Three Magic Words: Please, I’m Sorry and Thank You
November 6, 2016
Dr. Tom Pace
I Peter 5:1-5
We begin a new series of sermons today called “The Three Magic Words” and for the next three weeks we’re going to be looking at the words that our parents taught us to say over and over again. I was going to title the series, “What Do You say…” because it would be like a mom saying, “So what do you say…?” But I couldn’t get the nasal tone in the printed stuff or the tonality so we changed that.
Those words – please, I’m sorry and thank you are more than just etiquette, and we’re going to talk about how they are great representations of what our attitude posture is before the world and before God. So today we’re going to talk about please and the Christian word that I want to tie to that word please is the word submit. The Greek word is hupotasso and you’ll be tested on that at the end. It’s translated in Today’s Scripture as accept. Accept the authority. But the word literally means surrender or submit. It’s actually a military word that has to do with being under authority. This week is Veteran’s Day and we hope you’ll take some time to think about them.
But this is a word that has to do with being under authority, so would you listen as we hear the Scripture read today from I Peter.
Now as an elder myself and a witness of the sufferings of Christ, as well as one who shares in the glory to be revealed, I exhort the elders among youto tend the flock of God that is in your charge, exercising the oversight, not under compulsion but willingly, as God would have you do it—not for sordid gain but eagerly.Do not lord it over those in your charge, but be examples to the flock.And when the chief shepherd appears, you will win the crown of glory that never fades away.In the same way, you who are younger must accept the authority of the elders.And all of you must clothe yourselves with humility in your dealings with one another, for “God opposes the proud,
but gives grace to the humble.” (I Peter 5:1-5 –NRSV)
Let’s pray together. O God, open us up, open our eyes that we might see, and our ears that we might hear. Open our hearts that we might feel, and then O Lord open our hands that we might serve. Amen.
When you asked for a cookie, Mom would say, “What’s the magic word?” and you would say, “Please!” Then you’d get a cookie. When you got in a fight with your brother or sister, Mom or Dad would march you be in front of brother or sister and say, “What do you say to your brother?” You’d say, “I’m sorry.” It was about the best you could do - you didn’t really mean it but you said it anyway.
When the kids came for Trick or Treating this week they’d get their candy and turn and zip down the sidewalk because they were anxious to get to the next candy. And if they were of the age where there was an adult loitering outside on the sidewalk watching them, that adult would always say, “What do you say?” And the kid would turn around, “Thank you.” Then they’d go on about their business.
Now here’s what I’m here to say to you I think those words matter. They’re beyond etiquette. We have a tendency sometimes to think of etiquette as something that’s sort of superficial and I want to tell you that I believe in this case, particularly in this case, they mean something deeper.
See, our words shape us. What we say shapes what we feel and what we think. They’re not just expressions of what we feel and think, but they actually help to form what we say or think.
We’re been taught to believe that when we’re angry or upset it’s really important that we verbalize it, that we say how angry and upset we are. We’ve been taught that it’s not good to gunnysack – to hold our feelings in. I think in some cases that’s true, but they’ve done a good bit of research. There’s a professor named Brad Bushman at Ohio State who has done much research on what happens when we verbalize our negative emotions, especially when we write them down, O you e-mailers, Tweeters, and others. What it is does is reinforce the feelings that we have.
Immediately there is a quick sort of ventilating, letting off of steam but what they found is those negative feelings last much longer. It’s because you’ve codified them, you’ve made them more than something bouncing around inside you that’s gooey – you’ve now given it form and structure. And they last much longer.
Our words shape who we are. So what I want to suggest to you is that the word please makes a difference. I believe please puts us in the right attitude in the right posture before God and others.
So imagine if you would a continuum. And on one end of the continuum is a sense of apathy and complacence that says, “I can’t do anything about it. Life is the way it is. It is what it is. I can’t change it. It is what it is.” It’s like a teenager who says, “Whatever.” Boy, that makes you mad, doesn’t it? It’s like the worst thing. I’d rather them cuss and scream than say, “Whatever.” It’s like they’re saying, “I don’t agree with you. I don’t really want to respect you but I guess I can’t do anything about it.”
Or there’s sort of a positive way in that same complacence, “It’s all good.” That’s very positive but it’s not true. It’s not all good. There are some things that are bad. There are some things that we need to work against and strive against and make better and give ourselves to.
There’s a song called “The Housewife’s Lament” which I think expresses that sort of hopelessness sometimes. It goes, “Life is a toil and love is a trouble. Beauty will fade and riches will flee. Pleasures they dwindle and prices they double, and nothing is as I would wish it to be.” Boy, it’s bad and it’s not going to get any better.
So that’s here on this side is that apathy and complacency. Now way on the other side is entitlement. On the other side it says, “It’s bad and I deserve it to be better. And I’m going to be mad until it’s better.”
You know the opposite of entitlement is submission, to submit. It is a sense of saying, “I recognize that it’s not all up to me. I am not in charge of the world and the world does not revolve around me.”
So between entitlement and complacence I think there is something called active submission. What it does is say, “I’m going to work as hard as I can. I’m going to pray as hard as I can. I’m going to ask, and ask, and share my feelings about this. I’m going to say, ‘Come on, it can be better than this. We can do this, please, please, please.’”
If you have never been with a child at the checkout counter at the grocery store and the candy bars are right there. “Please, please, please!” And you say, “Okay! Here, it’s bad for you but eat it anyway!” You give in to that “ask- seek – knock” idea. That’s the images we get in Scripture of the persistent widow. This asking what’s in our hearts. But the word please also acknowledges that it’s not up to us. That someone else – some thing else – has the ability to make that decision and we submit to that. We know we’re not in charge of the world.
So what I want to do is present three different places that we learn how to say please. The word please comes from the expression “If it pleases you.” Basically we’re saying, “It’s up to you.” Three different ways: the first is others, the second is life, and the third is God. We say please to others, say please to life and say please to God.
First – saying please to others. Our Scripture today is Peter writing to the people of a church and he speaks first to the leaders of the church, the elders, the pastors if you will. And he says, “I exhort the elders among youto tend the flock of God that is in your charge, exercising the oversight, not under compulsion but willingly, as God would have you do it—not for sordid gain but earnestly.” He’s saying, “Look, these are your people.”
I have been incredibly blessed over my ministry to have wonderful congregations of people. Wonderful – every church I’ve served the people have been amazing. Part of that is that I decided that they’re amazing.
You decide – these are the people I’ve got. These are the people I love. These are the ones God gave me to tend. And I’m not going to spend my time saying, “I wish I had different people.” Instead I want to spend my energy tending the people that God has given me. You can spend your life wishing for something else, but he’s saying, “Look, these are the people you’ve got.”
Then he goes to the other side. He says, “In the same way, you who are younger must accept the authority of the elders.” Accept – submit is that word that’s there. “And all of you must clothe yourselves with humility in your dealings with one another, for God opposes the proud,but gives grace to the humble.” We’re going to talk about humility some more next week.
But he’s saying to them, “Look, don’t fight your boss. It’s not smart and it doesn’t work. Don’t come into your work place and decide you have all the answers and everybody else is stupid.”
There’s a point in your life when you’re growing up that you realize you may wish you had different parents. Remember that moment? You’re in junior high or high school and you think, “I want a dad who can teach me to pitch like Johnny has a dad who knows how to pitch. And I don’t have that dad.” Then you grow up and you begin to see your parents with sort of the roundness of who they are. All the good, and the bad and the yes and the no and you learn to accept them. As they are. And you hope they accept you as you are.
We can’t wish we had different children and we can’t wish we had different parents. Because it doesn’t happen. At some point you accept, you submit to life in the way it is. So you work as hard as you can, you pray as hard as you can, you lean into what you think ought to be the case. Then at the same time you accept that it’s not all up to you with the people that are in your life.
You wish you had more money, you wish you had a bigger house, you wish you drove a different car, you wish you had a better job. You can go on and on. You wish you lived in a city that wasn’t humid. When you go to Colorado for the summer and you come back and you get off the plane, you go, “Why do I live here?” You feel the humidity hit you.
But then you think to yourself, “Because this is my city, these are my people. That’s why I’m here.”
So that picture is so important. The image goes on. Paul writes this in Romans 13: “Submit yourself to the governing authorities.” The government that you’ve got. You submit yourselves to that government.
Look, we have an election coming on Tuesday and I suggest that some of you are going to be happy and some of you are not going to be happy on Wednesday morning. I know that. I would bet a lot of money on that. And so what we do is we work as hard as we can. We campaign, we speak, and we share what’s in our hearts. We say, “Please, please, please give us the president we want.”
But then we say, “But it’s not all up to me. This is in God’s hands. We’re doing the best we can. We work and we implore and then we trust God.” That’s what it means to be subject to, to submit to the people around us. You can wish it was different if you want and you can work for it to be different, but ultimately you accept. And you submit to the authority that is around you.
So the first is that we say please to others around us. Second, we say please to life. We read the names of those who have gone before us a few minutes ago, those who are in the Church Triumphant. It’s been interesting over the years. I remember when I first came to St. Luke’s and I’d been here a few months and we had All Saints Sunday. I knew almost none of the names. Almost none of them. They were just names on a sheet of paper. Names that were read. I’d pray for them but I didn’t really know who they were.
But this time I’ve done some of those memorial services but even those that I didn’t do the memorial service for, I know those people and I thought, “Wow, how that’s changed.”
When you talk to people who are near the end of their lives, almost without exception if you ask them they would say, “I wouldn’t do it any differently. I wouldn’t change anything. It’s been a good life. I’ve had a good life.”
Now if you really begin to push them and say, “Look, are you telling me you would have wanted this to happen instead of this? Seriously! You wouldn’t want your friend to have died, would you?” And they’ll say, “No, of course not. But when I look at my life, when I look at life as it is I say, ‘Thank you, God. It’s been a good life.’”
When we – those who have been left behind – deal with our grief we go through a process to get to submission. You probably are familiar – I learned it in seminary – DABDA – the Stages of Grief. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Sometimes they add an “H” for hope.
And what’s the end point? It’s when you finally get to the point that you’re not so upset that you lost the person, that you can no longer celebrate that you had them in the first place. You get to the point where you can say, “Thank you, God, for the gift of this person. I recognize that life has a beginning and an end among us here. Not as part of the Church Triumphant, but among us here that death is a part of God’s plan for life. And that I can give thanks to you for the life that you gave us.” To get to that point.
In our family the name that meant the most to us is Joyce Irene Wagner, my mother-in-law who passed away this past year. And when I think about her life she had challenges as a young person, her family had lots of difficulties and challenges when she was young. Over the last years of her life she had probably 15 years of health struggles and she worked hard to overcome those. But not once did it ever make her bitter or did she lose her faith. Yes, she could pray, and plead that she could be healed and that things would be better, that her health could be better. But at the same time she was so grateful and accepted the life that God had given her. That’s the essence of please, that simple word that we say over and over again. Please, God, I want to ask you, this is what I ask you but I trust you.
Those of you who are in Twelve Step groups are probably familiar with the Serenity Prayer. You may or not know that it was written by Reinhold Niebuhr who was one of the great theologians of the 20th century. I have always loved the prayer but it’s particularly the last part of the prayer that has spoken to me.
The first part of the prayer you probably know. It goes: “God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things which should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.” It’s had different words in the years that have gone by. But listen to the last part, “Living one day at a time, enjoying one moment at a time, accepting hardship as a pathway to peace, taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it. Trusting that you will make all things right if I surrender to your will so that I may be reasonably happy in this life and supremely happy with you forever in the next.”
The courage to change the things that can be changed, to be able to say to take life as it is, not as we would have it to be. That’s sufficient. That’s a please. That acknowledges that we’re not in charge.
So that brings me to the last component which is when we say please to God. That that is really the essence of prayer.
You have in your pew prayer leaves and we’re kind of bringing those back again, refocusing on them. You have probably seen the prayer tree in our new Fellowship Walk and around the church. At the two Connection Centers and by the Prayer Tree are some boxes that you can drop your prayers in. You write them on those leaves and our prayer team will pray for those things. And I suspect there will be many prayers of please, please, God. Please make my friend well, prayers of supplications for ourselves, prayers of intercession for others. Next week we’ll talk about prayers that say I’m sorry. Prayers of confession. And finally the next week prayers that say thank you.
But that’s the essence of prayer. To come before God with that posture, recognizing that it’s not up to us. We’re going to do as much as we can but we also trust in God.
Listen to what James says. This is the letter of James in verse seven. He says, “Submit yourselves then to God.” And he goes on: “Listen, you who say today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money. Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow! Instead, you ought to say, ‘if it’s the Lord’s will we will live and do this or that.’”
Do you see the difference? What’s the old saying? “When humans plan, God laughs”? I’ve always liked that. We plan things but God says, “You know, I’ve got all the cards here.”
I think the most powerful prayer in Scripture is the prayer of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. Because that prayer expresses exactly what we’re talking about here today. He says, “God, if there is a way, take this cup away from me. I don’t want to go to the cross. Please God.” Then he says, “Nonetheless, not what I will, but what thou wilt.” A statement of submission, of surrender.
So I don’t know what’s in your heart today. I don’t know the places where you have become just complacent and apathetic and you quit working and quit asking. I don’t know the places on the other side where you’re just mad because you don’t get what you want. But somewhere in the middle there is a place of active submission, of pleading with God. And giving yourself to making a difference, but recognizing it’s not in your hands.
Let’s pray together. Lord God, we do thank you for all those who have gone before us who are part of the Church Triumphant. And we’re so thankful for the gift of their lives, God, that their lives with all the ups and downs, with the good things and the bad ones with the hurt and with the joy with the things that are exactly as we would have them to be and things we would love to have changed. We thank you for them. We pray for your will to be done this week in this election. We pray that you would teach us how to work and plead and beg for what we believe is right. But to trust you, that you hold us all in the palm of your hand. We pray all this in the name of Christ our Lord. Amen.