Finding the Love of Your Life
01/18/2004 - Getting Close without Getting Hurt
In his new book called Everybody's Normal Till You Get to Know Them, John Ortberg, opens by taking us into a department store and walking us down an aisle where there's a section of merchandise marked, "On sale. Greatly reduced prices. No returns or exchanges. All sales final."
We've all been in stores like that. Sometimes they're outlets and sometimes they're not. But all the items have a tag that says, "as is." Each piece of clothing on the rack or in the pile is slightly irregular. These are damaged goods and we're told that going in. So if we're going to buy something we need to check it out first.
Some items may have a loose thread, some may have a button missing, some may have a zipper that doesn't zip or a stain that won't come out. But they all have a problem. These items are not normal merchandise.
And the store gives us fair warning. They're not going to take responsibility if we find a flaw. That's why there are no returns, refunds or exchanges. If you're looking for perfection you've walked down the wrong aisle. If you want that shirt or that pair of pants you have to take it "as is."
This morning we begin a brand new series at Valley View called Finding the Love of Your Life. First, let me tell you what this series is not. This series is not about finding a mate, the perfect match for you. We're not running a dating service here. I hope that doesn't disappoint you. This series, however, is about making you a better mate if you are married. But this series is not just for married couples. It's for everybody. Because finding the love of your life is not so much about finding the perfect person as it is about finding out how to be a better lover. Finding the love of your life is about learning how to love better.
So if you're a man or a woman, a boy or a girl, married or single, this series is going to help you become a better lover and more like the greatest lover who ever lived, Jesus Christ.
Last week, we were reminded in Greg Porter's teaching of what Jesus called the greatest commandment. It's found in Mark 12:29-31, The most important commandment, answered Jesus, is this ..."Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength." The second is this: "Lord your neighbor as yourself." There is no commandment greater than these.
You might want to look at this series as a course in love lessons. These days there are lessons for almost everything we do. Over the years our kids have had swimming lessons and skating lessons and tennis lessons and violin lessons and piano lessons and computer lessons and soon they'll have driving lessons. There are lessons for everything, but where do we learn to love? We'll this is a series of love lessons for us as a church.
In this series we're going to look at why community is so important to all of us. Where going to learn how to build community, sustain community, and what to do when community falls apart in a marriage, in a family, in a friendship, at work, at school, in the church because these are all places where community is expressed and experienced.
The source of our material comes from two books. First, of all the Bible, the Word of God, God's love letter to us. That's our primary resource. But we'll also draw material from the book I've already mentioned by John Ortberg called Everybody's Normal Till You Get to Know Them. I highly recommend it to you. It's a wonderful resource for couples and singles and groups to work through. And I'm using it as the outline for this series and as a source of material as well. We've ordered a limited amount of copies for the church. So if you'd like one you can order it at the resource table.
But the first lesson we need to learn if we're going to become better lovers is this ... there are no perfect people in the world. We are all slightly irregular, none of us is normal. In fact, most of us are down right weird when it comes to certain things in our lives. When dealing with human beings, we all live in the "as is" corner of the universe.
We may not notice the flaws in each other right away, just like we don't always catch the flaws in that shirt or that pair of pants in the "as is" pile. In fact, most of us are extremely good at hiding our defects from each other and do a great job at image management. But, eventually, upon closer inspection we discover what it is that makes us all slightly irregular.
For some of us it may be a quick temper, or a loose tongue, or a passive spirit, or trouble telling the truth. For others the flaw may be some great fear or phobia, or ragging pride, or a victim mentality, or uncontrolled lusts or appetites, or a sagging self-image that leaves us always feeling insecure, or some expression of obsessive-compulsive behavior, or a narcissism that deludes us into thinking we can do anything, or co-dependency, or bouts with depression, you name it. All of us could be diagnosed with some pathology.
None of us is normal. And if you're looking to enter into a relationship with another person there's only one way and that is "as is." If you're looking for perfection in people you're living on the wrong planet.
One of the great marks of personal maturity is when we come to accept the fact that everybody comes "as is." That is the first step towards becoming a better lover. That is lesson number one, because if we don't take that step we are destined to be disappointed in our relational world. People will fail us at some level and we can wear ourselves out going through life trying to fix people, control people, enable people, rescue people, excuse people or pretend that people are something they're really not.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the famous German pastor, who was executed for his faith by the Nazi's less than a month before the end of World War II left us a legacy of insight into what it takes to build and maintain community. In his book called Life Together he said people enter relationships with their own particular ideals and dreams of what community should look like.
"But God's grace quickly frustrates all such dreams. A great disillusionment with others, with Christians in general, and, if we are fortunate, with ourselves, is bound to overwhelm us as surely as God desires to lead us to an understanding of genuine Christian community ... The sooner this moment of disillusionment comes over the individual and the community, the better for both ... Those who love their dream of Christian community more than the Christian community itself become destroyers of that Christian community even though their personal intentions may be ever so honest, earnest, and sacrificial."
Do you hear what he's saying? He saying that the sooner the honeymoon is over the better, if we're really going to learn to love each other. Of course, the most painful part of all this is realizing that I am in the "as is" department too. I'm slightly irregular. I'm damaged goods. I'm not normal either. It took me years to figure that one out! But it's true.
And why are we all like that? Because we grew up in dysfunctional families? Because we suffer from some chemical imbalance? Because of some tragic event or deep hurt in our past? Those things certainly impact our behavior and our patterns of relating. But all those things, as difficult as they can be, are not the fundamental reason we are damaged goods. Instead, the answer is found in the Bible.
The Old Testament puts it this way in Isaiah 53:6, We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way. We are all fundamentally frightened, lost sheep.
The New Testament puts it this way in Romans 3:23, For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. We are all born separated from God and fall way short of perfection.
Jesus was a little more graphic when he was asked what makes a person slightly irregular, the word in his day was "unclean." Is it what a person eats and puts into the body that makes us unclean? Jesus said, "No. It's not what goes into your body that makes you unclean. It's what comes out of your hearts."
He went on, Mark 7:20-23 says, What comes out of you is what makes you "unclean." For from within, out of your hearts, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. All these evils come from inside and make you unclean.
That was Jesus' way of saying that we're all "as is" people, damaged goods, not normal. Theologians call it "total depravity." That doesn't mean that we're all as bad as we could be. But it does mean that we're all as bad off as we could be when it comes to relating to God and to each other.
This week I received an e-mail from someone who had no idea what I'd be teaching on this Sunday, which made it even better. It was in the form of a Recall Notice from God. "The maker of all human beings is recalling all units manufactured, regardless of make or year, due to the serious defect in the primary and central component of the heart. This is due to a malfunction in the original prototype units code named Adam and Eve, resulting in the reproduction of the same defect in subsequent units. This defect has been technically termed, "Sub-sequential Internal Non-morality," or more commonly known as S.I.N."
"Some of the symptoms include loss of direction, foul vocal emissions, amnesia of origin, lack of peace and joy, selfish or violent behavior, depression or confusion in the mental component, fearfulness, idolatry and rebellion."
"The Manufacturer, who is neither liable nor at fault for this defect, is providing factory authorized repair and service free of charge to correct this S.I.N. defect. The Repair Technician named Jesus, has most generously offered to bear the entire burden of the staggering cost of these repairs. There is no additional fee required."
"Warning: Continuing to operate the human being unit without correction voids the Manufacturer's warranty, exposing the unit to dangers and problems too numerous to list and will result in the human unit being permanently impounded. For free emergency service, call on Jesus."
We just finished up a series in Genesis. Do you remember the people we met in Genesis? God is making a statement about the human condition through the characters that he parades before us in that book. He starts with Adam and Eve and their desire to be god and their flagrant disobedience and the hiding and the shaming and the blaming that comes out of it.
Then they have a child named Cain, the first human baby, who grows up to become the first murderer when he kills his brother Abel. Noah, the great builder of the ark, gets drunk and curses his grandson. Lot, when his house is surrounded by the people of Sodom who want to hurt his guests, offers his daughters instead to the angry mob for sex. Later on, those same girls get their father drunk and sleep with him so that they can children. And Lot is considered the most righteous man in Sodom!
Abraham plays favorites between his sons Isaac and Ishmael who go through life estranged. Isaac plays favorites between his sons Jacob and Esau who are bitter enemies for twenty years. Jacob plays favorites between Joseph and his other eleven sons who want to kill Joseph and end up selling him into slavery.
Their marriages are disasters. Abraham sleeps with his wife's servant, Hagar, and then sends her away. Isaac and Rebekah fight over which son gets the blessing. Jacob marries two wives and gets into a fertility contest with them and their maidservants.
Jacob's firstborn son, Reuben, sleeps with his father's concubine. Another son, Judah, sleeps with his daughter-in-law when she dresses up like a prostitute. These people are messed up. They are not the Walton's. They are more like Jerry Springer contestants. But this is the cast of characters that God has to work with. Why does he record their lives in such dirty detail? Because early on he wants us to know that we are all messed up because of S.I.N.
The problem with the human race is not that there are just a few bad apples in the bunch, but that we are all bad apples to one degree or another. And yet, inside each one of us is this yearning to connect, to love and to be loved. It is the fiercest longing of our souls. Ortberg observes that our need for community with people and the God who made us is to the human spirit what food and air and water are to the human body. And that need will not go away even in the midst of all our abnormalities.
Henri Nouwen loved to say, "Community is the place where the person you least want to live with always lives."
Community is one reason people are so excited about the Eagles right now. It's not just about winning or losing a football game. It's about the sense of community it brings. It's about this sense of belonging and pulling together in the same direction. Last Sunday night, when we were coming home on the subway from the Linc after the Eagles win over the Packers. The whole subway car was singing "Fly Eagles fly on the road to victory." Standing there, packed in like sardines, we had a close community moment. We felt a sense of oneness.
Author Jane Howard says, "Call it a clan. Call it a tribe. Call it a network. Call it a family. Whatever you call it, whoever you are, you need one."
Which is why God said in the beginning, "It is not good for the man to be alone." We were created for relationship, to draw life and nourishment from each other the way the roots of a tree draw life from the soil. Community is the place for which God made us. Community is the place where God meets us.
But how do we pursue God's dream of community with real-life, slightly irregular, "as is" people? Can it really happen? How do we get close without getting hurt?
The North American Common Porcupine is member of the rodent family that has about 30,000 quills sticking out of its body. Each quill says, "Stay away!" I never met anybody who had a porcupine for a house pet. They're not real good at snuggling and you probably wouldn't want one sleeping on your bed at night. And because of that they tend to travel alone.
But they don't always want to be alone. In fact, in late autumn they go out looking for love. But love is risky business if you're a porcupine. So how do they get close without getting hurt? That's the porcupine's dilemma.
And that's the human dilemma too. How do we get close without getting hurt? We all long to love and be loved, but we're all damaged and not very good at it.
Well, people who study porcupines tell us that even they get close every once in a while. David Costello in his book The World of the Porcupine lets us in on the secret when he writes, "Males and females may remain together for some days before mating. They may touch paws and even walk on their hind feet in the so-called 'dance of the porcupines." Imagine two porcupines dancing together. How do they get close without getting hurt long enough to create another generation? They pull in their quills and they learn to dance.
And that's what this series is about. It's about pulling in our quills and learning to dance. It's about unhealthy people like us learning to relate in healthy ways. It's about how to build community, how to sustain community, and how to respond when community falls apart.
Lesson number one is embracing the truth that none of us is normal, where all imperfect people. Now that doesn't you go home and tell you spouse, "Now I know what's wrong with you!" Better, "Now I know what's wrong with me!"