A Fourth Church Sermon by Dana Ferguson

April 17, 2005 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Putting Feet to Prayer

Dana Ferguson
Executive Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalms 23
Acts 2:42–47

“They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship,
to the breaking of bread and the prayers.”

Acts 2:42 (NRSV)

We have to sit in our own anxiety and funkiness long enough
to know what a Promised Land would be like, or,
to put it another way, what it means to be saved—
which, if we are to believe Jesus or Ghandi,
specifically means to see everyone on earth as family.

Anne Lamott
Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith

There is a phrase that is often attributed to church folks. It’s one that aptly applies because it’s what we often think and feel. It goes like this: “We’ve never done it that way before.” Looking at our passage from Acts today, you’d certainly agree it’s true. We discover a community that devoted itself to the “apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to breaking of bread and the prayers.” Sounds familiar, doesn’t it. It sounds exactly like what Christian communities across this country and this globe do day in and day out. That’s because it is what we do. It’s what we’ve been instructed to do. It’s what we feel called to do, and it’s what we’ve been doing for centuries.

The Christian community we encounter in Acts is new. It’s newly converted and newly formed. The resurrection is fresh. Pentecost has just happened. The Holy Spirit has descended, and the disciples are at their formation. What has formed and shaped them, what has transformed them, is the resurrection of Jesus Christ. God’s love poured out has been made clear and real and tangible to them in a resurrected Christ. For them there is a new appreciation of the ability of God to change human life in lasting and decisive ways. The sense of awe that permeated the lives of the first disciples not only bound them to the object of their awe, the God who raised Jesus from the dead, but bound them to one another.

Describing the new disciples we encounter in Acts, author and preacher Barbara Brown Taylor writes,

The disciples were going to need something warm and hard that they could bump into on a regular basis, something so real that they would not be able to intellectualize it and so essentially untidy that there was no way they would ever gain control over it. So Jesus gave them things they could get their hands on, that would require them to get close enough to touch one another. Why else did Jesus spend his last night on earth teaching his disciples to wash feet and share supper? With all the conceptual truths in the universe at his disposal, he did not give them things to think about when he was gone. Instead, he gave them concrete things to do, specific ways of being in their bodies together, that would go on teaching them what they needed to know when he was no longer around to teach them. The disciples became apostles, witnesses of the risen Lord by the power of the Holy Spirit. . . . Surprising things began to happen. They began to say things that sounded like him, and they began to do things they had never seen anyone but him do before. (“Practicing Incarnation,” Christian Century, 5 April 2005)

The book of Acts calls us back to our roots. Its purpose is to equip new disciples for ministry. And it still applies to us as disciples today. It instructs us to do the basics: to study and to teach, to join together in fellowship, to break bread, to take care of and serve one another. It reminds us that Jesus didn’t come bringing an interesting philosophy of life. He came calling people to a new way of living and dying, and he gave us concrete examples of exactly what that way of life is.

As a young child, my favorite TV personality was Fred Rogers. I couldn’t wait each day to be invited to his neighborhood, to travel to the land of make-believe. Mr. Rogers, an ordained Presbyterian minister, in case you didn’t know, made real in his land of make-believe things he believed strongly. Mr. McFeely and Lady Fairchilde brought to us messages of being neighborly. of welcoming friend and stranger, of living peacefully in community together, caring for and supporting one another. When I was in kindergarten, my mother traveled to a conference where Fred Rogers was present. She made a big deal of the fact that he would be there but failed to return home with his autograph. I was outraged. I can remember as a five-year-old resolving never again to speak to my mother. Can’t remember if I was able to last even a day.

Amy Hollingworth has written a book reflecting upon the things that Fred Rogers taught her in her life. In The Simple Faith of Mister Rogers she writes,

At the center of Fred’s theology of loving your neighbor was this: Every person is made in the image of God, and for that reason alone, he or she is to be valued—“appreciated,” he liked to say. His definition of neighbor was simple: the person you happen to be with at the moment—whether that person is a Samaritan, a hermit bearing gifts, or a television viewer. He believed there is a sacredness in all. “It is God who inspires and informs all that is nourishing and good” in this world, Fred once said. (pp. 75–88)

She goes on to tell this story about a neighbor they had in common.

When you live in a town of one hundred people, it’s usually not necessary to look out the window to check who’s there before opening the front door. So when I heard the loud rap on the front door that morning, I didn’t bother to look. Instead I swung open the door and caught sight of a tall, thin man I didn’t recognize. He was dressed in mud-splattered coveralls with hair that looked like he had just awoken from a weeklong nap. There was a splattering noise at his feet. If Jesus had asked me at that moment who my neighbor was, I would have pleaded, “Anyone but this man.”

I stood frozen for a few seconds as I looked from the red-black puddle at his feet to the large cut of raw meat dripping blood through his fingers. He reached out his hands, and now the blood was dripping on the welcome mat that greeted visitors to the parsonage. “This is for you,” he said, looking down and avoiding my widening eyes.

Hollingsworth describes this visitor, Junior, as “a bona fide hermit. Except for when he sold the vegetables from his garden to townsfolk or did piecemeal work for local farmers, he rarely had contact with people. A fiftyish bachelor who looked older than he was, Junior lived alone in a dilapidated house that slanted sideways and rested upon dirt floors. It was rumored that electricity and indoor plumbing were modern concoctions he could do without.” Junior’s gift of freshly slain venison was one of appreciation to Hollingsworth’s husband for having visited him in the hospital when he suffered a stroke.

“No matter how ill-conceived Junior’s show of appreciation was,” she writes, “he became my neighbor that day. Junior had been broken by life.” From what they could gather, his parents had either died or left him when he was a boy, and he had been raised by an uncle who had also died, leaving him with no family.

Hollingsworth invited Junior to spend Christmas with their family.

When I greeted him at the door, the coveralls had been replaced by an old suit jacket, a few sizes too small, his long arms stretching beyond the jacket sleeves which were ripped in the elbows. He had carefully smoothed down his hair. His wanting to dress up for our celebration deeply touched me; he was the most resplendent Christmas guest we’d ever had. His presence was the best part of the day for me. That was Jesus Himself in Junior’s chair.

“On one of our visits to his home,” she continues,

he pulled my husband aside and told him that he knew a change had occurred in him because he was beginning to think differently. A fruit of that “thinking differently” was Junior’s decision to go to neighbors with whom he had longstanding feuds—like the one between Jacob and Esau—and ask for forgiveness. He was looking through new eyes, eyes that recognized “what’s wonderful” about his neighbor because they had recognized what was wonderful about him.

Amy talks about an encounter she had with Mr. Rogers sometime after that Christmas dinner. He was in his filming studio and was finishing a public service announcement about helping others in need. “I was thinking of Junior just then, as I said those words,” Fred shouted to me from across the studio during a pause in taping.
“‘Is Junior your son?’ a producer sitting near me asked, turning to look at me over her shoulder.”

“No,” Hollingsworth thought to herself, “he’s my neighbor.”

That’s exactly what the new community that we encounter in Acts is learning. As they act out what Christ had taught them together, they discover that they are neighbors—not because of physical closeness but because of spiritual closeness. They weren’t folks who necessarily had lots in common. They probably were not highly educated or even literate. What they had in common, what drew them together, was their experience of Jesus. Together they encouraged one another—learning together, eating together—not simply that they might be better but that they might do better. Together they told their stories. Jesus had transformed them. And so they acted out what they had experienced. And it caught on. Through them, others were transformed just as Junior was transformed by someone reaching out to let him know that he was loved and cherished.

Will Willimon, former chaplain of Duke University, writes,

Like it or not, if you are a Christian, you are called to bear witness, to testify to the hope that is within you, to tell people about Jesus. Tomorrow, when you get into the classroom, or the boardroom, the office, or over the kitchen table, that is what you are called to do. So we gather on Sunday and we speak to one another about Jesus so that we might get the courage and conviction to leave here and to speak to the world about Jesus. You learn, in our Sunday worship, the joy of hearing the truth, the invigoration that comes from having things called by their proper names. Then you go forth into the world to perform that same function for the world. Would that all of God’s people were prophets. (“Prophets All,” Pulpit Resource, 23 May 1999)

There are many ways to preach what we believe. What we do here in this pulpit week after week is only one of those ways. The traditional witnessing—sharing in words your faith story—is another. There are sometimes when it’s appropriate and others not so much. But there is never a time when it’s not appropriate for us to preach what we believe by living it. In the great words of St. Francis of Assisi, we are to preach the gospel always, using words when necessary.

Anne Lamott, in her recent book, Plan B: Further Thoughts about Faith, writes about a fellow church member, also named Anne.

She seemed too intense and I wondered if perhaps she was also a little cuckoo, which I suppose is not the politically correct word. Anne sometimes sounded like a mad Old Testament prophet, beseeching us to tend to the starving people of the world, to save the rain forests. She was so unabashed in her faithfulness and need that it made some people nervous. She was like your craziest aunt, the religious one with funny eyes who drinks.

Initially, I tried to keep my distance and make her understand that she and I were more church family than friends, but she did not seem to get it, or simply would not obey. She brought me Mary mementos and Jesusy things to carry with me when I traveled, and she called me sometimes to ask how Sam and I were. Little by little, I let her into my heart. True, she was odd, but she was also courageous, and dear, kind, and feisty, and very tender toward the children at church. I started sitting next to her during worship, sharing a hymnal or a Bible, and calling her at home from time to time to ask how she was. (pp. 75–88)

Lamott asked Anne to visit the Sunday School class of five- to twelve-year-olds that she taught and talk about her faith. Anne started by asking each of them their names and then whether they had noticed anything unusual about her. “There was a polite silence. The children shook their heads with burlesque puzzled looks, until one kid all but smote his forehead, and said, “Oh! You mean the hand!”

The child was referring to what Anne called her paw. She told them that her mother had been a chemist for the military in World War II, helping develop chemical weapons. Her mother and several of her colleagues had given birth to children with defects. Her defect was being born with a hand that wasn’t completely formed.

Lamott writes,

She showed them the scar tissue where she’d had surgery as a baby. The kids studied it with the fearless attention with which they might have examined a huge potato bug. She told how family pictures were arranged so that other people’s bodies hid her hand. “My mother found me disgusting. And only a few people over the years wanted to hold my hand. The offer was that if I shared my mother’s opinion of me, I got her. Otherwise I was totally alone. Until one day, Jesus came into the great emptiness.” It happened when she was six years old. She felt Jesus speaking to her. “He was saying, ‘I’m sorry it turned out this way, but you are whole in my eyes.’ So I got me back,” she said, “and in Jesus, I found a real mother.”

“Did you mind having only one hand,” a girl asked?

“I didn’t like it at all. It’s been harrowing. And there are many things I love to do that I can’t do well. Having this paw made me notice how much suffering there is in the world. It makes me ask, “What’s that suffering about? What’s the answer?” The suffering itself means nothing. But the answer is also that I can’t look away from it. I saw that God wanted me to help relieve the suffering. And that work has given me peace.”

Anne’s life was ended by cancer not long after her visit with the children. Her husband asked that the children make decorations for her casket, which they did. The parents delivered them to her home and decorated the casket themselves. At her funeral, the pastor said this, “Faith is not how we feel; it is about how we live. And Anne lived her own eulogy, gardening, praising God, fighting the great good fight for justice, loving her husband, playing piano, doing her yoga. Anne believed, without wavering. You don’t run into such faithfulness often, faith in the goodness of the world.”

All of us are called to do exactly what Anne did, to, as Anne Lamott notes, preach our own eulogy, to spend our life doing, to spend our life not just teaching and praying but also preaching.

“We’ve never done it that way before.” It doesn’t always serve us well, but sometimes it does. Sometimes it is good to return to our roots, to the ways of the first disciples, to do it the way it’s always been done in the church. We Presbyterian have built a system that allows for many good things to happen—for individuals to have a voice and a vote, for ministries to be built and outreach to happen. But we have also built a system with the possibility of making things more complicated than they need to be. Are our committees necessary? Are the hours we spend sitting around table talking about what we should do or how we should do it of value? Indeed. Indeed they are, but only when it leads to something bigger, only when it leads us to be witnesses to what we have learned and experienced in Christ Jesus. Oh that all of God’s people were preachers. Oh that centuries and generations after the resurrection that we too can live responding to it, day in and day out. Oh that we too might live like the newly converted Easter people.

When is the church at its best? When is the church most the church? When it does just what we discover in Acts today—when the church witnesses to the resurrection of Jesus Christ; when each of us in our way tells why this resurrection, why the love of God poured out, has mattered to us. We are at our best when we take what we’ve learned sitting around the table or studying the scripture, when we take what we often pray, and put feet on it; when we take what we have seen and know of God’s love and witness to it in our very beings. The church is most the church when we put feet to our prayers and hands to our beliefs, reaching out that others too might know the love of God we have come to know.

This past week, we learned that the condition of a church member who has been ill for some time had worsened. We prayed together and we shared stories together. A care team has been caring for her during the recent months of her treatment. They continued their work. People reached out—sending email messages, running errands, and doing whatever they could find to do. A colleague left me a message one night to give me an update. She closed by saying, “Mary is feeling well loved.” This, my friends, is when the church is the church—when God’s children are experiencing again and again the resurrection of Christ Jesus, when people live out what they have experienced, and when God’s people, friend and stranger alike, are knowing again the love of God made real in word and deed. This is the church at its best. Oh that each of us should be such preachers. All to God’s glory and honor and praise. Amen.