Lent 2

Have you ever heard the little poem that goes something like this?

Two prisoners there were who looked through bars,
One saw mud, the other saw stars.

Two basic attitudes toward life. What do you see when you look at life? Do you see mud? Or do you see stars?

Of course, a lot of what we see is relative.

A man went to his rabbi and complained, “Life is unbearable. There are nine of us living in one room. What can I do?”

The rabbi answered, “Bring your goat to live in the room with you.” The man was incredulous, but the rabbi insisted, “Do as I say and come back in a week.”

A week later the man came back looking more distraught than before. “We can’t stand it,” he told the rabbi, “The goat is filthy.”

The rabbi then told him, “Go home and let the goat out. And come back in a week.”

A radiant man returned to the rabbi a week later, exclaiming, “Life is beautiful. We enjoy every minute of it now that there’s no goat – only the nine of us.”

Sig Paulson has something to say on this matter. He writes: “On a flight from Jamaica to New York City, I had a most interesting lesson in the importance of vision. As I looked at the beautiful cloud formations over the water, I became aware that there was a flaw in the window through which I was looking. There was a little blemish in the glass, and as I tried to look through that blemish at the beautiful scene, I found that it was completely distorted and thrown out of focus. Nothing had happened to the scenery that I was viewing. It was merely that the window through which I was looking had a flaw in it.”

Are you looking at life through a flawed window? What do you see: mud or stars? The Biblical insight is that we are a mixture of both mud and stars. Paul says to us in Philippians 3:20, “We are citizens of heaven. . . “

But there is a lot in us that is not heavenly. We still inhabit these clay bodies. We still wrestle with the flesh that is the earthly vehicle for our spirits. We contain the essences of both heaven and earth. And, as the poet says:

Within my earthly temple there’s a crowd: There’s one of us that’s humble, one that’s proud,

There’s one that’s broken-hearted for his sins, and one that, unrepentant, sits and grins.

There’s one that loves his neighbor as himself, and one that cares for naught but fame and self,

From much corroding care I should be free, if I could once determine which is me!

Yes, part of us is mud, which holds us back from reaching our full potential. We’re like the caterpillar.

There is a potential butterfly hidden away beneath the exterior of the crawling caterpillar. But not all caterpillars become butterflies.

Entomologists tell us that sometimes a fly will deposit an egg into a caterpillar’s body. When the egg hatches, the newborn grub begins to feed upon the caterpillar, consuming those elements which would normally allow it to become a butterfly. The caterpillar suffers no pain and does not even feel that anything is wrong. It continues to eat and grow and live its life as before, but it will never become a butterfly. The grub has destroyed its capacity to advance. The winged creature which might have been is no longer possible.

We’re aware that something like that could happen to us. We’re aware of our own worm nature. But is it yet possible for us to be butterflies?

In Philippians 3:19 Paul speaks of those whose god is their bodily desires. The Bible is very candid about the struggle to overcome the earthly side of our nature. And that struggle goes on within the hearts of even the best of us.

Some look at life and only see mud. When Abraham – still called Abram in the 15th chapter of Genesis – was doubting the significance of his own life, God told him to look at the stars. “The Lord took him outside and said, ‘Look at the sky and try to count the stars; you will have as many descendants as that.’” But Abram had his eyes fixed on his own aging body – on the clay – and he wondered how he and Sarah could ever have any children. And God told him not to look at the clay but at the stars.

We are more than mud. Our lives do have significance. Under the clay of our bodies lies a golden inner self, a spirit, a personality that transcends mud. Our bodies are the temple of the living God.

In the Cathedral of Chartres in France, among the numerous small sculptures over one of the side portals, there is one that shows God the Creator, and behind him, only partially shown, is the first man. He is still half covered by God, as if he were between nothingness and being. The eyes of both are looking in the same direction, and their faces are unmistakably similar. The little sculpture is often called “Adam in the mind of God.”

This is Adam as God thinks of him. This is the true view of humankind: being similar to God and looking in the same direction. This is God’s view of people, whom God conceived and created. This is the view of people as they actually are.

Now I’m guessing that all of us would like to see the ‘stars’ part of us be stronger than the ‘mud’ part of us, as that is the part that is closest to God. But there is a journey we must take if we would allow our citizenship in heaven to take precedence over our citizenship on earth.

In the early years of flight, a pilot unexpectedly found one of his controls vibrating oddly. Having driven several rats from the tail of his plane before he left the hanger, he suspected that another rat was chewing at the control cord running from the tail assembly to the cockpit. He knew that if the rat chewed through the cord he would crash, yet there was no way for him to frighten off the rat. The airport was twenty minutes away, and the cord would most likely be bitten through before he could reach the ground.

Suddenly he knew what to do. He remembered hearing that rats were strictly lowland creatures. So he put his plane into the steepest climb possible and took it to the highest altitude that it would go. Although the motor sputtered a bit, and he felt slightly giddy because of the thin air, the chewing vibrations gradually ceased. A few minutes later he descended to his normal altitude and continued to the airport with no further trouble. Checking the tail section after landing, he found not one, but three rats, all dead from the lack of oxygen. The control cord had been nearly severed in two places.

The point should be clear. If we would prevent the rats from destroying our control, as it were, we must climb higher.

God told Abram to look up at the sky and count the stars. We can do this. For we are much more than clay. We are citizens of heaven.