Living a Legacy

  Rev. Dr. Christopher Carlson

There is a story about this fellow named Bob, who went on a trip out of state.  Now Bob, his name was Bob Smith, was a fairly well known fellow in his community, and it so happened that there was this other guy named Bob Smith.  This other Bob passed away.  Well the newspaper got it mixed up and thought the other Bob had died and wrote an obituary.  Well naturally when his friends found out that he had died, there was a lot of anguish, a lot of heartache.  But they had made a mistake.  Now another friend knew that he had been out of town and sent the first Bob the obituary and he got to read about himself.  But he knew everybody was worried about him, so he called back immediately to the town to a friend and said “Hi, this is Bob.”  You can imagine the silence on the other end.  He said “There’s been a mistake”, and this, that or the other.  Before he could say anything, his friend said, “Where are you calling from?”  Suppose something like that happened to you?  What would your obituary say?  What would people say about you at your funeral?  Today is Memorial Sunday.  It is also Pentecost Sunday.  It’s talking about two different things in a way.  Well I hope to talk about both; but a memorial is, of course, sometimes a statue or an inscription.  Sometimes it’s a day of remembrance, as it is today.  We remember particularly what people have done for us in the past.  But I want you to think about what kind of memorial you are leaving.  I am often struck and often talk about how all of us stand on the shoulders of others, particularly others from the past.  None of us are here by our own choice.  We’re here by the choices of, not only, our parents but our grand parents, our parents’ grandparents.  If one choice had been made different in where they were going to live or what they were going to do, we might not have been here.  I was talking about that with one of my daughters just yesterday, how my father was a baseball player and he was really good; but got drafted as he was about to start for the AAA team of the Giants in 1941.  If he played baseball, I wouldn’t have been here.   He got interrupted.  We all stand on the shoulders of others and others will stand on our shoulders.  What kind of legacy are we leaving?

I’ve chosen two scriptures for you this morning and both about memorials, if you will, or legacies.  The first is a famous passage at the beginning of Genesis 11.  In the early days God had told human beings to “fill the earth and multiply”, to be scattered, if you will, “and go out”.  But they didn’t want to do that.  This is a story or a group that wanted to stay put; and, not only stay put, they built a city and a large tower.  Notice what they wanted the tower to stand for.  (Genesis 11:1-9)

Now the whole world had one language and a common speech.  As men moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there.

They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.”  They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar.  Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”

But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower that the men were building.  The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.  Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”

So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel—because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world.  From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth.

The second scripture is about another legacy, an old man in a prison writing to people he had administered to, talking about and thinking about his past, but also what he would do in his future and why he is doing it.  This is none other than the apostle, Paul, writing to the Philippians.  In Philippians, chapter 1, he says:  (Philippians 1:19-26)

Yes, and I will continue to rejoice for I know that through your prayers and the help given by the Spirit of Jesus Christ, what has happened to me will turn out for my deliverance.  I eagerly expect and hope that I will in no way be ashamed, but will have sufficient courage so that now as always Christ will be exalted in my body, whether by life or by death.  For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain.  If I am to go on living in the body, this will mean fruitful labor for me.  Yet what shall I choose?  I do not know!  I am torn between the two:  I desire to depart and be with Christ, which is better by far but it is more necessary for you that I remain in the body.  Convinced of this, I know that I will remain, and I will continue with all of you for your progress and joy in the faith, so that through my being with you again your joy in Christ Jesus will overflow on account of me.

This is the word of the Lord.

Thanks be to God!

Let us pray.

Father in heaven, as we always pray, we pray for your Spirit to enlighten us, your Spirit to open our hearts and minds.  We pray Lord that what we hear today will be helpful to each one in his own way.  We pray for change Lord, change and movement toward you.  We do pray in Jesus’ name.  Amen.

A Methodist minister visited he parents’ graves in the state of South Carolina.  As they stood by the grave they read the memorials written there, concerning my father, he said, “Pastor, chaplain, World War II.  Under his mother’s name it said, “Devoted wife and teacher.”  It said “Loving parents of” and the four children were listed.  At the bottom, the great final verse of 1 Corinthians 13.  “And now abide these three:  faith, hope and love.  But the greatest of these is love.”  Beneath that verse is the symbol of the cross.  Of course, he goes on to say, “These few words couldn’t tell the whole story about these two people; but the essence of their life and faith, as declared there, is a fitting memorial.”  Flashback in the Middle East many years ago, another memorial; but it is an unsightly pile of bricks, probably the home of snakes and mice.  Perhaps as traveling merchants passed that way, one could ask the other, “Who left that pile of bricks over there?”  The other merchant would reply, “Well, according to the story, it was once a huge tower that reached the clouds.  Evidently the people who lived here a long time ago wanted to really make a name for themselves.  So they built a tower, and that pile of rubble is all that is left.”  Each of us in our lives builds some kind of structure with them.  Your epitaph is being written right now and the question is, “Is your life like a tower of Babel?  Or is it like a church spire, glorifying God?  Are you just living a life, or leaving or living a legacy?”  It’s a good question for all of us.  How do we determine which way we’re going?  Now I have devised some questions and some statements which are in your bulletin.  You can make use of them if you’d like.

The first is which way are you leaning, towards yourself or towards God?  There’s a funny little story of a man who married two women, first to Mary and then to Tillie, not to our Tillie, of course.  He outlived them both.  Finally, when he was getting up in age, he left these directions for his own burial.  He said, “I want to be buried between Mary and Tillie, but tilt me towards Tillie.”  With God there is no middle ground.  We are either leaning, or tilting, toward God or toward ourselves.  I don’t know about you, but for me that’s a real struggle; because I find because my own life, and all of us as human beings, we tend to be self-centered.  As I said many times in the past, if we were to take a group picture, who would you look for first?  Now that’s pretty obvious, we would look for ourselves.  Our lives tilt toward God or self.  Indeed, the question that we ask is what is that primary leaning?  Where are we going?  Are we building a tower of Babel or a spire toward God, because selfishness is a dangerous thing?  Selfishness and pride produce confusion and chaos.  It wrecks more marriages than adultery.  It leads to more breakups of business partnerships and causes more wars.  Where are we leaning?  To go along with this, we should ask maybe a deeper question, “What is our emphasis, self promotion or God’s promotion?”  The tower of Babel story is very interesting.  Why did they build the tower; to make a name for themselves, to make a name with whom?  I suppose other people.  Then other people could walk by and see that building and go “Wow, what great folks lived here.  What powerful people lived here?”  That’s something we need to remember always.  It actually doesn’t matter who we try to impress.  What matters is if we impress God or not.  There is a sense in which you have an audience of one.  It is God.  Whoever else you impress matters not, it is only the Lord that counts.

This is the struggle we’ve had for generations.  In the story of the Garden of Eden there were two sins actually.  The first was lack of faith, or trust in God.  You remember the question the devil pointed, “Did God really say that?”  Adam and Eve failed to trust God as a person; and then, right on the heels of that, they wanted to be gods themselves.  We see that in history.  Many, many years ago during the construction of a hall at Harvard, called Emerson Hall, the current president at the time, Charles Eliot, invited the great philosopher, William James, to suggest a suitable inscription for the hall.  After some reflection, James suggested a line from the Greek philosopher, Protagorus, which said, “Man is the measure of all things.”  Eliot didn’t care for that suggestion; and he went on to put a verse from Psalm 8, which says, “What is man that you are mindful of him”.  But between those two great lines lies the great distance between human centered and God centered points of view.  Someone once wrote that “most of us would choose the front of the bus, the back of the church and the center of attention.”  This has a lot of practical implications from the work that we choose to the directions that we go, even what we talk about on vacation.  Today is Memorial Day.  It is one of the biggest vacation weekends of the year, and how great that is.  If you’re not going on vacation this weekend, you will soon.  Let’s suppose you plan to spend a week someplace with another family, or maybe your own, or playing golf or cooking out or swimming, all the good things that we do in the summer.  During those days you will probably share thoughts about almost everything, tips on raising kids, or how you did it, or how it should be done; prospects for the Minnesota football team, maybe not; the latest diet; the best investment tips.  During all that time, does Jesus ever get into the conversation beyond simply asking for him to bless our food?  How much is God a part of our lives, really?  Is our emphasis self, and our own needs, or is it about the Lord?

So we look at where we are leaning to and what our emphasis is; and we ask another question, “What is our definition of greatness?”  I’ve told this story many times about how the disciples wanted to be on Jesus’ right hand and left hand when he came into the kingdom, in other words, second in command.  Greatness for them, of course, was power and comfort, a name for themselves.  Jesus reminds them “Not so with you.  Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all.”  Again, it doesn’t matter who you try to impress; what really matters is what God thinks.  When we walk out of here today we are tempted by all kind of things, to think about greatness as this or that or whatever.  God says “It is to be a servant.”  Even churches get wrapped up in this, even Christians.  The greatness of a church is its willingness to point beyond itself to Jesus Christ.  God is more impressed by our fidelity to scripture, our passion to win the lost, and our willingness to sacrifice for hurting people.

Martin Luther King said many years ago, about his own death.  He said, “Every now and then I think about my own death and I think about my own funeral; and if you get somebody to deliver the eulogy, tell them not to talk to long.  Tell them not to mention that I have a Nobel Prize.  Tell them not to mention that I have three or four hundred other awards.  I’d like for somebody to say that day that Martin Luther King Jr. tried to give his life serving others.  I’d like for somebody to say that Martin Luther King Jr. tried to love somebody.  Say that I was a drum major for justice, for peace, for righteousness.  I just want to leave a committed life behind.”  I just want to leave a committed life behind.  If you ask these questions and you find yourself lacking, as most of us will, then it is time to decide to take some action.  There is another story about Alfred Nobel, himself, who was shocked to read his own obituary, as we’ve talked about.  It said this, “Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, died yesterday.  He devised a way for more people to be killed in a war than ever before and he died a very rich man.”  Now the guy at the newspaper actually did get it wrong.  It was his brother that died.  He got them mixed up.  Of course, he didn’t mention that dynamite did a lot of good things as well, but this is what they said about him.  It had a profound effect on his life.  He decided he wanted to be known for something other than providing a way to kill people.  So, of course, he initiated the Nobel Prizes.  He said this, he said “Every person ought to have a chance to correct his epitaph in mid-stream and write a new one.”  He took action.  What can you do in mid-stream?  What direction can you go in?

So what is your definition of greatness?  What action will you take?  How can you make your life count?  I love the story about Paul.  His situation is that he is in prison; he’s looking out and seeing his past and what he’s done.  He sees a lot of people out there trying to undo what he’s done.  Yet, he is a man of great joy. He is a man who looks at the positive of what God is doing and he is actually happy with what God has done in his life; but he is still thinking about what else he can do.  He is so convinced that eternal life is going to be much better than this life, he’s ready to go then.  I could kind of see him calling the guard over and saying, “Hey I have some things to tell you that could get my head cut off.”  But he decides to stay, because he says “I am convinced of this I know I will remain, convinced that I can help, convinced that I can make my life count even more for you.”  The bible says that you and I are to be the light of the world.  Luis Palau tells a story about a friend of his who is a great missionary.  But this great missionary is one who has a sadness about his children.  He says “Only three of my six children have a serious commitment to the Lord.  The others are nice enough, nice lifestyles, nice children of their own, nice church, nice people; but they have no fire, no power, and no cutting edge.  They just go along with the flow.”  The great agony of our lives is to see half our children not counting for anything.  You see, it is not just living a nice clean life keeping your nose clean.  That’s great, but that’s not enough.  All of us need to have our lives count for something, count for Christ.  This is where the Holy Spirit comes in.  God has given us the Spirit who moves into our hearts and changes them and gives us grace.  We can’t do this by ourselves.  That may be the question, “How can I do this?”  Well it does involve self evaluation.  It does involve deciding to take action; but I think it involves simply asking the Lord to help.  In one of my devotions I say I think Presbyterians, or Christians, or people are kind of afraid of the Holy Spirit.  After all, when people get the Spirit they do some odd things.  First they start speaking in tongues, and we kind of go “Whoa. That’s kind of weird.”  Then they do other things.  They go out and become missionaries or they get excited in their worship.  I don’t think the Spirit is really about speaking in tongues but it is about passion; it is about direction; it is about courage; it’s about purpose.  The first thing you can do is simply pray to the Lord and say, “Lord, I want your Spirit even if it’s scary.  I want help in making my life count.”

Last, but not least, it is realizing what we have talked about a lot already, it’s not about us.  It’s not about you.  Life is not about us.  God didn’t put us here just for it to be about us.  He put us here for it to be about Him and to be about others.  There’s a story about two men having a quarrel.  One of them stood up and pounded the desk and said “I don’t care what the rest of you do.  All I want is my rights.”  Sitting in the front pew was a dear old Scottish man, somewhat hard of hearing, who cupped his hand behind his ear, leaned forward and said, “Aye brother, what’s that you say?  What do you want?”  The fellow said “Well I just said I want my rights, that’s all.”  The old Scot replied, “Your rights brother, is that what you want, your rights?  If you had your rights, you’d be in hell.  The Lord Jesus didn’t come to get his rights, he came to get your wrongs and he got them.”  The fellow who had been bickering stood transfixed and said “You’re right.  Settle it any way you like.”  The Lord has died for us, to give us a new direction, to write a new epitaph, if you will, to give us the courage to write a new memorial.  What would your epitaph say?  What is your legacy?  What would the Lord want you to do?  Let us all think about that.  In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.  Amen.