Sermons for the Month
Creative Destruction
DATE: April 1, 2001
SERVICE: Lent V
TEXT: Philippians 3:4b-14“To all of you Saints here this morning, grace and peace to you from God our Father, from His Son, Jesus Christ and His Holy Spirit. AMEN
It's a beast of beauty, your shiny new 2001 SUV. But within a few years, it will be a broken-down heap of junk. It will die and go the way of all old autos. Sure, it may spend a season on the used SUV lot. It may go through two more owners, but soon the thrill is gone. The sheen will dull, and rust will creep and corrode. Even old favorites like BMWs from the '80s. Their first owners paid big bucks, expecting the cars to last a lifetime, but by the new millennium they are burning quarts of rich OPEC oil and eating lots of good green cash to keep rolling in replacement parts and labor. Costs rise. The cars are doomed. Infused with obsolescence, the end quickly approaches. Taken in tow they will go, hauled behind tow trucks or riding piggyback on car carriers. Off on their final ride to the old cars home, the junkyard - now renamed "The Auto Recycling Center" - to be stripped of usable, salable doors and headlamps, bumpers and windows, taillights and floor mats. Ford, General Motors and others have been building automobiles for 100 years now, and back in the golden days of college jalopies and flirtatious flappers - as early as 1927 - it was becoming clear that old-fashioned rusting and ruined Model T's and others were making a heaping pile - numbered at a million autos and growing. The automobile industry needed a solution for the increasing problem of the discarded consumer products slowly oxidizing in stacks in salvage yards. And they found one, called the "Carbeque" (rhymes with barbeque), which put a car on a spit and roasted it until it melted into a ferrous blob (see Illustrations for details). Today, a new device literally chews and shreds your used SUV into fist-sized pieces while working in a manner similar to a humble common paper shredder. The full-sized car shredder spreads over a thousand feet, weighs several tons and costs millions of dollars to construct - but when installed, it can chew through dozens of cars an hour. Your clunker goes through a feed roll, right into heavy, pounding shredder hammers which turn it into metal meal, then on to scrubbers, then through forced-air currents and magnetics which separate precious ferrous material from the remains, which it sloughs off. The ferrous shreds and fragments are conveyed by whirring belts to waiting rail cars which take them off to the steel mill. "About 75 percent of the metal of a junked car is now recycled through shredding," claims the Argonne National Laboratory. Other technologies under development will "mine" the foam, fabric, plastic, glass and other auto materials, thereby reducing waste in landfills from cars by 60 percent. In time, very little will go to waste. Which means that the SUV you are driving today may have been a Yugo yesterday. And that can be a problem. What worked yesterday doesn't always work today. No one knew that better than the apostle Paul. He writes: If anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless. Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but one that comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith. I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead. Of course, looking back a few millennia, car shredding and recycling were non-issues. Paul may never have heard the Aramaic word for recycle - probably there wasn't one - but unquestionably he was familiar with the concept. In the old tongue of the KJV, Paul doesn't use the word "rubbish," he uses the word "dung" (3:8). Dung was recycled. It came from grass and was returned to fields to make them fertile to grow wheat, figs, grapes, olives. Paul understood the use of the old to create the new. He was himself reduced, reforged, refined and refashioned - becoming useful in the process. That's why he has some advice for us: Paul's destruction instruction is to forget the past, to reorder one's priorities and press on to a new prize, "the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus" (v. 14). He regards all his past as dung, as rubbish, for in his heart he is a new man, reborn in Christ. But does he really forget his past? Or, instead, does God refashion him from the materials available? Paul doesn't totally toss out the window his personal history. Instead, he drops his Hebrewness, his tribal sense of self, his zeal, his law knowledge and his blamelessness into the God-made shredder to be crushed, crunched, crackled, cracked, shredded, refined and redefined - and finally refashioned into useful tools for his preaching of the Good News. Paul no longer slavishly adheres to the old, the ritual, the traditional for to have done that would have meant the exclusion of what was most important, the sharing of Jesus Christ and him crucified. Paul changes his behavior by no longer zealously persecuting Christians, but he does use his Pharisaical tool bag to preach Jesus Christ. His knowledge of the Law and Jewish history certainly impacts his powerful preaching. His articulate skills in logical thinking - learned before he was converted - prove of notable use to Paul. He redirects his zeal and his passion for pressing on. On a spring morning in 1991, Lorraine Monroe paid her first visit to Intermediate School 10, on 149th Street in Harlem. The place hardly inspired greatness. There was neither a lobby nor a playground, and subway trains rumbled directly underneath. Inside, the facility was scarred by broken ceiling tiles, water stains and torn stage curtains. Monroe's tour came to an end at the dingy principal's office - her new place of business. "How could things have gotten this bad?" she thought. IS 10 (also known as Frederick Douglass School) was well-known for its violence, its poor attendance and its persistently low level of academic achievement. Her charge: to destroy IS 10. In its place, she was to create a special high school, one that would defy people's diminished expectations of what public education could accomplish in the inner city. This school would actually educate its students. It would graduate them, it would send them off to college, it would prepare them for careers... . Her assignment at IS 10 (which she renamed the Frederick Douglass Academy) proved to be a success .... She restored order and discipline, largely by promulgating "Twelve Non-Negotiable Rules and Regulations" - a code rooted in respect for oneself, for one's associates and for property. Its precepts were simple: Attend school daily, and arrive on time. Be prepared to work every day. Do homework nightly. Keep your desk area clean. Do not fight. Kids and teachers alike were now free to focus on learning. And learn they did: Test scores at the Frederick Douglass Academy quickly shot up, placing the academy among the top of all New York City schools. When the academy's first class graduated, in 1996, 96% of the students went on to college. It takes energy, intelligence and hard knocks to save what is salvageable from one waste stream and to transform it into something useful once again. It is no small or cheap task to build a crunching, smashing, car-cooking machine to transform a SUV into recoverable useful bits and pieces. It requires retooling, rethinking, refocusing. It takes a lot of trust in God, and energy, and hard knocks, to shred those things we love, those things which define us, those things to which our self-definition is attached - be it an SUV, or a career, or an income, or a lifestyle, or an image in the mirror. Ten years ago I had to shred my personal perceptions of what a church ought, should or better be - rather than what God chooses to make it. We are called to regard all as loss for Christ. But all is not lost and much is gained. We may recycle our spiritually destructive attachments, "egosizing" them, crushing them to a compact form, shredding them to extract the reusable parts and allowing God the opportunity to use the best parts of us in refashioned form as we pursue the holy prize. Paul understood the destruction instruction. We can, too, with God's help. AMEN