The Four "D's: of Discipleship: Discernment (Part 4 of 4)

Pentecost 8 2014a
August 10, 2014

“The Four ‘Ds’ of Discipleship: Discernment”

Proverbs 2:1-5

Back in June of 1943, during the midst of World War II, our neighbor to the south, Mexico, was attacked by naval gunfire.  Unfortunately, it wasn’t under attack from enemy forces.  It was actually being fired on by its biggest ally: the United States.

As official Navy records indicate, an American patrol boat under the command of a young Lieutenant anchored for the night near some islands off the coast  of California.  The Lieutenant wanted to show his men some fighting spirit, so he ordered them to open up with the ship’s cannon and with rifles and machine guns for some target practice at the nearby uninhabited islands.

Unfortunately, they weren’t uninhabited.  And in fact, they weren’t off the coast of California either.  Due to his poor navigation the Lieutenant had actually sailed his ship into Mexican waters, and the islands were Mexican territory… guarded at the time by a company of Mexican navy troops.  Without realizing his mistake, the American Lieutenant was firing on allied forces.

Fortunately, no one was hurt.  But the Mexicans were, understandably, a little upset, so they filed a formal complaint with the US,  and an official Navy Board of Inquiry wound up relieving the Lieutenant from his post and recommending that he not ever command anything again.  The officer who was lost and gave bad directions to his crew, by the way, was Lieutenant (Junior Grade) L. Ron Hubbard.  A few years later he would go on to create the Scientology religion.  Hubbard has been dead for decades now, and he still seems to be misleading people.

It is so easy for us to be misled in our lives.  Sometimes we’re misled by others, and sometimes we mislead ourselves. And this is an important topic for us; because as disciples of Jesus Christ: the fundamental question for us every day is this… what are we to do?  Whose leading shall we follow: our own inclinations, or the leading of God?  This is called discernment. 

The question before Christians is not “am I saved?”; nor is it “how am I saved?”.  Both of those questions have been answered once and for all time.  How we have been saved is crystal clear: by the blood of Jesus Christ, the Only Son of God, who took our sins upon him and suffered and died for us on the Cross and rose from the dead for us… because He is the way and the truth and the life and no one comes unto the Father but through Him, and those who share a death like his in baptism will most certainly share in the new life of the resurrection with Him, AMEN!

And we are saved in our baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.  In Mark 16:16 Jesus says, “He who believes and is baptized shall be saved.”  You can’t get more definitive than that.   Do you believe?  Have you been baptized?  Then you shall be saved.  As our President likes to say, “Period.  End of story.” Yet so often Christians seek to reassure themselves of their salvation again and again and again.  Like children probing with their tongue the empty space where a tooth used to be; they seek to affirm what God has already proclaimed.  So they go through an endless cycle of altar calls, or they pray for God to do what God has already done, or there is preaching and Bible study that never move past the question of salvation… and never gets to the REAL question that confronts disciples of Christ.  NOW THAT WE HAVE BEEN SAVED… WHAT ARE WE TO DO? 

This is the most fundamental question confronting us as disciples.  And to answer it, we have to learn and practice discernment. 

This morning we conclude our four part sermon series entitled “The 4 ‘Ds’ of Discipleship.”  Over the past weeks we’ve come to see that discipleship is the step beyond merely believing as Christians; discipleship is living in imitation of Christ.  And there are at least four key actions in being a disciple.  We’ve talked about the first step being the diminishment of the self… making God’s will supreme in our lives and diminishing our own will.  And we’ve talked about the need to develop spiritual discipline of prayer and engaging God’s Word in preaching and the Scriptures.  Then we talked about the need to be devoted to God above everything else in our lives as disciples.  And finally today: we address the need for discernment in discipleship.

Discernment can be defined as determining what is right and what is wrong through God’s mind.  But since the dawn of humankind we have tried to discern what is right and wrong through our own minds.  Way back in the Garden of Eden we became estranged from our Father in Heaven.  In Genesis 2:17 God told the first man that he could eat from whatever tree he  wanted to in the garden, “but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat…”   So, what do Adam and Eve go and do in the next chapter?  They ate of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.  Immediately they began determining for themselves what was right and what was wrong; what was good and what was evil.  And the first thing that they did was discern for themselves that being naked was wrong; so they sewed clothes for themselves out of fig leaves.  And God found out and banished them from paradise.

In his seminal book “Ethics” Dietrich Bonhoeffer asserts that discerning according to our own minds what is right and wrong is what separated us from God in the first place, and that separation is repeated in our own lives every time we determine good and evil for ourselves.

Bonhoeffer may be on to something.  Perhaps the most dangerous words that a Christian can utter are the words “I think…”  ‘I think that what those people are doing is wrong’… ‘I think that we should do this and not that…’  To say “I think” is to say we are discerning for ourselves what is right and what isn’t; it is following our own mind and not the mind of God.  The problem is: if we follow our own mind we cannot help pleasing ourselves. But if we follow the mind of God we cannot help pleasing God.

So, how do we do that?  How do we move from discerning through our own mind and begin discerning through God’s mind?  Well, we find guidance about this in our reading from Proverbs this morning.

Verses 1 through 3 of our reading from Proverbs:  “…receive my words and treasure up my commandments… make your ear attentive to wisdom… incline your heart to understanding.”

The Word of God is many things to us; one of them is a guidebook of how we are to live as disciples.   Psalm 119 tells us “Thy Word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path.”  The Bible is a road map for life… it tells us where to go and what to do or not to do.  If we follow God’s guidebook, then we will do well.  If we follow our own minds… not so well.

But there are people who disagree.  Especially in our culture today some will say, ‘But I did it my way and I still succeeded!’  They don’t understand that when we succeed despite ourselves it isn’t our discernment that is so good – it’s God’s grace that gets us through.

Thomas Wheeler, former president of the Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company, tells about a day when he and his wife decided to take a drive out in the country.  They were tooling along when he noticed that their car was low on gas, so he pulled into some rundown little gas station.  He asked the attendant to fill the tank and check the oil, then went off to the restroom.

As he was coming back to the car, he noticed that the attendant and his wife were kind of deeply engaged in conversation. They fell silent as he got near, and he paid the attendant and got back into the car.

As they drove away, Wheeler asked his wife if she knew the man. She said, yes: they had gone to high school together, and they’d dated and even gone steady for a year.

Wheeler got a big grin on his face, and he puffed out his chest and said, “Well,

“Boy, were you lucky that I came along. If you had married him, you’d be the wife of a gas station attendant instead of the wife of a corporate president.”

And his wife just smiled back and shook her head, and she said, “Oh, no, dear.  If I’d married him, he’d be the president and you’d be the gas station attendant.”

If we follow God’s guidance instead of our own discernment, we will please our Father in Heaven and we will live well.  But if we follow our own minds yet are saved from failure or overcome adversity we cannot take the credit.  It is God’s grace acting in our lives.

But, wouldn’t it be better to follow God in the first place?

As disciples we come to know that the only measuring stick for what is how God wants it to be.  Let us not say “I think that is right or that is wrong…”  Let us say, “GOD tells me that is right or that is wrong…”

As disciples of Christ we surrender our judgment… and instead accept God’s judgment.  And who do we do that?  Verses 1 through 3 of our reading from Proverbs:  “…receive my words and treasure up my commandments… make your ear attentive to wisdom… incline your heart to understanding.”

The path of discipleship is a path of crucifying our old selves every day, and taking on the heart and mind of God and nothing less.  This is what Christ calls us to, and it is a hard calling.  It is letting the Holy Spirit change us a little bit more everyday… gradually becoming more and more an imitator of Christ our Lord.  Discipleship is like growing older:  it is not for the faint of heart.

But the reward… if we undertake this journey… if we surrender all to Him… if we die to ourselves and put on the mind of Christ… then something wonderful happens.  Because we not only come to discern the righteousness of God: we also discern the love of God.  The closer we grow toward Him, the more we realize how much He loves us… and that He always has; even when we didn’t even realize that He was watching over us.

            When she was 34 years old, Susan’s life went dark.  A medical condition stole her sight in less than a week.  All of a sudden instead of being independent and confident she was scared… and totally dependent on her husband Mark.

          Mark was an Air Force officer stationed in Washington D.C., and he tried to help as much as he could.  For a year he would leave Susan in their apartment during the day, coming home to help her at night.  But after a year of that, Susan decided that she wanted to work again.  She got her old job back; but there was a problem.  Her office was across town.  To get there Susan would have to take the public bus.  The very thought of that terrified her.  But Mark promised to help her, and he did. 

For two solid weeks Mark, in his uniform, went with Susan to and from her work every day.  He encouraged her to use her hearing, her other senses… He helped her become familiar with the intersections, the crosswalks, all of the things that Susan had always taken for granted.  Now she slowly tapped along with a white cane.

          After two weeks it was time for Susan to take the bus on her own.  On that Monday she was terrified, Tuesday was a little better, and every day after seemed a bit easier. By the time Friday came, she could feel her old confidence coming back, and she was feeling proud that she’d overcome so much on her own.  As the bus stopped and opened its doors to let her off that morning, the bus driver said something that was the last thing Susan expected to hear.  As she felt for the railing to the steps down, she said to her, “Boy, I sure envy you.”  Susan said she thought at first that she was being mocked; why would the driver envy a blind woman?  So she said, “Why do you envy me?”

          And the driver said, “Honey, it must feel wonderful to have someone watch over you like that.”  Susan asked what she meant.  The bus driver said, “Every morning for the past week there’s been a fine looking man in uniform standing on that corner across the street.  He watches you get off the bus, and I see him watch as you cross the street… and he stays there until you go into your building.  Then, every day, he blows you a kiss and walks away.  You may not know it, but someone sure seems to love you!”

          Here is a promise for us this morning: the closer we draw near to Christ in discipleship, the more we will experience His love.  And we will develop hindsight, and become aware of just how much his love sustained us in the past… when we didn’t even know he was there.

Let us embrace the call to discipleship; let’s open our hearts and let the Lord transform us every day.  And let us walk in the steps that Christ calls us to as his disciples:  to diminish our will and make God’s will sovereign in our lives; to undertake spiritual disciplines of prayer and engaging God’s Word; to be willing to identify those things in our lives that compete for our loyalty with God, and remove them and devote ourselves to Him; and to set off our own insight and our own insight, and instead discern what we are to do in accordance with God’s mind.

And if we faithfully follow Him, each day He will transform us a little more.  And we will become aware of a depth of his love that we didn’t know when we first believed: a love that will sustain us in all things; that will yield us joy in all circumstances; and will empower us to serve Him and do His work… doers of the Word, as He calls us to be.  AMEN

The Reverend M. A. Greenauer 2014

Permission is granted to reproduce this work in whole or in part if the glory for its content is given to the Lord

The Four "Ds" of Discipleship: Devotion (Part 3 of 4)

Pentecost 7 2014a
July 27, 2014

Trinity Lutheran Church (NALC)

“The Four ‘Ds’ of Discipleship: Devotion”

Luke 16:10-16

         Out in San Diego recently, some university researchers did a study with dogs that showed the dogs exhibit jealousy and selfishness.  The scientists watched three dogs as they were being petted by another scientist, and they noted how the dogs would compete to be petted.  That showed jealousy, they said. And they also saw how the dogs each tried to ‘hog’ the petting for themselves; and that showed selfishness.

          And the researchers noted that dogs are a lot like people, and if dogs are (in their words) “hard wired” to be selfish and jealous… then people must be hard wired that way, too.  If we’re hard wired that way, then we can’t help being selfish and jealous.

          I respect most scientists, but I think these folks have it wrong in their analysis.  As human beings, we may be ‘soft wired’ to be selfish; and we may be ‘soft wired’ to be jealous; and we may be ‘soft wired’ to do all kinds of things that we know we shouldn’t do but we do them anyway.

          But being ‘soft wired’ instead of ‘hard wired’ means that we can (if we want to) choose NOT to do those things.  God has given us free will, and one of the benefits of having free will is that we can CHOOSE to do or not do something. 

          Now, today we continue our sermon series on ‘The 4 Ds of Discipleship.’  Over the past couple of weeks we’ve discussed how the first step of our discipleship journey is to diminish our own will and make the will of Christ sovereign in our lives.  This was demonstrated when Jesus called his first disciples and said, “Follow me…” and they dropped everything and followed him; they put Christ’s will before their own.  Then the next week we discussed how discipline, the second ‘D’, is important in a discipleship journey; developing spiritual disciplines – especially engaging God’s Word in preaching and reading, and engaging God in prayer where we take time to both talk to God… and then listen in meditation to His response.

          And this morning, we tackle the third ‘D’ of discipleship.  This ‘D’ is DEVOTION.  If we are to be disciples of Christ, we must be devoted to Christ exclusively.  To be devoted to Christ means choosing Christ over anything else.

          The famous opera singer Pavoratti writes about having to choose between two things in his life when he was young.  His father was a baker, and Pavoratti felt drawn to follow in his father’s footsteps.  He really enjoyed the life of rising early to bake the bread, of creating cakes or desserts. But at an early age folks noticed his voice; a professional opera singer took him under his wing and began to give him singing lessons.  Pavoratti was torn to between two possible careers, so he went to his father.  He said, “Father, should I be a baker or an opera singer?  Or maybe I could do both!”

          His father stood up and placed two of the dining room chairs in the middle of the room… separated so that there was a few inches between them.  Then he said, “Luciano, if you try to sit on two chairs, you will fall between them.  In chairs, like in life, you must choose one or the other.”

          Pavoratti says he chose singing. And having made his choice, he devoted himself to it with years of study.  But finally, 14 years later, he was accepted to the cast of the Metropolitan Opera.  In an interview he said, “Whatever you choose in life, you must devote yourself to it.  Devotion is the key.  You must choose one chair or the other.”

          Making a choice to love, fear, and honor Christ means that we choose to NOT love, fear, or honor something else.  This is what Jesus addresses in our Gospel reading this morning.

          This passage from Luke follows the parable Jesus tells about the ‘Unfaithful Steward’.   In that story, if you remember, a servant embezzled from his master, and then when he knew he was going to be fired, he forgave the debts of people who owed his master money in order to gain their goodwill.

          And in today’s reading, Jesus explains to the crowd what the point of that story was.  Many of the folks in the crowd were tax collectors who had put a devotion to money first in their lives; a lot of the others were Pharisees, who had put a devotion to their religious dogma first in their lives.  And in verse 13 Jesus tells them they need to choose in their lives if they are going to follow God.  They can be devoted to their money or their religious practices… or they can be devoted to God.  But, they can’t have it both ways.  “No servant can serve two masters” Christ tells them.

          Notice the word “servant” here.  A servant is someone who is submissive to another. In the Bible Greek, the word is doulas… a form of servanthood expressed in total submission.  If we are servants of God, then we must be submissive to God and no one else.  And if we choose NOT to be submissive to God, then we are being submissive to someone else.  One or the other.  “No servant can serve two masters.”   And this leads us to a hard question in these modern times. If we are not submissive to God in what we do or how we live, then who ARE we being submissive to?

          If we are simply being servants to ourselves… it would be easy to stop what we want to stop we shouldn’t do or things we really don’t want to do.  But we can’t stop.  We are “in bondage to sin, and we cannot free ourselves.”

          That’s because if we are not fully devoted to God, then whether we mean to or not we are being submissive to the anti-God. We call him Satan.

          It’s not fashionable to talk about Satan these days.  Scripture is filled with references to him; he even has speaking parts now and then.  But too often we are led to believe that Satan doesn’t really exist.

          Let me share some statistics with you.  In a Gallup poll taken last December, 74 % of Americans say that they believe in God. But less than half of Christians… only 35 %... believe that Satan is real.  65 % of Christians don’t believe in the devil.  Why is that?

          I think that this denial is an artifact of two things.  First, many churches have stopped preaching about Satan as an actual entity.  If Satan comes up in the assigned lectionary reading for that a certain Sunday, they either skip over that reading or they portray the devil as some mythical boogeyman that was needed back in the “old days” to scare people into going to church, but whom we don’t need in the modern age. 

          And the second reason is our culture.  This is a society that insists on inclusivity and lack of failure; in a culture that says we can’t keep score in youth soccer games so that no one experiences failure, and in a culture that sometimes recommends eliminating letter grades in school so that no one feels inferior: in THAT culture… there is no place for Satan.  Because Satan represents bad and evil, and inferring that something is bad or evil is judgmental.  Satan… is not politically correct.

          36 % of Americans believe that UFOs are real, but only 35 % of Christians believe that Satan is real.

          But he is.  In our baptism pastors have asked the same question for thousands of years.  “Do you renounce the devil and all his empty promises?”   This is not a rhetorical question that we stick in there just because it’s quaint or traditional.  From the very beginning of our life in Christ we are called to choose.  God or Satan, one or the other, we can’t have it both ways.  The choice we make many times each day is this: Which of those two are we going to be devoted to in that moment of our lives? “No servant can serve two masters.”

          The evil one tries to get us to be devoted to him.  He does it subtly.

          We’re on the beach and a young woman walks by in a bikini and she has been blessed by God with some wonderful endowments; or a muscular young man with ‘six pack’ abs wanders past… is it God who leads us to daydream of what could happen if…?  No, that’s the other one, trying to steal our devotion to Christ.

          Or we’re walking out of the store in the mall parking lot, and we suddenly realize that the sales clerk forgot to ring up part of what we bought.   Is it God who whispers in our minds, ‘Well, it’s not REALLY stealing because you tried to pay for it; it’s their fault.’?  Or is it God who whispers, ‘Besides, it’s raining.  Why should you have to walk back through the rain for their mistake?’  If that God?  No, that’s that voice of the anti-God; trying to steal our devotion.

          Or we’re stopped at the traffic light waiting for it to turn green, and we see the guy with the straggly beard wearing a surplus Army jacket walking towards us with a handwritten sign that says, “Homeless, Please Help”; who is it that instead of making us reach for change in our pocket tempts us to instead roll up our windows and lock our doosr?  Who is it that tempts us to stare straight ahead and not make eye contact?  Is that God?  No, it’s the other one… trying to steal our devotion from God.

          If we are going to move beyond just being believers and try to live as disciples of Christ: make no mistake – Satan is going to try to steal our devotion to Christ; just like he did with the first disciples.

          Take Peter for example.  In Matthew 16 Jesus tells Peter and the others God’s plan for salvation: he is going to be crucified and rise from the dead, the first born into the new life where we will follow in our time. And Peter speaks up, ‘Uh-uh!  I don’t want that to EVER happen where you have to suffer and die!’  And in verse 23, Jesus rebukes not Peter, but the one who is trying to steal Peter’s devotion from him.  “Get thee behind me, Satan!” Jesus says.  If we are going to be disciples, we are going to be tempted more than ever to give our devotion to the anti-God.  He may tempt us with many things: money or security… maybe with success or power… maybe even with theologies that reduce God’s authority and make religion about pleasing ourselves.  Whatever form it takes, we will be tempted to not be devoted to the Lord.

          Every day, many times, we have a choice to make: God or not God?

          And as disciples, our answer must be Jesus Christ.  We are to not just fix our eyes on him, but devote ourselves to pleasing him.  It’s God… or the other one. “No servant can serve two masters.”

                Making a choice to love, fear, and honor Christ means that we choose to NOT love, fear, or honor something else.  But if devote ourselves to Jesus as his disciples, then we experience the richness of faith and joy… because discipleship is giving all… as he gave all for us…

          A man named Dan Hingis writes about something he witnessed one day while he was serving as an aid worker in a United Nations refugee camp in eastern Africa.  The camp was filled with thousands of people fleeing from war in Sudan, and they came to the camp weak and sick; many of them were starving.  Even in the camp food was sparse.  There just wasn’t enough to go around.

          As Dan walked through the camp on evening his eyes settled on a woman lying in the dust.  She was weak from hunger, her bones so prominent under her skin that she looked like a skeleton.  Dan knew that she was starving.  In her arms, curled up naked in the dirt beside her, she held a tiny baby.  The child was probably a few months old, but she had all the markers of starvation in a child: the bulging belly, hair that looked like it had been bleached and was coming out in hanks.  The mother was so weak she couldn’t even call out for help.   She just pleaded with Dan with her sunken eyes.

          In his pocket, Dan said, was a single yam: a small sweet potato that was to be his dinner.  His stomach was rumbling since there hadn’t been food for lunch that day, but as he looked down at this desperate woman.  He reached into his  pocket and took the yam… and he stooped down and ever-so-gently placed it in the hand of the mother.  And he watched as she slowly raised the food to her mouth and took a small bite.  Dan says he was amazed at what happened next.  Slowly, with the few teeth she still had, she chewed the bite of yam.  But when it was soft and gooey, instead of swallowing… she leaned over her daughter… and dribbled the chewed food into the baby’s mouth.  Bite after bite she repeated the ritual until the entire yam was gone.  She had kept none for herself.  It all went to her child.

          The next morning, passing by the spot, Dan stopped to check on the mother and child.  During the night, the mother had died.  She had starved to death.  But her child lived.

          Dan says he will never forget that mother.  In his mind, she will always be the epitome of devotion.  She gave all that she had to the one she loved.

          Jesus did that for us.  He gave his life for us so that we will live forever.  And if we realize that and take up the call to discipleship, our only right response is to live for Him as he died for us.  This is what we call discipleship devotion, and this is what Christ calls us to undertake for His sake.

          “No servant can serve two masters” Jesus tells us in our Gospel.  We have to choose: do we live for ourselves, giving in to the sly devotion of the anti-God; or do we live for the one who died for us.

          Let’s choose wisely.  For the devotion of discipleship is hard, we cannot deny that. But the reward is to live with Christ in a relationship that is so rich and wonderful…  it makes what we give up in our devotion seem trite.

          “No servant can serve two masters”  Let us devote ourselves to serve the Lord alone, and no other.  AMEN

The Reverend M. A. Greenauer 2014

Permission is granted to reproduce this work in whole or in part if the glory for its content is given to the Lord