FAITHFUL TO THE MISSION

by

Eldridge E. Fleming, Ph.D.

New Hope Presbyterian Chuch

Rienzi, Mississippi

February 6, 2000

Children's Message:

This morning I want to talk to you about something very serious. I want to talk to you about squirrels. Do you know what a squirrel is? How would you describe a squirrel? Small, furry animal. That you hunt. All right, this guy is getting right on with it. Tell me something else about a squirrel. Eats nuts. Okay. Clint knows about squirrels. Climbs trees. Climbs trees -- does he ever climb trees! Something else. Hibernates. All right. Okay!

Let me tell you a story. This is a true story. It really happened to me this week. I went over to see our daughter who lives in Huntsville. She had told us, "I have a squirrel in my attic." Now if you've ever had squirrels in your attic, you know that is pretty serious business. You can hear them trouncing around sometimes and that sort of thing.

This squirrel had chewed a hole about this big around (2 ½ to 3 inches) and was inside the attic space; so my task was to put a new board on, and I was in the process of doing that. But when I pried the board off, all of a sudden there was this clamoring sound. I looked up and there was this squirrel looking at me from inside the building, from inside the attic. So I took the board off and then took the board and poked it up in there and swished it at the squirrel, and that squirrel went "p-s-s-s-t," right out through that hole that I had made by removing the board! At the time I was on a step ladder right outside the hole in the fascia board under the eave and was about twelve feet up off the ground, and that squirrel jumped out onto the ground and ran away like crazy.

That was okay, so I looked inside and there was this big squirrel's nest. Well, I had a little crow bar about so long -- maybe about this long (18-20 inches)-- and I reached in and began to pull the nest out. I wasn't about to stick my fingers in there because I didn't know if there was another big squirrel in there or not. I used the crow bar to pull out all the nest, and with one of those pulls, something went "plunk" onto the little paint holder platform -- shelf -- that's on the ladder. It was a little baby squirrel about this long (3-4 inches) -- no hair, eyes still closed -- and down below were two more baby squirrels laying on the ground. I had just pulled through that nest and pulled those baby squirrels out. There I am. I don't know if there are any more squirrels in there or not.

So, I decide that the best thing to do is to call Ashley. Ashley is thirteen and is our granddaughter. I wanted her to see a baby squirrel naked with no hair, no fur, and then I wanted to try to solicit her help in maybe feeding these baby squirrels and helping them to grow up. But she wasn't in the mood for feeding baby squirrels! Now I tell you, baby squirrels can be kind of hard to deal with, especially when they can't see where they are going. These couldn't even walk. They were little, newborn. The naval cord was still on their bodies.

We decided we'd get a box and put them in it. The mama squirrel had made a nest out of fiberglass insulation and leaves and I don't know how they had survived in that, but that is what the nest was made out of. So I put that material in the box and picked up the little baby squirrels. They feel funny wriggling around in your hand and they do look "rodent-like."

Do you know what rodents are? What is another word for rodent? A RAT! That's kind of what they look like, except little rats are about so big (much smaller) and these were bigger than my thumb. So I picked them up and put them in this nest that I had made out of the old nest and I covered them over so they would be protected since it was about 40 degrees outside. I looked up and here was the mother squirrel looking over the roof at me.

I went ahead and did my thing of putting a new board up -- a fascia board -- and then I decided I'd be a good guy and let the mama deal with the babies. So I put the box on the roof where she had been watching me while I was doing things on the eave and ground. I hooked the box on the edge of the roof where the gutters are so the box wouldn't turn over easily, and we went away. Ashley watched as the mother came down and smelled over in the box. I knew that an animal is supposed to be able to smell her young -- and your mom can smell her babies, too, but they may smell them for a different reason -- but the squirrels have a way of smelling their young. I knew that she knew they were in the box.

So we went away to the store and left the box there, and when we came back, the box was standing on its end. Down underneath where I had put the box was a yucca plant with long strips of leaves that were as sharp as razors, and I could just see the babies falling out down on those plant leaves. I didn't think of that when I put the box up there. Well, anyway, I looked all around the plant and couldn't find them anywhere, so we went inside and Ashley told us they had heard a commotion and that the mother squirrel had turned that box over. I really felt badly and I wondered how do you say, "I'm sorry!" to a mama squirrel. Now a mama squirrel's mission is to rear her young and there were three that I had seen -- and I didn't know how many she was supposed to have had.

The next morning when I got up and went out, there was another hole in the board -- not in the new board, but in the old board. So as a psychologist, I tried to do a little animal psychology about what happened. I had a feeling all along that the mama squirrel had gone back in to check on another baby because I didn't know if she had three babies or four. But if there were four, I knew she was going back in to see where that fourth one was. And sure enough, on that second morning, there was a hole.

I got my hammer and my ladder and I beat and banged and banged and nothing came out, so I nailed it up with a new board. The next morning there was no new hole; the next morning there was no disturbance. There is an instinctional feeling -- a built-in sensing -- of the mother squirrel that they have to go back and check to make sure the nest is gone and no more babies remain. So apparently that was okay.

Then I learned this morning that squirrels are like mama cats and take their young and move them. So apparently she had moved them out of the box and turned the box over in order to signal that she was finished, that the baby squirrels were gone. The mama squirrel was nowhere to be seen on Friday, so I'm assuming she moved her babies and put them in a safe place. She was true to her task. She checked on the young ones; she cut a hole through that board. I tried to make sure she was out of there before I nailed up the hole the second time. And I don't think she was inside. If she had been inside when I nailed up the hole, she would have gnawed through one of the old rotten boards nearby. I don't think she was inside and I don't think the babies were inside or she would have gone after them, and I feel okay after I learned that squirrels can move their young.

So how do you say, "I'm sorry," to a mama squirrel when you've destroyed her nest? It is a squirrel story and a mama's love. Let us pray.

Father, we thank you for the blessings you give us from day to day. We thank you for parents who love us, who would give their very lives for us, who would dig through all kinds of stuff to get to us. We thank you in Jesus' name. Amen.

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Our Old Testament reading today is from the fortieth chapter of Isaiah, verses twenty-one through thirty-one. This is a very familiar passage, one that you've heard in the past, I'm sure.

Our New Testament reading comes from I Corinthians, chapter nine, verses sixteen through twenty-three.

The gospel reading for the morning comes from Mark, the first chapter, verses twenty-nine through thirty-nine, and is a continuation from the verse where we left off last week. If you are able and can, would you stand with me as we hear the gospel?

The word of the Lord for the people of God. Thanks be to God.

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The text shall be those verses thirty-five through thirty-nine: And in the morning, a great while before day, he rose and went out to a lonely place, and there he prayed. And Simon and those who were with him pursued him, and they found him and said to him, "Every one is searching for you."

And he said to them, "Let us go on to the next towns, that I may preach there also; for that is why I came out." And he went throughout all Galilee, preaching in their synagogues and casting out demons. (RSV)

Once a lady came to me because she was very despairing and depressed, and very frustrated with her life. As a mother and a housewife, she could sense that nothing was going right. Everything was going wrong. She was essentially, practically depressed. In my whatever style it is, I asked her to explain to me how she spent her day, and she obliged and began to tell me how she spent her day. I wanted to know the details of her day, as to how she went about her housework and how she went about discharging her responsibilities. She told me. One of the things that became very clear at the early part of it was that she never completed a simple task. She was frustrated with her life. Her style was that she would begin to do some task such as, for example, make a bed. As she walked into the room where the bed was that she was going to make and as she started, she would think of something else that she had to do and she would go start it. Then she would go from that to something else and she never finished anything.

Now I'm not proposing to you mothers that you make the bed for those people in your house who are eight years of age and older. Anyone who is eight years of age can make a bed in three minutes and mothers don't need to make those beds. But they do need to see that they are made. It takes about five minutes to teach a child eight years of age how to make a bed and it takes that child about three minutes to do it. Okay? We have that squared away and settled! If it takes longer than that or if the bed is not made, then you have a different problem and it is called oppositional defiance -- that is, they refuse to do it. But this mother couldn't get anything completed.

If you go about life and never finish a task, you never know the joy of success, and if you are in the process of doing something and it is half-finished and your attention has gone to something else and you move to that and you start on it, this first task is still unfinished. There is no joy in work that is not completed. You must finish the task.

To tell someone this is the problem and this is how you solve it is not the complete answer. Believe it or not, people who have that kind of habit build that response style, they cannot in good conscience complete a task. You see, they feel guilty that something else needs them more than the one they are dealing with at the moment, and if they don't go to that they haven't done things the right way. Think about it. Not completing a task gives you no joy, and if you feel guilt bound because you aren't doing something here and your attention should be over there, there's no joy in that either. So it takes some practice. You have to practice completing a task. Practicing completing a job is really, really important.

One of the things that unions or organized labor has given us is the opportunity of doing one job and doing it well. Much of the contracts of former days for union workers was that a person would do a particular job and they would do it quite well. If your job was screwing nuts on a wheel that was passing before you on an assembly line and you had an air hammer or an air screwdriver or an electric one or whatever you used, you could do it well and get it all finished before the thing moved out of sight. You could do that and every time you completed your task.

For those persons who were trained in how to think and how to figure things out and go on to a more complex way of life, doing the same thing over and over and over again becomes very boring. Sometimes, though, we get so scattered that we get frustrated and we get so upset because we don't know the joy of a completed task. Mothers often feel that kind of responsibility to get things done, and yet, if they don't complete them -- along with all the rest of us -- they feel frustrated. I sense that kind of frustration a lot; that is, the frustration of never completing anything due to too many interests. So I feel obligated to stop and do one thing at a time. Our minds have been trained in how to think on multi-levels and on multi-things at a time, therefore it is easy to become distracted, isn't it? But the problem is, we have to face one task. We have to stay focused. Staying on task is a big problem for a lot of folks.

Mark gives us a window in which we can get some insight about how to stay on task; at least we can see how Jesus dealt with this thing of staying with the mission that had been given to him. You notice that Jesus had a mission given to him and that mission was from the Father. He had a commission. When you give someone a mission and you empower them to do it, you commission them. We do that in our churches. We commission people to certain tasks or jobs. We consecrate them, dedicate them -- but we commission them. We say, "Here, this is yours. Go do it." So let us see how Jesus was able to do that mission that he was sent to do.

Now let me say, before I get any farther, these principles or points that I am going to make can be used in any kind of mission or any kind of task to which you have been assigned. You can use them in anything; but I am particularly talking about them now for the church today.

First of all, Jesus knew his mission. This is fundamental. He knew who had commissioned him. He knew what his mission or his task was. In verse thirty-eight, he said Jesus' task was to "proclaim the message." What was the message? The message was the acceptable year of our Lord. What was the acceptable year of our Lord? Repent for the kingdom of God is at hand. That was the message he was taking to all the people. In our day and age, we need that message again as much as they did in that day. Jesus, you see, had a special service to render and that was to proclaim that mission.

Paul S. Milner, in the Layman's Bible Commentary's volume on Mark said, "He was a courier with news which must be broadcast as widely and as quickly as he could manage it. The news included, to be sure, the power to evict demons; but if he permitted the hubbub that was in use by this power to deflect attention from God's commission, he would forfeit his responsibility." Jesus knew what he was to do, to go to the neighboring towns.

Now the second thing that we can get from Mark in this succinct picture is that Jesus stayed close to the source of his mission. He stayed close to God, his Father. "In the morning when it was very dark, he got up and went out to a deserted place to pray." If you have a mission, if you have a task, there will come times in the processing of that task that you don't know what to do next or you may have choices and you don't know which choice would be better. So you need to ask questions of the one who gave you the task. Jesus -- on the first morning after that synagogue experience and a whole evening of healing people and casting out demons and the night's rest was scanty, probably, in hours -- needed some time to refresh.

He needed some time to refresh, because the third thing that Mark shows us, is that Jesus did not allow himself to get distracted. He was doing good. Peter came to him that morning with his companions and said to him, "Everyone is searching for you." This implied that healing work was still there to be done. Oh, there had been hundreds of folks last evening, but this morning there were more. I can see Jesus when he was getting ready to go out to his deserted place and I think Mark uses every word with great intensity. For example, he said that Jesus went to a deserted place. In my mind I can see people at Peter's house and his mother-in-law was there sick before and now she was well and I can see the people outside waiting, spending the night waiting for the morning when Jesus would come out and heal them, too.

So in the night, early in the morning, Mark says, "When it was very, very dark," no moonlight, only the starlight -- when it was very dark, way before the break of dawn, before the sun's rays had even began to come over the eastern horizon, in the very darkness of the night Jesus slipped out. He tiptoed over whoever he must have had to go around and about and over and by to get out to go to a deserted place where there weren't any people, to go away so that he could have time to pray. And in that place he finally found it, so that Peter and the others had a hard time finding him. But finally, after people were shuffling around and Jesus was missing and the crowd was growing, Peter came to him and said, "Everyone is looking for you."

It is nice to be wanted. It is nice to be needed. And those people who were there, those who had brought loved ones and relatives that were sick and needed healing, they were there waiting. Everyone was watching. "Everyone needs you and wants to have you there. You have the power and they want you to share it with them." That's heavy stuff. Jesus could have said, "Well, this is pretty important. These people need me. I'd really better stay here a while longer." Jesus didn't heal everybody, folks. He did not cast out all the demons that were there in the people of that day or any other time or place where he was. He did not heal all the sick. He did not cleanse all the lepers. He did not cast out all the demons. He did not clean up all the unclean spirits. Time and time again through the weeks that followed -- Paul Milner reminds us -- he had to keep his heart focused on the basic purpose: Why I came was to proclaim the message. And so he said to Peter and his friends, "Let's go to the next town." He didn't even go back to say goodbye. He didn't go back to do anything. He just moved on to the next town.

One of the major defenses against being distracted in the work of God is the time in prayer. You see. Milner says time and time again that concentration on this simple task led Jesus to withdraw into the wilderness. The wilderness is the Greek word that is translated also as "the lonely place." This place, symbolizing the ministry of John and the trial of Jesus by Satan was the place where by prayer, Jesus could resist the attraction of the popularity, where he could renew his dependence on God, and where he could return to his initial commission. Get a load of all that he says in this time of prayer. He had the power from the prayer to resist his attractions to popularity. He could renew his dependence on God and he could return to his initial commission. Jesus said, "This is why I came." So you see, he didn't get distracted because of that, and he moved on to the neighboring town.

The fourth thing is that Jesus shared his mission with others and trained them to proceed in it. He didn't do his work solo, alone. He developed disciples, he trained them, and my word is he practiced them. I know that's not very good grammatically; but the point is, Jesus had his disciples practice what he had been teaching them. Not only the twelve, but he sent seventy out in pairs at one time. He sent them out and let them practice what he had been teaching them. So when you have a task to do, you train other people to help you do that task and you let them practice what they are to do. Then you can send them on and keep on going. In leadership roles we have often heard that a good leader is one who develops someone to take his place when the leader is gone. Jesus was doing that. He had disciples. He trained them, and they could succeed.

In the fifth place -- and the last place -- he didn't quit until the mission was accomplished. Jesus didn't stay in one place. He moved on to the neighboring town and he preached his message there, and then he went on to another neighboring town. Everywhere he had to, he did healing and he did casting out of demons and cleansing of lepers and all of that. But his message was being gotten out. He didn't quit until his mission was finished. He didn't quit in the garden of Gethsemane. He didn't quit in Pilate's hall. He didn't quit when he was before Caiphus and the council. He didn't quit until the crucifixion was finished. His mission was completed. His task was over, and so therefore, Jesus' statement on the cross, "It is finished," was no hollow proclamation. It was, indeed, the fundamental goal on which he was working toward. His mission was going through to that point. He was proclaiming his message all along and so that message ended him on a cross. Finally, he was able to say, "It is finished," the last words he said before he died on the cross. His mission was accomplished.

So therefore, our challenge is to know our mission. Stay close to the source of the commission. Don't get distracted. Share the mission with others and help train them in how to achieve it. And don't quit until the mission is accomplished. So be it for all of us, for that is the way we want it to be for each of us. Amen.