“I Wish Life Came With An Eraser!”

(#4 in a Lenten Sermon Series; “Dennis in the Corner”)

 

So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation:

everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!

(2 Corinthians 5:17)

 

 

A sermon by Siegfried S. Johnson on the Fourth Sunday in Lent, March 2, 2008

Volume 2 Number 35

First United Methodist Church, 605 West Sixth, Mountain Home, Arkansas 72653

 

 

In this fourth installment of our Lenten sermon series, Dennis in the Corner, the wrong-doing committed by the little Menace is crystal clear.  “The handwriting is on the wall,” so to speak. With the evidence of his misdeed, spent crayolas, scattered on the floor behind him, Dennis sits In-the-Corner staring at once pristine walls now decorated with his artwork — a dinosaur, a house, a cowboy, sun and clouds.  Beautiful, don’t you think?  Evidently mom didn’t think so, which leaves Dennis sitting in his rocking chair, his private Lenten season of self-reflection, snuggling his Teddy Bear, alone with his thoughts.  We overhear what Dennis is thinking.  “Boy, I wish life came with an eraser!”

 

Yes, and don’t we all?  Surely there are times in each of our lives when we, too, wish life came with an eraser, when we would relish the opportunity to turn back the clock to a time just before our latest mistake, so we could have another go at it, come at it wiser, having experienced already the consequences of a wrong decision.  An eraser capable of doing that, giving us a fresh start free of our past mistakes, free of our past sins and failings — an eraser that could turn back the clock to a time before our mistakes had left us wondering, “What was I thinking?  How could I have done that?”   What price would be too much for that eraser of precious worth?

 

Speaking of turning back the clock, let me tell you a story from several decades ago, a time before computers took over the workplace, when we left the church office with our hands inky from those nasty stencils, aligning the holes on that blackened drum of the old mimeograph machine, oozing with ink that refused any path other than to your fingers, and then cranking away, churning out our documents.   In those days, Betty Nesmith Graham was a secretary in a Dallas bank and wondered if there might be a better way to correct typographical errors? 

 

As it happened, Betty had some art experience.  She knew artists worked with oils to paint over their errors.  Maybe that would work for her, too.  So in 1956 she concocted a fluid to paint over her errors.  Before long, secretaries throughout her Dallas bank were using, finding it saved them considerable time.  She called it, “Mistakeout.”  Thinking she had developed something worth marketing, she attempted to sell the product to marketing agencies and companies, including IBM.  They all turned her down. 

 

 

Talk about a mistake!  Not marketing something that erases our mistakes . . . is always a mistake. Secretaries loved the product, so Betty’s kitchen became her first manufacturing facility and she used her own kitchen blender to mix the ingredients.  Mistakeout became Liquid Paper, and grew in north Dallas, until in 1980 her little kitchen enterprise was sold to the Gillette Company for $47.5 million, hence to be known, no longer as Mistakeout, but Whiteout.  

 

I don’t tell you this to inspire you with a great American success story, but to point out that an eraser absolving us from our mistakes would be a product in great demand.  Wouldn’t it be great if there was a Whiteout for the soul?  Now, that would be worth selling everything in order to own.  How haunting can past mistakes, past sins, be.  Regret and guilt can drain our souls of the energy and enthusiasm and confidence we need to face today’s challenges.  The stains our lives accumulate through living can speak loudly.

 

One of the most successful Super Bowl commercials this last month was for just such a nifty product, not for mistakes on paper, but for stains on clothing.  Tide To Go.  The setting was a job interview, and as the young applicant in white shirt and tie sat down to interview with the boss for a position, he seemed confident.  The boss begins the interview with, “So tell me about yourself.”  And as the young man begins to do that, his nice voice is obscured by an annoying voice overlaying his own.  The boss tries to sustain eye contact with the young fellow, but his eyes move to the stain on his shirt which forms a little mouth, and every time the young man speaks the stain moves as if it had lips, talking rapidly in an annoying overlapping of voices.  Before long, the boss can’t look anywhere else but the stain.  As the screen on the 33 second ad fades we read, “Silence the Stain, Instantly,” and a tube of Tide to Go appears to erase the stain. 

 

The commercial has a couple of points to make.  Of course, most obviously, that stains can talk louder than our words, our intentions, our dreams, and that Tide have just the product to get that stain out.  But there’s another truth here . . . that we can be, almost inexplicably, blind to the stains we have accumulated in our lives, to the baggage we are carrying.   Sometimes we can’t hear the voices coming from our own lives.  The job applicant was somehow blissfully unaware that there were stains holding him back from his greatest potential. 

 

After the sacrament of Holy Communion we will sing as our Hymn of Dedication, “Grace that Is Greater Than All Our Sin.”  Listen to the third stanza:  “Dark is the stain that we cannot hide, what can avail to wash it away?  Look!  There is flowing a crimson Tide.  Whiter than snow you may be today.”

 

I returned yesterday from being a spiritual director at for an Emmaus Walk in Hot Springs.  As about fifty women gathered Thursday night, the Emmaus Community gathered by the hundreds to send them off on their Walk, excited about the opportunity to share the love of God with them in an amazing weekend.  Having worked at several such Walks, I never cease to be amazed at how much baggage we seem to bring with us, how many stains that need erasing become apparent through the three days of the Walk.  Through the experience of being immersed in a retreat environment with other Christians, and being recipients of such expressions of agape love, the pilgrims gradually come to sense not only the baggage we may have been carrying, but also to sense the love of God as something of a Mistakeout for the Soul.

 

 

In our text, 1 John 1:5 – 2:2, John speaks of how our stains can speak louder than our words.  “If we say . . . that we have fellowship with him while we are walking in darkness, we lie and do not do what is true . . . but if we walk in the light as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another and the blood of Jesus Christ cleanses us from all sin.

 

Amazing words, these!  The blood of Jesus Christ cleanses us from all sin.  As we gather now around the table of Christ’s Presence, let us rejoice in this great salvation.  Amen.