Rev Doug Gray
March 8, 2020
When you were a kid, did you ever wonder what it would be like to be a grown-up? I know I did. Lots of adults wanted to know what I wanted to be when I grew up. Do you remember thinking about that? For a long time, I wanted to be a firefighter, and then an astronaut, and for a while a school teacher. I remember watching the adults around me doing things that seemed very grown up, and I would try to imagine what it would be like to do those things if I were a grown up. What I love about the Disney movie, The Little Mermaid, is that Ariel is in one world trying to imagine another too. That’s true for us not just when we are kids trying to imagine what it would be like to be “all grown up,” but as teens and adults we live in the mundane world and wonder what the spiritual life would be like. In our passage today, Paul talks about his experience of the spiritual life in the midst of his real life, and I’d like to share with you how it made me think of The Little Mermaid.
The first key to finding the spiritual life is longing. Ariel has that in spades, doesn’t she? Looking in sunken ships for “treasure,” signs of the surface world. She sings, “I've got gadgets and gizmos a-plenty. I've got whozits and whatzits galore. You want thingamabobs?I've got twenty!But who cares?No big deal. I want more! I wanna be where the people are.I wanna see, wanna see them dancin',Walking around on those - what do you call 'em?Oh - feet!” As a teen going to church, I knew the names of church gadgets and gizmos—where I’m standing is called the pulpit, and the other place to speak from is the lectern. I knew choirs were for singing and pews for sitting. I knew communion meant something big, but it didn’t mean that for me. I wanted more! I knew a few handfuls of people who were different. They seemed to live a life I didn’t know, to know a meaning I hadn’t experienced, and to have a strength, wisdom and peace I really wanted but didn’t know how to get. When some people prayed, they were different after. Why was that? Paul expresses this kind of longing too. In verse 10, he writes, “I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death…” Though even now I don’t fully understand these words, I have a sense that Paul knows something super important and crazy interesting about the spiritual life in Jesus, and I get a sense of how much he wants to know more, and that awakens my longing to know too, to understand the new reality.
The second key to finding a new spiritual world is curiosity and a willingness to leave our old life and habits and try new ways. Of course, Ariel needs legs instead of fins, and she experiences new kinds of moving.
[Show “Seeing the Kingdom” — Little Mermaid 57:07–58:25]
How do we live a life marked by faith? Like Ariel observing horses, chickens and people, we can watch people of great faith, talk with them, learn from them. Who are the people of great faith around us? Do we know them well enough to learn from them? Do they know us well enough to coach us? What’s this prayer thing people do? How does that work? Like Ariel learning how to dance, it helps that we are dancing with Jesus who really does know how it works. We will have to try new things that may feel awkward at first, but as Paul writes, “Beloved, I do not consider that I have made it my own; but this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, 14I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.” Like Paul and Ariel, I am happy to let go of ordinary things to have something “Wow!”
The third key to finding the spiritual life is transformation. While the first two keys are ones inside of us, only God has the power to truly transform us in a lasting way. Only real love can truly transform us.
[Show “Father’s Love Brings Transformation” —Little Mermaid 1:15:10-1:16-21]
Like Ariel, sitting on a rock, unable to make the transition to the new world, teen-age me sat in the pews longing for more, but unable to transition to life in Jesus Christ. And then I experienced great love in my youth group. They saw past my acne and desperate desire to belong, to the real, God-given heart. They saw God at work in me, though I didn’t have the eyes to see. In the love of those teens and the adult advisors, I experienced a reflection of Jesus’ love and sacrifice. In the moment that I prayed, “Jesus, I want to be yours” I found the “Wow!” I had longed for. The insurmountable gap between knowing about God and knowing God, between sitting in the pews and participating in the spiritual reality of worship—that gap suddenly disappeared, and God’s Presence came flooding in. But it’s not something I could do for myself. That transformation, turning fins into legs, opening eyes and heart, were things only God could do in me.
It’s a strange thing, isn’t it, being what my small self would think of as a grown up. It’s strange because when I think about it, I don’t think I have really arrived yet. I’m not a firefighter or an astronaut, but together, we are trying to create a place where each of us can catch glimpses of the spiritual life, a life beyond knowing about God, a life of embracing the Lord we long for. Together with Jesus in our midst, we are trying to create a group of people who look past physical and emotional appearances to love people for who they truly are. In that place where the love of Christ is reflected, we pray and work so that God might enable people to go from sitting in a pew to walking with Jesus. The curious thing is that while I have a sense of what the spiritual life is like, in a sense the transformation isn’t complete yet. I don’t understand so much of what life in Jesus Christ is meant to be, but I know that this world is not my home, not really. My true home is the one completely on the other side of all our mundane reality. Paul writes, “our citizenship is in heaven, and it is from there that we are expecting a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. 21He will transform the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to the body of his glory, by the power that also enables him to make all things subject to himself.” Let’s pray