166 Racket Field

    (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “Racket Field”, originally shared on November 15, 2021. It was the 166^th video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)

   We all experience a lot of background noise in our lives. How do we filter out what’s not important so that we can focus on what is important? Today, we’re going to find out.

   I was at The Auto Club Raceway at Pomona the other day. The Auto Club NHRA (National Hot Rod Association) Finals were going on and I was just outside on Fairplex Drive, which is right between the raceway and Brackett Field. Brackett Field is a regional airport for small planes, helicopters (including fire-fighting helicopters), and private jets.

   Our home is around 2 miles from the raceway, but we can hear the races from our house.

   When our son was little, he’d refer to this area as “Racket Field”. The day I was there, there was Top Alcohol, Sportsman, Pro Stock, and Nitro competitions, as well as exhibitions, but the one thing that they all had in common was that they make a lot of racket.

   Round 1 of the Top Alcohol Eliminations was going on and it was way loud, even outside the viewing stands. People inside were holding their ears or wearing noise-canceling headphones.

   Most of the time, when people talk about “filtering out the noise” they mean removing the distractions that keep them from focusing on what’s important in life: the social media, unhelpful criticism or praise, the 24-hour news cycle; cultural temptations, selfishness as a virtue, glorification of material things, entertainment as the norm, and everything that seems so loud that we’re barely able to pursue our existence.

   We all have to do a lot of filtering, but first we have to decide what is important. Otherwise, we’re just being selfish.

   When Paul wrote the famous “love chapter” in his first letter to the Corinthians, he showed us the way.

   He said, in 1 Corinthians 13,

13 If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. ² And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. ³ If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

⁴ Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant ⁵ or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; ⁶ it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. ⁷ It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

⁸ Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. ⁹ For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; ¹⁰ but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. ¹¹ When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. ¹² For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. ¹³ And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.

   Paul wrote this letter to his “difficult” congregation, the church at Corinth. The Greek language in which he wrote it had several words for different kinds of love: “phileo” for friendship or personal attachment, “storge” for the love of members of a family, and “eros” for love for the body or for beauty itself. 

   But the one he used in every case in this chapter is “agape”, a selfless love or a higher appreciation and regard that comes from God. It is the kind of love with which God loves us. It is an expression of the living relationship with the one true living God that can only come from God.

   This is what helps us block out the noise. We live in response to what God has done for us in Jesus Christ.

   John writes in 1 John 4:7-21

⁷ Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. ⁸ Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love. ⁹ God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. ¹⁰ In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. ¹¹ Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. ¹² No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us.

¹³ By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit. ¹⁴ And we have seen and do testify that the Father has sent his Son as the Savior of the world. ¹⁵ God abides in those who confess that Jesus is the Son of God, and they abide in God. ¹⁶ So we have known and believe the love that God has for us.

God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them. ¹⁷ Love has been perfected among us in this: that we may have boldness on the day of judgment, because as he is, so are we in this world. ¹⁸ There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love. ¹⁹ We love because he first loved us. ²⁰ Those who say, “I love God,” and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen. ²¹ The commandment we have from him is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also.

   How do we know this? John says, “By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit.” 

   The Holy Spirit, the streams of living water gushing up from within us to eternal life, is God’s active presence for good in us and for the sake of the world.

   Martin Luther, the 16^th century Church reformer wrote, in his Small Catechism, “I believe that I cannot by my own understanding or effort believe in Jesus Christ my Lord, or come to him. But the Holy Spirit has called me through the Gospel, enlightened me with his gifts, and sanctified and kept me in true faith. In the same way he calls, gathers, enlightens, and sanctifies the whole Christian church on earth, and keeps it united with Jesus Christ in the one true faith.”

   We ask, “What am I doing, or not doing, that expresses the presence of God for me and within me?” We filter out everything else. It’s just noise.

   There is an African proverb, also attributed to others, that says, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”

   The Auto Club NHRA Finals that were happening at the raceway when I was there were all about going fast, and there was only one person driving each of those cars. But there is a group of people behind those drivers, expecting that their team will go far. In fact, the road to the finals for some of them has been a long one, leading to that competition on that day. The driver didn’t do it alone. The driver also wants to go far.

   Likewise, we are a part of a body, the Body of Christ. Christ is the head of the Body and we are its members. We are a part of the community of God’s people. In the chapter just before the one with which we began, Paul writes, in 1 Corinthians 12:12-13

¹² For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. ¹³ For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.

   Pray, study the Bible, encounter God in all things, worship, and work to make the world more like the inbreaking Kingdom of God, both as an individual member of the Church and together as the Body of Christ. Open your whole self to do these things and do them to glorify God.

  Filter out the noise in your life.

  Repent. Turn around and walk away from everything that draws you from God and toward everything that draws you to God.

   Focus on what’s important, what is everything in you and for you. Live a life lived from what we have first received from the one true living God. With agape, selfless love. We see it in the sacrificial love for others that we see most clearly on the cross. Live from that.

   Eliminate the noise from your life and follow Jesus.