Chris Taylor’s Sermon – 1/20/08
You Are What You Seek
Proverbs 3:5-8
Colossians 2:16-3:4
If we were to go out after church and sit down over a couple of coffee, I wonder how many of you would be able to tell me the goals that you have identified for your life, or more importantly, your sense of mission. Where are you heading? What’s your life about?
This past summer I found myself playing golf with a guy that I had never met before. He was in his mid to late thirties, recently married, and he and his wife had just celebrated the birth of their first child. He was a pretty good golfer, far better than I’m ever going to be. But what struck me was his comment that over the previous ten months or so he had played approximately forty rounds. That’s a lot of golf! And it is one thing if you are single or retired, but quite another to be young, recently married, and with a brand new child at home.
He was very clear: his goal was to be a better golfer. He had certainly succeeded. His game had significantly improved. And I share his story not to invite judgment, but to lift before you the connection between his goals and his life experience. Forty rounds of golf is the equivalent of somewhere between four or five forty-hour work weeks. Clearly, this one goal had a tremendous impact on his life, and on where he chose to invest his time and energies.
That’s the power of goals. We may not bring the same laser-like focus as that guy, but our goals (whatever they might be) are still going to have this tremendous affect. That’s why it is so important to know what our goals are, and to be very intentional about identifying our mission.
Our text this morning is an invitation to be intentional. Even more, it is really about choosing that one goal in life that can have the greatest impact of all. “Seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God [a phrase, by the way, that is picked up in our Apostle’s Creed]. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth…”
What is Paul talking about here? He is talking about our goals. He is talking about our focus in life.
The connection between focus and experience came home to me years ago when our oldest son graduated from high school. I had told him eight years before that when he finished high school we’d take a trip together. In the years that followed I forgot all about my promise, but Christopher didn’t. There he was after his graduation asking me where we were going to go. I was thrilled, actually, that he would remember, and after talking about it for a while, we decided on a motorcycle trip to the northern rim of the Grand Canyon.
That is how I found myself on a cold, snowy, February weekend driving around on a little motorcycle in a parking lot down in Colorado Springs. With about fifteen other people, I was taking a course prior to getting my license. One of the take-aways from that course, a lesson pounded home again and again, was to stay focused on where you wanted to go. Not on what you wanted to avoid, but on where you wanted to be.
Through the years you may have heard about state troopers by the side of the road, or people changing their tires who get hit by passing cars. The issue isn’t that people don’t see them. The issue, rather, is that seeing them they stay focused upon them and their cars drift over, unconsciously following the direction of their eyes.
Focus is everything. And what is true of driving or biking is true of life itself. Our lives are profoundly shaped by our goals, by our focus. It is why successful companies place so much emphasis on goal-setting. They know the impact those goals can have on shaping our behavior.
So here is Paul saying that we should set our sights on God, not on the things that are of this earth. It is not that these other things (the things of this earth) don’t matter. Obviously, they do. His point rather, is that by focusing on God all the other elements of this life will fall into their proper place. It is like making a U-turn on a motorcycle. The temptation is to watch your tire or watch the opposite curb to make sure you don’t hit it. Do that, and you are going to get in trouble. Instead, the key is to twist around and look over your shoulder at where you want to end up. Focus there, and then trust that your tire and that curb will end up where they are supposed to be.
A few weeks ago Bonnie and I went down to Washington D.C. to visit my mother and catch the Turner exhibit before it closed at the National Gallery. The early nineteenth century painter has long been one of my favorites. The exhibit was extraordinary; a massive representation of his work. One of the particular delights for me was finally being able to see in person a painting that I had heard about years before. What made this painting so special was that it was one of the very few that Turner had allowed someone to observe as he created it.
Turner had been visiting the home of one of his most generous patrons at the time, a man named Walter Fawkes. One morning over breakfast Fawkes asked him to make a drawing that would give some idea of the size of a man of war – an enormous ship of several decks that usually carried at least seventy-four guns. Turner happily agreed and invited Fawkes’ oldest son to watch. The boy sat by his side the entire morning, and later described what he observed:
He began by pouring wet paint on to the paper until it was saturated, he tore, he scratched, he scrabbled at it in a kind of frenzy and the whole thing was chaos – but gradually and as if by magic the lovely ship, with all its exquisite minutia [sic] came into being and by luncheon time the drawing was taken down in triumph.
The painting that emerged is known today as A First Rate Taking in Stores. It is one of Turner’s best-known watercolors, and filled with his signature hues. It was this whole idea of form emerging from chaos that brought this painting to mind as I studied our text; the idea of the painter’s focus giving this frenzy of color its shape and substance.
Look again at what Paul says about the centrality of Jesus, v. 19, “the head [that is, Jesus], from whom the whole body, nourished and held together by its ligaments and sinews, grows with a growth that is from God.” He is describing here a focal point that like Turner’s vision of the ship makes sense of the chaos, and draws all those richly varied elements into a coherent and substantive whole.
We are then, like the different elements of that painting; a bit of color, or a point of light. Each of us has a unique and specific part to play. Paul warns these Colossians not to let others condemn them for not following certain practices, or to disqualify them because their understanding of what it means to follow Jesus is somehow slightly different.
Are the colors of the sea wrong because they don’t match the sky? Or is the texture of the ship somehow superior to the very different textures of those elements beside it? Part of what makes a masterpiece is the capacity of the creator to bring so many different elements into a flawlessly coherent whole. Ever color, every brushstroke is essential to the whole.
It is no different for us. God never asks us to be like that person beside us or a row in front of us. Our role, our call, is to be uniquely ourselves in this vast canvas of God’s creation.
This weekend we remember and celebrate the remarkable ministry of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. What a role he had in promoting the righteousness and justice of our Creator! When I read Taylor Branch’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Parting the Waters, it came as a great surprise to discover the powerful (if indirect) connection between Dr. King on the one hand and John D. Rockefeller on the other.
As a penniless child, Rockefeller had sought out the Baptist faith – a faith and denomination to which he would remain committed for his entire life. On a June day in 1882 Rockefeller and his in-laws were attending the Erie Baptist Church in Cleveland, Ohio, when two women came to speak from the Atlanta Female Baptist Seminary. The school had been founded just a year before for young African-American women, and was in dire need. These two women, as it turned out, had once taught Rockefeller’s wife and she had always taken great pride in her connection to them. Her mother could remember the days when her own home had been a part of the Underground Railroad; a waypoint for Sojourner Truth and her runaway slaves. Rockefeller pledged his support.
A couple of years later, as a result of Rockefeller’s support, the school was renamed Spelman College after his in-laws. In the years that followed he purchased large tracts of land on Atlanta’s West Side which would ultimately become the home not only to Spelman, but to two men’s colleges, as well. Martin Luther King’s mother went to Spelman. His father went to the one of the two adjacent men’s colleges; a school named Morehouse College. And some two decades later Martin Luther King, Jr. began attending Morehouse himself. It was there, at Morehouse, that he first began to openly discuss issues of race and segregation.
One more connection: Rockefeller’s son {John Jr.) not only continued the family’s commitment to Spelman and Morehouse, but later built a church for Harry Emerson Fosdick along Riverside Drive in New York City. It was there, at Riverside Church, that Martin Luther King, Jr. would later preach what Branch called “some of the most important sermons of his life. ”
It would be hard to identify two more dissimilar people than John D. Rockefeller and Martin Luther King, Jr. – one a ruthless industrialist of extraordinary wealth, the other a pastor who built his ministry on issues of social and racial justice. Two very different brush-strokes on an enormous canvas. But each of them was shaped in their own way by their faith. Each was used by God as part of something so much bigger than either one.
Our Old Testament Lesson puts it as succinctly: “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not rely on your own insight.” The promise is equally wonderful: “It will be healing for your flesh and a refreshment for your body.”
What are your goals? What mission have you chosen for the years ahead?
It is in entrusting our lives to the hands of the master, focusing the whole of who we are upon him, that we find our lives becoming part of something so much bigger than ourselves; something significant and enduring. Focus is everything. So I invite you this morning to seek first the Kingdom of God that “all these things might be given unto you.” Seek God, and so open your life to all the richness and wonder of God’s intent.
Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters, (Simon and Schuster, New York, 1988), p. 39