Remember the Los Angeles riots that followed the first Rodney King verdict? A man named Reginald Denny was dragged from his truck and viciously beaten by an angry gang. After his painful recovery, Reginald Denny met face to face with his attackers. He shook hands with them and forgave them. A reporter, in commenting on the scene, wrote, "It is said that Mr. Denny is suffering from brain damage." Obviously the reporter could not understand how someone beaten as badly as Reginald Denny could forgive those who had beaten him. Denny and that particular reporter have entirely different perspectives. They have different expectations and concepts. The reporter had a difficult time understanding Denny.

I am reminded of another true story I read recently about a woman and her husband--Americans who were spending a summer in Florence. They attended an opera, which ended around midnight. The bus that was supposed to pick them up never came, so they decided to hitchhike. They went out to the side of the road and hopefully extended their thumbs. Car after car revved past them. Some slowed down, opened windows, and shouted un-cordial-sounding words. Some just glared and looked angry. Finally, one car stopped and a young driver offered them a ride. He spoke English quite well and informed them he had learned it one year working in the United States. He was very polite and helpful. Only later did the hitchhiking couple learn that in Italy the extended up-raised thumb which they had tried using to get a ride meant what the extended middle finger does in the United States. They had been causing hostility when they only wanted help. The bicultural driver who rescued them understood that they were hitchhiking "in American."

Non-Christians often have a hard time understanding Christians because we approach life with different perspectives and from different assumptions. And we Christians sometimes add to the communication problem because we speak in Christianese. We use terms and vocabulary that those unfamiliar with the Bible don't understand.

I recently read a summary of Paul’s Mars Hill discourse by Chuck Missler. He wrote the following:
“Paul began where the people were. Where were they? They were in idolatry. They had thirty thousand gods and idols of all kinds. Paul found their idol “to the unknown god”… and started out by complimenting them for being devout and god-fearing. He was not being snide or sarcastic; he was trying to win the people, not the argument. And then he quoted, not Scripture, but the poems of classic Greek authors. Six hundred years earlier, Epimenides had said, “For in him we live, and move, and have our being.” “For we are also his offspring” is from a poem Aratus, a Cilician who lived three centuries earlier. He also quoted from a religious hymn of Cleanthes, a contemporary of Aratus. This was the literature in which the Athenians would have been educated and from which Paul learned his education in Tarsus.”

No one knew Christian terminology and vocabulary better than Paul. But he also wisely knew when and when not to use Christianese. Too often we don’t. We sometimes get so wrapped up in winning theological arguments that we lose sight of the fact that we are to be winning people instead. Learning to talk to people in their language and being careful not to insult them with misunderstood terms, gestures, or attitudes is so important. How we say something may convey just as much as what we say. The trueness of what is in our hearts in conveyed by what we communicate. The best and most Christian communication is a careful and thoughtful choice of words and an attitude fully controlled by the spirit of Christ. Less Christianese and more Christ!

Here is an instructive story about a cattleman in old China who woke up one morning to find that his best horse had somehow gotten loose and run away. He needed that horse to work with the cattle. "What a curse," said his wife."What seems like a curse might be a blessing," said her husband.

Sure enough the very next day the horse returned followed by a fine new horse. Two beautiful horses instead of just one. “What a blessing! It is surely a blessing," said his wife. "What seems like a blessing might be a curse," said her husband.

Well, they turned the new horse over to the sturdy son of the cattleman for training. He was thrown from the horse and broke his leg. "What a curse," said the wife. “What seems like a curse might be a blessing," said her husband. A week or two later an officer from the king's army came to draft all able-bodied young men into military service for twenty years, but since he had a broken leg, the young man was exempt. The curse had indeed turned into a blessing.

As there is some wisdom in the old American proverb, "Be careful what you wish for because you might get it," so we might say we ought to be careful about what we pray for. We don't always know what might be good for us and what may not be good for us. In fact, in this respect, throughout my life I have seen blessings transformed into curses and curses into blessings and it most often depends on us.

Some of you will remember the musical Fiddler on the Roof, about the life of poor, peasant village Jews in old Czarist Russia at the beginning of the century. People sang songs like Sunrise, Sunset. But every time I saw the production I had one unpleasant moment. It was the time that Tevye is having one of his homey, intimate conversations with the Almighty. He says to God, "If money is a curse, blast me with it!" Now there was nothing wrong with the original author's intent, but with the audience reaction provoked by the manner in which those lines were played. The audience always laughed in a self-satisfied, knowing manner. It seemed to me something was wrong with their reaction. There's nothing wrong with being well off but the lifestyle of the audience was very different from the life of the poverty-stricken Tevye in that poor village of mud, with the always leaking roofs and the scarcity of the bare necessities of life. Tevye was always worried about where the family's next meal was coming from, so we can understand someone in Tevye's situation saying, "If money is a curse, blast me with it!” But Tevye's outburst provoked a laughter that seemed to say, "I have plenty of money. I sure like it and I would sure like a lot more," a kind of knowing and self-satisfied laughter. It's like the saying,"You can never be too rich."

Isn't money always a blessing? Well, is it always a blessing? In scripture there is a passage that seems strange at the beginning. When the children of Israel were wandering, starving in the wilderness, we are told God fed them manna from heaven. Now our modern idea of manna from heaven has come to mean something like winning the lottery or a wonderful business deal that comes our way and blesses us. But then scripture said, "I fed you manna in order to test you, to afflict you."

Well, we can understand how money is a test of one's character. Those who waste money on frivolous expenditures we call fools. Those for whom money is the goal of life, we call idolaters. Those who use it for productive purposes and for charitable purposes we call good and wise. But I've also seen that wealth, just as scripture advises us, can be a curse. I have seen young people from wealthy families retired before the age of 40, who spend the rest of their lives seeking every new possible entertainment or self-indulgence. What kind of life is that? I have seen how families have been broken up over the estates of parents, this one thinking he didn't get enough and so forth, because such hostility arises members of the family who meet only at the funerals of relatives and depart without saying a word to one another. I've seen character destroyed by too much money, a perceived blessing transformed into a curse.

Years ago I read the story about an elderly gentleman who was a pioneer in a chain discount marketing enterprise and he was extremely religious. He was a very generous man in the community particularly, for the elderly poor. He quietly helped many individuals who had trouble in business to get back on their feet and become productive again.

He had a son who was fed manna from heaven on a silver platter. He never had to work for anything. He never had to achieve anything on his own. Perhaps the parents mistakenly were trying to protect him from the hardships of their immigrant background, but he never learned to cope with any obstacles in his life in an honest way. As a result, the business went into bankruptcy and ruin. He tried to recover it in the wrong way and he got himself involved in corrupt practices and dirty politics. The family name of that man, which had been a blessing, was turned into shame, a kind of curse.

I have known people who knew how to change a curse into a blessing, not only for themselves but also for many others. When I was a young, one day my mother said to me,"There is someone I want you to meet." Now many would have considered my mother wrong to take a young child into that kind of situation, but I remember it six decades later as a positive, affirmative, happy experience. I also remember that woman's name, Mrs. O’Malley, which testifies to my mother's wisdom. The woman was almost completely paralyzed. She lay on a bed facing and overlooking a fairly busy street. The telephone company had fixed up a gadget so that she could talk into a voice box. People called her all day long because, despite her terrible infirmity--she was able to help a lot of people simply by her positive spirit, giving advice, consolation, cheerfulness, a joke here or there. She turned what many would consider a curse, being so disabled as to be cast into a self-pitying melancholy all of one's life, into a great blessing for herself and for many others. I am grateful to my mother to this day for giving me the blessing of a memory that has inspired me very often in the hard times that sometimes I have had to face.

All of us fall into times in which we think our own personal situation is so blighted with an imperfection or by a mistake we might have made that we can never repair it. This is the point of a wonderful story by a famous Polish teacher called the Dubna Maggid, or the preacher from the town of Dubna. A king had a large beautiful jewel, a ruby, especially precious to him because it was a gift from his deceased queen mother. Through some careless accident, a deep scratch ruined the jewel and the king was in despair about this. He called many experts to repair it. Some tried polishing. Some tried chemical solutions. Nothing worked.

A proclamation went out that if someone could remove that scratch the king would be indebted to him for a lifetime. Many tried and failed. One day a craftsman of humble demeanor came saying that he would like to try and the king, nearly giving up hope, turned it over to him. Some weeks later the craftsman returned. No, the scratch was not removed but the king was delighted because through his artistry the craftsman had turned the jewel into something far more precious than ever before. You see, on the surface of the jewel at the end of the scratch, he engraved a beautiful rose. The scratch had become the stem of the rose through that craftsman’s skill. A curse turned into a blessing beyond price.

In each of our lives, God gave us a precious jewel, more precious than any jewel. In any one of our lives there can be a scratch, an imperfection that we think sometimes can never be repaired. But through the love and grace of God, and by having the Spirit of God within our hearts, we can turn those imperfections into works of art which make our lives blessings, priceless blessings, not only for ourselves but for many others as well. I think this is what God meant when he blessed Abraham with the words,"Be thou a blessing." We can be sure that God wants us to be a blessing as well, therefore take heed to be a blessing not a curse.

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