Sermon: "Search Me - Self Examination"

2nd in the "Soul Training" series.
Delivered February 28, 2010 by Rev. George Antonakos.
Sermon Text: Psalm 130

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Good morning! How's everybody doing today? I was hoping that since last Sunday you would come in and say, "I'm a 10!" I hope you would say that. I hope you're coming in here feeling like a 10 today, on the scale of human well-being. But I know that it's impossible that everybody here today would feel like they're a 10 on that scale. I think some of you, I hope none of you feel like you're on a one, you're a one on that scale of human well-being. Some of you may. I'd guess that if we talked about it, we'd find that somewhere all of us are in between.

When I think about the ones, I can't help but think again about what's happened this past week with the earthquake in Chile and now, you know, just a reminder of Haiti which has dropped out of the news with the intensity it had been before. But I think people down there in those places are ones, maybe less.

One eight-year-old girl, when she was being interviewed after the earthquake in Haiti... I got this from a World Vision email. She said, "When the earthquake hit, the house was broken and destroyed. Mom and Dad were inside and they died. I cry every day. I can't sleep. I think of my Mom." World Vision field staff say that ninety percent of the people that they've spoken with have lost loved ones.

Well not on the scale of Haiti, as is often the case with pastors, I just have learned of a few difficulties just this past week, since last Sunday, and I'm not exaggerating when I tell you that some very difficult problems are going on in people's lives-deaths, miscarriages, heart attacks, accidents. One man who was delivering some furniture here, not even part of the church, said that he asked prayer for a father and a sister, both struggling with cancer and both very ill. And other losses and frustrations and failures and depression and all kinds of things.

So what do you do when you are a one? I mean, what do you do when you don't know what to do? Where do you turn when you don't know where to turn?

This past Monday evening, Dr. Bill Westra shared an opening devotional at our monthly session meeting, and he had us read the story of Hagar in the wilderness as he reflected on a book that's been helpful for him in understanding prayer. If you're not familiar with Hagar's story, here is the nutshell version.

Abraham, the father of our faith, is married to Sarah. Sarah cannot bear children. With her permission, she allows Abraham to father a child with Hagar, her handmaiden. Miraculously, Sarah has children shortly thereafter. Sarah become jealous of Hagar and her son, not wanting them to in any way have the first place at the table, so to speak. And she tells Abraham to cast Hagar and her boy out.

And so they go out in the wilderness with some water, but they run out, and they get to a time of tremendous desperation, so much so that she puts her son under a bush to die in the dessert. Here's what Genesis 21:16 says. "Then she went off and sat down about a bowshot away, for she thought, 'I cannot watch the boy die.' And as she sat there, she began to sob."

Well God hears Hagar's cry of desperation. He opens her eyes to see a well that she hadn't seen before, and not only does he save her and her son, he also gives her a soothing word of hope, of comfort about the future.

I mention that story because our text this morning is a cry to God for help. This Psalm 130 could have been written by somebody in Hagar's situation. I don't know if the person was in spiritual, emotional, or physical difficulty. It doesn't go into that kind of detail. It's on page 567. This is the prayer of a desperate person. This is someone fully convinced that they cannot figure things out on their own. This is the prayer of a one on the scale of well-being, and I wonder if anybody here can relate to that. It's possible.

So let's, whether it describes you or not, we can all be instructed by this prayer, because sooner or later, everybody reaches a point of uncertainty or difficulty or desperation, even, so here's a good way to respond if that ever becomes the case or if that's the case for you now.

Let's pray: Lord, I pray that you would guide us in the Word. Help us to see light in your lights and to come away with hope in our Lord Jesus Christ in whose name we pray, Amen.

Psalm 130, page 567.

"Out of the depths I cry to you, LORD; Lord, hear my voice.
Let your ears be attentive to my cry for mercy.
If you, LORD, kept a record of sins, Lord, who could stand?
But with you there is forgiveness, so that we can, with reverence, serve you.
I wait for the LORD, my whole being waits, and in his Word I put my hope.
I wait for the Lord more than watchmen wait for the morning, more than watchmen wait for the morning.
Israel, put your hope in the LORD, for with the LORD is unfailing love
and with him is full redemption.
He himself will redeem Israel from all their sins."

I like the way The Message version of the Bible paraphrases verse 1. "Help, God-the bottom has fallen out of my life!"

The book that Dr. Bill Westra shared with us on Monday depicts what this can look like in a diagram, and we've jazzed it up a little bit for you. In everyone's life, there are two lines, one depicting hope, one depicting reality, with a gap between that can feel like a desert or "the depths," as it's described in the Psalms. It's a time of tension. It's a time of uncertainty.

Think of all the desert stories in the Bible. Joseph in the middle of pit, not sure if he was going to make it another day. Moses in the wilderness, asking God, "Why did you make me leader?" And then there's David hiding in a cave. The farther apart the sense of hope and the sense of the experience of reality, the bigger the desert feels, the more tension is experienced. And in Hagar's story in particular, they seem just miles apart. Just thinking, "I'm going to hide my son under a bush so I don't have to watch him die," that is such a gap. But even there God is deeper than our depths and reaches down to us.

Psalm 130, verses 1 and 2 are Hagar-type prayers because not only is the person expressing a sense of hopelessness, they're feeling like God's not paying attention. Verse 2 says that. "Lord, hear my voice. Let your ears be attentive to my cry for mercy." Like, "You're not listening. Please, God!" There are two lessons I think this psalm is trying to convey to us when we reach life's low points, two things that we learn in the depths or in the desert space.

1. In the depths or that desert place, we learn to reach out to God. That's the purpose of the depths, to bring us to an end of ourselves so that we'll seek God. In a strange way the deserts, or the depths, become like an unwelcome gift, and we are caused to stretch beyond what we think we need, to the one whom we need. If you were to count all the times in this psalm that the Lord's name is mentioned, either directly or by pronoun, in eight verses, you'd find out that it's 15 times. I think that alone is trying to tell us something. The writer is trying to tell us that no matter what the nature of our despair is, or our depths, we can cry out to the One who cares.

Sometimes people have a conversation and they ask, "What's the best position for prayer? Is it kneeling? Is it standing? Is it lying prostrate on the floor? Sitting? What's the best position?" Well I'm not sure there is a best position, but listen to what Augustine said is the best disposition for prayer. "The best disposition for prayer is that of being desolate, forsaken, and stripped of everything. That's when we pray." Someone else said, "The best prayer is one in which we come empty-handed."

This past December a fund-appeal letter came from a place called St. Basil's Academy. It came to my home. It had my mom's name listed at the top of my address, and when I saw this letter, I smiled. But I also winced a little bit because St. Basil's Academy was a place that my mom had my brother and I go to for a certain period of time when I was 10 and he was eight.

It was in Hudson, it was across from Hudson, NY, or from West Point, NY, on the Hudson. She had learned from a priest that this was a place that I could learn the Orthodox religion, and I could learn how to speak the Greek language. So she said, "Well that's a twofer, so I'm sending my kids there." My parents had just been divorced, and so here we were. And I was telling people, "I'm going to the Academy. I'm going to St. Basil's Academy." I remember one friend saying to me, "Oh, you're going to hate that place." And I said, "No, I'm not, I'm going to the Academy. It's a great place."

Well, 10 minutes there, I hated the place, o.k. I mean if you remember like movies of people in like, kind of like Cool Hand Luke. Remember Cool Hand Luke, the prison camp? I mean it wasn't quite that bad, but like there were single bunks and then steel lockers next to each one and bulbs hanging down from the ceiling. That was about it. That was the dorm. Not a big budget there at St. Basil's.

Well I was praying, and I was, every Sunday I would call my mom and say, "Mom, please get us out of here. This is terrible. You don't understand." "No, you gotta be there. It's good for you and your brother. You'll learn religion. You'll learn the language. It's great."

Well one night after talking to her and she told me that, we went to vespers service in a little chapel, and in the back of that little chapel (you know, icons up front, candles, the whole thing), a 10-year-old kid, me, is sitting in a back seat, back chairs, and I'm just going like this. Just going like this. I'm just rocking out of sheer desperation, saying, "Dear God." I still remember the prayer word for word. "Dear God, please, with every inch of my heart, get me outta here. With every inch of my heart, I pray, get me outta here." Forty-five minutes.

The next morning, a knock comes at the classroom door. My uncle is at the door and says to me, "Come on, Buddy, we're gettin' outta here." And he's got my brother with him. Apparently during the time of that prayer, my mother called the head mistress of the place, and said, "Exactly what kind of school is this?" And she said, "Well this is a place for children who can't be cared for at home, people who are coming from an abused situation, maybe orphaned." She goes, "What?!" And that's when she must have called my uncle and he was on his way. During the prayer, during the prayer.

You know many times, my mom and I talked about that experience, and I said to her, "Mom, don't feel bad. You know, God uses mistakes in judgment. You know? It's okay. I learned something about God. I learned something, that God would be there." But when I left that place, when I left that campus, I was driving in the car, I didn't think anymore about God. Not at all. It's amazing, isn't it? I mean at that point, I knew somewhere deep in my heart that God is a God who can be prayed to and cares for us, but it took me nine more years before I would learn what verses 3 and 4 are talking about, and that's the second point.

2. We learn, that not only in the depths is a place where we learn to reach out to God, in the depths or the desert is a place where we learn that God reaches out to us. God reaches down to us. Look at the verses. "If you, LORD, kept a record of sins, Lord, who could stand?" God has entered into our sinful condition and doesn't keep score. "Lord, with you there is forgiveness so that we can revere you, so that we can worship you."

Last week we talked about contemplating God. This week we're talking about contemplating ourselves and who are we? We are sinners in need of God's forgiveness. But he reminds us that God is merciful and forgiving. Verse 3 of this passage is the Old Testament way of saying what the New Testament says, that "All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God." But thanks be to God that God doesn't keep a record book. God doesn't sit there and keep score of our misses and our faults and our mess-ups. God forgives. God reaches, and that's what he's done in Jesus Christ.

Listen to Richard Foster's quote in his classic book The Celebration of Discipline.

"At the heart of God is the desire to forgive and to give, thus the Cross and the resurrection. The usual notion of what Jesus did on the Cross runs something like this: People were so bad and so mean and God was so angry with them that He would not forgive them unless somebody big enough could take the rap for the whole lot of them. Nothing could be further from the truth. Love, not anger, brought Jesus to the Cross. Golgotha, the place where Jesus was crucified, came as a result of God's great desire to forgive, not his reluctance to forgive."

Let me put it in another way. It's a little theological sounding, but stick with me on this.

God did not primarily forgive us because his law was satisfied, but God chose to forgive us out of love, and in so doing, he saw to it that the demands of his law and justice and righteousness were satisfied. There's a big difference.

Classic illustration I've used many times. Maybe you've heard it. It's about a kid who's just gotten his driver's license, and he just loves to speed. And six times now, he's gotten tickets, and now he's the seventh time in the courtroom, and he knows it's gonna be trouble. But he breathes a sigh of relief because he sees the man who comes in to serve as judge is his father, so he thinks, "Wow, that was close."

But his father is fed up with him, too, and so he pronounces judgment after hearing the case, and he says, "$10,000 or one year in jail." The kid is looking at his dad like, "Dad, it's me." $10,000 or one year in jail. He doesn't have $10,000, and he just has unbelievable fears about what one year in jail can sound like. With that, his father takes off his robes. He comes down, takes a checkbook out of his pocket, writes a check for $10,000 and puts it right next to him, walks back up behind the bench, puts his robe back on, hits the gavel, and says, "$10,000 or one year in jail."

What do you think he did? What would you do? He took the gift. The price had been paid for him. He took the gift, and he used it to buy his freedom, his redemption.

Dear friends, the Cross is like that $10,000 check a trillion times over, for the sins of the whole world. But not just for the sins of the whole world, for yours and for mine. Jesus entered into the depths of our reality. You talk about the depths, out of the depths. Jesus entered into the depths to bring us back to God, and anybody who will put their trust in him, confess that he is Lord , believe in their heart that God raised him from the dead will be saved. They don't have to atone for their own sins. That's what the Cross is all about.

So we can approach God honestly. Having said all of this about God and about us, we can approach God honestly, crying out to him in the depths of our despair, believing that he hears us and that he forgives us. God is not holding anything against us. Listen to one other quote from Foster. This is awesome. "We do not have to make God willing to forgive. In fact, it is God who is working to make us willing to seek his forgiveness." That's the invitation to self-examination. And since God is this way, it makes complete sense to do self-examination and confession as a soul-training exercise.

Listen to the way some of the Church fathers have put it. "Liberation begins with the recognition of our brokenness." "Confession is the beginning of renewal," another one said. Augustine once wrote, one more time, "The confession of evil works is the first beginning of good works." Now if we don't engage in this exercise, if we don't engage in self-examination and repentance, then our sins become like a burden. They become like a weight to us.

Think of a balloon. I've shared this before, but I've had this, such a good illustration. Think of a balloon. A balloon, just blown up. Just a regular balloon, not a helium balloon. Just a regular balloon and just toss it up like this, right? If you try to take that balloon and hold it under water, how long do you think you'll be able to do that? It's light. You should be able to hold it under there pretty long. But I guarantee you, after a while, you won't be able to do it anymore, even though it's just a balloon.

When we submerge, when we suppress it, we don't come clean before God, that's exactly what it's like. This stress, this burden, this tension is in our lives. But if we'll release it to God in confession, it comes up above the surface and you can just knock it away. You can pop it. It's gone. So it is with the sins and burdens of our hearts in light of God's mercy. Our sins cannot keep us from God unless we give them the power to do so, and God has taken away the power, if we'll believe. Self-examination and confession are not to be feared, but they are to be tools that can allow us to be honest before God and gain mastery over sin.

So the question then becomes how? How do we do it? What does it look like? If you were speaking with someone conversant with step four of the 12-step program, it would look like something like this. "I am called to take a fearless moral inventory of my life, and when it's pertinent, to make amends for the sins that I've committed." The Church fathers had many ways to process this step. Some would think through the 10 commandments, just run down the 10 commandments in their mind. "God, where have I missed? Where have I missed? Show me."

Or some would take 1 Corinthians 13, you know the list of love: "Love is patient, love is kind. Love covers a multitude of sin. Love is gentle, doesn't hold anybody, doesn't keep record of wrongs. Bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things." I mean, all this. That would be another list.

Others go over the seven deadly sins, you know? But still others will look at something like Galatians 5:19-23. In the book of Galatians, Paul lists all kinds of negative aspects of the sinful nature. I'm not going to read it. It's just up there. That, those are some of the things, so somebody can look through that kind of list.

But on the other side of this, on the positive side of this is the fruit of the Spirit, and you can see them. Are these things true of my life? Am I experiencing these things? When it says, "Against such things there is no law", what that means is you can't follow any law to get to those things. That's God's work inside of your heart because of the Holy Spirit.

Whatever grid we use, the truth is in knowing that we can cry out to a God who cares. We can count on a God who forgives, and we can wait in hopeful expectation on a God who delivers. The psalmist says, "I wait for the Lord like a watchman. It's dark. It's dark. I can't see anything. I don't know what's going on out there, but I'm waiting for the dawn. I'm waiting for God to come and answer my prayer, come and give me what I need."

Again Richard Foster tells about a time in his own life when he wasn't burdened down by any particular sin, but in his first pastorate, he said he had reached the point where he felt no power whatsoever to do anything of substance. And he says, he said, "I had every Holy Spirit experience you ever want to have. If there was one, I had it." Still didn't, still a lack.

And he just had this growing impression by the Holy Spirit that something was blocking, and so he came up with an exercise that on three successive days, he would break his life up into the period of his childhood, his adolescence, and his adult years, and he would sit down in front of a blank piece of paper in complete silence for 10 minutes, and anything that the Holy Spirit brought to his mind, each of those days for each of those time periods, he would write down. He wouldn't judge them. He wouldn't analyze them. Just write them.

A week earlier, he had talked to a friend of his who was a confessor, and he said, "I'm gonna come and I'm gonna read my list to you." See this is where the confession part comes into... where do other people come into this? And if you can find a trusted friend, this is an unbelievable exercise.

Well he said he did this, and it was very difficult for him to do. He went to put his papers back in his briefcase. His confessor took the papers, ripped them into 100 pieces, threw them in the trash, then laid hands on him and prayed for healing for every area of his life that he mentioned-every wound, every sin, everything. He said he didn't feel this great emotional experience, but he said he came away from that experience feeling lighter than he had ever felt before, and that God had indeed answered his prayer, and that he was able to enter into a lot of the disciplines and finish the book, The Celebration of Discipline, that he was working on.

He was waiting for power and renewal. What are you waiting for? What was the psalmist waiting for? We don't know, but I can think of a few things. Maybe for an assurance that you really are forgiven? You are, in Jesus Christ. Maybe for healing, emotionally, physically, spiritually, or to be brought up from whatever the pit was. Waiting for God to work in the heart of another person. Perhaps for courage to take a step of faith. Maybe to face someone or something that's causing you fear. But whatever it is, at the core is the hope that God is actively involved to the very depths of our being, and will come like the dawn to bring us out of those depths, like a watchman waiting for the light.

Here's what Micah 7, verses 8 and 9, how he puts it. This could be the psalmist in another chapter.

"Do not gloat over me, my enemy! Though I have fallen, I will rise. Though I sit in darkness, The LORD will be my light. Because I have sinned against him, I will bear the LORD's wrath, until he pleads my case and establishes my right. He will bring me out into the light; I will see his righteousness."

A Grand Master chess champion was examining a painting in an art gallery. The artist had painted a chess match between the devil and a young man, who looked from the painting like a person outwitted. The painting showed the two engaged in a chess game being played for the man's soul. It was called Checkmate. That was the title of the painting. The chess champion stood observing the painting for several minutes, and then he smiled slightly. He turned to the curator and said, "I have good news for the man in this picture. He still has a move."

The father of lies has convinced too many people that they've been placed in checkmate, but the grace of God has provided a way for us to hope and understand that we still have a move. We can cry out to God. He'll hear our cry for help, and he will raise us from our depths, in Jesus' name, Amen.

Lord, we ask that you would indeed help us now as we enter into a time of reflection, of contemplation on who we are in the light of who you are. Lord, let these next few minutes not be the biding of time, but help them to be a meaningful time of understanding who we are and understanding that we can release whatever is burdening us to you. Give us a sense of hope that we still have another move. In Christ's name, Amen.

© 2010, Rev. George Antonakos
Central Presbyterian Church, Baltimore, MD 21204 410/823-6145
www.centralpc.org