The Marks of a Christian

June 11, 1995	Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31

Romans 5:1-5

John 16:12-15

As most of you know, this past week Valerie, Lynn and I attended the sessions of the Detroit Annual Conference. And while there we heard from an amazing man — Dr. W. Paul Jones, professor of Theology and Philosophy at St. Paul's School of Theology in Kansas City. He spoke to us during three of the morning worship services. And some of the things he said were startling to many.

One of the most striking things he talked about was of the pain and suffering he had endured growing up , and also as an adult striving to live out his calling to be a Christian. He told us that in all of his life he had never heard his own mother tell him that she loved him. Just three simple words that he had never heard from her lips: "I love you." And then Dr. Jones described how included in the last letter his mother wrote to him before she died were the words, "I shall always wonder where we went wrong with you." And then the next day his mother committed suicide.

And then Dr. Jones told us of an occasion when he had to take a very unpopular social stance back in the '60's while working as a professor at Yale University. Having been recently ordained, his bishop came to visit him and threatened to take away his orders if he didn't stop what he was doing. But he persevered and remained true to his Christian convictions, even in the face of ridicule from his own church leadership and many of its members.

Indeed, Dr. W. Paul Jones is an interesting man. But perhaps what makes him most interesting is the fact that he has suffered such things as these and has yet, in spite of it all, persevered and survived and even grown spiritually. Why? Because of the love and the grace of God.

Certainly, there isn't a person sitting in this room this morning who wants to suffer. I mean, if we were given the choice between going on a five mile hike and eating a nice warm piece of chocolate cake with a scoop of vanilla ice cream next to it, most of us would choose the cake and ice cream. Or, if I were to offer any young person sitting here a 10-speed bicycle as long as they would ride it on a bicycle trip from here to Mackinaw City, most of them would be content with the bicycle they have. This is because most of us naturally choose the easy path over the difficult one. Because we are human beings who want to avoid pain and discomfort, we want to take the easy way out. And, so, of course, it is much easier for us to sit at home and be couch potatoes rather than get involved with the hurting needs of our community. It is easier for us to turn our backs on our neighbors and pretend we don't hear when they abuse their children or each other. And it certainly is easier to look the other way, rather than to complain and get involved, if we don't like something that is happening to someone at work or at the school, or at city hall, or at the township hall, or with the county Board of Supervisors. And, yes, if an employer in the area is suspected of polluting the environment, or killing off spotted owls, it may be more financially expedient to look the other way rather than to stand up for what is right in the name of God.

Believe me. I know which is easier. Standing up for one's convictions, expressing one's faith by word and deed, living a moral, decent life, caring for someone who may be an outcaste, demanding nothing but the best for a community, can sometimes be like asking for trouble. For in the process, you can suffer everything from ulcers to sleepless nights to depression to many other kinds of anguish and torment. Indeed, sometimes it is not easy to be a serious, dedicated, Christian. I dare you to try.

And yet our lesson from the book of Romans for today tells us that because we are justified by faith we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. So often, however, we understand this scripture in the wrong way. For what does it mean to have peace with God? The fact is that most of us mistake peace with God for a general state of tranquility where we're not sick, no one in our family has died, everything is ok where we work, our spouse and the kids aren't on our back, and everybody leaves us alone when we want to be left alone. That's what we think peace with God is. And, so, some of us think that being religious and going to church and being a Christian will bring us peace. But how disappointed we are when we find that being religious and going to church and being a Christian may lead us into circumstances where we find anything but peace!

The fact is, however, that peace with God and peace with the powers and principalities of this world are two different things. It may be possible for a person to ignore or try to ignore the things around him/her that need to be changed, to allow the forces of darkness to go unchallenged, to stick one's head in the sand. Certainly, in doing that you will experience a kind of a peace. But that kind of peace is more like the peace you would expect to find in decay and death. Peace with God, on the other hand, is being able to fight the good fight and having the assurance that God loves you in the midst of it all. When you have peace with God, the walls can come tumbling down, and friends and loved ones can be falling at your right and at your left, and the devil, himself may be snarling at you in your face but, even in the midst of all of that, you still know that God is there telling you that he loves you.

But having such an awareness of God's peace may be difficult for us to come by. Dr. W. Paul Jones told us that in order to be aware of God's peace he personally had to take a substantial amount of time every day to simply listen to the voice of God. In fact, he told us that each of us should do that and even choose a nickname by which God could call us and talk with us as we took time to talk with God. In our prayers we could then be more intimate with a God who Jesus, himself, called "Daddy." In our prayers we could tell this intimate God of how things are going in our life. We could talk with God about the battles we were having and the hurts we were experiencing and the pain we were bearing. And because we did this we would indeed know the peace of God which passes all understanding.

Having such a relationship of peace with God is one that definitely has its benefits. The apostle Paul recognized these benefits when he said, "Suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us."

So we can choose which kind of peace we want. Do we want the kind of peace which is a surrender to the frustrations and problems and evils of this world? Or wouldn't we rather have peace with God that can only come when we are intent upon putting God at the very center of our being through faith?

One of the most memorable things that those of us at Annual Conference heard Dr. W. Paul Jones say was when he first started to speak to us in his first sermon, delivered on Wednesday morning. It was just two words, and they were said with a smile on his face: "I'm weird!" he said. What he meant was, "Look out! I'm a character! And I've been made the character that I am by the relationship I have with a loving God who has called me by name, and who, in the midst of struggle, suffering, and turmoil, has called me by name and said, 'I love you!'"

May we all be blessed with such a blessed weirdness as this!

Amen.