November 4, 2007 Message

November 4, 2007
Matthew 5:1-12, Matthew 7:24-27
“When Less Is More”

Yertle the Turtle is a great story about a turtle that thought he was big stuff. He was important. Yertle was a king… of a small pond that is. Everything he could see from the rock throne in the middle of that pond was his, or so he thought. But he couldn’t see everything, could he?
“He sat on a rock and could see all the pond,
But Yertle could not see the places beyond...”

So he figured if he could see farther, he could see more things… and they would all be his. And to see farther, all he had to do was to get up a little higher.
“So, he ordered nine turtles to swim to his stone,
And using these turtles he built a new throne.”

Those turtles got up on the stone in the middle of the pond and stood one on top of the other – with Yertle right there on top of the stack. You’d think the higher he was, the happier he would be. But not Yertle! Even when he could see a mile, and declared that the cow and the mule and the house and the cat and the blueberry bush were all his, he had to get higher yet. It seemed the more he could see, the more he wanted to see… and the more he stepped on others, until…
“That plain little turtle below in the stack,
That plain little turtle whose name was just Mack,
Decided he'd taken enough. And he had.
And that plain little lad got a little bit mad.
And that plain little Mack did a plain little thing:
He burped! And his burp shook the throne of the king.”

When that happened, Yertle fell from the top of the stack pretty fast, right into the pond… and into the mud. This story of Yertle is a little like the story Jesus told of the foolish man who built his house on the sand instead of on a rock and “When a storm rolled in and the waves came up, it collapsed like a house of cards." Yertle fell from his high place because he didn’t build his throne on a solid foundation, but on the backs of other turtles with only a tiny burp between his lofty, high perch and the sticky, slimy mud of the pond below.

Not only did his high position, above everyone else, rest on a ‘not so good’ foundation, the motivation behind it wasn’t good either. Remember, Yertle’s reason for being up so high was so he could see more, so more would be his. He was selfish and greedy. He wanted to get higher and higher so that more would be his. It was all about making his kingdom bigger.
Each day we have choices as well regarding the foundations on which our lives are built and how solid we want those foundations to be. Sure we can build on values like selfishness and greed. We can ignore or not care about people around us who need help. Or we can build on the values Jesus teaches.

He tells his followers and the church today: “These words I speak to you are not incidental additions to your life, homeowner improvements to your standard of living. They are foundational words, words to build a life on.” We can be like the Yertle the Turtle and the man who built his house on the sand or we can put “our house” on a rock solid foundation capable of getting us through the ‘storms and floods of life’ …and all the small burps as well.

His warning not to build our lives “on sand” is part of, what many consider, the most important sermon ever given: Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. His message that day included the Beatitudes, in which we find the very foundational elements on which we are to build our life as the people of God - the basic premise being found in Jesus’ words: “With less of you there is more of God and his rule.”

You see, when we become less concerned about thinking only of ourselves… and more concerned of others, we become meek… and more of God. The biblical understanding of meekness has more to do with humility, with seeing ourselves as we really are, no better or no worse than we are… or anyone else for that matter. That is, after all, how God sees us as well.
Once upon a time, there was a place where everybody, including the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker, wore a crown.

One day a traveling photographer, who made his living by taking pictures of kings and queens and their families, came to this country. He would take his camera throughout the country and take a picture of everyone wearing crowns. Then he would put them in an album and sell them to the king of the country for a lot of money.

The traveling photographer set up his camera and started tak-ing pictures in this place where everyone wore a crown. Person after person – every man, woman, and child – who walked by were all wearing crowns, so he took their pictures. He took a lot of pictures! And he began thinking. "How could so many people be part of the royal family?"

So he began asking questions. "Excuse me, Mister Butcher-with-the-Crown. What relation do you have to the king?" "I'm one of his children," the butcher replied, "so I guess I am a prince."
The photographer asked the baker, "Excuse me, ma'am. How are you related to the king?" She answered, "I'm one of his chil-dren, a princess." In fact, everyone he met was either a prince or a princess (or at least they claimed to be).

Finally, he had used up all his film (that was before you could download your pictures, erase them from memory and start over again). He printed the photos and headed to the castle with the largest album ever. He knocked at the door, only to be greeted by another man wearing a large crown. "You must be the king," the photographer said. "No, I am one of the king's aides. I'm also a prince."

"Another prince!" The photographer was amazed. "Tell me, prince, how can there be so many crowns? How can everybody be a prince or a princess? Doesn't it make the king unhappy that everyone is wearing a crown?"

"Of course not,” the king's helper told the photographer, "there is even a crown here for you, too, if you want it. The king issued a royal decree that everyone who enters this land becomes a member of his family. Everyone here wears a crown. Everyone here is a prince or princess. But there is one rule: we must remember that he is the king and that we all belong to the king's family!"

The lesson here is that to be meek is to know our identity as human beings - that God calls all of us to be his children. We are all princes and princesses in the kingdom of God. But we must always remember that God is the King. Our meekness – our humil-ity - requires our remembering that God is the head of the royal family.

With less of us there can be more of God… Perhaps the Beatitudes are not so much about ‘who is blessed in this world,’ but about ‘when we are blessed.’ And that is really quite simple – we are blessed when, in our lives, there is less of us, and more of God.
You're blessed when you're at the end of your rope…
Or you feel you've lost what is most dear to you…
Or are content with just who you are—no more, no less…
Or you've worked up a good appetite for God…
Or when you care…
Or when you get your mind and heart—put right…
Or when you can show people how to cooperate instead of compete or fight…
Or when your commitment to God becomes a nuisance…
Or when people put you down or speak lies about you to discredit me.

Then, and perhaps only then, will we begin to realize it’s not so much about us as it is about God. That’s when less becomes more – our relying less on us and more on God. That is when we are blessed. That is when we are all children of God. That is the foundation on which we are to build our life. A foundation in Jesus Christ who taught we are all children of God, heirs to a kingdom, that is as near as our becoming less and God becoming more.