Discovering the Real Jesus in Monroe

On September 25, 1985, my son David died. He was stillborn, and his twin Joshua survived. This happened at the Mid-Michigan Neo-natal center in Sparrow Hospital, Lansing. Every year when we come to this date Linda and I are grateful that Josh made it, and we can’t forget that we have a third son who is no longer with us.

I will also never forget, during that time of gain and loss, of giving and taking away, looking at Linda and agreeing with her that, if we did not have God to turn to, we would be hopeless.

This loss caused me to experience grief in ways I had never had before. Linda and I found out that we grieved differently, and have come to understand that, generally, women grieve differently than do men. How could this not be so, given that the woman carries the inborn child for months and forms a bond that a father could never really relate to? For me, my grief came like powerful thunderstorms with lightning that rolled in unexpectedly, with patches of blue sky that increased in duration over the months. And even now, 22 years after our gain-loss, a little storm can come upon me when I think of this. For Linda, her grief was like a long, long Michigan winter with continual gray skies, until finally some sun and blue sky began to show.

As for me, I became a “man of sorrows, acquainted with grief.” Not, of course, in the way Jesus the Christ was. But now I looked at people differently. The HOPING group at Sparrow Hospital asked me to speak, twice a year, to parents who lost their babies. And Linda and I were put in touch with some of them and talked with them and shared their grief. I was now a pastor to people in pain.

Linda and I would tell these loving parents about the hope we found in God and Jesus, and the difference it made in our lives. After all, if God did not exist, then there’s really little or nothing to “hope” for when it comes to the life of the child who is gone. “Hope” implies “expectation.” Hoping people are expectant people. This is radically different from “wishing” people. “Wishing” is a passive life-stance. If God was not real, all we’d have is “wishing.” The active hope in Linda and I is that we will see our son David again. This hope is based on the real, historical resurrection of Jesus. We are filled with expectancy. A day is coming when all of this, too, shall be made right.

My hope is based on a God who made us and loves us. This includes children. We see this exemplified in Matthew 19:13-15. “Then little children were brought to Jesus for him to place his hands on them and pray for them. But the disciples rebuked those who brought them. Jesus said, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.” When he had placed his hands on them, he went on from there.”

On Saturday Linda and I were privileged to speak and sing about the God who loves us and gives us hope at the Tomorrow’s Child walk at Munson Park. We gathered with many parents who lost babies to SIDS and other supporters. This was a true God-thing for me, and I am grateful for the local leadership that works hard to save the lives of babies. And I am certain that these babies are now with God. This inner certainty allows me to get through the stormy dark times when grief makes an appearance in my heart.

Years ago I was with my family on a getaway to a nice hotel in the north Detroit suburbs. My son Dan and I went into the sauna that was in the pool area. An older man was there who had a long scar on his chest, the evidence of open heart surgery.

He spoke to Dan and said, “My daughter likes to swim, too. I get to go watch her on the high school swim team.” He added, “I don’t see her as much as I’d like to.”

Then this stranger began to tell us the story of how he was the CEO of a large corporation in Farmington Hills, how he had made his millions many times over, how he had this huge home with everything in it, and how very much he had often dreamed of retiring around the age of 50 and spending time with his wife and daughter. And now, his dream was gone.

It took a while for him to tell this sad story. I was getting very hot! Even though I am Finnish and grew up in a world of saunas, I asked the man if he would like to go out and sit by the pool and talk.

While Dan went for a swim he said, “I gave her a million dollars in the settlement. You would think that would satisfy her.”

As I heard him sharing with me I am thinking thoughts like this: “What did you expect? The time and energy you put into building your career and making your multi-millions that bought you the big house in the elite suburb filled with all the things money can buy cost you the two most important things in your life: your marriage, and your family. What your wife and daughter really needed was not your money, but you.”

I didn’t say that to him. I sat with this total stranger who had just poured out his heart to me. He was deeply alone in life. He said, “I don’t know what to do.” A sad, solitary man surrounded by his stuff, he had lost his soul.

Jesus once said to his disciples, “Whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find in. What good will it be for a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul.”

There’s a lot of soul-forfeiture happening in America today. Peter Eavis of Fortune Magazine expresses it this way:

“Thanks to low interest rates in the wake of the stock market crash, getting rich in real estate, always part of the culture, became a national pastime, with cable-TV shows like Flip This House, Flip That House and The Property Ladder (not to mention newspapers and magazines) stoking everyone’s inner Donald Trump. Admit it - how often did you go on the Web to check the prices of homes in your neighborhood, just to see how much you could get for yours?

As prices kept soaring, the urge to get in on the boom became overpowering. Medical students, hairdressers and other amateurs were snapping up multiple condos in hot spots like Miami and Las Vegas, planning to flip them for quick gains. And people for whom home ownership once seemed out of reach took on far more debt than they could ever hope to repay. Don’t have enough cash to put down the customary 20 percent? Just put down 10 percent. Better yet, borrow the down payment! If the bank approves, it must be okay, right?

Feckless, naive and pathetically addicted to easy money - sure. But with teaser rates and complicated terms, hopeful homebuyers often had little sense of what they were getting into. Now many will pay dearly for their poor judgment -
losing their houses, having their credit ruined. We weigh our belief in individual responsibility against the all-too-human failing of getting caught up in a national frenzy.”

I told the stranger about another kind of life, a life that is “fuller” than anything he had ever experienced. I told him about God, and about Jesus, and about the ethics of the kingdom of God (Matthew chapters 5-7), and about how “life” is really a function of the heart/soul rather than material things and accomplishments. When he finally left me he looked at Linda and my two boys playing in the pool and said, “Enjoy your family.” I was, and I still am.

(The picture is one I took of Linda on a trip to Oval Beach on Lake Michigan near Saugatuck.)

A few weeks ago I preached message #100 in the Real Jesus series I’m doing on Sunday mornings at my church. The verses were Mark 8:22-26 and Matthew 16: 13-20. In this story Jesus was traveling through Bethsaida with his disciples when a blind man was brought to him, his friends begging Jesus to touch and heal the man. Jesus’ first touch brings only partial healing, because the man’s eyes only see amorphous blobs (“people like trees walking”). So, a second touch is needed, and then the man can see clearly. Why did Jesus need two tries at healing this man?

Because Jesus is giving an object lesson to his disciples, as we see in what immediately follows. He heals the blind man and in the process gives them a picture of what they are really like. Taking his disciples to the countryside around Caesarea Philippi, he asks them the question “Who do people say that I am?” They reply, the people say you are a prophet. Now that’s true, but far from the complete truth about Jesus. The people see Jesus unclearly. Viewing Jesus as merely a “prophet” is about as clear as viewing people as walking trees. (This, by the way, is how Muslims view Jesus, and it is incorrect.)

Jesus then asks them, “But who do you say I am?” Peter immediately responds, “You are the Christ!” That is, “You are the anointed king!” (=”Messiah”) Now Peter and the disciples see more clearly. This great insight was downloaded into Peter by God himself. Jesus tells him, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by man, but by my Father in heaven.” Only God can bring about the intuitive click, the big “Aha!” that is needed to grasp the Real Jesus. That’s why some people sit in a church building on a Sunday morning and get nothing, and others are devouring the words of the message and the worship. It’s the “Amazing Grace” “I was blind, but now I see” thing. 

It is precisely because of this clearer revelation that Jesus says some astounding things to Peter: “I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” The greater revelation Peter has brings a greater responsibility and a greater spiritual impartation. The Jesus-follower who gets it, who understands, is given “the keys of the kingdom of heaven.”

This is extremely important for any person who claims to be a Jesus-follower to understand. Without such clarity Jesus is not going to be able to continue with his disciples. The result of this new revelation is that Jesus gives Peter “keys.” “Keys” open locked doors and gates. A person who carries keys walks in the authority of the owner of the “building”; in this case, Jesus the Anointed King. These “keys” allow a Jesus-follower to be used by God to set people who dwell in darkness free into the life of the kingdom of God.

In these days, personally and for the people in my church family and beyond into the Monroe community, I am especially looking at the need for a greater revelation of Jesus, and am praying for us, that God will grant us this greater clarity about Jesus. That will be the foundation, the “rock,” upon which God builds his real, radical, revolutionary church in the days ahead.  

It’s Monday and, I think, some (many?) U-M fans are seriously depressed. And angry. Their team is Goliath, and little David has come onto their turf and brought the Big House to its knees. Now a dark cloud of thick shame covers the team, the school, and the fans, and will cover them, potentially, for all of time. In today’s Detroit News Bob Wojnowski writes that “the brutal truth” is that the Wolverines now bear “a stain that may never scrub completely away.” Whaaat??!!

The call today is for a sacrifice. Until that great atoning act is done worship will not be possible. You can’t sing “Hail to the Victors” when the powers of darkness are in the camp. It all comes down to the removal of Coach Lloyd Carr. I now think of the scene in “Apocalypto” where the human sacrifices stand atop the Mayan ziggurat awaiting their beheading which will placate the angry gods and thus relieve the anxious people.

This is football as religious worship. We have: 1) the battle of good vs. evil; 2) the concept of sin, without the idea of forgiveness; 3) the need for atonement or cleansing from sin by offering a sacrifice of blood; 4) true disciples who bleed the team’s colors; 5) issues of emotional and psychological life and death; 6) prophetic, predictive proclamations, some of which are akin to doom-and-gloom end-times revelations; 7) the need for sacrifice for the sake of a higher calling; 8 ) loyalty and the rejection of idol worship; 9) historical remembering as a legacy of faith (e.g., at U-M, reciting the “Bo legacy” in times like these); 10) the desire for vengeance (to be exacted on the next team); 11) the desecration of pagan territory; 12) the danger of marrying outside the faith (spiritual sports adultery); 13) matters of faith and doubt; 14) matters of honor and shame.

I think I have some understanding of this, because for eleven years I lived within earshot of Michigan State University’s football stadium. I worked at MSU as a pastor to students and faculty, and our home was about one mile from the stadium. I personally knew some of the athletes, and cheered when they won and felt bad when they lost. On a Saturday, when MSU scored a touchdown, we could hear the 80,000 people roar even though we were a mile away. And once, after MSU lost a big game, we saw smoke rising from a student apartment complex where there was burning furniture and even cars in the streets given as burnt offerings to the football gods.

What’s going on? I think we all have a need for worship and to worship someone or something. Years ago Bob Dylan wrote a song called “You’ve Got to Serve Somebody.” I think he was right. As a kid, as for me and my house, we worshiped all the Michigan teams. I was born in Michigan. My father was a Tigers and Lions and Red Wings and Pistons fan. Al Kaline and Gordie Howe were not only one of “us,” they were actually a better kind of people than the opponents were. It’s hard to shake the tribal feeling and the need to worship. Worship abhors a vacuum.

What’s the answer? I think: be a sports fan but get a life. Thank God for sports but, in the first place, thank God. Because when it comes to Jesus there’s no such thing as a stain that will never completely rub away, there’s no need for another human sacrifice, and there are global spiritual issues that concern the advancing kingdom of God that have eternal consequences. Have you ever known someone enslaved in the chains of some addiction that is destroying them and their home? I have, and I can tell you that a big win by their favorite sports team does nothing to bring them freedom. Have you ever seen someone set free from the bondage of addiction? I have, many times. The fact that my favorite football team (MSU) loses too many games means nothing compared to the joy of seeing people move from darkness into life.