Mascot - Rebel
Preacher: Joy Starnes

April 29, 2007

The fighting rebels

What was the name of your high school’s mascot?  In the DC area, we’re familiar with the Winston Churchill and St. Albans bulldogs, the BCC barons, and the St. Andrew’s Rampant Lion as if it’s not enough to just be a lion, they have to be rampant.

Where I come from in Monroe, North Carolina, I’m proud to tell you that my alma mater, Parkwood High School, was the home of the Fighting Rebels.  That’s right.   My high school’s mascot was a Rebel, straight from the days of the land of cotton where old times are not forgotten.  I’m sure many of you parents are thankful your child did not grow up with the rebel as a role model.

I recently saw on the internet where two women are trying to get rid of the Rebel mascot at my high school.  Apparently they feel that a school’s mascot should foster school spirit and a sense of pride among the student body and should not be a symbol known for its characteristic of rebellion. They believe that the Rebel mascot is not conducive to a positive learning environment. And all I have to say to them is “Good luck …”  Apparently you have former Miss Rebels who are up in arms about such ideas and are passing around petitions to “Save the Rebel”.

In NC, where tobacco grows well, rampant, the Parkwood rebels even enjoyed their very own smoking area on the school grounds. I still can’t understand how we had a space like this, approved by the authorities, but it was.  The legal age for buying cigarettes was 18 and yet, we had a designated area for tobacco consumption.  We even had the Confederate flag proudly displayed at the front entrance to our school, with the words “Home of the Fighting Rebels” painted beneath it.

And even for kids like me, who were generally law abiding, National Honor Society kinds of kids (because we knew the ticket out of  town was good grades) we were not immune to this rebellious nature.  My dad used to say that when I was a teenager, he worried that I’d get pulled over by the cops for speeding and tell the police officer that he was wrong. Indeed, I was a rebel myself.

Hard time behaving

Which is why, growing up, church stressed me out a bit.  I liked the social aspect of it and the covered dish suppers (or potluck dinner, as you folks call it) and the fact that my mom would let me socialize at the church on nights I might otherwise be grounded, and I even had some good, deep spiritual experiences there.  But I knew (or thought I knew) that being a Christian meant being a good girl and I knew that rebels were not altogether good girls.  I had not heard that Jesus came for the sick and so for me, to be a Christian, to be in good standing with God, meant to behave.  And as a rebel, I had a hard time behaving.

There’s a great book that recently came out, entitled, “Searching for God Knows What” and the author, Donald Miller, summarizes this underlying agony I felt as a teenager in the church when he wrote, “Growing up in a small conservative church in the South, you hear more about morality than you do about Christ. If you were immoral, if you danced, drank, or cussed, you were made to feel that God no longer liked you. And if you were moral, you were made to feel not one with Christ, but right and good and better than other people. These things were not stated directly, but the environment left me with this impression.  Christian spirituality, then, hinged on whether or not a person behaved.”

God already knows we’re rebels

So…  I tried to keep up my good girl image with the hopes that God would show me favor.  The truth is that if I’d taken the time to actually read the Bible, I may have discovered the fact that God already knows we are rebels – all of us…  The hard truth is that the Bible tells us this on more than one occasion.  1 John 1:8 says, “If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.”  In other words, if we don’t admit that we are rebels, we are liars.

Someone once told me that I don’t need to fear people’s criticism because Jesus has already said worse things about me than anyone else ever will.  When Jesus was telling the people to believe that God would give us good gifts, he went so far as to say, “You, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children.”  But here’s the good news.  Jesus loves us anyway.  We know from Romans 5:8 that God demonstrates his own love for us in this: while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

And what is our sin?  Many of us don’t really care about our sin; let’s be honest.  I remember a preacher in NC one time telling the great news about how God loves us so much that he sent Jesus and now because of Jesus dying on the cross to take my sin away from me, when God sees me, he sees one who is blameless and isn’t this so great that this is what God thinks of us?  And I thought, “Hey Man, you’re giving me a lot more credit than I deserve!  In fact, I don’t care what God thinks of me as much as I care what my friends think of me, what my co-workers think of me and, particularly, what this really cute guy sitting next to me thinks of me.  How many of you know this feeling?"

But let’s do admit there are sins we do care about…  There are the ones that leave you feeling shameful, guilty, and without a clean conscience when you go to bed at night.  There are the ones that hurt others, like talking on your cell phone while your child sits there talking to no one.  We don’t always love well.  I made someone cry just this past week; it was awful!  There are the sins that rob you of joy and a full, meaningful life, like checking your email or voice mail compulsively yet always screening your calls or never calling people back in a timely manner, or ever for that matter.  There’s the whole scene of addictions, from food addiction to spending addictions to sexual addictions.  There’s judging, gossiping.  I’ll stop there before we all get really depressed.

Isaiah 53 says, “We all like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way, and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all”.

So, not only are we rebels, but we are sheep.  Would you believe that the mascot for my college was a sheep?  I kid you not.  Is this message flowing or what?

The caring shepherd

I spent a summer in Ireland as a missionary and during that summer, my friends and I would take long drives in the country, you know, the kind that make your stomach queasy and you don’t know how long they’ll last because all you keep seeing is green and green and more green? Well, on one of these particular rides, I got to thinking about sheep shearing and how, I bet, by now they have an automated sheep shearing machine, kind of in the shape of a cage, where you can just put the sheep in the cage and some electronic razors, come together, contoured to the sheep’s body and do all the work without the shepherd having to lift a finger.  I knew my idea was brilliant and so I told everyone in the car.  They immediately tell me I’m wrong and a big argument erupts.  Finally, I insist that we pull the car over and so I can ask a shepherd about the sheep shearing machine myself.  Once I finish telling him about my train of thought and my question, he just looks at me like I’m crazy, and says, “No.  I do it myself.”

I believe we rebel because we do not know who God really is

How many of you see God as the shepherd who pays careful attention to each individual person or sheep or do you, like me, slip into this awful thinking that God would rather set us up in some automated machine and get back to what really interests him – like Irish dancing, 4-leaf clovers, Guinness.

Do we see God as an amazing pianist who is present and delights in making music for us or do we see him as that eerie grand piano down at the Chevy Chase Pavilion where it plays music and all the keys are going up and down, but there’s no one sitting at the piano and it’s very disturbing.

I propose that we are drawn to rebelling because we do not know the true character of our God.  Keeping rules is not attractive because we are not keeping any kind of a relationship.  In 2 Corinthians we read that Christ’s love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died. And he died for all, that those who live would no longer live for themselves, but for him who died for them and was raised again.”  Jesus’ love compels us to love and live our lives for him.

Our scripture today tells us numerous times of how God’s people didn’t follow his ways because they didn’t KNOW him, or RECOGNIZE him.  Paul told the folks in Antioch, “Because the residents of Jerusalem and their leaders did not recognize Jesus or understand the words of the prophets that are read every Sabbath, they fulfilled those words by condemning Jesus.”

We rebel largely because we do not know him.

Who do you say God is?

Jesus constantly asked those around him, “Who do you say I am?” and it was not because he was having an identity crisis.  You see, our understanding of him has every implication for whether or not we will follow him.  I recall a season of my life when I was depressed and angry at God, believing he was distant, unconcerned about my life, out to get me, disappointed in me, you name it.  One day I was hiking in the mountains, with no one near me when a voice spoke to me and said, “I’m not who you say I am.”  I know it was God speaking.  When he tells us not to take his name in vain, I believe that making him out to be someone he isn’t is a way we take that name in vain.

David understood who God is and wanted to be near Him

I marvel at our Psalm for today.  The Psalmist can’t stop saying great things about God and describing the truth of who he is and in that, he encourages others to get near to God.  Essentially he says, “The Lord himself is God, he himself made us, we are his, we’re the sheep of his pasture, be thankful and get close to him! Give him thanks! Call out to him!  God is good!  His mercy doesn’t stop, he’s gonna be faithful to us forever.  Be joyful in the Lord.  Do all you can for him!  Sing out loud.”  In the words of the Partridge Family, “Come on, get happy!”

Once we really know who He is, we don’t desire to rebel as much

Do you get it?  This is an invitation to the richest, most meaningful and loving relationship you will ever encounter.  We are not talking about keeping the rules.  Yes, there are rules that show us the way to have a good life, but we cannot perfectly keep the rules.  We can only keep the relationship.

Jesus said in our gospel reading today that his sheep know him and they know his voice.  He also says that those who love him will obey his commands.  They will obey him because they know him, because they understand his love and want to return that love through their actions.

Following Jesus is not a matter of keeping the rules, but of keeping the relationship. The beauty is that, while the rules will be broken, the relationship with God cannot be broken, at least while we are on this earth.

Most of us are too busy to know him

But we won’t get to know God unless we take the time to get to know him.  Think on your relationships with your favorite people.  How did you get to know them?  I imagine it was by spending time with them.  How do you keep those relationships going?  I imagine it is by spending time with them.

However, we Washingtonians are among the busiest people in the world.  Yesterday I saw an advertisement for “Life Management Services for Busy Individuals”.  For a fee and a reservation of at least 2 hours, you can get someone to unload your dishwasher, return your DVD’s to Blockbuster, go to the cosmetics counter, buy birthday gifts and… be at your house when the cable guy comes, among plenty of other daily tasks.  We are too busy to do life itself.
 
How will we find time to know God?  My deepest concern as a shepherd within this flock at All Saints’ is that individuals know Christ in a real, daily and personal way.  How can we do that with the demands of our schedules?

I came with suggestions.

Notice nature.  When’s the last time you sat in your living room with all the media turned off so you could hear the birds singing outside your door?

When’s the last time you took a walk around the block?  It doesn’t take very long.  Notice the wisteria that is in full bloom right now.  See how the green leaves have revisited the branches that were covered in snow not so long ago.  Thank God for the blue sky.  We don’t deserve it yet it comes back so often with the cleanest white clouds.  I’m constantly amazed by it.

Notice God in people.  I had the privilege of being stopped in traffic last Monday to witness the funeral procession of one of the Virginia Tech shooting victims.  Minutes after I cried, watching so many cars moving along, filled with loved ones saying “goodbye” to their dear friend Reema, I arrived at my destination to be greeted by a friend’s 1 year old daughter who was playing with her 9 month old neighbor.  God showed me the gift and the continuing life cycle.  That was an opportunity to praise him.

We have an opportunity to praise God and relate to Him in the way we treat our bodies.  Do we eat well?  Do we move our bodies enough?  Do we rest enough?  Paul told the Corinthians, “Whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God”.

When a co-worker or friend shares a concern with you, can you say to them, “That sounds really hard. I’m going to pray for you.”  And then, can you take a minute as you walk away from them to actually pray for them?

Can you stand to ride in the car without listening to the radio or talking on your cell phone just to be silent with God?  Dare you say to him as the prophet Samuel said, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.”  Well, now I’m saying it, “Speak, Lord, for your servants are listening.”

Because we are a busy people, I want to give you an opportunity right now to be still and silent before our Lord.  I’ll close us in prayer in just a moment.  Let’s bow our heads.