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LOOK, MA, NO HANDS! #10
FREE AT LAST
We’re going to close out our radio series on Pride with a couple of steamy bedroom stories . . . but it’s not what you think.
During the rocky last days of Richard Nixon’s presidency, the summer of 1974, he took a last-ditch diplomatic trip to the Soviet Union, hoping against hope that a breakthrough headline might still derail the growing Watergate scandal and get him off the hook. And the two main players with the President were Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and the White House chief of staff, General Alexander Haig. Both were closely linked to the negotiations with Moscow’s Leonid Brezhnev, and both craved the proximity to Nixon that such a trip should provide.
And then there was the matter of bedrooms. In the Kremlin Palace, Haig had been assigned the room right next to the President’s. Oh no! Kissinger was sure that HE, the chief negotiator, the craftsman of American foreign policy, should be right next door to the commander-in-chief, with Haig somewhere down by the ice machine. So he sent a strongly worded protest over to Brent Scowcroft, who was putting all this together. Haig, who heard about it, popped right back that, of course, the chief of staff needed to be by the boss’s side on a 24/7 basis. Couldn’t Kissinger fathom even that? Well, Scowcroft kind of dithered about on the delicate issue. The problem was that, depending on who was in that room, certain communications gear had to be installed, and White House technicians actually spent several days putting it in, taking it out . . . in . . . out . . . etc. Haig finally won the battle, and Kissinger lost no time trashing his opponent in front of anyone who would listen, from his motel room out in the back forty.
Well, that’s Bedroom Story #1. But here’s another one from the very same trip. Chuck Colson, who used to be on the President’s team before being indicted in the same Watergate mess, and who was converted to Christianity just before going to prison, has a book entitled Kingdoms in Conflict, and he has some juicy details to tell us too. Apparently Alexander Haig and press secretary Ronald Ziegler – who passed away just recently – were vying to get the top bunk at summer camp as well.
“By that time [in Watergate terms],” Colson writes, “everyone knew Mr. Nixon couldn’t survive the public clamor more than another month or two; his entire administration was about to collapse. Even so, the advance team” – I’m starting to feel sorry for these guys – “was equipped with tape measures and meticulous instructions to insure that in all sleeping accommodations Mr. Ziegler’s bed and General Haig’s bed would be equidistant from the President’s.”
It kind of makes you want to envision a great big bed there in downtown Moscow (a hard one), where you toss Nixon, Haig, Kissinger, Ziegler, and – for good measure – Brezhnev and Khrushchev – and say, “Now shut up and sleep! Stop bickering!”
But how often have we done the same, where pride drives us to wonder if, on the movie marquee of our own life, it should be Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan or the other way around? We’ve mentioned on this broadcast the hard day’s night a certain former Beatle spent trying to get it switched from Lennon-McCartney to the reverse of that. Pride can be such a burden, can’t it?
And really, we have just one final bedtime story, if you will, to gently put before you. And that’s this: friend, the Lord Jesus loves you so much that He wants to set you free from this struggle, this painful rat-race grab for power and influence and that seat by the window. In these Watergate stories, you can tell that these were just CONSUMING issues to the men involved. It haunted them. When they should have been focusing their attentions on the big black briefing folders about Soviet MIGs and ICBM and Salt II treaties, they were instead willing to make fools of themselves as flunkies beneath them on a White House flow chart scrambled around on their knees with a tape measure. And Jesus, who once got down on His knees and washed the feet of twelve of the most selfish guys you’d ever want on your presidential staff, says: “I want to release you, to set you free. When you have Me, you don’t need to keep going on like that.”
There’s a line in Proverbs that might have helped Nixon’s guys there in Moscow. Chapter 3, verse 34:
“He mocks proud mockers, but gives GRACE to the humble.”
Of course, we use “grace” theologically, meaning forgiveness, undeserved merit. But doesn’t grace also mean calm, and peace, and a sense of divine fulfillment? “So-and-so served with quiet grace,” we say, and a picture comes to mind of a person so at peace within herself that she CAN serve without being put out about it.
In the book of Matthew the Foot-washer Himself makes this promise to His greedy disciples:
“The greatest among you will be your servant. For whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.”
And perhaps Jesus is simply saying that if we live lives of humility, lives of service, lives of not caring about whose bed is where in the Kremlin pecking order – that He will lift us up to this haven of grace and peace, of getting our security from His love and not from where our bedposts are stationed. That would be the kind of exalting we’d want most anyway, correct?
There’s a verse in Luke that we could read on several levels. Chapter 12, verses 33 and 34:
“Sell your possessions,” Jesus tells His frantic friends, “and give to the poor. Provide purses for yourselves that will not wear out, a treasure in heaven that will not be exhausted, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys.” And you can say the rest along with me: “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”
Now we could go straight down to the ATM and analyze this passage with our wallets. We’ve been tipping our hat to the WRITING of C. S. Lewis all this week, but did you know that he quietly, with no fanfare, gave away huge portions of his estate, his royalties? He just found needy people and then wrote to his publisher and said: “Give so-and-so 15 pounds a month from my account.” Why? Well, because they needed the money, but even more to keep his own heart right with Jesus, to keep himself humble. Ironically, giving money away to the point where you’d think a person WOULD be a bit frantic about their own financial picture kept Lewis from BEING spiritually frantic in the chase for money in the first place.
But let’s go higher here, and notice that Jesus promises us a lifting up, a going to a kingdom where there won’t be any worrying about bank accounts and retirement vehicles. There’s a place where thieves can’t go, He gently assures us. There are no moths up there to whittle away your well-being. Then the Savior adds: “I want your heart to be up there with Me. I want to set you free.” And He’s talking more about HIMSELF than He is about heaven.
You know, we find just a glimpse of this in the beloved miracle story where Jesus fed 5000 people with one sack lunch. After a long day with no fruit roll-ups or chicken-salad sandwiches, people were starving. And the natural inclination was to scramble around, to take up a collection, to climb a tree or scavenge around in nearby fields. To run to the nearest town and invade the local Little Caesar’s. But Jesus says no. “LET’S feed them,” He says to the disciples. “Let’s allow them to relax; let’s give them an evening of quiet fulfillment, for their souls AND bodies. Let’s set them free from the constant grind of taking care of self.”
And you know, here in this rabid, frantic cell-phone 21st century, I think there’s an ache in Jesus’ heart to just give us freedom. To give us assurance of salvation so we can stop scrambling to attain heaven. To give us peace with our calendars so we can trust Him with a seventh day of Sabbath rest. To give us the guarantees of His providence so we can joyfully give Him one tenth of our income, knowing He is there to bolster us with all ten tenths in the first place.
Right at the end of his essay about Pride, entitled “The Great Sin,” this same C. S. Lewis whimsically writes about how Pride makes us “[strut] about like the little idiots we are,” and then observes:
“If you really get into any kind of touch with Him [God], you will, in fact, be humble – delightedly humble, feeling the infinite relief of having for once got rid of all the silly nonsense about your own dignity which has made you restless and unhappy all your life.” Then he adds, thinking of that higher land: “To get even near it, even for a moment, is like a drink of cold water to a man in a desert.”
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