April 20, 2008

Faith for the Future

Dana Ferguson
Executive Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 31:1–5, 15–16
John 14:1–14
Acts 7:55–60

“When they were stoning Stephen, he prayed, ‘Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.’”

Acts 7:59 (NRSV)

In a broken and fearful world,
the Spirit gives us courage
to pray without ceasing,
to witness among all peoples to Christ as Lord and Savior,
to unmask the idolatries in church and culture,
to hear the voices of peoples long silenced,
and to work with others for justice, freedom, and peace.

A Brief Statement of Faith
Presbyterian Church (USA)

It has been going along so swimmingly. We are now Sundays into the season of Easter, and the stories have been amazing: Jesus appearing to the disciples on the road to Emmaus, Peter and Paul’s preaching, hundreds of newly baptized converts, encouraging speeches from Jesus, the disciples are about doing their work. Now we get to this fifth week, and the wheels fall off. We read it right there in the book of Acts. Stephen is stoned. How can this happen? Jesus has risen. The tomb was empty and death was destroyed. Yet now we find ourselves right up against it, face to face with the enemy, death, and with death comes great suffering—a stoning, a wretched way to experience dying.

I must say if I were a disciple, a newly baptized convert, I’d have deep concern. Not only that, I might be rip-roaring mad. This newly raised Christ has come and has promised life abundant, has declared death is gone, and now death comes storming in and takes Stephen brutally and abruptly.

On a recent episode of the evening television show Nightline, Diane Sawyer interviewed Randy Pausch, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University. Sawyer reported some 10 million people have tuned in to the Internet to hear Pausch’s last lecture. Part of his draw is his zeal for life, his ability to sum up life lessons and tell them with humor and in ways that people understand and are persuaded by. He is energetic and personable and vibrant. Tuning in to snippets of his last lecture, you would never have guessed that he had recently been given a terminal diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. He says,

If you look at my CAT scans, there are approximately ten tumors in my liver, and the doctors told me three to six months of good health left. That was a month ago, so you can do the math. If I don’t seem as depressed or morose as I should be, sorry to disappoint you. And I assure you I am not in denial. And the other thing is, I’m in better shape than most of you. [He drops and does a few push-ups.] So anybody who wants to cry or pity me can come down and do a few of those, and then you may pity me.

Pausch tells of hearing the news from his doctor—”Randy, there’s a mass on your pancreas”—and the doctor saying, “and it’s not fair.” It’s exactly how those first disciples must have felt as Stephen was being stoned to death, how they must have felt when they heard the news of his death: that it wasn’t fair. Yet the story of Jesus Christ from the very beginning hasn’t been fair. Jesus, the Son of God, came to save the world from their sins. He took risks: talking to women, befriending outcasts, eating with sinners—nothing too harmful from our viewpoint. But he, too, was given a hard time by the officials, until finally, at last, he was hung on a cross to die. He warned his followers that their lives might also include such persecution. It wouldn’t always be a rosy, perfect picture. Not everyone would understand what his followers were about, and so his disciples, too, might suffer.

In the interview with Sawyer, Pausch said, “Don‘t think it’s unfair.” He continues explaining: “We all stand on the dartboard, and you know, a very small percentage of us are gonna catch the dart labeled pancreatic cancer. And I was—I was unlucky, but it wasn’t unfair.”

Unfair. It’s how we often want to characterize things when we or a loved one has gotten this kind of bad news or died a sudden death. But I’m afraid Pausch is right. Unfair just may not be the way to characterize it. The dying may be painfully tragic, heart wrenching, brutal, ill timed, illogical, debilitating, paralyzing. And so we gather as people have throughout the generations to grieve and console one another. Yet as deep and as real as our grief may be, the fact of the matter is that although the dying may be unfair, it isn’t death that isn’t fair.

For you see, life is a gift. It is a gift that comes to us free and clear. At the beginning of it we are given no guarantees or warranties or agreements. Unfair is when we’ve been assured one thing will happen and another does. But that isn’t the case here. There is a promise that comes with life in Christ and it is this: “I will be with you always.” That’s it. That’s the promise. And it’s the here and now for which we continually strive. But it doesn’t end there. It goes on eternally. Jesus says to the disciples, “When I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am, you may be also.” When all is done here on earth, all isn’t done for us with Christ. In fact, all is made complete.

Unlike the ever-popular game of Life, life isn’t a game. We don’t start out with a certain number of dollars, know we will take one of two paths, always have an income and a house, and race to see who gets to land at the best retirement home. Life isn’t about rules and spaces and places we land. Instead it’s about with whom we spend it. In the game of Life, there is a little plastic car each player drives, and early on each player chooses a mate for the ride ahead. That’s the kind of life this is, the kind of life that Jesus has offered to us—to saddle up alongside us and ride the whole of life right next to us, sustaining and supporting, calling and nurturing. And when we arrive at the end, there is no time of settling up—of counting paper money to see if indeed we will go to the mansion or to the poorhouse. There is no determining who played the game best, had the fewest losses or the biggest wins. Instead, Christ tells us there are many rooms but only one place to be, and that is with Christ—paper money or not, millionaire or pauper. Christ has prepared a place for all of us from the beginning of all time. The promise about the future is also about the present. Christ has been fully revealed, and so it is possible in this life to know the truth, to walk with the truth, to see the truth unveiled and alive in this world. Jesus says to the disciples, “I am preparing a place for you.” And so he has. For all of us. This journey of life is the journey to that place, the striving to know as closely as we can in this life the Christ we will know for all eternity.

Preacher and professor Tom Long puts it this way:

Hope implies a deep-seated trust in life that appears absurd to those who lack it. In fact,when Christians gather at a graveside and announce hope in the resurrection, it is precisely counter to all possibilities latent in the present tense. Christians cannot lay the cards on the table and predict how the hand will play out; they admit they do not know what the future holds. Will peace talks succeed or collapse? Will a child struggling with leukemia live or die? Will God’s agents for justice in the world pass away in the celebrated blessedness of old age, like Mother Teresa, or perish in their youth at the hands of an assassin, like Martin Luther King? We simply do not know. Our hope is based, rather, on the promise that, whatever the future may hold, God is, in ways often hidden, shaping all human life redemptively and bringing all things to fulfillment in Christ. Christian hope is based on the conviction that the God who has loved us and saved us in the past will give us grace sufficient for the present and continue to be our savior in the future. In short, Christians do not believe, on the basis of evidence, in progress; rather, we believe, against much of the evidence, in a God who keeps promises.
(“When Half Spent Was the Night: Preaching Hope in the New Millennium,”
Journal for Preachers, Easter 1999, p. 13)

Long then goes on to tell of visiting South Africa some years ago and having the privilege of meeting a young Johannesburg physician whose specialty was AIDS. He labored in a dingy inner-city hospital where the beds of the sufferers spilled out of the wards and lay scattered through the narrow corridors like toppled bowling pins. The doctor said, “The numbers are growing at a fearful rate; in some areas, over half the population is infected and we don’t have enough to help them. We don’t have the medicine, the beds, the staff, the knowledge.” “What keeps you going?” Long asked.

The doctor spoke quietly, hesitantly. “My faith.” He looked out the window. “I am holding on,” he said, “to the possibility of hope.” What allowed him to face the facts and to keep going nonetheless was the hope that God would act from the future toward the present to create a redemption not already there in the present tense. In other words, his eyes told him that the suffering and death all round him were a terrible word, a word that must be heard and heeded, but his hopeful faith reassured him that they were not the final word (Journal for Preachers, p. 19).

United Church of Christ preacher Lillian Daniels recounts a story of a couple whose airplane crashed in a remote lake. The 1996 New Haven Register headline went like this: “Tears Turn to Laughter as Dead Couple Returns.” When the plane went down, it left behind it an oil slick and the couples’ possessions and identification floating eerily on the water’s surface. Obituaries were written and funeral plans made. While all of these plans were being made, the couple was on the shore a quarter of a mile away, surviving on fresh water mussels and hoping to attract attention by waving their hands in the air. They never gave up hope and found it in a coroner sent to declare them dead.

When the couple returned home after the plane crash and time on the shore, they were greeted by their eight-year-old son, who had never given up hope. He had a cake in the shape of an airplane to celebrate their homecoming. The inscription read, “Bugsy and Sheila, Welcome home. You are grounded” (“You Are Grounded,” Journal for Preachers, Easter 2004, pp. 20–21). And so that is exactly what we are meant to be in these days of life, in these times that we Christians live the present based on the future of hope: we are to stay grounded—grounded in God. We are to live these days walking as closely as we possibly can with Christ, the risen one—learning his ways, living his gospel, preparing ourselves and this world for the hope in the future that we know. We are to live grounded in God and in the promises that God will act from the future to the present to create a redemption not already known in the present.

A pastor friend of mine, Jim Lowry, with whom I served in Memphis, Tennessee, is not only a gifted preacher; he’s a poet, and many of his prayers and sermons take that shape. I want to share with you some verses from his sermon “At Dawn,” hoping he will forgive me for not delivering with the beauty he can. He writes this:

If everything you believe in is true,
then there is hope.
If everything you believe in is a lie,
then there is no hope.

Remember what he taught you. . . .
Remembering what he taught you
is what will help you believe your Jesus is alive.
Today we must remember
how Jesus taught us
the meek really will,
at last,
inherit the earth.
We do believe that,
don’t we?
Today we must remember
how Jesus taught us
the peacemakers really are the children of God.
We do believe that,
don’t we?

Today we must remember
how Jesus taught us
that the ones who stand for what is right
will be blessed.
We do believe that,
shouldn’t we?

If you long for hope
that will not let you go; . . .
If you want the children
to grow up surrounded by kindness born of truth;

If you long for the world
not to self-destruct,
this is the story you must remember
and this is the story the church must tell:

Remember how once a long time ago
a decree went out from Caesar Augustus
that all the world should be enrolled.
Then remember and tell
how Jesus was born
in Bethlehem of Judea; and
how he was tempted in the wilderness;
and how when he was baptized
the heavens opened and God said,
“This is my son. . . . Listen to him”; and
how he took little children on his knee
and said,

Of such is the kingdom of God”;
and how he taught us
to turn the other cheek
and to love neighbor as self;
and how he made sick people well . . .
how when the disciples were in trouble
he walked to them on water; and
how he fed a multitude
with five loaves and two fish. . . .

We must remember and we must tell
the story of the Prodigal Son
and of the Good Samaritan;
and the Lost Sheep;
and the Invested Talents;
and all the rest.

And we must remember and we must tell
how he demonstrated
that dying for someone else’s sin
is the love
that will keep the world
from self-destructing.

In those moments of deep, deep dawn,
When you remember what he taught you,
You will know. . . .
You will believe. . . .
You will be sure
there is hope so strong
not even the grave can contain it.

That hope for us is the truth of Jesus of Nazareth.
(“At Deep Dawn,” Journal for Preachers, Easter 2004, pp. 26–33)

And that is where we are to be found grounded—grounded in the stories of Jesus, grounded in the overwhelming love of God, grounded in hope so strong that not even the grave can contain it. This is our truth in which we are to be grounded: In life and in death, we and this world belong to Jesus Christ.

All to God’s glory and honor and praise. Amen.