Philippians 3:12-16 Ephesians 4:11-1p6 Hebrews 5:11-1
When a scrawny, listless, dull-eyed baby is brought to a physician and the physician pronounces, “Failure to thrive”, the parents are in trouble. “Failure to thrive” suggests that the parents are negligent, or abusive, or psychologically unfit, or at the very least too immature to be entrusted with a baby.
For a long time I have thought that congregations should be far more concerned about the spiritual neo-nates among us who may fail to thrive.
The apostles were certainly aware of the challenge. John speaks of the need for birth. Peter adds that milk must be fed the neo-nates if they are to develop. Then Paul tells the Christians in Thessalonica how pleased he is that their “faith is growing abundantly.”
Still, Paul isn’t content to see that some believers at least have moved from birth to infancy and beyond. Why stop with childhood, even adolescence? The goal of his ministry, he insists, is to proclaim Jesus Christ so as to “present every man [woman] mature in Christ.” The apostle knows that infancy in infants is fine, but infancy in a 30-year old is tragic. Infancy in anyone except an infant is infantilism. There is never anything commendable about infantilism. Paul is horrified merely to think of Christians who might fail to thrive. We must grow up!
I: — In the first place it is essential that we mature, says the apostle, or else we shall remain “children, tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the cunning of men, by their craftiness in deceitful wiles.” When he speaks of “doctrine” in this context he doesn’t mean Christian truths; he means false teaching, ideology, fads and fancies which invariably lead people astray. Those who do not mature as Christians are vulnerable to whatever is blowing in the wind.
Think of the newest therapy from New York. I mention New York City only because two-thirds of the world’s psychoanalysts live in the one city. This fact does not seem to render NYC a better mental environment. And psychoanalysis is only one of 200 recognized schools of therapy. The 201st school is not going to be our salvation. Only the spiritually mature will be able to ensure that whatever is blowing in the wind isn’t going to be their spiritual seduction, even their spiritual destruction.
When I entered seminary sensitivity-training was “all the rage”. I noticed two things about fellow-candidates for the ministry who were the keenest on sensitivity-training, “T” groups, etc. Invariably they disdained the gospel, were ignorant of it, and appeared to lack any experience of it. The “sensitivity” fad had become a substitute for the gospel. In the second place they were consistently the most insensitive people I had met. They shredded others in class or in their “T”group, and were unconcerned that those who had been shredded haemorrhaged emotionally for several days. Imagine someone saying to you, “In this group today we are going to share our most intimate experience. What, Sally, you aren’t going to share your most intimate experience with this group of strangers? You appear to have hang-ups. Don’t you trust us? Have you internalized all your mother’s inhibitions?” Then Sally’s emotional haemorrhage began. The vocabulary had to do with sensitivity; the technique was coercion; the outcome was catastrophe.
After sensitivity-training (by now I was a newly-ordained clergyperson) it was bio-feedback. Then it was small group dynamics. Then third-world political leftism. (Crypto-communism had been newly sainted by the church’s left-wing “loonies”.) Then it was environmentalism. Jesus saves — seals! But what about codfish? The save-a-seal folks who hijacked the church didn’t seem to grasp the fact that one seal eats 22 pounds of cod per day. Why don’t we admit that baby seals were spared because seal pups have a cute face, while baby cod were not spared because they have an ugly face, and are first cousins of reptiles? (Have you ever wanted to cuddle a cod?)
Next it was the new-age movement. The new-age, upholding pantheism as it does — pantheism being the notion that God is the essence of all that is — conveniently lacked any understanding of evil or sin. For the new-agers there can’t be evil or sin, just because God is the essence of everything. No sin! What a bonanza! What a convenient religion for baby-boom yuppies! The moral disasters brought to me through the new-age ideology you would have to hear to believe, but I am not about to tell you.
Next it was the ridiculous extremism of wilder feminism. It isn’t the blood of Jesus that saves; now it’s women’s body-fluids, say the devotees of Sophia. (Before you dismiss this you should know that The United Church’s national office sent 50-plus delegates to the last Sophia conference.)
I am not denying that some of these groups may have had something profound to say; I am not denying that some have had a corrective that needed to be heard; I am not denying that some aspects of these groups may have developed in response to deficiencies in the church’s understanding of the gospel or its embodiment of the gospel. Nevertheless, precisely what is it that is profound? Where is it a corrective? How has there come to be a deficiency in the church’s understanding or embodiment of the gospel? Only the spiritually mature can answer these questions. Only the spiritually mature can resist seduction and victimization. Only the mature can recognize the swirling winds and resist being blown every which way.
Speaking of winds. When our more ancient foreparents began to sail they could sail only in the direction in which the wind was blowing. If the wind was blowing where they didn’t want to go, too bad. Either they took the sail down and drifted or they put the sail up and were blown off course. As our more ancient foreparents became more sophisticated sailors, however, they learned how to sail across the wind, even how to sail against the wind. Regardless of where the wind was blowing now, they could use the wind — any wind — to go where they were supposed to go.
It is a mark of Christian maturity that we can advance, go where we are supposed to be going, regardless of the most contrary winds that are blowing around us. We can sail across some winds (those winds that have something to say to us), while we sail against other winds (those currents that we must repudiate.) Nevertheless, regardless of the winds Christ’s people are surging ahead. Only the mature can do this!
In the passage we are examining in Paul’s letter to the congregation in Ephesus he tells us that we come to “mature manhood” as we come to “knowledge of the Son of God”. Then week-in and week-out we must be resolute in our coming to know Jesus Christ. Otherwise maturity will escape us, and we shall be defenceless against anything and everything that blows around us.
II: — There is another aspect to maturity. “Forgetting what lies behind”, writes Paul to the congregation in Philippi, “and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. Let those of us who are mature be thus minded.”
“Forgetting what lies behind.” The Greek word Paul uses (eplanthanomai) means to forget not merely in the sense of lose awareness of (“I forget where I left my umbrella”). More importantly, the Greek verb means to forget in the sense of no longer care about; have no interest in; can’t be bothered with; have no time for; never want to think of again. What lies behind, says the apostle, we no longer care about, can’t be bothered with, never think of. Why? Because we are preoccupied with what lies ahead. And what lies ahead? “The prize [reward] of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.”
I don’t know if Paul had any athletic talent. I do know he was fond of athletic images. When he speaks of “straining forward to what lies ahead” he has in mind a sprinter in the last few feet of a race leaning forward into the finish-line tape. The finish is only milliseconds away. The sprinter “lets it all out” and extends himself, leaning forward for the tape. Imagine the runner’s intensity, his concentration, his determination, his absorption. Is the crowd cheering or booing? He doesn’t hear. Is there even a crowd? He doesn’t see. Is it a hot day? He doesn’t feel. Forgetting what lies behind, he is absorbed in what lies ahead, so close to the finish-line he can almost touch it.
Speaking of forgetting what lies behind, in my boyhood days I looked upon the Hebrew story of Lot’s wife as the most stupid narrative I had ever read. She was told not to look back at the city she and her husband were fleeing. She stole a backward glance — and was “zapped” into a pillar of salt! What kind of primitive superstition was this story about? About a whimsical deity, as cruel as he was arbitrary, who lost his temper because someone didn’t conform to a pointless prohibition?
Now that I am old I return to the story constantly. I know now that the prohibition wasn’t pointless. Lot and his wife were fleeing Sodom, a city on which the judgement of God had fallen, as God’s judgement inevitably falls on all of history. Why did Lot’s wife look back? Did she secretly hanker after what Sodom was about, even though what Sodom was about had incurred God’s judgement? Even if she didn’t; even if she didn’t secretly hanker after Sodom’s sin, her looking back meant that she believed more about the past than she did about the future. She thought that the past held more for her than did the future. At the very least she sinned in resisting the summons of God toward the future. God’s people don’t look back longingly just because God himself is the God of the future! God’s people look ahead! The final, full manifestation of the kingdom of God is ahead of us. We are racing towards it! What sprinter ever ran looking backwards?
On Easter morning several women went to the city cemetery to deodorize a corpse. They were greeted with a word that startled them: “He isn’t here. He is risen. He is going before you to Galilee.” What we have to take home today is this: “He isn’t here…. He is going beforeyou.” We persist in looking for Jesus Christ amidst decay and death when the only way we can meet him is to look ahead. He is always before us, never behind us!
Lot’s wife: she looked back and was petrified, frozen, fixed forever in frustration and futility. Who wants to be fixed forever in frustration and futility? Then we shan’t look back, expecting more from the past than we expect from the future.
Being frozen would be bad enough. What’s worse in those who keep on looking back is the metamorphosis they gradually undergo. Those who look back persistently grieve for the past. Regret fills them.
As they continue to look back regret slowly turns into resentment. Somebody, several somebodies, “did them dirt” back then and now they are resentful.
As they continue to look back resentment curdles into rancour. Rancour is through-and-through bitterness, even hatred. Now they are full of pus and poison themselves.
As they continue to look back rancour hardens into retribution. Now they are vindictive, and the poison inside spills outside onto others.
Regret, resentment, rancour, retribution: from nostalgia-grief to a sour heart to a public menace. Lot’s wife was pillared into salt she was a traffic hazard to all who, more mature than she, were bent on moving ahead!
More mature? “One thing I do; forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I go flat out for the finish-line, just because my Lord and his kingdom await me there”, says the apostle, only to add, “Let those of us who are mature be thus minded.”
III: — Let’s listen as well to the unnamed author of the epistle to the Hebrews. “Everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, for he is a child. But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their faculties trained by practice to distinguish good from evil.” Solid food is needed to move people to a maturity which equips them to distinguish good from evil.
What is more important than being equipped to distinguish good from evil? What is more difficult? Most people assume it’s easy to distinguish good from evil; they assume that any slovenly sleepyhead can discern evil. Quite the contrary. Evil is subtle; evil is sophisticated; evil is blatant one instant and cleverly disguised the next, all of which keeps us off-balance and prevents simplistic diagnoses. Only the mature who have become mature through ingesting solid food; only the mature are equipped in this regard.
Not only is evil both blatant and subtle, there is no end to the complex interweaving of evil’s endless dimensions. Think, for instance, of those among us who are detained by the criminal justice system. Recently I spoke with a clergyman, an Anglican, who moved from being a parish priest in suburbia to a chaplain in a facility that incarcerates young offenders. These boys (I think they should be called “boys” rather then “men”, not least because the government has deemed them too young for trial in adult courts); these boys have committed horrific crimes. That’s why they are locked up. When my Anglican friend began his work among them he learned something that he hadn’t found in suburbia. These boys had to be taught how and when and why to brush their teeth; none of them had ever owned a toothbrush. More chilling to hear (so dreadful, in fact, as to be almost unendurable), none of the boys he met in the “young offender” prison had grown up in a family where they had had their own bed, a bed to themselves. Not only are these boys evildoers whose evildoing has victimized others; plainly they are victims of evil themselves. Then should they be punished or pitied? Are they to be punished and pitied? The criminal justice system, however crude and imprecise it might be (it is crude and imprecise), is the ready-to-hand instrument that has to be used in the face of a societal emergency. But is the criminal justice system subtle enough subsequently to assist evil-steeped youngsters who are themselves both victims and victimizers?
Then there is the evil which strikes us (some of us) as undeniably evil when others don’t see it to be evil at all. Not so long ago the newspapers told us of the court-decision which permits a pregnant woman to sniff glue and continue sniffing glue regardless of the damage done to her soon-to-be-born child. The court decided that to pronounce against glue-sniffing in this case would infringe a woman’s rights.
Lest we think that stupefying inability to sort out evil from non-evil is found only outside the church let me tell you of something else. I am a member of The Writers’ Union of Canada, and at one time I sat on the Rights and Freedoms Committee of The Writers’ Union of Canada. At one committee meeting we discussed an Alberta politician’s attempt at having a book banned. In the course of the discussion we were acquainted with several attempts in Alberta to have many books banned. A group of Christians there has sought to ban C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe on two grounds: it is anti-Christian, and it promotes witchcraft.
It takes genuine maturity to understand what is genuinely evil, how dimensions of evil interpenetrate, and what discerners should do in the midst of it all.
The maturity which enables us to distinguish good from evil is the same maturity which keeps us from being victimized by everything that is “blowing in the wind”. And of course the same maturity will find us looking ahead to that day when discernment will no longer be needed just because the kingdom of this world will have become the kingdom of our God and of his Christ.
No doubt you are thinking that the sermon has ended. It has. I cannot refrain, however from adding a postscript. From time to time throughout my 32-year ministry I am asked to make the sermons shorter, simpler, easier to grasp, less advanced, couched in less mature language. I dare not. Solid food, solid food, is needed if we are ever going to mature.
Victor Shepherd May 2002
1 Peter 2:2
2 Thessalonians 1:3
Ephesians 4:13-15*
Philippians 3:13-15*
Genesis 19:26
Mark 16:6-7
Hebrews 5:13-14*