"WHY WE DO WHAT WE DO"

Nehemiah 8:1-12; 1 Corinthians 12:12-27; Luke 4:14-21

Why do you and I do what we do?

I've been pondering this question all week -

And I've pondered it on just about every level.

I thought about it with my children this week

as we sat around the dinner table

and talked about how it is

that our brain has to steer the rest of our body

and direct our arms to raise,

tell our feet to move,

make our mouth talk or chew.

So at that very basic level,

we do what we do

because we are a bunch of nerves and neurons

all tied up with muscles and bone

and directed by a brain.

Since I am a Calvinist,

I thought about it on the level of human sin,

in a more despairing kind of way -

why do we behave the way we do?

The apostle Paul pondered the same thing.

He said, "That which I would do,

I do not do,

and that which I would not do, I do."

The mind is willing but the flesh is weak.

Why is that?

Why do we do the wrong thing,

even when we know that it's wrong?

At this level,

we do what we do because we are humans,

and that means that we fall short of the glory of God.

And then, since I am a pastor,

and since I have been doing some work

with the Worship Committee and the Adult Education committee,

I began to wonder why it is that we do what we do

in the context of this room.

Why do we stand and sit

and stand and sit,

and sing,

and bow our heads,

and pass the plates?

Why do we do what we do in worship?

Where did this pattern come from?

At this level,

we do what we do because we are Christians,

and because generations of other Christians

have done these things and called them "worship."

And that made me ponder this question on a more global level.

For good or ill,

why do we do what we do?

Where do we learn to act and speak?

Where do we get our quirky personalities?

This is the one we need to talk about today.

The main reason you and I do what we do

is related to where,

and with whom,

we spend our time.

Whether we like it or not,

whether or not genetics are involved,

you and I are most consistently influenced

by the people with whom we spend the most time.

Some of you remember

when they used to say "You are what you eat."

Actually, it's more like

"You are who you hang with."

Or, to comfort the English majors among us,

"you are with whom you hang."

Think about it.

Most of us don't choose to do things we don't enjoy.

Most of us want to spend our time

in a way that benefits us,

whether that's because we earn money from it,

or because we have fun doing it,

or because we like the people involved,

or because we think that we might learn something,

or in some other way profit

from being with them.

And when we are forced

into doing something we'd rather not do,

or forced into being with someone we'd rather not be with,

even if subtly,

we are shaped by the time spent there.

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Basically, that's the point

behind our reading from Nehemiah this morning.

That's what happened to the Hebrews. 

A quick Readers' Digest history lesson:

the Hebrews were exiled from their homeland

and forced to live inBabylon.

They were made to live there for something like a hundred years -

which means that very few of those who left

ever made it back home.

Because they were forced to live among the Persians,

they were forced to live like the Persians.

They began to dress like them,

to eat like them,

and even to talk like them.

Because the Persians spoke Aramaic,

they had to learn how to speak Aramaic too.

And after four or five generations of living that way,

their children and grandchildren were speaking Aramaic

as their native language. 

Every year took them further and further away

from their Hebrew roots.

So the time comes when they are made free

and once again allowed to return to their homeland.

Well, by then,

Persia had become their home.

Only the very oldest of them

had any recollection of another homeland.

Those that had none

felt no allegiance to another place

and no desire to return there.

Like it or not,

the Hebrews had become shaped

by the people with whom they had spent time

and the country in which they had spent it.

But there were some who did decide to come "home".

When they got there,

it was obvious

that they had been gone long enough and far enough

that they not only did not understand Hebrew,

they had learned to live

in ways other than what the scriptures taught.

So, enter all those guys with the odd names.

A special place was chosen,

a special stage was erected,

and interpreters were spread all throughout the crowd.

And when they heard the scriptures read to them,

and heard them interpreted for the first time

in a way they could understand,

the tears began to flow.

It was like someone had pulled down the veil

which had been standing between them

and something they used to know a long time ago.

Once again,

they were being shaped

by the people with whom they were spending time,

and by the country,

and the God,

with whom they were spending it.

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So back to our question

of why it is that we do what we do.

The main reason you and I do what we do

is related to where and with whom

we spend our time.

We are most influenced

by the people with whom we spend the most time.

And friends, if that is so,

I hate to say it,

but part of the reason we do what we do,

in that larger global sense,

is that we have been hanging out in Persia too long.

Or to put it another way,

we've been so preoccupied

with our captivity to other things and other people

that we've forgotten how to speak Hebrew.

If it's true

that we are shaped by those people and things

with whom we spend our time,

then you and I and our children

have been shaped by MTV,

by reality television,

by Tom Cruise and Britney Spears,

by computer games and Nintendo,

by twenty-four hour news channels

and twenty-four hour Wal-Marts,

by My Space and You Tube.

Spending our time in those ways and ways like them

means that we have not spent time

allowing ourselves to be shaped by scripture,

by worship,

by Sunday school and Bible study,

by fellowship with brothers and sisters in Christ.

Think about it:

If we assume that we sleep eight hours a night,

that means that each of us

has about a hundred and twelve waking hours every week.

If we put in an hour of Sunday school

and an hour of worship every week,

and call it done till next Sunday,

that's only about two percent of our time.

What are we doing

with the other ninety-eight percent of it?

Friends,

it's time for us to remember our God-given language.

It's past time.

We need contact with each other on a regular basis,

and not just two hours a week.

We need to stop speaking the lone-ranger lingo of our culture

and accept the fact

that, from the very beginning,  

Christians have relied on each other

like hands rely on feet,

like eyes rely on ears.

Being a Christian

does not just mean that we hold certain beliefs,

that we enter a church building from time to time,

or that our name is on the active membership roll somewhere.

Being a Christian

means being a member of the household of God,

involving ourselves with other Christians on a daily basis,

and allowing our lives to become intertwined with theirs

in complete and sometimes uncomfortable ways.

For sure,

we can call ourselves "Christian"

without ever spending time with other Christians

for that kind of support and upbuilding.

But our call is to be in the world, and not of it.

When we forsake spending time with the body,

we forsake allowing our lives to be shaped

in authentically Christian ways.

Both the Hebrew word for "assembly"

and the Greek word for "church"

come from root words that express the notion of call:

the sense of being vocally called upon,

as well as the sense of being called out,

called away from the everyday life

into something that is totally other.

When we allow ourselves

to be called not only by the name of Christian

but to be called into a community of believers,

we are being called out of the wider society

and led into a special vocation

that operates under different assumptions

than the rest of the world.

Living in a called community

forms us with habits, practices and beliefs

that are different from those who do not live there.

Why do we do what we do?

We are shaped and formed

by those people, places and things

with which we spend the most time.

We do some things in this place

that would give others pause:

stand up, sit down, stand up, sit down,

give money, sing together,

stand in line to get a little bread and dip it in a little wine.

Where else in the world

do you see people doing things like we do them here?

Yet that is precisely the point:

nowhere else in the world do we see that.

We may have been speaking a foreign language so long

that it doesn't seem foreign to us anymore,

But as we do these things -

over and over again,

on our own but in the company of others -

we can begin to shake off the ways of our exile

and start up again

speaking the language of the One who adopted us.

But if it's going to stick,

it's going to take more than two percent of our time.

Because of God's good gift to us in Jesus Christ,

you and I no longer live in exile.

Let's act like it.

That's why we do what we do.

Amen.

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Thanks to  David Cunningham and his book Reading is Believing, an exposition on the phrases of the Apostles' Creed, for some of the inspiration behind this sermon; especially his chapter on "I Believe in the Holy Spirit."