This Week's Sermons

Sermons for the Month
"God's Measuring Stick"
DATE: September 27, 1998
SERVICE: Pentecost XVI
TEXT: Luke 16:9-31
"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
You don't have to be a physicist in order to fully grasp Einstein's concept of relativity. Here's one way to prove the essentially elastic nature of time and space. Spend 20 minutes in a freeway snarl-up. Then spend 20 minutes in a phone conversation with an old friend. Did time pass the same way in both instances? Didn't time fly by when with an old friend? Didn't time grind to a halt when gridlocked on the freeway?
Did the week in which all the kids are home sick with the flu progress at the same chronological time as a week's vacation at the beach? The heart surgeon who slips into a super-concentrated "flow" state of consciousness never realizes she has been on her feet in surgery for eight hours. But that same surgeon looks at her watch every three minutes during an hour-long dinner banquet. A basketball player gets "in the zone" and is able to sustain peak physical performance for two 20-minute halves or four eight-minute quarters. But that same athlete can't keep himself from falling asleep at a half-hour organizational meeting. And on and on.
No matter what anybody tells us, there is no denying the fact: Some days are just longer than others.
Christians should be the first to know this. We live, breathe and have our being in a universe created by a God who measures all things on a divinely calibrated sliding scale. God refuses to adhere to the metric system, or Greenwich Mean Time, or Fahrenheit/ Centigrade.
Some of the most famous men and women in the Bible spent a lot of time trying to figure out God's quirky sense of timing and trying to predict how the scales of God's judgment would finally be balanced.
We have been studying in Confirmation, the divine sense of timing waited until Abraham and Sarah were extremely old before they celebrated the birth of their son Isaac.
It was Abraham who negotiated with God about the divine scale of justice verses the sins of Sodom. Would God let the weight of 10 righteous men outbalance all the sins of Sodom.
The divine measure of leadership chose Moses, a stuttering sheepherder, a fugitive murderer, an outcast from Pharaoh's house -- to lead the Israelites out of Egypt.
The divine definition of greatness selected David, a scrawny, dreamy-eyed, harp-playing youth, as the new king of the newly united nation of Israel.
The divine balancing scales repeatedly weighed the sins of Israel against God's own covenant promise and somehow found a way to keep them weighted in Israel's favor.
The divine openness to "second" chances multiplied into an unending series of prophetic words of repentance and forgiveness to a wayward people.
Without God's unpredictable measuring stick constantly sizing up the situation and fudging the figures in Israel's favor, the relationship between God and God's chosen people would have been a very short story. Thankfully, God measures all of us according to God's own "stick" ... a "stick" in which one occasion of repentance cancels out a lifetime of sin ... a "stick" in which a single confession of faith weighs more than a dozen acts of faithlessness ... a "stick" in which a heartfelt expression of genuine love stands taller than all our petty acts of selfishness and hate stacked together.
In today's reading, there was a rich man who had lived his whole life well-to-do. He had a stable of cars, a gaggle of servants, a house full of bathrooms. He went to church, at least quarterly because he was a busy man. He gave to the church but not excessively lest others think him a show-off or to avoid the church becoming overly dependent. He drove his Mercedes on the freeways that circled the city's slums; he refrained from opening the solicitations from the Salvation Army or Food for the Hungry; he turned the channel on the reports of the hurricane devastation in the Caribbean. It wasn't that he was such a bad man. God loved as he did most. It's just that he believed what the good book said, "God is forever forgiving."
Meanwhile, a poor man by the name of Lazarus tried to eke out a living by begging near the entrance to the rich man's bank. Existing on rice and discarded bread from the local bakery, his health was always something he had to forego for lack of insurance.
Both the Rich man and Lazarus died. But to the surprise of our Rich Man who was sure he had done just enough by way of charitable work to earn himself a comfortable spot in heaven, he found himself in that other place. And the measuring stick by which he had always measured his value and those of others was completely reversed on the other side of the grave. How foolish he had been, he now realized. "Have a heart God. Let me contact my family and tell them what could happen to them too if they don't change their ways."
"But they have Moses and the prophets to tell them." "That won't do any good. It didn't do any good for me. Let me speak to them."
"If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead."
There is a lesson to be learned in the Rich Man's apparent foolishness. Arthur Gordon, in his successor book to the best-selling The Touch of Wonder, tells of a similar lesson that arose from the Lenten tradition in his family of "the mite box." In their journey toward Easter, the children would put money into little offering boxes, to be taken to church on Easter Sunday and given as their Easter offering.
"The trouble in my case is that sometimes in moments of acute financial need, I would pry some of the coins out of my box. My conscience gnawed me a bit, but not too severely, because I always intended to put the money back for God before Easter. But somehow or another I was chronically short and never did. The fatal morning would always come. With Easter morning's dawn, Aunt Daisy would come over and always go to church with us on Easter. After breakfast, we were to bring in our mite boxes for inspection by our parents. My sister, a saint at an early age, was clean as a whistle, and her box was always filled with nickels and dimes and clean. It had never been opened. Mine was dog-eared and dirty with smudges on it from illicit openings in the face of financial crisis. I would look inside at a few surviving pennies rattling about forlornly.
"My father knew how wicked I had been, and he gave me a lecture every Easter. Why was I so selfish? Why couldn't I think less about myself and more about others? He was intent on making me feel my guilt, and was successful.
"Finally, Aunt Daisy tired of it, fished in her purse, and drew out a 50-cent piece and looked into my dazzled eyes. 'Here,' she said, 'Put this in your mite box.'
'Not fair!' howled my saintly sister.
'It's not right, Daisy,' said my angry father. 'The boy shouldn't be rewarded for poor performance.'
'Well,' Aunt Daisy smiled.
"To my sister, she said, 'You're right, dear, it's not fair. But never you mind. God will remember how faithful you've been.'
"To my father, she said, 'Haven't you ever had a gift that you did not deserve? I should think Easter might remind you of that.'
"Then her warm brown eyes rested on me, the chief of sinners. She said this: 'Arthur, God loves all sinners, large ones and small ones, like you. But don't push him too far.'" (Arthur Gordon, Return to Wonder [Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 1996], 135-136. With thanks to Dr. W. Frank Harrington of Peachtree Presbyterian Church, Atlanta, Georgia, for pointing me to this story.)
Don't push God's measuring "stick" too far. But because God keeps score according to a different set of rules, and because God's official time clock yokes past, present and future, even the most sinful and selfish human beings sometimes seem justified in crying out to God, "Unfair!" One of the wealthiest Christians in the United States, billionaire United Methodist Curtis Carlson, founder of Radisson hotels and other Carlson enterprises out of Minneapolis, Minnesota, sent his daughter, Marilyn Carlson Nelson, a birthday card. On the cover, Marilyn noted, it said, "You're the answer to my prayers .... "'Then I opened it and saw the rest. It said, 'You're the answer to my prayers ... but you're not what I prayed for!'"
God's measuring stick and ours are not always the same!
You prayed for good health. The answer you didn't pray for: Your spouse surprises you with a broccoli and brown rice casserole.
You prayed for a new sense of purpose and direction in your life. The answer you didn't pray for: Suddenly, you find out that your company has downsized you right out of a job.
You prayed for family unity. The answer you didn't pray for: You get a late-night phone call from your teenager telling you he's okay ... but the car isn't.
You prayed for renewal. The answer you didn't pray for: Your dog besieges you with saliva, fur and paw prints when you come home from a long and disappointing day.
One of my favorite sermons in the history of preaching is the one by George H. Morrison on the text from Zechariah 2:1-2:
"Then I looked up -- and there before me was a man with a measuring line in his hand! I asked, 'Where are you going?' He answered me, 'To measure Jerusalem, to find out how wide and how long it is'" (NIV).
Morrison used this text to show how God measures us and our lives using weightier units of measurement than gold and silver, dollars and cents, fame and fortune, square feet and cubic meters, and slide rules. "Measure Jerusalem; just think of it! Measure the city of the living God! Set down on a paper, in yards and feet and inches, all that is gathered in that word 'Jerusalem'; all the tears that have been wept in it, all the songs that have been sung in it, all the crying of brokenhearted men in it that had gone quivering to the ear of God. There are some things in life you cannot measure. Their meaning and their value are immeasurable. Tell me their area and you have told me nothing. Their value is not of space but of the spirit; of noble memories that cling to them, of heroism that turn their dust to gold, of trust in God and conquest of the devil, that make their trifling area like paradise. No wonder this young man was stopped, and stopped with the swift authority of heaven. To measure anything with God in it is one of the most hopeless of employments. It is to misinterpret all the past and to obscure the promise of the future, which pulses with a hope that is incalculable, and thrills with the possibilities of heaven."
Morrison goes on to tell of a visit to Shakespeare's home in Stratford-on-Avon. He couldn't believe how tiny it was. The whole house could probably fit into some of the bathrooms that we build today. "And yet, if I might venture to suggest, it is a larger place than many drawing rooms where there is watered tea, and watered cleverness, and everything watered but the heart" (The Greatest Sermons of George H. Morrison [New York: Harper & Brothers, 1959], 124-125).
The postage-stamp house where John Wesley lived with the family of Thomas Hird in the Georgia Colony of Frederica makes Shakespeare's home look like a castle. Some scholars are convinced that Wesley actually lived in a space smaller than this: a hut or lean-to that he placed on the Hird plot (Lot 12 North Ward).
Look what God did through the tiniest people, the tiniest plots of land, the tiniest tribes, the tiniest nations, the tiniest places. There's an old saying, "Give me love and a cottage becomes a castle."
There are many measuring sticks by which to measure life. The one we Christians are asked to use is the one used by God, the one that puts Lazarus on top, turns the smallest person into the most important, transforms the least significant into the greatest. God prays we use his not another's measuring stick. Regardless, however, it will be our choice, and the stick by which we will be held accountable. For whatever stick we use to measure others, it will be the one by which we ourselves will some day be measured in heaven.
AMEN