Episodes
Sunday Jun 09, 2013
Tourist Traps
Sunday Jun 09, 2013
Sunday Jun 09, 2013
Rev. Dean Snyder 1 Timothy 1:12-17
For many years we lived in the North and my brother Nevin lived in the South. As a preacher I had more vacation time than money, so every summer or every other summer we would travel South to mooch off Nevin for a week or two.
I don’t know when the signs would begin, maybe in Virginia. 200 miles to South of the Border. 190 miles to South of the Border. 180 miles to South of the Border. 175 miles to South of the Border. Until everyone in the car was obsessed with South of the Border, which turned out to be a place to spend money on things you absolutely didn’t need and didn’t really want, but for some reason, at the moment, had to have. You bought Mexican jumping beans and South Carolina state ash trays out of the strange mix of excitement and boredom that happens on a road trip.
On the journey South, starting maybe in southern Virginia in every town you passed, you would begin to see signs for a Waffle House. There were no Waffle Houses in Philadelphia. In the South there seemed to be more Waffle Houses than Baptist churches. So you would eventually end up eating at a Waffle House during the trip to Nevin’s house.
I hope I don’t offend anyone here but I had never eaten a meal at a Waffle House that I did not regret afterwards until two years ago. Jane and I spent a long weekend in Richmond to see a Tiffany glass exhibit at the museum and a live Prairie Home Companion radio show. Next to our hotel was a Waffle House. We went there for lunch one day and they had a salad on the menu. I ordered it and they brought me a mountain of raw vegetables and a plastic jar of Kraft Salad Dressing (they had only one flavor) and I had a healthy lunch at a Waffle house; the only meal at a Waffle House that I remember not regretting afterwards.
Or perhaps you have the opportunity to travel more broadly in your life. Every tour you take includes a stop at an authentic local handicraft store where you can buy authentic replicas of whatever the region was known for from pottery to rugs to tapestries. And you suddenly find yourself needing a full 16th century replica set of Roman dish ware; or Turkish rugs; or Middle Eastern mosaics.
Eventually you find yourself living in a house full of things that you can no longer remember where you got them or why. And it is time to downsize; your kids have their own stuff and don’t want yours; and you just hope that you are the first one to go so that the other person is the one who has to deal somehow with all of the stuff.
All year long we have been talking about the theme of journey. Life as a journey.
Right now during June we are talking about pit stops on the journey of life.
And our topic this morning is regrets on the journey of life. Things we’ve done that we regret. We a calling them tourist traps on the road trip of life.
Our biblical text are the letters of the Apostle Paul towards the end of his life written to his young friend Timothy. Paul is writing Timothy, whom he loves, to encourage him and to give him advice. But in the process Paul also reflects on his own life. He is writing from prison. It is a time of contemplation for Paul; a time to look back on his life and to try to figure out what it all means.
One of the things that the Apostle Paul writes about is his regrets. And he has some pretty serious regrets.
“I was formerly a blasphemer, a persecutor, and a man of violence,” Paul writes.
As a self-righteous rigid fundamentalist religious authority, Paul had cursed the name of Jesus, persecuted the followers of Jesus, and instigated the violence that led to the stoning to death of the apostle Stephen.
Paul has some pretty serious regrets.
So do some of us. Things we’ve done in our lives to people who loved us. Insensitive attitudes we’ve had earlier in our lives. Corners we cut. Angry things we've done. Cruel things we've done and said. People we used. People we turned our backs on we could have helped.
Many of us, maybe all of us, have regrets in our lives and the question is: On the journey of life, what do we do with our regrets.
In First Timothy, the Apostle Paul offers some possibilities. There are three things Paul does with his regrets that perhaps we can learn from. This is what we want to look at today. What do we do with a house full of regrets?
This is what Paul does: First of all, he faces them. He owns them right up front – Chapter one of his first letter to Timothy: I have regrets. “I was a blasphemer, a persecutor, and a man of violence.”
When regrets about things I’ve done or failed to do in my life come to mind my first impulse is to push them down … to push them away … to try not to think about them. I think it is called repression or denial or a combination of the two.
Paul does not try to hide from his regrets or deny them or repress them. He calls himself “the foremost” of sinners. He does not run from the memory of his sin.
Now I want to add that he doesn’t obsess on them either. He talks about them in First Timothy chapter One; he faces them, he owns them, and then he moves on. Because it is not our regrets that define us. It is not our sin that defines us.
But he doesn’t hide; he doesn’t run away from the reality of his regrets.
I find that the sins in my past that plague me the most are the ones I try the hardest not to think about. The ones I try to push out of my mind are the ones that wake me up in the middle of the night and attack me. But if I can confess them at least to myself and face them, my guilt loses its power over me and I can eventually let them go.
In my experience, however, it can take as much as a year of letting myself experience a sin I regret for my soul to be able to let it go – not experience it every day, but whenever it comes to mind. If I can face it and confess it, rather than deny it and repress it, it loses its power to define me or diminish me.
The Apostle Paul faced his regrets. “I was a blasphemer, a persecutor, and a man of violence,” he wrote to young Timothy in chapter one of his very first letter. This is not easy to do; to feel the pain of our regrets. But it is the beginning of healing.
The second thing Paul does with his regrets is that he understands them in the context of his situation in life. “I received mercy because I had acted ignorantly in unbelief,” he writes.
Yes, I have regrets but I did what I did because I was ignorant and without faith. I acted ignorantly in unbelief. I did not know any better.
Many of you remember Dee Lowman who was part of our staff for a number of years. She had a favorite quote and I believe it was a quote from Peter Storey of South Africa who will preach here in July. The quote is: “When we knew better, we did better.”
The Apostle Paul didn’t excuse himself but he did not exaggerate his own failings. He acknowledged that he did what he did because he just didn’t know any better.
He cuts himself a break.
Have you ever noticed how much easier it can be to understand and accept mistakes that other people have made in their lives than it is to understand and accept the mistakes that we have made in our own lives?
The psychiatrist M. Scott Peck, in his book The Road Less Travelle, said people can basically be divided into two groups – each of us belong to one of two broad groups – we have tendencies towards being either neurotic or sociopathic. Neurotics tend to blame our problems and the problems of the world on ourselves and feel guilty about them. Sociopaths blame their problems on others and feel anger toward them.
Most of us who show up in church are neurotic. We carry more than our fair share of blame. We think we should be perfect, sinless and blameless.
But many of the harmful things that we have done in life have been the consequence of ignorance, not being self-aware, not knowing better, not believing in ourselves, not trusting in God.
“I acted ignorantly in unbelief,” Paul says. I did what I did because I didn’t know any better.
Paul still takes responsibility for his sin but he understands that he is not perfect and does not demand perfection of himself. He does not punish himself more than he would want others punished.
Paul faces his regrets. He accepts his fallibility and imperfection.
And then, third, he trusts God to use his regrets. He trusts God to use his mistakes. He trusts God to use his sin.
“I received mercy,” Paul writes, “so that in me, as the foremost, Jesus Christ might display the utmost patience, making me an example to those who would come to believe in him for eternal life.”
This is what it means when the Bible talks about God as our redeemer … this fundamental trust that God takes even the parts of our lives that we most deeply regret and uses them for the sake of the kingdom of justice, inclusion, and grace that God invites humanity into.
Even our sin is redeemed because, when we face it and confess it and own it and experience the pain of it, it makes us more graceful. Our regrets actually have the possibility of making us more responsible, more caring, better persons.
God redeems our regrets. Our failures are redeemed. Our sin is redeemed. God takes what we meant to do harm and uses it for good.
Paul trusts God with his sin.
It is a hard thing to do … to trust God with our regrets. To say, in my ignorance and unawareness I did wrong to others and myself, the memory of it causes me pain, but I choose to trust God with even the wrong things I’ve done.
In the journey of life, out of ignorance, out of boredom, out of unbelief, we will harm others, we will harm ourselves, and we will harm the world. We have. We will.
We will carry the heavy weight of regret in the depth of our souls, but Christ invites us to give our regrets to him. To trust him even with our sin and guilt. Let it go. We have Christ’s permission to let it go.
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