The Value of Testimony

Jeremiah 4:11-12, 22-28

I Tim. 1:12-17

Young people – I’m very glad you’re here.  But why are you here?  I’m pretty sure it’s not because of the architecture, or my sermons, or the music and singing, or the praying.  Maybe you’re here because your parents are making you!  Or maybe because you’re genuinely on a journey to discover what kind of life is most meaningful and compelling and interesting.  Because you’re looking for people who can inspire you.  That’s probably the best reason to be here.

Oh, adults, I’m sorry.  I forgot you’re here.  This is important for you too.  Your kids and grandkids, our young people, won’t choose this life for themselves unless they hear some compelling, moving, inspiring, honest experiences from those of us who are a little older.

 

Actually, it’s probably always been this way.  In our reading today, Paul, an older, mature Christian, writes to a much younger Christian, Timothy.  And right at the beginning of the letter, Paul tells Timothy his story.  He “testifies” to what’s happened to him.  He gives his “testimony.”  And he hopes that his story will inspire Timothy to continue in the faith and to learn to tell his own story.

So I want to give my testimony today.  It’s not as interesting or dramatic as Paul’s.  And it’s no more important than yours.  It’s just that I think that you all have great stories to tell of what God has done in your life.  And I want you to be able to tell those stories naturally, and with confidence.  But I can’t expect you to tell your story if I can’t tell mine.

There’s just one problem.  I don’t have a conversion story.  Or at least I don’t have one like Paul’s.  He tells his story of the risen Christ appearing to him and the bright light knocking him to the ground and blinding him (Acts 9).  This amazing experience divided his life neatly into a before and after.

Maybe you have a story like that.  If so, I’m a little jealous.  I guess I’ve had a series of mini-conversions – “conversion-ettes” - rather than one big conversion.  It’s a little messier, but it’s all I’ve got. 

My first turn towards God was a clumsy beginning.

Here’s how it unfolded.  My older brother Aaron was sitting at our kitchen table talking with my parents about his upcoming baptism.  He was 10; I was 7.  I had seen others receive baptism at church.  I knew that I wanted to receive baptism at some point.  I remember sliding up to the table and announcing that I, too, wanted to be baptized this coming Sunday.

If my brother was getting baptized, I didn’t want to miss out on the fun. I wanted to do it too.  In that tradition baptism is by immersion, but I wasn’t even tall enough to keep my head above water.  And so I stood on a cinder block.

Luckily God accepts these silly, clumsy movements towards grace.  There is a story in Mark 5 where Jesus heals a woman who has been bleeding for twelve years.  She’s so tired of failed treatments and the shame of being unclean that she grabs the hem of Jesus cloak as he’s passing through a crowd in her home town.  She really didn’t know that much about Jesus.  She’d just heard others say that he was a healer, and so she took a chance.  But we’re told that God honored her simple, clumsy faith.

So I’m a little embarrassed that my baptism happened with such crude motivations as simply not wanting to be left out.  But there you go.  That was the beginning of my journey.

I wish I could tell you it got better from there.  But it really didn’t.  I was like most young people.  Most days I forgot I was baptized.  And even when I did remember my baptism, I wasn’t always sure what it meant.

My second turn towards God was an adolescent period of misguided intensity.

During High School my faith was becoming more and more personal for me.  It was kind of growing and taking on life in me.  I read the Bible and it didn’t seem like some stale, musty story.  It seemed like the characters were alive.  The stories were real.  And these old texts were powerful.  I read them ravenously.

So yes, there was intensity.  But it was pretty misguided.  As I watched others live their faith, listened to sermons, prayed, and read Scripture, I was like a kid who puts on a Chiefs jersey and thinks he’s in the NFL.  I was like a kid who plants one garden and calls himself a farmer.  I was just barely beginning.  I ought to have been paralyzed and terrified by how little I knew.  But I wasn’t.  I thought I was getting God right and most other people had God wrong.  It’s embarrassing to admit this.  But my over-confidence at the time is undeniable.

When I turned towards God a third time I was in college.  It was a crisis, but also kind of beautiful.  So call it a lovely unraveling.

Now of course I didn’t know as much as I thought I knew about faith.  But there was something very sweet about God.  At least that was my experience.  It was like tasting something and immediately wanting more of it. 

And I thought: well, I’ve been around some skilled pastors, and they really helped me.  So maybe I could do that.  And so off to college I went, ready to undergo training to become a pastor.  And I thought that if faith was good, then becoming a religious professional would be wonderful!  Boy was I wrong.

The beginning of my pastoral training was rewarding in a way, especially work in Bible and theology.  I loved it.  And there I met people who continue to be some of my best friends. 

But training to be a pastor was also disappointing.  It was like biting into a delicious hotdog and thinking – wow, this is good.  I’d sure like to go to the factory and see for myself how these are made!

What I found out was that many of us professional religious types are pathetic phonies, lacking courage, unfamiliar with any real power, afraid of failure.  There are two popular ways of dealing with this anxiety. 

First, you can become a religious CEO of a church business.  And the bigger the church the better. The model of being a pastor most esteemed was Bill Hybels at Willow Creek Community Church in suburban Chicago.  This was the pastor basically as hard-driving CEO of a vast organization of sophisticated programs.  In order to explore this route, I took a summer internship working in a large church in Indianapolis.  I hated it.  I wanted to be a pastor and theologian and writer.  Not a CEO.

The second way to deal with this anxiety is that you pretend you’re the religious expert who knows everything.  Here you become the expert providing comfort for everyone else by reinforcing their unhealthy need for security and certainty.

Pretty early in college, I figured out that I wouldn’t make a very good CEO.  And I didn’t want to be a fundamentalist peddling easy answers and fake comfort to people struggling with their faith.  What I discovered was that many people of faith are afraid.  Afraid of all kinds of stuff.  Afraid of the world, of new ideas, of big questions, afraid of facing themselves.  And I had some of that fear in me too.  But I didn’t like it.  And I didn’t want to live that way.  I wanted to live with wonder and curiosity.

The fourth turn in my life with God I’ll call a conversion into deep and wide. You know the song that kids sing – “Deep and wide, deep and wide, there’s a fountain flowing deep and wide”?  Well, that’s a wonderful image for how God’s amazing love keeps outstripping our capacity to imagine it.  Like Paul says, “The grace of our Lord was poured out on me abundantly” (v. 14).

This was perhaps the biggest and most powerful of my conversions so far.  The shifts that took place in me, and the adjustments to new ways of seeing the world, felt seismic.

This conversion happened slowly, over several years in my mid-20’s.  I was in seminary and graduate school in Connecticut.  I moved from the Midwest to the East Coast.  I moved from small town to a sophisticated college town.  To a place filled with ambitious people from around the world, with different experiences, and different beliefs.

In seminary I was able to learn with and from people from all different Christian traditions, and all kinds of ethnic backgrounds.  I got to know Christians who were gay.  I got to know atheists who said they had no faith and yet some of their lives looked more like God’s kingdom than mine did.

I loved it.  It was just what I wanted to experience.  Studying at Yale was like walking up the steep cliffs for the first time, and staring breathless, aghast at all the amazingly beautiful landscape spilling on in every direction as far as the eye could see. 

I read a piece from the spiritual writer Evelyn Underhill on retreat this weekend.  In it she refers to the experience of conversion as “the renunciation of the narrow horizon.”  That was my fourth conversion: learning that God was deeper and wider than I could imagine.  That my narrow horizons wouldn’t work anymore.

All four of these early conversions were manageable.  They were powerful, but they left me intact.  My fifth conversion was my complete undoing.  Here for the first time I experienced something like a crucifixion.  I’m speaking here, of course, of getting married and having children.

No, I’m serious.  Being married and being a parent is by far the most painful spiritual discipline I have ever experienced.  I may not be a violent blasphemer like Paul.  But I fight with really dark stuff in my heart.  And it’s mostly about selfishness, unkindness, and a lack of compassion.

God used the experience of family life to show me a picture of my own heart.  And it wasn’t pretty.  Here I’d been living out my baptism for over 15 years, and my heart was an absolute, selfish mess.  None of my previous conversions brought me so squarely before the unkindness in me.  God spared me that, I guess.  Or maybe I just wasn’t ready. 

The school kind of learning came easily for me.  But learning to be kind, loving, patient, supportive, forgiving, merciful, joyful and grateful.  This is the hardest work I’ve ever done. 

In college I noticed cute young woman on campus, dressed well, always laughing.  And I had to get to know her.  And so I made lots of awkward, fumbling strategies to be around her or talk to her.  Eventually I asked her if she wanted to go to lunch.  We went to Red Lobster.  (Don’t judge me, I was thinking Red Lobster is the kind of place if you really want to woo someone!).  And all I remember about that first date is that she talked the entire time.  She broke up with me twice, but finally realized what a treasure had fallen in her lap.  And we were married.

I have read the stories of monks and nuns who have made herculean sacrifices as a way of loving God.  They have taken vows of celibacy, renouncing marriage and intimacy in order to be more focused in their praying.  That’s impressive.  I’ve heard of monks who sleep on rocks.  Monks who stand on a stone pillar in the cold desert for days on end.  Monks who fast for weeks.  Nuns who wake up every three hours to pray.  Or who tie thorns around their legs as a constant reminder that we share Christ’s pain.

And I’m sure that Christ appreciates their devotion.  But if I could take a monk or nun out for coffee, I’d say, “Hey, try being married!”

Marriage has been the most deeply satisfying thing that’s happened to me.  But it has also meant I’ve had to learn to share my life, to share my space, my plans and dreams, to listen, to both desire and work for things that benefit Stephanie and not just me – this has been a long and difficult ordeal. 

I simply do not have time this morning to talk about that dark night of the soul called parenting.  So I will pass on.

I’ll finish today with the sixth turn in my journey.  This isn’t fun to talk about.  But I had to learn what brokenness feels like.  I had to learn what failure and disappointment feel like.

When we moved to NYC in 2008, we thought we’d be in New York for the rest of our lives.  We thought we’d raise our kids there.  And that’s not what happened.  So our time there was a rich, beautiful, amazing, wonderful four years instead of a lifetime. 

We helped start a small congregation.  And those friendships are precious to us and will last a lifetime.  We know that God used us.  God used us in that little congregation and in a couple of others we worked with.  And God used us in a variety of friendships in our neighborhood.  And yet, despite all that, things didn’t go as we’d hoped and planned. 

We made lots of sacrifices and rearranged our lives in a thousand ways to be able to help start new churches in New York.   And we thought that investment on our part would have us there long term.  But the financial difficulty and the stress for a family of five living in such an expensive city proved overwhelming.  So I am learning to live with loss and disappointment, to be faithful even in the midst of some failures.  To pray through confusion and uncertainty.

There is a Methodist prayer that says, “Lord, use me or lay me aside.”  That is the scariest prayer I’ve ever come across.  Both parts of the prayer are scary.  God might use you in ways you hadn’t anticipated.  Like when we pick up a screwdriver and use it as a chisel or mini-crow bar.  The willingness to be laid aside is even scarier.  I pray it.  But I don’t like praying it. 

The question I am learning to answer is this: am I willing to love and rejoice in God even when things don’t go my way?  Will I be faithful to God’s calling on my life in the midst of disappointment? 

Because if I am pouting, sulking, refusing to find gladness in my loss, then it looks as if I have been using God.  It looks as if I had agreed to serve and love God as long as God performs for me like a dancing monkey.

Here I am in my sixth conversion.  I’m 42 years old.  I’ve been a pastor for 20 years.  And I’m just now learning how to love and praise God.

There is a curious story in Mark 8.  The people of Bethsaida bring a blind man to Jesus for healing.  This is the only healing story that required two treatments.  Jesus spits on his hands, touches the man’s eyes.  “Do you see anything?” he asks him.  The man was confused, “Well, I see people, but they look like trees walking around.”  So Jesus has to perform the whole healing routine a second time.  This time, the man opened his eyes and could see clearly.

This story is a sign of hope for me.  There needn’t be just one big conversion.  This guy needed two healing experiences.  I’ve already used up six, but who’s counting?  This faith is huge and deep, and will take a lifetime of ongoing conversions to see things straight.

I owe everything I am and everything I have to the God who has loved me in Jesus Christ.  I hope that it’s clear that my story is pretty different than Paul’s story.  And so your story doesn’t have to be like Paul’s either, or like mine.  But you do have a story.

And whether your story involves a series of “conversion-ettes” like mine, or a dramatic all at once conversion like Paul’s, I pray that you’ll learn to tell it.  Tell it with all the honesty you can muster.  We are surrounded by young people who want to hear some good stories.