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THE POWER OF NEGATIVE THINKING

Dr. Stephen D. McConnell

August 26, 2012

We live in a world where the positive can quickly turn into the negative. Miroslav Volf, the Yale theologian
and native of the old Yugoslavia, tells the story of adopting their son Nathanael. They had been put in
contact with a pregnant, unwed, soon-to-be-mother who wanted to give her baby up for adoption.
Arrangements were made and about three months later the phone call came. The little boy had entered
the world. The Volfs couldn’t sleep the whole night in preparation to drive to the hospital and bring their
adopted son home. They stopped for a donut on the way and upon leaving the donut shop parking lot the
excited father turned the wrong way on a one way street – directly in front of a police officer. The lights on
the officer’s car began flashing – so the couple pulled over just minutes away from the hospital and from
receiving their newborn child. Eager to explain this to the officer – and used to the Yugoslavian custom
that when stopped by a police officer you are responsible for getting out of the car -- the professor stepped
out of the car – only to hear the officer yell: “Get back in the car.” “But you don’t understand officer, I just
wanted to tell you that I’m about ready to adopt my first child …” “Get back in the car!” the officer yelled.
Which the professor did. “License and registration.” And from there the air from the balloon escaped –
until they got handed a ticket and stern warning from the officer, “Next time, pay attention.” There you are
on your way to adopting your first child and you end up getting chewed out by law enforcement.

Volf does not fault the officer, he was just doing his job. But he tells the story to show how a day so positive
can quickly turn negative. Of how a holy moment can quickly turn into an unholy moment. Negativism has
that kind of power.

It’s amazing what the negative can do to you. It’s amazing how quickly you can be thinking one thing, a
very pleasant thing – and then the tone, the blare, the jar of an impatient word, a raised voice, a careless
rumor, a cast aspersion can get you thinking something very different. Something very unpleasant.
Something very unholy.
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The truth is, it doesn’t take much to get you swirling in the vortex of the negative. Certainly the flashing
lights and siren of a police car can startle you in that direction, but even the sound of what we say can get
us and others there just as fast.

We are in the middle of convention season, in between the two major political parties’ national
conventions. I was a political science major in college and ran a large collegiate political convention when I
was a senior. I loved this stuff when I was young. And while I understand that party conventions are more
theater than they are anything else and political campaigns can get dirty and nasty, I have been checking
myself over the last few weeks of listening and watching scorched earth political ads and I have been
noticing that the negative words—on either side—have an affect me. They do something to me. They make
me feel negative. But worse than that they draw me into the vortex of cynicism. They lead me and tempt
me to become cynical. I grow discouraged. And before I know it I end up saying cynical and negative things
myself. I get into a conversation about politics (which I know you are never supposed to do) and I hear
myself saying cynical things. “They’re all corrupt,” I say. “They’re all in it for the money,” I say. “They’re all
just trying to get elected,” I say. It’s amazing what the negative sound, the blaring horn, the caustic word
can do to you.

Have you ever been in a conversation with someone and a negative thing gets said – a story in the news, a
rumor from the neighborhood, a lament about the state of the world – and before you know it the whole
conversation is going negative. The vortex forms and every living and breathing thing is being drawn into a
black hole. Judgments are issued. Eyes are rolled. Despair is kindled. And after all is said and done you
have a little less to believe in.

The world can do that to you, you know. The world can give you a little less to believe in every day. You can
be thinking one day that the world is a pretty good place, but then the sharp word or the rude gesture or
the casual rumor is heard and it doesn’t take long for you to say to yourself, “You know the world really
isn’t such a nice place.”

I suppose that’s what happened in the Garden of Eden. The storyteller sets up pretty well. God creates a
pretty spectacular world. Light and water, trees and rivers, animals and birds, human beings partnered.
Work to do. It’s all pretty darn good. And then the serpent slithers in and pulls alongside one of the
humans and says, “Wow! Pretty nice world, huh? Except there’s just one problem.” And from then on the
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story is about the problem. And the problem leads to another problem. And now they can’t escape the
problem.

On the campus of the college I attended there is a hilltop from which you can look out upon a vast
landscape of Western Pennsylvania Amish farmland. You can see farmhouses and lakes and little lanes
and occasionally an Amish buggy clip-clopping down the road. It’s just beautiful. At one point I had paused
with a friend just to take in the view when my friend said to me, “What a lovely view. Too bad they had to
run that line of telephone poles over there.” I said, “What telephone poles?” “The ones over there,” he
said. And sure enough there they were, a little scar on the landscape. One I had not seen before. But all it
took was for someone to point them out … and from that moment on the vista was marred. They almost
became the only thing I could see.

Such is what the negative word can do.

It makes you wonder if it isn’t what the apostle had in mind when he writes in the first chapter of James
about religion – about good religion. We are going to be looking at the five chapters of James this month
and it’s interesting to observe that when James talks about religion he has nothing much to say about the
doctrine of religion, the content of our beliefs about God. There is no systematic theology presented by
James – no four points of orthodoxy. Instead what James is concerned about when it comes to religion is
what we do. What we do and what we say. Or maybe what we don’t say.

“Let everyone be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger,

for your anger does not produce God’s righteousness.”

“Be doers of the word, and not merely hearers.”

“Those who look into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and persevere, being not hearers
who forget but doers who act – they will be blessed in their doing.”

“If any think they are religious, and do not bridle their tongues but deceive their hearts,
their religion is worthless.”

Be slow to speak and bridle your tongue. Not words maybe that any of us want to hear. Bridle my tongue?
You mean to say that the world doesn’t want to hear my voice? But the wisdom of course is there when we
realize how quick things can go negative. How tempted we are to repeat the rumor, to sing the cynical
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chorus, to cast aspersions upon the actions of others, to doubt the motives, to point out the blemish. And
what happens in all of this – is that if there was any belief at all in our hearts – if there was any faith to
think that the world was a world loved by God and created by God and graced by God and blessed by God
– that it is really a beautiful order of which we are a part – that if we had any shred of believing these
things – when we don’t bridle our cynical tongues, or cynical spirits – well then we deceive our hearts. We
deceive the very repository of God’s goodness.

Instead, James says, “You want to know about religion? Religion is not about your opinion. Religion is not
about what you say. Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans
and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the cynical world.”

“Do something for God’s sake,” is another way of translating the Greek. Be a countervailing force to the
cynicism. The last thing we need is another talking head telling us how bad the world is or how bad that
group is or how bad that party is. The last thing the world needs to hear is your opinion. Do something for
God’s sake. Find an orphan to care for. Come alongside a widow. Give someone something to believe in.
The world everyday will convince us to believe a little less. So James says, be the countervailing force and
give someone something to believe in.

Of course the puzzle has a few pieces missing; both your sharing and commenting on something—doesn’t
change it! Be the solution to the problem.

A friend of mine who runs a company of a few hundred people – who has plenty of things to keep himself
busy with, called up the Big Brother organization and said he wants to be a countervailing force. Someone
who can dispel maybe the growing cynicism of a fatherless child. So every week he gives a couple hours to
a young boy just to give that young man a little something to believe in.

We received your stories from the Mission Field of Dreams and what we all learned is that it didn’t take a
whole lot of money -- $20, $50, $100 – to bring light into the darkness. A kid gets to go to camp. Food gets
put into someone’s mouth. A homeless man gets a gift. A Central American child receives medical
treatment. Go on our website and you will read scores of stories of what our church members did with a
little bit of money. Each one, each gesture, each action a countervailing force, an uncynical advance upon
a cynical world.
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It reminds me of a day when I was a young teenager. It had snowed a few inches the night before and for
whatever reason I was moping around the house, copping an attitude, angry about something that wasn’t
going my way. So my dad brings me to the window of our house and points me across the street to notice
Mrs. Ball’s house. Mrs. Ball was a lovely lady in our neighborhood who had lost her husband a couple of
years before. He pointed me to Mrs. Ball’s house and said, “See her driveway? See her sidewalk? Guess
what you get to do? You get to shovel it. You get to shovel it right now. And when you’re done with that, you
shovel ours.” “But dad …” “Do it.”

So with shovel in my hand I moped over to Mrs. Ball’s house and begrudgingly I shoveled … cursing the day
of my father’s birth. It didn’t take very long, she didn’t have much of a driveway. Not much walkway. I
finished and started back to our house when I heard a sound. A knocking. A knocking on the window pane.
I turned and there was the widow Mrs. Ball standing in the window. Just standing. And then came this (a
blow of a kiss). Just this.

But that’s all it took for me to have learned a little about religion.