Wax On - Wax Off

If you don’t understand this cultural reference, it’s from the movie, The Karate Kid. The main character in the movie is a teenage boy, Daniel who has just moved to town and is getting bullied. In order to stop it, he wants to learn karate. He meets up with the manager of his apartment building, Mr. Miyage who agrees to teach him. One requirement of this agreement is that Daniel must obey Mr. Miyage’s instructions even if they don’t seem to have anything to do with learning karate. Daniel agrees and the first thing Mr. Miyage does is hand Daniel a sponge and tells him to wash and wax his collection of classic cars. Mr. Miyago gives very specific instructions – one hand he’s to make wide circles to the right to put the wax on and with the other make wide circles to the left to take it off. He is also to breathe deeply, in through his nose and out through his mouth. Mr. Miyage watches him carefully and when Daniel forgets the instructions, Mr. Miyage calls out to him, “Wax on – Wax off,” while making the required motions.

“In the weeks that follow, Miyagi gives Daniel further chores to complete with similar instructions on technique: sanding a walkway that leads around Miyagi's backyard (landscaped to be a Japanese garden), staining the fence that surrounds his property and painting his house. With each new chore, Daniel's frustration grows at the seeming lack of any karate training and Miyagi's minimal praise of his work. One night, after finishing the painting of Miyagi's house, Daniel expresses his frustration to his teacher. Miyagi tells Daniel to show him how he washed and polished the cars. … and orders Daniel to show him the motions he'd been using to do the chores. Daniel quickly realizes that the chores … were also practice for defensive moves, exercises to build muscle tone and build his reflexes. After a few minutes of practice, Miyagi suddenly yells and throws several punches and kicks at Daniel, all of which Daniel blocks easily.”[1]

It turns out that what Daniel had been doing for all those weeks was building muscle and stamina, yes, but also created muscle memory. You may have heard the saying, “Practice makes perfect,” but really practice just builds muscle memory. Muscle memory is what helps us be able to ride a bike, even if we haven’t been on one in years, for example, or play the piano or type – excuse me, keyboard without looking at your hands.

Most of us count on muscle memory to be able to perform specific actions without having to think about it. I remember when we used to go ingathering (If you don’t know what that is, ask an Adventist older than 45.) Some of us would walk from door to door while some would ride in the back of a pick-up truck that drove slowly down the streets. The folks in the truck would be singing Christmas carols. I was always amazed that one of the carolers would bring along either her knitting or crocheting (I don’t remember which), and while she sang, her hands would be busy doing her needlework…in the dark! This same person could play the piano for church and carry on a conversation with someone at the same time...still boggles my mind!

Anyway, those are all the good things about doing something over and over until you don’t have to think about it anymore. There’s also a downside – you don’t have to think about it anymore and when that happens in your worship experience, you have a problem.

At the beginning of Zechariah 7, a delegation come to Jerusalem to ask the priests a question.

"Now in the fourth year of King Darius it came to pass that the word of the Lord came to Zechariah, on the fourth day of the ninth month, Chislev, when the people sent Sherezer, with Regem-Melech and his men, to the house of God, to pray before the Lord, and to ask the priests who were in the house of the Lord of hosts, and the prophets, saying, ‘Should I weep in the fifth month and fast as I have done for so many years?’
Then the word of the Lord of hosts came to me, saying, ‘Say to all the people of the land, and to the priests: “When you fasted and mourned in the fifth and seventh months during those seventy years, did you really fast for Me—for Me?”’” Zechariah 7:1-5

During all the time they had been in exile in Babylon, God’s people had fasted in the fourth month to remember when the walls of Jerusalem had been breached, in the fifth month to remember the destruction of the temple, in the seventh month for the Day of Atonement, and in the tenth month they fasted to mourn the siege against Jerusalem. The Day of Atonement was the only fast commanded by God through Moses.

Through Zechariah, God points the delegation to the purpose of their fasting. Were they just going through the motions? Were they thinking about the things the fasting was to commemorate? Or was it just one more thing to check off their To Do lists?

“According to the [New York] Times, people are paying as much as $3,484 a week to visit health spas where they go without food. One spa in Desert Hot Springs, California, is booked through October with a clientele that includes celebrities Ben Affleck and Courtney Love. Fashion designers and mortgage brokers have joined the fasting trend. Instead of stuffing themselves with steak and lobster, they subsist on apple-celery cocktails, herbal teas, laxatives, bee pollen, blended soups, and water mixed with squeezed lemons, Celtic Sea salt, and honey.
“… Fasters claim that a 4- to 30-day regimen not only helps them lose weight but has spiritual benefits, as well. ‘It used to be that people who came in to fast talked about weight loss,’ said Stephanie Paradise, owner of the New Age Health Spa in Neversink, N.Y. Now, she says, it's about ‘detoxing the mind, body and spirit.’
“Not all of the fasters are doing it for spiritual reasons, however. Natalia Rose, a nutritional consultant, appeals to their vanity. She organizes four-day fasting weekends for women that include motivational trips to a fashionable department store, to ‘remind them what it's all for.’”[2]

For the Jews, fasting wasn’t the point – remembering how God had led and taken care of them was.

Going to church every week, in and of itself, isn’t the point. Especially not if we’re just going through the motions or if we’re just going to see our friend and have social time.

Turning off the TV on Sabbath doesn’t make God happy if we sleep the day away or spend that time anxiously waiting for sundown so we can do what we really want to do.

Calling ourselves Christians doesn’t make God happy, especially if we’ve become just “Cultural Christians,” who look and act like Christians, but without any relationship to Jesus Christ. Cultural Christians are just going through the motions because that’s what their parents and friends do.

We need to make our relationship with Jesus a daily conscious choice and stop just going through the motions.

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[1] The Karate Kid, IMDb, Copyright © 1990-2013 IMDb.com, Inc., http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087538/synopsis

[2] Peter Larson, "Fashionable Fasting," the PRISM E-pistle (9-3-03); submitted by Marshall Shelley, Wheaton, Illinois

Hollow

“I hate, I despise your feast days, and I do not savor your sacred assemblies. Though you offer Me burnt offerings and your grain offerings, I will not accept them, Nor will I regard your fattened peace offerings. Take away from Me the noise of your songs, for I will not hear the melody of your stringed instruments.” Amos 5:21-23

Prophets have a hard job. God tells them what to say, and then they have to stand up in front of people and say it. And the message that God gives them is rarely, “Great job, folks! Keep it up!”

Even so, these particular verses from Amos seem harsh. Imagine if your preacher stood up in the pulpit and said, “This is what God has told me to say to you: ‘I hate, I despise your potlucks and your worship services. Even though you offer Me your tithe and your offering, I will not accept them. Take away from Me the noise your praise songs and hymns, for I will not hear the melody of your pianos, organs, guitars or drums.”

It sure sounds like God hates church! Why would He hate church? What God hates is hollow worship – where people just go through the motions. I think we’ve probably all done that from time to time. Maybe we’ve had a really rough week, so we come to church and we stand when the congregation stands, kneel when everybody kneels, we may even talk to people we know. We sit through the whole service but we leave without ever being mentally or spiritually touched by anything that went on. If anybody asked us what the message was, we probably couldn’t tell them.

Imagine though, if that went on for so long, that we accept that as how things should be. We’re just going through the motions – we look like Christians, we act like Christians, we even think we are Christians, but we have so relationship with God at all. And that’s what God hates – hollow Christians.

Amos was talking to the Jews of his time. Jesus said pretty much the same things to the Jews of His time.

“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith. These you ought to have done, without leaving the others undone. Blind guides, who strain out a gnat and swallow a camel!

“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you cleanse the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of extortion and self-indulgence. Blind Pharisee, first cleanse the inside of the cup and dish, that the outside of them may be clean also.

“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs which indeed appear beautiful outwardly, but inside are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness. Even so you also outwardly appear righteous to men, but inside you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.” Matthew 23:23-28

The scribes and the Pharisees were hollow just like their worship. They made sure they did all the right things, wore the right clothes, and ate all the right foods, but it was all for show. In their hearts they were terrible people who took advantage of people who sincerely were seeking God.

John Boykin explains in his column, “The Gospel of Coincidence.”

“What was so bad about [the Pharisees'] hypocrisy? If we think of it as consisting merely in their teaching or pretending one thing while in fact practicing something contradictory, we will miss Jesus' main point. What He nailed them for was that they were using God and the things of God as a means to some other end. That's what was insidious about the Pharisees' example. ‘They do all their deeds to be noticed by men’ (Matthew 23:5). ... Theirs was a problem of priorities: their first priority was social status, to which end God was but a means. What greater affront to God could there be? Better to ignore Him altogether than to exploit Him as a means to something else you value more highly.”[1]

Why are we Christians? Why do we go to the church we do? Is coming to church mainly our social event of the week? Are we more concerned about what we wear than what we hear from the pulpit? Do we worry more about the form of worship than actually worshipping? And what difference does it make, anyway? Isn’t it more important that we’re there than not being involved at all?

“Jesus spoke as one having knowledge and authority. The denunciation he uttered against the Jews condemned their formalism and hypocrisy. His scathing rebukes and denunciation of formalism have the same force today as they had in the days of the scribes and Pharisees, and apply to those who have a form of godliness, but deny the power thereof. The God of infinite holiness cannot accept external service as spiritual worship. Those who worship God must worship him in spirit and truth, or their service is vain. There must be reality in the religious ceremonies, or they are simply pretensions, hollow abominations. But though Jesus rebuked the priests and religious teachers for their formalism and hypocrisy, yet how forbearing and tender were his lessons to the poor, the oppressed, the afflicted, and discouraged. The priests and rulers, the scribes and Pharisees, destroyed the living pastures, and defiled the well-springs of the water of life. By their false precepts they confused the understanding, and clouded that which was clear. They misrepresented God by their hardness of heart, by their impurity, pride, and selfishness. They made God altogether such a one as themselves. Their imagination was darkened and polluted by their wicked works. Because of their religious degeneracy they could discern nothing that pertained to the spiritual kingdom of Christ. Through rejecting the messages of mercy brought to them by the Lord of light and glory, they became, in their stubborn resistance, past feeling. They had evidence in abundance of the divine character and mission of Christ, and increased evidence would only have increased their guilt. Thinking themselves to be wise, they became fools. As men do today, so they did then, and used the very intellect that God had given them to brand with falsehood his eternal truth.” (E.G. White, Sabbath School Worker, December 1, 1894)

So, what’s it going to be for us? Are we going to take our lead from the Pharisees or from Jesus? Will we allow the vessel to become more important to us than the contents? Are we going to worry more about how people are dressed at church than that they’re at church at all? Are we going to come to church to meet our friends or to meet with God? Are we going to let the formality of our church service get between God and a searching heart?

God is longing to meet us and inhabit our worship. Let’s not let our worship be hollow anymore. Let’s not wait to hear, “Woe unto you!” Let’s fill our hearts and minds with the spirit of praise.

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[1] John Boykin, The Gospel of Coincidence, Christianity Today, Vol. 39, no. 5

Going Through the Motions

Thoughts on the Sabbath School Lesson for 12.1.12

Have you ever gotten home from work but you don’t remember driving there? You’re on auto-pilot. It happens whenever we’ve done something so many times that our brain doesn’t really have to engage in what we’re doing to make it happen. It’s almost like our muscles just take over: tying our shoes, playing a musical instrument, typing.

You can probably think of lots of things that have become like that for you. You’ve seen, or maybe you are one of those folks who can knit or crochet so well that you don’t need to see what you’re doing. I used to wear contact lenses and sometimes I’d wake up in the night and not be able to remember if I’d taken my contacts off or not. Of course it was easy to find out – if I could see more than a foot away, then I needed to get up and take them out.

Anyway, being on auto-pilot is not necessarily a bad thing. Imagine if you had to think about every step you took, everywhere we walked? There was a time when most of us had to think of how to form every letter and how to spell every word when we wrote things down. When you sign something now, our hands pretty much knows what to do without our help.

Being on auto-pilot isn’t necessarily a good thing either, though – some folks, who’ve been married a really long time can say “I love you” without really thinking about it. Sometimes they might be talking to someone besides their spouse on the phone and they’ll end the conversation with “I love you” but the person on the phone is a business associate instead of their spouse. That can be pretty awkward.

Sometimes our worship can become so automatic that our brain disengages from it and we find ourselves just going through the motions. We go to church, stand up, sit down and kneel at all the right times, but we’re not actually involved in the worship service beyond just being a warm body sitting in the pew. We’re just there because it’s become a habit – just another thing we do in our lives.

Going through the motions can be particularly tragic when we’re talking about some of the really meaningful ceremonies of our worship service – baptism, foot-washing, and communion.

I know, I can hear you, “Hey, how can baptism become routine, I only do that once.” And you’re right, but sometimes our on-going experience of having been baptized can become stale. Remember how the church at Ephesus was described in Revelation?

“I know thy works, and thy labour, and thy patience, and how thou canst not bear them which are evil: and thou hast tried them which say they are apostles, and are not, and hast found them liars:  And hast borne, and hast patience, and for my name's sake hast laboured, and hast not fainted.  Nevertheless I have somewhat against thee, because thou hast left thy first love.” Revelation 2:2-4

See? They were doing all the right things, but they were just going through the motions. The instructions for resolving that problem come in verse 5: 

“Remember therefore from whence thou art fallen, and repent, and do the first works; or else I will come unto thee quickly, and will remove thy candlestick out of his place, except thou repent.” Revelation 2:5

Jesus also left us with a reminder of baptism to keep the experience more fixed in our minds. Just before the Last Supper, when He gathered with all 12 of the disciples in the upper room.

“Jesus knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he was come from God, and went to God; He riseth from supper, and laid aside his garments; and took a towel, and girded himself. After that he poureth water into a bason, and began to wash the disciples' feet, and to wipe them with the towel wherewith he was girded. Then cometh he to Simon Peter: and Peter saith unto him, Lord, dost thou wash my feet? Jesus answered and said unto him, What I do thou knowest not now; but thou shalt know hereafter Peter saith unto him, Thou shalt never wash my feet. Jesus answered him, If I wash thee not, thou hast no part with me. Simon Peter saith unto him, Lord, not my feet only, but also my hands and my head. Jesus saith to him, He that is washed needeth not save to wash his feet, but is clean every whit: and ye are clean, but not all. For he knew who should betray him; therefore said he, Ye are not all clean. So after he had washed their feet, and had taken his garments, and was set down again, he said unto them, Know ye what I have done to you?" John 13:3-12

Footwashing or the Ordinance of Humility as our church calls it, is a reminder that we fall daily into sin and that Jesus and His sacrifice are our only hope for salvation.

Footwashing is an important time within our church families to remind us of our baptism experience.

On that same evening, in that same upper room, Jesus also gave us Communion.

“And as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and blessed it, and brake it, and gave it to the disciples, and said, Take, eat; this is my body.  And he took the cup, and gave thanks, and gave it to them, saying, Drink ye all of it; For this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins. But I say unto you, I will not drink henceforth of this fruit of the vine, until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father's kingdom.” Matthew 26:26-29

Isn’t that an amazing promise – “I will not drink henceforth of this fruit of the vine, until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father's kingdom.” We will be with Him in the kingdom!

Let’s not let Baptism, The Ordinance of Humility and the Communion Service become one more case of auto-pilot. Stay focused!