels a little like dropping the food processor blade through our foot.

That’s it - Jesus loves us by giving us the truth.  Although this young man thought he cared about God, for the first time in his life he realizes that wealth is what really most matters.  Imagine Jesus in our own time saying, “the ushers will now be passing the plate to collect the title to your house.  Make sure to put in all your bank account numbers because we’ll be distributing all of your wealth to poorer people this afternoon.”  Does the word of God feel sharp to you yet?

Michael Lewis’ book The Blind Side will be released as a film next month.  It tells two parallel stories.  The first concerns how football strategy has changed since the 1980’s era San Francisco 49ers emphasized a game based on short reliable passes.  This in turn vastly increased the value and pay of professional left tackles who are the primary defenders of a right-handed quarterback’s blind side.

The other story is about a remarkable young African American man named Michael Oher who grew up in the slums of Memphis.  His mother was addicted to crack cocaine.  His father was uninvolved in his upbringing and was murdered when he was in high school.  Michael lived in foster homes and was homeless. For large periods of his life he simply did not attend any school.

But then he got a break.  Michael Oher was crashing at his friend Steven’s place.  Steven’s dying grandmother had one last wish, that her grandson should receive the education he needed to become a Christian minister.  Steven’s father Big Tony had the gumption to take this request seriously and brought both boys to a Christian high school far out in the white suburbs.

At Briarcrest Christian School Michael stood  out.  For one thing he was one of only a few African American students and for another he was about six foot four inches and weighed 330 pounds.  He rarely said anything.  He came from such an impoverished background and had attended so little school that he didn’t know what a cell was in biology or what the word atom meant.  He had never heard about nouns or verbs.  There were so many things he didn’t know about in that middle class world, that he couldn’t even follow the conversation.

Then Michael Oher got his second break.  Sean Tuohy had been an outstanding college basketball player twenty years earlier and was the hero of his own rags to riches story.  He had long been married to a Leigh Anne the former cheerleader who had been his college sweetheart.  Although he worked as an announcer for the local professional basketball team, most of his money came from owning more than 70 fast food franchises.  As luck would have it their daughter Collins was one of Michael Oher’s classmates.

Sean Tuohy realized that Michael had no money for lunches and quietly arranged to pay for a charge card so that the boy could eat.  One thing led to another and before long he had set up a special tutor who worked with Michael for hours each day.  Then Michael moved in as their adopted child.  This young man never had a bed before.  Not long after he arrived his new mother Leigh Anne remembers sending him into the house for his backpack.  She told him that it was in the foyer.  She went in ten minutes later to find him wandering around the living room.  He didn’t know what a foyer was.

I don’t have time to elaborate, but I hope that you take a moment to think about the ramifications of making a homeless teenager a full member of your family.  Imagine what it means to so completely connect your life with someone who has been seriously damaged by a world run by rival drug gangs.  Or imagine what it was like to be a homeless teenager and suddenly immersed in a world with totally different rules and expectations.

Michael worked with a dedicated tutor and through on-line classes brought his grades up enough to play college football.  He was chosen in the first round of the NFL draft and now plays for the Baltimore Ravens on a five year $13.8 million contract.

Sean and Leigh Anne were involved in forming one of the fastest growing evangelical churches in Memphis.  I have a hunch that like us they have felt the sharp edge of God’s word.  Like us they had choices when they heard today’s gospel.  They could sell their 70 fast food franchises and give the money to the poor, or go away disappointed like the rich young man.  But these aren’t our only choices.  They could decide that the important part of the story is not “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of the needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God” (Mk. 10).

Perhaps the most valuable lesson to learn from this is that as the gospel says later, “for God all things are possible.”  With God’s grace Michael Oher and the Tuohy’s took a real risk and experienced a real miracle.  God makes possible the good things we do.

This morning we talked about the difficulty of Christianity for us as people who are turned in on ourselves.  God finds us in this state.  God’s living word sharper than a food processor blade confronts us.  It takes away the false sense of security that blankets our life.

But this is not the end of the story for us.  We are not creatures defined by our inability, but sons and daughters who live in the promise that for God all things are possible.

What does a confrontation with the living word of God show you about your blind side?  There is an answer to our deepest questions.  God invites us to draw close to the one who is most familiar with the mysteries of our heart.  In Amos’ words, “Seek God and live” (Amos 5).  Let God make all things possible in your life!

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Gilbert Keith Chesterton, The Wit and Wisdom of G.K. Chesterton, (NY: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1911), 10 (from What is Wrong with the World).

Luther writes, “[D]ue to original sin, our nature is so curved in upon itself at its deepest levels that it not only bends the best gifts of God toward itself in order to enjoy them (as the moralists and the hypocrites make evident), nay rather, “uses” God in order to obtain them, but it does not even know that, in this wicked, twisted, crooked way, it seeks everything, including God, only for itself.” Martin Luther, Lectures on Romans ed. Wilhelm Pauck (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster Press, 1961), 159

C.S. Lewis “The Great Sin,” Mere Christianity (NY: Macmillan, 1943), 108ff.

What follows is a close paraphrase of Margaret R. Miles, The Word Made Flesh: A History of Christian Thought (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 249.

Michael Lewis, The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game (NY: W.W. Norton, 2006).

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© Malcolm C. Young, 2009Amos 5:6-7,10-15

Christ Church, Los Altos, CA Sermon P23Ps. 19:7-14

19 Pentecost (Proper 23B) 8:00 a.m. & 10:00 a.m.Heb. 4:12-16

Sunday 11 October 2009Mk. 10:17-31

The Blind Side and the Living Word of God

“Indeed, the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart” (Hebrews 4).