I heard this week about a very, very special automobile. It was built in the 1920’s by the Italian manufacturer Bugatti, and it was designed to be sold to the outrageously wealthy. This car was equipped with 450 horses under the hood; it was some 22 feet long and weighed about 6000 pounds. It was hand-crafted of the finest materials, it handled like a dream, and it cost something like $400,000 even in the 1920’s.
Naturally, it was not exactly everyman’s car, and only a few were made. The story I heard said that only six of them are known still to exist, and that the only one of them in the United States is owned by a retired general, who keeps it locked away in a secure garage, polished and shiny, pristine and proper, without spot or blemish of any kind. And here is what struck me about the story: this car is about 70 years old. It is a magnificent driving machine. It would take you virtually anywhere in complete comfort. But in 70 years it has been driven only 3200 miles. Only 3200 miles in three score and ten years of service.
This Bugatti is a museum piece. It’s something to see. But, then, that’s all that it is. It’s just something to see. It has all this power, all this potential, but nobody puts it to use. It has all this "get up and go", but no one is using it. It’s just good to look at, and that’s all.
You see, looking good is really no problem, no problem at all. There’s no problem with looking good, if that’s what you want Just stay out of trouble. Just keep out of harm’s way. Just don’t go where you shouldn’t go and don’t say what you shouldn’t say. Just hang on to that privacy thing, and you will look good. You will be unspotted and unblemished.
But will you go anywhere? Will you do anything? Will you make a difference for anybody? Somehow, I just think that God has more in mind for us than mere goodness. I believe that God wants to move us from goodness to going. From goodness to going.
The story is told that one day a tour guide was taking people around Westminster Abbey, probably the most famous church in England. The guide pointed out the ancient Abbey’s beauties, its glorious windows, the graves of kings and queens, the throne on which England’s monarchs are crowned. She went on and on about the poet’s corner, the musician’s corner, and all of the great worthies of the past who were buried or memorialized in that great church. But when she paused for questions, one tourist asked a penetrating one. Said the tourist, "This is a lovely, beautiful, historic church. But has anyone been saved here lately?"
Church, we at Takoma Park may look good in many respects. But how many have been saved here lately? And how shall we move from goodness to going?
Two men’s lives intersected one day. And for both of them it meant moving from goodness to going. For both of them it marked a moment when, in obedience to Christ, they went beyond their conventional goodness and became go-ers.
I
One of those men was Saul. Saul was a good man. A deadly good man. We are told that Saul was absolutely convinced that he was right. So convinced was he that he worked night and day to root out this Christian thing that had upset his tidy little world. Not content with bashing every Christian he could find in Jerusalem, Saul got permission to travel down the road to Damascus and ferret out the believers there too.
Saul was a good man; an exceedingly good man. Good in the sense that he was following his code of morality strictly and rigidly. Good in the sense that what he believed in he was pursuing with fervor. And what Saul believed in was a k1nd of icy purity, a harsh goodness that is all demand and no grace, all hard edge and no softness.
Goodness. Mere goodness. Arrogant goodness.
You know what? That sounds an awful lot like the people among whom we live here in Washington. That sounds a great deal like the world’s goodness which surrounds us. People who are right and who know they are right. People who will argue any cause and advocate any position. People who are hard-working and ambitious; people who think nothing of staying late at the office, taking work home, pouring themselves into the mad pursuit of some cause.
But people who are also out of touch with humanity. Out of touch with their own needs as well as out of touch with the hurts of others. People who may indeed live moral lives, by almost anybody’s standards, but whose principal concern is with their own reputations, their own accomplishments, their own standing. People who will ride over anybody or anything in their ways to look good.
"Saul, still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest and asked for letters to the synagogues at Damascus, so that if he found any who belonged to the way, men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem." Doesn’t that sound familiar?
This is contemporary Washington! Full up to the brim with arrogance, confidence, brashness, and cocksure goodness!
It reminds me of the description written of one of his fictional characters by Nathaniel Hawthorne, and later quoted in the Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis, "She’s the sort of woman who lives for others .. you can always tell the others by their hunted expression." Some kinds of goodness are bad news!
But now, do you know the old saying, "The bigger they are, the harder they fall"? The more conventionally good, the more arrogantly good somebody is, the more they are ready for the good news. They have been living bad news for so long, they are really ready for good news.
You see, behind all of the arrogance, for many people, lies a deep insecurity. Behind the bravado and the "I’m always right" facade, there is usually some kind of uncertainty that is being masked. When a person is living an arrogantly good life, as they define good, and that so-called goodness has an oppressive edge to it, mark it down: here is someone who is deeply dissatisfied. Here is someone who is troubled in heart but doesn’t know how to acknowledge it. Here is someone feeling unloved, unwanted, unappreciated, and doesn’t know how even to admit that. And so he tries even harder to be good, to be right, to be on target. But it all becomes even more elusive. It just never comes, that love that goodness is looking for.
But, praise God, for Saul, a moment came. A moment of unconditional love. A moment of blinding truth. There on the road to Damascus, trudging along toward a merciless mission, Saul met the Lord. And when Saul knew that the jig was up, that his game had been found out; when Saul knew that he could hide no longer behind his rabid goodness, he experienced the grace of Christ. Saul was saved; Saul was saved from his sin and saved from his goodness; and on his way to becoming Paul, the apostle to the nations and ultimately on of the most influential persons who has ever lived.
I am suggesting this morning that the world is full of Sauls. The world, particularly our Washington world, is full of people who revel in their goodness and take pride in their accomplishments; people who have tremendous potential. And who, like Saul, are really just wounded spirits, looking for unconditional love, waiting for something to happen which would free them from their own goodness.
These Sauls could so readily become Pauls. Their goodness, like his, could so readily become going, going and making a difference in this world.
II
But I want you to notice now what the Lord told Saul to do. And how his life intersected with someone else, someone else who needed to move from goodness to going.
After Saul’s Damascus Road experience, here are the Lord’s instructions. "Get up and enter the city, and you will be told what you are to do." Just hold on to the first phrase, "Get up and enter." "Get up and enter".
Hold on to that phrase, because it stands along side the Lord’s command to that other man I’ve been mentioning. To Ananias, a disciple in Damascus ... to Ananias, already a believer, already a faithful Christian, already a recipient of the good news ... to Ananias comes a command. His was, "Get up and go."
Have you got it? To Saul, "Get up and enter." To Ananias, "Get up and go."
To Saul, the world’s man, now that you have confronted yourself and now that you have been touched by Christ, "Get up and enter the city, where somebody will be there to help you." To help you get beyond your goodness and into going.
And to Ananias, Christ’s man, already a believer, already in the church, already discipled, this new dimension of obedience, "Get up and go. Go to the street called Straight, and at the house of Judas look for a man of Tarsus named Saul. At this moment he is praying, and he has seen in a vision a man named Ananias come in and lay his hands on him so that he might regain his sight."
Wow! What do you think Ananias felt about all of that? How would you react if you got a message something like, Christian, get up and go to the street called Pennsylvania, and at the house of White look for a man of Arkansas named Bill. Or, if you don’t care for that one, Christian, go to the street called East Capitol, and at the House of Representatives look for a man of Georgia named Newt. What would you say?
Well, probably something like what Ananias said. "Lord, I have heard from many about this man, how much evil he has done to your saints in Jerusalem." Lord, why should I have to go into such uncomfortable surroundings? Why should I have to go out of my way, out of my settled pattern, to be in the presence of evil? Lord, why should I have to leave my goodness behind and stain myself with this man’s evil?
Do you recognize that feeling? Do you know where that is coming from? Oh, we Christians are the victims of our goodness too. Just like the world is a victim of its goodness, we Christians too want to look good. So we are afraid to be where evil dwells. We don’t want to be with the wrong people or in the wrong place.
What does that mean? Doesn’t that mean that we too have some insecurities, just like the world? Doesn’t that mean that we have not learned how to trust Christ, wherever we go and on whatever assignment He has called us?
Saul tried to look good from the world’s perspective; he was insecure. Ananias’ first instinct was to look good from the church’s perspective, and that too was insecure.
Oh, I know what this irrational, emotional resistance is all about. I know what it is like to feel you have to protect your goodness from the presence of wrong. Let me tell you a little story about how that feels.
Now you know that I was raised and nurtured in a spiritual environment in which alcohol was just about the biggest no-no we ever talked about. In my youth group days it seemed as though the major mark of a Christian was that he didn’t drink alcohol. And so deep and so pervasive was that teaching that it got to be a kind of emotional thing. You just couldn’t stand even to be around the stuff, much less partake of it. And although up here in my head I know that my being where alcohol is does not really compromise me, down here in the tummy somewhere, down here in the emotions, it still gets to me.
And so, shortly before Christmas, my wife was doing some baking, and the recipes called for a little wine and some kind of fruit-based liqueur. Guess who had to go to the liquor store to pick up these ingredients. And so he who has probably not been inside a liquor store more than four times in his whole life, and at least two of which were to use a pay phone … he has to go to the store, find this alien stuff on the shelves, and bring it home, in a plain brown wrapper.
Well, going there was bad enough. It got worse when I had to pay for it, and found that they didn’t take the Discover card, so I had to use my Visa card, the one that says AMERICAN BAPTIST Credit Union! That was tough! But it got worse.
Because as I started to slink out of the store, sort of half crouching, I realized that I was directly across the street from a business run by one of our church members! What if that person should see me coming out of a liquor store, with that telltale brown paper bag! Oh no, what is going to happen to my witness?! I won’t look good!
But of course I had to leave and so slipped away and got into my car as fast as my wobbly legs would allow (don’t even guess how they got to be wobbly!) However, two or three days later, on Sunday, a gift appeared on my desk. A gift from this particular church member. It was a cake; a Christmas cake; a cake whose odor gave off the unmistakable scent of ... well, you guessed it!
Oh, do you see? How we do try to protect our goodness when it doesn’t need protecting! How we do attempt to preserve our image just by avoiding the presence of evil! But that isn’t necessary. That isn’t important. All that is important is that, like Ananias, we hear and obey the Lord’s command, "Get up and go." Get up and go to the places where evil is and do not worry about whether you will be protected, for the Lord will protect us, the Lord will preserve us, and all He asks is that we just get up and go.
Oh, there is so much more I would like to say about Paul and Ananias. I’d like to be able to take the time to point out that the Lord told Ananias to go to a specific person, "At the house of Judas look for a man of Tarsus named Saul." Sometimes when we do evangelism, we want to make it impersonal. We want to pretend that if we just put up flyers or pretty up the church building to make it more inviting, that that is enough.
But that’s not evangelism. It should be done, but it’s not real evangelism, because it’s not personal. The Lord says, "Get up and go ... and look for a particular man named Saul.”
And I wish I had time to say more about how the world is really just waiting on tiptoes for us. I wish I could develop the idea that we don’t have to worry about the hard cases and the tough guys out there. Just go to the ones who are already on their way, the ones whom the Spirit has already prepared. "Look for ... Saul. At this moment he is praying." There are plenty of people who already feel a spiritual hunger; you don’t have to wonder who they are. Just look and listen, they will tell you. Start your witness with those who are already on the way.
And, oh, if only I could linger with this, "He is praying and he has seen in a vision a man named Ananias come in and lay his hands on him so that he might regain his sight." Do you know that there are certain people who are looking to you for help? To you and to you alone. You are the only Bible they will read, you are the only sermon they are hearing, you are the only testimony they know. Like Saul was waiting for Ananias, they are waiting for you and for you alone. And if you do not share the good news with them, they may not be able to hear it from anybody else.
I don’t have time to develop all of those themes, but this I must say. Next week at the annual meeting I will lay out for you a host of possibilities, under the heading, "By All Means Saving Some," I will ask you and the committees and ministries of the church to become very clear, very intentional, very forthright about sharing the good news this year. Many ideas will be proposed; some, doubtless, you will reject, some you will postpone, but some, I pray, you will accept and go with.
For, you see, we are a church which cherishes goodness. We like looking good, we are proud of what it feels like to be a part of this congregation. And that’s fine. But there is something more. There is something beyond goodness. And that is going.
"Get up and go", the Lord’s command to Christians. "Get up and go to the street called Straight, Ananias, and find somebody in particular, who is spiritually needy; somebody who has all this potential for the Kingdom; somebody who is waiting just for you." Get up and go.
Get up and go to the street called Aspen or Piney Branch or Glenwild or Sunnyside or Seventh or wherever it is that you live. Get up and go. Go beyond goodness, somebody needs you there.
Get up and go to the street called Georgia, where it seems like evil dwells. Get up and go, for your goodness will not be compromised. Unlikely as it may seem, somebody needs you there. You might find Saul on his way to becoming Paul, right there. You might find the next president, the next missionary, the next scientist, the next teacher, the next whatever, waiting to be touched.
Get up and go to the street called Pennsylvania, or the street called East Capitol, or wherever the corridors of power are, wherever it is you work. Because there, despite all their confidence, their arrogance, are human beings waiting for you to lay on hands and give them back their sight.
Then when the tour guide shows them around Takoma Park, the answer will be a swift and sure, "Yes" when they ask, "It looks good, but has anyone been saved here lately?"
Frankly, I don’t want a shiny, polished Bugatti, one that I have to protect. I’ll take my battered and discolored Plymouth any day. It still has plenty of get up and go.
