Is the Church Too Magoo

Is the Church Too Magoo?

Philippians 4:4-9

Today’s sermon title may be confusing to you. I don’t pretend to be up on all the latest cultural trends and slang usage, so I honestly don’t know if the term I put in there is in anyone’s working vocabulary or if it’s just a pet word that my kids use.

They use the term magoo to describe a lack of awareness, a condition of being naive, unworldly, and relentlessly and annoyingly positive.

If I can present a picture of magoo, it would be a scene from a play called The Nerd. A man gets a visit from an old army buddy whose life he saved many years ago. The visitor is suffocatingly appreciative, insufferably nice, and absurdly positive. Driven to their wits end by this visitor’s puppy dog enthusiasm, the host and his friends hatch a plot to bore the visitor to tears so that he will leave them alone.

They create the stupidest, most pointless game they can think of, and then they begin playing this game with great energy and passion. The game is so dumb that the visitor is temporarily at a loss, and the plotters dare to hope that he’s finally going to lose interest in them.

But when they finally finish the game, after a long and tedious effort, the visitor announces, “When you first explain the rules, you wouldn’t think it would be that much fun, but, you know, now that I’m catching on to it, this game is really great! Let’s play again!”

That’s the definition of magoo: so utterly and hopelessly head-in-the-clouds upbeat in spite of all evidence to the contrary that you can hardly stand to be around them for any length of time.

There are times when the apostle Paul borders on being magoo. Here is a guy who should know better. He has experienced more suffering and misery than most of us can imagine. His back is basically scar tissue. He was whipped at least five times with 40 lashes apiece. Beaten with rods three times. Stoned nearly to death once. Shipwrecked at sea. Imprisoned more times than he can count. Ridiculed, mocked, insulted. Always on the road, danger constantly around him. Hungry, thirsty and cold. The congregations he so painstakingly starts up wind up bickering and backsliding and making a mess of the gospel.

By any objective assessment he has led a difficult, frustrating, and exhausting life. As the old country tune says, if it weren’t for bad luck he’d have no luck at all.

Yet in his letters he so often comes across as Winnie the Pooh’s pal Tigger. He bounces around gushing over everything. Everything’s wonderful, everything’s great. When he gets beaten and thrown in jail he doesn’t seem to realize it’s a bad thing: no, he organizes a prisoner party and forms a glee club.

Listen to how he starts his letter to the Corinthians, a congregation that has given him fits: “I give thanks to my God always for you because of the grace of God that has been given you in Christ Jesus, for in every way you have been enriched in him, in speech and knowledge of ever kind, so that you are not lacking in any spiritual gift.”

Or his letter to the Philippians: “I thank my God every time I remember you, constantly praying with joy in every one of my prayers for all of you.”

How about Ephesians, where he writes: “Be filled with the spirit as you sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord in your hearts, giving thanks to God the Father at all times and for everything.”

Or today’s reading: “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say rejoice.”

Have you ever been around a modern day soulmate of Paul? Everything is praise the Lord this and praise the Lord that? They can’t thank God enough for seeing to it that they had the exact change at the checkout counter?

Have you noticed how the national church is relentlessly positive? Go to a synod function or national gathering. Despite organizational and policy headaches that can be downright scary, it’s all joy and praise and thanks and celebration.

I’m pretty sure that the image we project is a little magoo. Always joyful and thankful? That attitude grates on the realists among us. Get real. Let me know that you’re human. Admit it, some days really stink.

Last Monday was a beautiful day and I went for a run in midmorning. I was rounding the curve on Prairie Street going up the hill to Cottonwood. And you know, there’s a lot of construction clutter on that sidewalk. Now I had been running with Loyal in the dark of early morning for weeks without incident. But here in broad daylight, I clipped a chunk of concrete, and started to go down. I fought like crazy to regain my balance. And I came so close. Nearly thought I’d pulled out of it, but not quite. After 40 yards of what I’m sure was incredibly graceful windmilling and whirlybirding, I crashed and burned on the concrete.

Managed to rip up both palms, and skinned up so much of my left side that I used more bandaids this past week than have in last 45 years combined.

There is no need to reveal exactly what I thought or said as slammed into the sidewalk, but I can assure you, I was not singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord in my heart, giving thanks to God the Father at all times and for everything.

Now someone like Paul might have dusted himself off, looked around and said, “Hey, no one witnessed that! Thank you Jesus for saving me from that embarrassment. Hey, praise the Lord I did not break any bones! The Lord is generous indeed. Great is the Lord and greatly to be praised!”

I just didn’t have that in me. I was mad at myself, the sidewalk, and actually the whole world and everything in it. I hurt all over, and dreaded having to go home and scour clean all those fresh sores.

There are many times to give thanks but I’m sorry, that wasn’t one of them.

When I ask the question is this church too magoo, I’m coming at it from this angle. There is an evangelism price we pay for taking Paul too seriously. For being too magoo.

The problem is that we set ourselves up too high. We set such a high standard and expectation for behavior, and someone from the outside listens to that and says, “I don’t know what world they’re living in, but it doesn’t look anything like mine. They are floating around in lala land. They just don’t get it.”

To make matters worse, they see the church spending half its time condemning everyone and declaring that the world and especially our society is going to hell in a handbasket, and the other half praising and thanking God for how wonderfully God is running the world. Sometimes we’re all negative and sometimes we’re all magoo.

And people sit in the middle of this and say, “Would you just leave me alone?”

I think we do well to remember why Paul wrote what he did. Yes, in many of his writings he was relentlessly positive, and he urged all of us to be so. But it was not because he was naïve or unworldly or magoo. If you want to see another side of Paul, read Galatians, where a fuming Paul is shockingly descriptive in what he suggests his enemies can do to themselves. He knew very well the troubles life can bring.

We live in a world where great things happen. And we live in a world where the other stuff happens.

Paul was aware of that and of two truths that go with that. First, when we focus more on the great things of life than the bad, life is better. We hear this in common sayings: when life gives you lemons, make lemonade. We discover this in self-improvement classes and psychology based on Norman Vincent Peale’s book: the Power of Positive Thinking, and even transcendental meditation.

It actually goes back to way long ago. Biblical writers like Paul were proclaiming the same thing. Only they proclaim the message this way: We live in a world where great things happen, mostly because of God. And we live in a world in which the other stuff happens, mostly because of people.

When we focus on the good stuff, we focus on God. Or maybe it’s the other way around. Either way, good things happen when we do that. When we focus on the bad stuff, we focus us on ourselves. Or maybe it’s the other way around. Either way, bad things happen when we do that. Being positive works.

The second truth is that despite what we all know is good for us, we tend to focus on the bad stuff. We complain about all the bad things that are going on in the world, all the bad breaks we get. We criticize all the lazy, incompetent, corrupt, and stupid people with whom we are forced to share this planet. We are surrounded by the overpaid and arrogant, the greedy and materialistic, the depraved and the disgusting, the ungrateful and the selfish, the clueless and the cowardly.

The more we focus on that, the more cynical we become about this world. The more God’s world becomes an ugly place, hardly worth bothering with, much less improving, or saving. The presence of God all but fades from view. We end up worshipping a God of scarcity who has invested so little in this creation that it makes no sense for us to knock ourselves out in a hopeless cause. Focusing on the negative is a recipe for inaction, bitterness, and division.

Worse than that, focusing on the negative is lack of faith. Faith means saying “yes” to God. Faith means, yeah we know there’s bad stuff out there, yeah, sometimes the evidence doesn’t predict a positive result, but we’re not giving up. We’re not going to let it beat us. We are going to trust those promises of the Bible. We believe in new life and the love of God and the saving power of Jesus.

That faith, that saying yes, can accomplish marvelous things. Because now the world is not a barren wasteland but a garden of possibility. God is not a god of scarcity with no influence on a cruddy world, but a God of abundance with unimaginable riches to share.

Focus on God, focus on the good, writes Paul in Philippians, and watch what happens. Focus your energy on whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is beautiful, whatever is admirable—anything excellent or praiseworthy—focus on these things. You’ll be amazed at the difference in your life that that change of attitude can accomplish.

Christian stewardship operates on the same principle. I don’t think I’m being magoo about the challenges this congregation faces. I know the challenges are real and have to be dealt with. But I believe what Paul says about the importance of attitude. Whom do we worship: a god of scarcity and stinginess, or a God of abundance?

Do we focus on ourselves and the negative and all the reasons why we can’t do it, why our congregation can’t do it? On how meager are God’s gifts to us, and so we really have little to contribute and it wouldn’t make much difference if we did?

If that is the case, we should all sit down to our Thanksgiving turkey dinners this week and join in the chorus of cynics who say, “Hey, God, thanks for nothing. What a messed up world you’re running”!

Paul’s response: Focus on God, focus on what is good and true and noble and right. Faith is all about saying yes and there’s nothing magoo about faith, so long as we recognize the very real challenges of this world, and the ups and down of this life.

I pray to God that today in our stewardship commitment, in our lives, and this coming holiday when we sit down to the feast, we tap into the power of positive thinking. That we say yes to God’s creation. That we say yes to God’s promises. That we give thanks to the Lord, for he is good, and his mercy endures for ever.

For when we do so, the peace of God which passes all understanding will descend upon our hearts.