Scriptural Sermons

I attended a funeral recently. It was for my high school math teacher. He was one great guy. Everyone loved him. He taught math at my high school for forty years, and he also coached wrestling. By the time he retired, he had become something of a legend in his own time. The funeral was upbeat, not like so many funerals that are so very sad. He lived a full and long life, and we gathered to celebrate that. But for one man – a classmate of mine who wrestled for him. He was absolutely devastated. I approached him in the parking lot after the funeral and asked if he was okay. He broke down. “That man was everything to me,” he said. “I was O.K. so long as he was in the world.” Then he shared his story. His mother died when he was very young. His father was a physically and emotionally abusive alcoholic. By the time he was in high school, he was far down a bad road. He hadn’t the support to do well at school, so he didn’t. He was very angry, so he was a behavior problem. The only friends he could make were kids like himself, so he hung out with a tough crowd. And he had begun to dabble in drugs. He was pretty much a lost cause at the age of sixteen. Enter my math teacher. He approached him one day out of the blue and told him he could tell by his gait that he was born to wrestle. This could only have been a ruse to intervene. Even I, who knows nothing about wrestling, am suspicious that you can identify one born to wrestle by his gait. At any rate, the ruse worked. He intervened. And he made him into a great wrestler. On top of that, he made him into a great young man. His advice, understanding, and support were unwavering. He helped him to deal with his past in such a way that it didn’t destroy him. He filled his present with new found responsibility, purpose, structure, and discipline. And he paved his way to a future. After graduation he went to college on a wrestling scholarship and eventually became a doctor. “I feel so lost,” he concluded his story. “What am I going to do now?” While he was sharing his story, I could not help but think how hard life can be. We here are generally prosperous and privileged, so we can afford to put up a front. But behind that front life can be hard. Because it’s out there -- loss, abuse, addiction, and a host of other afflictions. It’s enough to make you lose your way. And as I said, we here are generally prosperous and privileged. What if the loss, abuse, and addiction are compounded by poverty or racism? Then it’s all but a foregone conclusion. Your way is lost. Yes, life can be hard. Life takes casualties. Lots of them. It can make us feel helpless and overwhelmed. We want to make things better, but what could we possibly do? The answer is no farther away than my late math teacher. What could we possibly do to make things better? We could reach out, like he did. And what is in view here is not merely a good example, although we must never underestimate the power of a good example and must always strive to be one. But there’s more in view than that. It has to do with the Bible. The Bible may seem like a forbidding book. For one thing it’s thousands of pages long. It makes War and Peace look like a short story. For another thing, it’s unimaginably ancient. The Bible’s story begins 2,000 years before the Common Era. I just read that a sizable portion of millennials don’t know what the Holocaust was. To them that’s ancient history - a mere 75 years back. The Bible is more than 4,000 years back. That’s unimaginably ancient. For yet another thing, it traffics in extremely complicated and sophisticated theology, plumbing in its unfolding the depths of such mysteries as our nature, the predicament that our nature has landed us in, and the means of our redemption. And it does so all the while purging itself of false starts or conclusions. So it may seem forbidding. But at the same time, ironically, the Bible lends itself to succinct summaries. Here’s one: God lives. Here’s another: Good triumphs over evil. And another: Love triumphs over fear. And another: Practice universal justice. And another: Love one another. And here’s one that’s right on point: Reach out. The Bible can be summarized in just two words. Reach out. Think about it. That’s what God did. God reached out. God reached out to Abraham and told him that from him would one day issue a nation, and not just any nation, but a nation that would somehow bless all the nations by bestowing upon them redemption. God reached out to Moses and bequeathed him an ethical law so that God’s people could bear his righteousness. God reached out to David and told him that from his descendants would emerge one who would embody that redemption. And that one in the fullness of time emerged. God reach out to his son. He told him that if he would make a great sacrifice, the greatest sacrifice, it would be the means for all people to reach out to one another. In a real way. A way that advanced God’s own being and cause. And his son made that sacrifice. And in his brief ministry that preceded that sacrifice, he reached out to everyone. And I mean everyone. Lepers. Prostitutes. Beggars. Even a bitter little man perched up in a sycamore tree. So reaching out is not just a good example. It is nothing less the mechanism that God that employs to bestow redemption. Yes, life can be hard. Paul knew this. “We would prefer to be away from the body and at home with the Lord.” But Paul goes on. “So we must make it our goal to please him, whether we are at home in the body or away from it.” And this means reaching out. “I feel so lost now. What am I going to do?” asked my grieving classmate. I told him that his coach had already showed him what to do. I told him to reach out. Amen.

Birmingham, Alabama was just like any other city in the Jim Crow South. It was segregated. But perhaps the word “segregated,” as negative as are its connotations, is something of a euphemism in this particular case. Segregation can be taken simply to mean separation. Locker rooms are segregated. Dormitories are segregated. This means that men and women have separate facilities -- separate, but equal, to coin a loaded phrase. But of course, this was not what was going on in the Jim Crow South, nothing of the sort. It wasn’t as if there were separate but equal facilities for African Americans and White Americans. It was that African Americans were not permitted the use of White American facilities. Libraries, stores, parks, schools, restaurants, rest rooms, swimming pools, transportation, hotels, amusement parks, houses, apartments, and of course, churches. African Americans were not permitted the use of these facilities, or if by rare exception they were, that use was severely restricted. Needless to say, African Americans had nothing comparable of their own. And how was this so-called segregation enforced? By signs, mostly - “White” and “Colored.” Now you may say to yourself? Signs? What kind of enforcement is that? Signs can easily be ignored or defied. If someone put a sign saying “No Calvinists” at my health food store, I’d go in anyway and read them the riot act to boot. And after all, African Americans comprised, depending on the count, a third to a half of the population in the Jim Crow South. How could such egregious discrimination be enforced by signs? Well, truth be told, especially when African American discontent in the Jim Crow South began to grow, there was some concern among White Americans that signs were not enough. So in Birmingham for example, to give the signs additional muscle, eighteen unsolved bombings took place in African American neighborhoods. I don’t know about you, but if I were an African American in Birmingham in those days, and there was the threat that my children, or any children, would be blown to pieces, I think I’d read (and heed) the signs. In 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr. turned his attention to Birmingham. He began to organize peaceful demonstrations there. In short order, a judge ordered King to cease his demonstrations on the grounds that Birmingham had not granted him the required permits. King ignored the order and was thereupon imprisoned. A colleague who came to visit him brought him a local newspaper. In it King saw a full page advertisement taken out by white clergymen declaring that his demonstrations were, and I quote, “untimely.” King, in the margins of that newspaper, began a letter of response to that advertisement. When he ran out of space in the margins, he continued the letter on toilet paper, until he was at last supplied with a notepad. King’s letter, of course, was his immortal manifesto, “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” In it, he argued for the “timeliness” of his demonstrations. There were, basically, two fronts to his argument. The first front of his argument was that it is easy enough for those who are not suffering from social injustice to tell those who are to be patient, to wait. And of course, King is irrefutable here. It would be like telling someone who is dying of thirst to be patient, to wait, while you yourself are sitting right beside a well; or like telling someone who is starving to death to be patient, to wait, while you’ve just come from a feast. It’s rather hypocritical, insensitive, and indifferent. It’s rather hardhearted. It’s rather cruel. Allow me to quote King at some length on this point: “For years now I have heard the word "Wait!" It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This "Wait" has almost always meant 'Never." We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that ‘justice too long delayed is justice denied.’ We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights…Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging dart of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross-county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"…, when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at a tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness" -- then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.” The second front of his argument was that to ask African Americans to be patient, to wait rested upon the false premise that social justice is evolving by some kind of natural process; that it wasn’t something that must be struggled for. Again, to quote King, this time with much greater brevity: “Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be coworkers with God.” And when King was freed from the Birmingham Jail, he continued the struggle for social justice there. That struggle reached its nadir when children aged six to sixteen joined in the demonstrations in place of their parents who could not risk the loss of their livelihoods. The response of the Birmingham police was to throw the children in the Birmingham jail. Before long, the jail was packed past capacity with nearly 1,000 children. When other children continued to demonstrate and there was no room left for them in the jail, the police turned their power hoses upon them. The force of the hoses snapped their bones and washed their small bodies down the streets. And this lost Birmingham its war against African Americans. By this time the press had turned its attention to Birmingham. Photos of the persecuted children spread throughout the country and the world, which together convulsed in moral horror. The process of integration in Birmingham was then haltingly begun. The signs began to come down. Birmingham, Alabama turned out to be the turning point in the Civil Rights Movement. It was where Martin Luther King Jr. taught the Jim Crow South and teaches us here today that the immoral course is to tell those suffering from social injustice to be patient, to wait; and the moral course is to join the struggle to achieve social justice. Martin Luther King Jr., was undeniably, from a secular standpoint a visionary, and from a Christian standpoint a prophet. He gave a face to wisdom and conviction and courage. His leadership changed the course of this nation in a worthy direction. That, of course, is why we honor him each year on his birthday. But there’s one compliment that can’t be bestowed upon him. It can’t be said he was original. He himself again and again decried his own originality. He insisted he was merely following the Bible. And indeed he was. Just consider just our New Testament lesson. Paul had founded a church in Corinth, Greece, and from his letter to that church it appears that the minute he left Corinth, they screwed everything up. It’s little surprise really. The barriers between Jews and Greeks were impenetrable. You can’t overcome a cultural barriers of that magnitude with a little evangelism. What the church in Corinth errantly took from Paul was that if Christians were justified through Jesus Christ, at the end of the age and then alone they would be saved. Between now and then, it was pretty much business as usual. Justification through Jesus Christ functioned basically as a “Get Out Of Hell Free” card. Paul wrote to the church at Corinth that if that’s how they viewed justification through Jesus Christ that they were justified, “in vain.” “Now,” Paul declared, “is the favorable time." What Paul tried to impress upon the church at Corinth is that justification through Jesus Christ was a call to active service in the here and now. It was a call to stand up and be counted. It was a call to accomplish salvation in that place and time. It was a call to timeliness. What King did really was to make the Bible come alive in the Jim Crow South. And on Martin Luther King, Jr. Sunday, may he inspire us to make the Bible come alive in our time as well. Amen.

Getting my three daughters off to Middle School last week was no mean feat. In fact, it was a back breaker. Getting them off year by year is tough enough. Normally, it requires a complicated and lengthy registration process involving the school district; school supplies lists that inevitably include hard-to-find items such as purple, one inch, three ring binders or royal blue jumbo book covers; new backpacks, lunch boxes, shoes, and clothes; and medical, dental, and vision forms. Middle School added to all that the so-called "genre" project. Some sadistic Middle School teachers thought it would be a good idea to give all incoming Middle Schoolers summer homework. My daughters each had to read three books of a given genre, summarize them in ten bullet points, and state their assessments of the genre using textual examples. This is the kind of work I give to my college students, so naturally my daughters felt the assignment to be over their heads. Bottom line -- to adequately assist them I had to read the nine books. But the real kicker turned out to be the medical, dental, and vision forms. For me that meant, here's that number again, nine separate appointments. I soldiered through them, but at the end of the ninth appointment, one of the girls was referred by the pediatrician to a specialist. "It's just one more appointment," I told myself. "Ten is a nice round number." When we got to the specialist's office, the receptionist gave us a grim look. "Doctor's running an hour behind," she stated flatly. "Doctor's running an hour behind?" I repeated weakly. I felt at this point I had neared the finish line only to be told I had ten more miles to go. "Oh well," I said to my daughter trying to put a positive spin on the thing, "at least there are lots of good magazines to read." To tell the truth I hadn't read a magazine in ages. How could I, with all the Middle School preparation I was wrestling with? I had no time for such luxuries. I opened the magazine, slipping into relaxation mode. That mode lasted until I began to peruse the first article. It was entitled “Fighting Aging”. It was an informational piece featuring a chart. On the far-left side of the chart was a list of various indicators of aging – frown lines, laugh lines, worry lines, marionette lines, dark spots, turkey neck, bags, etc. Next to the list were two columns -- one that listed the over the counter way to eradicate these indicators of aging, and another that listed the way involving medical procedures. Interspersed in the margins were graphic photos of faces diagrammed for surgery and hypodermic needles being stuck into wrinkles. I have to admit that I found the article horrifying. Aging naturally wasn’t even considered an option. Come on now, I thought. Laugh lines? Frown lines? Worry lines? Are these things really so intolerable? Can I just leave mine alone? Didn’t I earn them? Haven’t I the right to wear them? I flipped the page only to be confronted with the headline, "Celebrities Unphotoshopped" which showcased photographs of celebrities who actually looked their ages. This was being presenting as some kind of an expose, some kind of a scandal. I tossed the magazine aside, though it caused me to realize something: It take tremendous moral courage to age in this culture. But why? Why is this the case? It is, I think, that our culture exploits the vanity and insecurity that lurks, to varying degrees, in us all. Our culture does so by advancing a false, but inviolable premise – namely, that youth is good, and maturity is bad. We are inundated by this premise, and we have internalized it. Hence we seek to appear young. Case in point: If we are told we look ten years younger than we are, we are delighted; but if we would ever happened to be told that we look ten years older than we are, we would carry the insult to the grave. And to make matters worse, our culture advances this false but inviolable premise only so that it can make money off of us; so it can sell us goods and services. But we could go deeper. It’s not just our vanity and insecurity that are being preyed upon. It’s our mortality. Let’s face it. We evade our mortality. We don’t want to be bound to the circle of life, especially as that circle cycles downward. We don’t want to grow old -- to slow down, to suffer physical limitations and ailments, to experience loss, to become marginalized, and finally to die. And our culture, in marketing youth to us, aids us in this evasion of our mortality. As I said, it takes tremendous moral courage to age in this culture. But that moral courage the Bible provides. It provides it throughout its unfolding. The Bible has a whole different take on aging than our culture. Consider the book of Ecclesiastes. The book of Ecclesiastes acknowledges that there are inexorable stages of life -- “a time to be born and a time to die” -- but here’s the key thing. It describes these stages of life as, “matters under heaven.” The book of Ecclesiastes recognizes that it is God who has ordained these stages of life. And as the Bible unfolds further it helps us to understand why God has ordained these stages of life. Paul hints at it – “Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day.” God has ordained these stages of life as the means to ready us for consummation in God’s eternity. And aging, if by God’s providence we reach that stage of life, is the stage God has ordained for us to wind down, to let go, to say farewell, to look back and discern the ways in which we bore God’s image in our lifetimes, and to look forward to the glory that will be revealed. And if this were not enough evidence of the Bible’s take on aging, we need only look to the Bible’s culmination, to the Christ event. God sent Christ precisely to demonstrate -- to teach us and to show us -- that at all stages of life, and in all that these stages may hand us, God is with us, bestowing upon us the way of his eternity. The Bible then, needless to say, would not approve of our culture’s take on aging. In fact, the Bible would repudiate it. It would contend that our culture’s take on aging is a human concoction that denies God’s very providence for us. And this much is undeniable: there is no sense in contending with God’s providence for us. God created us as his, and God is God. So to contend with God’s providence for us is in the last analysis self-denying. It’s self-defeating. It’s downright suicide. Maturity, friends, means to be fully developed. Maturity then is a good thing. Let us strive then to embrace maturity as it comes, and to be, whatever our age, mature Christians who fear not life and fear not death. Amen.