I ran across an article this past week that talked about the ways and means of how we argue and fight with each other as humans. The premise is that we all have certain techniques that we default to when we are in an argument with a colleague, or (dare I say) a spouse. Dianna (my wife) and I are incredibly compatible, and I cannot seriously remember our last fight, we just don’t do it. We just say no. Besides, after 30 years we already know what the other will think and say anyway before it is said. It also helps that she is right, she is right, she is always right. And Evan, pay attention here– my daughter is too. (Note to reader: this message is approved by my wife). You see, I am still the boss at my house and I have a note in my pocket from Dianna that says I am. I am not getting myself in trouble am I honey? Dear? sweetie pie?Well, we seriously don’t fight, and when we have it has been over absolutely nothing.  It is usually because I am pig-headed about something insignificant. I know, I know, I may seem above that to some of you, but the truth is I only speak ex cathedra from the pulpit.  I have been otherwise known to be an instigator in “the nothing fight.” What is the nothing fight?  The article I was referring to this week defines it this way: The nothing fight. If you are one of the rare few who have never experienced the nothing fight, then you are truly an anomaly or you just are in denial. It starts with something so simple as a sink full of dirty dishes or a wrong turn at a stop sign and turns into “I never liked your mother and your haircut makes you look like a meth-addict.” Contrary to popular belief, there is a right and a wrong way to fight. Everyone has a certain way they deal with conflicts in all relationships, not just romantic ones. Once you identify your fighting style, you can learn to work on your weaknesses and utilize your strengths to solve conflicts without going berserk at the drop of a hat. Are you an avoider? If you apologize after someone hits you from behind going 70 mph while you were stopped at a stop sign, you are an avoider. Avoiders try to elude conflict at every cost. The positive to this is they don’t get in many fights, but the negative is they allow themselves to be walked all over. Arguments can never be completely avoided unless you are a hermit living in the hills of eastern Tennessee. But when avoiders do encounter an argument, they will freeze up because they don’t know how to deal with it.Well, I am very good at the nothing fight.  I can argue over about anything if I am so in the mood, and sometimes I do so just to play the devil’s advocate as if the pitch-forked one needed an assist. The last big fight I remember was when I refused to have my picture made with the family while on a trip in Kansas City about seven years ago.  Now, I love pictures of my family but somewhere along the way I bump up against my picture taking limitations. My family’s quota evidently is higher than mine, so uh, well we had a nothing fight. Fortunately, we made up in time to enjoy lunch at Arthur Bryant’s world famous barbeque.  You all know that the classic nothing fights involve important things such as not putting the lid down, putting the toilet paper on the roller backwards, and squeezing the toothpaste wrong. Wait a minute; I am seeing a trend here as these are all bathroom habits. What is that about?  Well, you get my point, I’ll bet you can think of your own nothing fights.  The problem with nothing fights is that they sure seem like something in the heat of battle.  So as good as I am at the nothing fight, I am even more skilled at the “no fight” as I am a classic avoider.  Truthfully, I am interpersonally a strange mix of an “avoider” and a “confronter.” I do confront all kinds of other folk in my role at work, but I also avoid some fights depending on my energy level and on my stress level on a given day. And it is truly easier (at least for the moment) to avoid unpleasant things than to deal with them. Avoidance is a simple way of coping by not having to cope. When feelings of discomfort appear, we find ways of not experiencing them. Some believe that avoidance is a major defense mechanism in phobias. Procrastination is another form of avoidance as we put off to tomorrow those things that we can avoid today.  I am at times a procrastinator (like starting this sermon on Saturday night) because I am a recovering perfectionist.  After all, if we put something off we don’t have the chance to fail, do we?The truth is we are all avoiders at time.  You probably avoid something in your life, it is human nature. We avoid going to the dentist, we avoid doing our taxes early, we avoid crowded streets and stores and restaurants, and we avoid all sorts of unfortunate and unpleasant situations.  We avoid diet and exercise (but hey, I don’t anymore), we avoid the truth about cigarettes. We avoid conflict and we avoid people we don’t like. We pray the senility prayer more than we pray the serenity prayer and it goes like this: “God grant me the senility to forget the people I never liked anyway, the good fortune to run into the ones I do, and the eyesight to tell the difference. We avoid the truth from about everything from low-carb diets, to the dangers of tanning booths, to global warming and to the diminishing oil supply.  OK, that last one is hard to avoid unless you ride your bicycle everywhere. We avoid the reality that we are not as young as we used to be, and we buy products that help us hang on to the illusion of youth.  We avoid pain and want the fastest acting Tylenol or Ibuprofen that we can find.  We avoid commitment in all its forms, and we avoid getting hurt personally.  After all, we are avoiders by nature.  We even avoid by not loving and not caring so as to protect ourselves from hurt. In our lectionary text today on this Palm Sunday, I had a choice so I have selected the lectionary text that includes Jesus agonizing in the Garden of Gethsemane.   Here is a classic text on avoiding on several levels. This is a special, sacred scripture, a glimpse into the real human Jesus. A Jesus who also tries to avoid the way of the cross.  Why?  I can only guess, but being a human myself there is the obvious suffering, the carrying the sin of the world on his back (whatever that really means, maybe he literally had the weight of the world on his shoulders), the divine displeasure by the God-parent who turns his back on the son and by a groaning creation itself, whose sun refuses to shine for three hours. And yet even so, I am not sure that explains all of it.  There is mystery here– perhaps that is best left as mystery.  I wouldn’t even consider speculation on discerning his mind at this point.  What I do understand is that he suffered.  He agonized.  He sweated drops of blood. He cried.  He grieved.  He pleaded with God.  Not a pretty picture, as all of us who have suffered understands this type of pain all too well, and to top it all off in the end he ended up on his cross.  So yes, I believe that he seriously wanted to avoid all of this pain, who wouldn’t?  I see no reason to believe otherwise based on the text.  Was the cross his duty? Maybe.  Or maybe it was the logical outcome of religious intolerance and hatred by some otherwise “good” people.  There were people who didn’t know what to do with the Nazarene, but got mad enough at him for bucking their traditions that they had to kill him.  That is certainly believable. And there is nothing like the pain of being executed as an innocent man.  One who knew that he did not deserve what he got out of life, but could clearly see the downward spiral, the progression that got him to here. Of course, as in any human trauma he preferred to not be alone.  I kind of like someone to hold my hand and pray for me when I am overcome by my own human predicament.  So he has a few of his good buddies along for the ride, Peter and of course the sons of thunder, James and John.   But the good buddies were also the quintessential avoiders. Because in the midst of his great angst, all they could do was sleep.  Not once, but three, yes count ‘em three times he tried to impress the seriousness of his plight upon them and all they could do is sleep.   And in these verses, we have one of the ultimate excuses of all time, “the spirit is willing but then flesh is weak.”   So why couldn’t the disciples stay awake, for one little single solitary hour? Now I have dozed off in places that I probably shouldn’t have in life, but if I was caught not once but three times, I think I could stay awake out of shear embarrassment.  Especially if my leader was around the corner in anguish sweating out bullets of blood, I mean you don’t see that everyday. But they could not stay awake, perhaps not because they failed to see the seriousness of the situation, but precisely because they did and didn’t want to bear it.  They were avoiders par excellence.  Because frankly, I don’t see anyway that they could not have realized that something big was going down here.  I mean they were clueless much of the time, but they were not stupid. So they disengaged by using the ultimate avoiding tool in our toolbox, they went to sleep hoping that it all would go away.  They were avoiders. I would suggest to you this morning, lest we be too hard on Peter, and the sometimes thunderous James and John, that we too are asleep at the wheel all too often.  And furthermore, the modern church is still sleeping and not alert to all that we should be awake to.  Perhaps the church is the ultimate avoider institutionally in the world today.  I would suggest to you that we are sleeping, and that we need to rouse the sleeping giant or risk fading into insignificance in our culture.If that is a possibility, then this is a message we all need to hear today.It seems to me that the church in the 21^st century may need to wake up, and we definitely need to stop avoiding. The salvation of the world depends upon it on so many levels.  The church needs to wake up and become spiritually aware once again, because despite all of its apparent success it may be spiritually asleep while a crisis is going on right next door.  Today’s church is about big business, today’s church is about programming, today’s church is about convenience, and today’s church is about intolerance.   Today’s church on many levels is unparalleled in history.  It is about untold millions of dollars, it is about entertaining worship.  It is largely about spectating and not participating, and it is about loving yourself instead of loving your enemy as yourself. It seems that the church today is about success, and that is a numbers game, any metrics that you wan to analyze.  It is about church growth, and it is about egocentrism. It is about institutional religion. It is possible to be highly religious and spiritually asleep at the same time. In fact, that’s the oldest trick in the religious book.  To be highly religious, or to be awake to religion and to be sound asleep to anything spiritually may be the single most important thing wrong with many today.              Because the truth is, religion is easier.  Because the truth is, there are more built in rewards for religion. Because the truth is, in the familiar territory we call religion we never, ever have to leave our comfort zone.   And just because we are small here at Providence, just because we don’t have all the religious trappings of a bigger church, it does not let us off the hook.  We have many challenges facing us as 21^st century churches. We have to adapt to a postmodern world where people have a multiplicity of choices and we have to realize that people fulfill their need to be spiritual in many ways other than the institutional church or the familiar Christianity. It will take leaders who understand this postmodern culture to effectively lead the 21^st century church.  It seems to me that we need to pay attention to new things like the Emerging and/or the Emergent Church movement, one answer to postmodernism, and in case you have not heard of it Eddie Gibbs and Ryan Bolger, in their book, Emerging Churches: Creating Christian Community in Postmodern Cultures (Baker Academic, 2005) define emerging in this way:Emerging churches are communities that practice the way of Jesus within postmodern cultures. This definition encompasses nine practices. Emerging churches (1) identify with the life of Jesus, (2) transform the secular realm, and (3) live highly communal lives. Because of these three activities, they (4) welcome the stranger, (5) serve with generosity, (6) participate as producers, (7) create as created beings, (8) lead as a body, and (9) take part in spiritual activities. You see, the truth is the church no longer holds a competitive edge in society; the writing is on the wall. It is no longer the de facto standard that we default to for our spiritual needs. It is seen as just one among many spiritual choices. The challenge in this kind of world is that churches must model truth, not just preach truth.  Churches must be authentic and relevant, and must create environments where people can experience God and spiritual community.  The church has to be about more than indoctrination, and faith has to become primarily relational and not just informational. We have to be about dialogue, and we have to be more accepting and tolerant.  We need to understand the importance of inclusivity with a broader range of people as we are all on the faith journey and can learn from each other in our quest not just to understand God, but to experience God, which has to be our goal if we are to affect change.  I mean after all, even the demons believe but tremble. We have to understand that what we have in common is far more important than what divides us. That whatever emerges religiously from the postmodern world we live in will be more about “doing” and “dialogue” than about “knowing” and “monologue.”  It will be about doing right and not just about being right.   We need to wake up and start living like we belong in the Kingdom and we belong to Jesus.  We also have to find a way to stop spending all our resources on ourselves and to start using our prodigious assets to impact the world’s problems in a bigger way.  The church has to stop being threatened by the different, and start embracing diversity – not just of people, but of ideas as well.  The church needs to be about redemption, not about moralizing or about being judgmental.  The church should be transformational to people, society and processes. Beginning right here on this very street.             The church needs to wake up big time.  The church needs to stop sleeping and realize that few are really interested in being committed disciples in this day and age in the traditional sense.  But at the same time, people need more than a dose of feel good, that doesn’t last, and we need to wake up to the call of a serious following of Christ.  And I mean good old fashion roll up the sleeves get out of our comfort zone and out of our stained glass cathedrals type following.  /span> And our commission comes from the Christ who loved first, last and always. A Christ who did not throw stones at sinners, a Christ who feasted with all sorts of people, a Christ who embraced and loved life and dreaded, yes even agonized over death.  A Christ who came to free, to liberate, to open up, to affect change, to reprioritize, to put people above all else, yea even the most established rules. The church must wake up and become more tolerant and accepting of people different from ourselves to maintain viability in this globally shrinking, pluralistic world. You see, to fail to do so is to be asleep to our world and to its needs. To fail to do so will limit the effectiveness of our message of love and grace.  The church needs to deliver on its ability to offer a life changing experience for all the lost souls that are common in our world.
 So I ask you today, as I ask myself, are you awake or asleep like the disciples?  Because there is work to be done for the kingdom, right here in Little Rock, Arkansas, right here on 32^nd street, and if we don’t think so, we might just be spiritually insensitive at best, or spiritually asleep at worse.  And no matter how well we do church; no matter how well we worship; no matter how well we fellowship; no matter how well we do religion; there is a whole lot of people out there who need the love of God, who need to experience the grace of God, and who especially need the comfort that comes from the peace of God in there lives.  And many of them are not just in bed this morning, but are in church this morning somewhere sound asleep.  And if it is us, then it is time to wake up.  Because you see, we are people of the day, and not of the night. And for whatever else we may be about, we are here to shine the light of God into the dark nights of souls everywhere.  And there is only one way to do that, and it requires us to wake up, and to stop avoiding the obvious.  The obvious Good News of Jesus Christ.  Thanks be to God, Amen!