BUILDING CHARACTER
SCRIPTURE
As a father
I always wanted to build character in our sons as they grew up. Now I want you to know that I have made
mistakes in that effort to produce character.
When we bought our first house in
I’ve always
been concerned with the fouling of our air by the internal combustion engine,
so I bought a reel-type mower, powered by nothing more than brute force. Our small lawn only took about twenty minutes
to mow. Of course, I was following
Paul’s rhetorical flights in which I was told that, “Suffering produces
endurance, and endurance produces character.”
It was character that I was after in our sons as they mowed the
lawn. Let me tell you, that lawn mower
produced a lot of suffering. The boys
suffered as they struggled with that mower that was supposed to keep our air
clean. I suffered as I listened to their
bitter complaints about this green machine.
As Paul said, “Suffering produces endurance,” so I endured their cries
of anguish for awhile. I’m sorry to
report that I could see that this mower was producing no character
whatsoever. So bitter were their
complaints that I took over the mowing.
Soon that wonderful device calculated to save our environment was
hanging in the garage as I hurried off to Sears to buy a carbon belching, walk
behind, push-type lawn mower. The
environmentally friendly device appeared in the next garage sale we had. As I said earlier, I have made mistakes.
The thing I
did learn from that was that Paul was right that suffering (mine) produced
endurance (again mine, in the form of stubbornness) and the only character
formed was mine as I learned that I had to retreat from my early resolve to
teach our sons a lesson.
I would
like to think that I was justified by my faith in myself, but that is exactly
the point of Paul’s comments. We are not
justified by the trust that we have in ourselves. This may come to you as breaking news, but we
are sinners. I am a sinner. It was my sinful nature that created the
situation in which I became a stubborn father with a lawnmower fixation.
Now don’t
get me wrong, I think we parents have a responsibility to shape the character
of our children. We ought to model what
we want them to become. What we want
them to become is people who have a solid foundation on which to grow their
lives, just as we need that same base for our lives. That base is to be found in none other than
Jesus the Christ. Through Jesus, we who
were far from God through our pride about lawnmowers and other things are
brought near to God through our faith, and we are justified by that faith.
I can’t
think of justification without thinking of my printing background. I have told you previously that I worked my
way through college on a small city newspaper in the hot lead era, which is
very different from the electronic process of printing today. Justification is a technical term in
printing. When you hand set type, you
had to make sure that each line came out even.
That meant that it had to come out right on both margins regardless of
the letters you used. You had to slip
spacers in the type if your margins were not even. Everything had to be set in a proper
line. You could not be ragged right or
left. The computer does all of that
automatically now, and what a godsend it is for the printer. God has set us right with God’s standards for
a right relationship with God through Jesus.
God has evened out the lines of our life so that they are not ragged but
in perfect order.
This good
news puts us at peace with God. Our
lives are not a steady state of heavenly bliss, just as Jesus’ life was not a
steady state. He went about preaching,
teaching and healing, of course, but he also encountered opposition and
conflict. This resulted in his
crucifixion and death and brought about his resurrection and our new life in
him.
Just so,
our lives are lived in the messy reality that we, too, face on a daily
basis. Paul says that we are able to do
this through God’s gracious love in Jesus Christ, and, “We boast in our hope of
sharing the glory of God. And not only
that, but we boast in our sufferings.”
And, how we
suffer. There isn’t one of us who hasn’t
at some time in our lives suffered doubt in ourselves. Remember, those of you who are students;
finals are coming up soon or maybe have already occurred. There are very few of us who haven’t suffered
grief at some loss or death. There are
few who haven’t been crushed by the thoughtless words or actions of
another. Those are only a few of our
opportunities to suffer. Paul tells us
that sufferings produce endurance.
I don’t
know about you, but there are some things I don’t want to endure. Watching American
Idol rises right to the top of my list, nor would I want a root canal a
week. Those are silly remarks about a
serious subject. We do find ourselves
from time to time in situations in which we would rather not find ourselves. In those times we stay with our convictions
that God has justified our lives through our faith stance. We model for one another in our endurance of
what may seem intolerable, faithful living.
We stay the course in our faith.
That
endurance, Paul tells us, produces character.
We are shaped by our experiences, both good and bad. We learn from our mistakes. Over and above it all is our faith in the one
God who sustains us and liberates us from our past with forgiveness and grace. That shapes our character as people freed
from our past for the service of God as we look around and see a world full of
need. This character produces hope and
we have come full circle.
We are full
of hope because we live in the midst of the great love of God that has
sustained us through all the movements of our lives.
This takes
me back to the lawn mower again. When I
realized that the lawn mower was a symbol of my sinful pride, I was made aware
that I didn’t need to hang on to that pride because God had given me the grace
to operate freely without pride in anything, but God’s release from sinful
pride to pride in being a part of God’s wonderful creation through God’s
forgiveness in Jesus Christ. That was a
gift of God, and I had no part in creating it.
It was then that character was built, when I utterly and fully threw
myself on the mercy of God.
We
celebrate that freedom in Christ as we participate with one another in this
sacrament of the Lord’s Supper prepared for us.
Sermon preached
by Reverend Jake Close at First Congregational United Church of Christ,
Appleton, Wisconsin on June 3, 2007.