Christ Lutheran Church: Welcome

The Boss of Me - Jan. 28, 2007

The Boss of Me

Luke 2:51, Philippians 2

January 28, 2007

Rev. Dave R. Garwick

As most of you know, I am what they call in the industry a "retread" - otherwise known as a second career pastor.  Before God sent me back to the shop for retooling as a pastor in my mid-thirties, I spent the previous fifteen years as a speech and language pathologist.  My second job in that field was a ten year stint in the Minneapolis Public Schools.  I started there as a team teacher in preschool special education classrooms.  One of my most memorable little charges was a kid from a different classroom whose name was something like T.J. O'Malley.  Couldn't get this little bugger to say a thing for weeks and weeks until that fateful day when I told him to move from one bus line to the next.  THAT got him to say his first words.  All three feet of him looked straight up at me and said, "Hey! YOU ain't the boss 'o me!"  So, I went and found the boss of him ... who told him to move to the other line.  He's forty years old now and I would love to know whatever became of T. J. O'Malley.

in one little declaration of independence, that little guy summed up the very core of human nature, what the Church calls "original sin".  In all our sawed-off stature, we look straight up to God and say, "YOU ain't the boss 'o me!"  You may be God, all right, my 'higher power' and stuff, but YOU can't tell ME what to do - You ain't the BOSS 'o me!"  You can advise me, You can bless me, You can do what I ask YOU to do, you can get me out of the holes I've dug for myself, You can even die on the cross for me and all that stuff, but You ain't the BOSS 'o me.  You can write down in the Bible what You want from me, but You ain't the BOSS 'o me.  "It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul."  "Invictus"   William Ernest Henley

These days, even among church goers, it is rarely sufficient to suggest that we should do or refrain from something simply because God said so in the Bible.  Most people no linger even pretend that this should be enough.  People have no problem telling their pastor, "Well, that all depends on how you interpret it," or "But I saw on The History Channel" or "That does no make sense to me," or "How do we know that?" or "But I read a book once that said ..." - all as VERY intelligent reasons why we do not have to necessarily follow what God says in the Bible...

...as if we WOULD obey if only God were capable of explaining things to our satisfaction?  Give me a break.  Such so-called brilliant challenges to God's commands are nothing more than very transparent and embarrassingly childish efforts to find any excuse to simply not obey our Father.

Obedience is a notion that has always been out of favor, but which has fallen on particularly hard times these days.  Yet our eternity hangs on obedience in at least two ways.  In the Epistle Lesson, we are told that when the Second Person of the Holy Trinity found Himself in the appearance of a human being, He humbled himself and became obedient.

Remember the Bible Focus Lesson at the very beginning of the service, when Jesus was twelve years old?  That is to say, in the twelfth year of His earthly assignment?  Here is God himself, who made the entire universe, being obedient to two earthlings that He had made!  Think about that!  Because He had taken the earthly role of being a human child, He played it out the whole way, including being obedient to His earthly parents.

But this was nothing compared to His decision to be obedient to His Father in heaven to the point of death.  I said that our eternity hangs on straight out obedience to the Father.  If Jesus had chosen to NOT be obedient to the Father, if He had chosen to NOT come to earth, if He had chosen to NOT give Himself on the cross as a sacrifice to pay for our sins, then what would become of us?  Let's just say that you could forget the sunscreen, folks.

The Wednesday Lenten series is going to be called "The Seven Choices of Christ".  These are seven opportunities Jesus had to ditch us and save himself, when He chose instead to humble himself and become obedient unto death, when our eternity hung in the balance of His obedience to the Father.

But our eternity also hangs in the balance of obedience in a second way:  when WE choose whether or not to be obedient.  For example, Jesus said that if we do not forgive one another, then our Father in heaven will not forgive us.  That is His nice way of saying "Hell".  He said that if we refuse to help those on the margin of life, then that too can make us the goats of Hell.  He said that hose who continue to slander against one another, those who continue to have sex outside marriage and those who practice witchcraft will all sacrifice their inheritance of heaven.

Obedience to the Father has always run counter to our short term, self-centered, earthly appetites.  I know whereof I speak:  been there, done, got the T shirt.  But obedience is how Jesus purchased our ticket for an eternity of joy.  And obedience is how we hang on TO it.

Amen.  May it be so!