June 7, 2009 First Sunday after Pentecost, Triity Sunday,
Youth Sunday
First Congregational Church in Thetford, Vermont, UCC
Psalm 71:5-6, 17-18; Mark 2:1-12
Thinking Outside the Box
The phrase “thinking outside the box” has become a cliché only in recent years.
It refers to a puzzle that management consultants use to illustrate the need for creative
problem solving. Here is the puzzle:
• • •
• • •
• • •
They present people with this grid of nine dots, three rows of three, and they ask
them to connect all the dots using four continuous straight lines. Most people find it
impossible, which it is, if your mind automatically puts a box around the perimeter of
the nine dots, as most do. But if you can think outside the box and extend one of your
four straight lines out beyond the grid of dots, a solution appears. (Here is a web site
where you can see a solution: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking_outside_the_box.)
We humans tend to draw boxes around ourselves and crawl inside and lock the
door behind us. We make up our minds that things are just so, and we find it almost
impossible to think otherwise. The story of Pentecost, and the story of Easter, and the
story of Jesus’ life in the gospels all show the Holy Spirit and God and Christ at work
trying to free us from our boxes.
At Pentecost the Spirit comes like a powerful wind, and the former walls of the
120 people in that room are blown out, and suddenly they can speak languages they do
not know, and they can heal the sick and preach wisdom and live cooperatively in ways
they didn’t even dream of before. People around them hear them speaking in different
languages praising God and assume they are drunk, because that is the only explanation
that fits within the box of reason. But to understand how the Spirit works we need to
think outside reason.
At Easter, they had buried Jesus in the ultimate box of death, but he burst its
prison. That night the disciples hid in fear behind the locked door of a room’s tight box,
but Jesus passed right through it, and breathed on them, and sent them out.
Again and again in Jesus’ ministry he tried to shake our boxes, turn them upside
down, show us that they were illusions. Conventional wisdom said, love your friends
and hate your enemies. Jesus said, love your enemies. Conventional wisdom said
return good for good and evil for evil. Jesus said, return good for evil. He said the
nonviolent, not the violent, would inherit the earth.
In today’s passage Jesus was teaching in a house that was filled to overflowing.
The crowd was so thick around the door of the house that no one could get through.
Four men came carrying a paralyzed man. They believed that Jesus could heal him, if
only they could reach him. But there was no way. Then one of them thought outside the
box. They could go up the outside stair and dig a hole through the mud and thatch roof
and lower the man down into the room. Brilliant! And it worked!
But that is not the end of the story. Jesus also was thinking outside the box.
Among the crowd of the poor and sick and outcast were some scribes. Scribes were part
of the religious and political power structure that decided whether or not a person was
free of sin, which included deciding if a person was free of sickness, because sickness
was believed to be caused by sin. If the scribes and the priests said that God had not
forgiven you, or that God’s disfavor with you was shown by some physical flaw, then
you were not only shut out of the temple, you were shut out from society. Anyone who
associated with you or touched you would also become impure. Among other painful
consequences, this made the poor poorer, and multiplied their suffering.
So when Jesus said to the man suddenly lowered into the room, “Your sins are
forgiven,” the scribes were outraged. This was blasphemy, they said. Remember that
blasphemy is the charge against Jesus at his trial where he is condemned to death.
Revolution would be another word for it. Jesus was taking the power away from the
oppressors. He was setting the captives free. He forgave the man’s sins and healed him
and sent him back into his life. Jesus was saying, all may enter the realm of God’s
infinite forgiveness and unconditional love, including those whom the scribes and
priests shut out. The crowd was amazed and glorified God and said, “We have never
witnessed anything like this before!”
We, too, should be amazed and glorify God for this, because of what it means for
our lives and our world. It means that if we feel stuck, if we feel trapped, if we cannot
see our way out of a life situation that is oppressing us, God and Jesus Christ and the
Holy Spirit exist to help us. They offer us a force that can guide and empower us to
break free of the boxes that confine us. If we open our heart and mind to God and
Christ and Spirit and put our life and will in their care, if we let go of everything and
trust in them, we will find solutions that wait just outside the limits of what we can
imagine.
But allowing ourselves to trust in that liberating, inspiring force is not easy. The
history of Christianity since the first Pentecost is the history of the struggle between the
human love of boxes and the Holy Spirit’s love of freedom from boxes. Today is
Trinity Sunday, and the story of how we got here to have something called the Trinity is
all about boxes.
On the one hand, the idea that there is one God in three persons took some
serious thinking outside the box. The Christian faith evolved from three distinct
entities, God, Jesus and the Spirit, into this complex, creative relationship that the
Trinity describes. But along the way, there was intense conflict between different
factions of creative thinkers who were trying to solve the problem of who these three
divine persons were. Everyone was trying to put everyone else into a box labeled
heresy. Everyone was trying to draw a box around their idea that said they were right
and all other ideas outside their box were wrong.
One of the things I love about our denomination, the United Church of Christ, is
the spirit of freedom in it. The United Church of Christ takes as its motto the prayer that
Jesus said just before his arrest in the gospel of John. He prayed, “that they may all be
one.” The UCC would like to see all Christians lay down their barricades and live in
peace together. The boxes that divide us are illusion, we say; they are just a way of
thinking. If we can think outside them we will see that our unity in the love of God and
Christ and the Holy Spirit is what is real.
We are blessed to live in a time and place where one ancient and painful box is
being broken through before our very eyes. Marriage is beginning to be extended to
include same sex couples. To the older generations, this seems miraculous. But to the
younger generations, it seems obvious. They can see that the box of marriage being for
some and not for others was just an illusion, a mental construct. It has never held them
the way it has the older generations.
I think we may see the same thing happen with much else in the church in the
coming decades. We may have to think outside the box if the church is going to
survive. For most of the last two thousand years, predominantly Christian societies set
Sundays aside for worship. Other business did not happen. In the last few decades, as
our culture has grown increasingly fast-paced and heavily programmed, it has broken
down the walls of the old blue-laws and opened Sunday up for any and all activities.
The scheduling of youth sports on Sunday has had a huge impact on our church. Plus,
many people are so burned out from activities the other six days of the week that they
feel they need Sunday as their one day to stay home or do something together as a
family. Far from blaming them, we need to find ways to help them. But this creates a
growing challenge for the church that will require creative problem solving.
We have another challenge, as well. We live in a society where 80% of people
under the age of 20 have never been to a single worship service or Sunday School class.
What we need to think about, what we need to ask ourselves is, are they missing
something they need? Do we have something to offer that could benefit more than just
the small percentage of children and youth who are here now? Is it important for us to
reach beyond our limits and let those families know what benefits we find here and
invite those youth to participate? And if so, how can we do that?
Even now, one of our biggest problems is the inconsistency of attendance of
children and youth. Teachers and leaders work hard to prepare lessons and activities,
but it is possible to have a completely different set of children from one week to the
next, and it may be predominantly third graders one week and kindergarteners the next.
This is not the fault of the families or the teachers or the program—it is just the way
things work in our society today. Things have changed. So our thinking needs to
change. Some churches solve this problem by providing rides to children whose
families cannot make it on a Sunday morning. Other churches have Tuesday School
instead of Sunday School, as an after-school program. What would make the most sense
for us?
One major challenge to creative problem solving is that we like our boxes. We
like to build them and live in them. We particularly like our church boxes. So thank
God for the youth. Thank God new generations keep coming along who say, like the
child in The Emperor’s New Clothes, “What box? I don’t see any box.”
Let us resolve to learn from the children and begin to think outside the boxes that
are creating problems for us now, so that we will be here to serve children and adults
alike for generations to come. Let us rejoice in the Pentecost Spirit of freedom and
change and new life, and give ourselves completely to its force. May it shake us free
wherever we feel stuck. Let us open ourselves to go wherever it blows us next.
Let us pray in silence, opening our minds to the Spirit’s direction…
Sermon 06/07/2009