breathing room: Leap of Faith 2014: Golden Balls & the Goodness of God

sermon notes from the Vineyard Church of Milan 03/09/2014
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How interesting, eh? Imagine yourself in that situation. A lot of money on the line. Every choice is a leap of faith.

Do you want all of the money? Do you try to convince the other person that you are going to split so that you can steal? Or do you happy with half? Do you trust the person across from you? If they say they are going to split, do you split too? What if they say they are going to split, but you don’t trust them? Do you split so at least someone goes home with something? Or do you steal so that no one gets anything?

Of course, in this one, everything is turned on its head. He’s promising to steal, and then give half the money later. How did you feel about him? He seemed selfish and then turned out to be generous. How do you feel about him now that you saw what he did? Is he more trustworthy or less?

Now imagine that you are playing this game with Jesus. Let’s say he’s sitting across the table from you. $100,000 at play. He’s looking in your eyes. You’re looking in his. And he says to you what he said to his disciples in John 10:10

“I have come that you may have life, and have it to the full.”

That’s it. No matter what you say to him, he looks you in the eyes, penetrating to your soul, and says it again, and again, and again. I have come that you may have life, and have it to the full.

I don’t know what you’re planning to do. You might be planning to steal. You might be planning to split. But I want you to imagine sitting across from him, high stakes, dramatic music playing, crowd watching, breathlessly. How do you feel? Can you trust him? What do you trust him to do or be in that situation? Why do you feel that way?

Now hold that thought. We’ll come back to Golden Balls a little later.

Here’s what I’m advocating as we enter our Leap of Faith season – one of the most powerful seasons we have together as a church, as a faith family:

Jesus is really good. Really, truly, in every way that really matters, good. And his goodness makes all the difference for us.

Why does it matter if he’s good?

If he’s good, we can trust him. Depend on him. Go to him. Receive from him. Sit across the table from him at the most important moments in our lives and have total peace, even when we don’t know what’s going to happen next.

If he’s not good, we can’t. We can’t do any of those things.

If he’s really good, we can even get over our trust issues. Our self-control issues. Our reluctance. Our self-sufficiency.

If he’s not really good, we just won’t. Because some of us still have a hard time trusting even good people, period, don’t we? Because we don’t trust ourselves to tell if someone’s good. No, it would take an extraordinary kind of goodness for us to drop our guard and actually, really, even just a little bit trust, for some of us.

But if we do trust him, if he’s really, really good – good enough for even the most disillusioned of us to trust – he can lead us to life, reveal life to us, and be life for us.

This is the whole point of God and us. He’s a Father who longs to give life to his sons and daughters. The witness of the first people to encounter this God in a personal way were surprised to discover that he wasn’t like any god they’d ever heard of. He didn’t have needs, wasn’t looking for people to do things for him. He wanted to bless them. And the only requirement was that they would wait on him. Trust him. Depend on him. Come to him with their needs and desires. Because this God was love, and for love, it’s all about relationship. There is no life outside of creative, generous, self-giving relationship. And the thing that opens the door to that is trust. Just a little bit of trust. A baby-step of faith.

Is he really good? Is he really going to be good to me? Ha, yes, looks like he is. Huh, how about that? Well, let’s try another step. Sure enough, wow, he’s really good. And he seems to love me.

And pretty soon those baby steps of faith are leading to a life of faith. Of trusting in God’s goodness. And not just generalized goodness, but personal goodness, directed unfathomably towards us. Which undoes fear and anxiety and all the things that bring so much destruction in all of our other endeavors and relationships. There’s a healing quality to relationship with a good God who is good to us.

If we don’t trust him, either because we don’t want to or are unable to, we are cut off from the inexhaustible, unending joyous life he came to make available to us. And we’re left with whatever life we can fend for on our own. Whatever life we can extract from the people around us, from pleasures and achievements and things.

The stakes are pretty high, in other words.

(The most theologically inclined among us might object: but isn’t the chief end of humanity, according to the Westminster Shorter Catechism, to glorify God, and enjoy him forever? Yes, I’ll buy that. But I’ll also say that the witness of scripture is that it is in fact God’s glory to take care of those who trust in him.

The primary way we glorify God is not our praise or our moral lives or our good deeds, but rather, very simply that we come to him with our needs and he meets those needs. That’s how God’s glory grows. Not through a great PR department, but through unimaginably good customer service. Granted, customer is the wrong word, but you take my point. God offers to take care of us, we entrust ourselves into his care, he comes through, his glory increases, our trust grows, he comes through, his glory increases, etc. etc. etc. and all along the way, in his top ranked by J.D. Power and Associates company, we are filled with the deepest, most satisfying joy.)

So let’s start here, talking about Jesus being really good, with these questions.

What does it mean to be good? What is it about goodness? What is it about his goodness?

We’re entering the territory of an ages old philosophical debate, of course.

The Transcendental Realists say that the good is the right relation between all that exists, and that the good actually exists in the mind of the Divine, and that it can be expressed in a just political community, in love, friendship, virtues, and harmony between humanity, nature, and the divine.

The Religious Abolutists say that good is defined by adherence to a God-given code of conduct; obedience to the code is good.

The Hedonists say that one must pursue one’s own pleasures, regardless of societal norms. To achieve one’s desires is good.

The Moral Relativists say that good and evil are defined relatively; that good is usually whatever serves society best and evil is whatever is harmful to it.

Welfarists say that things are good because they have positive effects on human well-being.

And that’s really just scratching the surface.

What I’d propose for this Leap of Faith series, is that we look at the goodness of Jesus on his own terms. Jesus says that he’s come so that we can have life, and have it to the full. If he says that’s his intent, what would it mean for him to be good?

I’m suggesting that Jesus is good because:

1) Jesus is genuine, truthful. That really is his motivation – he makes himself personally accessible to us so that we can thrive. So that we can experience this gift of being alive in the fullest, most joyful way possible, in a way that as we are experiencing it, we say, Yes, this is a good gift.

2) Jesus can do what he says. He’s actually capable of making that life available to us if we’ll trust him, follow him, be his disciple, respond to his invitation and leading. Which I suppose means he knows what he’s doing and he’s got the means/power/skill/etc. to achieve it.

3) There is some kind of extraordinary personal quality, an essential core to his being that allows us to have confidence in trusting him. We can be sure of him. This last one is more elusive to define or express, but I think Rudyard Kipling’s poem gets us as close as anything else:

IF you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
' Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,
if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!

In other words, when we encounter a person like that (if we ever encounter a person like that!), we never ever have any reason to second guess them. We are sure of them.

So those are some of the aspects of Jesus’ goodness that we’ll be looking at in this Leap of Faith season together. His desire, capacity, and trustworthiness to offer us life/give us life/lead us to life, and life to the full. Jesus has that kind of goodness. The kind we love. The kind we want. The kind we hope in. The kind we are inspired by. The kind we imitate. The kind we follow. The kind we trust. The kind that can save us. The kind that, if we let ourselves, we can fall in love with.

So for today’s purposes, I want to just tease out one aspect of Jesus’ goodness to get us started, which we will really unpack next week, and then outline for us how the Leap of Faith is going to work so we can get started on this experiment / adventure together.

Why is it difficult to be sure of people? People are capable of incredible acts of generosity and heroism and selflessness and charity. The kinds of acts that cause us to catch our breath and restore our faith in humanity. And yet. And yet, nearly every person is also capable of being swayed by fear, by shame, by pride, by anxiety. And in that state, they can act cowardly or selfishly or greedily. The kinds of acts that knock the wind out of us and make us say, like the songwriter of Psalm 116 in the Bible, “all men are liars.”

And that’s our answer. We are, most all of us, susceptible to the influence of fear and pride. Fear and pride introduce something like a quantum uncertainty into the human equation. Meaning even “good” people (not that that’s a valid category, but it’s a term we often use) can make choices that don’t serve the interests of the good.

Let’s go back to “Golden Balls.”

Nick had “good” intentions all along. He wanted to share the money. We know that because he split, when he had every reason to think he’d be able to walk away with all of it if he stole. But he knew the only way to ensure a split from Ibrahim was to find a way to force him to split. Why? Because there is no way to know what kind of influence fear or pride might play on Ibrahim in that moment. So Nick announces, in no uncertain terms, that he was going to play the “steal” ball. He announced, essentially, that he was making the decision fear or pride would normally cause someone to make. It was so startling and unexpected that Ibrahim spent all of his energy having to decide if he wanted to play the “steal” ball and walk away with nothing (and possibly look spiteful and vindictive), or play the “split” ball and have a shot at getting half the money after Nick won it all, hoping against hope that the good would intrude on Nick’s pride.

We know, of course, which choice he made. But we feel conflicted about it. Even though it worked out well for him, something in us is unsettled. I think it’s because what he was trusting was Nick’s “badness” (which, as it turns out, wasn’t actually the case). And it’s because we feel like Ibrahim lost some of his essential freedom in the bargain. Nick took the powerful position right from the get go, by announcing his intentions and his lack of concern about losing all the money, and Ibrahim was left to respond to him, in a relatively weak negotiating position. One tidbit you may not know, because of how the clip was edited for TV, is that Ibrahim was so upset about being in that weak position that he argued with Nick for 45 minutes before they were finally forced to pick balls. In other words, even though it worked out well for Ibrahim, it felt a little icky, a little coerced along the way.

Sometimes, in our religious lives, it can feel like we have to do that sort of thing with trusting God. Like he’s got all the power and we sort of have a choice to trust him or not, but really, it’s not a good choice. And I think that’s because of how those of us with authority in religious settings have tried to lay out the case for trusting God and his goodness. For example, how many people have chosen a life of faith out of fear of hell rather than a love of heaven? How many have chosen to live religiously approved lives as a form of disaster insurance rather than a risk-it-all investment in the dawning of Love’s glorious new age? And maybe we’ve done that with good intentions, because we’ve wanted to help move people towards “good” decisions, but we’ve done it in un-Jesus-like ways. And if that’s the way you’ve entered into faith, you maybe feel a little like Ibrahim. Happy you’re walking away with some money, but exhausted for the effort it took. And not entirely sure what to make of this guy you had to deal with to get it.

Next week, I’m going to tell you a little of the behind the scenes of that Golden Balls episode. About what was going on in each of their minds, and about what happens in our minds when we are faced with questions about trusting someone.

And we’re going to look at Jesus’ goodness in light of this. At how Jesus’ goodness is on a completely different level. At how he flips the tables in the power game of trust, so that aren’t left with doubts about his intentions or about his weaknesses that might cause us to be left holding the “split” ball and none of the goods. So that we aren’t left thinking the “steal” ball is our safest option. So that we operate out of hard-to-believe, pinch-me-I’m-dreaming freedom in our decisions to take mini-leaps of faith in him, without any arm twisting or ickiness whatsoever. So that what we have on the other side is exhilaration, not exhaustion.

That’s next week. For now, some practical suggestions to get started in the Leap of Faith journey. All of them are outlined in the Leap of Faith User Manual you should have in your hands or in digital form somewhere.