Ideology of Today

Good morning.

I usually start off by saying my name is Dave, and I'm a recovering minister, but I'm not going to do that today.

I'm Kirk's dad, and I'm very proud of him and his ministry here at Commonplace Church, and I'm not sure this thing is going to work right.

And I've been involved in fellowshipping here for a little over a year now, and I've really enjoyed getting to know a lot of you.

I've tried to uh do some hospitality in a feeble way, but I'll I'll continue to try to uh get together with people and uh just uh share some brunch and uh some times at the barn.

Um we just finished celebrating our 250th uh anniversary as a country.

And um I I'm not sure this is going to work.

I don't I don't can I just use this?

No, no.

Um all right, I I think it's I think I got it now.

All right.

Um I I love America.

Uh I've been to 18 countries, and every time I've come back, uh I've appreciated um the United States a great deal.

However, I am a social critic, okay?

I'm a cultural critic of our country.

And uh this morning I want to look at tempering some American ideologies that can affect the quality of our spirituality, the quality of our Thanksgiving.

And ideology is kind of an ingrained way of thinking that most of us don't even realize uh we're we're doing, um, but um it can affect our spirituality.

I um pastored the Budlake Chapel for 30 years, and during part of that time uh I used to do sermons by request.

Um people would give me a topic or a portion of scripture, and I would develop a sermon on that.

And uh started out where I would do the month of January, and for a couple of years I actually went right up to Easter developing sermons that uh people requested, and it was very, very, I think, uh productive and interesting.

One of the sermons that was requested was on finding the will of God for your life.

Very important, very significant topic.

And so I got out my concordance and I started uh looking up the will of God in the scriptures and came across some um really um provocative and profound passages of scriptures.

1 Thessalonians 4, 3 says, It is the will of God that you be holy, sanctified.

Okay, sanctification, a fancy word for holiness.

And so you can look at your life and you can evaluate is what I'm doing in this aspect of my life something that is leading me to a greater holiness, or is it leading me away from a greater holiness?

So you can find the will of God by seeking sanctification.

1 Peter 2, 15 says, For this is the will of God, that by doing good you should silence the ignorant talk of foolish men.

So we're saved by grace through faith.

It's a gift of God, it's not of works, so none of us can boast.

So our salvation is not based on our good works.

And this is very different from all other religions in the world.

All other religions you're trying to make the grade, you're trying to uh earn favor with God.

And Christianity says that's not the way, it's different.

Your faith is in the person and work of Jesus Christ, the infinite Son of God who died to pay for your sins, and um he provides this great exchange.

He takes on your sin, and um he gives us the status of his holiness, his righteousness.

So we're seen before a holy God as a righteous, holy individual through the righteousness of Jesus Christ.

But it also says that we're God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works.

So we are to do good works.

It's the quality control, if you will, of our faith.

James says faith without works is dead.

So part of the will of God is doing good.

1 Thessalonians 5.18 says, give thanks in all circumstances, for it is God's will for you in Christ Jesus.

So giving thanks in all circumstances, and this is really not easy because a lot of crummy things happen in life.

Um, I grew up, uh my father was the worst case scenario person, very, very negative.

And I have had to fight this idea of um looking at a circumstance and looking at it in a worst case scenario, and not being able to find the consolation prize, not be able to say, okay, well, you know, there's some good that has come out of this, or some good will happen, because all things ultimately work together for good to those who love God and um who are called according to his purposes.

All right, so these are three areas of finding the will of God for your life.

Now, in the Old Testament, there were two types of sacrifices that you find.

The first one was the lamb that was brought to the temple and was sacrificed by the priest.

And the priest would put his hand on the head of the lamb, and there would be this transference of the sins of the person who brought the lamb to the lamb.

Without the shedding of blood, there's no remission of sins, okay?

Um, and so there was this sacrifice that took place of an animal, the shedding of blood.

However, the person would come back a time later and they would bring a grain offering.

It was a thanksgiving offering.

It was an offering that said, Thank you, God, for forgiving my sins, for um giving me a new fresh start.

Now, in the New Testament, we have something that's very, very similar.

It's built upon Jesus Christ being the New Testament Lamb of God, who takes on the sins of all who put their faith and trust in him.

However, we are called to be the thanksgiving offering.

Listen to what Romans 12, 1 and 2 says.

All right, when I was being ordained back in the 70s, this is one of the big questions that was asked of the ordination, the ordination candidate, where give me the outline of the book of Romans, and so you would say, well, chapters 1 through 8, Jesus is a sacrifice for sin.

9 through 11 is the interlude where Paul talks about uh the place of Israel in God's economy.

And then chapter 12 through 16, well, that's the thanksgiving offering.

That's the way our lives are to be lived in order to please God.

Listen to what it says.

Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God's mercy, to offer yourselves as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God, which is your spiritual worship.

Do not be conformed any longer to the patterns of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.

Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is, his good and pleasing and perfect will.

So he's saying, this is how you find the will of God.

You say, I'm the thanksgiving offering, I'm offering my life, I'm offering my body to you because you have given me the great salvation of forgiveness of sins and eternal life.

And I'm gonna work at not having my mind influenced by the world.

My mind is gonna be renewed, I'm not gonna be conformed to the patterns of this world.

And it's very, very clear if you do this, you can find the good and perfect will of God.

Now, for some of us, in order not to be pressed into the world's mold, in order to be that living sacrifice, that thanksgiving offering, some of us may have to temper the ideology of capitalism in order to be a living sacrifice and have a grateful heart.

Some of us may have to temper the ideology of entitlement in order to be a living sacrifice and have a grateful heart.

Some of us may have to temper the ideology of extreme individualism in order to be a living sacrifice and have a grateful heart.

And some of us may have to temper the ideology of being other-oriented in order to be a living sacrifice and have a grateful heart.

Tempering the ideology of capitalism in order to be a living sacrifice and have a thankful heart.

I'm a brave person, you know, I'm I'm really a brave person doing this.

Um, our primary uh system in America uh is capitalism, all right?

And um, you know, you pay your 33% taxes, and you can keep whatever else uh you make from the profit uh of your hard work, and um you can buy whatever whatever you want, and uh get as many of this or as many of that as you want.

And so capitalism does promote innovation, it promotes prosperity, but it can also promote greed, exploitation, and a great deal of inequality.

And one of the things it does tend to do, and this is what needs to be tempered in this ideology, is this mentality of I did it myself, why should I thank God or anyone else?

I worked hard, I pulled myself up by my bootstraps.

It was 1965.

I was studying forestry at Penn State University, the Man Alto campus down near Chambersburg, Pennsylvania.

I made friends with uh two really great guys.

Um we didn't uh drink or seduce women on weekends, and so we decided that um we were going to take a road trip uh to Hagerstown, Maryland.

We had already seen the movie at Chambersburg, so we wanted to go to Hagerstown and see uh what was playing down there when you know you only had one movie playing at one theater at a time.

So we get down to Hagerstown, and there's this movie called Shenandoah.

And um it was a very, very powerful movie about a family in Virginia during the Civil War, and it gets pulled apart by um the different factions of the Civil War.

But Jimmy Stewart is the father of this big clan before this uh tearing apart all takes place.

Jimmy Stewart sitting down at this bountiful, bountiful table, all right, and he says a prayer, something like this.

I don't remember the exact words, but it was sort of like we planted it, we watered it, we harvested it, but we thank you anyhow.

We thank you anyhow.

Now, this can be part of the capitalistic mindset that we may need to temper.

The scripture says this it says, you may say to yourselves, My power and the strength of my hands have produced this wealth for me.

But remember, the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you the ability to produce wealth, and so confirms his covenant, which he swore to your forefathers as it is today.

We need to give thanks to the Lord because he gives us the ability to produce wealth.

We just don't do it ourselves.

I read a book back in the 80s called God Owns My Business.

A man got into the plastics business right after the Second World War, and he was a Christian, and he made a commitment of giving 10% of his earnings from the business to missions and to the Lord's work, and he did that.

And after a number of years, he realized something.

He realized he could comfortably live off of 10% and give 90% to the Lord's work, which he did.

And this is another issue with capitalism.

We have this idea that if we get more, we've got to get bigger and better and more and more, and we really need to plateau.

It would be wise to plateau in our thinking and to use that blessing for others.

In fact, the Apostle Paul writes in 2 Corinthians, he's writing to the Corinthian church who promised to give a gift to the poor in Jerusalem.

And um he refers to the manna, manna, which literally means what is it?

You know, it was the bread of heaven that came down every day while the children of Israel were in the wilderness uh for 40 years and fed them.

And you could go out and gather enough for that day.

If you tried to hoard it, it would rot.

You could gather enough for the Sabbath, so you didn't have to go out, and you could also gather more if you were going to share it with other people and it wouldn't rot.

And he said, He who has gathered much should share with him who has gathered little that there be no lack.

So there needs to be the tempering of capitalism in order to be a living sacrifice and have a grateful heart by tempering some of the idea of we did it ourselves and we got it all and we don't have to share it with anybody else.

Some of us may have to temper the ideology of entitlement in order to be a living sacrifice and have a thankful heart.

Now, capitalism has been greatly tempered in our culture from the 1800s.

The 1800s there was a lot of exploitation of workers, but we now have labor unions that temper capitalism.

We have unemployment, we have Social Security, we have Medicare, we have these things that have really tempered uh crass capitalism.

However, it can create a mindset, it can create an entitlement mindset that says somebody else should take care of me.

The state owes me.

I'm entitled to the American dream.

I only want what I deserve.

I'm not getting everything I want and feel I deserve.

So how can I be thankful?

There's an interesting passage in Galatians 6, 2 through 5.

It says this.

It says, Carry each other's burdens, and in this you will fulfill the law of Christ.

If anyone thinks he is something when he is nothing, he deceives himself.

Each one should test his own actions.

Then he can take pride in himself without comparing himself to somebody else, for each one should carry his own load.

Seems like a contradiction.

Carry each other's burdens.

Each one should carry his own load.

You get the nuance of this in the Greek.

And what it's saying basically is when the load you're carrying is crushing you, the body of Christ really needs to be there to help to lift the load.

However, it doesn't mean that they're going to carry that load for you.

And you need to eventually pull your own weight.

We've had, I think, 79 people who have lived with us at the barn over the past 50 years.

Actually, Blaise Branchot, who's here today, was one of the first people who ever who ever lived with us back in the back in the 70s, worked with the young people at the barn.

But we've had four single parents, we've had people going through divorce, we've had people coming out of rehab, we've had a number of homeless people there.

And there have been times when, in so many words, we've had to say to them, you know what?

We've helped to lift your load when it was crushing you.

But now you you have got to really start pulling your own weight and carrying your own load even more.

In order to be a living sacrifice and have a grateful heart, we may have to temper the ideology of entitlement.

Some of us may have to temper the ideology of extreme individualism in order to be a living sacrifice and have a grateful heart.

I think we got our first 12-inch television set in 1950.

Okay.

Little black and white TV set.

My father loved cowboy movies, loved John Wayne, and um I grew up watching a lot of cowboy movies.

I realized later on that I had been desensitized to violence, watching the cowboys shoot the Indians, watching the good guys shoot the bad guys, and I had to really reorient from that violent orientation that I really grew up with as normal.

But there was also the Marlboro man.

The Marlboro man was on almost all of those cowboy shows, okay?

So here was this rugged individualist on a horse with a Stetson hat, smoking a Marlboro cigarette, and he was like the ideal of the American male.

Extreme individualism.

Simon and Garfunkel sang, I am a rock, I'm an island, and a rock feels no pain, and an island never cries.

The idea of you can do it on your own, you can become stoic and do it on your own.

When I was studying sociology, I came across a study by a sociologist named Eric Fromm.

And he was a German sociologist who embedded himself in an African tribe when there still was a primitive African tribe to embed yourself with.

So he's doing this comparative study between that tribe and the young people growing up in it and the Western culture and the young people growing up in it.

And Frome concluded that the African tribe, the young people growing up in the African tribe, had what he called an automatic connectedness.

An automatic connectedness.

They felt they were part of the hunting, the gathering, the preparation, the survival of that clan, of that tribe.

And he compared that to Western culture, where he said most young people grow up with a feeling of alienation and existential anxiety.

And I read that and I said, that was me.

Let me tell you, that's how I grew up.

This feeling of I gotta prove myself.

I don't really feel like I'm connected.

I really don't feel like I belong.

And finally, when I when I did come to Christ, I I realized that I was part of a corporate solidarity.

I was part of the body of Christ.

I was accepted in the beloved.

I was no longer an alien and stranger, excluded from the covenant and promise and without hope.

And it was a wonderful thing to realize that reality, that I was part of the body of Christ.

And that extreme individualism of the Marlborough man was something I could reject because I was part of this corporate unit, this corporate solidarity.

Some of us may have to reject the extreme individualism in order that we may be part of the body of Christ and assemble together.

The Bible says we're not to forsake the assembling of ourselves together.

And I realize that Skype really helped during the COVID situation, but I almost think now that some of us are forsaking the assembling of ourselves together as the corporate body of Christ because it's too convenient to sit home in our pajamas and watch it on television, watch it on the computer.

Some of us may have to temper the ideology of being other-oriented in order to be a living sacrifice and have a grateful heart.

Sociologists say that we have moved from being what they called inner directed, directed by inner convictions to being other-oriented.

We're looking for other people to give us our sense of worth, our value, and identity.

I believe that part of that is a result of being brainwashed with the evolutionary philosophy that we have evolved from primordial slime.

And therefore, we don't have the rooting and the grounding in the understanding that we were made by God in his image.

And I believe as a result of this loss of inner direction, I believe there's a great deal of inferiority, eating disorders, suicide, general dissatisfaction with our identity.

A lot of the gay and trance identity, I believe, all grows out of that sense of not having a deep inner connection of who we are, and that this is part of our being inner directed rather than being other other directed.

I was born with my right eye turned in pretty pretty badly.

So I think I was three years old and they operated to straighten it out, and it was okay for a while.

But I remember walking down the hallway in junior high in the seventh grade, the eye had started to go out now, and I was seeing double, and I've seen double for the last 66 years.

But um I've had three other operations to bring it back in.

The eye would go out and they'd operate and they'd bring it back in.

But I looking back on this and understanding sociology more than I did back then, but understanding that I made an important decision during that time because I was extremely self-conscious about this, and it was extremely difficult for me as a teenager.

But I made a decision that man looks on the outward appearance, God looks on the heart.

And I made this decision that I was going to work on my relationship with God and my heart, and I was not going to let other people, in a sense, define me by a defect, a physical defect that I had.

And it was something that was really, really important to me that I was able to be able to make that decision and to get beyond being other directed by what other people thought of me and by some of the jokes or comments that were made about my uh physical characteristic of my uh lazy, my lazy eye.

We must realize that we are made in God's image and that we have worth and value as unique persons simply because of that fact.

We must seek our direction in life through the word of God that dwells richly within us.

We must reject the obsession to compare ourselves with others and be thankful for who we are in Christ.

I want to be able to say with my whole heart, praise the Lord, O my soul, all my inmost being, praise his holy name, praise the Lord, O my soul, and forget not his benefits, who forgives all your sins and redeems your life from the pit and crowns you with love and compassion, who satisfies your desires with good things, so that your youth is renewed like the eagles.

Capitalism may sometimes make you feel like you did it yourself and you don't need to thank God.

Entitlements may make you think that you should have more and you can't be content with what you have.

Extreme individualism can make you feel anxious and feeling like you don't belong.

And being other-oriented can make you lose sight of your value as a person who's made in the image and likeness of God.

We're not to be pressed into the world's mold, okay?

We are to be the living sacrifice, the thanksgiving offering, and that's how we find the will of God in Christ Jesus.

Let's pray.

Lord, we thank you for our country.

We thank you for the many blessings and freedoms that we experience here.

But we're called to be light, and we're called to be salt, and we're called to be that living sacrifice, that thanksgiving offering.

And we pray that in the areas of American culture and ideology that we would be able to temper those things that need to be tempered so that we can truly be those living sacrifices that you want us to be, and be the light and salt that you have called us to be in Jesus' name.

Amen.