Sermons

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October 23, 2005 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

God Is Kind

Carol J. Allen
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 90
Matthew 22:34–46

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart,
and with all your soul, and with all your mind.
This is the greatest and first commandment.”
Matthew 22:37–38 (NRSV)

The first service that one owes to others in the fellowship
consists in listening to them. . . . It is God’s love for us that
[God] not only gives us [God’s] Word but also lends us his ear. . . .
Many people are looking for an ear that will listen.
They do not find it among Christians because these Christians are
talking when they should be listening. . . . [The one] who can no longer listen
to his brother [or sister] will soon be no longer listening to God either. . . .
This is the beginning of the death of the spiritual life. . . . .
Christians have forgotten that the ministry of listening has been committed to them
by [God] who is himself the great listener and whose work they should share.
We should listen with the ears of God that we may speak the Word of God.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Life Together

Click here to read Dr. Buchanan’s Prayers of the People from this service.


So many of you have blessed me by sharing your personal stories that I want to share some of my own testimony with you as I’m preparing to retire from the staff of Fourth Church. I hope my story will illuminate this morning’s sermon text.

My church life began in earnest when I was confirmed at fourteen and joined the Mt. Hope Presbyterian Church in Lansing, Michigan. Mt. Hope was a small congregation, located near the factory where my grandfather worked as a night watchman. He and his family were German immigrants, and we lived in a neighborhood that included other displaced Europeans. I don’t believe that my quiet, gentle, farmer grandfather ever felt fully at home in his new country and in an urban environment.

How did I get hooked on church and why have I stayed? Because I was welcomed, valued, and put to work—teaching fourth graders in Sunday School, as a matter of fact. I was challenged by sermons and conversations with the pastor to think big, to stretch beyond my limits, to consider what I could do to say thanks for the gift of my life and what I could do to change the world for the better. The pastor’s family and the college student who was our youth group advisor gave me the listening ear I needed. My dad was a soldier and frequently moved our family around the country as he accepted new assignments. This left me feeling like a displaced person. My parents eventually handled their differences by going their separate ways. Then my mother, brother, sister, and I settled in with my grandparents, and Mt. Hope Church became a place I could depend upon and belong to, no matter what.

I have to admit that I’ve taken occasional sabbaticals from the church to decide whether I wanted to re-up and continue to throw my lot in with the church. I’ve experienced the gaps between what the church preaches and how it practices. I know that many people have been wounded deeply where the church is infected with sexism, racism, homophobia, and indifference to institutionalized oppression. I know this is why there are people who want to learn about spirituality but not Christianity. For them, the two couldn’t possibly go together, because religion has come to mean oppressive structures and rules. I know that it is possible to be spiritual without being Christian, and I know that there are boundaries to Christian spirituality. Some elements of the church’s traditions and practices deserve to be honored. Some do not. Christians can learn from the truth-telling of other spiritualities. Bradley Holt, author of Thirsty for God, a helpful survey of the history of Christian spirituality, adds a note of caution that Christians should, however, “not lose the centrality of Jesus Christ and the Bible as normative for Christian spirituality” (p. 9).

Despite its shortcomings, I keep being drawn back to church as my base of operations. This is because, in my experience, church is also the place where I have seen and felt most deeply the kindness of God and have seen the face of this kind God in the stories of Jesus of Nazareth. Whatever kindness there is in me comes from the kindness of God that I learned, and keep learning, in church. Early in my ministry, I asked a more seasoned colleague who was African-American, “Why do you stay in a church that is racist?” He replied, “Because my allegiance is to Jesus Christ, and the church is the only institution that confesses Jesus Christ as Lord and tries to follow him.” When it is at its best, though not equivalent to God, the church can be a kind, humanizing, and saving place.

My confession of faith underlies the focus of this sermon, my last from this pulpit as the Associate Pastor for Congregational Care at Fourth Church. I’ll be retiring at the end of this month and will leave with deep gratitude. I’ve been privileged to work with great and gracious colleagues, church leaders, and members. You will continue to be a great and gracious church. The kindness of God is in you.

In the second of two Academy “Pilgrimage in Faithfulness” courses offered by our church, the aim is to explore the nature of Christian spirituality and some of the practices or habits that constitute a Christian way of life. This is important, because there is a variety of spiritualities and practices in play these days. There are many gods wanting to claim our allegiance. Today’s scripture text from Matthew hints at what is at the heart of Christian spirituality. Christian spirituality is about loving the God revealed in Jesus of Nazareth. The Christian practice of truth-telling is grounded in the ongoing life of communities of people who confess as Lord of their lives the one who has said, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment.”

In Thirsty for God, Holt quotes his spiritual director, who says, “Christian spirituality is not something to study, but something to live” (p. 129). I believe that if God did join humankind by becoming incarnate in the flesh of Jesus of Nazareth and remains alive among us through the Holy Spirit, then God is not only “out there” in the universe but is “in here” with us, experiencing our human condition. Holt reminds readers that we have been gifted by God with the capacity to enter into four kinds of relationships. Our very identity is constituted through relationships. God has made us with the capacity to relate to and love God, ourselves, others, and creation.

In this season of remembering God’s call to be good stewards, let us not forget that we are to be good stewards of our capacity for love and relationship. Holt proposes that living faithfully within the web of these relationships is the essence of Christian spirituality. I would say then that telling the truth about ourselves to God as we negotiate these relationships and telling the truth about God to those with whom we are in relationship is another way to think about the practice of testimony.

Thomas Long, professor of preaching, in his book on the Christian practice of testimony (Testimony: Talking Ourselves into Being Christian) refers to the memoir written by Mary Ann Bird called The Whisper Test. Mary Ann Bird was born with multiple physical problems. She was deaf in one ear and had a cleft palate. Her face was disfigured with a nose that wasn’t straight. Her feet were deformed. The teasing words of her classmates left emotional scars. Long writes that for Mary Ann

one of the worst experiences at school . . . was the day of the annual hearing test. The teacher would call each child to her desk, and the child would cover first one ear, and then the other. The teacher would whisper something to the child like “The sky is blue” or “You have new shoes.” This was “the whisper test”; if the teacher’s phrase was heard and repeated, the child passed the test. To avoid the humiliation of failure, Mary Ann would always cheat on the test, secretly cupping her hand over her one good ear so that she could still hear what the teacher said.

One year Mary Ann was in the class of Miss Leonard, one of the most beloved teachers in the school. Every student, including Mary Ann, wanted to be noticed by her. . . . Then came the day of the dreaded hearing test. When her turn came, Mary Ann was called to the teacher’s desk. As Mary Ann cupped her hand over her good ear, Miss Leonard leaned forward to whisper. “I waited for those words,” Mary Ann wrote, “which God must have put into her mouth, those seven words which changed my life.” Miss Leonard did not say “The sky is blue” or “You have new shoes.” What she whispered was “I wish you were my little girl.” Mary Ann went on to become a teacher herself, a person of inner beauty and great kindness (pp. 85–86)

I believe the teacher’s words echo God’s truth: “I wish you were my little girl.” Called into existence by God’s voice in Jesus Christ, the church listens and then whispers these words of affirmation and invitation in each new age to ever-widening circles of God’s diverse peoples, especially today through the global church, through cultures and peoples very different from ourselves and our culture. To receive and accept God’s love is to find ourselves on a personal and shared pilgrimage of transformation. The invitation to join the church in its pilgrimage of inclusive love is where my ministry began. Somehow in the lonely, isolated days of my childhood, before I had words to name and witness to the truth of it, I sensed that someone was “in there” with me, someone to whom I could speak the truth of my life, someone who was always there, listening patiently, someone to go and come from, someone who would never let me down, despite the inevitable battering that life delivers, nudging me on to face my fears and not give up on life or the hope for a brighter future. When the church welcomed me into its fellowship through baptism and when the Army chaplain at Ft. Meade, Maryland, put the sign of the cross on my forehead, I heard the message. I “got it.” Like a children’s story puts it, you are a “somebody,” not a “nobody.”

Over time, it dawned on me that if I could welcome one other “nobody” into understanding themselves to be a “somebody,” my life would have been well spent and my gratitude to God well shown. That led me eventually to the beginning of my particular brand of service as a minister, ordained to help the church be a welcoming and truth-telling place. The book of Ephesians describes my call and sense of purpose with these words: Ministry is “to equip the saints [that is, members of the church] for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ” (Ephesians 4:12–13).

The Bible is the story of how God’s coming displaces people. Seeking after God’s truth often puts us at odds with certain values and practices of our culture and inspires us to speak and live God’s truth, in contrast to what some in the media or in politics may be speaking. The Bible is also the story of persons who colluded against God by setting themselves up to be God and chose to live and speak in contradiction to God’s vision and hopes. We can learn from both sets of stories. This is not easy to do. Our biggest figh ts in church seem to be over interpretations of the Bible.

Consider the potential battle over the truth of scripture from Matthew’s account of the exchange between Jesus and the Pharisees. From more than 600 Jewish laws, Jesus was asked to pick the greatest. The questioners comes as representative of a group approaching Jesus not as a sincere colleague but as one bent on causing contention. He knew that all the laws were thought to carry equivalent weight, so whichever law Jesus chose could be seen as disparaging the choice of someone else and set off a quarrel.

Jesus replied to his critics without letting himself be baited. He recited the commandments to love God, self and neighbor, but he went on to say that the two commandments could not be separated from each other. He was implying that though the two are not the same as each other, the commandments are a unity, and together, they are the foundation for all the other commandments of the law and the prophets. Jesus was pointing to the criteria for interpreting all other laws—that is, does the commandment encourage, inspire, equip persons to love with God’s love, to love God, self and neighbor as God sees each of these?

Let me quote from Tom Long:

To love God and to love one’s neighbor. This is the essential message of our faith, these are the central goals in life, and everything can be organized around them. And these two goals form the standard for how Christians talk out in the world, the tests for Christian truth-telling. Christians seek to tell the truth not just to be accurate or to keep themselves safe from being caught in a lie. Christians tell the truth in order to increase the love of God and love of neighbor. These are often hard tests to apply, but they are the yardsticks by which Christian testimony is measured. (p. 101)

Long goes on to put in words why I avoid watching late night talk shows. He says,

Some comedians have made careers out of insulting people. In the full glare of stage lights and to people’s faces, they say what most other people do in whispers and behind people’s backs. By insulting people, these comedians demonstrate the dark side of words, the power of words to wound. They generate laughter by the shock value of words, by using words in exactly the opposite way that we sense they were intended to be used. Such words do not increase the love of God and neighbor. They avoid the love of God and tear down our regard for the neighbor. In short, they put people in their place.

Ironically, Christians, too, use words to put people in their place. But Christians have a different vision of “place.” Christians believe that all people are created in God’s image, that every person we meet, from the guy next to us in the subway to the woman stocking the shelves at the [White Hen] to the teenager serving burgers at Wendy’s has been crowned by God “with glory and honor” (Psalm 8:5). This is the proper place of human beings, and we want to use words to put people in their place, their God-given place. (pp. 101–102)

God knows that the church does not always live up to this ideal. Nevertheless, God keeps calling the church to be the laboratory in which to practice truth-telling to each other, that we might practice truth-telling in all the places where we reside.

What if, Tom Long asks,

what if God did not create the world on a whim or a dare or simply because he could do whatever he pleased, a dramatic and showy exercise of divine power, but because God deserved companionship. What if God created the world not just so there would the thrill of Niagara Falls, the dizzying heights of the Himalayas, or the stark beauty of the Sahara, but so there would be an ear to hear, a voice to respond? What if . . . God . . . shouted the creative word across the canyon of ageless silence yearning for something more than an echo but instead a voice bravely answering back, “Here I am.” (p. 76)

In Jesus Christ, I believe that God has chosen to be a permanent conversation partner who makes of us a blessing that we might bless God in blessing our neighbor, a line that stretches around the world. It is true—we read it in today’s psalm (Psalm 90)—we must live in the tension between being finite and fragile and belonging to God who has chosen, though not confined by them, to live within the limits of human hearts and hands. This is in order that we might understand ourselves to be more than dust of the earth that is conquered in a short span of years by death. Through the risen Jesus Christ, we belong to God. In him is the will and power to speak the truth of love and grace, mercy and peace, through our life together in the church, a truth that will last long after we are gone, that will remain as our spiritual legacy and will continue to build up the body of Christ that it might speak truth to the world.

My sermon title came from Kathy Galloway in her book of poetry Talking to the Bones (SPCK, 1996). Ms. Galloway is a minister of the Church of Scotland and a member of the Iona Community. I close with her poem [a portion of which is printed here] from the section titled, “Three Meditations.” Her words spoke to me of God’s kindness. Listen for God’s Word. May it be a word of hope and encouragement for you as you travel the transitions of your lives.

“ The Sower and the Seed”
. . .
. . . Growth is always painful, stretching, unfamiliar.
But in the dying of autumn, I see the birthing of spring.
God is kind. This is the way of the kingdom.
So I surrender myself to the movement of life,
to the hand of God.

I look at my own hand. It is closed, still clutching for what is gone.
But I cannot scatter seed with a clenched fist.
I open my hand. I let go of all that I have been holding that needs to die.
. . .

My seeds are small. But they have great potential.
I don’t know where they will take root.
So I want to sow well, with care;
seeds of friendship and respect, and value for people.
seeds of justice and love.
seeds of reverence and encouragement.
I want to sow seeds of peace.

I can only sow.
for the rest, I trust, and I let go.
(pp. 23–24)

Amen.

Remember Jesus who said, “Love the Lord your God with [your whole self]. This is the greatest and first commandment.” In following his command, you will receive the kindest gift of all—God’s very self, who will teach you the truth of your life and who will love and keep you forever. To that same God be all honor, praise, and glory. Amen.

 

Bradley P. Holt, Thirsty for God: A Brief History of Christian Spirituality. Augsburg,1993.

Thomas G. Long, Testimony: Talking Ourselves into Being Christian. Jossey-Bass, 2004.


 

October 23, 2005

Prayers of the People
by John M. Buchanan, Pastor

We praise and thank you, dear God, for the gift of this day. New every morning is your love. New every morning is the freshness of your grace and the nearness of your care. We praise and thank you for the wonder of life itself, for the beautiful creation you have given for our sustenance and enjoyment. For the changing colors of trees and rich hues of fall flowers, for still warm sun and crisp morning air, and for our senses of sight and hearing, taste and touch, which you have given us and which allow us to experience and enjoy your creation, we give you thanks.

For the touch of a beloved’s hand, for an encouraging hug, for a timely pat on the back, for firm handshakes and welcoming smiles, we give you thanks, and for the powerful beauty of human love. For new babies and laughing children, for energetic adolescents and seeking young adults, we praise you, creator God. And for the blessings of important work to do and the more settled maturity of the years, we thank you.

And for your love, shown, given, poured out in the life of Jesus Christ, your Son, we thank and praise you.

Dear God, we pray for others. We pray this morning for those who are ill, those we know who are lonely, depressed, anxious, afraid. Bless them and be with them. Be with those whose tears of grief are not yet dry. And be with those whose joy and gladness are full.

O God of all people and all nations, we pray for our neighbors you have called us to love: for the poor and homeless, for the men and women of our armed forces. We pray, Lord of all, for the peace of the world—in Iraq and Afghanistan, in Israel/Palestine, and wherever men and women and children suffer because of warfare and violent conflict. We pray for suffering victims of storm and flood and for those who minister to them.

And we pray for ourselves. We would be your faithful people. We would find our true lives by losing them for your sake. Forgive us when we fail to be all you want us to be. Support us when we stumble; pick us up when we fall. Give us your good gifts of patience, courage, and the capacity to love, and help us today to live lives of joyful service.

Hear these prayers. Hear the prayers that remain unspoken in our hearts. For we offer them in the name and for the sake of Jesus Christ. Amen.

Sermon © Fourth Presbyterian Church

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