What are you doing here?

“What are you doing here?" The Dover Church
June 26, 2011 – Second Sunday after Pentecost
Scripture: Psalm 34, Matthew 7:21-29

“What are you doing here?” The words came out gently enough, but I can still remember how stunned I was by the question. I was sitting across the desk from my seminary professor of St. Paul and his letters. He had invited me to stop by his office “to talk.” Having been a professor myself before going to seminary, I had assumed that he wanted to talk about my academic progress and the quality of my work in his seminar, or the lack thereof. That’s what I had invited my students to my office to talk about. This professor, however, was a committed Methodist preacher and pastor before he was a serious professor of New Testament, whereas I had been just some guy studying Vikings, Old Norse mythology and medieval Icelandic sagas. I was speechless, which is pretty drastic for me, when, after shaking my hand and offering me a seat across the desk from him, my professor started our conversation with the question: “What are doing here?”
I felt like the proverbial deer in the headlights. It was as if my brain both froze and started running in circles at the same time. What did he mean by that? Did he mean: What are you doing here? Or what are you doing here? Or what are you doing here? Or what are you doing here? Having just come out of the academic world of graded achievement, I heard his question as a critical challenge, as in, “What is your problem?” or “How is it that you don’t seem to know what you ought to know?” or even, “I thought you already had a Ph.D. How can you possibly be as academically incompetent as you seem to be?” Or did he mean “here” as in “in his office, or “here” as in “What is a professor of Scandinavian Studies doing here in seminary?”
So I puffed myself up, went for the big picture answer, and told him. “I am here to find God. I really want to live in the presence of God, know God firsthand, have God lead me in my life. All the promises of God in the Bible – I want them to be real in my life.” Having gotten up a head of steam, I launched into my big plan of finding God through a combination of intensive theological study and disciplined prayer. I wanted to know everything there was to know academically about God and I wanted to learn how to get myself on God’s wave length through the practice of spiritual disciplines. Satisfied that I had given a suitably coherent, comprehensive and impressive answer, I sat back and caught my breath.
Paul looked at me with a warm and genuine smile and said, “that's great, Mr. Olmstead.” (He always called everyone Mr., Mrs., Ms. or Miss, even the students who insisted that he call them by their first names) “But allow me to reframe your objective for you, if you don’t mind. Would the Kingdom of God, being a kingdom person living a kingdom life, if you will, be enough for you?”
He smiled again, leaned in a little closer, and continued, “We are, after all, supposed to be disciples of Jesus Christ in this seminary. You yourself are preparing to be a minister of the Church of Jesus Christ in this seminary. Let us not forget (which meant me, because he certainly hadn’t forgotten) that the thing Jesus preached was the Kingdom of God, being a kingdom person living a kingdom life.
“How about that, Max?” he asked with another warm smile, using my Christian name. “Would that satisfy you?”
I didn't know where he was going with this, so I reverted to teenage discourse and mumbled, “Sure. I don't really know, but I guess so.”
“Fine,” he said. “Then open your Bible, I know you have one because I've seen it on your desk in class, open it to chapters 5-7 in the Gospel according to St. Matthew and read Jesus' Sermon on the Mount. Those two chapters are about how to do just that, what the Kingdom of God is, and how to be a kingdom person living a kingdom life. The Beatitudes, the salt and the light and leaven, the Lord's Prayer, the mustard seed and the hidden treasure, loving enemies, not judging, it's all in there.”
No need to jot that down. I could remember Matthew 5-7, so I just nodded my head. He looked at me with a twinkle in his eye and said, “Then just do it.”
“Just do it?” I asked incredulously. "This guy has to have a screw loose. There must be more to it than that," I thought to myself.
“Yes, Max. Just do it. Get back to basics. Jesus is the Master and we are disciples. He teaches. We do. He leads. We follow. The Sermon on the Mount is about what we do and how we follow. It's about how to be a kingdom person living a kingdom life. Read those two chapters from Matthew and just do it. Don't get side tracked by a lot of analytical or interpretive thinking. Just do what Jesus says and see what happens. Contrary to what some other professors around here might be teaching, the main points are pretty black and white once you understand the context and know your Isaiah. The time you might spend trying to make it more complex, subtle, nuanced or theoretical than it is is just Satan’s way of keeping you from getting down to kingdom living. (“Ah, there’s the Methodist pastor talking,” I thought) It's just like any other discipline, running, dieting, saving money. You just have to do it to reach your goal. There are no short cuts.”
“Don’t misunderstand me,” he went on. “It will be hard work and you will have to make some tough choices. It is a lot more radical than anything I hear being preached these days, more radical than what most of the people you will be preaching to, liberals or conservatives, will want to hear. Most people rejected what Jesus had to say, so don’t think this is going to be a picnic. BUT…All the promises of God, the deliverance and salvation, the joy and abundant life, the light, the peace which passes all understanding, the healing and community, the return from exile, they'll become your reality. If that is what you want, Max, being a kingdom person living a kingdom life, just do it."
He paused again, with that amused look he had, and said, “and I'm pretty sure you will experience the presence of God along the way.”
I felt like Beaver Cleaver saying, “Gee, thanks, Professor Sampley.”
Then he added, as a seeming afterthought, “Oh, and don't forget the grace.”
“Don't forget the grace? He says he's a Christian but this is sounding Zen to me," I thought. I managed a pathetic, “how so?”
“The grace, Max. The grace of God that makes anything and everything possible. If you leave this office and actually feel moved to read the Sermon on the Mount, that will be by the grace of God. If, having read something in the Sermon that opens your eyes and heart to a place of change in your life, that will be by the grace of God. If, having read and understood, you feel moved to actually start doing it and then actually do start doing it, that will be by the grace of God. If, having started doing, you find yourself being a kingdom person living a kingdom life, and it grabs you enough to keep you doing it during the tiring, boring, uneventful and unfulfilling times, amidst all the apparent setbacks, enough so that this doing becomes your way of life, that will be by the grace of God. Yes, don't forget the grace, Max. Recognizing the grace is the same thing as living the active presence of God you so much want to experience.”
Having grown up in a church where a lot of people thought that congregationalism meant "anything goes," being a modern American who resisted imitation and obedience, who felt that mature adults had to find their own way, break their own paths, think for themselves, not wanting to just buy into some program, parts of which might not "work" for me, I boldly blurted out, “and if I don’t? Don’t do any of those things? Don’t get started? Don’t follow through? Don’t stick with it?” “Well, Max,” Professor Sampley smiled, “that will be your choice. You will be worshipping and following a God of you own making. There's plenty of room for individual initiative and thinking things through when you follow Jesus, but you'll never know what being a kingdom person living a kingdom life is like until you do it."
And that is our lesson for this morning. Jesus and his way of life, kingdom living, is the rock on which we are invited to build our lives. The winds do blow and the rains do fall and the waters do rise and we have to choose whether we will stagger about on the shifting sands, the shifting sands of either the same old project which hasn’t been working out for us but which we keep insisting on trying to make work, the shifting sands of the latest, greatest solution to life according to some expert we saw on TV, or if we will build our lives on the solid rock of our Lord and Savior. Paul Sampley was right: it has been hard work with difficult choices, plenty of people have not liked what I have to say or do, and there have been plenty of times when I have been oh so tempted to just give up because I wasn’t feeling anything, but it really has been as simple as just doing it and the reward has been a faithful way of leaning into, opening up, to life, knowing God is with me. It was the grace of God that put my professor in my path that day to be my pastor. As your pastor, I’d like to be that instrument of God’s grace for you. What are you doing here? Would being a kingdom person living a kingdom life satisfy you? Then read the Sermon on the Mount and just do what Jesus says....and don't forget the grace. Amen.