This week I’ve fielded a number of requests for a video or podcast of the message I delivered in Sarasota this past weekend. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be one available. So today’s blog post offers the next best thing – a transcript of my notes.

If you speak in public then you understand the limitations of text. There’s no way to replicate “live”; the interactive element is lost – including deviations, pauses, asides, responses from the pews, amens, tears, and much more.

Once in a while everything works together to create a uniquely meaningful experience, and I’ve got to say my visit to Sarasota was certainly one of those times. When it was over, the congregation gifted me with a standing ovation, and while I’m not a big “applause in church” person, I received it as the best way the members of Trinity had of saying “thank you.”

Warning, this is a long post – 2,600 words as opposed to my usual 500. But I believe it might well be worth the read.

Live Like You Mean It!

(notes for the journey to Jerusalem)

• Micah 6:1-8
• Reading from Reaching Toward Easter:  “REDIRECT” – (pp 132-133)
• Revelation 21:22 – 22:5

Good morning. Most of you know me because of my brother, Geoff Maul. Geoff was an active member of this faith community up to the exact moment that he died, March 12, 2012. He was a few days shy of 58, the age I will be this Wednesday.

Geoff attended morning worship here in this sanctuary the day before he passed away, and he departed this world with many members of the choir and his friends from Spirit Café (along with his family) literally singing back up for his goodbye.

I hesitate to talk about such a poignant moment, because I’m such a crybaby and to be honest I’m still a little scared of my emotions (something Geoff certainly never was!)… But this story is so relevant and so appropriate to this morning’s message that it would be wrong to skip over it in any way.

LIFE: Because today’s message is about life! It’s about the kind of life that carries far more weight than the testimony offered by the feeble physical iteration of self that is limited to these bodies, bodies that tend to give us so much trouble! It’s the kind of life that adds a dimension to our experience as human beings that cannot be accounted for in any way other than Jesus.

Jesus, talking about life in John’s gospel, referred to it this way. “I came that you all (he was evidently from the south) may have life, and have it abundantly!” Or, as Eugene Peterson paraphrased the thought in The Message, “Real and eternal life, more and better life than [you] ever dreamed of.”

The apostle Paul, writing to his friend Timothy, expanded on the idea: “Tell those rich in this world’s wealth to quit being so full of themselves and so obsessed with money, which is here today and gone tomorrow. Tell them to go after God, who piles on all the riches we could ever manage—to do good, to be rich in helping others, to be extravagantly generous. If they do that, they’ll build a treasury that will last, gaining life that is truly life.” (1 Tim 6:17-19)

What we’re talking about this morning is exactly that: “The Life that is truly life!”

In Day 17 of Reaching Toward Easter I tell the story of sitting next to an attorney on a flight to Kansas. He was returning from Miami, where he’d delivered a $260,000 check to the beneficiaries of a trust. They had no idea the money was coming.

I asked the man why he didn’t just mail the check. “Are you kidding?” he replied, “and miss the opportunity to share such a life-transforming gift in person?”

“I can’t help thinking about how easily I let you duck out of our conversation about faith earlier,” I replied. “The Good News of the Gospel is more transformational than $260,000 and a trip to Miami, yet you wouldn’t have guessed that from the way I was talking! I held it out like a limp handshake and I’m supposed to be talking about The life that is truly life!”

OUR MISSION: Seven months ago my wife, Rebekah, and I moved for only the 2nd time in 31 years of ministry. The reason we did this was that the church she served in Brandon – for almost 17 amazing years – had evolved into the most faithful and committed group of Jesus-followers we have ever known.

“If we had stayed,” Rebekah said, “I could have experienced another ten-plus years of guaranteed affirming, encouraging, rewarding… relaxing ministry.”

In short, and this is my assessment as “The Preacher’s Husband,” the church in Brandon was too healthy to justify turning down the invitation to move.

Fact is, there are too many churches in too many communities that find themselves in desperate need of a serious charge of life. God offered us one more opportunity to match our passion with His purposes, and so moving to Wake Forest was a “no-brainer.”

SO WHAT? Why is this relevant to this morning’s message? Well, the short answer is that both Rebekah and I have become committed to living creative lives in service of our conviction that it is God’s plan for every human being on the face of this good earth to “Live like they mean it,” to live an abundant life.

That’s why God sent Jesus. That’s why this six-week run-up to Easter is so important. That’s why, this morning, I came all the way from North Carolina to share these “Notes for the journey to Jerusalem.”

Because we are all on a journey, in one-way or another. There is no such thing as standing still. We’re either moving toward Jerusalem, or we’re slipping away. As explorer/missionary David Livingston said after tragedy struck in Africa: “I’m prepared to go anywhere, provided it be forward.”

Regardless of our past, our unique moment of conversion, our brushes with confusion, our conscious turning away, our philosophical thoughts about maybe, one day, considering Jesus….   It is this Lenten journey, this week, this day, this moment – always – that we face the opportunity to take one step farther down the dusty road and renew our commitment not only to accept the transformational love of God but to live into that transformation as participants in what Easter makes possible.

REVELATION: Our reading from the book of Revelation this morning does not come from the usual collection of traditional Lenten passages. But I want to refer to it because it speaks directly to what this new life in Christ looks like.

The scripture tells us that

1. The glory of God provides the light
2. The river of life flows from the light and life that – in turn – flow out of God
3. The doors of the city are always open
4. The leaves of the trees alongside the river of life are for the healing of the nations

I believe that our responsibility… our ministry… our opportunity as children of the light, is to be those leaves, products of the tree of life, and to offer ourselves for the healing of the nations.

RESURRECTION: One of the final miracles of Jesus – before he entered Jerusalem that first Palm Sunday – was the raising of Lazarus from the dead.

I’m sure you remember the story. Jesus went to the tomb, and then called his friend out.

“Lazarus,” we would say, “had been bought ____ to life.”

What was that missing word? “Back”. He was returned “back” to a state of life.

Later, maybe a few months, maybe a few years, but eventually, what happened to Lazarus? That’s right, he died.

The life Lazarus was bought back to was – essentially – the same life he had before.

Now fast forward in your minds to Easter Sunday. The resurrection of Jesus. Jesus was not bought BACK to life.

No, he wasn’t. When Jesus was resurrected he was resurrected not back, but FORWARD, INTO NEW LIFE. This was a life that didn’t – won’t ever – end in death.

This is the Jesus quality of life! It’s the quality of new life that we are called into when we make the decision to follow Jesus.

We, the body of Christ, are RESURRECTION PEOPLE!

2^nd WEEK OF CREATION: I’d like us to think about Easter in the following way:

• Back in Genesis; there was evening and there was morning, the first day. Then there was evening and there was morning, all the way through the sixth day. Then, on the seventh day, God rested.
• “So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all the work that he had done in creation.”
• So, six days of creation, plus one, and there was the first week.
• Now comes Easter morning. Jesus was resurrected – resurrected FORWARD – into a new kind of life. Jesus ushered in what I like to refer to as The Second Week of Creation. And that, my good friends at Trinity, is where we live. We live in the second week of creation. We are – as Paul says – a new creation in Christ

“So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! (2 Corinthians 5:17)

All this, then, is by way of explaining – somewhat – in a roundabout kind of a way – why I chose the Micah passage for this morning’s other scripture reading.

MICAH: With what shall I come before the Lord, the prophet asks, rhetorically; (and it’s a good question). and bow myself before God on high? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings? with calves a year old? …. (Do I bring God the same-old, same-old?)Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams? with ten thousands of rivers of oil?…. (Is God even a little bit impressed with what we’re impressed with?) Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?”…. (You mean, like the pagans, trying to buy their own salvation with the blood of the innocents….)

No, not in a million years! “Pay attention,” the prophet is saying; “it’s not that complicated… Because…”

He has told you – O members of Trinity MCC… O members of First Methodist, First Presbyterian, First Whatever, St. Whoever Catholic… First Southern Judge the World Church of the Only Truly Saved, First Christian, First Assembly of God, First Megachurch of slick preaching and easy answers…. –

He has told you what is good; and what does the Lord require of you? but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God!!

Please, please, O please… the Lord is telling anyone who is willing to listen. Stop using religion to prop up your status quo; your nostalgia; your “we’re never going to change”-ism; your fabricated, mostly made up, imaginary 1950’s model life…. And invite God to make a new creation out of you and be willing to give up all your presumptions, your presuppositions, your prejudices and your dependence on The Way Things Are!

(And that includes not only the conservatives amongst us but the died-in-the-wool liberals too).

And give God the room to resurrect, to bring you to New Life. Not BACK to life. But to raise you FORWARD into the New Creation he plans to use to be the leaves on that tree of life, for the healing of the nations.

• To do justice
• To love kindness
• and to walk humbly with God.

MORNING: Up there in North Carolina we live in a beautiful, wooded, neighborhood just less than a one-mile walk to the center of main street Wake Forest. (Come to the “Q&A” lunch after church and I’ll share a couple of slides).

All our trees make for some heavy shade. It’s beautiful, but sometimes when the sun stays behind those persistent North Carolina clouds you can feel the light-depravation take a toll on the spirit and the psyche.

So I make sure and pull the shades all the way up, first thing every morning.

In fact, I make a ritual of it. I call it “Renewing my commitment to the light,” and it dovetails with my morning devotional disciplines.

Every day, well before the sun begins to pour in over the windowsill and into the kitchen, I set the coffee pot going, walk the dog, and meditate on the Upper Room scripture for the day.

Then, when I return, and before I wake up Rebekah with a fresh-brewed mug of coffee (she is truly blessed among women!) I work my way around the house and open every single set of blinds. I call it “renewing my commitment to the light,” because it puts a stamp of practical determination on top of my prayers and cements my commitment to Be The Presence of Christ in this world – to be a deliberate conduit of light and life – to be intentional about “living into” the invitation to be a New Creation every single day.

My wonderful wife, the recipient of that cup of morning coffee, offered the following response to someone who was pressing her for a pat answer on the question of Giving her Life to Jesus.

“You need to know the exact day, and the hour of the day you gave your life to Christ,” he said, implying that she couldn’t be a REAL Christian if her experience didn’t exactly mirror his narrow definition.

“I gave my life to Jesus this morning,: she said, “around the time my husband brought me that first cup of coffee.” She paused…

“I give my life to Jesus every morning,” she went on, “it’s a decision I’m always making, always expanding, always growing into.”

LIGHT AND LIFE: And that is the essence of what I want to share here this morning. So I’ll finish by reading my blog post from Friday morning, written in the middle of preparing this message for today:

“Today my agenda is to write about life. Long story short, “life” is the subject matter of a message I’ve been asked to share this coming Sunday. Life is a vibrant, vigorous, charged, vital, dynamic concept, and so it’s critically important that I do the subject justice when I speak; especially as the context is God’s compelling invitation for each one of us to live like we mean it – because God most certainly meant it when we were created.

God most certainly meant it when you were created…

“But then we grow older, and some of us grow more cynical, and we forget – little by little we forget. We lose touch with the heart of our connection to pure joy and we replace it with our own contrived substitutions until we come to the point where we no longer even believe the real thing exists.

“And Jesus is here to tell us that he is willing to guide us back to the source of life, that he is willing to literally be our companion as we recalibrate the pathways to the quality of life he constantly refers to in his teaching.

“That is what I intend to communicate this weekend. That this Lenten journey, this pilgrimage down the dusty road to Jerusalem, will become an insistent, winsome invitation to engage the fullness of life.

“I pray that we will respond to this invitation with enthusiasm and with renewed commitment. Because what this world needs today is a clear and compelling testimony to authentic life.” Through the ministry of this church, in our words and – most especially – through our living.

“Then,” Paul wrote to his friends in Philippi, “you will shine among them like stars in the sky as you hold firmly to the word of life.”

AMEN….