On The Cutting Edge

My Dad was in the foreign service when I was a kid and my family was stationed in Argentina for a couple of years. We lived in a city called Rosario, about 4 hours north of Buenos Aires. The weather was fabulous, the schools were good, the streets were safe, and there was a club with an Olympic sized pool within biking distance. I really thought it was a great place to live, except for the bombings, and that only happened twice, and it happened at night where my dad worked, not where he lived, so nobody was hurt. It was a more innocent age, I guess, and my folks played it down, so we kind of thought of it as an adventure. But what did I know, I was only 10.

It came as a surprise to me when I found out a few years later, after we came back to the States, that Dad had received extra pay, a hardship allowance, because of the substandard living conditions. Medical care, sanitation, the kind of infrastructure we take for granted here were all second-rate at best. And one of the trials we had to live with was the gas-fired water heater in the bathroom. Without going into the details of how it worked which I don’t remember all that clearly anyway, sometimes the pilot light went out. The matches were kept in the medicine cabinet next to the toothpaste. And one evening when it was time for my bath the light was out, so I lit a match, and it blew up, and I lost all the hair on my face. There was only a little stubble left of my eyebrows and my eyelashes and my bangs. I was really lucky not to have been blinded.

That’s the image I see whenever I read 1 Cor 3, which came up in my morning devotions this past week while I was preparing this sermon.

“If anyone builds on the foundation with gold, silver, previous stones, wood, hay, straw - the work of each builder will become visible for the Day will disclose it, because it will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test what sort of work has been done. If what has been built on the foundation survives, the builder will receive a reward. If the work is burned up, the builder will suffer loss; the builder will be saved, but only as through fire.” [1 Cor 3:11-15]

Anything in our lives that isn’t built of eternal things, on the foundation of Jesus Christ, will be burnt up. And it seems to me that the more dry, strawy, useless stuff we have built with, the fiercer the fire will burn and the more painful the purification process. Imagine if I’d been wearing flammable clothing when the gas exploded. There mightn’t have been much left. I’ve been in burn units, working as a hospital chaplain. Burn victims are not a pretty sight, and they take a long time to heal. Straightforward broken bones or knife wounds are a whole lot easier to fix.

Now, mind you, Paul does say that if you have the foundation of Jesus Christ, that core foundation will survive even if you build on it with cheap, non-flame retardant material. But wouldn’t it make a whole lot more sense to clean up your life before you come within ignition range, so that you can make it through on judgment day with no more than a few scorch marks? If you get the corrective surgery done the right way, you won't have to endure the more drastic flame-cure process.

Back when surgery was a crude, often hit-or-miss affair, the image of surgical remedies for spiritual disorders wasn’t a whole lot more attractive than fire. But now that we have such things as laser surgery on eyeballs, we might begin to get a feel for the delicacy, the precision, with which the Great Physician uses Scripture to dissect and repair our souls. Think better than Botox. Think complete overhaul.

It is not a simple, one-step process. The prophet Jeremiah spoke truly when he said, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and beyond cure. Who can understand it?”[Jer 17:9] Only the Holy Spirit, using the Word of God as a scalpel, is capable of cutting through our pretensions, and showing us to ourselves.

For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and spirit, of joints and marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart...

The first stage in the process of cutting the trash out of our lives is first of all to recognize the rubbish for what it is. And that’s hard, in our world. We live in one of the most determinedly self-absorbed, self-indulgent, self-obsessed societies the world has ever known. It’s hard to stand against the messages that bombard us day in and day out. The only defense we have against those messages is the Word of God, but that defense is stronger than Fort Knox.