I wonder
whether anyone has ever had a keener understanding of human nature than Mark
Twain. Consider his observations on
unproductive anxiety: “I’ve lived through terrible things in my life; some of
which actually happened.” On happiness:
“Grief can take care of itself, but to get the full value of joy you must have
somebody to divide it with.” On maturing—and
perhaps also on parenting: “When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I
could hardly stand to have the old man around.
But when I got to be 21 I was astonished at how much [he] had learned in
seven years.” On shame: “Man is the only
animal that blushes—or needs to.” On
moral purity: “A clear conscience is the sure sign of a bad memory.” And on New Year’s resolutions: “Now is the
accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them
as usual.”
We are not a
full month into a new year and yet many of us can already see the wreckage of
our resolutions strewn about us. I
recall one January 1st when I discovered that in the course of that
first and single day I had laid asunder all three of my New Year’s
resolutions—to lose a little weight, get more exercise, and watch less football
on television—by engaging in a ten-hour-long marathon of college bowl games
interrupted only by stuporous excursions to the refrigerator for more French
onion dip. This was, shall we say, an
inauspicious beginning.
And, of
course, the higher we aim the harder we fall.
So if we find ourselves in February or March without a perfect record of
keeping our checkbook balanced or sending birthday cards to relatives or
reading the New York Times from cover to cover then it is possible that we will
feel a tad of frustration—but unlikely we will experience a sense of deep
personal disappointment. We may,
however, take our failures harder if our pledges involved making truly profound
changes in ourselves: to be more loving, more generous, more grateful, more
patient, more forgiving, more faithful, more selfless, more like followers of
Jesus Christ. In such circumstances, we
may cry with Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Of what use to make heroic vows of amendment
if the same old law-breaker is to keep them?”
For many of
us, this emotional struggle is made worse by the fact that we don’t feel
comfortable talking about it with other people—perhaps even those who are
closest to us. After all, our “heroic
vows of amendment” often involve a battle with an inner demon, and demons tend
to be scary, unattractive, and alienating—not exactly the sort of thing you
want to show off in front of your friends, your family, your co-workers, your partner,
or your children.
Yet again,
Mark Twain understood perfectly. “Everyone
is a moon,” he declared, “and has a dark side which he never shows to
anybody.” Trying to bring light to that
long-hidden and darkened territory is daunting and challenging stuff,
particularly if we think we need to go it alone.
We find
references to this problem throughout the scriptures. One of my favorite examples appears in the
seventh chapter of Romans, where we hear Paul’s full-blown exasperation with
his own failures of resolve. “I do not do the thing I want, but I do the very
thing I hate,” he laments in verse 15. But
he continues. In verse 18: “I can will
what is right, but I cannot do it!” And
in verse 19: “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is
what I do!” Now, notice this: amidst all
this confession, Paul still keeps the details of his transgressions to
himself. “Everyone is a moon,” indeed;
even our sainted friend, Paul, who in these passages sounds an awful lot like
the rest of us.
Of course, the
obstacles are still more imposing when we cannot, or do not, or will not see the
faults we need to work on. This is the
special genius of those wonderful lines in Psalm 19, thrown in so casually they
are almost thrown away: “But who can detect their own errors? Oh, cleanse me from hidden faults.” These verses offset the psalm’s theme of
praise with one of humility—we may not even know what we don’t know—that
presses straight through to those magnificent closing verses: “Let the words of
my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable to you, O Lord, my rock
and my redeemer.”
This morning,
I want to try to persuade you that this dilemma—how we go about working deep
changes in ourselves given our fondness for our faults, and sometimes our
blindness to them—is a solvable one as long as we do not engage in three
different kinds of mistaken thinking.
If we fall into those errors, we run the risk of convincing ourselves
that we are stuck in the mud of our old habits and that our efforts to live
differently amount to nothing more than wheel spinning. But, if we can see those errors for what they
are, and move past them, then we have good reasons to be confident that we can shed
our old skin and put on some new.
The first
error occurs when our self-doubt, prior failures, or observations of the
struggles of others convince us that we cannot change—a self-fulfilling
prophecy that prompts us to abandon the project. My friends, this is simply wrong. Indeed, it is twice wrong.
It is wrong as
a matter of human psychology and development; we human beings are hardwired for
change—more change than we tend to believe.
Just a few weeks ago, a team of psychologists, led by Dr. Dan Gilbert of
Harvard, issued a new report finding that people generally underestimate how
much they can and will change. Based on
a study of more than 19,000 people (ranging from ages 18 to 68), Dr. Gilbert
and his colleagues concluded that we are inclined to think of who we are as a
relatively settled thing—even though later we see how much changing we still
had before us. Dr. Gilbert says: “[We often look back on our
earlier selves] with a mixture of amusement and chagrin. What we never seem to realize is that our
future selves will look back and think the very same thing about us. At every age we think we’re having the last
laugh, and at every age we’re wrong.”
Dr. Daniel
McAdams, a psychologist at Northwestern University who has studied the same
phenomenon, offers this example to illustrate the point. In the 1980s, at the height of the craze over
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Dr. McAdams had a conversation with his
four-year-old daughter. When he told her
that someday the Ninja Turtles might not be her favorite thing in the whole
wide world, she resisted—indeed, she refused to entertain the possibility. Of course, eventually other things did indeed
come to take their place in her heart, but here’s the most interesting point:
this illusion is not limited to four-year-olds; studies show that it appears
throughout young adulthood, middle age, and even our later years. (John Tierney, “Why You Won’t Be The Person
You Expect to Be,” The New York Times, January 3, 2013). It goes with the territory of being human.
More significantly,
though, a belief that we cannot or will not change is inconsistent with the central
tenets of our faith. If we cannot
change, then the calls we hear to do so from Moses, Jeremiah, John the Baptist,
Paul, and Jesus of Nazareth amount to nothing more than a cruel joke. And our faith does not just subscribe to the
idea that we can change; it adheres, with a sacred confidence, to the belief
that in our searching encounter with God we are already changed. As Paul
says in his second letter to the Corinthians, “if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation; everything old has passed away; everything has become new.”
This reminds me of one of my favorite passages from the writings of C.S. Lewis: “I pray because I can’t help myself. I pray because I’m helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time, waking and sleeping. It doesn’t change God. It changes me.”
So the first
error—which, as I say, is wrong both psychologically and theologically—is
thinking that we cannot and will not change.
We can. We will. By the holy grace of God, we are doing so right
now, at this very instant.
The second
error occurs when we think—and therefore behave—as though our faults are
hidden. I think that this, too, is twice
wrong. I suspect that more people know
more about our weaknesses than we would like to believe. But, more importantly, God knows about them,
every last one of them, no matter how vigorously we have labored to conceal or
deny them.
Indeed, the Bible is so absolutely clear on this point that it makes it two times in its first four chapters. As we all know, in Chapter 3 of Genesis, Adam and Eve try to hide their disobedience from God, and, in Chapter 4, Cain does the same—and all of them meet with the same level of success. God is not fooled and, at the risk of an extravagant understatement, is not amused. Proverb 15 tells us that “the eyes of the Lord are in every place,” and that includes all the places in ours hearts, minds, and souls—even the darkest places.
So the second
error lies in believing that we can keep our faults and our need to address
them to ourselves. We cannot, at least
with respect to God. Indeed, God already
has a very good grasp on those issues—thank you very much—and already knows, infinitely
better than we do, what needs to happen next.
Well, that
leads us to the third error, which occurs when we think that we have to effect
deep changes in ourselves alone and on our own horsepower. This, I want to suggest to you, is the
biggest mistake of all. And, to get at
just what a whopper it is, I want you to think about what it would mean if it
were true.
If this were
true, then there would be no reason for God to know what is in our hearts that
has anything to do with love. God would
just be like some kind of omniscient CIA agent, spying on us and collecting
data and turning us over to the proper authorities when we mess up—as we
invariably do. God would embody the most
sinister version imaginable of those unsettling holiday lyrics: “he knows if
you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake!”
No, no, and
no. God sees our faults and understands
what we need to do differently in these sloppy rag-tag lives of ours. But God puts this perfect knowledge of us to
work on our behalf. God uses it to bless
us, to move us, to illumine us, to inspire us, to connect us, sometimes even to
block and tackle for us, always to change us.
And, while we may give up on ourselves, God never gives up on us.
Toward the end of her book “Help, Thanks, Wow: Three Essential Prayers,” Anne Lamott writes this:
“God keeps giving,
forgiving, and inviting us back. [A friend] says this is a scandal, and that God has no common sense. God doesn’t say: ‘I have had it this time. You have
taken this course four times and you flunked again. What a joke.’
We get to keep starting over.
Lives change, sometimes quickly, but usually slowly.”
If you are
like me, your own change probably seems the slowest and most halting of
all. But I suppose we can take some
consolation in a God who could say “You think you’re a tough nut to
crack?! Let me tell you about some guys
named Moses and David and Peter and Paul. And how they struggled! I know; they talked to me about it ... all the time.”
Sisters and brothers in Christ, ours
is a God of hope and love. And, where
hope and love are possible, change is possible.
That is not just good news; it is, for our sordid and stubborn old
hearts, the best news—ever.
Amen.
A benediction: When I look out my window on this icy and frozen day, I can see no evidence that God is busily at work on spring. And, yet, I know that He is. Go forth into this good day knowing that--even when you cannot see it--God is also busily at work on you, with you, for you. And know that you are blessed that this is so.
