The Maybe Moment
Sermon
Sermons On The First Readings
Series II, Cycle B
The Maybe Moment
Earlier this year, Debra Bezzina was piloting her Nissan Altima down Interstate 96 in Michigan. Reaching for a pack of gum in her pocket, she took her eyes from the road for a couple of seconds. All of a sudden, a voice, speaking with urgency, said, "Not, Not, Not." Yanking her attention back to the road, Bezzina realized that her car had started to drift across the solid white line to the right. She quickly corrected and went safely on her way.
Bezzina was grateful for the warning, but there was nobody in the car to thank. The alert had been generated by a device she was field-testing for an auto parts maker. The gadget was designed to warn drivers about road departures and lane shifting.
Although that warning system is still experimental, you will likely have something similar in the next new car you buy, and some form of it is predicted to be widespread by 2010. Not only will your car warn you about drifting, but also about entering curves at speeds that are too high for safety or when you are closing the gap between your vehicle and the car ahead of you too fast. Other "smart" technologies will follow.
The idea of early warning is a good one, of course, and it should increase highway safety, but it is also likely that some drivers will ignore the cautionary sounds and others will disconnect them. In fact, a lot of the experimentation that is going into these systems today focuses as much on how people react to them as on the technologies themselves. Joseph Coughlin, who is the Age-Lab director at MIT, said recently, "We tend to be so optimistic about the technology and know so little about the human element."1
The researchers are wise to pay attention to the human element, for when it comes to listening to early warning systems, our human track record is not too good.
Case in point: King David and his affair with Bathsheba, which ended up with her pregnant and with David arranging for the death of her husband.
The whole business began late one afternoon when the king walked out on the roof terrace of his palace. The Bible account uses four verbs to describe what happened next.
The first verb is "saw." From the vantage point of his palace roof, the king saw a beautiful woman, in her own home, bathing. The second verb is "inquired." David sent someone from his serving staff to inquire about her, to find out who she was, and to glean any other pertinent information. The third verb is "get." On learning that her name was Bathsheba and that she was the wife of one of David's loyal warriors, David sent messengers to get her, to summon her to his palace. The final verb is "lay," and you know what that's about.
Of course what David did was both wrong and sinful, but what interests me today is the intervals between the actions represented by those verbs. First David saw her. Now that was quite by accident, and the fact that she happened to be unclothed and bathing when David spotted her was nothing against David. If anything, it was her mistake for not making sure the curtains were closed.
But between his seeing her and his inquiring about her, David must have ignored an early warning system. Somewhere in the back of his mind, the words, "Not, Not, Not," must have been sounding off, but David chose to ignore them.
Now we might still give David the benefit of the doubt until the results of his inquiry came back, because, for all David knew, she might have been single and available for courting. In those days, that fact that David already had some wives was no obstacle, as polygamy was the normal practice, especially for kings. But when David learned that Bathsheba was married, and to one of his own soldiers to boot, that should have been the end of it. But it wasn't, and at this point, the "Not, Not, Not" alarm must have been blaring at him. Once again though, David chose to disregard it. And after that ... well, David must have decided he simply wasn't going to listen to it at all.
It's true that the biblical story doesn't mention these alarms, but from what the Bible has already told us about David up to that point, we know that they had to be there. David was not some narcissistic guy with neither conscience nor moral scruples. In fact, the Bible portrays him as an honorable and upright man, one having a deeply personal relationship with God, one who prays sincerely, one who composes beautiful psalms in praise of God, and one who has made special provisions for the Ark of the Covenant, the symbol of God's presence, to be kept in the king's royal city. Even more, God told the prophet Samuel that David was "a man after [God's] own heart" (1 Samuel 13:14). So David had a built-in early warning system, to be sure. But he overrode it and gave in to temptation.
Now I don't want to stay on David's story any longer because my topic this morning is not adultery, but the ways we choose to ignore those early warning alarms at the time of any sort of temptation, alarms that I am convinced are among God's gifts to us.
Temptations come along in all sorts of guises. Recall that in the Garden of Eden, the temptation was for Adam and Eve to consider their own judgment better than God's. Some temptations come at different stages of life. One edition of the Old Farmer's Almanac had this comment: "Don't worry about avoiding temptation -- as you grow older, it starts avoiding you." That's humorous, but it really isn't true. The things that tempt us may change with aging, but temptation does not avoid us. We may not be tempted to have a fling or to steal from our place of employment, but there is always the pull to be less than who we want to be, to not live up to our best ideals.
There is an old saying to the effect that you can't keep a bird from flying over your head, but you can keep him from building a nest in your hair. The point, of course, is that temptation, no matter what its subject is, can arise from a thought, a suggestion, a craving, or, as in David's case, a chance glance. There is no sin in that, and we generally cannot prevent such happenstance. Temptations of some kind, and more likely, of several kinds, come to us all. I saw a cartoon once in which a man was praying, "And I want to thank you for finally delivering me from temptation." The man was shipwrecked on a tiny, barren island barely six feet in diameter.2 Even there, however, there would likely be some temptation in one's spirit.
You see, David's sin began not when he happened to see Bathsheba, but when he ignored the alarm that sounded inside him and allowed the idea that occurred to him to take up residency in his head. As far as resisting temptation goes, that is a key moment, a point at which it is easier to say no than it is likely to be later. It is the "maybe moment," the point in time at which going down the wrong path is still only a possibility. That's the early warning moment, when the "Not, Not, Not" is sounding. At that moment, we need to make a conscious decision to firmly close the door on that possibility. After that moment, we often have more invested in the idea, and closing the door becomes more difficult.
Commentator J. R. P. Schlater says that ordinary people do not usually start out going against the "red light" of life. That kind of deliberate and intentional wrongdoing comes from a degenerate lifestyle. But we are, he says, "constantly taking chances with the yellow light." That yellow light is the color of the maybe moment, and when we continue to take it lightly, Schlater notes, it gradually becomes a green light for our consciences, until at last, red and green are interchangeable in those areas where we are susceptible. We develop, he says, a kind of moral color blindness.3
The maybe moment is the time to think -- but even more, to pray. A recent study about the matter of self-control helps us to see why this is so. The study, conducted by Roy Baumeister, a social psychologist at Florida State University, concluded that self-control is neither an acquired skill nor a logical thought process. Rather, Baumeister said, self-control is an exhaustible resource that operates like a well; we empty it with use and refill it with rest.
For the test, Baumeister divided people into two groups. One group was asked to not think about a white bear (which is almost impossible to do after the notion has been planted in your mind). The other group was given no such instruction, and allowed their minds to wander freely. Next, both groups were given some difficult anagrams to solve. The white-bear group gave up much faster than the free-thought group, which suggested that the former had used up their day's supply of self-control trying to suppress the white-bear thought.4
Now if that study's conclusion is correct, you can see why some days you seem to be able to handle certain temptations just fine on your own, but other days, they seem to snag you. Back in the fifteenth century, the German devotional writer Thomas ˆ Kempis said it this way, "I resolve to meet evil courageously, but when even a small temptation cometh, I am in sore straits. That which seemeth trifling sometimes giveth rise to a grievous temptation; and when I think myself to be secure and least expect it, I am overcome by a light breath."
Christian experience, however, reveals that any maybe moment is the right time to pray.
In the fourth and fifth centuries, there were some Christians who moved out into the Egyptian desert to live in monk-like solitude as a form of martyrdom and devotion to God. There is a story from one of those desert fathers that tells something about praying during the maybe moment. According to the story, an old man was living in a temple when some demons came and told him to leave, claiming the temple belonged to them. The old man refused to leave, however, and told them, "No place belongs to you." Then the demons began to scatter his palm leaves around, one by one, but the old man kept picking them up. Finally the devil took the man's hand and pulled him toward the door. When they got there, the old man grabbed hold of the doorframe with his other hand and cried out, "Jesus, save me." Immediately the devil dropped his hand and fled. The old man began to weep, and the Lord appeared to him, asking why he wept. The man answered, "Because the devils have dared to seize a man and treat him like this." The Lord replied, "You had been careless. As soon as you turned to me again, you see I was beside you." The devotional writer Henri Nouwen, commenting on this story, points out that our most significant encounters with Christ often come not before or after or beyond the struggle with our tempting demons, but in the midst of the struggle. Christ comes to us at that moment and says, "As soon as you turned to me again, you see I was beside you."5
It is important for us to hear that, believe that. No matter what wrong thing we may be tempted to do, those temptations can never separate us from God's love. Temptations can attack any one of us, and they can catch us when our self-control wells have gone dry. But Christ is not absent during those times. He says, "As soon as you turned to me again, you see I was beside you."
We can thank God for the early warning systems he has placed within us, those internal sirens that alert us to danger, that tell us we are approaching a maybe moment with a dangerous undertow. And we can use those moments for fresh, meaningful encounters with our Lord, on whose strength we can call.
__________
1.ÊAl Karr, "Savvy Safety Systems Are Developed for Cars," The Wall Street Journal, March 2, 2004, D8.
2.ÊBy cartoonist Joe McKeever.
3.ÊThe Interpreter's Bible, Vol. 4, p. 106.
4.ÊReported by Sora Song, "The Science of Self-Control," Time magazine, March 10, 2003, p. 66.
5.ÊHenri J. M. Nouwen, The Way of the Heart (New York: Seabury Press, 1981), p. 29.
Earlier this year, Debra Bezzina was piloting her Nissan Altima down Interstate 96 in Michigan. Reaching for a pack of gum in her pocket, she took her eyes from the road for a couple of seconds. All of a sudden, a voice, speaking with urgency, said, "Not, Not, Not." Yanking her attention back to the road, Bezzina realized that her car had started to drift across the solid white line to the right. She quickly corrected and went safely on her way.
Bezzina was grateful for the warning, but there was nobody in the car to thank. The alert had been generated by a device she was field-testing for an auto parts maker. The gadget was designed to warn drivers about road departures and lane shifting.
Although that warning system is still experimental, you will likely have something similar in the next new car you buy, and some form of it is predicted to be widespread by 2010. Not only will your car warn you about drifting, but also about entering curves at speeds that are too high for safety or when you are closing the gap between your vehicle and the car ahead of you too fast. Other "smart" technologies will follow.
The idea of early warning is a good one, of course, and it should increase highway safety, but it is also likely that some drivers will ignore the cautionary sounds and others will disconnect them. In fact, a lot of the experimentation that is going into these systems today focuses as much on how people react to them as on the technologies themselves. Joseph Coughlin, who is the Age-Lab director at MIT, said recently, "We tend to be so optimistic about the technology and know so little about the human element."1
The researchers are wise to pay attention to the human element, for when it comes to listening to early warning systems, our human track record is not too good.
Case in point: King David and his affair with Bathsheba, which ended up with her pregnant and with David arranging for the death of her husband.
The whole business began late one afternoon when the king walked out on the roof terrace of his palace. The Bible account uses four verbs to describe what happened next.
The first verb is "saw." From the vantage point of his palace roof, the king saw a beautiful woman, in her own home, bathing. The second verb is "inquired." David sent someone from his serving staff to inquire about her, to find out who she was, and to glean any other pertinent information. The third verb is "get." On learning that her name was Bathsheba and that she was the wife of one of David's loyal warriors, David sent messengers to get her, to summon her to his palace. The final verb is "lay," and you know what that's about.
Of course what David did was both wrong and sinful, but what interests me today is the intervals between the actions represented by those verbs. First David saw her. Now that was quite by accident, and the fact that she happened to be unclothed and bathing when David spotted her was nothing against David. If anything, it was her mistake for not making sure the curtains were closed.
But between his seeing her and his inquiring about her, David must have ignored an early warning system. Somewhere in the back of his mind, the words, "Not, Not, Not," must have been sounding off, but David chose to ignore them.
Now we might still give David the benefit of the doubt until the results of his inquiry came back, because, for all David knew, she might have been single and available for courting. In those days, that fact that David already had some wives was no obstacle, as polygamy was the normal practice, especially for kings. But when David learned that Bathsheba was married, and to one of his own soldiers to boot, that should have been the end of it. But it wasn't, and at this point, the "Not, Not, Not" alarm must have been blaring at him. Once again though, David chose to disregard it. And after that ... well, David must have decided he simply wasn't going to listen to it at all.
It's true that the biblical story doesn't mention these alarms, but from what the Bible has already told us about David up to that point, we know that they had to be there. David was not some narcissistic guy with neither conscience nor moral scruples. In fact, the Bible portrays him as an honorable and upright man, one having a deeply personal relationship with God, one who prays sincerely, one who composes beautiful psalms in praise of God, and one who has made special provisions for the Ark of the Covenant, the symbol of God's presence, to be kept in the king's royal city. Even more, God told the prophet Samuel that David was "a man after [God's] own heart" (1 Samuel 13:14). So David had a built-in early warning system, to be sure. But he overrode it and gave in to temptation.
Now I don't want to stay on David's story any longer because my topic this morning is not adultery, but the ways we choose to ignore those early warning alarms at the time of any sort of temptation, alarms that I am convinced are among God's gifts to us.
Temptations come along in all sorts of guises. Recall that in the Garden of Eden, the temptation was for Adam and Eve to consider their own judgment better than God's. Some temptations come at different stages of life. One edition of the Old Farmer's Almanac had this comment: "Don't worry about avoiding temptation -- as you grow older, it starts avoiding you." That's humorous, but it really isn't true. The things that tempt us may change with aging, but temptation does not avoid us. We may not be tempted to have a fling or to steal from our place of employment, but there is always the pull to be less than who we want to be, to not live up to our best ideals.
There is an old saying to the effect that you can't keep a bird from flying over your head, but you can keep him from building a nest in your hair. The point, of course, is that temptation, no matter what its subject is, can arise from a thought, a suggestion, a craving, or, as in David's case, a chance glance. There is no sin in that, and we generally cannot prevent such happenstance. Temptations of some kind, and more likely, of several kinds, come to us all. I saw a cartoon once in which a man was praying, "And I want to thank you for finally delivering me from temptation." The man was shipwrecked on a tiny, barren island barely six feet in diameter.2 Even there, however, there would likely be some temptation in one's spirit.
You see, David's sin began not when he happened to see Bathsheba, but when he ignored the alarm that sounded inside him and allowed the idea that occurred to him to take up residency in his head. As far as resisting temptation goes, that is a key moment, a point at which it is easier to say no than it is likely to be later. It is the "maybe moment," the point in time at which going down the wrong path is still only a possibility. That's the early warning moment, when the "Not, Not, Not" is sounding. At that moment, we need to make a conscious decision to firmly close the door on that possibility. After that moment, we often have more invested in the idea, and closing the door becomes more difficult.
Commentator J. R. P. Schlater says that ordinary people do not usually start out going against the "red light" of life. That kind of deliberate and intentional wrongdoing comes from a degenerate lifestyle. But we are, he says, "constantly taking chances with the yellow light." That yellow light is the color of the maybe moment, and when we continue to take it lightly, Schlater notes, it gradually becomes a green light for our consciences, until at last, red and green are interchangeable in those areas where we are susceptible. We develop, he says, a kind of moral color blindness.3
The maybe moment is the time to think -- but even more, to pray. A recent study about the matter of self-control helps us to see why this is so. The study, conducted by Roy Baumeister, a social psychologist at Florida State University, concluded that self-control is neither an acquired skill nor a logical thought process. Rather, Baumeister said, self-control is an exhaustible resource that operates like a well; we empty it with use and refill it with rest.
For the test, Baumeister divided people into two groups. One group was asked to not think about a white bear (which is almost impossible to do after the notion has been planted in your mind). The other group was given no such instruction, and allowed their minds to wander freely. Next, both groups were given some difficult anagrams to solve. The white-bear group gave up much faster than the free-thought group, which suggested that the former had used up their day's supply of self-control trying to suppress the white-bear thought.4
Now if that study's conclusion is correct, you can see why some days you seem to be able to handle certain temptations just fine on your own, but other days, they seem to snag you. Back in the fifteenth century, the German devotional writer Thomas ˆ Kempis said it this way, "I resolve to meet evil courageously, but when even a small temptation cometh, I am in sore straits. That which seemeth trifling sometimes giveth rise to a grievous temptation; and when I think myself to be secure and least expect it, I am overcome by a light breath."
Christian experience, however, reveals that any maybe moment is the right time to pray.
In the fourth and fifth centuries, there were some Christians who moved out into the Egyptian desert to live in monk-like solitude as a form of martyrdom and devotion to God. There is a story from one of those desert fathers that tells something about praying during the maybe moment. According to the story, an old man was living in a temple when some demons came and told him to leave, claiming the temple belonged to them. The old man refused to leave, however, and told them, "No place belongs to you." Then the demons began to scatter his palm leaves around, one by one, but the old man kept picking them up. Finally the devil took the man's hand and pulled him toward the door. When they got there, the old man grabbed hold of the doorframe with his other hand and cried out, "Jesus, save me." Immediately the devil dropped his hand and fled. The old man began to weep, and the Lord appeared to him, asking why he wept. The man answered, "Because the devils have dared to seize a man and treat him like this." The Lord replied, "You had been careless. As soon as you turned to me again, you see I was beside you." The devotional writer Henri Nouwen, commenting on this story, points out that our most significant encounters with Christ often come not before or after or beyond the struggle with our tempting demons, but in the midst of the struggle. Christ comes to us at that moment and says, "As soon as you turned to me again, you see I was beside you."5
It is important for us to hear that, believe that. No matter what wrong thing we may be tempted to do, those temptations can never separate us from God's love. Temptations can attack any one of us, and they can catch us when our self-control wells have gone dry. But Christ is not absent during those times. He says, "As soon as you turned to me again, you see I was beside you."
We can thank God for the early warning systems he has placed within us, those internal sirens that alert us to danger, that tell us we are approaching a maybe moment with a dangerous undertow. And we can use those moments for fresh, meaningful encounters with our Lord, on whose strength we can call.
__________
1.ÊAl Karr, "Savvy Safety Systems Are Developed for Cars," The Wall Street Journal, March 2, 2004, D8.
2.ÊBy cartoonist Joe McKeever.
3.ÊThe Interpreter's Bible, Vol. 4, p. 106.
4.ÊReported by Sora Song, "The Science of Self-Control," Time magazine, March 10, 2003, p. 66.
5.ÊHenri J. M. Nouwen, The Way of the Heart (New York: Seabury Press, 1981), p. 29.
