Fuzzicity

Philippians 3:4b-14
If anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day in the family of Israel, tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; according to the law, a Pharisee; according to zeal, a persecutor of the church; according to righteousness under the law being blameless.

But whatever advantages came to me, these I consider disadvantages through Christ. Even more I regard all things as disadvantages because of the surpassing knowledge of my Lord Jesus Christ, for whom I suffer disadvantages in all things and consider them rubbish in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having my own righteousness from the law but rather through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith. To know him and the power of his resurrection and to participate in his suffering, to conform to his death, so that may come to resurrection from the dead. It is not that I already have this or have received perfection already, but I press on and seek to seize hold of it, because Christ Jesus has seized hold of me.

Brothers and sisters, I don't consider myself to have seized it, but I do this one thing: forgetting what lies behind, and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on to the goal which is the prize of the heavenly calling of God in Christ Jesus.

You know what one of my favorite Bible stories is? It’s not one you hear very often, but to me it’s just right. It’s just the way I think spiritual “enlightenment” happens.

Jesus is teaching in the villages around Galilee. He’s frustrated because no one seems to be able to understand what he is trying to show them. Especially his disciples. He has just expressed his frustration to the disciples. He says to them, “Do you still not get it? Do you have eyes and fail to see? Do you have ears and fail to hear? And don’t you remember?” [Mark 8:17-18]” No one seems to be able to see what’s really going on.

It is at this very moment that the people bring him a blind man--somebody who really can’t see what’s going on. Jesus takes him outside the village and, (this is the gross part), he spits on the blind man’s eyes and lays hands on him and says, “Can you see anything?”

We’re expecting this to do the trick. Jesus has been healing people all over the place and all it takes is the touch of his hands. Surely touching and…ew!…spitting on the blind man’s eyes will make a difference. But something really unusual happens. When Jesus says, “Can you see anything?” the blind man says, “I see people but they look like trees walking.” Jesus has to lay hands on him a second time for his sight to come in clearly.

I like that story. I like it because I think it describes the process so many of us must go through in order to see clearly. Sometimes things have to get fuzzy before they can get clear. Sometimes we need something to bring us up short - to interrupt our world as we know it -- so that we everything we think we know is fuzzy and the new world that God wants to show us can begin to come into focus.

I have to tell you that I hear this call in what Paul says to us in Philippians this morning. The first thing I want to say today is that in order to get to clarity we first have to go through fuzzicity. (How’s that for a new word?)

Now you may be saying to yourself: There’s too much fuzzicity in my life already. I don’t need any more fuzziness, I want clarity. There are too many things bringing me up short. There are too many interruptions to the world as I know it. The hurricane was a great big fuzzy that made me wonder what God was up to or where God was. Trying to figure out my parents -- now that’s a big fuzzy. Or from the other side -- trying to figure out my teenager -- that’s fuzzicity. What does it mean when I’m facing a huge illness? What do I do when there’s been a death? Where is God and where am I? You may be saying right now: I don’t need fuzzicity, Alex, I need clarity. I need you to make it crystal clear to me how God is in the midst of my school, my work, my life, my relationships, my everything. Don’t give me fuzzy; I need something solid to hold on to.

I’ll give you all of that, but when God shows up in the midst of our fuzzy and uncertain lives it may not strike us at first as something earth-shatteringly solid. God first needs to disrupt the lives we have been living and to call us to new place we are supposed to be going. The way to clarity may not be all that clear. We may see God’s kingdom in the distance, but it may seem like trees walking.

We’re still getting to know each other, so I need to tell you a story. It’s the story of how I finally heard God’s call to the ministry. Some people get that call in a blinding flash, like Paul getting knocked off his donkey on the road to Damascus. Other people find themselves in the midst of a situation of great need and suddenly realize that’s where they are supposed to be, like the Queen Esther discovering that she had attained her position so that God could use her in a time of great persecution for the Jewish people. Some people get the call at Emmaus, others through Disciple Bible Study, others at a revival. For me it took a weasel.

I was a year out of college, working at a radio station as a news director and disc jockey. It didn’t pay a thing, but I loved it. I had already started dreaming about the next step in a radio news career. I put in applications in bigger media markets. I started imagining myself opening the CBS Evening News like Walter Cronkite.

One thing I was not thinking about was ordained ministry. I wasn’t even that tied in to a church. Oh, I had thought about it as a youth, but I had discovered radio in college and I didn’t think I would look back.

I was content in my life. I had met Suzanne and we were married and living in an apartment at the foot of a beautiful mountain. We had a great network of friends through our clogging group. I thought I was content.

But then a minister friend, someone who had been my mentor since I was a youth, invited me to help out at a United Methodist youth retreat for the annual conference. I had done youth work before. I was intrigued. So I said, “Yes.”

On the last night of the retreat, the leader of the session read a story about a weasel. It wasn’t overtly a story about God. It was written by a naturalist named Annie Dillard who lived for a time at Hollins College near Roanoke. In a short story titled, “Living Like Weasels” she described an encounter she had with a weasel by the pond at Hollins.

It was a brief encounter - no more than a few seconds - but it affected her profoundly. She was fascinated by this ribbon of a creature with its intense eyes. She recalled stories she had heard from friends about a weasel who had bitten into the hand of a man and who would not let go until the man plunged his hand beneath the water of a pond. Weasels, you see, do not give up when they are seeking their prey. They go for the jugular and don’t let go.

In the story Annie Dillard recalls that another friend had found the skull of a weasel embedded in the neck of an eagle. Obviously it had missed its mark, but still held on, refusing to give up its prey. The eagle probably had flown through the skies with the weasel still attached, gutting it and letting its bones fall off across the fields below.

Finally Dillard wonders what it would be like to live like a weasel -- to live by instinct and not by choice. Yielding to the God-given impulse to search out your point of life and to attack it with your whole self and to hold on to it until it carries you aloft, flying over fields until your bones scatter across the ground. How wonderful it would be to give in to the perfect necessity of following your instincts to the pulsing, point of life.

Well, that story was just what I needed to hear to make my contented life fuzzy. I needed something to shock my sensibilities so that I could hear God’s voice again. I needed a reminder that even though I could have been a radio news director or even Walter Cronkite, that was not what I needed to be. At that moment I wasn’t sure exactly what it was I did need to be, but the path I was on was not the right one. My point of life was calling me in a different direction.

It wasn’t even that clear at that moment. When I got home from the youth retreat I got a call from a radio station in Ft. Myers, Florida that was going to offer me twice what I was making in Charlottesville. Now, double nothing and you still get nothing but it seemed like a lot at the time. They gave me 48 hours to decide. And Suzanne and I talked. I went for some very long runs down the mountain valley. And I turned the job down. Ten months later we were in seminary. It still wasn’t clear to me what it would mean. I was still in a state of fuzzicity. But I was on the way to something and I was living like a weasel.

The point is that we need an interruption to life as we know it to get a glimpse of what God intends for us. It is not the case that being a Christian means just being a nicer version of what you have been before. Emily Post may be a fine teacher of etiquette, but she’s not the one who’s going to lead us to the kingdom. Only Jesus Christ can do that and his way looks different.

The things we take confidence in to get us through our daily lives are not sufficient to get us through the fuzziness. A solid financial nest egg, good health, being a pillar in the community or the church, having a large number of social contacts -- none of these can protect us from the uncertainties of life. You didn’t need Katrina and Rita to show you that, but they certainly make it clear. All of our advantages count for nothing when we are faced with tragedy and death.

But we do have one advantage -- we have a God who loves us, who came to be among us, who counted every earthly advantage as nothing, who was born in the poverty of a manger, who lived with no roof over his head, who gathered a ragtag group of followers together and made them his family, who associated with the worst elements in society, who was condemned as a common criminal and executed without even the dignity of the clothes on his back. If it’s not clear to you that this way of Jesus is the only advantage we can claim, then welcome to the fuzziness.

This is just what Paul talks about in the passage from the letter to the Philippians that we read this morning. Paul is telling the Christians in Philippi that if they want to get into a boasting contest, he would probably win. He was an upstanding Jew, trained in the faith, a defender of the law, and blameless under the law.

But he knew that there was something that had interrupted all the confidence he had placed in his earthly position. He knew that he had been seized by Christ. He knew that his life was to be found in Christ. He knew that because of this everything had changed for him. Because of this the story of Jesus death and resurrection was the most important story he could tell. It’s scandalous, yes. It’s ridiculous, yes. That God would come and suffer and die in order to claim us? It’s absolutely outrageous. But it’s just the sort of thing we need to interrupt our lives and make us think twice. It’s just the sort of thing we need to get us over ourselves and into God.

When you find your life in Christ your whole life story gets told anew. It then makes sense to say that “I was born just outside the city as Christ suffered and died,” because in some sense our story begins on that hillside of Calvary at the cross. The death-defying God leads us through the baptismal water so that we can emerge through the light filtering into an empty tomb. And we walk out of the tomb into a garden that is every bit as new and miraculous as Eden was. Life begins again, our lives are born anew as we discover what God is doing.

Paul clings to this. He says, “To know Jesus and the power of his resurrection and to participate in his suffering, to conform to his death, so that I may come to resurrection from the dead -- this is the righteousness Jesus asks from us.” Not to make it on our own merits, not to believe that we have already arrived, but to know that we have been claimed. Our lives, Paul says, are like a race in which we press on, seeking to seize hold of the prize just as Christ Jesus has seized hold of us.

Is that what you’re doing? Do you feel like you’re leaning forward into God’s new age or are we holding back? Do you feel like you’ve been seized by the God who will not let you go or are you convinced that you are dangling at loose ends? Are you pressing on to the goal or just feeling oppressed? Are you running the race or feeling run into the ground? Do you remember that you have been baptized? Do you remember that our lives are not our own, that they are God’s and are destined for God? Do you remember that God so loved the world that God sent the only begotten Son so that whosoever believes in him might not be condemned but saved?

Do you remember? Because if you don’t, we’ve got a reminder. It’s not much really. Not a potluck dinner spread. Not an all-you-can-eat buffet. It’s not the finest bread or a well-aged wine. It’s a loaf and a cup and a story of how Jesus came to claim you and me and to fuzzy up our world and to move us on towards our heavenly calling. Do this, Jesus says, to remember.

When we gather around this table, we do it with our sisters and brothers all over the world. It’s the most distinctive thing we Christians do. This is our family table. And the people who gather here are not here because they’re perfect. Far from it. They’re here because they’ve been invited, because they’re crazy, mixed-up lives have been interrupted by something greater. They’re here because of Jesus. And that’s how you get the best seat at the table - not by being perfect, but by being a child of God.

Thanks be to God.