Philippians 4:10-14

Some of the most exciting moments happen when we finally see something for the way it really is. Some people call it having an epiphany: “Finally I see it—it all connects!” Some people describe it as connecting the dots. At first, things appear to be in place, but the relationships are not clear. Then an idea comes and the dots are connected. Some call this the light coming on. And there is the phrase I am using today: seeing life with a new pair of eyes. I believe everyone here is concerned about seeing life with a new pair of eyes. It is the way to grow and move ahead, expanding and stretching.

I am a big fan of Charlie Rose, the Public Broadcasting System talk show host. Here in New York, Charlie Rose comes on at 11 pm, and when I am awake at that hour I always watch his show. Not too long ago he interviewed Dr. Kim Clark, the outgoing dean of the Harvard Business School. He asked Dr. Clark what was the best advice he had ever received. He replied that among the good advice he had heard in life  one piece had been so useful that he passed it along to his students: Don’t take courses...take professors. If you simply take a course, you will forget what you learned after a while. But if you take a professor, somebody who is fully alive, impassioned with his subject and loving his students, that professor will stretch your mind and help you to see the world with a new pair of eyes.

Each of the four gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, refers to Jesus’ seeking out His disciples, finding the ones He wanted to be on His team. As it says in the scriptures, He called them to follow Him. In a sense He was saying, “Come with me, and I will help you to see this world with a new set of eyes. The way you will see the world will give you the most dramatic, the most exciting, the most fulfilling, the most wonderful life imaginable.” The disciples fooled around for three years, never connecting the dots, the light never coming on, not seeing with that new set of eyes, until Jesus’ death. In the light of the Resurrection, it all came clear to them. Each of them, except for Judas (who, if he had waited a couple of days, would have had a very different experience), spent the rest of his life telling the story of what he saw with his new pair of eyes. They tried to convey their experience with Jesus, their hope in God, and what a phenomenal life people could have if they only could see with this same set of eyes. These eleven men changed the world.

How do we get to the point of seeing so clearly? One way is through something we might want, might ask for, but it happens in its own time. The timing can be described this way: “When the student is ready, the teacher appears.” How many times has it happened to you that only when you were ready for something did the teacher arrive to help you move along?

After my first semester in college, I went home for Christmas vacation a very unhappy eighteen-year-old. Things had not gone well. I was afraid I might be put on probation, maybe worse. They might even have said, “Arthur, you are not ready for college.” Because I was lost. I had bitten off more than I could chew, and I was frightened. That Christmas vacation at home, I saw a book on my father’s desk. I don’t remember the name of the book or the author’s name, although it was not Norman Vincent Peale. I remember reading a chapter that was all about thinking positively and the difference that positive thinking could make in a person’s life.

It was the first awareness I had that one could make a choice to be positive. Like most teenagers, I was cynical and skeptical. It was the way to be—more downcast then upbeat— and I was finding myself in a deeper and deeper hole. But in that book on my father’s desk, I read about how positive thinking changes relationships. It helps one move along with a job. It can be healing. It changes every aspect of one’s life. I had no idea that fifteen years later I would be a young minister on the staff of a church where positive thinking was a centerpiece. The idea of positive thinking has been here as long as human beings have been on the face of the earth, but it got a name and was preached to the world by Dr. Peale, from the very place where I am standing.

After I got to Marble, I realized that it was more than just positive thinking. As wonderful as that is, it is not enough. I discovered something else: positive faith. When your faith combines with positive thinking, it becomes a positive faith, and you have really got something. You hear the teachings of Jesus in a new way. Jesus said if you have faith—this is an incredible statement—if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, which is very, very tiny, and you say to that mountain over there, “Move,” it will move. He did not mean a literal mountain, but mountains of challenges, mountains of problems, mountains of difficulty. You can move them with the power of faith.

The Apostle Paul was “Mr. Positive Faith” himself. He had started out a negative person. He was seeking to defeat the Christians and wipe them out. On the way to Damascus, he had an experience where he was blinded for three days, and when his sight returned, he not only saw with his physical eyes again, but he saw the world in a different way. He went out and told the story of Jesus Christ with a positive faith. He nurtured the new, small Christian communities through letters when he could not be there. In his letter to the Philippians he said, “I have learned how to get along in all circumstances. I can do with a lot, I can do with a little bit. I can have hard times, I can have easy times. I know how to adjust. I can be content.” And he gives the reason: “I can do all things, I can do all things, through Christ, who gives me the strength.”

In his letter to the Romans, he again spoke about dealing with difficulties and adversity. His words were not born out of intellect—he had a tremendous intellect—but his reassurances were born out of the struggle of his life experience. “I have discovered that all things work together for good, everything works together for good, to those who love God and are called according to God’s purpose.” No matter what happens to you, whatever you go through, you are always, as a Christian, going to land on your feet. This is the power of positive thinking; the power of positive faith.

Some of you remember the name Norman Cousins. For years he was editor of the Saturday Review. In the early days of his life’s journey, he criticized Dr. Peale’s ideas about positive thinking. Then something happened. In Russia, on a whirlwind trip, he fell gravely ill. He was flown back to a hospital in the United States. The doctors determined that his systems were breaking down. One day he was told, “Norman, you had better get your affairs in order.” Now this great intellect did some interesting figuring. “How did I get sick?” he asked himself. “I got sick because of negative stress, negative attitudes, negative production from my body. If I got sick because I was so negative and so stressed, then I can get well by doing things that are positive.” And he switched gears.

He signed himself out of the hospital, took huge doses of vitamin C and other supplements. But, most important, he realized he needed to change his thinking. He got hold of some early copies of “Candid Camera” and began to watch them. If you remember “Candid Camera,” there were some really funny scenes. For every minute of laughter, he had thirty minutes without pain. In time, Norman Cousins came back to health. In fact, about twenty years ago I invited him to come to Marble Church and speak one night, and he was delightful. Dr. Peale was still alive at the time, and he said, “Can you believe Norman Cousins coming to my church?”

When the student is ready, the teacher appears. What we need comes into our lives when we are ready, and we begin to see life with a new pair of eyes.

A second way we can begin to see with a new pair of eyes may be best expressed by something I heard Eric Butterworth say. Eric Butterworth, for many years, was a Unity minister here in New York. “We spend hours and hours looking Jesus in the face and praising Him,” he observed, “but I don’t think He wants that. What Jesus really wants is for a person to stand next to Him, shoulder to shoulder, elbow to elbow, and look out at the world, and see the world as He sees the world.” This is a very different thing. You know what He was seeing in His day. He saw His own people, the Jews. He saw the Samaritans, who were considered enemies. There were the lepers, people who were outcast. There were the poor, there were widows, there were all manner of people in difficult and nearly impossible circumstances. In our own day, we can also see those whom Jesus would have viewed with compassion. Somebody once said about Jesus, “He was the only teacher that was tall enough to see over the fences that divide us.”

Do you know that wonderful four-line poem by Edwin Markham?

He drew a circle that shut me out.
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
But love and I had the wit to win.
We drew a circle that took him in.

Let me tell you a story of something that happened to me nearly twenty years ago. It changed my life. It changed the life of this church. Our facilities manager for many years was a man named John Hillhouse. John is now retired and living in Vero Beach, Florida. He is a man of sterling character, a man of great faith, and a great person to work with. He has a wonderful attitude, wonderful work ethic, very diligent, very responsible, very caring.

One day John said, “I’d like to have breakfast with you one morning.” So a few days later we met in a coffee shop and had breakfast. “Arthur,” he said, “I want to tell you my story.” When he was six or seven years old, he had realized that he was different from the other kids. He told me, “Never in my life have I had a sexual feeling for a woman. At that early age I knew something was wrong. And of course,” he said, “I was gay.” He went on to talk about a life of isolation, fear, and pain. He had great difficulty with his father, who had been an all-American football player at Syracuse University, and who wanted John to be a jock like his father. “What’s wrong with you?” his father would ask him. “You’re not a man.” John began retreating further and further into a shell. When he was a teenager he started to drink and eventually became an alcoholic. For twenty-five years he worked for the food company A&P. He never missed a day of work, drinking evenings and weekends and managing to keep up a good front. John was a miserably unhappy man.

Then he got into Alcoholics Anonymous, and somebody in AA suggested he go to Marble Church. He did, and he found a degree of acceptance here. There were other gay people, although they were not fully included in the life of the church.

After John told me his story, I did a 180-degree turn. I had always been glad that gay people were comfortable coming to this church, and to the church I had served before coming here, but I had never once cared enough to ask one of them, “Tell me your story. I want to know what it feels like to be who you are in the life you are living.” I had participated in jokes against gays. I assumed they had made a choice in their sexual orientation and that they were morally irresponsible people. More than anything else, I was thoughtless. I had given no thought to what they were going through, until the morning when I had breakfast with John Hillhouse. It gave me a new pair of eyes. I saw souls. I saw brothers, I saw sisters.

And so, in time, with some difficulty, this church became truly inclusive. Now we are not a church that says, “I love you, but…,” but instead, “I love you, because you are a child of God.” When we stand next to Jesus and look at the world as He looked at the world, necessarily we embrace our brothers and sisters who may be a little different from us. Who knows that they don’t think we are the ones who are different?

There is a story in Luke about Jesus shortly before His crucifixion. He looked out over the city of Jerusalem, and He wept. He was grieving, He said, because of the people’s lack of understanding of the ways of peace.

So my urging to you today is not to look Jesus in the face and spend all of your time praising and praising Him. Stand next to Him, shoulder to shoulder, elbow to elbow. See how He saw the world, and adopt that same set of eyes. Your life will be enriched and increased, and you will make this a much, much better world. The world needs to be better.

Let us pray.

Gracious God, the eyes of Jesus are upon us, and upon the world. Help us to see and to live as He lived.