A Checkered Past
with Rev. Alex Lang
April 23, 2023
I have had people ask me, “Why should I follow Jesus? What difference will it make in my life?” This Sunday, I’m going to answer that question and tell you some really amazing stories along the way.
The Scripture
Genesis 3:1-13
Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”
2 The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, 3 but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’”
4 “You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman. 5 “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
6 When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. 7 Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.
8 Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. 9 But the Lord God called to the man, “Where are you?”
10 He answered, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.”
11 And he said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?”
12 The man said, “The woman you put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.”
13 Then the Lord God said to the woman, “What is this you have done?”
The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”
Matthew 18:6-7
6 “If anyone causes one of these little ones—those who believe in me—to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea. 7 Woe to the world because of the things that cause people to stumble! Such things must come, but woe to the person through whom they come!
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As many of you are probably aware, the United States constitution dictates that a census must be taken every 10 years for the purposes of “enumerating the population.” In other words, the government wants to know how many people are living in the US so that the House of Representatives can have the appropriate number of congressional seats. The first year that the census was taken was in 1790 and has been performed every 10 years ever since.
However, over the decades, the census has seen fit to collect more information about the population than simple numerical counts. Gender, nationality, occupation have all become standard questions on the census. The problem for the Census Bureau, in the early decades of the census, was that all this information had to be tabulated by hand. So the Census Bureau held a contest in 1884 to see if any person could come up with a machine to help them automate the process of data collection from the census.
The winner was a man named Herman Hollerith, a young engineer who developed a tabulation machine that read data using a punch card system. Hollerith’s machine worked so well that the Census Bureau was able to save 5 million dollars, 1/3 of its annual budget. Hollerith patented his machine and by the turn of the 20th century, his Tabulating Machine Company or TMC was selling his machine around the world and had a virtual monopoly over the market. Hollerith even agreed to license his patents for royalties to foreign governments so that they too could easily collect census data.
Finish reading
This becomes important because one of the countries that licensed his patent was Germany in 1910. Hollerith’s machines were used to collect and sort typical census data for the German government from 1910 until 1933. But in 1933, Germany experienced a revolution when Hitler came to power. Hitler’s primary agenda was to rid Germany of any person who was not of Aryan descent. Hitler needed a systematic way to identify, sort, and destroy anyone who fit this criteria, but computers did not yet exist. So the next best option was Hollerith’s machine.
Hollerith, having died in 1929, was no longer affiliated with the company he had built, so Hitler’s higher ups contacted the new CEO of Hollerith’s company, a man by the name of Thomas Watson. Watson flew to Germany to personally oversee the project. The Hollerith machines would not only be used to sort Jews from non-Jews, but also helped the Nazis to create train schedules so that they could transport Jews and other non-Aryans to the concentration camps.
Imagine the logistics involved in transporting 6 million people from all over Europe to the appropriate death camp. It would be extremely complicated knowing which trains were where and keeping track of who had been exterminated and when. But Hollerith’s machines made it easy. They also helped to provide statistics on how people were killed, down to specifics like whether a prisoner was worked to death, shot or gassed. Watson was so helpful to Hitler that Hitler awarded him the Order of the German Eagle in 1937. The Order of the German Eagle was given to foreign dignitaries and diplomats who had been particularly sympathetic to the Nazi cause.
Thanks to Hitler’s need for Hollerith machines, Watson made massive profits for his company. These profits were so enormous that, years later, Hitler’s money would fund crucial research and development that would eventually turn Hollerith’s original company into a global powerhouse in computers. But the company was no longer named TMC or the Tabulating Machine Company; rather it had been renamed by Watson in 1924 to International Business Machine, better known as IBM.
As you can probably imagine, IBM has not been forth coming about this era in their company’s history. The PR nightmare that would ensue if it became common knowledge that IBM had enabled the atrocities of the holocaust is something that IBM wants to avoid. However, when a book by Edwin Black came out in 2001 documenting IBM’s involvement with Hitler, IBM was noticeably silent. Their only public statement was to say that not much is known about this period in their company’s history. So rather than admit to it, rather than own it, IBM has denied and dismissed any claims of wrong doing.
I think it is a truism to say that there is baggage in everyone’s history. Whether it be a company or an individual, we all carry things with us from our past that taint and tarnish that image we like to present as being so clean and neat. Many of us act like IBM when confronted with our past. We deny that anything’s wrong. We resist admitting that anything bad has ever happened to us. We say, “Well, that part of my history’s a little murky. I don’t really like talking about it.” So it gets tucked under the covers. Stored away in a place where nobody will ever know about it and dismissed as being trivial or inconsequential.
But our histories are never trivial or inconsequential and they never stay hidden. Truth always has a way of coming out; of finding its way to the surface. And when the truth confronts us, we can either accept its existence or we can deny that it’s there. But how you deal with the truth of your life defines who you are as a person.
I know that for much of my life, I ran from who I was. Rather than accept the person who was looking back at me in the mirror, I wished I was someone else: someone smarter, funnier, better looking. It was hard for me to accept that I could not be more than who I was, so I hated myself. Part of the reason why I began lifting weights is because my body was one of the few things I could control.
When I was 18, I would work out for an average 6 hours a day. I didn’t really have a goal. I just wanted to be as big and as strong as possible so no one would ever challenge me. This is my freshman ID from college. To say that I looked scary would be putting it mildly. I had a shaved head and my neck and shoulders had no distinctive starting or stopping point.
Looking back on it now, I realize I was suffering from a condition known as muscular dysmorphia. It’s essentially the reverse of anorexia nervosa. With muscular dysmoprhia, a person feels that they are never big enough, so they tend to workout compulsively. I also suffered from depression and low self-esteem.
In my darkest moments, life felt so overwhelming that I would often contemplate suicide. What’s more, I harbored this really intense anger in my heart towards the people around me. I felt like I was in this perpetual haze, as though I was disconnected from the person who was living my life. It was almost as if I was watching a movie of somebody else being me.
Have you ever felt that way; so disconnected from who you are that life doesn’t seem real? I still have days where I feel that way, but they are less frequent now than they used to be. And strangely enough, what brought me back to a sense of self, what made me whole again was my interaction with the Bible. I say that it’s strange because, at the time, I didn’t really think that the Bible was all that special. From my point of view, it was just like any other book.
I thought of the Bible as a set of religious documents that were given a special status by ignorant people who didn’t know any better. I believed this in part because the people who I knew who held the Bible in such high esteem were often judgmental and close-minded. They didn’t seem to be in touch with reality. They would dismiss all scientific discovery, saying that it was total rubbish and then tell you that all your problems could be solved by Jesus.
I remember so clearly having conversations with people like this who would try to explain to me why I needed Jesus in my life. They would say things to me like, “God is so perfect that God can’t have anything to do with sin. So if you’re living a sinful life, then God can’t have anything to do with you and that’s why you need Jesus so that you can have God in your life.”
So as if I already didn’t feel bad enough, I was now being told that God didn’t want me and that God wouldn’t love me unless I did certain things that made God love me. But to be totally honest with you, after listening to them, I didn’t really want Jesus in my life. I figured if Jesus was anything like these judgmental and close-minded people who were promoting him, then I’d rather go it alone and not have God in my life at all.
But when I sat down and started reading the Bible for myself, when I took the time to really dig into the texts, I discovered that Jesus was nothing like these people who were promoting him. Jesus is extremely open-minded and he has great sense of compassion and understanding. Jesus says things like, “Occasions for stumbling bound to come, but woe to the one by whom they come.” In other words, Jesus is saying, “You’re gonna make mistakes. It’s bound to happen. I understand that you’re not going to be perfect, just try not to cause other people to make mistakes along the way.”
This made me realize that God isn’t looking for perfect people who have it all together. God understands that you’re going to mess up; that you’re going to do things you wish you hadn’t done. I would even go so far as to say God expects you to sin. A good example of this would be the story of Adam and Eve.
Do you really think God didn’t know that Adam and Eve were going to eat of the forbidden fruit in Garden of Eden? Of course, God did. God expected it. That’s the point of the story. Adam and Eve are representative of what we all experience. We all mess up, we all do wrong, but you know what, that’s okay, because the entire rest of the Bible is about how God is going to use those mistakes, those faults, those flaws to turn us into the best people we can be.
So many people want to forget their pasts. They want to pretend like the past never happened. But our histories are an important part of who we are and I think for so many Christians this idea that you’ve accepted Jesus into your life means that the past is no longer relevant to you; that the past can no longer affect you. So they end up saying that the future is all that matters because the past is meaningless, but nothing could be further from the truth.
Your past matters; the things that you’ve done wrong matter, because those things have shaped you into the person who you are today. I wouldn’t be the man I am today if I hadn’t struggled with depression and anger and low self-esteem. But if I reject all of that; if I pretend like those things didn’t happen, then I’m rejecting a huge part of who I am.
And I‘ve got to tell you that for long time I lived that way. I pretended like I wasn’t depressed, that I didn’t have anger issues or suffer from low self-esteem and it only cause my problems to become worse. But when I started reading the scriptures and, in particular, Jesus words, I realized that a lot of what Jesus was saying is that you need to be honest about who you are.
The people who Jesus praises the most in the gospels are the people who are brutally honest about their flaws. Jesus shows us again and again that the people who lay it all out there for the world to see are the ones who experience true healing in their lives. Jesus teaches us that there is a freedom in honesty and through that honesty something amazing can happen: Your mistakes and weaknesses can become strengths.
When people ask me, “Why should I believe in Jesus? What difference will it make in my life?” I tell them that what Jesus does for us is that he takes all the bad stuff inside of us and uses it for good. Jesus doesn’t just erase our mistakes and pretend like they never happened. He uses our flaws to create someone better than who we are now.
Jesus made space in my heart so that I could be an honest person, so that I could look in the mirror and accept myself for who I am. Jesus allowed me to embrace my flaws and not wish I was someone else and because of that, today I believe in myself, my anger has abated and I see the world, not as a dark place full of despair, but as a place full of hope.
So I leave you this morning with a choice. On the one hand, you can choose to live your life like IBM. You can pretend like those horrible things in your past never happened; that your clean and spotless image is every bit as pristine as you want people to think it is. Or you can choose a life of honesty. You can proclaim to the world around you that you don’t have it all together; that there are things in your past you are not proud of; that your mistakes stay with you, but you want to use those mistakes to become something better than you are now.
I think we all know which is the better choice, the only question is, “Are you willing to allow Jesus to take you there?” I can attest to the fact that it’s a difficult, but wonderful journey. I hope one day you can experience that journey as well. Amen.