"If the answer is 'No,' then it has to go."

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A sermon preached by the Very Rev. Mike Kinman at Christ Church Cathedral on Sunday, September 30, 2012

“If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life maimed than to have two hands and to go to hell, to the unquenchable fire.”

If the answer is, “No.” Then it’s got to go.

Let me say that again.

If the answer is, “No.” Then it’s got to go.

Kind of sounds like I’ve got a Johnnie Cochran thing going, doesn’t it? But it’s true. If you’re going to create something of incredible power and beauty, there’s one rule you have to follow:

If the answer is, “No.” Then it’s got to go.

Maybe this story can help me explain.

You can have a good argument about what the most impressive sculpture ever carved is, but any conversation has got to include Michelangelo’s David. Not only is it exquisite in its beauty, it’s absolutely enormous. David is 17 feet tall and weighs more than six tons.

What you might not know is that Michelangelo wasn’t the only artist to work on David. In fact, David was commissioned and the huge stone block for it was quarried and dragged to Florence 11 years before Michelangelo was even born. You see, the original contract to carve David was given to Agostino di Duccio, a student of Donatello. He worked on it for two years and very roughly started to shape the legs, feet and torso. But then his master, Donatello, died, and for reasons nobody quite knows, Agostino stopped.

And so this 17-foot tall, 13,000 pound partially carved block sat there. And it sat there. And it sat there. This huge, haphazardly carved block of marble stood virtually untouched … for 35 years. Until finally, the commission to finish it was awarded to a 26 year old artist named Michelangelo, who had just finished another beautiful work, the Pieta, in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.

Michelangelo worked on it for two and a half more years, and what he finished with was the masterpiece we know today. There’s a story that soon after the public unveiling he was standing by David and someone asked him, “How did you do it?” “How did you succeed where others had failed? How had you made something so magnificent out of something that had been carved up and discarded and given up on for more than three decades?”

“That’s easy,” he said. “I simply chipped away everything that wasn’t David.”

That’s all.

He simply looked at every piece of that enormous block of marble and asked, “Is this David?”

And if the answer was, “No.”

Then it had to go.

I’m not sure there is a better parable of following Jesus, a better image of discipleship than this story of the great artist and that enormous partially carved and then abandoned block of marble.
That’s because there is a masterpiece inside each one of us. Inside each one of us is a creation of deep and profound beauty just waiting to be revealed. And like that giant piece of stone, we have been worked on and worked over by lesser artists. Artists who maybe saw something in us but not the deepest beauty that lies within. Artists who didn’t know how to bring it out.



And maybe we have even been abandoned and left alone, maybe even for years. Maybe even for many, many years.

Maybe we’ve been carved up or left alone so much that trusting that there is a masterpiece inside us feels impossible. Maybe we’ve been carved up or left alone so much that the idea of trusting someone to work on us is more than a little bit scary.

But following Jesus is all about trust.

It’s about trusting that Jesus is the master artist and we are the block.

Trusting that Jesus has a vision of us that is our deepest beauty and that he wants nothing more than to bring it out for all to see.

Trusting that there are pieces of us, even big pieces, that we must allow Jesus to chip away. Pieces that we may hold dear, that we might even think we desperately need but even though we might not be able to see it, pieces that are not part of the masterpiece of deep love and beauty Jesus knows we can become.

Trusting Jesus to look at us and say, “is this piece part of the masterpiece that you can become?” Trusting that if if the answer is, “No” then it’s got to go.

Jesus is really clear about what it means to follow him. What it means to become the masterpiece of power and beauty that he sees inside each one of us. It’s not some 15-point plan or even 10 commandments to follow.

It’s just two things: The Great Commandment and the Great Commission.

Just two things.

The Great Commandment: “Love God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength and love your neighbor as yourself.”

The Great Commission: “Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.”

Just two things.

Well, I guess it’s really four.

Love God with everything that’s in us
Love our neighbor the same way.
Trust God loves us the same way.
Share all of the above.

That means the question for us in every part of our lives is not “is this good?” or “will this help me get ahead?” or “will other people like this?” or even “will this make me happy?” The question for us in every part of our lives is, “Does this help me, does this help us better trust, follow and share Jesus?”

And if the answer is “No.” … then it’s got to go.

Sound harsh? Well that’s nothing compared to what we just heard Jesus say. Let me read it again.

“If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life maimed than to have two hands and to go to hell, to the unquenchable fire. And if your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life lame than to have two feet and to be thrown into hell., And if your eye causes you to stumble, tear it out; it is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and to be thrown into hell, where their worm never dies, and the fire is never quenched.”

These are hard words! Jesus isn’t just saying get rid of all the bad stuff in our lives. Hands, feet, eyes. These are all good things. But he doesn’t care.

Because his question for us is not “is it good?” The question is “does this help us better trust, follow and share Jesus?”

Does this help us better love God?
Does this help us better love our neighbor?
Does this help us better trust God loves us?
Does this help us better share the Gospel of Jesus Christ?

If the answer is “No.” Then it has to go.

Why is Jesus so ruthless about this? Because good really is the enemy of great. Because when we settle for less than “if the answer is ‘no,’ then it has to go” we commit ourselves not to becoming the beauty deep inside us but to being pedestrian and inoffensive. If we settle for less, we set ourselves down the road not to becoming Michelangelo’s David, but to becoming some of those cast cement lawn ornaments over at Gringo Jones.

Jesus is so ruthless in his language because God’s dream for us isn’t to be some half-finished block of marble that never became what it could have become because a real artist never got her hands on it.

God’s dream for us is of a power and beauty worthy of people created in God’s image and bound together in the Body of Christ.

But we will never be called to that life anywhere but here. And so we must help one another hear and heed that call.

We won’t get it from the world. The world outside these walls convinces us more and more to expect less and less of ourselves and each other. To settle for asking questions like “am I better off today than I was four years ago” instead of “how can we become a nation that promotes the welfare and secures the blessings of liberty for all people.” To settle for building up treasures for ourselves on earth instead of giving our lives away and building up treasures in heaven.

To settle for having a nice church with a good crowd on Sunday and a balanced budget instead of being a transforming force for loving God, loving our neighbor, and spreading the Gospel in the world. Now that’s a mission statement.

Jesus isn’t interested in us settling or becoming a shell of what we could be. Jesus yearns for us to become the masterpieces of power and beauty he sees inside each and all of us. To not settle for ordinary when we could be extraordinary. To not follow others when we could follow him.

So let’s look at our lives, shall we? Are the things we are doing together as this community and individually in our lives … are they helping us better trust, follow and share Jesus?”

Can we lead an examined life, asking the question of each action, each commitment, each moment of spent time:

Does this help us better love God?
Does this help me better love my neighbor?
Does this help us better trust God loves us?
Does this help me better share the Gospel of Christ?

Together, can we let Jesus be the artist with the vision of Michelangelo, looking on each and all of us and seeing not what the world sees but the masterpiece within?

Together, can we listen to Jesus as he invites us to measure our lives not by the world’s yardstick but by how well we follow, trust and share the love he brings?

Together, can we trust Jesus enough to say: If the answer is, “No” then it has to go?