“Been There, Done That!”

I Corinthians 10:1-13

March 11^th and 14^th, 2004

Saint Paul United Methodist Church

Rev. John Andrew Fleming

I wonder if you have been a part of the following scene or something like it. My guess is that if you have lived long enough, you may have been on both sides of it. So imagine the scene, it is a Friday night, an hour or so after the time that you were supposed to be home. Your curfew is midnight. If this had been the first time that you had been late, tonight would not be such a big deal. But tonight is not the first time that you have been late. It is probably the fifth or sixth time now. There is a grace period in your curfew. If you are a few minutes late, fifteen minutes or so, it is okay. But you are way beyond the grace period on this Friday night. What is worse is that you have been warned. Your folks have been lenient. They have given you several chances. As you walked out the door, borrowing their car, their words run in your ears, “Be home on time tonight or else!” How could you let it happen? How could midnight come so fast? As you drive down your street, you creep along, and about the time that you are a couple of driveways away, you kill the headlights and coast into your driveway. Luckily your folks bedroom is on the backside of the house. The chance of them hearing you pull up, if they are in bed, and they should be at 1:00 in the morning, is pretty slim. Unfortunately, your room is next to their room. Your brother and sister, nestled away on their college campuses could not have agreed to give you their rooms, the better rooms, when they left home, could they?

You quietly close the car door, careful not to slam it. You will have to walk through the kitchen and the den. You will have to slowly open the hallway door, and creep down the hallway, especially paying attention to that board in the hardwood floor that creeps when you walk across it, and then enter your room. Your shoes are off. You will have to slip your jeans and t-shirt off and quietly put on your bed clothes, and climb into your bed. All without the luxury of a light. This, by the way, friends, is not autobiographical! I was always home on time! I am a rule follower from way back! Just as you are beginning to take off your jeans, light suddenly floods the room. There, sitting in the comfortable chair in your room, is your dad. He is the heavy in the family, the one who deals with the teenagers when they misbehave. Actually, he has been waiting for you for forty-five minutes or so. If it were not for the talk that the two of you were about to have, he might have smiled and said, “Gotcha!” But he cannot smile. The subject he is about to bring up wipes away any smile. On this Friday night, he has gotten up the courage to confront his child. The one that he used to rock to sleep and change diapers, has been doing some things that he has noticed, but not yet mentioned. You see, what is going on in this teenager’s life is more than curfew tardiness. He has tried all of the tricks. He has tried anger and the speech on page ninety-five of The Teenage Years chapter of the parent’s manual. The one where you are supposed to say, with zest, “If you are going to live under my roof, you are going to follow my rules.” Nothing has worked. And on this Friday night, with alcohol on his little girl’s breath and a look of horror on her face, he motions for her to join him on the side of her bed. She notices it almost immediately, the look on her daddy’s face is not anger or even disappointment. She has seen both of those looks before. She has seen this look before, but not often. She can tell that he is about to say something important. His words begin with these, “Honey, have I ever told you about some of the things that I did growing up in your grandparent’s lives?” He had not told her, by the way. He had told her of the happy times and the good memories, but he had not told her about some of the things that he had done, big mistakes that he had made, relationships that he had nearly lost. One by one, he admitted things to his little girl that he never wanted to admit to anyone and at the end of it, he looked her squarely in the eyes and said, “Baby, I see a lot of you in me. Please, learn from me. Do not go down the path that you have started to go down. Now, church, have you been a part of such a conversation, on either side of it? My guess is that you have.

Back in August, when I went to the last Connected in Christ retreat that I could go to, Adam Hamilton, our pastor at one of the largest and fastest growing churches in our country, The Church of the Resurrection, came and spoke to the group. He talked about his church’s mission, how they were dedicated to reaching out to the unchurched and the nominally churched in Leawood, Kansas and how successful the church had been. On any given weekend, he said, that there are six thousand people in their worship services. Then he told the story of his daughter, who was once his little girl. When she was, after he was sure that she was asleep, he would kneel at her crib and then her big girl bed and he would pray that she would come to know Jesus as he had come to know Jesus. It got harder when she was a teenager, when she did not want anyone in her room. It was really hard when she told her father, the preacher, that she was not sure if she believed in Jesus. Adam Hamilton said this to us, “I had spent my years in the ministry trying to convince people of their need for Jesus and had been wildly successful. But now, I could not even convince my own daughter that Jesus was believable. The story has a happy ending. He told us that she now believes, but it is hard, isn’t it, when the ones closest to us start down dangerous paths?

Which, I think, is the thing that is really on the apostle, Paul’s mind in our scripture lesson for this morning. Now Paul, of course, was not the parent of anyone in the Corinthian church, but he is their pastor. Up until this point in his first letter to them, Paul has pleaded, criticized, coaxed, charmed, and coaxed the Christians in a city that can only be compared to a city like New Orleans in our day. In nine chapters, few subjects have been off limits for the apostle. Some of the issues have been raised by the Corinthians themselves while others simply were on this apostle’s heart and mind. In the words that make up the chapters, Paul has talked about the issues of factions inside the church, sexual immorality, lawsuits brought on by some of them on others of them, fornication and infidelity, problems in marriage relationships and what to do about meat that had been dedicated and sacrificed to pagan gods. With a short skirt to defend his apostleship in the ninth chapter, Paul returns with fervor and zest to the subject of idolatry in the words that make up our lesson this morning.

Paul begins, as typical in this letter of his, by telling the Corinthians that he does not want them to be ignorant or perhaps a better word for ignorance is unaware. Paul does not want the Corinthians to be unaware of what God had done for his people in the past. With the stories close to his heart and on his mind, Paul reminds them of the Israelite’s, God’s chosen people, and the great things that God had done for them in the past. With a flurry of adjectives and verbs, Paul reminds the Corinthians that while these people were in the wilderness, wandering there with Moses for forty years, God gave them all of His divine attention. He went with them in the form of a cloud. His power, in the form of wind, parted the Red Sea. While they were out there, in the wilderness, they did not want for food or for drink. Manna fell from heaven everyday and whenever there was a need for water, God provided that, too. Paul takes a little liberty in his interpretation of these stories, I think. He wants to say that the water surrounding them was like baptismal waters. He wants to say that the manna falling from the heavens and the water pouring from the rock could be compared to the bread and wine of Christ’s communion. You have to pay attention to the turn that Paul makes in this passage. Paul attention to this line of his, “Nevertheless, God was not pleased with most of them; their bodies were scattered over the desert.” Then he warns, “Now these things occurred as examples to keep us from setting our hearts on evil things as they did.”

I do not mind telling you that the next few lines are Old Testament lines about a God that seems hard to worship. I am so thankful for Jesus and the New Testament. Paul mentions at least three sins, some argue that it is four, that should be examples and warnings for the folks in Corinth. First, Paul warns for them not to follow a life of idolatry. Now we could never be accused of that, could we, following after things that do not satisfy? To make his point, Paul remembers the story of Moses going up on Mount Sinai to be with God. Up there, his face shone, and when he came down the mountain what he found was a golden calf that the people said magically appeared. It may have appeared while they were drinking and dancing. It is a funny story, really, but what happened as a result of their sin was no joke. Then Paul issued the second warning, “We should not commit sexual immorality, as some of them did, and in a single day 23,000 of them did.” That’s a story right out of the book of Numbers, chapter twenty-one. Only Paul gets the numbers wrong. It wasn’t 23,000 it was 24,000. The last two warnings are more general in their scope and finding a corresponding story isn’t as easy, but the lesson is still there. Do not put the Lord your God to the test is the first of these last warning, for snakes will bit you. And do not grumble, comes the second warning, as some of God’s people did, and were destroyed by the destroying angel, probably a reference to what happened that first Passover night. It is harsh and it is hard and these words of Paul and his remembering of these stories was supposed to grab the Corinthians’ attention.

But then he eases up a bit and offers words that could apply to folks of any generation including our own. I would like for us to go home this morning thinking about these three things that Paul says. But before he gets to what we are supposed to do with temptation, he says something profound about the subject. His words say this, “So if you think that you are standing firm, be careful that you do not fall.” That is a sermon in and of itself. When you think that you are on sold ground, when you think that you are more secure than you have ever been. When you think that temptation is no where near you, you had better look out.

Now knowing that, listen to the three pieces of advice that Paul offers. First, he says, “No temptation has seized you except what is common to man.” The problem with temptation is that we think that we are the only one who has ever been through what we are going through. We are the only ones tempted to follow other gods. We are the only ones to lust in our hearts after other people. We are the only ones whose secret sins nearly paralyze them. When we are going through temptations, we think, “I am all alone in this.” They may not admit it to you, their eyes might be down right now, but there is probably someone in this very room who is dealing with the same temptation that you are now dealing with. Or, at the very lease, has dealt with it sometime in the near past. The problem with temptation is that we think that we are all alone in it. I know you think that you are special, but you are not alone in any temptation.

Listen to Paul’s second piece of counsel. He writes this to the Corinthians: “And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear.” Which is pretty good news for us, don’t you think. The problem that I have, personally with God, is that I think that he overestimates my ability to stand up to temptation. Are you like me? Do your sins seem to get the best of you just most of the time? There are those little sins, pesky little things, that just seem to get the best of me most of the time. I cannot seem to get past them. Is God stronger than these sins, of course He is! Does my life need new direction from time to time? Of course it does. Barbara Brown Taylor is a great preacher and teacher. She helped me to see that our the Hebrew word for righteousness literally means, one whose aim is true. So she encourages us to think of life as target practice; daily we try to hit the bulls eye. Some days we hit it and on others, the arrows fall hundreds of feet away. But practicing daily is what improves your aim. We will continue to sin, of course, but that is not our aim. Our true aim is what Thomas Merton once said, “Our desire to please God does, in fact, please God.”

And then Paul gives a last word of advice and he says this...but when you are tempted; he will provide a way out so that you can stand up under it. Good advice from a guy who has been there and done that. Let us pray.

(Special thanks to the writings of Barbara Brown Taylor for the idea of taking aim for righteousness. These words can be found in her book, Speaking of Sin).